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

attitude and the perfectly stupid expression of his face.

"In my young days we had lots of otters," whispered the old fellow; "but they've hunted 'em so that if we see the tail of one in seven years it is as much as ever we do. And the sub-prefect at Ville-aux-Fayes,--doesn't monsieur know him? though he be a Parisian, he's a fine young man like you, and he loves curiosities,--so, as I was saying, hearing of my talent for catching otters, for I know 'em as you know your alphabet, he says to me like this: 'Pere Fourchon,' says he, 'when you find an otter bring it to me, and I'll pay you well; and if it's spotted white on the back,' says he, 'I'll give you thirty francs.' That's just what he did say to me as true as I believe in God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. And there's a learned man at Soulanges, Monsieur Gourdon, our doctor, who is making, so they tell me, a collection of natural history which hasn't its mate at Dijon even; indeed he is first among the learned men in these parts, and he'll pay me a fine price, too; he stuffs men and beasts. Now my boy there stands me out that that otter has got the white spots. 'If that's so,' says I to him, 'then the good God wishes well to us this morning!' Ha! didn't you see the water bubble? yes, there it is! there it is! Though it lives in a kind of a burrow, it sometimes stays whole days under water. Ha, there! it heard you, my good gentleman; it's on its guard now; for there's not a more suspicious animal on earth; it's worse than a woman."

"So you call women suspicious, do you?" said Blondet.

"Faith, monsieur, if you come from Paris you ought to know about that better than I. But you'd have done better for me if you had stayed in your bed and slept all the morning; don't you see that wake there? that's where she's gone under. Get up, Mouche! the otter heard monsieur talking, and now she's scary enough to keep us at her heels till midnight. Come, let's be off! and good-bye to our thirty francs!"

Mouche got up reluctantly; he looked at the spot where the water bubbled, pointed to it with his finger and seemed unable to give up all hope. The child, with curly hair and a brown face, like the angels in a fifteenth-century picture, seemed to be in breeches, for his trousers ended at the knee in a ragged fringe of brambles and dead leaves. This necessary garment was fastened upon him by cords of tarred oakum in guise of braces. A shirt of the same burlap which made the old man's trousers, thickened, however, by many darns, open in front showed a sun-burnt little breast. In short, the attire of the being called Mouche was even more startlingly simple than that of Pere Fourchon.

"What a good-natured set of people they are here," thought Blondet; "if a man frightened away the game of the people of the suburbs of Paris, how their tongues would maul him!"

As he had never seen an otter, even in a museum, he was delighted with this episode of his early walk. "Come," said he, quite touched when the old man walked away without asking him for a compensation, "you say you are a famous otter catcher. If you are sure there is an otter down there--"

From the other side of the water Mouche pointed his finger to certain air-bubbles coming up from the bottom of the Avonne and bursting on its surface.

"It has come back!" said Pere Fourchon; "don't you see it breathe, the beggar? How do you suppose they manage to breathe at the bottom of the water? Ah, the creature's so clever it laughs at science."

"Well," said Blondet, who supposed the last word was a jest of the peasantry in general rather than of this peasant in particular, "wait and catch the otter."

"And what are we to do about our day's work, Mouche and I?"

"What is your day worth?"

"For the pair of us, my apprentice and me?--Five francs," said the old man, looking Blondet in the eye with a hesitation which betrayed an enormous overcharge.

The journalist took ten francs from his pocket, saying, "There's ten, and I'll give you ten more for the otter."

"And it won't cost you dear if there's white on its back; for the sub-prefect told me there wasn't one o' them museums that had the like; but he knows everything, our sub-prefect,--no fool he! If I hunt the otter, he, M'sieur des Lupeaulx, hunts Mademoiselle Gaubertin, who has a fine white 'dot' on her back. Come now, my good gentleman, if I may make so bold, plunge into the middle of the Avonne and get to that stone down there. If we head the otter off, it will come down stream; for just see their slyness, the beggars! they always go above their burrow to feed, for, once full of fish, they know they can easily drift down, the sly things! Ha! if I'd been trained in their school I should be living now on an income; but I was a long time finding out that you must go up stream very early in the morning if you want to bag the game before others. Well, somebody threw a spell over me when I was born. However, we three together ought to be slyer than the otter."

"How so, my old necromancer?"

"Why, bless you! we are as stupid as the beasts, and so we come to understand the beasts. Now, see, this is what we'll do. When the otter wants to get home Mouche and I'll frighten it here, and you'll frighten it over there; frightened by us and frightened by you it will jump on the bank, and when it takes to earth, it is lost! It can't run; it has web feet for swimming. Ho, ho! it will make you laugh, such floundering! you don't know whether you are fishing or hunting! The general up at Les Aigues, I have known him to stay here three days running, he was so bent on getting an otter."

