LIBRARY THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA BARBARA PRESENTED BY Mr. H. H. KM iani LIBK/UU H. DE BALZAC THE COMEDIE HUMAINE HAS KILLED ME, THE SCAMP H. DE BALZAC THE PEASANTRY (Les PAYSANS) AND PIERRE GRASSOU TRANSLATED BY ELLEN MARRIAGE WITH A PREFACE BY GEORGE SAINTSBURY PHILADELPHIA THE GEBBIE PUBLISHING Co., Ltd. 1898 CONTENTS PAGB PREFACE ix THE PEASANTRY BOOK I CHAP. I. THE CHATEAU 3 II. A BUCOLIC OVERLOOKED BY VIRGIL 21 III. THE TAVERN . . 36 IV. ANOTHER IDYL 55 V. THE ENEMIES FACE TO FACE 73 VI. A TALE OF ROBBERS 96 VII. OF EXTINCT SOCIAL SPECIES lit I VIII. THE GREAT REVOLUTIONS OF A LITTLE VALLEY . . I2Q IX. OF MEDIOCRACY 155 x. A HAPPY WOMAN'S PRESENTIMENTS 175 XI. THE OARISTYS, THE EIGHTEENTH ECLOGUE OF THEOCRITUS, LITTLE APPRECIATED IN A COURT OF ASSIZE . . .192 XII. SHOWS HOW THE TAVERN IS THE PEOPLE'S PARLIAMENT . 211 xin. THE PEASANTS' MONEY-LENDER 231 vi CONTENTS. BOOK II CHAP. PAGH I. THE BEST SOCIETY OF SOULANGES 254 ii. THE QUEEN'S DRAWING-ROOM 279 III. THE CAFE DE LA FAIX 297 IV. THE TRIUMVIRATE OF VILLE-AUX-FAYES .... 3IO V. HOW A VICTORY WAS WON WITHOUT A BLOW . . . 324 VI. THE FOREST AND THE HARVEST 333 "II. THE GREYHOUNP 342 VIII. RUSTIC VIRTUES 354 IX. THE CATASTROPHE 359 X. THE VICTORY OF THE VANQUISHED 365 JPIERRE GRASSOU 373 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS " HE HAS KILLED ME, THE SCAMP ! " (p. 67) . . Frontispiece PACK FOURCHON AND MOUCHE Si SHE LEANED ON EMILE BLONDET'S ARM . . . . '. 178 A TUG AT HIS GRANDFATHER'S BLOUSE, WHICH SENT THE OLD MAN OVER ON TO THE MOUND 2$3 MICHAUD'S MURDERER .....*.. 363 Drawn by D. Murray-Smith. PREFACE. FEW, I suppose, of the readers of "Les Paysans" (The Peasantry) in more recent years have read it without a more or less distinct mental comparison with the corresponding book in the Rougon-Macquart series. And I should hope that this comparative process has had, in the best minds, only one result. "Les Paysans" (which, by the way, is a very late book, partly posthumous, and is said, though not on positive authority, to have enjoyed the collaboration of Madame de Balzac) is not one of Balzac's best ; but it is as far above "La Terre " (The Land) from every conceivable point of view, except that of Holy well Street,* as a play of Shake- speare is above one of Monk Lewis. The comparison, indeed, exhibits something more than the difference of genius in Balzac and in M. Zola. It illustrates the difference of their methods. We know how not merely the Rougon-Macquart series in general, but "La Terre " in particular, was composed. M. Zola, who is a conscientious man, went down to a village (somewhere in the Beauce, if I recollect rightly), stayed some time, made his notes, and came back to Paris. There is nothing like the same great gulf fixed between the Londoner and the countryman in England as that which exists between the Parisian and the Provincial in France. But imagine an Englishman, not even English by race, from his youth up an inhabitant of great towns, attempting to delineate the English peasantry after a few weeks' stay in a Wiltshire village ! Balzac, on the other hand, a Frenchman of Frenchmen, was born in a French country town, was brought up in the country, and, what is more, was in the constant habit of * Socialists' headquarters, London. (ix) x PREFACE. retiring to out-of-the-way country inns and similar places to work. He had the key to begin with ; and he never let it get rusty. To some tastes and judgments his country sketches, if less lively, are more veracious even than his Parisian ones ; they have less convention about them ; they are less obviously under the dominion of prepossessions and crotchets, less elaborately calculated to form backgrounds and scenery for the evolutions of Rastignacs and Rubempres. The result is, in "Les Paysans," a book of extraordinary interest and value. In one respect, indeed, it falls short of the highest kind of novel. There is no character in whose fortunes or in whose development we take the keenest interest. Blondet is little more than an intelligent chorus or reporter, though he does not tell the story; Montcornet is a good- natured "old silly;" the Countess is a Countess. Not one of the minor characters, not even Rigou, is very much more than a sketch. But then there is such a multitude of these sketches, and they are all instinct with such life and vigor ! Although Balzac has used no illegitimate attractions think only of the kind of stuff with which M. Zola, like a child smearing color on a book-engraving, would have daubed the grisly outlines of the Tonsard family ! he has not shrunk from what even our modern realists, I suppose, would allow to be " candor ; " and his book is as masterly as it is crushing in its indictment against the peasant. Is the indictment as true as it is severe and well urged? I am rather afraid that we have not much farther to look than at certain parts of more than one of the Three Kingdoms to see that we need not even limit ourselves to the French peasant in admitting that it is. There are passages in the book which read as if they might be extracts mutatis mutandis (with neces- sary changes) from a novel on the Irish Land League or the Welsh Anti-Tithe Agitation. To a certain extent, no doubt, the English peasant, at least when he is not Celtic, is rather less bitten with actual "land-hunger" than the Frenchman ; PREFACE. xi and even when he is a Celt, it does not seem to be so much land-hunger proper as a dislike to adopting any other occupa- tion which drives him to crime. Moreover, Free Trade and other things have made land in the United Kingdom very much less an object of positive greed than it was in France eighty years ago, or, indeed, than it is there still. Yet the main and