Sons of the Soil, Honoré de Balzac [epub read online books TXT] 📗

DEDICATION

To Monsieur P. S. B. Gavault.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote these words at the beginning of his
Nouvelle Heloise: "I have seen the morals of my time and I publish
these letters." May I not say to you, in imitation of that great
writer, "I have studied the march of my epoch and I publish this
work"?

The object of this particular study--startling in its truth so
long as society makes philanthropy a principle instead of
regarding it as an accident--is to bring to sight the leading
characters of a class too long unheeded by the pens of writers who
seek novelty as their chief object. Perhaps this forgetfulness is
only prudence in these days when the people are heirs of all the
sycophants of royalty. We make criminals poetic, we commiserate
the hangman, we have all but deified the proletary. Sects have
risen, and cried by every pen, "Arise, working-men!" just as
formerly they cried, "Arise!" to the "tiers etat." None of these
Erostrates, however, have dared to face the country solitudes and
study the unceasing conspiracy of those whom we term weak against
those others who fancy themselves strong,--that of the peasant
against the proprietor. It is necessary to enlighten not only the
legislator of to-day but him of to-morrow. In the midst of the
present democratic ferment, into which so many of our writers
blindly rush, it becomes an urgent duty to exhibit the peasant who
renders Law inapplicable, and who has made the ownership of land
to be a thing that is, and that is not.

You are now to behold that indefatigable mole, that rodent which
undermines and disintegrates the soil, parcels it out and divides
an acre into a hundred fragments,--ever spurred on to his banquet
by the lower middle classes who make him at once their auxiliary
and their prey. This essentially unsocial element, created by the
Revolution, will some day absorb the middle classes, just as the
middle classes have destroyed the nobility. Lifted above the law
by its own insignificance, this Robespierre, with one head and
twenty million arms, is at work perpetually; crouching in country
districts, intrenched in municipal councils, under arms in the
national guard of every canton in France,--one result of the year
1830, which failed to remember that Napoleon preferred the chances
of defeat to the danger of arming the masses.

If during the last eight years I have again and again given up the
writing of this book (the most important of those I have
undertaken to write), and as often returned to it, it was, as you
and other friends can well imagine, because my courage shrank from
the many difficulties, the many essential details of a drama so
doubly dreadful and so cruelly bloody. Among the reasons which
render me now almost, it may be thought, foolhardy, I count the
desire to finish a work long designed to be to you a proof of my
deep and lasting gratitude for a friendship that has ever been
among my greatest consolations in misfortune.

De Balzac.

SONS OF THE SOIL


PART I

Whoso land hath, contention hath.


CHAPTER I. THE CHATEAU

Les Aigues, August 6, 1823.

To Monsieur Nathan,

My dear Nathan,--You, who provide the public with such delightful dreams through the magic of your imagination, are now to follow me while I make you dream a dream of truth. You shall then tell me whether the present century is likely to bequeath such dreams to the Nathans and the Blondets of the year 1923; you shall estimate the distance at which we now are from the days when the Florines of the eighteenth century found, on awaking, a chateau like Les Aigues in the terms of their bargain.

My dear fellow, if you receive this letter in the morning, let your mind travel, as you lie in bed, fifty leagues or thereabouts from Paris, along the great mail road which leads to the confines of Burgundy, and behold two small lodges built of red brick, joined, or separated, by a rail painted green. It was there that the diligence deposited your friend and correspondent.

On either side of this double pavilion grows a quick-set hedge, from which the brambles straggle like stray locks of hair. Here and there a tree shoots boldly up; flowers bloom on the slopes of the wayside ditch, bathing their feet in its green and sluggish water. The hedge at both ends meets and joins two strips of woodland, and the double meadow thus inclosed is doubtless the result of a clearing.

These dusty and deserted lodges give entrance to a magnificent avenue of centennial elms, whose umbrageous heads lean toward each other and form a long and most majestic arbor. The grass grows in this avenue, and only a few wheel-tracks can be seen along its double width of way. The great age of the trees, the breadth of the avenue, the venerable construction of the lodges, the brown tints of their stone courses, all bespeak an approach to some half-regal residence.

