Though deeply moved as she listened to this grand utterance of true catholic charity, the countess answered in the fatal words, “We will consider it,”—words of the rich, which contain that promise to the ear which saves their purses and enables them to stand with arms crossed in presence of all disaster, under pretext that they were powerless.
Hearing those words, the abbe bowed to Madame de Montcornet and turned off into a path which led him direct to the gate of Blangy.
“Belshazzar’s feast is the everlasting symbol of the dying days of a caste, of an oligarchy, of a power!” he thought as he walked away. “My God! if it be Thy will to loose the poor like a torrent to reform society, I know, I comprehend, why it is that Thou hast abandoned the wealthy to their blindness!”
Old Mother Tonsard’s screams brought a number of people from Blangy to know what was happening at the Grand-I-Vert, the distance from the village to the inn not being greater than that from the inn to the gate of Blangy. One of these inquiring visitors was old Niseron, La Pechina’s grandfather, who was on his way, after ringing the second Angelus, to dig the vine-rows in his last little bit of ground.
Bent by toil, with pallid face and silvery hair, the old vinedresser, now the sole representative of civic virtue in the community, had been, during the Revolution, president of the Jacobin club at Ville-aux-Fayes, and a juror in the revolutionary tribunal of the district. Jean-Francois Niseron, carved out of the wood that the apostles were made of, was of the type of Saint Peter; whom painters and sculptors have united in representing with the square brow of the people, the thick, naturally curling hair of the laborer, the muscles of the man of toil, the complexion of a fisherman; with the large nose, the shrewd, half-mocking lips that scoff at fate, the neck and shoulders of the strong man who cuts his wood to cook his dinner while the doctrinaires of his opinions talk.
Such, at forty years of age on the breaking out of the Revolution, was this man, strong as iron, pure as gold. Advocate of the people, he believed in a republic through the very roll of that name, more formidable in sound perhaps than in reality. He believed in the republic of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in the brotherhood of man, in the exchange of noble sentiments, in the proclamation of virtue, in the choice of merit without intrigue,—in short, in all that the narrow limits of one arrondissement like Sparta made possible, and which the vast proportions of an empire make chimerical. He signed his beliefs with his blood,—his only son went to war; he did more, he signed them with the prosperity of his life,—last sacrifice of self. Nephew and sole heir of the curate of Blangy, the then all-powerful tribune might have enforced his rights and recovered the property left by the priest to his pretty servant-girl, Arsene; but he respected his uncle’s wishes and accepted poverty, which came upon him as rapidly as the fall of his cherished republic came upon France.
Never a farthing’s worth, never so much as the branch of a tree belonging to another passed into the hands of this notable republican, who would have made the republic acceptable to the world if he and such as he could have guided it. He refused to buy the national domains; he denied the right of the Republic to confiscate property. In reply to all demands of the committee of public safety he asserted that the virtue of citizens would do for their sacred country what low political intriguers did for money. This patriot of antiquity publicly reproved Gaubertin’s father for his secret treachery, his underhand bargaining, his malversations. He reprimanded the virtuous Mouchon, that representative of the people whose virtue was nothing more nor less than incapacity,—as it is with so many other legislators who, gorged with the greatest political resources that any nation ever gave, armed with the whole force of a people, are still unable to bring forth from them the grandeur which Richelieu wrung for France out of the weakness of a king. Consequently, citizen Niseron became a living reproach to the people about him. They endeavored to put him out of sight and mind with the reproachful remark, “Nothing satisfies that man.”
The patriot peasant returned to his cot at Blangy and watched the destruction, one by one, of his illusions; he saw his republic come to an end at the heels of an emperor, while he himself fell into utter poverty, to which Rigou stealthily managed to reduce him. And why? Because Niseron had never been willing to accept anything from him. Reiterated refusals showed the ex-priest in what profound contempt the nephew of the curate held him; and now that icy scorn was revenged by the terrible threat as to his little granddaughter, about which the Abbe Brossette spoke to the countess.
The old man had composed in his own mind a history of the French republic, filled with the glorious features which gave immortality to that heroic period to the exclusion of all else. The infamous deeds, the massacres, the spoliations, his virtuous soul ignored; he admired, with a single mind, the devotedness of the people, the “Vengeur,” the gifts to the nation, the uprising of the country to defend its frontier; and he still pursued his dream that he might sleep in peace.
The Revolution produced many poets like old Niseron, who sang their poems in the country solitudes, in the army, openly or secretly, by deeds buried beneath the whirlwind of that storm, just as the wounded left behind to die in the great wars of the empire cried out, “Long live the Emperor!” This sublimity of soul belongs especially to France. The Abbe Brossette respected the convictions of the old man, who became simply but deeply attached to the priest from hearing him say, “The true republic is in the Gospel.” The stanch republican carried the cross, and wore the sexton’s robe, half-red, half-black, and was grave and dignified in church,—supporting himself by the triple functions with which he was invested by the abbe, who was able to give the fine old man, not, to be sure, enough to live on, but enough to keep him from dying of hunger.
Niseron, the Aristides of Blangy, spoke little, like all noble dupes who wrap themselves in the mantle of resignation; but he was never silent against evil, and the peasants feared him as thieves fear the police. He seldom came more than six times a year to the Grand-I-Vert, though he was always warmly welcomed there. The old man cursed the want of charity of the rich,—their selfishness disgusted him; and through this fiber of his mind he seemed to the peasants to belong to them; they were in the habit of saying, “Pere Niseron doesn’t like the rich; he’s one of us.”
The civic crown won by this noble life throughout the valley lay in these words: “That good old Niseron! there’s not a more honest man.” Often taken as umpire in certain kinds of disputes, he embodied the meaning of that archaic term,—the village elder. Always extremely clean, though threadbare, he wore breeches, coarse woollen stockings, hob-nailed shoes, the distinctively French coat with large buttons and the broad-brimmed felt hat to which all old peasants cling; but for daily wear he kept a blue jacket so patched and darned that it looked like a bit of tapestry. The pride of a man who feels he is free, and knows he is worthy of freedom, gave to his countenance and his whole bearing a something that was inexpressibly noble; you would have felt he wore a robe, not rags.
“Hey! what’s happening so unusual?” he said, “I heard the noise down here from the belfry.”
They told him of Vatel’s attack on the old woman, talking all at once after the fashion of country-people.
“If she didn’t cut the tree, Vatel was wrong; but if she did cut it, you have done two bad actions,” said Pere Niseron.
“Take some wine,” said Tonsard, offering a full glass to the old man.
“Shall we start?” said Vermichel to the sheriff’s officer.
“Yes,” replied Brunet, “we must do without Pere Fourchon and take the assistant at Conches. Go on before me; I have a paper to carry to the chateau. Rigou has gained his second suit, and I’ve got to deliver the verdict.”
So saying, Monsieur Brunet, all the livelier for a couple of glasses of brandy, mounted his gray mare after saying good-bye to Pere Niseron; for the whole valley were desirous in their hearts of the good man’s esteem.
