It was about seven o’clock when Rigou drove by the Cafe de la Paix. The setting sun, slanting its beams across the little town, was diffusing its ruddy tints, and the clear mirror of the lake contrasted with the flashing of the resplendent window-panes, which originated the strangest and most improbable colors.
The deep schemer, who had grown pensive as he revolved his plots, let his horse proceed so slowly that in passing the Cafe de la Paix he heard his own name banded about in one of those noisy disputes which, according to the Abbe Taupin, made the name of the establishment a gain-saying of its customary condition.
For a clear understanding of the following scene we must explain the topography of this region of plenty and of misrule, which began with the cafe on the square, and ended on the country road with the famous Tivoli where the conspirators proposed to entrap the general. The ground-floor of the cafe, which stood at the angle of the square and the road, and was built in the style of Rigou’s house, had three windows on the road and two on the square, the latter being separated by a glass door through which the house was entered. The cafe had, moreover, a double door which opened on a side alley that separated it from the neighboring house (that of Vallet the Soulanges mercer), which led to an inside courtyard.
The house, which was painted wholly in yellow, except the blinds, which were green, is one of the few houses in the little town which has two stories and an attic. And this is why: Before the astonishing rise in the prosperity of Ville-aux-Fayes the first floor of this house, which had four chambers, each containing a bed and the meagre furniture thought necessary to justify the term “furnished lodgings,” was let to strangers who were obliged to come to Soulanges on matters connected with the courts, or to visitors who did not sleep at the chateau; but for the last twenty-five years these rooms had had no other occupants than the mountebanks, the merchants, the vendors of quack medicines who came to the fair, or else commercial travellers. During the fair-time they were let for four francs a day; and brought Socquard about two hundred and fifty francs, not to speak of the profits on the consumption of food which the guests took in his cafe.
The front of the house on the square was adorned with painted signs; on the spaces that separated the windows from the glass door billiard-cues were represented, lovingly tied together with ribbons, and above these bows were depicted smoking bowls of punch, the bowls being in the form of Greek vases. The words “Cafe de la Paix” were over the door, brilliantly painted in yellow on a green ground, at each end of which rose pyramids of tricolored billiard-balls. The window-sashes, painted green, had small panes of the commonest glass.
A dozen arbor-vitae, which ought to be called cafe-trees, stood to the left and right in pots, and presented their usual pretensions and sickly appearance. Awnings, with which shopkeepers of the large cities protect their windows from the head of the sun, were as yet an unknown luxury in Soulanges. The beneficent liquids in the bottles which stood on boards just behind the window-panes went through a periodic cooking. When the sun concentrated its rays through the lenticular knobs in the glass it boiled the Madeira, the syrups, the liqueurs, the preserved plums, and the cherry-brandy set out for show; for the heat was so great that Aglae, her father, and the waiter were forced to sit outside on benches poorly shaded by the wilted shrubs,—which Mademoiselle kept alive with water that was almost hot. All three, father, daughter, and servant, might be seen at certain hours of the day stretched out there, fast asleep, like domestic animals.
In 1804, the period when “Paul and Virginia” was the rage, the inside of the cafe was hung with a paper which represented the chief scenes of that romance. There could be seen Negroes gathering the coffee-crop, though coffee was seldom seen in the establishment, not twenty cups of that beverage being served in the month. Colonial products were of so little account in the consumption of the place that if a stranger had asked for a cup of chocolate Socquard would have been hard put to it to serve him. Still, he would have done so with a nauseous brown broth made from tablets in which there were more flour, crushed almonds, and brown sugar than pure sugar and cacao, concoctions which were sold at two sous a cake by village grocers, and manufactured for the purpose of ruining the sale of the Spanish commodity.
As for coffee, Pere Socquard simply boiled it in a utensil known to all such households as the “big brown pot”; he let the dregs (that were half chicory) settle, and served the decoction, with a coolness worthy of a Parisian waiter, in a china cup which, if flung to the ground, would not have cracked.
At this period the sacred respect felt for sugar under the Emperor was not yet dispelled in the town of Soulanges, and Aglae Socquard boldly served three bits of it of the size of hazel-nuts to a foreign merchant who had rashly asked for the literary beverage.
The wall decoration of the cafe, relieved by mirrors in gilt frames and brackets on which the hats were hung, had not been changed since the days when all Soulanges came to admire the romantic paper, also a counter painted like mahogany with a Saint-Anne marble top, on which shone vessels of plated metal and lamps with double-burners, which were, rumor said, given to the beautiful Madame Socquard by Gaubertin. A sticky coating of dirt covered everything, like that found on old pictures put away and long forgotten in a garret. The tables painted to resemble marble, the benches covered in red Utrecht velvet, the hanging glass lamp full of oil, which fed two lights, fastened by a chain to the ceiling and adorned with glass pendants, were the beginning of the celebrity of the then Cafe de la Guerre.
There, from 1802 to 1804, all the bourgeois of Soulanges played at dominoes and a game of cards called “brelan,” drank tiny glasses of liqueur or boiled wine, and ate brandied fruits and biscuits; for the dearness of colonial products had banished coffee, sugar, and chocolate. Punch was a great luxury; so was “bavaroise.” These infusions were made with a sugary substance resembling molasses, the name of which is now lost, but which, at the time, made the fortune of its inventor.
