CHAPTER XI. THE OARISTYS, EIGHTEENTH ECLOGUE OF THEOCRITUS

LITTLE ADMIRED ON THE POLICE CALENDAR

The sagacity of a savage, which Michaud's new occupation had developed among his faculties, joined to an acquaintance with the passions and interests of Blangy, enabled him partially to understand a third idyll in the Greek style, which poor villagers like Tonsard, and middle-aged rich men like Rigou, translate freely—to use the classic word—in the depths of their country solitudes.

Nicolas, Tonsard's second son, had drawn an unlucky number at a recent conscription. Two years earlier his elder brother had been pronounced, through the influence of Soudry, Gaubertin, and Sarcus the rich, unfit for military service, on account of a pretended weakness in the muscles of the right arm; but as Jean-Louis had since wielded instruments of husbandry with remarkable force and skill, a good deal of talk on the subject had gone through the district. Soudry, Rigou, and Gaubertin, who were the special protectors of the family, had warned Tonsard that he must not expect to save Nicolas, who was tall and vigorous, from being recruited if he drew a fatal number. Nevertheless Gaubertin and Rigou were so well aware of the importance of conciliating bold men able and willing to do mischief, if properly directed against Les Aigues, that Rigou held out certain hopes of safety to Tonsard and his son. The late monk was occasionally visited by Catherine Tonsard who was very devoted to her brother Nicolas; on one such occasion Rigou advised her to appeal to the general and the countess.

"They may be glad to do you this service to cajole you; in that case, it is just so much gained from the enemy," he said. "If the Shopman refuses, then we shall see what we shall see."

Rigou foresaw that the general's refusal would pass as one wrong the more done by the land-owner to the peasantry, and would bind Tonsard by an additional motive of gratitude to the coalition, in case the crafty mind of the innkeeper could suggest to him some plausible way of liberating Nicolas.

Nicolas, who was soon to appear before the examining board, had little hope of the general's intervention because of the harm done to Les Aigues by all the members of the Tonsard family. His passion, or to speak more correctly, his caprice and obstinate pursuit of La Pechina, were so aggravated by the prospect of his immediate departure, which left him no time to seduce her, that he resolved on attempting violence. The child's contempt for her prosecutor, plainly shown, excited the Lovelace of the Grand-I-Vert to a hatred whose fury was equalled only by his desires. For the last three days he had been watching La Pechina, and the poor child knew she was watched. Between Nicolas and his prey the same sort of understanding existed which there is between the hunter and the game. When the girl was at some little distance from the pavilion she saw Nicolas in one of the paths which ran parallel to the walls of the park, leading to the bridge of the Avonne. She could easily have escaped the man's pursuit had she appealed to her grandfather; but all young girls, even the most unsophisticated, have a strange fear, possibly instinctive, of trusting to their natural protectors under the like circumstances.

Genevieve had heard Pere Niseron take an oath to kill any man, no matter who he was, who should dare to touch (that was his word) his granddaughter. The old man thought the child amply protected by the halo of white hair and honor which a spotless life of three-score years and ten had laid upon his brow. The vision of bloody scenes terrifies the imagination of young girls so that they need not dive to the bottom of their hearts for other numerous and inquisitive reasons which seal their lips.

When La Pechina started with the milk which Madame Michaud had sent to the daughter of Gaillard, the keeper of the gate of Conches, whose cow had just calved, she looked about her cautiously, like a cat when it ventures out onto the street. She saw no signs of Nicolas; she listened to the silence, as the poet says, and hearing nothing, she concluded that the rascal had gone to his day's work. The peasants were just beginning to cut the rye; for they were in the habit of getting in their own harvests first, so as to benefit by the best strength of the mowers. But Nicolas was not a man to mind losing a day's work,—especially now that he expected to leave the country after the fair at Soulanges and begin, as the country people say, the new life of a soldier.

When La Pechina, with the jug on her head, was about half-way, Nicolas slid like a wild-cat down the trunk of an elm, among the branches of which he was hiding, and fell like a thunderbolt in front of the girl, who flung away her pitcher and trusted to her fleet legs to regain the pavilion. But a hundred feet farther on, Catherine Tonsard, who was on the watch, rushed out of the wood and knocked so violently against the flying girl that she was thrown down. The violence of the fall made her unconscious. Catherine picked her up and carried her into the woods to the middle of a tiny meadow where the Silver-spring brook bubbled up.