No science, not even that of statistics, can explain the rapidity with which news flies in the country, nor how it spreads over those ignorant and untaught regions which are, in France, a standing reproach to the government and to capitalists. Contemporaneous history can show that a famous banker, after driving post-horses to death between Waterloo and Paris (everybody knows why—he gained what the Emperor had lost, a commission!) carried the fatal news only three hours in advance of rumor. So, not an hour after the encounter between old mother Tonsard and Vatel, a number of the customers of the Grand-I-Vert assembled there to hear the tale.
The first to come was Courtecuisse, in whom you would scarcely have recognized the once jovial forester, the rubicund do-nothing, whose wife made his morning coffee as we have before seen. Aged, and thin, and haggard, he presented to all eyes a lesson that no one learned. “He tried to climb higher than the ladder,” was what his neighbors said when others pitied him and blamed Rigou. “He wanted to be a bourgeois himself.”
In fact, Courtecuisse did intend to pass for a bourgeois in buying the Bachelerie, and he even boasted of it; though his wife went about the roads gathering up the horse-droppings. She and Courtecuisse got up before daylight, dug their garden, which was richly manured, and obtained several yearly crops from it, without being able to do more than pay the interest due to Rigou for the rest of the purchase-money. Their daughter, who was living at service in Auxerre, sent them her wages; but in spite of all their efforts, in spite of this help, the last day for the final payment was approaching, and not a penny in hand with which to meet it. Madame Courtecuisse, who in former times occasionally allowed herself a bottle of boiled wine or a bit of roast meat, now drank nothing but water. Courtecuisse was afraid to go to the Grand-I-Vert lest he should have to leave three sous behind him. Deprived of power, he had lost his privilege of free drinks, and he bitterly complained, like all other fools, of man’s ingratitude. In short, he found, according to the experience of all peasants bitten with the demon of proprietorship, that toil had increased and food decreased.
“Courtecuisse has done too much to the property,” the people said, secretly envying his position. “He ought to have waited till he had paid the money down and was master before he put up those fruit palings.”
With the help of his wife he had managed to manure and cultivate the three acres of land sold to him by Rigou, together with the garden adjoining the house, which was beginning to be productive; and he was in danger of being turned out of it all. Clothed in rags like Fourchon, poor Courtecuisse, who lately wore the boots and gaiters of a huntsman, now thrust his feet into sabots and accused “the rich” of Les Aigues of having caused his destitution. These wearing anxieties had given to the fat little man and his once smiling and rosy face a gloomy and dazed expression, as though he were ill from the effects of poison or with some chronic malady.
“What’s the matter with you, Monsieur Courtecuisse; is your tongue tied?” asked Tonsard, as the man continued silent after he had told him about the battle which had just taken place.
“No, no!” cried Madame Tonsard; “he needn’t complain of the midwife who cut his string,—she made a good job of it.”
“It is enough to make a man dumb, thinking from morning till night of some way to escape Rigou,” said the premature old man, gloomily.
“Bah!” said old Mother Tonsard, “you’ve got a pretty daughter, seventeen years old. If she’s a good girl you can easily manage matters with that old jail bird—”
“We sent her to Auxerre two years ago to Madame Mariotte the elder, to keep her out of harm’s way; I’d rather die than—”
“What a fool you are!” said Tonsard, “look at my girls,—are they any the worse? He who dares to say they are not as virtuous as marble images will have to do with my gun.”
“It’ll be hard to have to come to that,” said Courtecuisse, shaking his head. “I’d rather earn the money by shooting one of those Arminacs.”
“Well, I call it better for a girl to save a father than to wrap up her virtue and let it mildew,” retorted the innkeeper.
Tonsard felt a sharp tap on his shoulder, delivered by Pere Niseron.
“That is not a right thing to say!” cried the old man. “A father is the guardian of the honor of his family. It is by behaving as you do that scorn and contempt are brought upon us; it is because of such conduct that the People are accused of being unfit for liberty. The People should set an example of civic virtue and honor to the rich. You all sell yourselves to Rigou for gold; and if you don’t sell him your daughters, at any rate you sell him your honor,—and it’s wrong.”
“Just see what a position Courtecuisse is in,” said Tonsard.
“See what a position I am in,” replied Pere Niseron; “but I sleep in peace; there are no thorns in my pillow.”
“Let him talk, Tonsard,” whispered his wife, “you know they’re just his notions, poor dear man.”
Bonnebault and Marie, Catherine and her brother came in at this moment in a state of exasperation, which had begun with Nicolas’s failure, and was raised to the highest pitch by Michaud’s advice to the countess about Bonnebault. As Nicolas entered the tavern he was uttering frightful threats against the Michaud family and Les Aigues.
“The harvest’s coming; well, I vow I’ll not go before I’ve lighted my pipe at their wheat-stacks,” he cried, striking his fist on the table as he sat down.
“Mustn’t yelp like that before people,” said Godain, showing him Pere Niseron.
“If the old fellow tells, I’ll wring his neck,” said Catherine. “He’s had his day, that old peddler of foolish reasons! They call him virtuous; it’s his temperament that keeps him so, that’s all.”
Strange and noteworthy sight!—that of those lifted heads, that group of persons gathered in the reeking hovel, while old Mother Tonsard stood sentinel at the door as security for the secret words of the drinkers.
Of all those faces, that of Godain, Catherine’s suitor, was perhaps the most alarming, though the least pronounced. Godain,—a miser without money,—the cruelest of misers, for he who seeks money surely takes precedence of him who hoards it, one turning his eagerness within himself, the other looking outside with terrible intentness,—Godain represented the type of the majority of peasant faces.
He was a journeyman, small in frame, and saved from the draft by not attaining the required military height; naturally lean and made more so by hard work and the enforced sobriety under which reluctant workers like Courtecuisse succumb. His face was no bigger than a man’s fist, and was lighted by a pair of yellow eyes with greenish strips and brown spots, in which a thirst for the possession of property was mingled with a concupiscence which had no heat,—for desire, once at the boiling-point, had now stiffened like lava. His skin, brown as that of a mummy, was glued to his temples. His scanty beard bristled among his wrinkles like stubble in the furrows. Godain never perspired, he reabsorbed his substance. His hairy hands, formed like claws, nervous, never still, seemed to be made of old wood. Though scarcely twenty-seven years of age, white lines were beginning to show in his rusty black hair. He wore a blouse, through the breast opening of which could be seen a shirt of coarse linen, so black that he must have worn it a month and washed it himself in the Thune. His sabots were mended with old iron. The original stuff of his trousers was unrecognizable from the darns and the infinite number of patches. On his head was a horrible cap, evidently cast off and picked up in the doorway of some bourgeois house in Ville-aux-Fayes.