These succinct details will recall to the memory of all travellers many others that are analogous; and those persons who have never left Paris can imagine the ceiling blackened with smoke and the mirrors specked with millions of spots, showing in what freedom and independence the whole order of diptera lived in the Cafe de la Paix.
The beautiful Madame Socquard, whose gallant adventures surpassed those of the mistress of the Grand-I-Vert, sat there, enthroned, dressed in the last fashion. She affected the style of a sultana, and wore a turban. Sultanas, under the Empire, enjoyed a vogue equal to that of the “angel” of to-day. The whole valley took pattern from the turbans, the poke-bonnets, the fur caps, the Chinese head-gear of the handsome Socquard, to whose luxury the big-wigs of Soulanges contributed. With a waist beneath her arm-pits, after the fashion of our mothers, who were proud of their imperial graces, Junie (she was named Junie!) made the fortune of the house of Socquard. Her husband owed to her the ownership of a vineyard, of the house they lived in, and also the Tivoli. The father of Monsieur Lupin was said to have committed some follies for the handsome Madame Socquard; and Gaubertin, who had taken her from him, certainly owed him the little Bournier.
These details, together with the deep mystery with which Socquard manufactured his boiled wine, are sufficient to explain why his name and that of the Cafe de la Paix were popular; but there were other reasons for their renown. Nothing better than wine could be got at Tonsard’s and the other taverns in the valley; from Conches to Ville-aux-Fayes, in a circumference of twenty miles, the Cafe Socquard was the only place where the guests could play billiards and drink the punch so admirably concocted by the proprietor. There alone could be found a display of foreign wines, fine liqueurs, and brandied fruits. Its name resounded daily throughout the valley, accompanied by ideas of superfine sensual pleasures such as men whose stomachs are more sensitive than their hearts dream about. To all these causes of popularity was added that of being an integral part of the great festival of Soulanges. The Cafe de la Paix was to the town, in a superior degree, what the tavern of the Grand-I-Vert was to the peasantry,—a centre of venom; it was the point of contact and transmission between the gossip of Ville-aux-Fayes and that of the valley. The Grand-I-Vert supplied the milk and the Cafe de la Paix the cream, and Tonsard’s two daughters were in daily communication between the two.
To Socquard’s mind the square of Soulanges was merely an appendage to his cafe. Hercules went from door to door, talking with this one and that one, and wearing in summer no other garment than a pair of trousers and a half-buttoned waistcoat. If any one entered the tavern, the people with whom he gossiped warned him, and he slowly and reluctantly returned.
Rigou stopped his horse, and getting out of the chaise, fastened the bridle to one of the posts near the gate of the Tivoli. Then he made a pretext to listen to what was going on without being noticed, and placed himself between two windows through one of which he could, by advancing his head, see the persons in the room, watch their gestures, and catch the louder tones which came through the glass of the windows and which the quiet of the street enabled him to hear.
“If I were to tell old Rigou that your brother Nicolas is after La Pechina,” cried an angry voice, “and that he waylays her, he’d rip the entrails out of every one of you,—pack of scoundrels that you are at the Grand-I-Vert!”
“If you play me such a trick as that, Aglae,” said the shrill voice of Marie Tonsard, “you sha’n’t tell anything more except to the worms in your coffin. Don’t meddle with my brother’s business or with mine and Bonnebault’s either.”
Marie, instigated by her grandmother, had, as we see, followed Bonnebault; she had watched him through the very window where Rigou was now standing, and had seen him displaying his graces and paying compliments so agreeable to Mademoiselle Socquard that she was forced to smile upon him. That smile had brought about the scene in the midst of which the revelation that interested Rigou came out.
“Well, well, Pere Rigou, what are you doing here?” said Socquard, slapping the usurer on the shoulder; he was coming from a barn at the end of the garden, where he kept various contrivances for the public games, such as weighing-machines, merry-go-rounds, see-saws, all in readiness for the Tivoli when opened. Socquard stepped noiselessly, for he was wearing a pair of those yellow leather-slippers which cost so little by the gross that they have an enormous sale in the provinces.
“If you have any fresh lemons, I’d like a glass of lemonade,” said Rigou; “it is a warm evening.”
“Who is making that racket?” said Socquard, looking through the window and seeing his daughter and Marie Tonsard.
“They are quarrelling for Bonnebault,” said Rigou, sardonically.
The anger of the father was at once controlled by the interest of the tavern-keeper. The tavern-keeper judged it prudent to listen outside, as Rigou was doing; the father was inclined to enter and declare that Bonnebault, possessed of admirable qualities in the eyes of a tavern-keeper, had none at all as son-in-law to one of the notables of Soulanges. And yet Pere Socquard had received but few offers for his daughter. At twenty-two Aglae already rivalled in size and weight Madame Vermichel, whose agility seemed phenomenal. Sitting behind a counter increased the adipose tendency which she derived from her father.
