This rapid summary will have the merit of introducing some of the principal actors in this drama, and of exhibiting their individual interests; we shall thus be enabled to show the dangers which surrounded the General comte de Montcornet at the moment when this history opens.



CHAPTER VI. A TALE OF THIEVES

When Mademoiselle Laguerre first visited her estate, in 1791, she took as steward the son of the ex-bailiff of Soulanges, named Gaubertin. The little town of Soulanges, at present nothing more than the chief town of a canton, was once the capital of a considerable county, in the days when the House of Burgundy made war upon France. Ville-aux-Fayes, now the seat of the sub-prefecture, then a mere fief, was a dependency of Soulanges, like Les Aigues, Ronquerolles, Cerneux, Conches, and a score of other parishes. The Soulanges have remained counts, whereas the Ronquerolles are now marquises by the will of that power, called the Court, which made the son of Captain du Plessis duke over the heads of the first families of the Conquest. All of which serves to prove that towns, like families, are variable in their destiny.

Gaubertin, a young man without property of any kind, succeeded a steward enriched by a management of thirty years, who preferred to become a partner in the famous firm of Minoret rather than continue to administer Les Aigues. In his own interests he introduced into his place as land-steward Francois Gaubertin, his accountant for five years, whom he now relied on to cover his retreat, and who, out of gratitude for his instructions, promised to obtain for him a release in full of all claims from Madame Laguerre, who by this time was terrified at the Revolution. Gaubertin's father, the attorney-general of the department, henceforth protected the timid woman. This provincial Fouquier-Tinville raised a false alarm of danger in the mind of the opera-divinity on the ground of her former relations to the aristocracy, so as to give his son the equally false credit of saving her life; on the strength of which Gaubertin the younger obtained very easily the release of his predecessor. Mademoiselle Laguerre then made Francois Gaubertin her prime minister, as much through policy as from gratitude. The late steward had not spoiled her. He sent her, every year, about thirty thousand francs, though Les Aigues brought in at that time at least forty thousand. The unsuspecting opera-singer was therefore much delighted when the new steward Gaubertin promised her thirty-six thousand.

To explain the present fortune of the land-steward of Les Aigues before the judgment-seat of probability, it is necessary to state its beginnings. Pushed by his father's influence, he became mayor of Blangy. Thus he was able, contrary to law, to make the debtors pay in coin, by "terrorizing" (a phrase of the day) such of them as might, in his opinion, be subjected to the crushing demands of the Republic. He himself paid the citizens in assignats as long as the system of paper money lasted,—a system which, if it did not make the nation prosperous, at least made the fortunes of private individuals. From 1793 to 1795, that is, for three years, Francois Gaubertin wrung one hundred and fifty thousand francs out of Les Aigues, with which he speculated on the stock-market in Paris. With her purse full of assignats Mademoiselle was actually obliged to obtain ready money from her diamonds, now useless to her. She gave them to Gaubertin, who sold them, and faithfully returned to her their full price. This proof of honesty touched her heart; henceforth she believed in Gaubertin as she did in Piccini.

In 1796, at the time of his marriage with the citoyenne Isaure Mouchon, daughter of an old "conventional," a friend of his father, Gaubertin possessed about three hundred and fifty thousand francs in money. As the Directory seemed to him likely to last, he determined, before marrying, to have the accounts of his five years' stewardship ratified by Mademoiselle, under pretext of a new departure.

"I am to be the head of a family," he said to her; "you know the reputation of land-stewards; my father-in-law is a republican of Roman austerity, and a man of influence as well; I want to prove to him that I am as upright as he."

Mademoiselle Laguerre accepted his accounts at once in very flattering terms.

In those earlier days the steward had endeavored, in order to win the confidence of Madame des Aigues (as Mademoiselle was then called) to repress the depredations of the peasantry; fearing, and not without reason, that the revenues would suffer too severely, and that his private bonus from the buyers of the timber would sensibly diminish. But in those days the sovereign people felt the soil was their own everywhere; Madame was afraid of the surrounding kings and told her Richelieu that the first desire of her soul was to die in peace. The revenues of the late singer were so far in excess of her expenses that she allowed all the worst, and, as it proved, fatal precedents to be established. To avoid a lawsuit, she allowed the neighbors to encroach upon her land. Knowing that the park walls were sufficient protection, she did not fear any interruption of her personal comfort, and cared for nothing but her peaceful existence, true philosopher that she was! A few thousand a year more or less, the indemnities exacted by the wood-merchants for the damages committed by the peasants,—what were they to a careless and extravagant Opera-girl, who had gained her hundred thousand francs a year at the cost of pleasure only, and who had just submitted, without a word of remonstrance, to a reduction of two thirds of an income of sixty thousand francs?

"Dear me!" she said, in the easy tone of the wantons of the old time, "people must live, even if they are republicans."

The terrible Mademoiselle Cochet, her maid and female vizier, had tried to enlighten her mistress when she saw the ascendency Gaubertin was obtaining over one whom he began by calling "Madame" in defiance of the revolutionary laws about equality; but Gaubertin, in his turn, enlightened Mademoiselle Cochet by showing her a so-called denunciation sent to his father, the prosecuting attorney, in which she was vehemently accused of corresponding with Pitt and Coburg. From that time forward the two powers went on shares—shares a la Montgomery. Cochet praised Gaubertin to Madame, and Gaubertin praised Cochet. The waiting-maid had already made her own bed, and knew she was down for sixty thousand francs in the will. Madame could not do without Cochet, to whom she was accustomed. The woman knew the secrets of dear mistress's toilet; she alone could put dear mistress to sleep at night with her gossip, and get her up in the morning with her flattery; to the day of dear mistress's death the maid never could see the slightest change in her, and when dear mistress lay in her coffin, she doubtless thought she had never seen her looking so well.

The annual pickings of Gaubertin and Mademoiselle Cochet, their wages and perquisites, became so large that the most affectionate relative could not possibly have been more devoted than they to their kindly mistress. There is really no describing how a swindler cossets his dupe. A mother is not so tender nor so solicitous for a beloved daughter as the practitioner of tartuferie for his milch cow. What brilliant success attends the performance of Tartufe behind the closed doors of a home! It is worth more than friendship. Moliere died too soon; he would otherwise have shown us the misery of Orgon, wearied by his family, harassed by his children, regretting the blandishments of Tartufe, and thinking to himself, "Ah, those were the good times!"

During the last eight years of her life the mistress of Les Aigues received only thirty thousand francs of the fifty thousand really yielded by the estate. Gaubertin had reached the same administrative results as his predecessor, though farm rents and territorial products were notably increased between 1791 and 1815,—not to speak of Madame's continual purchases. But Gaubertin's fixed idea of acquiring Les Aigues at the old lady's death led him to depreciate the value of the magnificent estate in the matter of its ostensible revenues. Mademoiselle Cochet, a sharer in the scheme, was also to share the profits. As the ex-divinity in her declining years received an income of twenty thousand francs from the Funds called consolidated (how readily the tongue of politics can jest!), and with difficulty spent the said sum yearly, she was much surprised at the annual purchases made by her steward to use up the accumulating revenues, remembering how in former times she had always drawn them in advance. The result of having few wants in her old age seemed, to her mind, a proof of the honesty and uprightness of Gaubertin and Mademoiselle Cochet.

"Two pearls!" she said to the persons who came to see her.

Gaubertin kept his accounts with apparent honesty. He entered all rentals duly. Everything that could strike the feeble mind of the late singer, so far as arithmetic went, was clear and precise. The steward took his commission on all disbursements,—on the costs of working the estate, on rentals made, on suits brought, on work done, on repairs of every kind,—details which Madame never dreamed of verifying, and for which he sometimes charged twice over by collusion with the contractors, whose silence was bought by permission to charge the highest prices. These methods of dealing conciliated public opinion in favor of Gaubertin, while Madame's praise was on every lip; for besides the payments she disbursed for work, she gave away large sums of money in alms.

"May God preserve her, the dear lady!" was heard on all sides.

The truth was, everybody got something out of her, either indirectly or as a downright gift. In reprisals, as it were, of her youth the old actress was pillaged; so discreetly pillaged, however, that those who throve upon her kept their depredations within certain limits lest even her eyes might be opened and she should sell Les Aigues and return to Paris.

This system of "pickings" was, alas! the cause of Paul-Louis Carter's assassination; he committed the mistake of advertising the sale of his estate and allowing it to be known that he should take away his wife, on whom a number of the Tonsards of Lorraine were battening. Fearing to lose Madame des Aigues, the marauders on the estate forbore to cut the young trees, unless pushed to extremities by finding no branches within reach of shears fastened to long poles. In the interests of robbery, they did as little harm as they could; although, during the last years of Madame's life, the habit of cutting wood became more and more barefaced. On certain clear nights not less than two hundred bundles were taken. As to the gleaning of fields and vineyards, Les Aigues lost, as Sibilet had pointed out, not less than one quarter of its products.