Clear-sighted enough to estimate the elements of good fortune that centred in Catherine Tonsard, his ambition was to succeed her father at the Grand-I-Vert. He made use of all his craftiness and all his actual powers to capture her; he promised her wealth, he also promised her the license her mother had enjoyed; besides this, he offered his prospective father-in-law an enormous rental, five hundred francs a year, for his inn, until he could buy him out, trusting to an agreement he had made with Monsieur Brunet to pay these costs by notes on stamped paper. By trade a journeyman tool-maker, this gnome worked for the wheelwrights when work was plentiful, but he also hired himself out for any extra labor which was well paid. Though he possessed, unknown to the whole neighborhood, eighteen hundred francs now in Gaubertin’s hands, he lived like a beggar, slept in a barn, and gleaned at the harvests. He wore Gaubertin’s receipt for his money sewn into the waist-belt of his trousers,—having it renewed every year with its own added interest and the amount of his savings.
“Hey! what do I care,” cried Nicolas, replying to Godain’s prudent advice not to talk before Niseron. “If I’m doomed to be a soldier I’d rather the sawdust of the basket sucked up my blood than have it dribbled out drop by drop in the battles. I’ll deliver this country of at least one of those Arminacs that the devil has launched upon us.”
And he related what he called Michaud’s plot against him, which Marie and Bonnebault had overheard.
“Where do you expect France to find soldiers?” said the white-haired old man, rising and standing before Nicolas during the silence which followed the utterance of this threat.
“We serve our time and come home again,” remarked Bonnebault, twirling his moustache.
Observing that all the worst characters of the neighborhood were collecting, Pere Niseron shook his head and left the tavern, after offering a farthing to Madame Tonsard in payment for his glass of wine. When the worthy man had gone down the steps a movement of relief and satisfaction passed through the assembled drinkers which would have told whoever watched them that each man in that company felt he was rid of the living image of his own conscience.
“Well, what do you say to all that, hey, Courtecuisse?” asked Vaudoyer, who had just come in, and to whom Tonsard had related Vatel’s attempt.
Courtecuisse clacked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, and set his glass on the table.
“Vatel put himself in the wrong,” he said. “If I were Mother Tonsard, I’d give myself a few wounds and go to bed and say I was ill, and have that Shopman and his keeper up before the assizes and get twenty crowns damages. Monsieur Sarcus would give them.”
“In any case the Shopman would give them to stop the talk it would make,” said Godain.
Vaudoyer, the former field-keeper, a man five feet six inches tall, with a face pitted with the small-pox and furrowed like a nut-cracker, kept silence with a hesitating air.
“Well, you old ninny, does that ruffle you?” asked Tonsard, attracted by the idea of damages. “If they had broken twenty crowns’ worth of my mother’s bones we could turn it into good account; we might make a fine fuss for three hundred francs; Monsieur Gourdon would go to Les Aigues and tell them that the mother had got a broken hip—”
“And break it, too,” interrupted Madame Tonsard; “they do that in Paris.”
“It would cost too much,” remarked Godain.
“I have been too long among the people who rule us to believe that matters will go as you want them,” said Vaudoyer at last, remembering his past official intercourse with the courts and the gendarmerie. “If it were at Soulanges, now, it might be done; Monsieur Soudry represents the government there, and he doesn’t wish well to the Shopman; but if you attack the Shopman and Vatel they’ll defend themselves viciously; they’ll say, ‘The woman was to blame; she had a tree, otherwise she would have let her bundle be examined on the highroad; she wouldn’t have run away; if an accident happened to her it was through her own fault.’ No, you can’t trust to that plan.”
“The Shopman didn’t resist when I sued him,” said Courtecuisse; “he paid me at once.”
“I’ll go to Soulanges, if you like,” said Bonnebault, “and consult Monsieur Gourdon, the clerk of the court, and you shall know to-night if there’s money in it.”
“You are only making an excuse to be after that big goose of a girl, Socquard’s daughter,” said Marie Tonsard, giving Bonnebault a slap on the shoulder that made his lungs hum.
Just then a verse of an old Burgundian Christmas carol was heard:—
Every one recognized the vinous voice of old Fourchon, to whom the verse must have been peculiarly agreeable; Mouche accompanied in his treble tones.
“Ha! they’re full!” cried old Mother Tonsard to her daughter-in-law; “your father is as red as a grid-iron, and that chip o’ the block as pink as vine-shoot.”
“Your healths!” cried the old man, “and a fine lot of scoundrels you are! All hail!” he said to his granddaughter, whom he spied kissing Bonnebault, “hail, Marie, full of vice! Satan is with three; cursed art thou among women, etcetera. All hail, the company present! you are done for, every one of you! you may just say good-bye to your sheaves. I being news. I always told you the rich would crush us; well now, the Shopman is going to have the law of you! Ha! see what it is to struggle against those bourgeois fellows, who have made so many laws since they got into power that they’ve a law to enforce every trick they play—”
A violent hiccough gave a sudden turn to the ideas of the distinguished orator.
“If Vermichel were only here I’d blow in his gullet, and he’d get an idea of sherry wine. Hey! what a wine it is! If I wasn’t a Burgundian I’d be a Spaniard! It’s God’s own wine! the pope says mass with it—Hey! I’m young again! Say, Courtecuisse! if your wife were only here we’d be young together. Don’t tell me! Spanish wine is worth a dozen of boiled wine. Let’s have a revolution if it’s only to empty the cellars!”
“But what’s your news, papa?” said Tonsard.
“There’ll be no harvest for you; the Shopman has given orders to stop the gleaning.”
“Stop the gleaning!” cried the whole tavern, with one voice, in which the shrill tones of the four women predominated.
“Yes,” said Mouche, “he is going to issue an order, and Groison is to take it round, and post it up all over the canton. No one is to glean except those who have pauper certificates.”
“And what’s more,” said Fourchon, “the folks from the other districts won’t be allowed here at all.”
“What’s that?” cried Bonnebault, “do you mean to tell me that neither my grandmother nor I, nor your mother, Godain, can come here and glean? Here’s tomfoolery for you; a pretty show of authority! Why, the fellow is a devil let loose from hell,—that scoundrel of a mayor!”
“Shall you glean whether or no, Godain?” said Tonsard to the journeyman wheelwright, who was saying a few words to Catherine.
“I? I’ve no property; I’m a pauper,” he replied; “I shall ask for a certificate.”
“What did they give my father for his otter, bibi?” said Madame Tonsard to Mouche.
Though nearly at his last gasp from an over-taxed digestion and two bottles of wine, Mouche, sitting on Madame Tonsard’s lap, laid his head on his aunt’s neck and whispered slyly in her ear:—
“I don’t know, but he has got gold. If you’ll feed me high for a month, perhaps I can find out his hiding-place; he has one, I know that.”
“Father’s got gold!” whispered La Tonsard to her husband, whose voice was loudest in the uproar of the excited discussion, in which all present took part.
“Hush! here’s Groison,” cried the old sentinel.