special ingredients of a land agitation the ruthless disregard of life, the indifference to all considerations of gratitude or justice, the secret-society alliance against the upper classes all these things are delineated here with an almost terrifying veracity. For individual and separate sketches of scenes and charac- ters (with the limitation above expressed) the book may vie almost with the best. The partly real, partly fictitious, otter- hunting of the old scoundrel Fourchon is quite first-rate ; and it is of a kind rarely found in French writers till a time much more modern than Balzac's. The machinations of Gaubertin, Sibilet, and Rigou are a little less vivid ; but the latter is a masterly character of the second class, and perhaps the best type in fiction of the intelligent sensualist of the lower rank of the man hard-headed, harder-hearted, and entirely desti- tute of any merit but shrewdness. The character of Bonne- bault is a little, a very little, theatrical; the troupier franf ais (French soldier) debauched, but not ungenerous, appears a little too much in his cartoon manner. " La Pechina " wants fuller working out ; but she affords one of the most interesting touches of the comparison above suggested in the scene between her, Nicolas, and Catherine. One turns a little squeamish at the mere thought of what M. Zola would have made of it in the effort to make clear to the lowest apprehension what Balzac, almost without offense, has made clear to all but the very lowest. Michaud is good and not overdone ; and of his enemies the Tonsards enough has been said. They could not be better in their effectiveness ; and, I am afraid, they could not be much better in their truth. Here, at least, if xu PREFACE. the moral picture is grimy enough, Balzac cannot, I think, be charged with having exaggerated it, while he cannot be denied the credit of having presented it in extraordinarily forcible and brilliant colors and outlines. "Les Paysans," owing to the lateness of its appearance, was less pulled about than almost any other of its author's books. It, or rather the first part of it, appeared under the title " Qui Terre a guerre a " (who wage war for land) in the "Presse" for December, 1844. Nothing more appeared during the author's life; but in 1855 the " Revue de Paris " reprinted the previous portion and finished the book, and the whole was published in four volumes by de Potter in the same year. "Pierre Grassou" is good in itself; it is very characteristic of its time, and it is specially happy as giving a touch of comedy, which is grateful. The figure of the artist- bourgeois, neither Bohemian nor buveur d'eau (water drinker), is excel- lently hit off, and the thing leaves us with all the sense of a pleasant afterpiece. G. S. THE PEASANTRY. To M. P.-S.-B. Gavault. "I have seen the manners of my time, and I publish these letters," wrote Jean- Jacques Rousseau at the beginning of his " Nouvelle Heloise ; " can I not imi- tate that great writer and tell you that "/am studying the tendencies of my epoch, and I publish this work ?" S0 long as society inclines to exalt philanthropy into a principle instead of regarding it as an accessory, this Study will be terribly true to life. Its object is to set in relief the principal types of a class neglected by the throng of writers in quest of new subjects. This neg- lect, it may be, is simple prudence in days when the working classes have fallen heirs to the courtiers and flatterers of kings, when the criminal is tlic hero of romance, the headsman is sentimentally interesting, and we behold something like an apotheosis of the prole- tariat. Sects have arisen among us, every pen among them swells the chorus of " Workers, arise ! " even as once the Third Estate was bidden to "Arise I" It is pretty plain that no Herostratus among them has had the courage to go forth into remote country districts to study the phenomena of a permanent conspiracy of those whom we call '''the weak" against those who imagine themselves to be "the strong" of the Peasan- try against the Rich. All that can be done is to open the eyes of the legislator, not of to-day, but of to-mor- row. In the midst of an attack of democratic vertigo to which so many blind scribes have fallen victims, is it not imperatively necessary that some one should (1) THE PEASANTRY. paint the portrait of this Peasant who stultifies the Code by reducing the ownership of land to a something that at once is and is not ? Here you shall see this in- defatigable sapper at his work, nibbling and gnawing the land into little bits, carving an acre into a hundred scraps, to be in turn divided, summoned to the banquet by the bourgeois, who finds in him a victim and ally. Here is a social dissolvent, created by the Revolution, that will end by swallowing up the bourgeoisie, which in its day devoured the old noblesse. Here is a Robes- pierre, with a single head and twenty million hands, whose very insignificance and obscurity has put him out of the reach of the law ; a Robespierre always at his work, crouching in every commune, enthroned in town council chambers, and bearing arms in the Na- tional Guard in every district in France, for in the year 1830 France forgot that Napoleon preferred to run the risks of his misfortunes to the alternative of arming the masses. If during the past eight years I have a hundred times taken up and laid down the most considerable piece of work which I have undertaken ; my friends, as you yourself , will understand that courage may well falter before such difficulties, and the mass of details essential to the development of a drama so cruelly bloodthirsty, but among the many reasons which in- duce something like temerity in me, count as one my desire to complete a work