in the evening, by six o’clock saw the tide of battle turned by Desaix’s
desperate attack and Kellermann’s terrific charge, so Chesnel in the
midst of defeat saw the beginnings of victory. No one but a Chesnel,
an old notary, an ex-steward of the manor, old Maitre Sorbier’s junior
clerk, in the sudden flash of lucidity which comes with despair, could
rise thus, high as a Napoleon, nay, higher. This was not Marengo, it
was Waterloo, and the Prussians had come up; Chesnel saw this, and was
determined to beat them off the field.
“Madame,” he said, “remember that I have been your man of business for
twenty years; remember that if the d’Esgrignons mean the honor of the
province, you represent the honor of the bourgeoisie; it rests with you,
and you alone, to save the ancient house. Now, answer me; are you
going to allow dishonor to fall on the shade of your dead uncle, on the
d’Esgrignons, on poor Chesnel? Do you want to kill Mlle. Armande weeping
yonder? Or do you wish to expiate wrongs done to others by a deed which
will rejoice your ancestors, the intendants of the dukes of Alencon, and
bring comfort to the soul of our dear Abbe? If he could rise from his
grave, he would command you to do this thing that I beg of you upon my
knees.”
“What is it?” asked Mme. du Croisier.
“Well. Here are the hundred thousand crowns,” said Chesnel, drawing the
bundles of notes from his pocket. “Take them, and there will be an end
of it.”
“If that is all,” she began, “and if no harm can come of it to my
husband----”
“Nothing but good,” Chesnel replied. “You are saving him from eternal
punishment in hell, at the cost of a slight disappointment here below.”
“He will not be compromised, will he?” she asked, looking into Chesnel’s
face.
Then Chesnel read the depths of the poor wife’s mind. Mme. du Croisier
was hesitating between her two creeds; between wifely obedience to her
husband as laid down by the Church, and obedience to the altar and the
throne. Her husband, in her eyes, was acting wrongly, but she dared not
blame him; she would fain save the d’Esgrignons, but she was loyal to
her husband’s interests.
“Not in the least,” Chesnel answered; “your old notary swears it by the
Holy Gospels----”
He had nothing left to lose for the d’Esgrignons but his soul; he risked
it now by this horrible perjury, but Mme. du Croisier must be deceived,
there was no other choice but death. Without losing a moment, he
dictated a form of receipt by which Mme. du Croisier acknowledged
payment of a hundred thousand crowns five days before the fatal letter
of exchange appeared; for he recollected that du Croisier was away from
home, superintending improvements on his wife’s property at the time.
“Now swear to me that you will declare before the examining magistrate
that you received the money on that date,” he said, when Mme. du
Croisier had taken the notes and he held the receipt in his hand.
“It will be a lie, will it not?”
“Venial sin,” said Chesnel.
“I could not do it without consulting my director, M. l’Abbe Couturier.”
“Very well,” said Chesnel, “will you be guided entirely by his advice in
this affair?”
“I promise that.”
“And you must not give the money to M. du Croisier until you have been
before the magistrate.”
“No. Ah! God give me strength to appear in a Court of Justice and
maintain a lie before men!”
Chesnel kissed Mme. du Croisier’s hand, then stood upright, and majestic
as one of the prophets that Raphael painted in the Vatican.
“You uncle’s soul is thrilled with joy,” he said; “you have wiped
out for ever the wrong that you did by marrying an enemy of altar and
throne”--words that made a lively impression on Mme. du Croisier’s
timorous mind.
Then Chesnel all at once bethought himself that he must make sure of
the lady’s director, the Abbe Couturier. He knew how obstinately devout
souls can work for the triumph of their views when once they come
forward for their side, and wished to secure the concurrence of the
Church as early as possible. So he went to the Hotel d’Esgrignon, roused
up Mlle. Armande, gave her an account of that night’s work, and sped her
to fetch the Bishop himself into the forefront of the battle.
“Ah, God in heaven! Thou must save the house of d’Esgrignon!” he
exclaimed, as he went slowly home again. “The affair is developing now
into a fight in a Court of Law. We are face to face with men that have
passions and interests of their own; we can get anything out of them.
