Sons of the Soil Part 25

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, pa.s.sed 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 G.o.dain.

"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 bl.u.s.ter."

"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 h.e.l.l 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 a.s.sociates, 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. .h.i.therto 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 ill.u.s.trate 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 pa.s.sage, 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 s.p.a.ce was plastered.

The mantel, also in walnut, surmounted by a mirror in the most grotesque frame, had no other ornament than two bra.s.s 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 G.o.d 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 a.r.s.ene was disinterested; and the bequest left to her by the late Abbe Niseron would be inexplicable were it not for the curious circ.u.mstance 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 s.e.xton, 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 a.r.s.ene, the pretty servant whom the old abbe engaged in 1789. a.r.s.ene was the niece of his housekeeper, whose place the girl took by request of the latter on her deathbed.