“What devil is it that gets into girls?” said Socquard to Rigou.
“Ha!” replied the ex-Benedictine, “of all the devils, that’s the one the Church has most to do with.”
Just then Bonnebault came out of the billiard-room with a cue in his hand, and struck Marie sharply, saying:—
“You’ve made me miss my stroke; but I’ll not miss you, and I’ll give it to you till you muffle that clapper of yours.”
Socquard and Rigou, who now thought it wise to interfere, entered the cafe by the front door, raising such a crowd of flies that the light from the windows was obscured; the sound was like that of the distant practising of a drum-corps. After their first excitement was over, the big flies with the bluish bellies, accompanied by the stinging little ones, returned to their quarters in the windows, where on three tiers of planks, the paint of which was indistinguishable under the fly-specks, were rows of viscous bottles ranged like soldiers.
Marie was crying. To be struck before a rival by the man she loves is one of those humiliations that no woman can endure, no matter what her place on the social ladder may be; and the lower that place is, the more violent is the expression of her wrath. The Tonsard girl took no notice of Rigou or of Socquard; she flung herself on a bench, in gloomy and sullen silence, which the ex-monk carefully watched.
“Get a fresh lemon, Aglae,” said Pere Socquard, “and go and rinse that glass yourself.”
“You did right to send her away,” whispered Rigou, “or she might have been hurt”; and he glanced significantly at the hand with which Marie grasped a stool she had caught up to throw at Aglae’s head.
“Now, Marie,” said Socquard, standing before her, “people don’t come here to fling stools; if you were to break one of my mirrors, the milk of your cows wouldn’t pay for the damage.”
“Pere Socquard, your daughter is a reptile; I’m worth a dozen of her, I’d have you know. If you don’t want Bonnebault for a son-in-law, it is high time for you to tell him to go and play billiards somewhere else; he’s losing a hundred sous every minute.”
In the middle of this flux of words, screamed rather than said, Socquard took Marie round the waist and flung her out of the door, in spite of her cries and resistance. It was none too soon; for Bonnebault rushed out of the billiard-room, his eyes blazing.
“It sha’n’t end so!” cried Marie Tonsard.
“Begone!” shouted Bonnebault, whom Viollet held back round the body lest he should do the girl some hurt. “Go to the devil, or I will never speak to you or look at you again!”
“You!” said Marie, flinging him a furious glance. “Give me back my money, and I’ll leave you to Mademoiselle Socquard if she is rich enough to keep you.”
Thereupon Marie, frightened when she saw that even Socquard-Alcides could scarcely hold Bonnebault, who sprang after her like a tiger, took to flight along the road.
Rigou followed, and told her to get into his carriole to escape Bonnebault, whose shouts reached the hotel Soudry; then, after hiding Marie under the leather curtains, he came back to the cafe to drink his lemonade and examine the group it now contained, composed of Plissoud, Amaury, Viollet, and the waiter, who were all trying to pacify Bonnebault.
“Come, hussar, it’s your turn to play,” said Amaury, a small, fair young man, with a dull eye.
“Besides, she’s taken herself off,” said Viollet.
If any one ever betrayed astonishment it was Plissoud when he beheld the usurer of Blangy sitting at one of the tables, and more occupied in watching him, Plissoud, than in noticing the quarrel that was going on. In spite of himself, the sheriff allowed his face to show the species of bewilderment which a man feels at an unexpected meeting with a person whom he hates and is plotting against, and he speedily withdrew into the billiard-room.
“Adieu, Pere Socquard,” said Rigou.
“I’ll get your carriage,” said the innkeeper; “take your time.”
“How shall I find out what those fellows have been saying over their pool?” Rigou was asking himself, when he happened to see the waiter’s face in the mirror beside him.
The waiter was a jack at all trades; he cultivated Socquard’s vines, swept out the cafe and the billiard-room, kept the garden in order, and watered the Tivoli, all for fifty francs a year. He was always without a jacket, except on grand occasions; usually his sole garments were a pair of blue linen trousers, heavy shoes, and a striped velvet waistcoat, over which he wore an apron of homespun linen when at work in the cafe or billiard-room. This apron, with strings, was the badge of his functions. The fellow had been hired by Socquard at the last annual fair; for in this valley, as throughout Burgundy, servants are hired in the market-place by the year, exactly as one buys horses.
“What’s your name?” said Rigou.
“Michel, at your service,” replied the waiter.
“Doesn’t old Fourchon come here sometimes?”
“Two or three times a week, with Monsieur Vermichel, who gives me a couple of sous to warn him if his wife’s after them.”
“He’s a fine old fellow, Pere Fourchon; knows a great deal and is full of good sense,” said Rigou, paying for his lemonade and leaving the evil-smelling place when he saw Pere Socquard leading his horse round.
Just as he was about to get into the carriage, Rigou noticed the chemist crossing the square and hailed him with a “Ho, there, Monsieur Vermut!” Recognizing the rich man, Vermut hurried up. Rigou joined him, and said in a low voice:—
“Are there any drugs that can eat into the tissue of the skin so as to produce a real disease, like a whitlow on the finger, for instance?”