Madame des Aigues had forbidden Cochet to marry during her lifetime, with the selfishness often shown in all countries by a mistress to a maid; which is not more irrational than the mania for keeping possession, until our last gasp, of property that is utterly useless to our material comfort, at the risk of being poisoned by impatient heirs. Twenty days after the old lady's burial Mademoiselle Cochet married the brigadier of the gendarmerie of Soulanges, named Soudry, a handsome man, forty-two years of age, who, ever since 1800 (in which year the gendarmerie was formed) had come every day to Les Aigues to see the waiting-maid, and dined with her at least three times a week at the Gaubertins'.

During Madame's lifetime dinner was served to her and to her company by themselves. Neither Cochet nor Gaubertin, in spite of their great familiarity with the mistress, was ever admitted to her table; the leading lady of the Academie Royale retained, to her last hour, her sense of etiquette, her style of dress, her rouge and her heeled slippers, her carriage, her servants, and the majesty of her deportment. A divinity at the Opera, a divinity within her range of Parisian social life, she continued a divinity in the country solitudes, where her memory is still worshipped, and still holds its own against that of the old monarchy in the minds of the "best society" of Soulanges.

Soudry, who had paid his addresses to Mademoiselle Cochet from the time he first came into the neighborhood, owned the finest house in Soulanges, an income of six thousand francs, and the prospect of a retiring pension whenever he should quit the service. As soon as Cochet became Madame Soudry she was treated with great consideration in the town. Though she kept the strictest secrecy as to the amount of her savings,—which were intrusted, like those of Gaubertin, to the commissary of wine-merchants of the department in Paris, a certain Leclercq, a native of Soulanges, to whom Gaubertin supplied funds as sleeping partner in his business,—public opinion credited the former waiting-maid with one of the largest fortunes in the little town of twelve hundred inhabitants.

To the great astonishment of every one, Monsieur and Madame Soudry acknowledged as legitimate, in their marriage contract, a natural son of the gendarme, to whom, in future, Madame Soudry's fortune was to descend. At the time when this son was legally supplied with a mother, he had just ended his law studies in Paris and was about to enter into practice, with the intention of fitting himself for the magistracy.

It is scarcely necessary to remark that a mutual understanding of twenty years had produced the closest intimacy between the families of Gaubertin and Soudry. Both reciprocally declared themselves, to the end of their days, "urbi et orbi," to be the most upright and honorable persons in all France. Such community of interests, based on the mutual knowledge of the secret spots on the white garment of conscience, is one of the ties least recognized and hardest to untie in this low world. You who read this social drama, have you never felt a conviction as to two persons which has led you to say to yourself, in order to explain the continuance of a faithful devotion which made your own egotism blush, "They must surely have committed some crime together"?

After an administration of twenty-five years, Gaubertin, the land-steward, found himself in possession of six hundred thousand francs in money, and Cochet had accumulated nearly two hundred and fifty thousand. The rapid and constant turning over and over of their funds in the hands of Leclercq and Company (on the quai Bethume, Ile Saint Louis, rivals of the famous house of Grandet) was a great assistance to the fortunes of all parties. On the death of Mademoiselle Laguerre, Jenny, the steward's eldest daughter was asked in marriage by Leclercq. Gaubertin expected at that time to become owner of Les Aigues by means of a plot laid in the private office of Lupin, the notary, whom the steward had set up and maintained in business within the last twelve years.

Lupin, a son of the former steward of the estate of Soulanges, had lent himself to various slight peculations,—investments at fifty per cent below par, notices published surreptitiously, and all the other manoeuvres, unhappily common in the provinces, to wrap a mantle, as the saying is, over the clandestine manipulations of property. Lately a company has been formed in Paris, so they say, to levy contributions upon such plotters under a threat of outbidding them. But in 1816 France was not, as it is now, lighted by a flaming publicity; the accomplices might safely count on dividing Les Aigues among them, that is, between Cochet, the notary, and Gaubertin, the latter of whom reserved to himself, "in petto," the intention of buying the others out for a sum down, as soon as the property fairly stood in his own name. The lawyer employed by the notary to manage the sale of the estate was under personal obligations to Gaubertin, so that he favored the spoliation of the heirs, unless any of the eleven farmers of Picardy should take it into their heads to think they were cheated, and inquire into the real value of the property.

Just as those interested expected to find their fortunes made, a lawyer came from Paris on the evening before the final settlement, and employed a notary at Ville-aux-Fayes, who happened to be one of his former clerks, to buy the estate of Les Aigues, which he did for eleven hundred thousand francs. None of the conspirators dared outbid an offer of eleven hundred thousand francs. Gaubertin suspected some treachery on Soudry's part, and Soudry and Lupin thought they were tricked by Gaubertin. But a statement on the part of the purchasing agent, the notary of Ville-aux-Fayes, disabused them of these suspicions. The latter, though suspecting the plan formed by Gaubertin, Lupin, and Soudry, refrained from informing the lawyer in Paris, for the reason that if the new owners indiscreetly repeated his words, he would have too many enemies at his heels to be able to stay where he was. This reticence, peculiar to provincials, was in this particular case amply justified by succeeding events. If the dwellers in the provinces are dissemblers, they are forced to be so; their excuse lies in the danger expressed in the old proverb, "We must howl with the wolves," a meaning which underlies the character of Phillinte.

When General Montcornet took possession of Les Aigues, Gaubertin was no longer rich enough to give up his place. In order to marry his daughter to a rich banker he was obliged to give her a dowry of two hundred thousand francs; he had to pay thirty thousand for his son's practice; and all that remained of his accumulations was three hundred and seventy thousand, out of which he would be forced, sooner or later, to pay the dowry of his remaining daughter, Elise, for whom he hoped to arrange a marriage at least as good as that of her sister. The steward determined to study the general, in order to find out if he could disgust him with the place,—hoping still to be able to carry out his defeated plan in his own interests.

With the peculiar instinct which characterizes those who make their fortunes by craft, Gaubertin believed in a resemblance of nature (which was not improbable) between an old soldier and an Opera-singer. An actress, and a general of the Empire,—surely they would have the same extravagant habits, the same careless prodigality? To the one as to the other, riches came capriciously and by lucky chances. If some soldiers are wily and astute and clever politicians, they are exceptions; a soldier is, usually, especially an accomplished cavalry officer like Montcornet, guileless, confident, a novice in business, and little fitted to understand details in the management of an estate. Gaubertin flattered himself that he could catch and hold the general with the same net in which Mademoiselle Laguerre had finished her days. But it so happened that the Emperor had once, intentionally, allowed Montcornet to play the same game in Pomerania that Gaubertin was playing at Les Aigues; consequently, the general fully understood a system of plundering.

In planting cabbages, to use the expression of the first Duc de Biron, the old cuirassier sought to divert his mind, by occupation, from dwelling on his fall. Though he had yielded his "corps d'armee" to the Bourbons, that duty (performed by other generals and termed the disbanding of the army of the Loire) could not atone for the crime of having followed the man of the Hundred-Days to his last battle-field. In presence of the allied army it was impossible for the peer of 1815 to remain in the service, still less at the Luxembourg. Accordingly, Montcornet betook himself to the country by advice of a dismissed marshal, to plunder Nature herself. The general was not deficient in the special cunning of an old military fox; and after he had spent a few days in examining his new property, he saw that Gaubertin was a steward of the old system,—a swindler, such as the dukes and marshals of the Empire, those mushrooms bred from the common earth, were well acquainted with.

The wily general, soon aware of Gaubertin's great experience in rural administration, felt it was politic to keep well with him until he had himself learned the secrets of it; accordingly, he passed himself off as another Mademoiselle Laguerre, a course which lulled the steward into false security. This apparent simple-mindedness lasted all the time it took the general to learn the strength and weakness of Les Aigues, to master the details of its revenues and the manner of collecting them, and to ascertain how and where the robberies occurred, together with the betterments and economies which ought to be undertaken. Then, one fine morning, having caught Gaubertin with his hand in the bag, as the saying is, the general flew into one of those rages peculiar to the imperial conquerors of many lands. In doing so he committed a capital blunder,—one that would have ruined the whole life of a man of less wealth and less consistency than himself, and from which came the evils, both small and great, with which the present history teems. Brought up in the imperial school, accustomed to deal with men as a dictator, and full of contempt for "civilians," Montcornet did not trouble himself to wear gloves when it came to putting a rascal of a land-steward out of doors. Civil life and its precautions were things unknown to the soldier already embittered by his loss of rank. He humiliated Gaubertin ruthlessly, though the latter drew the harsh treatment upon himself by a cynical reply which roused Montcornet's anger.