destined as a token of deep and lasting gratitude for a devotion which was one of my greatest consolations in misfortune. DE BALZAC. BOOK I. He that hath the Land Must fight for his own Hand. I. THE CHATEAU. To Monsieur Nathan. "THE AlGUES, "August 6, 1823. " Now, my dear Nathan, purveyor of dreams to the public, I will set you dreaming of the actual, and you shall tell me if ever this century of ours can leave a legacy of such dreams to the Nathans and the Blondets of 1923. You shall measure the distance we have traveled since the time when the Florines of the eighteenth century awoke to find such a castle as the Aigues in their contract. "When you get my letter in the morning, dear friend of mine, from your bed will you see, fifty leagues away from Paris, by the side of the high road on the confines of Bur- gundy, a pair of red brick lodges separated or united by a green-painted barrier? There the coach deposited your friend. " A privet hedge winds away on either side of the lodge gates ; with trails of bramble like stray hairs escaping from it, and here and there an upstart sapling. Wild flowers grow along the top of the bank above the ditch bathed at their roots by the stagnant green water. To right and left the hedges ex- tend as far as the coppice which skirts a double meadow, a bit of cleared forest, no doubt. (3) 4 THE PEASANTRY. " From the dusty deserted lodges at the gates there stretches a magnificent avenue of elm-trees, a century old ; the spread- ing tops meet in a majestic green arched roof overhead, and the road below is so overgrown with grass that you can scarcely see the ruts. The old-world look of the gate, the venerable elm-trees, the breadth of the alleys on either side which cross the avenue, prepare you to expect an almost royal castle. Before reaching the lodge I had had a look at the valley of the Aigues from the top of one of the slopes which we in France have the vanity to call a hill, just above the village of Conches, where we changed horses for the last stage. At the end the highway makes a detour to pass through the little sub-prefecture of Ville-aux-Fayes, where a nephew of our friend Lupeaulx lords it over the rural popula- tion. The higher slopes of the broad ridges above the river are crowned by the forest which stretches along the horizon line, and the whole picture is framed in the setting of the far-off hills of the Morvan that miniature Switzerland. All this dense forest lies in three hands. It belongs partly to the Aigues, partly to the Marquis de Ronquerolles, partly to the Comte de Soulanges, whose country houses, parks, and villages, seen far down below in the valley, seem to be a realization of 'Velvet' Breughel, landscape fancies. "If these details do not put you in mind of all the castles in Spain which you have longed to possess in France, this wonder-stricken Parisian's traveler's tale is clean thrown away upon you. Briefly, I have delighted in a country where nature and art blend without spoiling each other, for nature here is an artist, and art looks like nature. I have found the oasis of which we have dreamed so often after reading certain romances ; exuberant wildness subordinated to an effect, nature left to herself without confusion, and even with a suggestion of the wilderness, neglect, mystery; a certain character of its own. Over the barrier with you, and on we THE PEASANTRY. 5 " When with curious eyes I tried to look down the whole length of the avenue, which the sun only penetrates at sunrise and sunset, drawing zebra markings of shadow across it when the light is low, my view was cut short by the outline of a bit of rising ground. The avenue makes a detour to avoid it, and, when you have turned the corner, the long row of trees is in- terrupted again by a little wood ; you enter a square with a stone obelisk standing erect in the midst like an eternal note of exclamation. Purple or yellow flowers (according to the time of year) droop from the courses of the masonry, and the monolith itself is surmounted (what a notion !) by a spiked ball. Clearly it was a woman who designed the Aigues, a man does not have such coquettish fancies. The architect acted upon instructions. " Beyond the little wood, posted there like a sentinel, I came out into a delicious dip of the land, and crossed a foam- ing stream by a single-span stone bridge covered with mosses of glorious hues, the daintiest of time's mosaics. Then the avenue ascends a gentle slope above the course of the stream, and in the distance you see the first set picture a mill with its weir and causeway nestled among green trees. There was the thatched roof of the miller's house, the ducks and drying linen, the nets and tackle, and well-boat, to say nothing of the miller's lad, who had. been gazing at me before I set eyes on him. Wherever you may be in the country, sure though you feel that you are quite alone, you are the cynosure of some pair of eyes under a cotton night-cap. Some laborer drops his hoe to look at you, some vine-dresser straightens his bent back, some little maid leaves her goats, or cows, or sheep, and scrambles up a near-by willow tree to watch your every movement. " Before long the elm avenue becomes an alley, shaded by acacias, which brings you to a gate belonging to the period when wrought-iron was twisted into aerial filigree work, not unlike a writing-master's specimen flourishes ; this Avenue 6 THE PEASANTRY. gate, as it is called, reveals the taste of the grand dauphin who built it ; and if the golden arabesques are somewhat red- dened now by the rust beneath, it seemed to me to be none the less picturesque on that account. On either side it is flanked by a porter's lodge, after the manner of the palace at Versailles, each surmounted by a