“If Monsieur Gourdon would help, yes,” answered the little chemist.
“Vermut, not a word of all this, or you and I will quarrel; but speak of the matter to Monsieur Gourdon, and tell him to come and see me the day after to-morrow. I may be able to procure him the delicate operation of cutting off a forefinger.”
Then, leaving the little man thoroughly bewildered, Rigou got into the carriole beside Marie Tonsard.
“Well, you little viper,” he said, taking her by the arm when he had fastened the reins to a hook in front of the leathern apron which closed the carriole and the horse had started on a trot, “do you think you can keep Bonnebault by giving way to such violence? If you were a wise girl you would promote his marriage with that hogshead of stupidity and take your revenge afterwards.”
Marie could not help smiling as she answered:—
“Ah, how bad you are! you are the master of us all in wickedness.”
“Listen to me, Marie; I like the peasants, but it won’t do for any one of you to come between my teeth and a mouthful of game. Your brother Nicolas, as Aglae said, is after La Pechina. That must not be; I protect her, that girl. She is to be my heiress for thirty thousand francs, and I intend to marry her well. I know that Nicolas, helped by your sister Catherine, came near killing the little thing this morning. You are to see your brother and sister at once, and say to them: ‘If you let La Pechina alone, Pere Rigou will save Nicolas from the conscription.’”
“You are the devil incarnate!” cried Marie. “They do say you’ve signed a compact with him. Is that true?”
“Yes,” replied Rigou, gravely.
“I heard it, but I didn’t believe it.”
“He has guaranteed that no attacks aimed at me shall hurt me; that I shall never be robbed; that I shall live a hundred years and succeed in everything I undertake, and be as young to the day of my death as a two-year old cockerel—”
“Well, if that’s so,” said Marie, “it must be devilishly easy for you to save my brother from the conscription—”
“If he chooses, that’s to say. He’ll have to lose a finger,” returned Rigou. “I’ll tell him how.”
“Look out, you are taking the upper road!” exclaimed Marie.
“I never go by the lower at night,” said the ex-monk.
“On account of the cross?” said Marie, naively.
“That’s it, sly-boots,” replied her diabolical companion.
They had reached a spot where the high-road cuts through a slight elevation of ground, making on each side of it a rather steep slope, such as we often see on the mail-roads of France. At the end of this little gorge, which is about a hundred feet long, the roads to Ronquerolles and to Cerneux meet and form an open space, in the centre of which stands a cross. From either slope a man could aim at a victim and kill him at close quarters, with all the more ease because the little hill is covered with vines, and the evil-doer could lie in ambush among the briers and brambles that overgrow them. We can readily imagine why the usurer did not take that road after dark. The Thune flows round the little hill; and the place is called the Close of the Cross. No spot was ever more adapted for revenge or murder, for the road to Ronquerolles continues to the bridge over the Avonne in front of the pavilion of the Rendezvous, while that to Cerneux leads off above the mail-road; so that between the four roads,—to Les Aigues, Ville-aux-Fayes, Ronquerolles, and Cerneux,—a murderer could choose his line of retreat and leave his pursuers in uncertainty.
“I shall drop you at the entrance of the village,” said Rigou when they neared the first houses of Blangy.
“Because you are afraid of Annette, old coward!” cried Marie. “When are you going to send her away? you have had her now three years. What amuses me is that your old woman still lives; the good God knows how to revenge himself.”
The cautious usurer compelled his wife and Jean to go to bed and to rise by daylight; assuring them that the house would never be attacked if he sat up till midnight, and he never himself rose till late. Not only had he thus secured himself from interruption between seven at night and five the next morning but he had accustomed his wife and Jean to respect his morning sleep and that of Hagar, whose room was directly behind his.
So, on the following morning, about half past six, Madame Rigou, who herself took care of the poultry-yard with some assistance from Jean, knocked timidly at her husband’s door.
“Monsieur Rigou,” she said, “you told me to wake you.”
The tones of that voice, the attitude of the woman, her frightened air as she obeyed an order the execution of which might be ill-received, showed the utter self-abnegation in which the poor creature lived, and the affection she still bore to her petty tyrant.
“Very good,” replied Rigou.
“Shall I wake Annette?” she asked.
“No, let her sleep; she has been up half the night,” he replied, gravely.
The man was always grave, even when he allowed himself to jest. Annette had in fact opened the door secretly to Sibilet, Fourchon, and Catherine Tonsard, who all came at different hours between eleven and two o’clock.
Ten minutes later Rigou, dressed with more care than usual, came downstairs and greeted his wife with a “Good-morning, my old woman,” which made her happier than if counts had knelt at her feet.
“Jean,” he said to the ex-lay-brother, “don’t leave the house; if any one robs me it will be worse for you than for me.”
By thus mingling mildness and severity, hopes and rebuffs, the clever egoist kept his three slaves faithful and close at his heels, like dogs.
Taking the upper-road, so-called, to avoid the Close of the Cross, Rigou reached the square of Soulanges about eight o’clock.