Perfect silence reigned in the tavern. When Groison had got to a safe distance, Mother Tonsard made a sign, and the discussion began again on the question as to whether they should persist in gleaning, as before, without a certificate.
“You’ll have to give in,” said Pere Fourchon; “for the Shopman has gone to see the prefect and get troops to enforce the order. They’ll shoot you like dogs,—and that’s what we are!” cried the old man, trying to conquer the thickening of his speech produced by his potations of sherry.
This fresh announcement, absurd as it was, made all the drinkers thoughtful; they really believed the government capable of slaughtering them without pity.
“I remember just such troubles near Toulouse, when I was stationed there,” said Bonnebault. “We were marched out, and the peasants were cut and slashed and arrested. Everybody laughed to see them try to resist cavalry. Ten were sent to the galleys, and eleven put in prison; the whole thing was crushed. Hey! what? why, soldiers are soldiers, and you are nothing but civilian beggars; they’ve a right, they think, to sabre peasants, the devil take you!”
“Well, well,” said Tonsard, “what is there in all that to frighten you like kids? What can they get out of my mother and daughters? Put ‘em in prison? well, then they must feed them; and the Shopman can’t imprison the whole country. Besides, prisoners are better fed at the king’s expense than they are at their own; and they’re kept warmer, too.”
“You are a pack of fools!” roared Fourchon. “Better gnaw at the bourgeois than attack him in front; otherwise, you’ll get your backs broke. If you like the galleys, so be it,—that’s another thing! You don’t work as hard there as you do in the fields, true enough; but you don’t have your liberty.”
“Perhaps it would be well,” said Vaudoyer, who was among the more valiant in counsel, “if some of us risked our skins to deliver the neighborhood of that Languedoc fellow who has planted himself at the gate of the Avonne.”
“Do Michaud’s business for him?” said Nicolas; “I’m good for that.”
“Things are not ripe for it,” said old Fourchon. “We should risk too much, my children. The best way is to make ourselves look miserable and cry famine; then the Shopman and his wife will want to help us, and you’ll get more out of them that way than you will by gleaning.”
“You are all blind moles,” shouted Tonsard, “let ‘em pick a quarrel with their law and their troops, they can’t put the whole country in irons, and we’ve plenty of friends at Ville-aux-Fayes and among the old lords who’ll sustain us.”
“That’s true,” said Courtecuisse; “none of the other land-owners complain, it is only the Shopman; Monsieur de Soulanges and Monsieur de Ronquerolles and others, they are satisfied. When I think that if that cuirassier had only had the courage to let himself be killed like the rest I should still be happy at the gate of the Avonne, and that it was he that turned my life topsy-turvy, it just puts me beside myself.”
“They won’t call out the troops for a Shopman who has set every one in the district against him,” said Godain. “The fault’s his own; he tried to ride over everybody here, and upset everything; and the government will just say to him, ‘Hush up.’”
“The government never says anything else; it can’t, poor government!” said Fourchon, seized with a sudden tenderness for the government. “Yes, I pity it, that good government; it is very unlucky,—it hasn’t a penny, like us; but that’s very stupid of a government that makes the money itself, very stupid! Ah! if I were the government—”
“But,” cried Courtecuisse, “they tell me in Ville-aux-Fayes that Monsieur de Ronquerolles talked about our rights in the Assembly.”
“That’s in Monsieur Rigou’s newspaper,” said Vaudoyer, who in his capacity of ex-field-keeper knew how to read and write; “I read it—”
In spite of his vinous tenderness, old Fourchon, like many of the lower classes whose faculties are stimulated by drunkenness, was following, with an intelligent eye and a keen ear, this curious discussion which a variety of asides rendered still more curious. Suddenly, he stood up in the middle of the room.
“Listen to the old one, he’s drunk!” said Tonsard, “and when he is, he is twice as full of deviltry; he has his own and that of the wine—”
“Spanish wine, and that trebles it!” cried Fourchon, laughing like a satyr. “My sons, don’t butt your head straight at the thing,—you’re too weak; go at it sideways. Lay low, play dead; the little woman is scared. I tell you, the thing’ll come to an end before long; she’ll leave the place, and if she does the Shopman will follow her, for she’s his passion. That’s your plan. Only, to make ‘em go faster, my advice is to get rid of their counsellor, their support, our spy, our ape—”
“Who’s that?”
“The damned abbe, of course,” said Tonsard; “that hunter after sins, who thinks the host is food enough for us.”
“That’s true,” cried Vaudoyer; “we were happy enough till he came. We ought to get rid of that eater of the good God,—he’s the real enemy.”
“Finikin,” added Fourchon, using a nickname which the abbe owed to his prim and rather puny appearance, “might be led into temptation and fall into the power of some sly girl, for he fasts so much. Then if we could catch him in the act and drum him up with a good charivari, the bishop would be obliged to send him elsewhere. It would please old Rigou devilish well. Now if your daughter, Courtecuisse, would leave Auxerre—she’s a pretty girl, and if she’d take to piety, she might save us all. Hey! ran tan plan!—”
“Why don’t you do it?” said Godain to Catherine, in a low voice; “there’d be scuttles full of money to hush up the talk; and for the time being you’d be mistress here—”
“Shall we glean, or shall we not glean? that’s the point,” said Bonnebault. “I don’t care two straws for your abbe, not I; I belong to Conches, where we haven’t a black-coat to poke up our consciences.”
“Look here,” said Vaudoyer, “we had better go and ask Rigou, who knows the law, whether the Shopman can forbid gleaning, and he’ll tell us if we’ve got the right of it. If the Shopman has the law on his side, well, then we must do as the old one says,—see about taking things sideways.”
“Blood will be spilt,” said Nicolas, darkly, as he rose after drinking a whole bottle of wine, which Catherine drew for him in order to keep him silent. “If you’d only listen to me you’d down Michaud; but you are miserable weaklings,—nothing but poor trash!”
“I’m not,” said Bonnebault. “If you are all safe friends who’ll keep your tongues between your teeth, I’ll aim at the Shopman—Hey! how I’d like to put a plum through his bottle; wouldn’t it avenge me on those cursed officers?”
“Tut! tut!” cried Jean-Louis Tonsard, who was supposed to be, more or less, Gaubertin’s son, and who had just entered the tavern. This fellow, who was courting Rigou’s pretty servant-girl, had succeeded his nominal father as clipper of hedges and shrubberies and other Tonsardial occupations. Going about among the well-to-do houses, he talked with masters and servants and picked up ideas which made him the man of the world of the family, the shrewd head. We shall presently see that in making love to Rigou’s servant-girl, Jean-Louis deserved his reputation for shrewdness.
“Well, what have you to say, prophet?” said the innkeeper to his son.