Catherine Tonsard was tall and strong, and in every respect the type of woman whom painters and sculptors take, as the Republic did in former days, for their figures of Liberty. She charmed the young men of the valley of the Avonne with her voluminous bosom, her muscular legs, and a waist as robust as it was flexible; with her plump arms, her eyes that could flash and sparkle, and her jaunty air; with the masses of hair twisted in coils around her head, her masculine forehead and her red lips curling with that same ferocious smile which Eugene Delacroix and David (of Angers) caught and represented so admirably. True image of the People, this fiery and swarthy creature seemed to emit revolt through her piercing yellow eyes, blazing with the insolence of a soldier. She inherited from her father so violent a nature that the whole family, except Tonsard, and all who frequented the tavern feared her.

"Well, how are you now?" she said to La Pechina as the latter recovered consciousness.

Catherine had placed her victim on a little mound beside the brook and was bringing her to her senses with dashes of cold water. "Where am I?" said the child, opening her beautiful black eyes through which a sun-ray seemed to glide.

"Ah!" said Catherine, "if it hadn't been for me you'd have been killed."

"Thank you," said the girl, still bewildered; "what happened to me?"

"You stumbled over a root and fell flat in the road over there, as if shot. Ha! how you did run!"

"It was your brother who made me," said La Pechina, remembering Nicolas.

"My brother? I did not see him," said Catherine. "What did he do to you, poor fellow, that should make you fly as if he were a wolf? Isn't he handsomer than your Monsieur Michaud?"

"Oh!" said the girl, contemptuously.

"See here, little one; you are laying up a crop of evils for yourself by loving those who persecute us. Why don't you keep to our side?"

"Why don't you come to church; and why do you steal things night and day?" asked the child.

"So you let those people talk you over!" sneered Catherine. "They love us, don't they?—just as they love their food which they get out of us, and they want new dishes every day. Did you ever know one of them to marry a peasant-girl? Not they! Does Sarcus the rich let his son marry that handsome Gatienne Giboulard? Not he, though she is the daughter of a rich upholsterer. You have never been at the Tivoli ball at Soulanges in Socquard's tavern; you had better come. You'll see 'em all there, these bourgeois fellows, and you'll find they are not worth the money we shall get out of them when we've pulled them down. Come to the fair this year!"

"They say it's fine, that Soulanges fair!" cried La Pechina, artlessly.

"I'll tell you what it is in two words," said Catherine. "If you are handsome, you are well ogled. What is the good of being as pretty as you are if you are not admired by the men? Ha! when I heard one of them say for the first time, 'What a fine sprig of a girl!' all my blood was on fire. It was at Socquard's, in the middle of a dance; my grandfather, Fourchon, who was playing the clarionet, heard it and laughed. Tivoli seemed to me as grand and fine as heaven itself. It's lighted up, my dear, with glass lamps, and you'll think you are in paradise. All the gentlemen of Soulanges and Auxerre and Ville-aux-Fayes will be there. Ever since that first night I've loved the place where those words rang in my ears like military music. It's worthy giving your eternity to hear such words said of you by a man you love."

"Yes, perhaps," replied La Pechina, thoughtfully.

"Then come, and get the praise of men; you're sure of it!" cried Catherine. "Ha! you'll have a fine chance, handsome as you are, to pick up good luck. There's the son of Monsieur Lupin, Amaury, he might marry you. But that's not all; if you only knew what comforts you can find there against vexation and worry. Why, Socquard's boiled wine will make you forget every trouble you ever had. Fancy! it can make you dream, and feel as light as a bird. Didn't you ever drink boiled wine? Then you don't know what life is."