Blondet, armed with a branch cut for him by the old man, who requested him to whip the water with it when he called to him, planted himself in the middle of the river by jumping from stone to stone.

"There, that will do, my good gentleman."

Blondet stood where he was told without remarking the lapse of time, for every now and then the old fellow made him a sign as much as to say that all was going well; and besides, nothing makes time go so fast as the expectation that quick action is to succeed the perfect stillness of watching.

"Pere Fourchon," whispered the boy, finding himself alone with the old man, "there's _really_ an otter!"

"Do you see it?"

"There, see there!"

The old fellow was dumb-founded at beholding under water the reddish-brown fur of an actual otter.

"It's coming my way!" said the child.

"Hit him a sharp blow on the head and jump into the water and hold him fast down, but don't let him go!"

Mouche dove into the water like a frightened frog.

"Come, come, my good gentleman," cried Pere Fourchon to Blondet, jumping into the water and leaving his sabots on the bank, "frighten him! frighten him! Don't you see him? he is swimming fast your way!"

The old man dashed toward Blondet through the water, calling out with the gravity that country people retain in the midst of their greatest excitements:--

"Don't you see him, there, along the rocks?"

Blondet, placed by direction of the old fellow in such a way that the sun was in his eyes, thrashed the water with much satisfaction to himself.

"Go on, go on!" cried Pere Fourchon; "on the rock side; the burrow is there, to your left!"

Carried away by excitement and by his long waiting, Blondet slipped from the stones into the water.

"Ha! brave you are, my good gentleman! Twenty good Gods! I see him between your legs! you'll have him!--Ah! there! he's gone--he's gone!" cried the old man, in despair.

Then, in the fury of the chase, the old fellow plunged into the deepest part of the stream in front of Blondet.

"It's your fault we've lost him!" he cried, as Blondet gave him a hand to pull him out, dripping like a triton, and a vanquished triton. "The rascal, I see him, under those rocks! He has let go his fish," continued Fourchon, pointing to something that floated on the surface. "We'll have that at any rate; it's a tench, a real tench."

Just then a groom in livery on horseback and leading another horse by the bridle galloped up the road toward Conches.

"See! there's the chateau people sending after you," said the old man. "If you want to cross back again I'll give you a hand. I don't mind about getting wet; it saves washing!"

"How about rheumatism?"

"Rheumatism! don't you see the sun has browned our legs, Mouche and me, like tobacco-pipes. Here, lean on me, my good gentleman--you're from Paris; you don't know, though you _do_ know so much, how to walk on our rocks. If you stay here long enough, you'll learn a deal that's written in the book o' nature,--you who write, so they tell me, in the newspapers."

Blondet had reached the bank before Charles, the groom, perceived him.

"Ah, monsieur!" he cried; "you don't know how anxious Madame has been since she heard you had gone through the gate of Conches; she was afraid you were drowned. They have rung the great bell three times, and Monsieur le cure is hunting for you in the park."

"What time is it, Charles?"

"A quarter to twelve."

"Help me to mount."

"Ha!" exclaimed the groom, noticing the water that dripped from Blondet's boots and trousers, "has monsieur been taken in by Pere Fourchon's otter?"

The words enlightened the journalist.

"Don't say a word about it, Charles," he cried, "and I'll make it all right with you."

"Oh, as for that!" answered the man, "Monsieur le comte himself has been taken in by that otter. Whenever a visitor comes to Les Aigues, Pere Fourchon sets himself on the watch, and if the gentleman goes to see the sources of the Avonne he sells him the otter; he plays the trick so well that Monsieur le comte has been here three times and paid him for six days' work, just to stare at the water!"

"Heavens!" thought Blondet. "And I imagined I had seen the greatest comedians of the present day!--Potier, the younger Baptiste, Michot, and Monrose. What are they compared to that old beggar?"

"He is very knowing at the business, Pere Fourchon is," continued Charles; "and he has another string to his bow, besides. He calls himself a rope-maker, and has a walk under the park wall by the gate of Blangy. If you merely touch his rope he'll entangle you so cleverly that you will want to turn the wheel and make a bit of it yourself; and for that you would have to pay a fee for apprenticeship. Madame herself was taken in, and gave him twenty francs. Ah! he is the king of tricks, that old fellow!"

The groom's gossip set Blondet thinking of the extreme craftiness and wiliness of the French peasant, of which he had heard a great deal