"You are living off my land," said the general, with jesting severity.

"Do you think I can live off the sky?" returned Gaubertin, with a sneer.

"Out of my sight, blackguard! I dismiss you!" cried the general, striking him with his whip,—blows which the steward always denied having received, for they were given behind closed doors.

"I shall not go without my release in full," said Gaubertin, coldly, keeping at a distance from the enraged soldier.

"We will see what is thought of you in a police court," replied Montcornet, shrugging his shoulders.

Hearing the threat, Gaubertin looked at the general and smiled. The smile had the effect of relaxing Montcornet's arms as though the sinews had been cut. We must explain that smile.

For the last two years, Gaubertin's brother-in-law, a man named Gendrin, long a justice of the municipal court of Ville-aux-Fayes, had become the president of that court through the influence of the Comte de Soulanges. The latter was made peer of France in 1814, and remained faithful to the Bourbons during the Hundred-Days, therefore the Keeper of the Seals readily granted an appointment at his request. This relationship gave Gaubertin a certain importance in the country. The president of the court of a little town is, relatively, a greater personage than the president of one of the royal courts of a great city, who has various equals, such as generals, bishops, and prefects; whereas the judge of the court of a small town has none,—the attorney-general and the sub-prefect being removable at will. Young Soudry, a companion of Gaubertin's son in Paris as well as at Les Aigues, had just been appointed assistant attorney in the capital of the department. Before the elder Soudry, a quartermaster in the artillery, became a brigadier of gendarmes, he had been wounded in a skirmish while defending Monsieur de Soulanges, then adjutant-general. At the time of the creation of the gendarmerie, the Comte de Soulanges, who by that time had become a colonel, asked for a brigade for his former protector, and later still he solicited the post we have named for the younger Soudry. Besides all these influences, the marriage of Mademoiselle Gaubertin with a wealthy banker of the quai Bethume made the unjust steward feel that he was far stronger in the community than a lieutenant-general driven into retirement.

If this history provided no other instruction that that offered by the quarrel between the general and his steward, it would still be useful to many persons as a lesson for their conduct in life. He who reads Machiavelli profitably, knows that human prudence consists in never threatening; in doing but not saying; in promoting the retreat of an enemy and never stepping, as the saying is, on the tail of the serpent; and in avoiding, as one would murder, the infliction of a blow to the self-love of any one lower than one's self. An injury done to a person's interest, no matter how great it may be at the time, is forgiven or explained in the long run; but self-love, vanity, never ceases to bleed from a wound given, and never forgives it. The moral being is actually more sensitive, more living as it were, than the physical being. The heart and the blood are less impressible than the nerves. In short, our inward being rules us, no matter what we do. You may reconcile two families who have half-killed each other, as in Brittany and in La Vendee during the civil wars, but you can no more reconcile the calumniators and the calumniated than you can the spoilers and the despoiled. It is only in epic poems that men curse each other before they kill. The savage, and the peasant who is much like a savage, seldom speak unless to deceive an enemy. Ever since 1789 France has been trying to make man believe, against all evidence, that they are equal. To say to a man, "You are a swindler," may be taken as a joke; but to catch him in the act and prove it to him with a cane on his back, to threaten him with a police-court and not follow up the threat, is to remind him of the inequality of conditions. If the masses will not brook any species of superiority, is it likely that a swindler will forgive that of an honest man?

Montcornet might have dismissed his steward under pretext of paying off a military obligation by putting some old soldier in his place; Gaubertin and the general would have understood the matter, and the latter, by sparing the steward's self-love would have given him a chance to withdraw quietly. Gaubertin, in that case, would have left his late employer in peace, and possibly he might have taken himself and his savings to Paris for investment. But being, as he was, ignominiously dismissed, the man conceived against his late master one of those bitter hatreds which are literally a part of existence in provincial life, the persistency, duration, and plots of which would astonish diplomatists who are trained to let nothing astonish them. A burning desire for vengeance led him to settle at Ville-aux-Fayes, and to take a position where he could injure Montcornet and stir up sufficient enmity against to force him to sell Les Aigues.

The general was deceived by appearances; for Gaubertin's external behavior was not of a nature to warn or to alarm him. The late steward followed his old custom of pretending, not exactly poverty, but limited means. For years he had talked of his wife and three children, and the heavy expenses of a large family. Mademoiselle Laguerre, to whom he had declared himself too poor to educate his son in Paris, paid the costs herself, and allowed her dear godson (for she was Claude Gaubertin's sponsor) two thousand francs a year.

The day after the quarrel, Gaubertin came, with a keeper named Courtecuisse, and demanded with much insolence his release in full of all claims, showing the general the one he had obtained from his late mistress in such flattering terms, and asking, ironically, that a search should be made for the property, real and otherwise, which he was supposed to have stolen. If he had received fees from the wood-merchants on their purchases and from the farmers on their leases, Mademoiselle Laguerre, he said, had always allowed it; not only did she gain by the bargains he made, but everything went on smoothly without troubling her. The country-people would have died, he remarked, for Mademoiselle, whereas the general was laying up for himself a store of difficulties.

Gaubertin—and this trait is frequently to be seen in the majority of those professions in which the property of others can be taken by means not foreseen by the Code—considered himself a perfectly honest man. In the first place, he had so long had possession of the money extorted from Mademoiselle Laguerre's farmers through fear, and paid in assignats, that he regarded it as legitimately acquired. It was a mere matter of exchange. He thought that in the end he should have quite as much risk with coin as with paper. Besides, legally, Mademoiselle had no right to receive any payment except in assignats. "Legally" is a fine, robust adverb, which bolsters up many a fortune! Moreover, he reflected that ever since great estates and land-agents had existed, that is, ever since the origin of society, the said agents had set up, for their own use, an argument such as we find our cooks using in this present day. Here it is, in its simplicity:—

"If my mistress," says the cook, "went to market herself, she would have to pay more for her provisions than I charge her; she is the gainer, and the profits I make do more good in my hands than in those of the dealers."

"If Mademoiselle," thought Gaubertin, "were to manage Les Aigues herself, she would never get thirty thousand francs a year out of it; the peasants, the dealers, the workmen would rob her of the rest. It is much better that I should have it, and so enable her to live in peace."

The Catholic religion, and it alone, is able to prevent these capitulations of conscience. But, ever since 1789 religion has no influence on two thirds of the French people. The peasants, whose minds are keen and whose poverty drives them to imitation, had reached, specially in the valley of Les Aigues, a frightful state of demoralization. They went to mass on Sundays, but only at the outside of the church, where it was their custom to meet and transact business and make their weekly bargains.

We can now estimate the extent of the evil done by the careless indifference of the great singer to the management of her property. Mademoiselle Laguerre betrayed, through mere selfishness, the interests of those who owned property, who are held in perpetual hatred by those who own none. Since 1792 the land-owners of Paris have become of necessity a combined body. If, alas, the feudal families, less numerous than the middle-class families, did not perceive the necessity of combining in 1400 under Louis XI., nor in 1600 under Richelieu, can we expect that in this nineteenth century of progress the middle classes will prove to be more permanently and solidly combined that the old nobility? An oligarchy of a hundred thousand rich men presents all the dangers of a democracy with none of its advantages. The principle of "every man for himself and for his own," the selfishness of individual interests, will kill the oligarchical selfishness so necessary to the existence of modern society, and which England has practised with such success for the last three centuries. Whatever may be said or done, land-owners will never understand the necessity of the sort of internal discipline which made the Church such an admirable model of government, until, too late, they find themselves in danger from one another. The audacity with which communism, that living and acting logic of democracy, attacks society from the moral side, shows plainly that the Samson of to-day, grown prudent, is undermining the foundations of the cellar, instead of shaking the pillars of the hall.



CHAPTER VII. CERTAIN LOST SOCIAL SPECIES

The estate of Les Aigues could not do without a steward; for the general had no intention of renouncing his winter pleasures in Paris, where he owned a fine house in the rue Neuve-des-Mathurines. He therefore looked about for a successor to Gaubertin; but it is very certain that his search was not as eager as that of Gaubertin himself, who was seeking for the right person to put in his way.

Of all confidential positions there is none that requires more trained knowledge of its kind, or more activity, than that of land-steward to a great estate. The difficulty of finding the right man is only fully known to those wealthy landlords whose property lies beyond a certain circle around Paris, beginning at a distance of about one hundred and fifty miles. At that point agricultural productions for the markets of Paris, which warrant rentals on long leases (collected often by other tenants who are rich themselves), cease to be cultivated. The farmers who raise them drive to the city in their own cabriolets to pay their rents in good bank-bills, unless they send the money through their agents in the markets. For this reason, the farms of the Seine-et-Oise, Seine-et-Marne, the Oise, the Eure-et-Loir, the Lower Seine, and the Loiret are so desirable that capital cannot always be invested there at one and a half per cent. Compared to the returns on estates in Holland, England, and Belgium, this result is enormous. But at one hundred miles from Paris an estate requires such variety of working, its products are so different in kind, that it becomes a business, with all the risks attendant on manufacturing. The wealthy owner is really a merchant, forced to look for a market for his products, like the owner of ironworks or cotton factories. He does not even escape competition; the peasant, the small proprietor, is at his heels with an avidity which leads to transactions to which well-bred persons cannot condescend.