The privilege enjoyed by older persons to wet their throats with boiled wine excites the curiosity of the children of the peasantry over twelve years of age to such a degree that Genevieve had once put her lips to a glass of boiled wine ordered by the doctor for her grandfather when ill. The taste had left a sort of magic influence in the memory of the poor child, which may explain the interest with which she listened, and on which the evil-minded Catherine counted to carry out a plan already half-successful. No doubt she was trying to bring her victim, giddy from the fall, to the moral intoxication so dangerous to young women living in the wilds of nature, whose imagination, deprived of other nourishment, is all the more ardent when the occasion comes to exercise it. Boiled wine, which Catherine had held in reserve, was to end the matter by intoxicating the victim.

"What do they put into it?" asked La Pechina.

"All sorts of things," replied Catherine, glancing back to see if her brother were coming; "in the first place, those what d' ye call 'ems that come from India, cinnamon, and herbs that change you by magic,—you fancy you have everything you wish for; boiled wine makes you happy! you can snap your fingers at all your troubles!"

"I should be afraid to drink boiled wine at a dance," said La Pechina.

"Afraid of what?" asked Catherine. "There's not the slightest danger. Think what lots of people there will be. All the bourgeois will be looking at us! Ah! it is one of those days that make up for all our misery. See it and die,—for it's enough to satisfy any one."

"If Monsieur and Madame Michaud would only take me!" cried La Pechina, her eyes blazing.

"Ask your grandfather Niseron; you have not given him up, poor dear man, and he'd be pleased to see you admired like a little queen. Why do you like those Arminacs the Michauds better than your grandfather and the Burgundians. It's bad to neglect your own people. Besides, why should the Michauds object if your grandfather takes you to the fair? Oh! if you knew what it is to reign over a man and put him beside himself, and say to him, as I say to Godain, 'Go there!' and he goes, 'Do that!' and he does it! You've got it in you, little one, to turn the head of a bourgeois like that son of Monsieur Lupin. Monsieur Amaury took a fancy to my sister Marie because she is fair and because he is half-afraid of me; but he'd adore you, for ever since those people at the pavilion have spruced you up a bit you've got the airs of an empress."

Adroitly leading the innocent heart to forget Nicolas and so put it off its guard, Catherine distilled into the girl the insidious nectar of compliments. Unawares, she touched a secret wound. La Pechina, without being other than a poor peasant girl, was a specimen of alarming precocity, like many another creature doomed to die as prematurely as it blooms. Strange product of Burgundian and Montenegrin blood, conceived and born amid the toils of war, the girl was doubtless in many ways the result of her congenital circumstances. Thin, slender, brown as a tobacco leaf, and short in stature, she nevertheless possessed extraordinary strength,—a strength unseen by the eyes of peasants, to whom the mysteries of the nervous system are unknown. Nerves are not admitted into the medical rural mind.

At thirteen years of age Genevieve had completed her growth, though she was hardly as tall as an ordinary girl of her age. Did her face owe its topaz skin, so dark and yet so brilliant, dark in tone and brilliant in the quality of its tissue, giving a look of age to the childish face, to her Montenegrin origin, or to the ardent sun of Burgundy? Medical science may dismiss the inquiry. The premature old age on the surface of the face was counterbalanced by the glow, the fire, the wealth of light which made the eyes two stars. Like all eyes which fill with sunlight and need, perhaps, some sheltering screen, the eyelids were fringed with lashes of extraordinary length. The hair, of a bluish black, long and fine and abundant, crowned a brow moulded like that of the Farnese Juno. That magnificent diadem of hair, those grand Armenian eyes, that celestial brow eclipsed the rest of the face. The nose, though pure in form as it left the brow, and graceful in curve, ended in flattened and flaring nostrils. Anger increased this effect at times, and then the face wore an absolutely furious expression. All the lower part of the face, like the lower part of the nose, seemed unfinished, as if the clay in the hands of the divine sculptor had proved insufficient. Between the lower lip and the chin the space was so short that any one taking La Pechina by the chin would have rubbed the lip; but the teeth prevented all notice of this defect. One might almost believe those little bones had souls, so brilliant were they, so polished, so transparent, so exquisitely shaped, disclosed as they were by too wide a mouth, curved in lines that bore resemblance to the fantastic shapes of coral. The shells of the ears were so transparent to the light that in the sunshine they were rose-colored. The complexion, though sun-burned, showed a marvellous delicacy in the texture of the skin. If, as Buffon declared, love lies in touch, the softness of the girl's skin must have had the penetrating and inciting influence of the fragrance of daturas. The chest and indeed the whole body was alarmingly thin; but the feet and hands, of alluring delicacy, showed remarkable nervous power, and a vigorous organism.