This du Croisier has taken advantage of the public prosecutor’s absence;
the public prosecutor is devoted to us, but since the opening of the
Chambers he has gone to Paris. Now, what can they have done to get
round his deputy? They have induced him to take up the charge without
consulting his chief. This mystery must be looked into, and the ground
surveyed to-morrow; and then, perhaps, when I have unraveled this web of
theirs, I will go back to Paris to set great powers at work through Mme.
de Maufrigneuse.”
So he reasoned, poor, aged, clear-sighted wrestler, before he lay down
half dead with bearing the weight of so much emotion and fatigue. And
yet, before he fell asleep he ran a searching eye over the list of
magistrates, taking all their secret ambitions into account, casting
about for ways of influencing them, calculating his chances in the
coming struggle. Chesnel’s prolonged scrutiny of consciences, given in a
condensed form, will perhaps serve as a picture of the judicial world in
a country town.
Magistrates and officials generally are obliged to begin their career in
the provinces; judicial ambition there ferments. At the outset every man
looks towards Paris; they all aspire to shine in the vast theatre where
great political causes come before the courts, and the higher branches
of the legal profession are closely connected with the palpitating
interests of society. But few are called to that paradise of the man
of law, and nine-tenths of the profession are bound sooner or later to
regard themselves as shelved for good in the provinces. Wherefore, every
Tribunal of First Instance and every Court-Royal is sharply divided
in two. The first section has given up hope, and is either torpid or
content; content with the excessive respect paid to office in a country
town, or torpid with tranquillity. The second section is made up of
the younger sort, in whom the desire of success is untempered as yet
by disappointment, and of the really clever men urged on continually
by ambition as with a goad; and these two are possessed with a sort of
fanatical belief in their order.
At this time the younger men were full of Royalist zeal against the
enemies of the Bourbons. The most insignificant deputy official was
dreaming of conducting a prosecution, and praying with all his might for
one of those political cases which bring a man’s zeal into prominence,
draw the attention of the higher powers, and mean advancement for King’s
men. Was there a member of an official staff of prosecuting counsel
who could hear of a Bonapartist conspiracy breaking out somewhere
else without a feeling of envy? Where was the man that did not burn to
discover a Caron, or a Berton, or a revolt of some sort? With reasons of
State, and the necessity of diffusing the monarchical spirit throughout
France as their basis, and a fierce ambition stirred up whenever party
spirit ran high, these ardent politicians on their promotion were lucid,
clear-sighted, and perspicacious. They kept up a vigorous detective
system throughout the kingdom; they did the work of spies, and urged
the nation along a path of obedience, from which it had no business to
swerve.
Justice, thus informed with monarchical enthusiasm, atoned for
the errors of the ancient parliaments, and walked, perhaps, too
ostentatiously hand in hand with religion. There was more zeal than
discretion shown; but justice sinned not so much in the direction of
machiavelism as by giving the candid expression to its views, when those
views appeared to be opposed to the general interests of a country which
must be put safely out of reach of revolutions. But taken as a whole,
there was still too much of the bourgeois element in the administration;
it was too readily moved by petty liberal agitation; and as a result,
it was inevitable that it should incline sooner or later to the
Constitutional party, and join ranks with the bourgeoisie in the day
of battle. In the great body of legal functionaries, as in other
departments of the administration, there was not wanting a certain
hypocrisy, or rather that spirit of imitation which always leads France
to model herself on the Court, and, quite unintentionally, to deceive
the powers that be.
Officials of both complexions were to be found in the court in which
young d’Esgrignon’s fate depended. M. le President du Ronceret and an
elderly judge, Blondet by name, represented the section of functionaries
shelved for good, and resigned to stay where they were; while the young
and ambitious party comprised the examining magistrate M. Camusot, and
his deputy M. Michu, appointed through the interests of the Cinq-Cygnes,
and certain of promotion to the Court of Appeal of Paris at the first
opportunity.