A land-steward must understand surveying, the customs of the locality, the methods of sale and of labor, together with a little quibbling in the interests of those he serves; he must also understand book-keeping and commercial matters, and be in perfect health, with a liking for active life and horse exercise. His duty being to represent his master and to be always in communication with him, the steward ought not to be a man of the people. As the salary of his office seldom exceeds three thousand francs, the problem seems insoluble. How is it possible to obtain so many qualifications for such a very moderate price,—in a region, moreover, where the men who are provided with them are admissible to all other employments? Bring down a stranger to fill the place, and you will pay dear for the experience he must acquire. Train a young man on the spot, and you are more than likely to get a thorn of ingratitude in your side. It therefore becomes necessary to choose between incompetent honesty, which injures your property through its blindness and inertia, and the cleverness which looks out for itself. Hence the social nomenclature and natural history of land-stewards as defined by a great Polish noble.

"There are," he said, "two kinds of stewards: he who thinks only of himself, and he who thinks of himself and of us; happy the land-owner who lays his hands on the latter! As for the steward who would think only of us, he is not to be met with."

Elsewhere can be found a steward who thought of this master's interests as well as of his own. ("Un Debut dans la vie," "Scenes de la vie privee.") Gaubertin is the steward who thinks of himself only. To represent the third figure of the problem would be to hold up to public admiration a very unlikely personage, yet one that was not unknown to the old nobility, though he has, alas! disappeared with them. (See "Le Cabinet des Antiques," "Scenes de la vie de province.") Through the endless subdivision of fortunes aristocratic habits and customs are inevitably changed. If there be not now in France twenty great fortunes managed by intendants, in fifty years from now there will not be a hundred estates in the hands of stewards, unless a great change is made in the law. Every land-owner will be brought by that time to look after his own interests.

This transformation, already begun, suggested the following answer of a clever woman when asked why, since 1830, she stayed in Paris during the summer. "Because," she said, "I do not care to visit chateaux which are now turned into farms." What is to be the future of this question, getting daily more and more imperative,—that of man to man, the poor man and the rich man? This book is written to throw some light upon that terrible social question.

It is easy to understand the perplexities which assailed the general after he had dismissed Gaubertin. While saying to himself, vaguely, like other persons free to do or not to do a thing, "I'll dismiss that scamp"; he had overlooked the risk and forgotten the explosion of his boiling anger,—the anger of a choleric fire-eater at the moment when a flagrant imposition forced him to raise the lids of his wilfully blind eyes.

Montcornet, a land-owner for the first time and a denizen of Paris, had not provided himself with a steward before coming to Les Aigues; but after studying the neighborhood carefully he saw it was indispensable to a man like himself to have an intermediary to manage so many persons of low degree.

Gaubertin, who discovered during the excitement of the scene (which lasted more than two hours) the difficulties in which the general would soon be involved, jumped on his pony after leaving the room where the quarrel took place, and galloped to Soulanges to consult the Soudrys. At his first words, "The general and I have parted; whom can we put in my place without his suspecting it?" the Soudrys understood their friend's wishes. Do not forget that Soudry, for the last seventeen years chief of police of the canton, was doubly shrewd through his wife, an adept in the particular wiliness of a waiting-maid of an Opera divinity.

"We may go far," said Madame Soudry, "before we find any one to suit the place as well as our poor Sibilet."

"Made to order!" exclaimed Gaubertin, still scarlet with mortification. "Lupin," he added, turning to the notary, who was present, "go to Ville-aux-Fayes and whisper it to Marechal, in case that big fire-eater asks his advice."

Marechal was the lawyer whom his former patron, when buying Les Aigues for the general, had recommended to Monsieur de Montcornet as legal adviser.

Sibilet, eldest son of the clerk of the court at Ville-aux-Fayes, a notary's clerk, without a penny of his own, and twenty-five years old, had fallen in love with the daughter of the chief-magistrate of Soulanges. The latter, named Sarcus, had a salary of fifteen hundred francs, and was married to a woman without fortune, the eldest sister of Monsieur Vermut, the apothecary of Soulanges. Though an only daughter, Mademoiselle Sarcus, whose beauty was her only dowry, could scarcely have lived on the salary paid to a notary's clerk in the provinces. Young Sibilet, a relative of Gaubertin, by a connection rather difficult to trace through family ramifications which make members of the middle classes in all the smaller towns cousins to each other, owed a modest position in a government office to the assistance of his father and Gaubertin. The unlucky fellow had the terrible happiness of being the father of two children in three years. His own father, blessed with five, was unable to assist him. His wife's father owned nothing beside his house at Soulanges and an income of two thousand francs. Madame Sibilet the younger spent most of her time at her father's home with her two children, where Adolphe Sibilet, whose official duty obliged him to travel through the department, came to see her from time to time.

Gaubertin's exclamation, though easy to understand from this summary of young Sibilet's life, needs a few more explanatory details.

Adolphe Sibilet, supremely unlucky, as we have shown by the foregoing sketch of him, was one of those men who cannot reach the heart of a woman except by way of the altar and the mayor's office. Endowed with the suppleness of a steel-spring, he yielded to pressure, certain to revert to his first thought. This treacherous habit is prompted by cowardice; but the business training which Sibilet underwent in the office of a provincial notary had taught him the art of concealing this defect under a gruff manner which simulated a strength he did not possess. Many false natures mask their hollowness in this way; be rough with them in return and the effect produced is that of a balloon collapsed by a prick. Such was Sibilet. But as most men are not observers, and as among observers three fourths observe only after a thing has taken place, Adolphe Sibilet's grumbling manner was considered the result of an honest frankness, of a capacity much praised by his master, and of a stubborn uprightness which no temptation could shake. Some men are as much benefited by their defects as others by their good qualities.

Adeline Sarcus, a pretty young woman, brought up by a mother (who died three years before her marriage) as well as a mother can educate an only daughter in a remote country town, was in love with the handsome son of Lupin, the Soulanges notary. At the first signs of this romance, old Lupin, who intended to marry his son to Mademoiselle Elise Gaubertin, lost no time in sending young Amaury Lupin to Paris, to the care of his friend and correspondent Crottat, the notary, where, under pretext of drawing deeds and contracts, Amaury committed a variety of foolish acts, and made debts, being led thereto by a certain Georges Marest, a clerk in the same office, but a rich young man, who revealed to him the mysteries of Parisian life. By the time Lupin the elder went to Paris to bring back his son, Adeline Sarcus had become Madame Sibilet. In fact, when the adoring Adolphe offered himself, her father, the old magistrate, prompted by young Lupin's father, hastened the marriage, to which Adeline yielded in sheer despair.

The situation of clerk in a government registration office is not a career. It is, like other such places which admit of no rise, one of the many holes of the government sieve. Those who start in life in these holes (the topographical, the professorial, the highway-and-canal departments) are apt to discover, invariably too late, that cleverer men then they, seated beside them, are fed, as the Opposition writers say, on the sweat of the people, every time the sieve dips down into the taxation-pot by means of a machine called the budget. Adolphe, working early and late and earning little, soon found out the barren depths of his hole; and his thoughts busied themselves, as he trotted from township to township, spending his salary in shoe-leather and costs of travelling, with how to find a permanent and more profitable place.

No one can imagine, unless he happens to squint and to have two legitimate children, what ambitions three years of misery and love had developed in this young man, who squinted both in mind and vision, and whose happiness halted, as it were, on one leg. The chief cause of secret evil deeds and hidden meanness is, perhaps, an incompleted happiness. Man can better bear a state of hopeless misery than those terrible alternations of love and sunshine with continual rain. If the body contracts disease, the mind contracts the leprosy of envy. In petty minds that leprosy becomes a base and brutal cupidity, both insolent and shrinking; in cultivated minds it fosters anti-social doctrines, which serve a man as footholds by which to rise above his superiors. May we not dignify with the title of proverb the pregnant saying, "Tell me what thou hast, and I will tell thee of what thou art thinking"?

Though Adolphe loved his wife, his hourly thought was: "I have made a mistake; I have three balls and chains, but I have only two legs. I ought to have made my fortune before I married. I could have found an Adeline any day; but Adeline stands in the way of my getting a fortune now."

