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

kind!" added the countess.

"But you are on bad terms with our mayor, Monsieur Gaubertin," said the lieutenant. "It would be wise, for the sake of the future, to be reconciled with him."

"With him!" cried the count. "Then you don't know that he was my former steward, and a swindler!"

"A swindler no longer," said the lieutenant, "for he is mayor of Ville-aux-Fayes."

"Ha, ha!" laughed Blondet, "the lieutenant's wit is keen; evidently a mayor is essentially an honest man."

The lieutenant, convinced by the count's words that it was useless to attempt to enlighten him, said no more on that subject, and the conversation changed.


CHAPTER VI. THE FOREST AND THE HARVEST

The scene at Conches had, apparently, a good effect on the peasantry; on the other hand, the count's faithful keepers were more than ever watchful that only dead wood should be gathered in the forest of Les Aigues. But for the last twenty years the woods had been so thoroughly cleared out that very little else than live wood was now there; and this the peasantry set about killing, in preparation for winter, by a simple process, the results of which could only be discovered in the course of time. Tonsard's mother went daily into the forest; the keepers saw her enter; knew where she would come out; watched for her and made her open her bundle, where, to be sure, were only fallen branches, dried chips, and broken and withered twigs. The old woman would whine and complain at the distance she had to go at her age to gather such a miserable bunch of fagots. But she did not tell that she had been in the thickest part of the wood and had removed the earth at the base of certain young trees, round which she had then cut off a ring of bark, replacing the earth, moss, and dead leaves just as they were before she touched them. It was impossible that any one could discover this annular incision, made, not like a cut, but more like the ripping or gnawing of animals or those destructive insects called in different regions borers, or turks, or white worms, which are the first stage of cockchafers. These destructive pests are fond of the bark of trees; they get between the bark and the sap-wood and eat their way round. If the tree is large enough for the insect to pass into its second state (of larvae, in which it remains dormant until its second metamorphose) before it has gone round the trunk, the tree lives, because so long as even a small bit of the sap-wood remains covered by the bark, the tree will still grow and recover itself. To realize to what a degree entomology affects agriculture, horticulture, and all earth products, we must know that naturalists like Latreille, the Comte Dejean, Klugg of Berlin, Gene of Turin, etc., find that the vast majority of all known insects live at the sacrifice of vegetation; that the coleoptera (a catalogue of which has lately been published by Monsieur Dejean) have twenty-seven thousand species, and that, in spite of the most earnest research on the part of entomologists of all countries, there is an enormous number of species of whom they cannot trace the triple transformations which belong to all insects; that there is, in short, not only a special insect to every plant, but that all terrestrial products, however much they may be manipulated by human industry, have their particular parasite. Thus flax, after covering the human body and hanging the human being, after roaming the world on the back of an army, becomes writing-paper; and those who write or who read are familiar with the habits and morals of an insect called the "paper-louse," an insect of really marvellous celerity and behavior; it undergoes its mysterious transformations in a ream of white paper which you have carefully put away; you see it gliding and frisking along in its shining robe, that looks like isinglass or mica,--truly a little fish of another element.

The borer is the despair of the land-owner; he works underground; no Sicilian vespers for him until he becomes a cockchafer! If the populations only realized with what untold disasters they are threatened in case they let the cockchafers and the caterpillars get the upper hand, they would pay more attention than they do to municipal regulations.

Holland came near perishing; its dikes were undermined by the teredo, and science is unable to discover the insect from which that mollusk derives, just as science still remains ignorant of the metamorphoses of the cochineal. The ergot, or spur, of rye is apparently a population of insects where the genius of science has been able, so far, to discover only one slight movement. Thus, while awaiting the harvest and gleaning, fifty old women imitated the borer at the feet of five or six hundred trees which were fated to become skeletons and to put forth no more leaves in the spring. They were carefully chosen in the least accessible places, so that the surrounding branches concealed them.

Who conveyed the secret information by which this was done? No one. Courtecuisse happened to complain in Tonsard's tavern of having found a tree wilting in his garden; it seemed he said, to have a disease, and he suspected a borer; for he, Courtecuisse, knew what borers were, and if they once circled a tree just below the ground, the tree died. Thereupon he explained the process. The old women at once set to work at the same destruction, with the mystery and cleverness of gnomes; and their efforts were doubled by the rules now enforced by the mayor of Blangy and necessarily followed by the mayors of the adjoining districts.