President du Ronceret held a permanent post; it was impossible to turn
him out. The aristocratic party declined to give him what he considered
to be his due, socially speaking; so he declared for the bourgeoisie,
glossed over his disappointment with the name of independence, and
failed to realize that his opinions condemned him to remain a president
of a court of the first instance for the rest of his life. Once started
in this track the sequence of events led du Ronceret to place his hopes
of advancement on the triumph of du Croisier and the Left. He was in no
better odor at the Prefecture than at the Court-Royal. He was compelled
to keep on good terms with the authorities; the Liberals distrusted him,
consequently he belonged to neither party. He was obliged to resign
his chances of election to du Croisier, he exercised no influence, and
played a secondary part. The false position reacted on his character;
he was soured and discontented; he was tired of political ambiguity, and
privately had made up his mind to come forward openly as leader of the
Liberal party, and so to strike ahead of du Croisier. His behavior in
the d’Esgrignon affair was the first step in this direction. To begin
with, he was an admirable representative of that section of the middle
classes which allows its petty passions to obscure the wider interests
of the country; a class of crotchety politicians, upholding the
government one day and opposing it the next, compromising every cause
and helping none; helpless after they have done the mischief till
they set about brewing more; unwilling to face their own incompetence,
thwarting authority while professing to serve it. With a compound of
arrogance and humility they demand of the people more submission than
kings expect, and fret their souls because those above them are not
brought down to their level, as if greatness could be little, as if
power existed without force.
President du Ronceret was a tall, spare man with a receding forehead and
scanty, auburn hair. He was wall-eyed, his complexion was blotched, his
lips thin and hard, his scarcely audible voice came out like the husky
wheezings of asthma. He had for a wife a great, solemn, clumsy
creature, tricked out in the most ridiculous fashion, and outrageously
overdressed. Mme. la Presidente gave herself the airs of a queen; she
wore vivid colors, and always appeared at balls adorned with the turban,
dear to the British female, and lovingly cultivated in out-of-the-way
districts in France. Each of the pair had an income of four or five
thousand francs, which with the President’s salary, reached a total
of some twelve thousand. In spite of a decided tendency to parsimony,
vanity required that they should receive one evening in the week.
Du Croisier might import modern luxury into the town, M. and Mme. de
Ronceret were faithful to the old traditions. They had always lived in
the old-fashioned house belonging to Mme. du Ronceret, and had made no
changes in it since their marriage. The house stood between a garden and
a courtyard. The gray old gable end, with one window in each story,
gave upon the road. High walls enclosed the garden and the yard, but the
space taken up beneath them in the garden by a walk shaded with
chestnut trees was filled in the yard by a row of outbuildings. An old
rust-devoured iron gate in the garden wall balanced the yard gateway,
a huge, double-leaved carriage entrance with a buttress on either side,
and a mighty shell on the top. The same shell was repeated over the
house-door.
The whole place was gloomy, close, and airless. The row of iron-gated
openings in the opposite wall, as you entered, reminded you of prison
windows. Every passer-by could look in through the railings to see how
the garden grew; the flowers in the little square borders never seemed
to thrive there.
The drawing-room on the ground floor was lighted by a single window on
the side of the street, and a French window above a flight of steps,
which gave upon the garden. The dining-room on the other side of the
great ante-chamber, with its windows also looking out into the garden,
was exactly the same size as the drawing-room, and all three apartments
were in harmony with the general air of gloom. It wearied your eyes
to look at the ceilings all divided up by huge painted crossbeams and
adorned with a feeble lozenge pattern or a rosette in the middle. The
paint was old, startling in tint, and begrimed with smoke. The sun had
faded the heavy silk curtains in the drawing-room; the old-fashioned
Beauvais tapestry which covered the white-painted furniture had lost
all its color with wear. A Louis Quinze clock on the chimney-piece
stood between two extravagant, branched sconces filled with yellow
wax candles, which the Presidente only lighted on occasions when the
old-fashioned rock-crystal chandelier emerged from its green wrapper.
Three card-tables, covered with threadbare baize, and a backgammon
box, sufficed for the recreations of the company; and Mme. du Ronceret
treated them to such refreshments as cider, chestnuts, pastry puffs,
glasses of eau sucree, and home-made orgeat. For some time past she had
made a practice of giving a party once a fortnight, when tea and some
pitiable attempts at pastry appeared to grace the occasion.