colossal urn. A ha-ha fence, bristling with spikes most formidable to behold, extends for some distance on either side, and when the ha-ha ends a rough unplastered wall begins, a wall of motley-colored stones of the strangest conceivable shapes, imbedded in reddish- colored mortar, the warm yellow of the flints blending with the white chalk and red-brown gritstone. "At first sight the park looks sombre, for the walls are hidden by climbing plants, and the trees have not heard the sound of an axe for fifty years. You might think that it had become virgin forest again by some strange miracle known to woods alone. The plants that cling about the tree-trunks have bound them together. Glistening mistletoe-berries hang from every fork in the branches where the rain-water can lie. There I have found giant ivy-stems, and such growths as can only exist at a distance of fifty leagues from Paris, where land is not too dear to afford them ample room. It takes a good many square miles to make such a landscape as this. There is no sort of trimness about it, no sign of the garden rake. The ruts are full of water, where the frogs increase and multi- ply and the tadpoles abide in peace ; delicate forest flowers grow there, the heather is as fine as any that I have seen by the hearth in January in Florine's elaborate flower-stand. The mystery of the place mounts to your brain and stirs vague longings. The scent of the forest is adored by all lovers of poetry, for all things in it the most harmless mosses, the deadliest lurking growths, damp earth, water-willows, and balm and wild thyme, and the yellow stars of the water-lilies, all the teeming vigorous growth of the woods yields itself to me in the breath of the forest and brings me the thought of THE PEASANTRY. 7 them all, perhaps the soul of them all. I fell to thinking of a rose-colored dress flitting along the winding alley. " It ended abruptly at last in a little wood full of tremulous birches and poplars and their quivering kind, sensitive to the wind, slender-stemmed, graceful of growth, the trees of free love. And then, my dear fellow, I saw a sheet of water covered with pond-lilies, and a light nutshell of a boat, painted black and white, dainty as a Seine waterman's craft, lying rotting among the leaves of the water-plants, broad and spreading, or delicate and fine. " Beyond the water rises the castle, which bears the date 1560. It is a red brick building with stone facings, string courses and angles, all of stone. The casements (oh ! Versailles) still keep their tiny square window-panes. The stone of the string courses is cut into pyramids alternately raised and de- pressed, as on the Renaissance front of the ducal palace. The castle is a straggling building, with the exception of the main body, which is approached by an imposing double stone stair- case ascending in parallel lines and turning half-way up at right angles. The round balusters are flattened at the thickest part and taper toward the bottom. To this main body various turrets have been added, covered with lead in floral designs, and modern wings with balconies and urns more or less in the Grecian style. There is no symmetry about it, my dear fellow. The buildings are dotted down quite promiscuously nests sheltered, as it were, by a few trees. Their leafage scat- ters countless brown needles over the roof, a deposit of soil for the moss to grow in, filling the great rifts, which attract the eyes, with plant life. Here there is stone-pine, with rusty red bark and umbrella-shaped top, there a cedar a couple of centuries old, a spruce-fir, or weeping-willows, or an oak-tree rising above these, and (in front of the principal turret) the most outlandish-looking shrubs, clipped yews to set you think- ing of some old French plaisance long since swept away, and hortensias and magnolias at their feet ; in fact, it is a sort of g THE PEASANTRY. horticultural pensioner's hospital, an asylum of nature where trees that have had their day linger on, forgotten like other heroes. " A quaintly carved chimney at the house angle, puffing out volumes of smoke, assured me that this charming view was no scene on the stage. If there was a kitchen, human beings lived there. Can you imagine me, Blondet, the Parisian who thinks he has come to the Arctic regions when he finds him- self at Saint-Cloud, set down in the midst of that torrid zone of Burgundian landscape? The sun beats down in scorching rays, the kingfisher keeps to the brink of the pool, the cicadas chirp, the grasshoppers cry, the seed-vessels of some plant crack here and there, the poppies distill their opiate in thick tears, everything stands out sharp and clear against the dark- blue sky. Joyous fumes of Nature's punch mount up from the reddish earth on the garden terraces ; insects and flowers are drunk with the vapor that burns our faces and scorches our eyes. The grapes are rounding, the vines wearing a network of pale threads so fine that it puts laceworkers to the blush ; and (a final touch) all along the terrace, in front of the house, blaze the blue larkspurs, nasturtiums the color of flame, and sweet-peas. The scent of tuberose and orange blossoms comes from a distance. The forest fragrance which stirred my imagination prepared me for the pungent perfumes burning in this flower-seraglio. " Then, at the head of the stone staircase, imagine a woman like a queen of flowers, a woman dressed in white, holding a sunshade lined with white silk above her bare head, a woman whiter than the silk, whiter than the lilies at her feet, or the starry jessamine thrusting itself up boldly through the balus- trade before her ; a Frenchwoman born in Russia, who says, ' I had quite given you up! ' She had seen me ever since the turning in the path. How perfectly any woman, even the simplest of her sex, understands and adapts herself to a situa- tion. The servants were busy preparing breakfast, evidently THE PEASANTRY. 