This mixture of diabolical imperfections and divine beauties, harmonious in spite of discords, for they blended in a species of savage dignity, also this triumph of a powerful soul over a feeble body, as written in those eyes, made the child, when once seen, unforgettable. Nature had wished to make that frail young being a woman; the circumstances of her conception moulded her with the face and body of a boy. A poet observing the strange creature would have declared her native clime to be Arabia the Blest; she belonged to the Afrite and Genii of Arabian tales. Her face told no lies. She had the soul of that glance of fire, the intellect of those lips made brilliant by the bewitching teeth, the thought enshrined within that glorious brow, the passion of those nostrils ready at all moments to snort flame. Therefore love, such as we imagine it on burning sands, in lonely deserts, filled that heart of twenty in the breast of a child, doomed, like the snowy heights of Montenegro, to wear no flowers of the spring.

Observers ought now to understand how it was that La Pechina, from whom passion issued by every pore, awakened in perverted natures the feelings deadened by abuse; just as water fills the mouth at sight of those twisted, blotched, and speckled fruits which gourmands know by experience, and beneath whose skin nature has put the rarest flavors and perfumes. Why did Nicolas, that vulgar laborer, pursue this being who was worthy of a poet, while the eyes of the country-folk pitied her as a sickly deformity? Why did Rigou, the old man, feel the passion of a young one for this girl? Which of the two men was young, and which was old? Was the young peasant as blase as the old usurer? Why did these two extremes of life meet in one common and devilish caprice? Does the vigor that draws to its close resemble the vigor that is only dawning? The moral perversities of men are gulfs guarded by sphinxes; they begin and end in questions to which there is no answer.

The exclamation, formerly quoted, of the countess, "Piccina!" when she first saw Genevieve by the roadside, open-mouthed at sight of the carriage and the elegantly dressed woman within it, will be understood. This girl, almost a dwarf, of Montenegrin vigor, loved the handsome, noble bailiff, as children of her age love, when they do love, that is to say, with childlike passion, with the strength of youth, with the devotion which in truly virgin souls gives birth to divinest poesy. Catherine had just swept her coarse hands across the sensitive strings of that choice harp, strung to the breaking-point. To dance before Michaud, to shine at the Soulanges ball and inscribe herself on the memory of that adored master! What glorious thoughts! To fling them into that volcanic head was like casting live coals upon straw dried in the August sun.

"No, Catherine," replied La Pechina, "I am ugly and puny; my lot is to sit in a corner and never to be married, but live alone in the world."

"Men like weaklings," said Catherine. "You see me, don't you?" she added, showing her handsome, strong arms. "I please Godain, who is a poor stick; I please that little Charles, the count's groom; but Lupin's son is afraid of me. I tell you it is the small kind of men who love me, and who say when they see me go by at Ville-aux-Fayes and at Soulanges, 'Ha! what a fine girl!' Now YOU, that's another thing; you'll please the fine men."

"Ah! Catherine, if it were true—that!" cried the bewitched child.

"It is true, it is so true that Nicolas, the handsomest man in the canton, is mad about you; he dreams of you, he is losing his mind; and yet all the other girls are in love with him. He is a fine lad! If you'll put on a white dress and yellow ribbons, and come to Socquard's for the midsummer ball, you'll be the handsomest girl there, and all the fine people from Ville-aux-Fayes will see you. Come, won't you?—See here, I've been cutting grass for the cows, and I brought some boiled wine in my gourd; Socquard gave it me this morning," she added quickly, seeing the half-delirious expression in La Pechina's eyes which women understand so well. "We'll share it together, and you'll fancy the men are in love with you."

During this conversation Nicolas, choosing the grassy spots to step on, had noiselessly slipped behind the trunk of an old oak near which his sister had seated La Pechina. Catherine, who had now and then cast her eyes behind her, saw her brother as she turned to get the boiled wine.