“I say that you are playing into the hands of the rich folk,” replied Jean-Louis. “Frighten the Aigues people to maintain your rights if you choose; but if you drive them out of the place and make them sell the estate, you are doing just what the bourgeois of the valley want, and it’s against your own interest. If you help the bourgeois to divide the great estates among them, where’s the national domain to be bought for nothing at the next Revolution? Wait till then, and you’ll get your land without paying for it, as Rigou got his; whereas if you go and thrust this estate into the jaws of the rich folk of the valley, the rich folk will dribble it back to you impoverished and at twice the price they paid for it. You are working for their interests, I tell you; so does everybody who works for Rigou,—look at Courtecuisse.”
The policy contained in this allocution was too deep for the drunken heads of those present, who were all, except Courtecuisse, laying by their money to buy a slice of the Aigues cake. So they let Jean-Louis harangue, and continued, as in the Chamber of Deputies, their private confabs with one another.
“Yes, that’s so; you’ll be Rigou’s cats-paw!” cried Fourchon, who alone understood his grandson.
Just then Langlume, the miller of Les Aigues, passed the tavern. Madame Tonsard hailed him.
“Is it true,” she said, “that gleaning is to be forbidden?”
Langlume, a jovial white man, white with flour and dressed in grayish-white clothes, came up the steps and looked in. Instantly all the peasants became as sober as judges.
“Well, my children, I am forced to answer yes, and no. None but the poor are to glean; but the measures they are going to take will turn out to your advantage.”
“How so?” asked Godain.
“Why, they can prevent any but paupers from gleaning here,” said the miller, winking in true Norman fashion; “but that doesn’t prevent you from gleaning elsewhere,—unless all the mayors do as the Blangy mayor is doing.”
“Then it is true,” said Tonsard, in a threatening voice.
“As for me,” said Bonnebault, putting his foraging-cap over one ear and making his hazel stick whiz in the air, “I’m off to Conches to warn the friends.”
And the Lovelace of the valley departed, whistling the tune of the martial song,—
“I say, Marie! he’s going a queer way to get to Conches, that friend of yours,” cried old Mother Tonsard to her granddaughter.
“He’s after Aglae!” said Marie, who made one bound to the door. “I’ll have to thrash her once for all, that baggage!” she cried, viciously.
“Come, Vaudoyer,” said Tonsard, “go and see Rigou, and then we shall know what to do; he’s our oracle, and his spittle doesn’t cost anything.”
“Another folly!” said Jean-Louis, in a low voice, “Rigou betrays everybody; Annette tells me so; she says he’s more dangerous when he listens to you than other folks are when they bluster.”
“I advise you to be cautious,” said Langlume. “The general has gone to the prefecture about your misdeeds, and Sibilet tells me he has sworn an oath to go to Paris and see the Chancellor of France and the King himself, and the whole pack of them if necessary, to get the better of his peasantry.”
“His peasantry!” shouted every one.
“Ha, ha! so we don’t belong to ourselves any longer?”
As Tonsard asked the question, Vaudoyer left the house to see Rigou.
Langlume, who had already gone out, turned on the door-step, and answered:—
“Crowd of do-nothings! are you so rich that you think you are your own masters?”
Though said with a laugh, the meaning contained in those words was understood by all present, as horses understand the cut of a whip.
“Ran tan plan! masters indeed!” shouted old Fourchon. “I say, my lad,” he added to Nicolas, “after your performance this morning it’s not my clarionet that you’ll get between your thumb and four fingers!”
“Don’t plague him, or he’ll make you throw up your wine by a punch in the stomach,” said Catherine, roughly.
Strategically, Rigou’s position at Blangy was that of a picket sentinel. He watched Les Aigues, and watched it well. The police have no spies comparable to those that serve hatred.
When the general first came to Les Aigues Rigou apparently formed some plans about him which Montcornet’s marriage with a Troisville put an end to; he seemed to have wished to patronize the new land-owner. In fact his intentions were so patent that Gaubertin thought best to let him into the secrets of the coalition against Les Aigues. Before accepting any part in the affair, Rigou determined, as he said, to put the general between two stools.
One day, after the countess was fairly installed, a little wicker carriage painted green entered the grand courtyard of the chateau. The mayor, who was flanked by his mayoress, got out and came round to the portico on the garden side. As he did so Rigou saw Madame le comtesse at a window. She, however, devoted to the bishop and to religion and to the Abbe Brossette, sent word by Francois that “Madame was out.”
This act of incivility, worthy of a woman born in Russia, turned the face of the ex-Benedictine yellow. If the countess had seen the man whom the abbe told her was “a soul in hell who plunged into iniquity as into a bath in his efforts to cool himself,” if she had seen his face then she might have refrained from exciting the cold, deliberate hatred felt by the liberals against the royalists, increased as it was in country-places by the jealousies of neighborhood, where the recollections of wounded vanity are kept constantly alive.
A few details about this man and his morals will not only throw light on his share of the plot, called “the great affair” by his two associates, but it will have the merit of picturing an extremely curious type of man,—one of those rural existences which are peculiar to France, and which no writer has hitherto sought to depict. Nothing about this man is without significance,—neither his house, nor his manner of blowing the fire, nor his ways of eating; his habits, morals, and opinions will vividly illustrate the history of the valley. This renegade serves to show the utility of democracy; he is at once its theory and its practice, its alpha and its omega, in short, its “summum.”
Perhaps you will remember certain masters of avarice pictured in former scenes of this comedy of human life: in the first place the provincial minister, Pere Grandet of Saumur, miserly as a tiger is cruel; next Gobseck, the usurer, that Jesuit of gold, delighting only in its power, and relishing the tears of the unfortunate because gold produced them; then Baron Nucingen, lifting base and fraudulent money transactions to the level of State policy. Then, too, you may remember that portrait of domestic parsimony, old Hochon of Issoudun, and that other miser in behalf of family interests, little la Baudraye of Sancerre. Well, human emotions—above all, those of avarice—take on so many and diverse shades in the diverse centres of social existence that there still remains upon the stage of our comedy another miser to be studied, namely, Rigou,—Rigou, the miser-egoist; full of tenderness for his own gratifications, cold and hard to others; the ecclesiastical miser; the monk still a monk so far as he can squeeze the juice of the fruit called good-living, and becoming secular only to put a paw upon the public money. In the first place, let us explain the continual pleasure that he took in sleeping under his own roof.
Blangy—by that we mean the sixty houses described by Blondet in his letter to Nathan—stands on a rise of land to the left of the Thune. As all the houses are surrounded by gardens, the village is a very pretty one. Some houses are built on the banks of the stream. At the upper end of the long rise stands the church, formerly flanked by a parsonage, its apse surrounded, as in many other villages, by a graveyard. The sacrilegious old Rigou had bought the parsonage, which was originally built by an excellent Catholic, Mademoiselle Choin, on land which she had bought for the purpose. A terraced garden, from which the eye looked down upon Blangy, Cerneux, and Soulanges standing between the two great seignorial parks, separated the late parsonage from the church. On its opposite side lay a meadow, bought by the last curate of the parish not long before his death, which the distrustful Rigou had since surrounded with a wall.