9 delayed till the diligence should arrive. She had not ven- tured to come to meet me. "What is this but our dream? the dream of all lovers of Beauty in its many forms beauty as of seraphs in a Luini's ' Marriage of the Virgin ' at Sarono, beauty that a Rubens dis- covers in the press of the fight in his ' Battle of Thermodon,' beauty that five centuries have elaborated in the cathedrals of Milan and Seville, beauty of Saracen Granada, beauty of a Louis Quatorze's Versailles, beauty of the Alps beauty of La Limagne ? " Here there is nothing overmuch of prince or financier, but prince of the blood and farmer-general have dwelt at the Aigues, or it would not include two thousand acres of wood- land, a park nine hundred acres in extent, the mill, three little holdings, a large farm at Conches, and the vineyards belonging to the estate, which must bring in seventy-two thousand francs every year. Such is the Aigues, dear boy, whither I have come on an invitation of two years' standing, and here I write at this moment in the Blue Chamber the room kept for intimate friends of the house. "At the high end of the park there are a dozen springs of clear and limpid water from the Morvan, flowing in liquid ribbons down through the park in the valley, and through the magnificent gardens to pour into the pool. These have given the Aigues its name ; Les Aigues-Vives, the living water, it used to be on old title-deeds, in contradistinction to Les Aigues- Mortes, the dead water, but Vives has been suppressed. The pool empties itself into the little river that crosses the avenue, through a narrow, willow-fringed channel. The effect of the channel thus decked is charming. As you glide along it in a boat, you might fancy yourself in the nave of some vast cathedral, with the main body of the house at the further end of the channel to represent the choir ; and if the sunset sheds its orange hues, barred with shadow, across the front of the castle and lights up the panes, it seems to you that you see the 1C THE PEASANTRY. fiery stained-glass windows. At the end of the channel you see Blangy, the principal village in the commune, which boasts some sixty houses and a country church; or, strictly speaking, this is simply an ordinary house in shocking repair, and distinguished from the rest by a wooden steeple roofed with broken tiles. A decent private house and a parsonage are likewise distinguishable. "The commune is, for all that, a fairly large one. There are some two hundred scattered hearths in it, beside those in the little market town itself. There are fruit-trees along the wayside, and the land is cut up here and there into gardens, regular laborers' gardens, where everything is crowded into a little space, flowers, and onions, and cabbages, and vines, and gooseberry-bushes, and a great many dung-heaps. The village itself has an unsophisticated air; it looks rustic, with that very tidy simplicity which painters prize so highly. And further away, quite in the distance, you see the little town of Sou- langes on the edge of a large sheet of water, like an imitation Lake of Thun. " When you walk here in the park, with its four gates each in the grand style, you find your Arcadia of mythology grow flat as Beauce. The real Arcadia is in Burgundy, and not in Greece ; Arcadia is the Aigues, and nowhere else. The little streams have united to make the river that winds along the lowest grounds of the park, hence the cool stillness peculiar to it, and the appearance of loneliness that puts you in mind of the Chartreuse, an idea carried out by a hermitage on an island contrived in the midst ; without, it looks like a ruin in good earnest ; within, its elegance is worthy of the taste of the sybarite-financier who planned it. "The Aigues, my dear fellow, once belonged to that Bouret who spent two millions on a single occasion when Louis XV. came here. How many stormy passions, distin- guished intellects, and lucky circumstances have combined to make this beautiful place what it is. One of Henri IV. 's THE PEASANTRY. 11 mistresses rebuilt the present castle, and added the forest to the estate. Then the castle was given to Mile. Choin, a favorite of the grand dauphin, and she too enlarged the Aigues by several farms. Bouret fitted up the house with all the refinements of luxury to be found in the snug Parisian paradises of operatic celebrities. Jt was Bouret, too, who restored the ground-floor rooms in the style of Louis XV. " The dining-hall struck me dumb with wonder. Your eyes are attracted first to the fantastic arabesques of the ceiling, which is covered with frescoes in the Italian manner. Stucco women terminating in leafage bear baskets of fruit, from which the foliage of the ceiling springs. On the wall-spaces between the figures some unknown artists painted wonderful designs, all the glories of the table ; salmon and boars' heads, and shell-fish, and every edible thing that by any strange freak of resemblance can recall the human form man, woman, or child ; for whimsicality of invention the designer might rival the Chinese, who, to my thinking, best understand deco- rative art. A spring is set under the table in the floor by the chair of the mistress of the house, so that she may touch the bell with her foot to summon the servants without inter- rupting the conversation or disturbing her pose. Paintings of voluptuous scenes are set above the doors. All the embra- sures are of marble mosaic, and the hall is warmed from be- neath. From every window there is a delightful view. "The dining-hall communicates with a bathroom on the one hand and a boudoir on the other. The bathroom is lined with Sevres tiles, painted in monochrome, after Boucher's de- signs ; the floor is paved with mosaic ; the bath itself with marble. In an alcove, screened by a painting on copper, raised by means of pulleys and a counterpoise, there is a couch of gilded wood in the very height of the Pompadour style. The lapis blue ceiling is spangled with golden stars. In this way the bath, the table, and the loves are brought together. 