Adolphe had been to see his relation Gaubertin three times in three years. A few words exchanged between them let Gaubertin see the muck of a soul ready to ferment under the hot temptations of legal robbery. He warily sounded a nature that could be warped to the exigencies of any plan, provided it was profitable. At each of the three visits Sibilet grumbled at his fate.

"Employ me, cousin," he said; "take me as a clerk and make me your successor. You shall see how I work. I am capable of overthrowing mountains to give my Adeline, I won't say luxury, but a modest competence. You made Monsieur Leclercq's fortune; why won't you put me in a bank in Paris?"

"Some day, later on, I'll find you a place," Gaubertin would say; "meantime make friends and acquaintance; such things help."

Under these circumstances the letter which Madame Soudry hastily dispatched brought Sibilet to Soulanges through a region of castles in the air. His father-in-law, Sarcus, whom the Soudrys advised to take steps in the interest of his daughter, had gone in the morning to see the general and to propose Adolphe for the vacant post. By advice of Madame Soudry, who was the oracle of the little town, the worthy man had taken his daughter with him; and the sight of her had had a favorable effect upon the Comte de Montcornet.

"I shall not decide," he answered, "without thoroughly informing myself about all applicants; but I will not look elsewhere until I have examined whether or not your son-in-law possesses the requirements for the place." Then, turning to Madame Sibilet he added, "The satisfaction of settling so charming a person at Les Aigues—"

"The mother of two children, general," said Adeline, adroitly, to evade the gallantry of the old cuirassier.

All the general's inquiries were cleverly anticipated by the Soudrys, Gaubertin, and Lupin, who quietly obtained for their candidate the influence of the leading lawyers in the capital of the department, where a royal court held sessions,—such as Counsellor Gendrin, a distant relative of the judge at Ville-aux-Fayes; Baron Bourlac, attorney-general; and another counsellor named Sarcus, a cousin thrice removed of the candidate. The verdict of every one to whom the general applies was favorable to the poor clerk,—"so interesting," as they called him. His marriage had made Sibilet as irreproachable as a novel of Miss Edgeworth's, and presented him, moreover, in the light of a disinterested man.

The time which the dismissed steward remained at Les Aigues until his successor could be appointed was employed in creating troubles and annoyances for his late master; one of the little scenes which he thus played off will give an idea of several others.

The morning of his final departure he contrived to meet, as it were accidentally, Courtecuisse, the only keeper then employed at Les Aigues, the great extent of which really needed at least three.

"Well, Monsieur Gaubertin," said Courtecuisse, "so you have had trouble with the count?"

"Who told you that?" answered Gaubertin. "Well, yes; the general expected to order us about as he did his cavalry; he didn't know Burgundians. The count is not satisfied with my services, and as I am not satisfied with his ways, we have dismissed each other, almost with fisticuffs, for he raged like a whirlwind. Take care of yourself, Courtecuisse! Ah! my dear fellow, I expected to give you a better master."

"I know that," said the keeper, "and I'd have served you well. Hang it, when friends have known each other for twenty years, you know! You put me here in the days of the poor dear sainted Madame. Ah, what a good woman she was! none like her now! The place has lost a mother."

"Look here, Courtecuisse, if you are willing, you might help us to a fine stroke."

"Then you are going to stay here? I heard you were off to Paris."

"No; I shall wait to see how things turn out; meantime I shall do business at Ville-aux-Fayes. The general doesn't know what he is dealing with in these parts; he'll make himself hated, don't you see? I shall wait for what turns up. Do your work here gently; he'll tell you to manage the people with a high hand, for he begins to see where his crops and his woods are running to; but you'll not be such a fool as to let the country-folk maul you, and perhaps worse, for the sake of his timber."

"But he would send me away, dear Monsieur Gaubertin, he would get rid of me! and you know how happy I am living there at the gate of the Avonne."

"The general will soon get sick of the whole place," replied Gaubertin; "you wouldn't be long out even if he did happen to send you away. Besides, you know those woods," he added, waving his hand at the landscape; "I am stronger there than the masters."

This conversation took place in an open field.

"Those 'Arminac' Parisian fellows ought to stay in their own mud," said the keeper.

Ever since the quarrels of the fifteenth century the word 'Arminac' (Armagnacs, Parisians, enemies of the Dukes of Burgundy) has continued to be an insulting term along the borders of Upper Burgundy, where it is differently corrupted according to locality.

"He'll go back to it when beaten," said Gaubertin, "and we'll plough up the park; for it is robbing the people to allow a man to keep nine hundred acres of the best land in the valley for his own pleasure."

"Four hundred families could get their living from it," said Courtecuisse.

"If you want two acres for yourself you must help us to drive that cur out," remarked Gaubertin.

At the very moment that Gaubertin was fulminating this sentence of excommunication, the worthy Sarcus was presenting his son-in-law Sibilet to the Comte de Montcornet. They had come with Adeline and the children in a wicker carryall, lent by Sarcus's clerk, a Monsieur Gourdon, brother of the Soulanges doctor, who was richer than the magistrate himself. The general, pleased with the candor and dignity of the justice of the peace, and with the graceful bearing of Adeline (both giving pledges in good faith, for they were totally ignorant of the plans of Gaubertin), at once granted all requests and gave such advantages to the family of the new land-steward as to make the position equal to that of a sub-prefect of the first class.

A lodge, built by Bouret as an object in the landscape and also as a home for the steward, an elegant little building, the architecture of which was sufficiently shown in the description of the gate of Blangy, was promised to the Sibilets for their residence. The general also conceded the horse which Mademoiselle Laguerre had provided for Gaubertin, in consideration of the size of the estate and the distance he had to go to the markets where the business of the property was transacted. He allowed two hundred bushels of wheat, three hogsheads of wine, wood in sufficient quantity, oats and barley in abundance, and three per cent on all receipts of income. Where the latter in Mademoiselle Laguerre's time had amounted to forty thousand francs, the general now, in 1818, in view of the purchases of land which Gaubertin had made for her, expected to receive at least sixty thousand. The new land-steward might therefore receive before long some two thousand francs in money. Lodged, fed, warmed, relieved of taxes, the costs of a horse and a poultry-yard defrayed for him, and allowed to plant a kitchen-garden, with no questions asked as to the day's work of the gardener, certainly such advantages represented much more than another two thousand francs; for a man who was earning a miserable salary of twelve hundred francs in a government office to step into the stewardship of Les Aigues was a change from poverty to opulence.

"Be faithful to my interests," said the general, "and I shall have more to say to you. Doubtless I could get the collection of the rents of Conches, Blangy, and Cerneux taken away from the collection of those of Soulanges and given to you. In short, when you bring me in a clear sixty thousand a year from Les Aigues you shall be still further rewarded."

Unfortunately, the worthy justice and his daughter, in the flush of their joy, told Madame Soudry the promise the general had made about these collections, without reflecting that the present collector of Soulanges, a man named Guerbet, brother of the postmaster of Conches, was closely allied, as we shall see later, with Gaubertin and the Gendrins.

"It won't be so easy to do it, my dear," said Madame Soudry; "but don't prevent the general from making the attempt; it is wonderful how easily difficult things are done in Paris. I have seen the Chevalier Gluck at dear Madame's feet to get her to sing his music, and she did,—she who so adored Piccini, one of the finest men of his day; never did he come into Madame's room without catching me round the waist and calling me a dear rogue."

"Ha!" cried Soudry, when his wife reported this news, "does he think he is going to lead the notary by the nose, and upset everything to please himself and make the whole valley march in line, as he did his cuirassiers? These military fellows have a habit of command!—but let's have patience; Monsieur de Soulanges and Monsieur de Ronquerolles will be on our side. Poor Guerbet! he little suspects who is trying to pluck the best roses out of his garland!"

Pere Guerbet, the collector of Soulanges, was the wit, that is to say, the jovial companion of the little town, and a hero in Madame Soudry's salon. Soudry's speech gives a fair idea of the opinion which now grew up against the master of Les Aigues from Conches to Ville-aux-Fayes, and wherever else the public mind could be reached and poisoned by Gaubertin.

The installation of Sibilet took place in the autumn of 1817. The year 1818 went by without the general being able to set foot at Les Aigues, for his approaching marriage with Mademoiselle de Troisville, which was celebrated in January, 1819, kept him the greater part of the summer near Alencon, in the country-house of his prospective father-in-law. General Montcornet possessed, besides Les Aigues and a magnificent house in Paris, some sixty thousand francs a year in the Funds and the salary of a retired lieutenant-general. Though Napoleon had made him a count of the Empire and given him the following arms, a field quarterly, the first, azure, bordure or, three pyramids argent; the second, vert, three hunting horns argent; the third, gules, a cannon or on a gun-carriage sable, and, in chief, a crescent or; the fourth, or, a crown vert, with the motto (eminently of the middle ages!), "Sound the charge,"—Montcornet knew very well that he was the son of a cabinet-maker in the faubourg Saint-Antoine, though he was quite ready to forget it. He was eaten up with the desire to be a peer of France, and dreamed of his grand cordon of the Legion of honor, his Saint-Louis cross, and his income of one hundred and forty thousand francs. Bitten by the demon of aristocracy, the sight of the blue ribbon put him beside himself. The gallant cuirassier of Essling would have licked up the mud on the Pont-Royal to be invited to the house of a Navarreins, a Lenoncourt, a Grandlieu, a Maufrigneuse, a d'Espard, a Vandenesse, a Verneuil, a Herouville, or a Chaulieu.