Just as he was fastening his rein to the post nearest the little door with three steps, a blind opened and Soudry showed his face, pitted with the small-pox, which the expression of his small black eyes rendered crafty.
“Let’s begin by taking a crust here before we start,” he said; “we sha’n’t get breakfast at Ville-aux-Fayes before one o’clock.”
Then he softly called a servant-girl, as young and pretty as Annette, who came down noiselessly, and received his order for ham and bread; after which he went himself to the cellar and fetched some wine.
Rigou contemplated for the hundredth time the well-known dining-room, floored in oak, with stuccoed ceiling and cornice, its high wainscot and handsome cupboards finely painted, its porcelain stone and magnificent tall clock,—all the property of Mademoiselle Laguerre. The chair-backs were in the form of lyres, painted white and highly varnished; the seats were of green morocco with gilt nails. A massive mahogany table was covered with green oilcloth, with large squares of a deeper shade of green, and a plain border of the lighter. The floor, laid in Hungarian point, was carefully waxed by Urbain and showed the care which ex-waiting-women know how to exact out of their servants.
“Bah! it cost too much,” thought Rigou for the hundredth time. “I can eat as good a dinner in my room as here, and I have the income of the money this useless splendor would have wasted. Where is Madame Soudry?” he asked, as the mayor returned armed with a venerable bottle.
“Asleep.”
“And you no longer disturb her slumbers?” said Rigou.
The ex-gendarme winked with a knowing air, and pointed to the ham which Jeannette, the pretty maid, was just bringing in.
“That will pick you up, a pretty bit like that,” he said. “It was cured in the house; we cut into it only yesterday.”
“Where did you find her?” said the ex-Benedictine in Soudry’s ear.
“She is like the ham,” replied the ex-gendarme, winking again; “I have had her only a week.”
Jeannette, still in her night-cap, with a short petticoat and her bare feet in slippers, had slipped on a bodice made with straps over the arms in true peasant fashion, over which she had crossed a neckerchief which did not entirely hide her fresh and youthful attractions, which were at least as appetizing as the ham she carried. Short and plump, with bare arms mottled red, ending in large, dimpled hands with short but well-made fingers, she was a picture of health. The face was that of a true Burgundian,—ruddy, but white about the temples, throat, and ears; the hair was chestnut; the corners of the eyes turned up towards the top of the ears; the nostrils were wide, the mouth sensual, and a little down lay along the cheeks; all this, together with a jaunty expression, tempered however by a deceitfully modest attitude, made her the model of a roguish servant-girl.
“On my honor, Jeannette is as good as the ham,” said Rigou. “If I hadn’t an Annette I should want a Jeannette.”
“One is as good as the other,” said the ex-gendarme, “for your Annette is fair and delicate. How is Madame Rigou,—is she asleep?” added Soudry, roughly, to let Rigou see he understood his joke.
“She wakes with the cock, but she goes to roost with the hens,” replied Rigou. “As for me, I sit up and read the ‘Constitutionnel.’ My wife lets me sleep at night and in the morning too; she wouldn’t come into my room for all the world.”
“It’s just the other way here,” replied Jeanette. “Madame sits up with the company playing cards; sometimes there are sixteen of them in the salon; Monsieur goes to bed at eight o’clock, and we get up at daylight—”
“You think that’s different,” said Rigou, “but it comes to the same thing in the end. Well, my dear, you come to me and I’ll send Annette here, and that will be the same thing and different too.”
“Old scamp, you’ll make her ashamed,” said Soudry.
“Ha! gendarme; you want your field to yourself! Well, we all get our happiness where we can find it.”
Jeanette, by her master’s order, disappeared to lay out his clothes.
“You must have promised to marry her when your wife dies,” said Rigou.
“At your age and mine,” replied Soudry, “there’s no other way.”
“With girls of any ambition it would be one way to become a widower,” added Rigou; “especially if Madame Soudry found fault with Jeannette for her way of scrubbing the staircase.”
The remark made the two husbands pensive. When Jeannette returned and announced that all was ready, Soudry said to her, “Come and help me!”—a precaution which made the ex-monk smile.
“There’s a difference, indeed!” said he. “As for me, I’d leave you alone with Annette, my good friend.”
A quarter of an hour later Soudry, in his best clothes, got into the wicker carriage, and the two friends drove round the lake of Soulanges to Ville-aux-Fayes.
“Look at it!” said Rigou, as they reached an eminence from which the chateau of Soulanges could be seen in profile.
The old revolutionary put into the tone of his words all the hatred which the rural middle classes feel to the great chateaux and the great estates.
“Yes, but I hope it will never be destroyed as long as I live,” said Soudry. “The Comte de Soulanges was my general; he did me kindness; he got my pension, and he allows Lupin to manage the estate. After Lupin some of us will have it, and as long as the Soulanges family exists they and their property will be respected. Such folks are large-minded; they let every one make his profit, and they find it pays.”
“Yes, but the Comte de Soulanges has three children, who, at his death, may not agree,” replied Rigou. “The husband of his daughter and his sons may go to law, and end by selling the lead and iron mines to manufacturers, from whom we shall manage to get them back.”