"Here, take some," she said, offering it.

"It burns me!" cried Genevieve, giving back the gourd, after taking two or three swallows from it.

"Silly child!" replied Catherine; "see here!" and she emptied the rustic bottle without taking breath. "See how it slips down; it goes like a sunbeam into the stomach."

"But I ought to be carrying the milk to Mademoiselle Gaillard," cried Genevieve; "and it is all spilt! Nicolas frightened me so!"

"Don't you like Nicolas?"

"No," answered Genevieve. "Why does he persecute me? He can get plenty other girls, who are willing."

"But if he likes you better than all the other girls in the valley—"

"So much the worse for him."

"I see you don't know him," answered Catherine, as she seized the girl rapidly by the waist and flung her on the grass, holding her down in that position with her strong arms. At this moment Nicolas appeared. Seeing her odious persecutor, the child screamed with all her might, and drove him five feet away with a violent kick in the stomach; then she twisted herself like an acrobat, with a dexterity for which Catherine was not prepared, and rose to run away. Catherine, still on the ground, caught her by one foot and threw her headlong on her face. This frightful fall stopped the brave child's cries for a moment. Nicolas attempted, furiously, to seize his victim, but she, though giddy from the wine and the fall, caught him by the throat in a grip of iron.

"Help! she's strangling me, Catherine," cried Nicolas, in a stifled voice.

La Pechina uttered piercing screams, which Catherine tried to choke by putting her hands over the girl's mouth, but she bit them and drew blood. It was at this moment that Blondet, the countess, and the abbe appeared at the edge of the wood.

"Here are those Aigues people!" exclaimed Catherine, helping Genevieve to rise.

"Do you want to live?" hissed Nicolas in the child's ear.

"What then?" she asked.

"Tell them we were all playing, and I'll forgive you," said Nicolas, in a threatening voice.

"Little wretch, mind you say it!" repeated Catherine, whose glance was more terrifying than her brother's murderous threat.

"Yes, I will, if you let me alone," replied the child. "But anyhow I will never go out again without my scissors."

"You are to hold your tongue, or I'll drown you in the Avonne," said Catherine, ferociously.

"You are monsters," cried the abbe, coming up; "you ought to be arrested and taken to the assizes."

"Ha! and pray what do you do in your drawing-rooms?" said Nicolas, looking full at the countess and Blondet. "You play and amuse yourselves, don't you? Well, so do we, in the fields which are ours. We can't always work; we must play sometimes,—ask my sister and La Pechina."

"How do you fight if you call that playing?" cried Blondet.

Nicolas gave him a murderous look.

"Speak!" said Catherine, gripping La Pechina by the forearm and leaving a blue bracelet on the flesh. "Were not we amusing ourselves?"

"Yes, madame, we were amusing ourselves," said the child, exhausted by her display of strength, and now breaking down as though she were about to faint.

"You hear what she says, madame," said Catherine, boldly, giving the countess one of those looks which women give each other like dagger thrusts.

She took her brother's arm, and the pair walked off, not mistaking the opinion they left behind them in the minds of the three persons who had interrupted the scene. Nicolas twice looked back, and twice encountered Blondet's gaze. The journalist continued to watch the tall scoundrel, who was broad in the shoulders, healthy and vigorous in complexion, with black hair curling tightly, and whose rather soft face showed upon its lips and around the mouth certain lines which reveal the peculiar cruelty that characterizes sluggards and voluptuaries. Catherine swung her petticoat, striped blue and white, with an air of insolent coquetry.

"Cain and his wife!" said Blondet to the abbe.

"You are nearer the truth than you know," replied the priest.

"Ah! Monsieur le cure, what will they do to me?" said La Pechina, when the brother and sister were out of sight.

The countess, as white as her handkerchief, was so overcome that she heard neither Blondet nor the abbe nor La Pechina.

"It is enough to drive one from this terrestrial paradise," she said at last. "But the first thing of all is to save that child from their claws."

"You are right," said Blondet in a low voice. "That child is a poem, a living poem."