From 1818, when the impossibility of a change in favor of the Bonaparte family was made clear to him, Montcornet had himself trumpeted in the faubourg Saint-Germain by the wives of some of his friends, who offered his hand and heart, his mansion and his fortune in return for an alliance with some great family.

After several attempts, the Duchesse de Carigliano found a match for the general in one of the three branches of the Troisville family,—that of the viscount in the service of Russia ever since 1789, who had returned to France in 1815. The viscount, poor as a younger son, had married a Princess Scherbellof, worth about a million, but the arrival of two sons and three daughters kept him poor. His family, ancient and formerly powerful, now consisted of the Marquis de Troisville, peer of France, head of the house and scutcheon, and two deputies, with numerous offspring, who were busy, for their part, with the budget and the ministries and the court, like fishes round bits of bread. Therefore, when Montcornet was presented by Madame de Carigliano,—the Napoleonic duchess, who was now a most devoted adherent of the Bourbons, he was favorably received. The general asked, in return for his fortune and tender indulgence to his wife, to be appointed to the Royal Guard, with the rank of marquis and peer of France; but the branches of the Troisville family would do no more than promise him their support.

"You know what that means," said the duchess to her old friend, who complained of the vagueness of the promise. "They cannot oblige the king to do as they wish; they can only influence him."

Montcornet made Virginie de Troisville his heir in the marriage settlements. Completely under the control of his wife, as Blondet's letter has already shown, he was still without children, but Louis XVIII. had received him, and given him the cordon of Saint-Louis, allowing him to quarter his ridiculous arms with those of the Troisvilles, and promising him the title of marquis as soon as he had deserved the peerage by his services.

A few days after the audience at which this promise had been given, the Duc de Barry was assassinated; the Marsan clique carried the day; the Villele ministry came into power, and all the wires laid by the Troisvilles were snapped; it became necessary to find new ways of fastening them upon the ministry.

"We must bide our time," said the Troisvilles to Montcornet, who was always overwhelmed with politeness in the faubourg Saint-Germain.

This will explain how it was that the general did not return to Les Aigues until May, 1820.

The ineffable happiness of the son of a shop-keeper of the faubourg Saint-Antoine in possessing a young, elegant, intelligent, and gentle wife, a Troisville, who had given him an entrance into all the salons of the faubourg Saint-Germain, and the delight of making her enjoy the pleasures of Paris, had kept him from Les Aigues and made him forget about Gaubertin, even to his very name. In 1820 he took the countess to Burgundy to show her the estate, and he accepted Sibilet's accounts and leases without looking closely into them; happiness never cavils. The countess, well pleased to find the steward's wife a charming young woman, made presents to her and to the children, with whom she occasionally amused herself. She ordered a few changes at Les Aigues, having sent to Paris for an architect; proposing, to the general's great delight, to spend six months of every year on this magnificent estate. Montcornet's savings were soon spent on the architectural work and the exquisite new furniture sent from Paris. Les Aigues thus received the last touch which made it a choice example of all the diverse elegancies of four centuries.

In 1821 the general was almost peremptorily urged by Sibilet to be at Les Aigues before the month of May. Important matters had to be decided. A lease of nine years, to the amount of thirty thousand francs, granted by Gaubertin in 1812 to a wood-merchant, fell in on the 15th of May of the current year. Sibilet, anxious to prove his rectitude, was unwilling to be responsible for the renewal of the lease. "You know, Monsieur le comte," he wrote, "that I do not choose to profit by such matters." The wood-merchant claimed an indemnity, extorted from Madame Laguerre, through her hatred of litigation, and shared by him with Gaubertin. This indemnity was based on the injury done to the woods by the peasants, who treated the forest of Les Aigues as if they had a right to cut the timber. Messrs. Gravelot Brothers, wood-merchants in Paris, refused to pay their last quarter dues, offering to prove by an expert that the woods were reduced one-fifth in value, through, they said, the injurious precedent established by Madame Laguerre.

"I have already," wrote Sibilet, "sued these men in the courts at Ville-aux-Fayes, for they have taken legal residence there, on account of this lease, with my old employer, Maitre Corbinet. I fear we shall lose the suit."

"It is a question of income, my dear," said the general, showing the letter to his wife. "Will you go down to Les Aigues a little earlier this year than last?"

"Go yourself, and I will follow you when the weather is warmer," said the countess, not sorry to remain in Paris alone.

The general, who knew very well the canker that was eating into his revenues, departed without his wife, resolved to take vigorous measures. In so doing he reckoned, as we shall see, without his Gaubertin.



CHAPTER VIII. THE GREAT REVOLUTIONS OF A LITTLE VALLEY

"Well, Maitre Sibilet," said the general to his steward, the morning after his arrival, giving him a familiar title which showed how much he appreciated his services, "so we are, to use a ministerial phrase, at a crisis?"

"Yes, Monsieur le comte," said Sibilet, following the general.

The fortunate possessor of Les Aigues was walking up and down in front of the steward's house, along a little terrace where Madame Sibilet grew flowers, at the end of which was a wide stretch of meadow-land watered by the canal which Blondet has described. From this point the chateau of Les Aigues was seen in the distance, and in like manner the profile, as it were, of the steward's lodge was seen from Les Aigues.

"But," resumed the general, "what's the difficulty? If I do lose the suit against the Gravelots, a money wound is not mortal, and I'll have the leasing of my forest so well advertised that there will be competition, and I shall sell the timber at its true value."

"Business is not done in that way, Monsieur le comte," said Sibilet. "Suppose you get no lessees, what will you do?"

"Cut the timber myself and sell it—"

"You, a wood merchant?" said Sibilet. "Well, without looking at matters here, how would it be in Paris? You would have to hire a wood-yard, pay for a license and the taxes, also for the right of navigation, and duties, and the costs of unloading; besides the salary of a trustworthy agent—"

"Yes, it is impracticable," said the general hastily, alarmed at the prospect. "But why can't I find persons to lease the right of cutting timber as before?"

"Monsieur le comte has enemies."

"Who are they?"

"Well, in the first place, Monsieur Gaubertin."

"Do you mean the scoundrel whose place you took?"

"Not so loud, Monsieur le comte," said Sibilet, showing fear; "I beg of you, not so loud,—my cook might hear us."

"Do you mean to tell me that I am not to speak on my own estate of a villain who robbed me?" cried the general.

"For the sake of your own peace and comfort, come further away, Monsieur le comte. Monsieur Gaubertin is mayor of Ville-aux-Fayes."

"Ha! I congratulate Ville-aux-Fayes. Thunder! what a nobly governed town!—"

"Do me the honor to listen, Monsieur le comte, and to believe that I am talking of serious matters which may affect your future life in this place."

"I am listening; let us sit down on this bench here."

"Monsieur le comte, when you dismissed Gaubertin, he had to find some employment, for he was not rich—"

"Not rich! when he stole twenty thousand francs a year from this estate?"

"Monsieur le comte, I don't pretend to excuse him," replied Sibilet. "I want to see Les Aigues prosperous, if it were only to prove Gaubertin's dishonest; but we ought not to abuse him openly for he is one of the most dangerous scoundrels to be found in all Burgundy, and he is now in a position to injure you."

"In what way?" asked the general, sobering down.