Once a quarter the du Roncerets gave a grand three-course dinner, which
made a great sensation in the town, a dinner served up in execrable
ware, but prepared with the science for which the provincial cook is
remarkable. It was a Gargantuan repast, which lasted for six whole
hours, and by abundance the President tried to vie with du Croisier’s
elegance.
And so du Ronceret’s life and its accessories were just what might
have been expected from his character and his false position. He felt
dissatisfied at home without precisely knowing what was the matter; but
he dared not go to any expense to change existing conditions, and was
only too glad to put by seven or eight thousand francs every year, so as
to leave his son Fabien a handsome private fortune. Fabien du Ronceret
had no mind for the magistracy, the bar, or the civil service, and his
pronounced turn for doing nothing drove his parent to despair.
On this head there was rivalry between the President and the
Vice-President, old M. Blondet. M. Blondet, for a long time past, had
been sedulously cultivating an acquaintance between his son and the
Blandureau family. The Blandureaus were well-to-do linen manufacturers,
with an only daughter, and it was on this daughter that the President
had fixed his choice of a wife for Fabien. Now, Joseph Blondet’s
marriage with Mlle. Blandureau depended on his nomination to the post
which his father, old Blondet, hoped to obtain for him when he himself
should retire. But President du Ronceret, in underhand ways, was
thwarting the old man’s plans, and working indirectly upon the
Blandureaus. Indeed, if it had not been for this affair of young
d’Esgrignon’s, the astute President might have cut them out, father and
son, for their rivals were very much richer.
M. Blondet, the victim of the machiavelian President’s intrigues, was
one of the curious figures which lie buried away in the provinces
like old coins in a crypt. He was at that time a man of sixty-seven or
thereabouts, but he carried his years well; he was very tall, and in
build reminded you of the canons of the good old times. The smallpox had
riddled his face with numberless dints, and spoilt the shape of his nose
by imparting to it a gimlet-like twist; it was a countenance by no means
lacking in character, very evenly tinted with a diffused red, lighted up
by a pair of bright little eyes, with a sardonic look in them, while
a certain sarcastic twitch of the purpled lips gave expression to that
feature.
Before the Revolution broke out, Blondet senior had been a barrister;
afterwards he became the public accuser, and one of the mildest of those
formidable functionaries. Goodman Blondet, as they used to call him,
deadened the force of the new doctrines by acquiescing in them all, and
putting none of them in practice. He had been obliged to send one or
two nobles to prison; but his further proceedings were marked with such
deliberation, that he brought them through to the 9th Thermidor with a
dexterity which won respect for him on all sides. As a matter of fact,
Goodman Blondet ought to have been President of the Tribunal, but when
the courts of law were reorganized he had been set aside; Napoleon’s
aversion for Republicans was apt to reappear in the smallest
appointments under his government. The qualification of ex-public
accuser, written in the margin of the list against Blondet’s name, set
the Emperor inquiring of Cambaceres whether there might not be some
scion of an ancient parliamentary stock to appoint instead. The
consequence was that du Ronceret, whose father had been a councillor
of parliament, was nominated to the presidency; but, the Emperor’s
repugnance notwithstanding, Cambaceres allowed Blondet to remain on the
bench, saying that the old barrister was one of the best jurisconsults
in France.
Blondet’s talents, his knowledge of the old law of the land and
subsequent legislation, should by rights have brought him far in his
profession; but he had this much in common with some few great spirits:
he entertained a prodigious contempt for his own special knowledge, and
reserved all his pretentions, leisure, and capacity for a second pursuit
unconnected with the law. To this pursuit he gave his almost exclusive
attention. The good man was passionately fond of gardening. He was in
correspondence with some of the most celebrated amateurs; it was
his ambition to create new species; he took an interest in botanical
discoveries, and lived, in short, in the world of flowers. Like
all florists, he had a predilection for one particular plant; the
pelargonium was his especial favorite. The court, the cases that came
before it, and his outward life were as nothing to him compared with the
inward life of fancies and abundant emotions which the old man led. He
fell more and more in love with his flower-seraglio; and the pains which
he bestowed on his garden, the sweet round of the labors of the months,
held Goodman Blondet fast in his greenhouse. But for that hobby he would
have been a deputy under the Empire, and shone conspicuous beyond a
doubt in the Corps Legislatif.