12 THE PEASANTRY. "Beyond the salon, in all the glory of the style of Louis XIV., is the splendid billiard-room. I do not know that it has its match in Paris. At the farther end of the semicircular entrance-hall, the finest and daintiest of staircases, lighted from above, leads to the various suites of apartments, built in different centuries. And yet, my dear fellow, they cut off the heads of farmers-general in 1793 ! Good heavens ! why can- not people understand that miracles of art are impossible without great fortunes and lordly lives of secure tranquillity. If the Opposition must needs put kings to death, they might leave us a few petty princes to keep up insignificant great state. " At the present day these accumulated treasures are in the keeping of a little woman with an artist's temperament. Not content with restoring the place on a large scale, she makes a labor of love of their custody. Philosophers, falsely so called, who are wholly taken up with themselves, while apparently interested in humanity, call these pretty things extravagances. They will swoon away before a spinning-jenny and wax faint with bliss over tiresome modern industrial inventions, as if we of to-day were any greater or any happier than they of the time of Henri IV., of Louis XIV., or Louis XVI., who set their seal upon this castle of the Aigues. What palace, what royal castle, what houses, or works of art, or golden brocaded stuffs, shall we leave behind us ? We rummage out our grand- mothers' petticoats to cover our armchairs. Like knavish and selfish life-tenants, we pull everything down that we may plant cabbages where marvelous palaces stood. But yesterday the plough went over the domain of Persan, whence one of the richest families of the parliament of Paris took its name ; Montmorency has fallen under the hammer Montmorency, on which one of the Italians about Napoleon spent incredible sums ; then there is Le Val, the work of Regnaud de Saint- Jean-d'Angely ; and Cassan, built by the mistress of a Prince of Conti; four royal dwelling-places in all destroyed quite THE PEASANTRY. 13 lately in the valley of the Oise alone. We are making ready a Roman Campagna about Paris for the morrow of a coming sack, when the storm-wind from the North shall blow upon our plaster villas and pasteboard ornaments and " Now, just see, my dear fellow, what comes of the habit of writing journalists' padding. Here am I, rounding off a sort of article for you. Can it be that the mind, like a high- way, has its ruts? I will pull myself up at once, for I am robbing them at the office, and robbing myself, and, probably, to make you yawn. There goes the second bell for one of those abundant breakfasts, long fallen into disuse, in the ordi- nary way, of course, in Parisian houses. You shall have the rest of this to-morrow. " Now for the history of my Arcadia. In 1815 there died at the Aigues one of the most celebrated queans of last cen- tury, an opera singer, overlooked by the guillotine, and for- gotten by the aristocracy, literature, and finance ; intimate as she had been with finance, literature, and the aristocracy (and on a bowing acquaintance with the guillotine), she had fallen into neglect, like many charming old ladies, who expiate the triumphs of youth in the country, and take a new love for a lost love, nature replacing human nature. Such women live with the flowers, the scent of the woods, the open sky, and the light of the sun, with everything that sings, or flutters, or shines, or springs from the earth ; birds, or lizards, or blos- soms, or grass. They know nothing about these things ; they do not seek to explain it, but they have a capacity for loving left in age ; and so well do they love, that dukes and marshals, old jealousies and bickerings, and farmers-general, and their follies and luxurious extravagance, and paste gems and dia- monds, and rouge and high-heeled pantofles, are all forgotten for the sweets of a country life. " I am in the possession of valuable information which throws a light on Mile. Laguerre's later life ; for I have felt rather uncomfortable now and again about the old age of such 14 THE PEASANTRY. as Florine, and Marietta, and Suzanne du Val-Noble, and Tullia, just like any child who puzzles his wits to know where all the old moons go. "Mile. Laguerre took fright in 1790 at the turn things were taking, and came to settle down at the Aigues, which Bouret had bought for her (he spent several summers here with her). The fate of the du Barry put her in such a quaking that she buried her diamonds. She was only fifty-three years old at the time, and, according to her woman (who has mar- ried a gendarme here, a Mme. Soudry, whom they call Mad- ame the Mayoress, a piece of brazen-fronted flattery), Madame was handsomer than ever.' Nature, my dear fellow, has her reasons for what she does, no doubt, when she treats these creatures as pet children ; debauchery does not kill them ; on the contrary, they thrive, and flourish, and renew their youth upon it ; lymphatic though they look, they have nerves which sustain their marvelous framework, and bloom perennially from a cause which would make a virtuous woman hideous. Decidedly, fate is not a moral agent. " Mile. Laguerre's life here was above reproach, nay, might