"Gaubertin has control of nearly one third of the supplies sent to Paris. As general agent of the timber business, he orders all the work of the forests,—the felling, chopping, floating, and sending to market. Being in close relations with the workmen, he is the arbiter of prices. It has taken him three years to create this position, but he holds it now like a fortress. He is essential to all dealers, never favoring one more than another; he regulates the whole business in their interests, and their affairs are better and more cheaply looked after by him than they were in the old time by separate agents for each firm. For instance, he has so completely put a stop to competition that he has absolute control of the auction sales; the crown and the State are both dependent on him. Their timber is sold under the hammer and falls invariably to Gaubertin's dealers; in fact, no others attempt now to bid against them. Last year Monsieur Mariotte, of Auxerre, urged by the commissioner of domains, did attempt to compete with Gaubertin. At first, Gaubertin let him buy the standing wood at the usual prices; but when it came to cutting it, the Avonnais workmen asked such enormous prices that Monsieur Mariotte was obliged to bring laborers from Auxerre, whom the Ville-aux-Fayes workmen attacked and drove away. The head of the coalition, and the ringleader of the brawl were brought before the police court, and the suits cost Monsieur Mariotte a great deal of money; for, besides the odium of having convicted and punished poor men, he was forced to pay all costs, because the losing side had not a farthing to do it with. A suit against laboring men is sure to result in hatred to those who live among them. Let me warn you of this; for if you follow the course you propose, you will have to fight against the poor of this district at least. But that's not all. Counting it over, Monsieur Mariotte, a worthy man, found he was the loser by his original lease. Forced to pay ready money, he was nevertheless obliged to sell on time; Gaubertin delivered his timber at long credits for the purpose of ruining his competitor. He undersold him by at least five per cent, and the end of it is that poor Mariotte's credit is badly shaken. Gaubertin is now pressing and harassing the poor man so that he is driven, they tell me, to leave not only Auxerre, but even Burgundy itself; and he is right. In this way land-owners have long been sacrificed to dealers who now set the market-prices, just as the furniture-dealers in Paris dictate values to appraisers. But Gaubertin saves the owners so much trouble and worry that they are really gainers."

"How so?" asked the general.

"In the first place, because the less complicated a business is, the greater the profits to the owners," answered Sibilet. "Besides which, their income is more secure; and in all matters of rural improvement and development that is the main thing, as you will find out. Then, too, Monsieur Gaubertin is the friend and patron of working-men; he pays them well and keeps them always at work; therefore, though their families live on the estates, the woods leased to dealers and belonging to the land-owners who trust the care of their property to Gaubertin (such as MM. de Soulanges and de Ronquerolles) are not devastated. The dead wood is gathered up, but that is all—"

"That rascal Gaubertin has lost no time!" cried the general.

"He is a bold man," said Sibilet. "He really is, as he calls himself, the steward of the best half of the department, instead of being merely the steward of Les Aigues. He makes a little out of everybody, and that little on every two millions brings him in forty to fifty thousand francs a year. He says himself, 'The fires on the Parisian hearths pay it all.' He is your enemy, Monsieur le comte. My advice to you is to capitulate and be reconciled with him. He is intimate, as you know, with Soudry, the head of the gendarmerie at Soulanges; with Monsieur Rigou, our mayor at Blangy; the patrols are under his influence; therefore you will find it impossible to repress the pilferings which are eating into your estate. During the last two years your woods have been devastated. Consequently the Gravelots are more than likely to win their suit. They say, very truly: 'According to the terms of the lease, the care of the woods is left to the owner; he does not protect them, and we are injured; the owner is bound to pay us damages.' That's fair enough; but it doesn't follow that they should win their case."

"We must be ready to defend this suit at all costs," said the general, "and then we shall have no more of them."

"You shall gratify Gaubertin," remarked Sibilet.

"How so?"

"Suing the Gravelots is the same as a hand to hand fight with Gaubertin, who is their agent," answered Sibilet. "He asks nothing better than such a suit. He declares, so I hear, that he will bring you if necessary before the Court of Appeals."

"The rascal! the—"

"If you attempt to work your own woods," continued Sibilet, turning the knife in the wound, "you will find yourself at the mercy of workmen who will force you to pay rich men's prices instead of market-prices. In short, they'll put you, as they did that poor Mariotte, in a position where you must sell at a loss. If you then try to lease the woods you will get no tenants, for you cannot expect that any one should take risks for himself which Mariotte only took for the crown and the State. Suppose a man talks of his losses to the government! The government is a gentleman who is, like your obedient servant when he was in its employ, a worthy man with a frayed overcoat, who reads the newspapers at a desk. Let his salary be twelve hundred or twelve thousand francs, his disposition is the same, it is not a whit softer. Talk of reductions and releases from the public treasury represented by the said gentleman! He'll only pooh-pooh you as he mends his pen. No, the law is the wrong road for you, Monsieur le comte."

"Then what's to be done?" cried the general, his blood boiling as he tramped up and down before the bench.

"Monsieur le comte," said Sibilet, abruptly, "what I say to you is not for my own interests, certainly; but I advise you to sell Les Aigues and leave the neighborhood."

On hearing these words the general sprang back as if a cannon-ball had struck him; then he looked at Sibilet with a shrewd, diplomatic eye.

"A general of the Imperial Guard running away from the rascals, when Madame la comtesse likes Les Aigues!" he said. "No, I'll sooner box Gaubertin's ears on the market-place of Ville-aux-Fayes, and force him to fight me that I may shoot him like a dog."

"Monsieur le comte, Gaubertin is not such a fool as to let himself be brought into collision with you. Besides, you could not openly insult the mayor of so important a place as Ville-aux-Fayes."

"I'll have him turned out; the Troisvilles can do that for me; it is a question of income."

"You won't succeed, Monsieur le comte; Gaubertin's arms are long; you will get yourself into difficulties from which you cannot escape."

"Let us think of the present," interrupted the general. "About that suit?"

"That, Monsieur le comte, I can manage to win for you," replied Sibilet, with a knowing glance.

"Bravo, Sibilet!" said the general, shaking his steward's hand; "how are you going to do it?"

"You will win it on a writ of error," replied Sibilet. "In my opinion the Gravelots have the right of it. But it is not enough to be in the right, they must also be in order as to legal forms, and that they have neglected. The Gravelots ought to have summoned you to have the woods better watched. They can't ask for indemnity, at the close of a lease, for damages which they know have been going on for nine years; there is a clause in the lease as to this, on which we can file a bill of exceptions. You will lose the suit at Ville-aux-Fayes, possibly in the upper court as well, but we will carry it to Paris and you will win at the Court of Appeals. The costs will be heavy and the expenses ruinous. You will have to spend from twelve to fifteen thousand francs merely to win the suit,—but you will win it, if you care to. The suit will only increase the enmity of the Gravelots, for the expenses will be even heavier on them. You will be their bugbear; you will be called litigious and calumniated in every way; still, you can win—"

"Then, what's to be done?" repeated the general, on whom Sibilet's arguments were beginning to produce the effect of a violent poison.

Just then the remembrance of the blows he had given Gaubertin with his cane crossed his mind, and made him wish he had bestowed them on himself. His flushed face was enough to show Sibilet the irritation that he felt.

"You ask me what can be done, Monsieur le comte? Why, only one thing, compromise; but of course you can't negotiate that yourself. I must be thought to cheat you! We, poor devils, whose only fortune and comfort is in our good name, it is hard on us to even seem to do a questionable thing. We are always judged by appearances. Gaubertin himself saved Mademoiselle Laguerre's life during the Revolution, but it seemed to others that he was robbing her. She rewarded him in her will with a diamond worth ten thousand francs, which Madame Gaubertin now wears on her head."

The general gave Sibilet another glance still more diplomatic than the first; but the steward seemed to take no notice of the challenge it expressed.

"If I were to appear dishonest, Monsieur Gaubertin would be so overjoyed that I could instantly obtain his help," continued Sibilet. "He would listen with all his ears if I said to him: 'Suppose I were to extort twenty thousand francs from Monsieur le comte for Messrs. Gravelot, on condition that they shared them with me?' If your adversaries consented to that, Monsieur le comte, I should return you ten thousand francs; you lose only the other ten, you save appearances, and the suit is quashed."

"You are a fine fellow, Sibilet," said the general, taking his hand and shaking it. "If you can manage the future as well as you do the present, I'll call you the prince of stewards."

"As to the future," said Sibilet, "you won't die of hunger if no timber is cut for two or three years. Let us begin by putting proper keepers in the woods. Between now and then things will flow as the water does in the Avonne. Gaubertin may die, or get rich enough to retire from business; at any rate, you will have sufficient time to find him a competitor. The cake is too rich not to be shared. Look for another Gaubertin to oppose the original."

"Sibilet," said the old soldier, delighted with this variety of solutions. "I'll give you three thousand francs if you'll settle the matter as you propose. For the rest, we'll think about it."

"Monsieur le comte," said Sibilet, "first and foremost have the forest properly watched. See for yourself the condition in which the peasantry have put it during your two years' absence. What could I do? I am steward; I am not a bailiff. To guard Les Aigues properly you need a mounted patrol and three keepers."

"I certainly shall have the estate properly guarded. So it is to be war, is it? Very good, then we shall make war. That doesn't frighten me," said Montcornet, rubbing his hands.

"A war of francs," said Sibilet; "and you may find that more difficult than the other kind; men can be killed but you can't kill self-interest. You will fight your enemy on the battle-field where all landlords are compelled to fight,—I mean cash results. It is not enough to produce, you must sell; and in order to sell, you must be on good terms with everybody."

"I shall have the country people on my side."

"By what means?"

"By doing good among them."