The ex-monk and mayor having refused to sell back the parsonage for its original purpose, the parish was obliged to buy a house belonging to a peasant, which adjoined the church. It was necessary to spend five thousand francs to repair and enlarge it and to enclose it in a little garden, one wall of which was that of the sacristy, so that communication between the parsonage and the church was still as close as it ever was.
These two houses, built on a line with the church, and seeming to belong to it by their gardens, faced a piece of open ground planted by trees, which might be called the square of Blangy,—all the more because the count had lately built, directly opposite to the new parsonage, a communal building intended for the mayor’s office, the home of the field-keeper, and the quarters of that school of the Brothers of the Christian Doctrine, for which the Abbe Brossette had hitherto begged in vain. Thus, not only were the houses of the ex-monk and the young priest connected and yet separated by the church, but they were in a position to watch each other. Indeed, the whole village spied upon the abbe. The main street, which began at the Thune, crept tortuously up the hill to the church. Vineyards, the cottages of the peasantry, and a small grove crowned the heights.
Rigou’s house, the handsomest in the village, was built of the large rubble-stone peculiar to Burgundy, imbedded in yellow mortar smoothed by the trowel, which produced an uneven surface, still further broken here and there by projecting points of the stone, which was mostly black. A band of cement, in which no stones were allowed to show, surrounded each window with a sort of frame, where time had made some slight, capricious cracks, such as appear on plastered ceilings. The outer blinds, of a clumsy pattern, were noticeable for their color, which was dragon-green. A few mosses grew among the slates of the roof. The type is that of Burgundian homesteads; the traveller will see thousands like it when visiting this part of France.
A double door opened upon a passage, half-way down which was the well of the staircase. By the entrance was the door of a large room with three windows looking out upon the square. The kitchen, built behind and beneath the staircase, was lighted from the courtyard, which was neatly paved with cobble-stones and entered by a porte-cochere. Such was the ground-floor. The first floor contained three bedrooms, above them a small attic chamber.
A wood-shed, a coach-house, and a stable adjoined the kitchen, and formed two sides of a square around the courtyard. Above these rather flimsy buildings were lofts containing hay and grain, a fruit-room, and one servant’s-chamber.
A poultry-yard, the stable, and a pigsty faced the house across the courtyard.
The garden, about an acre in size and enclosed by walls, was a true priest’s garden; that is, it was full of wall-fruit and fruit-trees, grape-arbors, gravel-paths, closely trimmed box-trees, and square vegetable patches, made rich with the manure from the stable.
Within, the large room, panelled in wainscot, was hung with old tapestry. The walnut furniture, brown with age and covered with stuffs embroidered in needle-work, was in keeping with the wainscot and with the ceiling, which was also panelled. The latter had three projecting beams, but these were painted, and between them the space was plastered. The mantel, also in walnut, surmounted by a mirror in the most grotesque frame, had no other ornament than two brass eggs standing on a marble base, each of which opened in the middle; the upper half when turned over showed a socket for a candle. These candlesticks for two lights, festooned with chains (an invention of the reign of Louis XV.), were becoming rare. On a green and gold bracket fastened to the wall opposite to the window was a common but excellent clock. The curtains, which squeaked upon their rods, were at least fifty years old; their material, of cotton in a square pattern like that of mattresses, alternately pink and white, came from the Indies. A sideboard and dinner-table completed the equipment of the room, which was kept with extreme nicety.
At the corner of the fireplace was an immense sofa, Rigou’s especial seat. In the angle, above a little “bonheur du jour,” which served him as a desk, and hanging to a common screw, was a pair of bellows, the origin of Rigou’s fortune.
From this succinct description, in style like that of an auction sale, it will be easy to imagine that the bedrooms of Monsieur and Madame Rigou were limited to mere necessaries; yet it would be a mistake to suppose that such parsimony affected the essential excellence of those necessaries. For instance, the most fastidious of women would have slept well in Rigou’s bed, with fine linen sheets, excellent mattresses, made luxurious by a feather-bed (doubtless bought for some abbe by a pious female parishioner) and protected from draughts by thick curtains. All the rest of Rigou’s belongings were made comfortable for his use, as we shall see.
In the first place, he had reduced his wife, who could neither read, write, nor cipher, to absolute obedience. After having ruled her deceased master, the poor creature was now the servant of her husband; she cooked and did the washing, with very little help from a pretty girl named Annette, who was nineteen years old and as much a slave to Rigou as her mistress, and whose wages were thirty francs a year.
Tall, thin, and withered, Madame Rigou, a woman with a yellow face red about the cheek-bones, her head always wrapped in a colored handkerchief, and wearing the same dress all the year round, did not leave the house for two hours in a month’s time, but kept herself in exercise by doing the hard work of a devoted servant. The keenest observer could not have found a trace of the fine figure, the Rubens coloring, the splendid lines, the superb teeth, the virginal eyes which first drew the attention of the Abbe Niseron to the young girl. The birth of her only daughter, Madame Soudry, Jr., had blighted her complexion, decayed her teeth, dimmed her eyes, and even caused the dropping of their lashes. It almost seemed as if the finger of God had fallen upon the wife of the priest. Like all well-to-do country house-wives, she liked to see her closets full of silk gowns, made and unmade, and jewels and laces which did her no good and only excited the sin of envy and a desire for her death in the minds of all the young women who served Rigou. She was one of those beings, half-woman, half-animal, who are born to live by instinct. This ex-beautiful Arsene was disinterested; and the bequest left to her by the late Abbe Niseron would be inexplicable were it not for the curious circumstance which prompted it, and which we give here for the edification of the vast tribe of expectant heirs.
Madame Niseron, the wife of the old republican sexton, always paid the greatest attention to her husband’s uncle, the priest of Blangy; the forty or fifty thousand francs soon to be inherited from the old man of seventy would put the family of his only nephew into a condition of affluence which she impatiently awaited, for besides her only son (the father of La Pechina) Madame Niseron had a charming little daughter, lively and innocent,—one of those beings that seem perfected only because they are to die, which she did at the age of fourteen from “pale color,” the popular name for chlorosis among the peasantry. The darling of the parsonage, where the child fluttered about her great uncle the abbe as she did in her home, bringing clouds and sunshine with her, she grew to love Mademoiselle Arsene, the pretty servant whom the old abbe engaged in 1789. Arsene was the niece of his housekeeper, whose place the girl took by request of the latter on her deathbed.