His marriage was the second cause of his obscurity. As a man of forty,
he was rash enough to marry a girl of eighteen, by whom he had a son
named Joseph in the first year of their marriage. Three years afterwards
Mme. Blondet, then the prettiest woman in the town, inspired in the
prefect of the department a passion which ended only with her death.
The prefect was the father of her second son Emile; the whole town knew
this, old Blondet himself knew it. The wife who might have roused
her husband’s ambition, who might have won him away from his flowers,
positively encouraged the judge in his botanical tastes. She no more
cared to leave the place than the prefect cared to leave his prefecture
so long as his mistress lived.
Blondet felt himself unequal at his age to a contest with a young wife.
He sought consolation in his greenhouse, and engaged a very pretty
servant-maid to assist him to tend his ever-changing bevy of beauties.
So while the judge potted, pricked out, watered, layered, slipped,
blended, and induced his flowers to break, Mme. Blondet spent his
substance on the dress and finery in which she shone at the prefecture.
One interest alone had power to draw her away from the tender care of
a romantic affection which the town came to admire in the end; and
this interest was Emile’s education. The child of love was a bright and
pretty boy, while Joseph was no less heavy and plain-featured. The old
judge, blinded by paternal affection loved Joseph as his wife loved
Emile.
For a dozen years M. Blondet bore his lot with perfect resignation.
He shut his eyes to his wife’s intrigue with a dignified, well-bred
composure, quite in the style of an eighteenth century grand seigneur;
but, like all men with a taste for a quiet life, he could cherish a
profound dislike, and he hated his younger son. When his wife died,
therefore, in 1818, he turned the intruder out of the house, and packed
him off to Paris to study law on an allowance of twelve hundred francs
for all resource, nor could any cry of distress extract another penny
from his purse. Emile Blondet would have gone under if it had not been
for his real father.
M. Blondet’s house was one of the prettiest in the town. It stood almost
opposite the prefecture, with a neat little court in front. A row of
old-fashioned iron railings between two brick-work piers enclosed it
from the street; and a low wall, also of brick, with a second row of
railings along the top, connected the piers with the neighboring house.
The little court, a space about ten fathoms in width by twenty in
length, was cut in two by a brick pathway which ran from the gate to the
house door between a border on either side. Those borders were always
renewed; at every season of the year they exhibited a successful show
of blossom, to the admiration of the public. All along the back of the
gardenbeds a quantity of climbing plants grew up and covered the walls
of the neighboring houses with a magnificent mantle; the brick-work
piers were hidden in clusters of honeysuckle; and, to crown all, in
a couple of terra-cotta vases at the summit, a pair of acclimatized
cactuses displayed to the astonished eyes of the ignorant those thick
leaves bristling with spiny defences which seem to be due to some plant
disease.
It was a plain-looking house, built of brick, with brick-work arches
above the windows, and bright green Venetian shutters to make it gay.
Through the glass door you could look straight across the house to the
opposite glass door, at the end of a long passage, and down the central
alley in the garden beyond; while through the windows of the dining-room
and drawing-room, which extended, like the passage from back to front of
the house, you could often catch further glimpses of the flower-beds
in a garden of about two acres in extent. Seen from the road, the
brick-work harmonized with the fresh flowers and shrubs, for two
centuries had overlaid it with mosses and green and russet tints. No one
could pass through the town without falling in love with a house with
such charming surroundings, so covered with flowers and mosses to the
roof-ridge, where two pigeons of glazed crockery ware were perched by
way of ornament.
M. Blondet possessed an income of about four thousand livres derived
from land, besides the old house in the town. He meant to avenge his
wrongs legitimately enough. He would leave his house, his lands, his
seat on the bench to his son Joseph, and the whole town knew what he
meant to do. He had made a will in that son’s favor; he had gone as
far as the Code will permit a man to go in the way of disinheriting
one child to benefit another; and what was more, he had been putting by
money for the past fifteen years to enable his lout of a son to buy back
from Emile that portion of his father’s estate which could not legally
be taken away from him.