"Doing good to the valley peasants! to the petty shopkeepers of Soulanges!" exclaimed Sibilet, squinting horribly, by reason of the irony which flamed brighter in one eye than in the other. "Monsieur le comte doesn't know what he undertakes. Our Lord Jesus Christ would die again upon the cross in this valley! If you wish an easy life, follow the example of the late Mademoiselle Laguerre; let yourself be robbed, or else make people afraid of you. Women, children, and the masses are all governed by fear. That was the great secret of the Convention, and of the Emperor, too."

"Good heavens! is this the forest of Bondy?" cried the general.

"My dear," said Sibilet's wife, appearing at this moment, "your breakfast is ready. Pray excuse him, Monsieur le comte; he has eaten nothing since morning for he was obliged to go to Ronquerolles to deliver some barley."

"Go, go, Sibilet," said the general.

The next morning the count rose early, before daylight, and went to the gate of the Avonne, intending to talk with the one forester whom he employed and find out what the man's sentiments really were.

Some seven or eight hundred acres of the forest of Les Aigues lie along the banks of the Avonne; and to preserve the majestic beauty of the river the large trees that border it have been left untouched for a distance of three leagues on both sides in an almost straight line. The mistress of Henri IV., to whom Les Aigues formerly belonged, was as fond of hunting as the king himself. In 1593 she ordered a bridge to be built of a single arch with shelving roadway by which to ride from the lower side of the forest to a much larger portion of it, purchased by her, which lay upon the slopes of the hills. The gate of the Avonne was built as a place of meeting for the huntsmen; and we know the magnificence bestowed by the architects of that day upon all buildings intended for the delight of the crown and the nobility. Six avenues branched away from it, their place of meeting forming a half-moon. In the centre of the semi-circular space stood an obelisk surmounted by a round shield, formerly gilded, bearing on one side the arms of Navarre and on the other those of the Countess de Moret. Another half-moon, on the side toward the river, communicated with the first by a straight avenue, at the opposite end of which the steep rise of the Venetian-shaped bridge could be seen. Between two elegant iron railings of the same character as that of the magnificent railing which formerly surrounded the garden of the Place Royale in Paris, now so unfortunately destroyed, stood a brick pavilion, with stone courses hewn in facets like those of the chateau, with a very pointed roof and window-casings of stone cut in the same manner. This old style, which gave the building a regal air, is suitable only to prisons when used in cities; but standing in the heart of forests it derives from its surroundings a splendor of its own. A group of trees formed a screen, behind which the kennels, an old falconry, a pheasantry, and the quarters of the huntsmen were falling into ruins, after being in their day the wonder and admiration of Burgundy.

In 1595, the royal hunting-parties set forth from this magnificent pavilion, preceded by those fine dogs so dear to Rubens and to Paul Veronese; the huntsmen mounted on high-steeping steeds with stout and blue-white satiny haunches, seen no longer except in Wouverman's amazing work, followed by footmen in livery; the scene enlivened by whippers-in, wearing the high top-boots with facings and the yellow leathern breeches which have come down to the present day on the canvas of Van der Meulen. The obelisk was erected in commemoration of the visit of the Bearnais, and his hunt with the beautiful Comtesse de Moret; the date is given below the arms of Navarre. That jealous woman, whose son was afterwards legitimatized, would not allow the arms of France to figure on the obelisk, regarding them as a rebuke.

At the time of which we write, when the general's eyes rested on this splendid ruin, moss had gathered for centuries on the four faces of the roof; the hewn-stone courses, mangled by time, seemed to cry with yawning mouths against the profanation; disjointed leaden settings let fall their octagonal panes, so that the windows seemed blind of an eye here and there. Yellow wallflowers bloomed about the copings; ivy slid its white rootlets into every crevice.

All things bespoke a shameful want of care,—the seal set by mere life-possessors on the ancient glories that they possess. Two windows on the first floor were stuffed with hay. Through another, on the ground-floor, was seen a room filled with tools and logs of wood; while a cow pushed her muzzle through a fourth, proving that Courtecuisse, to avoid having to walk from the pavilion to the pheasantry, had turned the large hall of the central building into a stable,—a hall with panelled ceiling, and in the centre of each panel the arms of all the various possessors of Les Aigues!

Black and dirty palings disgraced the approach to the pavilion, making square inclosures with plank roofs for pigs, ducks, and hens, the manure of which was taken away every six months. A few ragged garments were hung to dry on the brambles which boldly grew unchecked here and there. As the general came along the avenue from the bridge, Madame Courtecuisse was scouring a saucepan in which she had just made her coffee. The forester, sitting on a chair in the sun, considered his wife as a savage considers his. When he heard a horse's hoofs he turned round, saw the count, and seemed taken aback.

"Well, Courtecuisse, my man," said the general, "I'm not surprised that the peasants cut my woods before Messrs. Gravelot can do so. So you consider your place a sinecure?"

"Indeed, Monsieur le comte, I have watched the woods so many nights that I'm ill from it. I've got a chill, and I suffer such pain this morning that my wife has just made me a poultice in that saucepan."

"My good fellow," said the count, "I don't know of any pain that a coffee poultice cures except that of hunger. Listen to me, you rascal! I rode through my forest yesterday, and then through those of Monsieur de Soulanges and Monsieur de Ronquerolles. Theirs are carefully watched and preserved, while mine is in a shameful state."

"Ah, monsieur! but they are the old lords of the neighborhood; everybody respects their property. How can you expect me to fight against six districts? I care for my life more than for your woods. A man who would undertake to watch your woods as they ought to be watched would get a ball in his head for wages in some dark corner of the forest—"

"Coward!" cried the general, trying to control the anger the man's insolent reply provoked in him. "Last night was as clear as day, yet it cost me three hundred francs in actual robbery and over a thousand in future damages. You will leave my service unless you do better. All wrong-doing deserves some mercy; therefore these are my conditions: You may have the fines, and I will pay you three francs for every indictment you bring against these depredators. If I don't get what I expect, you know what you have to expect, and no pension either. Whereas, if you serve me faithfully and contrive to stop these depredations, I'll give you an annuity of three hundred francs for life. You can think it over. Here are six ways," continued the count, pointing to the branching roads; "there's only one for you to take,—as for me also, who am not afraid of balls; try and find the right one."

Courtecuisse, a small man about forty-six years of age, with a full-moon face, found his greatest happiness in doing nothing. He expected to live and die in that pavilion, now considered by him his pavilion. His two cows were pastured in the forest, from which he got his wood; and he spent his time in looking after his garden instead of after the delinquents. Such neglect of duty suited Gaubertin, and Courtecuisse knew it did. The keeper chased only those depredators who were the objects of his personal dislike,—young women who would not yield to his wishes, or persons against whom he held a grudge; though for some time past he had really felt no dislikes, for every one yielded to him on account of his easy-going ways with them.

Courtecuisse had a place always kept for him at the table of the Grand-I-Vert; the wood-pickers feared him no longer; indeed, his wife and he received many gifts in kind from them; his wood was brought in; his vineyard dug; in short, all delinquents at whom he blinked did him service.

Counting on Gaubertin for the future, and feeling sure of two acres whenever Les Aigues should be brought to the hammer, he was roughly awakened by the curt speech of the general, who, after four quiescent years, was now revealing his true character,—that of a bourgeois rich man who was determined to be no longer deceived. Courtecuisse took his cap, his game-bag, and his gun, put on his gaiters and his belt (which bore the very recent arms of Montcornet), and started for Ville-aux-Fayes, with the careless, indifferent air and manner under which country-people often conceal very deep reflections, while he gazed at the woods and whistled to the dogs to follow him.

"What! you complain of the Shopman when he proposes to make your fortune?" said Gaubertin. "Doesn't the fool offer to give you three francs for every arrest you make, and the fines to boot? Have an understanding with your friends and you can bring as many indictments as you please,—hundreds if you like! With one thousand francs you can buy La Bachelerie from Rigou, become a property owner, live in your own house, and work for yourself, or rather, make others work for you, and take your ease. Only—now listen to me—you must manage to arrest only such as haven't a penny in the world. You can't shear sheep unless the wool is on their backs. Take the Shopman's offer and leave him to collect the costs,—if he wants them; tastes differ. Didn't old Mariotte prefer losses to profits, in spite of my advice?"

Courtecuisse, filled with admiration for these words of wisdom, returned home burning with the desire to be a land-owner and a bourgeois like the rest.

When the general reached Les Aigues he related his expedition to Sibilet.

"Monsieur le comte did very right," said the steward, rubbing his hands; "but he must not stop short half-way. The field-keeper of the district who allows the country-people to prey upon the meadows and rob the harvests ought to be changed. Monsieur le comte should have himself chosen mayor, and appoint one of his old soldiers, who would have the courage to carry out his orders, in place of Vaudoyer. A great land-owner should be master in his own district. Just see what difficulties we have with the present mayor!"