In 1791, just about the time that the Abbe Niseron offered his house as an asylum to Rigou and his brother Jean, the little girl played one of her mischievous but innocent tricks. She was playing with Arsene and some other children at a game which consists in hiding an object which the rest seek, and crying out, “You burn!” or “You freeze!” according as the searchers approach or leave the hidden article. Little Genevieve took it into her head to hide the bellows in Arsene’s bed. The bellows could not be found, and the game came to an end; Genevieve was taken home by her mother and forgot to put the bellows back on the nail. Arsene and her aunt searched more than a week for them; then they stopped searching and managed to do without them, the old abbe blowing his fire with an air-cane made in the days when air-canes were the fashion,—a fashion which was no doubt introduced by some courtier of the reign of Henri III. At last, about a month before her death, the housekeeper, after a dinner at which the Abbe Mouchon, the Niseron family, and the curate of Soulanges were present, returned to her jeremiades about the loss of the bellows.
“Why! they’ve been these two weeks in Arsene’s bed!” cried the little one, with a peal of laughter. “Great lazy thing! if she had taken the trouble to make her bed she would have found them.”
As it was 1791 everybody laughed; but a dead silence succeeded the laugh.
“There is nothing laughable in that,” said the housekeeper; “since I have been ill Arsene sleeps in my room.”
In spite of this explanation the Abbe Niseron looked thunderbolts at Madame Niseron and his nephew, thinking they were plotting mischief against him. The housekeeper died. Rigou contrived to work up the abbe’s resentment to such a pitch that he made a will disinheriting Jean-Francois Niseron in favor of Arsene Pichard.
In 1823 Rigou, perhaps out of a sense of gratitude, still blew the fire with an air-cane, and left the bellows hanging to the screw.
Madame Niseron, idolizing her daughter, did not long survive her. Mother and child died in 1794. The old abbe, too, was dead, and citizen Rigou took charge of Arsene’s affairs by marrying her. A former convert in the monastery, attached to Rigou as a dog is to his master, became the groom, gardener, herdsman, valet, and steward of the sensual Harpagon. Arsene Rigou, the daughter, married in 1821 without dowry to the prosecuting-attorney, inheriting something of her mother’s rather vulgar beauty, together with the crafty mind of her father.
Now about sixty-seven years of age, Rigou had never been ill in his life, and nothing seemed able to lessen his aggressively good health. Tall, lean, with brown circles round his eyes, the lids of which were nearly black, any one who saw him of a morning, when as he dressed he exposed the wrinkled, red, and granulated skin of his neck, would have compared him to a condor,—all the more because his long nose, sharp at the tip, increased the likeness by its sanguineous color. His head, partly bald, would have frightened phrenologists by the shape of its skull, which was like an ass’s backbone, an indication of despotic will. His grayish eyes, half-covered by filmy, red-veined lids, were predestined to aid hypocrisy. Two scanty locks of hair of an undecided color overhung the large ears, which were long and without rim, a sure sign of cruelty, but cruelty of the moral nature only, unless where it means actual insanity. The mouth, very broad, with thin lips, indicated a sturdy eater and a determined drinker by the drop of its corners, which turned downward like two commas, from which drooled gravy when he ate and saliva when he talked. Heliogabalus must have been like this.
His dress, which never varied, consisted of a long blue surtout with a military collar, a black cravat, with waistcoat and trousers of black cloth. His shoes, very thick soled, had iron nails outside, and inside woollen linings knit by his wife in the winter evenings. Annette and her mistress also knit the master’s stockings. Rigou’s name was Gregoire.
Though this sketch gives some idea of the man’s character, no one can imagine the point to which, in his private and unthwarted life, the ex-Benedictine had pushed the science of selfishness, good living, and sensuality. In the first place, he dined alone, waited upon by his wife and Annette, who themselves dined with Jean in the kitchen, while the master digested his meal and disposed of his wine as he read “the news.”
In the country the special names of journals are never mentioned; they are all called by the general name of “the news.”
Rigou’s dinner, like his breakfast and supper, was always of choice delicacies, cooked with the art which distinguishes a priest’s housekeeper from all other cooks. Madame Rigou made the butter herself twice a week. Cream was a concomitant of many sauces. The vegetables came at a jump, as it were, from their frames to the saucepan. Parisians, who are accustomed to eat the fruits of the earth after they have had a second ripening in the sun of a city, infected by the air of the streets, fermenting in close shops, and watered from time to time by the market-women to give them a deceitful freshness, have little idea of the exquisite flavors of really fresh produce, to which nature has lent fugitive but powerful charms when eaten as it were alive.
The butcher of Soulanges brought his best meat under fear of losing Rigou’s custom. The poultry, raised on the premises, was of the finest quality.
This system of secret pampering embraced everything in which Rigou was personally concerned. Though the slippers of the knowing Thelemist were of stout leather they were lined with lamb’s wool. Though his coat was of rough cloth it did not touch his skin, for his shirt, washed and ironed at home, was of the finest Frisian linen. His wife, Annette, and Jean drank the common wine of the country, the wine he reserved from his own vineyards; but in his private cellar, as well stocked as the cellars of Belgium, the finest vintages of Burgundy rubbed sides with those of Bordeaux, Champagne, Roussillon, not to speak of Spanish and Rhine wines, all bought ten years in advance of use and bottled by Brother Jean. The liqueurs in that cellar were those of the Isles, and came originally from Madame Amphoux. Rigou had laid in a supply to last him the rest of his days, at the national sale of a chateau in Burgundy.
The ex-monk ate and drank like Louis XIV. (one of the greatest consumers of food and drink ever known), which reveals the costs of a life that was more than voluptuous. Careful and very shrewd in managing his secret prodigalities, he disputed all purchases as only churchmen can dispute. Instead of taking infinite precautions against being cheated, the sly monk kept patterns and samples, had the agreements reduced to writing, and warned those who forwarded his wines or his provisions that if they fell short of the mark in any way he should refuse to accept their consignments.
Jean, who had charge of the fruit-room, was trained to keep fresh the finest fruits grown in the department; so that Rigou ate pears and apples and sometimes grapes, at Easter.
No prophet regarded as a God was ever more blindly obeyed than was Rigou in his own home. A mere motion of his black eyelashes could plunge his wife, Annette, and Jean into the deepest anxiety. He held his three slaves by the multiplicity of their many duties, which were like a chain in his hands. These poor creatures were under the perpetual yoke of some ordered duty, with an eye always on them; but they had come to take a sort of pleasure in accomplishing these tasks, and did not suffer under them. All three had the comfort and well-being of that one man before their minds as the sole end and object of all their thoughts.
Annette was (since 1795) the tenth pretty girl in Rigou’s service, and he expected to go down to his grave with relays of such servants. Brought to him at sixteen, she would be sent away at nineteen. All these girls, carefully chosen at Auxerre, Clamecy, or in the Morvan, were enticed by the promise of future prosperity; but Madame Rigou persisted in living. So at the end of every three years some quarrel, usually brought about by the insolence of the servant to the poor mistress, caused their dismissal.
Annette, who was a picture of delicate beauty, ingenuous and sparkling, deserved to be a duchess. Rigou knew nothing of the love affair between her and Jean-Louis Tonsard, which proves that he had let himself be fooled by the girl,—the only one of his many servants whose ambition had taught her to flatter the lynx as the only way to blind him.