The great land-owners of the department applauded General de Montcornet's course; and the prefect in his private drawing-room declared that if, instead of living in Paris, other land-owners would come and live on their estates and follow such a course together, a solution of the difficulty could be obtained; for certain measures, added the prefect, ought to be taken, and taken in concert, modified by benefactions and by an enlightened philanthropy, such as every one could see actuated in General Montcornet.

The general and his wife, assisted by the abbe, tried the effects of such benevolence. They studied the subject, and endeavored to show by incontestable results to those who pillaged them that more money could be made by legitimate toil. They supplied flax and paid for the spinning; the countess had the thread woven into linen suitable for towels, aprons, and coarse napkins for kitchen use, and for underclothing for the very poor. The general began improvements which needed many laborers, and he employed none but those in the adjoining districts. Sibilet was in charge of the works and the Abbe Brossette gave the countess lists of the most needy, and often brought them to her himself. Madame de Montcornet attended to these matters personally in the great antechamber which opened upon the portico. It was a beautiful waiting-room, floored with squares of white and red marble, warmed by a porcelain stove, and furnished with benches covered with red plush.

It was there that one morning, just before harvest, old Mother Tonsard brought her granddaughter Catherine, who had to make, she said, a dreadful confession,--dreadful for the honor of a poor but honest family. While the old woman addressed the countess Catherine stood in an attitude of conscious guilt. Then she related on her own account the unfortunate "situation" in which she was placed, which she had confided to none but her grandmother; for her mother, she knew, would turn her out, and her father, an honorable man, might kill her. If she only had a thousand francs she could be married to a poor laborer named Godain, who _knew all_, and who loved her like a brother; he could buy a poor bit of ground and build a cottage if she had that sum. It was very touching. The countess promised the money; resolving to devote the price of some fancy to this marriage. The happy marriages of Michaud and Groison encouraged her. Besides, such a wedding would be a good example to the people of the neighborhood and stimulate to virtuous conduct. The marriage of Catherine Tonsard and Godain was accordingly arranged by means of the countess's thousand francs.

Another time a horrible old woman, Mother Bonnebault, who lived in a hut between the gate of Conches and the village, brought back a great bundle of skeins of linen thread.

"Madame la comtesse has done wonders," said the abbe, full of hope as to the moral progress of his savages. "That old woman did immense damage to your woods, but now she has no time for it; she stays at home and spins from morning till night; her time is all taken up and well paid for."

Peace reigned everywhere. Groison made very satisfactory reports; depredations seemed to have ceased, and it is even possible that the state of the neighborhood and the feeling of the inhabitants might really have changed if it had not been for the revengeful eagerness of Gaubertin, the cabals of the leading society of Soulanges, and the intrigues of Rigou, who one and all, with "the affair" in view, blew the embers of hatred and crime in the hearts of the peasantry of the valley des Aigues.

The keepers still complained of finding a great many branches cut with shears in the deeper parts of the wood and left to dry, evidently as a provision for winter. They watched for the delinquents without ever being able to catch them. The count, assisted by Groison, had given certificates of pauperism to only thirty or forty of the real poor of the district; but the other two mayors had been less strict. The more clement the count showed himself in the affair at Conches the more determined he was to enforce the laws about gleaning, which had now degenerated into theft. He did not interfere with the management of three of his farms which were leased to tenants, nor with those whose tenants worked for his profit, of which he had a number; but he managed six farms himself, each of about two hundred acres, and he now published a notice that it was forbidden, under pain of being arrested and made to pay the fine imposed by the courts, to enter those fields before the crop was carried away. The order concerned only his own immediate property. Rigou, who knew the country well, had let his farm-lands in portions and on short leases to men who knew how to get in their own crops, and who paid him in grain; therefore gleaning did not affect him. The other proprietors were peasants, and no nefarious gleaning was attempted on their land.

When the harvest began the count went himself to Michaud to see how things were going on. Groison, who advised him to do this, was to be present himself at the gleaning of each particular field. The inhabitants of cities can have no idea what gleaning is to the inhabitants of the country; the passion of these sons of the soil for it seems inexplicable; there are women who will give up well-paid employments to glean. The wheat they pick up seems to them sweeter than any other; and the provision they thus make for their chief and most substantial food has to them an extraordinary attraction. Mothers take their babes and their little girls and boys; the feeblest old men drag themselves into the wheat-fields; and even those who own property are paupers for the nonce. All gleaners appear in rags.

The count and Michaud were present on horseback when the first tattered batch entered the first fields