it not almost be classed with the Lives of the Saints, after that famous adventure of hers ? One evening, driven distracted by hopeless love, she fled from the opera in her stage costume, and spent the night in weeping by the roadside out in the fields (how we have slandered love in the time of Louis XV. !). The dawn was so unwonted a sight to her that she sang her sweetest airs to greet it. Some peasants gathered about her, attracted as much by her pose as by her tinsel fripperies, and, amazed by her gestures, her beauty, and her singing, they one and all took her for an angel, and fell upon their knees. But for Voltaire, there would have been another miracle at Bag- nolet. " I know not whether heaven will give much credit to this sinner for her tardy virtue, for a life of pleasure becomes loath- some to one so palled with pleasure as a wanton of the stage of THE PEASANTRY. 15 the time of Louis XV. Mile. Laguerre was born in 1740. She was in the full bloom of her beauty in 1760, when they nicknamed M. de (the name escapes me) Ministre de la guerre (Minister of War), on account of his liaison with her. "She changed her name, which was quite unknown in the country, called herself Mme. des Aigues, the better to bury herself in the district, and amused herself by keeping up her estate with extremely artistic taste. When Bonaparte became First Consul, she rounded off her property with some of the church lands, selling her diamonds to buy them ; and, as an opera-girl is scarcely fitted to shine in the management of estates, she left the land to her steward, and devoted her per- sonal attention to her park, her fruit-trees, and her flower- garden. " Mademoiselle being dead and buried at Blangy, the notary from Soulanges (the little place between Ville-aux- Fayes and Blangy) made an exhaustive inventory, and in course of time discovered the famous singer's next-of-kin ; she herself knew nothing about them ; but eleven families, poor agricultural laborers, living near Amiens, lay down in rags one night and woke up next morning in sheets of gold. "The Aigues had to be sold, of course, and Montcornet bought it. In various posts in Spain and Pomerania he had managed to save the requisite amount, something like eleven hundred thousand francs. The furniture was included in the purchase. It seems as if the fine place must always belong to some one in the War Department. Doubtless, the general was not insensible to the luxurious influences of his ground- floor apartments, and in talking to the countess yesterday I insisted that the Aigues had determined his marriage. " If you are to appreciate the countess, my dear fellow, you must know that the general is choleric in temper, sanguine in complexion, and stands five feet nine inches; is round as a barrel, bull-necked, and the owner of a pair of shoulders for which a smith might forge a model cuirass. Montcornet 16 THE PEASANTRY. commanded a company of Cuirassiers at Essling (called by the Austrians Gross- Aspern), and did not lose his life when his magnificent cavalry was pushed back into the Danube. Man and horse managed to cross the river on a huge beam of wood. The Cuirassiers, finding that the bridge was broken, turned like heroes when Montcornet gave the word, and stood their ground against the whole Austrian army. They took up more than thirty cartloads of cuirasses next day on the field, and among themselves the Germans coined a special nickname for the Cuirassiers those 'men of iron.'* *I set my face on principle against footnotes; but the present one, the first which I have permitted myself, may be excused on the score of its historical interest. It will show, moreover, that battle scenes have yet to be described in other than the dry technical language of military writers, who, for three thousand years, can speak of nothing but right wings, left wings, and centres more or less routed, but say not a word of the soldier, his heroism, and his hardships. The conscientious manner in which I am setting about the " Scenes de la vie militaire " has meant a series of visits to every battlefield at home or abroad watered by French blood, so I de- termined to see the field of Wagram. As I reached the bank of the Danube opposite Lobau, I noticed ribbed marks under the soft grass, something like the furrows in a field of luzern, and asked the peasant, our guide, about this new system of agriculture (for so I took it to be). " That is where the Cuirassiers of the Imperial Guard are lying," he said ; " they are buried under those mounds that you see." The words sent a shiver through me; and Prince Friedrich von Schwartzenberg, who interpreted them, added that this very peasant had driven the train of carts full of the cuirasses of the dead, and that by one of the grotesque accidents of war it was the same man who prepared Napoleon's breakfast on the morning of the battle. Poor though he was, he had kept the double napoleon which the Emperor had given him for his eggs and milk. The cur6 of Gross-Aspern showed us over the famous cemetery where Frenchmen and Austrians fought in blood half-way to the knee with cour- age equally obstinate and equally splendid on either side. But there was a marble tablet in the place on which we concentrated our whole atten- tion, the cur6 explaining how that it was erected to the memory of the owner of Gross-Aspern, killed on the third day of the fight, and that it was the only return made to the family. Then he said, with deep sadness THE PEASANTRY. 