Just then the Montenegrin girl was in a state where soul and body smoke, as it were, after the conflagration of an anger which has driven all forces, physical and intellectual, to their utmost tension. It is an unspeakable and supreme splendor, which reveals itself only under the pressure of some frenzy, be it resistance or victory, love or martyrdom. She had left home in a dress with alternate lines of brown and yellow, and a collarette which she pleated herself by rising before daylight; and she had not yet noticed the condition of her gown soiled by her struggle on the grass, and her collar torn in Catherine's grasp. Feeling her hair hanging loose, she looked about her for a comb. At this moment Michaud, also attracted by the screams, came upon the scene. Seeing her god, La Pechina recovered her full strength. "Monsieur Michaud," she cried, "he did not even touch me!"

The cry, the look, the action of the girl were an eloquent commentary, and told more to Blondet and the abbe than Madame Michaud had told the countess about the passion of that strange nature for the bailiff, who was utterly unconscious of it.

"The scoundrel!" cried Michaud.

Then, with an involuntary and impotent gesture, such as mad men and wise men can both be forced into giving, he shook his fist in the direction in which he had caught sight of Nicolas disappearing with his sister.

"Then you were not playing?" said the abbe with a searching look at La Pechina.

"Don't fret her," interposed the countess; "let us return to the pavilion."

Genevieve, though quite exhausted, found strength under Michaud's eyes to walk. The countess followed the bailiff through one of the by-paths known to keepers and poachers where only two can go abreast, and which led to the gate of the Avonne.

"Michaud," said the countess when they reached the depth of the wood, "We must find some way of ridding the neighborhood of such vile people; that child is actually in danger of death."

"In the first place," replied Michaud, "Genevieve shall not leave the pavilion. My wife will be glad to take the nephew of Vatel, who has the care of the park roads, into the house. With Gounod (that is his name) and old Cornevin, my wife's foster-father, always at hand, La Pechina need never go out without a protector."

"I will tell Monsieur to make up this extra expense to you," said the countess. "But this does not rid us of that Nicolas. How can we manage that?"

"The means are easy and right at hand," answered Michaud. "Nicolas is to appear very soon before the court of appeals on the draft. The general, instead of asking for his release, as the Tonsards expect, has only to advise his being sent to the army—"

"If necessary, I will go myself," said the countess, "and see my cousin, de Casteran, the prefect. But until then, I tremble for that child—"

The words were said at the end of the path close to the open space by the bridge. As they reached the edge of the bank the countess gave a cry; Michaud advanced to help her, thinking she had struck her foot against a stone; but he shuddered at the sight that met his eyes.

Marie Tonsard and Bonnebault, seated below the bank, seemed to be conversing, but were no doubt hiding there to hear what passed. Evidently they had left the wood as the party advanced towards them.

Bonnebault, a tall, wiry fellow, had lately returned to Conches after six years' service in the cavalry, with a permanent discharge due to his evil conduct,—his example being likely to ruin better men. He wore moustachios and a small chin-tuft; a peculiarity which, joined to his military carriage, made him the reigning fancy of all the girls in the valley. His hair, in common with that of other soldiers, was cut very short behind, but he frizzed it on the top of his head, brushing up the ends with a dandy air; on it his foraging cap was jauntily tilted to one side. Compared to the peasants, who were mostly in rags, like Mouche and Fourchon, he seemed gorgeous in his linen trousers, boots, and short waistcoat. These articles, bought at the time of his liberation, were, it is true, somewhat the worse for a life in the fields; but this village cock-of-the-walk had others in reserve for balls and holidays. He lived, it must be said, on the gifts of his female friends, which, liberal as they were, hardly sufficed for the libations, the dissipations, and the squanderings of all kinds which resulted from his intimacy with the Cafe de la Paix.