The chateau just then showed up in profile, as if to defy the ex-monk.
“Ah! look at it; in those days they built well,” cried Soudry. “But just now Monsieur le Comte is economizing, so as to make Soulanges the entailed estate of his peerage.”
“My dear friend,” said Rigou, “entailed estates won’t exist much longer.”
When the topic of public matters was exhausted, the worthy pair began to discuss the merits of their pretty maids in terms too Burgundian to be printed here. That inexhaustible subject carried them so far that before they knew it they saw the capital of the arrondissement over which Gaubertin reigned, and which we hope excites enough curiosity in the reader’s mind to justify a short digression.
The name of Ville-aux-Fayes, singular as it is, is explained as the corruption of the words (in low Latin) “Villa in Fago,”—the manor of the woods. This name indicates that a forest once covered the delta formed by the Avonne before it joins its confluent the Yonne. Some Frank doubtless built a fortress on the hill which slopes gently to the long plain. The savage conqueror separated his vantage-ground from the delta by a wide and deep moat and made the position a formidable one, essentially seignorial, convenient for enforcing tolls across the bridges and for protecting his rights of profit on all grains ground in the mills.
That is the history of the beginning of Ville-aux-Fayes. Wherever feudal or ecclesiastical dominion established there we find gathered together interests, inhabitants, and, later, towns when the localities were in a position to maintain them and to found and develop great industries. The method of floating timber discovered by Jean Rouvet in 1549, which required certain convenient stations to intercept it, was the making of Ville-aux-Fayes, which, up to that time, had been, compared to Soulanges, a mere village. Ville-aux-Fayes became a storage place for timber, which covered the shores of the two rivers for a distance of over thirty miles. The work of taking out of the water, computing the lost logs, and making the rafts which the Yonne carried down to the Seine, brought together a large concourse of workmen. Such a population increased consumption and encouraged trade. Thus Ville-aux-Fayes, which had but six hundred inhabitants at the end of the seventeenth century, had two thousand in 1790, and Gaubertin had now raised the number to four thousand, by the following means.
When the legislative assembly decreed the new laying out of territory, Ville-aux-Fayes, which was situated where, geographically, a sub-prefecture was needed, was chosen instead of Soulanges as chief town or capital of the arrondissement. The increased population of Paris, by increasing the demand for and the value of wood as fuel, necessarily increased the commerce of Ville-aux-Fayes. Gaubertin had founded his fortune, after losing his stewardship, on this growing business, estimating the effect of peace on the population of Paris, which did actually increase by over one-third between 1815 and 1825.
The shape of Ville-aux-Fayes followed the conformation of the ground. Each side of the promontory was lined with wharves. The dam to stop the timber from floating further down was just below a hill covered by the forest of Soulanges. Between the dam and the town lay a suburb. The lower town, covering the greater part of the delta, came down to the shores of the lake of the Avonne.
Above the lower town some five hundred houses with gardens, standing on the heights, were grouped round three sides of the promontory, and enjoyed the varied scene of the diamond waters of the lake, the rafts in construction along its edge, and the piles of wood upon the shores. The waters, laden with timber from the river and the rapids which fed the mill-races and the sluices of a few manufactories, presented an animated scene, all the more charming because inclosed in the greenery of forests, while the long valley of Les Aigues offered a glorious contrast to the dark foil of the heights above the town itself.
Gaubertin had built himself a house on the level of the delta, intending to make a place which should improve the locality and render the lower town as desirable as the upper. It was a modern house built of stone, with a balcony of iron railings, outside blinds, painted windows, and no ornament but a line of fret-work under the eaves, a slate roof, one story in height with a garret, a fine courtyard, and behind it an English garden bathed by the waters of the Avonne. The elegance of the place compelled the department to build a fine edifice nearly opposite to it for the sub-prefecture, provisionally lodged in a mere kennel. The town itself also built a town-hall. The law-courts had lately been installed in a new edifice; so that Ville-aux-Fayes owed to the active influence of its present mayor a number of really imposing public buildings. The gendarmerie had also built barracks which completed the square formed by the marketplace.
These changes, on which the inhabitants prided themselves, were due to the impetus given by Gaubertin, who within a day or two had received the cross of the Legion of honor, in anticipation of the coming birthday of the king. In a town so situated and so modern there was of course, neither aristocracy nor nobility. Consequently, the rich merchants of Ville-aux-Fayes, proud of their own independence, willingly espoused the cause of the peasantry against a count of the Empire who had taken sides with the Restoration. To them the oppressors were the oppressed. The spirit of this commercial town was so well known to the government that they send there as sub-prefect a man with a conciliatory temper, a pupil of his uncle, the well-known des Lupeaulx, one of those men, accustomed to compromise, who are familiar with the difficulties and necessities of administration, but whom puritan politicians, doing infinitely worse things, call corrupt.