Before reaching this enclosure from the height of an eminence such as we Frenchmen rather conceitedly call a mountain, at the foot of which lies the village of Conches (the last post-house), I had seen the long valley of Aigues, at the farther end of which the mail road turns to follow a straight line into the little sub-prefecture of La Ville-aux-Fayes, over which, as you know, the nephew of our friend des Lupeaulx lords it. Tall forests lying on the horizon, along vast slopes which skirt a river, command this rich valley, which is framed in the far distance by the mountains of a lesser Switzerland, called the Morvan. These forests belong to Les Aigues, and to the Marquis de Ronquerolles and the Comte de Soulanges, whose castles and parks and villages, seen in the distance from these heights, give the scene a strong resemblance to the imaginary landscapes of Velvet Breughel.

If these details do not remind you of all the castles in the air you have desired to possess in France you are not worthy to receive the present narrative of an astounded Parisian. At last I have seen a landscape where art is blended with nature in such a way that neither of them spoils the other; the art is natural, and the nature artistic. I have found the oasis that you and I have dreamed of when reading novels,--nature luxuriant and adorned, rolling lines that are not confused, something wild withal, unkempt, mysterious, not common. Jump that green railing and come on!

When I tried to look up the avenue, which the sun never penetrates except when it rises or when it sets, striping the road like a zebra with its oblique rays, my view was obstructed by an outline of rising ground; after that is passed, the long avenue is obstructed by a copse, within which the roads meet at a cross-ways, in the centre of which stands a stone obelisk, for all the world like an eternal exclamation mark. From the crevices between the foundation stones of this erection, which is topped by a spiked ball (what an idea!), hang flowering plants, blue or yellow according to the season. Les Aigues must certainly have been built by a woman, or for a woman; no man would have had such dainty ideas; the architect no doubt had his cue.

Passing through the little wood placed there as sentinel, I came upon a charming declivity, at the foot of which foamed and gurgled a little brook, which I crossed on a culvert of mossy stones, superb in color, the prettiest of all the mosaics which time manufactures. The avenue continues by the brookside up a gentle rise. In the distance, the first tableau is now seen,--a mill and its dam, a causeway and trees, linen laid out to dry, the thatched cottage of the miller, his fishing-nets, and the tank where the fish are kept,--not to speak of the miller's boy, who was already watching me. No matter where you are in the country, however solitary you may think yourself, you are certain to be the focus of the two eyes of a country bumpkin; a laborer rests on his hoe, a vine-dresser straightens his bent back, a little goat-girl, or shepherdess, or milkmaid climbs a willow to stare at you.

Presently the avenue merges into an alley of acacias, which leads to an iron railing made in the days when iron-workers fashioned those slender filagrees which are not unlike the copies set us by a writing-master. On either side of the railing is a ha-ha, the edges of which bristle with angry spikes,--regular porcupines in metal. The railing is closed at both ends by two porter's-lodges, like those of the palace at Versailles, and the gateway is surmounted by colossal vases. The gold of the arabesques is ruddy, for rust has added its tints, but this entrance, called "the gate of the Avenue," which plainly shows the hand of the Great Dauphin (to whom, indeed, Les Aigues owes it), seems to me none the less beautiful for that. At the end of each ha-ha the walls of the park, built of rough-hewn stone, begin. These stones, set in a mortar made of reddish earth, display their variegated colors, the warm yellows of the silex, the white of the lime carbonates, the russet browns of the sandstone, in many a fantastic shape. As you first enter it, the park is gloomy, the walls are hidden by creeping plants and by trees that for fifty years have heard no sound of axe. One might think it a virgin forest, made primeval again through some phenomenon granted exclusively to forests. The trunks of the trees are swathed with lichen which hangs from one to another. Mistletoe, with its viscid leaves, droops from every fork of the branches where moisture settles. I have found gigantic ivies, wild arabesques which flourish only at fifty leagues from Paris, here where land does not cost enough to make one sparing of it. The landscape on such free lines covers a great deal of ground. Nothing is smoothed off; rakes are unknown, ruts and ditches are full of water, frogs are tranquilly delivered of their tadpoles, the woodland flowers bloom, and the heather is as beautiful as that I have seen on your mantle-shelf in January in the elegant beau-pot sent by Florine. This mystery is intoxicating, it inspires vague desires. The forest odors, beloved of souls that are epicures of poesy, who delight in the tiny mosses, the noxious fungi, the moist mould, the willows, the balsams, the wild thyme, the green waters of a pond, the golden star of the yellow water-lily,--the breath of all such vigorous propagations came to my nostrils and filled me with a single thought; was it their soul? I seemed to see a rose-tinted gown floating along the winding alley.

The path ended abruptly in another copse, where birches and poplars and all the quivering trees palpitated,--an intelligent family