Cowardice is like courage; of both there are various kinds. Bonnebault would have fought like a brave soldier, but he was weak in presence of his vices and his desires. Lazy as a lizard, that is to say, active only when it suited him, without the slightest decency, arrogant and base, able for much but neglectful of all, the sole pleasure of this "breaker of hearts and plates," to use a barrack term, was to do evil or inflict damage. Such a nature does as much harm in rural communities as it does in a regiment. Bonnebault, like Tonsard and like Fourchon, desired to live well and do nothing; and he had his plans laid. Making the most of his gallant appearance with increasing success, and of his talents for billiards with alternate loss and gain, he flattered himself that the day would come when he could marry Mademoiselle Aglae Socquard, only daughter of the proprietor of the Cafe de la Paix, a resort which was to Soulanges what, relatively speaking, Ranelagh is to the Bois de Boulogne. To get into the business of tavern-keeping, to manage the public balls, what a fine career for the marshal's baton of a ne'er-do-well! These morals, this life, this nature, were so plainly stamped upon the face of the low-lived profligate that the countess was betrayed into an exclamation when she beheld the pair, for they gave her the sensation of beholding snakes.

Marie, desperately in love with Bonnebault, would have robbed for his benefit. Those moustachios, the swaggering gait of a trooper, the fellow's smart clothes, all went to her heart as the manners and charms of a de Marsay touch that of a pretty Parisian. Each social sphere has its own standard of distinction. The jealous Marie rebuffed Amaury Lupin, the other dandy of the little town, her mind being made up to become Madame Bonnebault.

"Hey! you there, hi! come on!" cried Nicolas and Catherine from afar, catching sight of Marie and Bonnebault.

The sharp call echoed through the woods like the cry of savages.

Seeing the pair at his feet, Michaud shuddered and deeply repented having spoken. If Bonnebault and Marie Tonsard had overheard the conversation, nothing but harm could come of it. This event, insignificant as it seems, was destined, in the irritated state of feeling then existing between Les Aigues and the peasantry, to have a decisive influence on the fate of all,—just as victory or defeat in battle sometimes depends upon a brook which shepherds jump while cannon are unable to pass it.

Gallantly bowing to the countess, Bonnebault passed Marie's arm through his own with a conquering air and took himself off triumphantly.

"The King of Hearts of the valley," muttered Michaud to the countess. "A dangerous man. When he loses twenty francs at billiards he would murder Rigou to get them back. He loves a crime as he does a pleasure."

"I have seen enough for to-day; take me home, gentlemen," murmured the countess, putting her hand on Emile's arm.

She bowed sadly to Madame Michaud, after watching La Pechina safely back to the pavilion. Olympe's depression was transferred to her mistress.

"Ah, madame," said the abbe, as they continued their way, "can it be that the difficulty of doing good is about to deter you? For the last five years I have slept on a pallet in a parsonage which has no furniture; I say mass in a church without believers; I preach to no hearers; I minister without fees or salary; I live on the six hundred francs the law allows me, asking nothing of my bishop, and I give the third of that in charity. Still, I am not hopeless. If you knew what my winters are in this place you would understand the strength of those words,—I am not hopeless. I keep myself warm with the belief that we can save this valley and bring it back to God. No matter for ourselves, madame; think of the future! If it is our duty to say to the poor, 'Learn how to be poor; that is, how to work, to endure, to strive,' it is equally our duty to say to the rich, 'Learn your duty as prosperous men,'—that is to say, 'Be wise, be intelligent in your benevolence; pious and virtuous in the place to which God has called you.' Ah! madame, you are only the steward of Him who grants you wealth; if you do not obey His behests you will never transmit to your children the prosperity He gives you. You will rob your posterity. If you follow in the steps of that poor singer's selfishness, which caused the evils that now terrify us, you will bring back the scaffolds on which your fathers died for the faults of their fathers. To do good humbly, in obscurity, in country solitudes, as Rigou now does evil,—ah! that indeed is prayer in action and dear to God. If in every district three souls only would work for good, France, our country, might be saved from the abyss that yawns; into which we are rushing headlong, through spiritual indifference to all that is not our own self-interest. Change! you must change your morals, change your ethics, and that will change your laws."

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!"



CHAPTER XII. SHOWETH HOW THE TAVERN IS THE PEOPLE'S PARLIAMENT

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:—

"One fine moment of his life Was at the wedding feast; He changed the water into wine,— Madeira of the best."

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,—

"You who know the hussars of the Guard, Don't you know the trombone of the regiment?"

"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.



CHAPTER XIII. A TYPE OF THE COUNTRY USURER

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."