The interior of Gaubertin’s house was decorated with the unmeaning commonplaces of modern luxury. Rich papers with gold borders, bronze chandeliers, mahogany furniture of a new pattern, astral lamps, round tables with marble tops, white china with gilt lines for dessert, red morocco chairs and mezzo-tint engravings in the dining-room, and blue cashmere furniture in the salon,—all details of a chilling and perfectly unmeaning character, but which to the eyes of Ville-aux-Fayes seemed the last efforts of Sardanapalian luxury. Madame Gaubertin played the role of elegance with great effect; she assumed little airs and was lackadaisical at forty-five years of age, as though certain of the homage of her court.
We ask those who really know France, if these houses—those of Rigou, Soudry, and Gaubertin—are not a perfect presentation of the village, the little town, and the seat of a sub-prefecture?
Without being a man of mind, or a man of talent, Gaubertin had the appearance of being both. He owed the accuracy of his perception and his consummate art to an extreme keenness after gain. He desired wealth, not for his wife, not for his children, not for himself, not for his family, not for the reputation that money gives; after the gratification of his revenge (the hope of which kept him alive) he loved the touch of money, like Nucingen, who, it was said, kept fingering the gold in his pockets. The rush of business was Gaubertin’s wine; and though he had his belly full of it, he had all the eagerness of one who was empty. As with valets of the drama, intrigues, tricks to play, mischief to organize, deceptions, commercial over-reachings, accounts to render and receive, disputes, and quarrels of self-interest, exhilarated him, kept his blood in circulation, and his bile flowing. He went and came on foot, on horseback, in a carriage, by water; he was at all auctions and timber sales in Paris, thinking of everything, keeping hundreds of wires in his hands and never getting them tangled.
Quick, decided in his movements as in his ideas, short and squat in figure, with a thin nose, a fiery eye, an ear on the “qui vive,” there was something of the hunting-dog about him. His brown face, very round and sunburned, from which the tanned ears stood out predominantly,—for he always wore a cap,—was in keeping with that character. His nose turned up; his tightly-closed lips could never have opened to say a kindly thing. His bushy whiskers formed a pair of black and shiny tufts beneath the highly-colored cheek-bones, and were lost in his cravat. Hair that was pepper-and-salt in color and frizzled naturally in stages like those of a judge’s wig, seeming scorched by the fury of the fire which heated his brown skull and gleamed in his gray eyes surrounded by circular wrinkles (no doubt from a habit of always blinking when he looked across the country in full sunlight), completed the characteristics of his physiognomy. His lean and vigorous hands were hairy, knobbed, and claw-like, like those of men who do their share of labor. His personality was agreeable to those with whom he had to do, for he wrapped it in a misleading gayety; he knew how to talk a great deal without saying a word of what he meant to keep unsaid. He wrote little, so as to deny anything that escaped him which might prove unfavorable in its after effects upon his interests. His books and papers were kept by a cashier,—an honest man, whom men of Gaubertin’s stamp always seek to get hold of, and whom they make, in their own selfish interests, their first dupe.
When Rigou’s little green chaise appeared, towards twelve o’clock, in the broad avenue which skirts the river, Gaubertin, in cap, boots, and jacket, was returning from the wharves. He hastened his steps,—feeling very sure that Rigou’s object in coming over could only be “the great affair.”
“Good morning, gendarme; good morning, paunch of gall and wisdom,” he said, giving a little slap to the stomachs of his two visitors. “We have business to talk over, and, faith! we’ll do it glass in hand; that’s the true way to take things.”
“If you do your business that way, you ought to be fatter than you are,” said Rigou.
“I work too hard; I’m not like you two, confined to the house and bewitched there, like old dotards. Well, well, after all that’s the best way; you can do your business comfortably in an arm-chair, with your back to the fire and your belly at table; custom goes to you, I have to go after it. But now, come in, come in! the house is yours for the time you stay.”
A servant, in blue livery edged with scarlet, took the horse by the bridle and led him into the courtyard, where were the offices and the stable.
Gaubertin left his guests to walk about the garden for a moment, while he went to give his orders and arrange about the breakfast.
“Well, my wolves,” he said, as he returned, rubbing his hands, “the gendarmerie of Soulanges were seen this morning at daybreak, marching towards Conches; no doubt they mean to arrest the peasants for depredations; ha, ha! things are getting warm, warm! By this time,” he added, looking at his watch, “those fellows may have been arrested.”
“Probably,” said Rigou.
“Well, what do you all say over there? Has anything been decided?”
“What is there to decide?” asked Rigou. “We have no part in it,” he added, looking at Soudry.
“How do you mean nothing to decide? If Les Aigues is sold as the result of our coalition, who is to gain five or six hundred thousand francs out of it? Do you expect me to, all alone? No, my inside is not strong enough to split up two millions, with three children to establish, and a wife who hasn’t the first idea about the value of money; no, I must have associates. Here’s the gendarme, he has plenty of funds all ready. I know he doesn’t hold a single mortgage that isn’t ready to mature; he only lends now on notes at sight of which I endorse. I’ll go into this thing by the amount of eight hundred thousand francs; my son, the judge, two hundred thousand; and I count on the gendarme for two hundred thousand more; now, how much will you put in, skull-cap?”
“All the rest,” replied Rigou, stiffly.
“The devil! well, I wish I had my hand where your heart is!” exclaimed Gaubertin. “Now what are you going to do?”