This uncrowned Louis XV. did not keep himself wholly to his pretty Annette. Being the mortgagee of lands bought by peasants who were unable to pay for them, he kept a harem in the valley, from Soulanges to five miles beyond Conches on the road to La Brie, without making other payments than “extension of time,” for those fugitive pleasures which eat into the fortunes of so many old men.
This luxurious life, a life like that of Bouret, cost Rigou almost nothing. Thanks to his white slaves, he could cut and mow down and gather in his wood, hay, and grain. To the peasant manual labor is a small matter, especially if it serves to postpone the payment of interest due. And so Rigou, while requiring little premiums on each month’s delay, squeezed a great deal of manual labor out of his debtors,—positive drudgery, to which they submitted thinking they gave little because nothing left their pockets. Rigou sometimes obtained in this way more than the principal of a debt.
Deep as a monk, silent as a Benedictine in the throes of writing history, sly as a priest, deceitful as all misers, carefully keeping within the limits of the law, the man might have been Tiberius in Rome, Richelieu under Louis XIII., or Fouche, had the ambition seized him to go to the Convention; but, instead of all that, Rigou had the common sense to remain a Lucullus without ostentation, in other words, a parsimonious voluptuary. To occupy his mind he indulged a hatred manufactured out of the whole cloth. He harassed the Comte de Montcornet. He worked the peasants like puppets by hidden wires, the handling of which amused him as though it were a game of chess where the pawns were alive, the knights caracoled, the bishops, like Fourchon, gabbled, the feudal castles shone in the sun, and the queen maliciously checkmated the king. Every day, when he got out of bed and saw from his window the proud towers of Les Aigues, the chimneys of the pavilions, and the noble gates, he said to himself: “They shall fall! I’ll dry up the brooks, I’ll chop down the woods.” But he had two victims in mind, a chief one and a lesser one. Though he meditated the dismemberment of the chateau, the apostate also intended to make an end of the Abbe Brossette by pin-pricks.
To complete the portrait of the ex-priest it will suffice to add that he went to mass regretting that his wife still lived, and expressed the desire to be reconciled with the Church as soon as he became a widower. He bowed deferentially to the Abbe Brossette whenever he met him, and spoke to him courteously and without heat. As a general thing all men who belong to the Church, or who have come out of it, have the patience of insects; they owe this to the obligation they have been under, ecclesiastically, to preserve decorum,—a training which has been lacking for the last twenty years to the vast majority of the French nation, even those who think themselves well-bred. All the monks which the Revolution brought out of their monasteries and forced into business, public or private, showed in their coldness and reserve the great advantage which ecclesiastical discipline gives to the sons of the Church, even those who desert her.
Gaubertin had understood Rigou from the days when the Abbe Niseron made his will and the ex-monk married the heiress; he fathomed the craft hidden behind the jaundiced face of that accomplished hypocrite; and he made himself the man’s fellow-worshipper before the altar of the Golden Calf. When the banking-house of Leclercq was first started he advised Rigou to put fifty thousand francs into it, guaranteeing their security himself. Rigou was all the more desirable as an investor, or sleeping partner, because he drew no interest but allowed his capital to accumulate. At the period of which we write it amounted to over a hundred thousand francs, although in 1816 he had taken out one hundred and eighty thousand for investment in the Public Funds, from which he derived an income of seventeen thousand francs. Lupin the notary had cognizance of at least one hundred thousand francs which Rigou had lent on small mortgages upon good estates. Ostensibly, Rigou derived about fourteen thousand francs a year from landed property actually owned by him. But as to his amassed hoard, it was represented by an “x” which no rule of equations could evolve, just as the devil alone knew the secret schemes he plotted with Langlume.
This dangerous usurer, who proposed to live a score of years longer, had established fixed rules to work upon. He lent nothing to a peasant who bought less than seven acres, and who could not pay one-half of the purchase-money down. Rigou well understood the defects of the law of dispossession when applied to small holdings, and the danger both to the Public Treasury and to land-owners of the minute parcelling out of the soil. How can you sue a peasant for the value of one row of vines when he owns only five? The bird’s-eye view of self-interest is always twenty-five years ahead of the perceptions of a legislative body. What a lesson for a nation! Law will ever emanate from one brain, that of a man of genius, and not from the nine hundred legislative heads, which, great as they may be in themselves, are belittled and lost in a crowd. Rigou’s law contains the essential element which has yet to be found and introduced into public law to put an end to the absurd spectacle of landed property reduced to halves, quarters, tenths, hundredths,—as in the district of Argenteuil, where there are thirty thousand plots of land.
Such operations as those Rigou was concerned in require extensive collusion, like those we have seen existing in this arrondissement. Lupin, the notary, whom Rigou employed to draw at least one third of the deeds annually entrusted to his notarial office, was devoted to him. This shark could thus include in the mortgage note (signed always in presence of the wife, when the borrower was married) the amount of the illegal interest. The peasant, delighted to feel he had to pay only his five per cent interest annually, always imagined he should be able to meet the payment by working doubly hard or by improving the land and getting double returns upon it.
Hence the deceitful hopes excited by what imbecile economists call “small farming,”—a political blunder to which we owe such mistakes as sending French money to Germany to buy horses which our own land had ceased to breed; a blunder which before long will reduce the raising of cattle until meat will be unattainable not only by the people, but by the lower middle classes (see “Le Cure de Village.”)
So, not a little sweat bedewed men’s brows between Conches and Ville-aux-Fayes to Rigou’s profit, all being willing to give it; whereas the labor dearly paid for by the general, the only man who did spend money in the district, brought him curses and hatred, which were showered upon him simply because he was rich. How could such facts be understood unless we had previously taken that rapid glance at the Mediocracy. Fourchon was right; the middle classes now held the position of the former lords. The small land-owners, of whom Courtecuisse is a type, were tenants in mortmain of a Tiberius in the valley of the Avonne, just as, in Paris, traders without money are the peasantry of the banking system.
Soudry followed Rigou’s example from Soulanges to a distance of fifteen miles beyond Ville-aux-Fayes. These two usurers shared the district between them.
Gaubertin, whose rapacity was in a higher sphere, not only did not compete against that of his associates, but he prevented all other capital in Ville-aux-Fayes from being employed in the same fruitful manner. It is easy to imagine what immense influence this triumvirate—Rigou, Soudry, and Gaubertin—wielded in election periods over electors whose fortunes depended on their good-will.
Hate, intelligence, and means at command, such were the three sides of the terrible triangle which describes the general’s closest enemy, the spy ever watching Les Aigues,—a shark having constant dealings with sixty to eighty small land-owners, relations or connections of the peasantry, who feared him as such men always fear their creditor.
Rigou was in his way another Tonsard. The one throve on thefts from nature, the other waxed fat on legal plunder. Both liked to live well. It was the same nature in two species,—the one natural, the other whetted by his training in a cloister.