17 " Montcornet looks like a hero of ancient times. He has strong muscular arms, a broad, resonant chest, a head striking from its leonine character, and a voice that can sound the command to ' Charge ! ' above the din of battle ; but his is the courage of a sanguine temperament unreasoning and uncal- culating. Montcornet is an awe-inspiring figure at first sight, like many another general whom the soldier's commonsense, the wariness of a man who continually takes his life in his hand, and the habit of command seemingly raise above other men. You take him for a Titan, but he harbors a dwarf in him, like the pasteboard giant who greeted Queen Elizabeth at the gate of Kenilworth Castle. Choleric and kind, full of the pride of the Empire, he has the caustic tongue of a soldier, quick with a word, quicker still with a blow. The man who made so grand a figure on the battlefield becomes unbearable in domestic life, all his ideas of love were learned in the camp, his is that soldiers' love for whom the ancients (ingenious makers of myths) discovered a tutelary deity in Eros off- spring of Mars and Venus. Those delicious religious chron- in his tones, " That was a time of great misery ; a time of great promises ; but now to-day is the day of forgetfulness." The words seemed to me to be grandly simple ; but when I had thought the matter over, the apparent ingratitude of the House of Austria seemed to me to be justi- fiable. Neither peoples nor kings are rich enough to reward all the devo- tion shown iu the hour of supreme struggle. Let those who serve a cause with a lurking thought of reward set a price on their blood, and turn condottieri ! Those who handle sword or pen for their country should think of nothing but how to "play the man," as our forefathers used to say, and accept nothing, not even glory itself, save as a lucky accident. Three times they stormed that famous cemetery; the third time Massena made his famous address to his men from the coach-body in which they carried the wounded hero, " You've five sous a day, you blackguards, and I've forty millions, and you let me go in front! " Every one knows the order of the clay that the Emperor sent to his lieutenant by M. de Sainte- Croix, who swam the Danube three times, " Die, or take the village again ; the existence of the army is at stake J The bridges are broken." THE AUTHOR. 2 18 THE PEASANTRY. iclers admit half a score of different Loves. Make a study of the paternity and attributes of each, and you will provide yourself with a social nomenclature of the completest kind. We imagine that we invent this or that, do we? When the globe, like a dreaming sick man, turns again through another cycle and our continents become oceans, the Frenchman of the coming time will find a steam-engine, a cannon, a copy of a daily paper, and a charter lying wrapped about with weeds at the bottom of our present Atlantic. " Now, the countess, my dear boy, is a little woman, fragile and delicate and timid. What say you to this marriage? Any one who knows the world, knows that this sort of thing happens so often that a well-assorted marriage is an exception. I came here to see how this tiny, slender woman holds the leading strings; for she has this huge, tall, square-built general of hers quite as well in hand as ever he kept his Cuirassiers. " If Montcornet raises his voice before his Virginie, madame lays her finger on her lips, and he holds his tongue. The old soldier goes to smoke his pipe or cigar in a summer-house fifty paces away from the castle, and perfumes himself before he comes back. He is proud of his subjection. If anything is suggested, he turns to her, like a bear infatuated for grapes, with 'That is as madame pleases.' He comes to his wife's room, the paved floor creaking like boards under his heavy tread ; and if she cries in a startled voice, ' Do not come in ! ' he describes a right wheel in military fashion, meekly remark- ing, ' You will let me know when I may come and speak to you,' and this from the voice that roared to his Cuirassiers on the banks of the Danube, ' Boys, there is nothing for it but to die, and to die handsomely, since there is nothing else to be done ! ' A touching little thing I once heard him say of his wife, 'I not only love her, I reverence her.' Sometimes, in one of his fits of rage, when his wrath knows no bounds and pours out in torrents that carry all before it, the little woman THE PEASANTRY. 19 goes to her room and leaves him to storm. But four or five days later she will say, ' Don't put yourself in a passion, you will break a bloodvessel on your lungs, to say nothing of the pain it gives me,' and the Lion of Essling takes to flight to dry the tears in his eyes. If he comes into the salon when we are deep in conversation, 'Leave us,' she says, 'he is reading something to me,' and the general goes. " None but strong men, great-natured and hot-tempered, among these thunderbolts of battle, diplomates with Olympian brows and men of genius, are capable of these courses of con- fidence, of generosity for weakness, of constant protection and love without jealousy, of this bonhomie with a woman. Faith ! I rate the countess' science as far above crabbed and peevish virtues as the satin of a settee above the Utrecht vel- vet of a dingy back-parlor sofa. "Six days have I spent in this admirable country, dear fel- low, and I am not tired yet of admiring the wonders of this park-land with the dark forests rising above it, and the paths beside the streams. Everything here fascinates me nature, and the stillness of nature, quiet enjoyment, the easy life which nature offers. Ah ! here is real literature, there are never defects of style in a meadow ; and complete happiness would be complete forgetfulness even of the 'Debats.' "You ought not to need to be told that we have had two wet mornings. While the countess slept, and Montcornet tramped over his property, driven to keep the promise so rashly given, I have been writing to you. "Hitherto, though I was born in Alen