“Whatever you do; tell your plan.”
“My plan,” said Gaubertin, “is to take double, and sell half to the Conches, and Cerneux, and Blangy folks who want to buy. Soudry has his clients, and you yours, and I, mine. That’s not the difficulty. The thing is, how are we going to arrange among ourselves? How shall we divide up the great lots?”
“Nothing easier,” said Rigou. “We’ll each take what we like best. I, for one, shall stand in nobody’s way; I’ll take the woods in common with Soudry and my son-in-law; the timber has been so injured that you won’t care for it now, and you may have all the rest. Faith, it is worth the money you’ll put into it!”
“Will you sign that agreement?” said Soudry.
“A written agreement is worth nothing,” replied Gaubertin. “Besides, you know I am playing above board; I have perfect confidence in Rigou, and he shall be the purchaser.”
“That will satisfy me,” said Rigou.
“I will make only one condition,” added Gaubertin. “I must have the pavilion of the Rendezvous, with all its appurtenances, and fifty acres of the surrounding land. I shall make it my country-house, and it shall be near my woods. Madame Gaubertin—Madame Isaure, for that’s what she wants people to call her—says she shall make it her villa.”
“I’m willing,” said Rigou.
“Well, now, between ourselves,” continued Gaubertin, after looking about him on all sides and making sure that no one could overhear him, “do you think they are capable of striking a blow?”
“Such as?” asked Rigou, who never allowed himself to understand a hint.
“Well, if the worst of the band, the best shot, sent a ball whistling round the ears of the count—just to frighten him?”
“He’s a man to rush at an assailant and collar him.”
“Michaud, then.”
“Michaud would do nothing at the moment, but he’d watch and spy till he found out the man and those who instigated him.”
“You are right,” said Gaubertin; “those peasants must make a riot and a few must be sent to the galleys. Well, so much the better for us; the authorities will catch the worst, whom we shall want to get rid of after they’ve done the work. There are those blackguards, the Tonsards and Bonnebault—”
“Tonsard is ready for mischief,” said Soudry, “I know that; and we’ll work him up by Vaudoyer and Courtecuisse.”
“I’ll answer for Courtecuisse,” said Rigou.
“And I hold Vaudoyer in the hollow of my hand.”
“Be cautious!” said Rigou; “before everything else be cautious.”
“Now, papa skull-cap, do you mean to tell me that there’s any harm in speaking of things as they are? Is it we who are indicting and arresting, or gleaning or depredating? If Monsieur le comte knows what he’s about and leases the woods to the receiver-general it is all up with our schemes,—‘Farewell baskets, the vintage is o’er’; in that case you will lose more than I. What we say here is between ourselves and for ourselves; for I certainly wouldn’t say a word to Vaudoyer that I couldn’t repeat to God and man. But it is not forbidden, I suppose, to profit by any events that may take place. The peasantry of this canton are hot-headed; the general’s exactions, his severity, Michaud’s persecutions, and those of his keepers have exasperated them; to-day things have come to a crisis and I’ll bet there’s a rumpus going on now with the gendarmerie. And so, let’s go and breakfast.”
Madame Gaubertin came into the garden just then. She was a rather fair woman with long curls, called English, hanging down her cheeks, who played the style of sentimental virtue, pretended never to have known love, talked platonics to all the men about her, and kept the prosecuting-attorney at her beck and call. She was given to caps with large bows, but preferred to wear only her hair. She danced, and at forty-five years of age had the mincing manner of a girl; her feet, however, were large and her hands frightful. She wished to be called Isaure, because among her other oddities and absurdities she had the taste to repudiate the name of Gaubertin as vulgar. Her eyes were light and her hair of an undecided color, something like dirty nankeen. Such as she was, she was taken as a model by a number of young ladies, who stabbed the skies with their glances, and posed as angels.
“Well, gentlemen,” she said, bowing, “I have some strange news for you. The gendarmerie have returned.”
“Did they make any prisoners?”
“None; the general, it seems, had previously obtained the pardon of the depredators. It was given in honor of this happy anniversary of the king’s restoration to France.”
The three associates looked at each other.
“He is cleverer than I thought for, that big cuirassier!” said Gaubertin. “Well, come to breakfast. After all, the game is not lost, only postponed; it is your affair now, Rigou.”
Soudry and Rigou drove back disappointed, not being able as yet to plan any other catastrophe to serve their ends and relying, as Gaubertin advised, on what might turn up. Like certain Jacobins at the outset of the Revolution who were furious with Louis XVI.‘s conciliations, and who provoked severe measures at court in the hope of producing anarchy, which to them meant fortune and power, the formidable enemies of General Montcornet staked their present hopes on the severity which Michaud and his keepers were likely to employ against future depredators. Gaubertin promised them his assistance, without explaining who were his co-operators, for he did not wish them to know about his relations with Sibilet. Nothing can equal the prudence of a man of Gaubertin’s stamp, unless it be that of an ex-gendarme or an unfrocked priest. This plot could not have been brought to a successful issue,—a successfully evil issue,—unless by three such men as these, steeped in hatred and self-interest.