“How so, my old necromancer?”
“Why, bless you! we are as stupid as the beasts, and so we come to understand the beasts. Now, see, this is what we’ll do. When the otter wants to get home Mouche and I’ll frighten it here, and you’ll frighten it over there; frightened by us and frightened by you it will jump on the bank, and when it takes to earth, it is lost! It can’t run; it has web feet for swimming. Ho, ho! it will make you laugh, such floundering! you don’t know whether you are fishing or hunting! The general up at Les Aigues, I have known him to stay here three days running, he was so bent on getting an otter.”
Blondet, armed with a branch cut for him by the old man, who requested him to whip the water with it when he called to him, planted himself in the middle of the river by jumping from stone to stone.
“There, that will do, my good gentleman.”
Blondet stood where he was told without remarking the lapse of time, for every now and then the old fellow made him a sign as much as to say that all was going well; and besides, nothing makes time go so fast as the expectation that quick action is to succeed the perfect stillness of watching.
“Pere Fourchon,” whispered the boy, finding himself alone with the old man, “there’s really an otter!”
“Do you see it?”
“There, see there!”
The old fellow was dumb-founded at beholding under water the reddish-brown fur of an actual otter.
“It’s coming my way!” said the child.
“Hit him a sharp blow on the head and jump into the water and hold him fast down, but don’t let him go!”
Mouche dove into the water like a frightened frog.
“Come, come, my good gentleman,” cried Pere Fourchon to Blondet, jumping into the water and leaving his sabots on the bank, “frighten him! frighten him! Don’t you see him? he is swimming fast your way!”
The old man dashed toward Blondet through the water, calling out with the gravity that country people retain in the midst of their greatest excitements: —
“Don’t you see him, there, along the rocks?”
Blondet, placed by direction of the old fellow in such a way that the sun was in his eyes, thrashed the water with much satisfaction to himself.
“Go on, go on!” cried Pere Fourchon; “on the rock side; the burrow is there, to your left!”
Carried away by excitement and by his long waiting, Blondet slipped from the stones into the water.
“Ha! brave you are, my good gentleman! Twenty good Gods! I see him between your legs! you’ll have him! — Ah! there! he’s gone — he’s gone!” cried the old man, in despair.
Then, in the fury of the chase, the old fellow plunged into the deepest part of the stream in front of Blondet.
“It’s your fault we’ve lost him!” he cried, as Blondet gave him a hand to pull him out, dripping like a triton, and a vanquished triton. “The rascal, I see him, under those rocks! He has let go his fish,” continued Fourchon, pointing to something that floated on the surface. “We’ll have that at any rate; it’s a tench, a real tench.”
Just then a groom in livery on horseback and leading another horse by the bridle galloped up the road toward Conches.
“See! there’s the chateau people sending after you,” said the old man. “If you want to cross back again I’ll give you a hand. I don’t mind about getting wet; it saves washing!”
“How about rheumatism?”
“Rheumatism! don’t you see the sun has browned our legs, Mouche and me, like tobacco-pipes. Here, lean on me, my good gentleman — you’re from Paris; you don’t know, though you do know so much, how to walk on our rocks. If you stay here long enough, you’ll learn a deal that’s written in the book o’ nature, — you who write, so they tell me, in the newspapers.”
Blondet had reached the bank before Charles, the groom, perceived him.
“Ah, monsieur!” he cried; “you don’t know how anxious Madame has been since she heard you had gone through the gate of Conches; she was afraid you were drowned. They have rung the great bell three times, and Monsieur le cure is hunting for you in the park.”
“What time is it, Charles?”
“A quarter to twelve.”
“Help me to mount.”
“Ha!” exclaimed the groom, noticing the water that dripped from Blondet’s boots and trousers, “has monsieur been taken in by Pere Fourchon’s otter?”
The words enlightened the journalist.
“Don’t say a word about it, Charles,” he cried, “and I’ll make it all right with you.”
“Oh, as for that!” answered the man, “Monsieur le comte himself has been taken in by that otter. Whenever a visitor comes to Les Aigues, Pere Fourchon sets himself on the watch, and if the gentleman goes to see the sources of the Avonne he sells him the otter; he plays the trick so well that Monsieur le comte has been here three times and paid him for six days’ work, just to stare at the water!”
“Heavens!” thought Blondet. “And I imagined I had seen the greatest comedians of the present day! — Potier, the younger Baptiste, Michot, and Monrose. What are they compared to that old beggar?”
“He is very knowing at the business, Pere Fourchon is,” continued Charles; “and he has another string to his bow, besides. He calls himself a rope-maker, and has a walk under the park wall by the gate of Blangy. If you merely touch his rope he’ll entangle you so cleverly that you will want to turn the wheel and make a bit of it yourself; and for that you would have to pay a fee for apprenticeship. Madame herself was taken in, and gave him twenty francs. Ah! he is the king of tricks, that old fellow!”
The groom’s gossip set Blondet thinking of the extreme craftiness and wiliness of the French peasant, of which he had heard a great deal from his father, a judge at Alencon. Then the satirical meaning hidden beneath Pere Fourchon’s apparent guilelessness came back to him, and he owned himself “gulled” by the Burgundian beggar.
“You would never believe, monsieur,” said Charles, as they reached the portico at Les Aigues, “how much one is forced to distrust everybody and everything in the country, — especially here, where the general is not much liked — ”
“Why not?”
“That’s more than I know,” said Charles, with the stupid air servants assume to shield themselves when they wish not to answer their superiors, which nevertheless gave Blondet a good deal to think of.
“Here you are, truant!” cried the general, coming out on the terrace when he heard the horses. “Here he is; don’t be uneasy!” he called back to his wife, whose little footfalls were heard behind him. “Now the Abbe Brossette is missing. Go and find him, Charles,” he said to the groom.
CHAPTER III. THE TAVERN
The gate of Blangy, built by Bouret, was formed of two wide pilasters of projecting rough-hewn stone; each surmounted by a dog sitting on his haunches and holding an escutcheon between his fore paws. The proximity of a small house where the steward lived dispensed with the necessity for a lodge. Between the two pilasters, a sumptuous iron gate, like those made in Buffon’s time for the Jardin des Plantes, opened on a short paved way which led to the country road (formerly kept in order by Les Aigues and the Soulanges family) which unites Conches, Cerneux, Blangy, and Soulanges to Ville-aux-Fayes, like a wreath, for the whole road is lined with flowering hedges and little houses covered with roses and honey-suckle and other climbing plants.
There, along a pretty wall which extends as far as a terrace from which the land of Les Aigues falls rapidly to the valley till it meets that of Soulanges, are the rotten posts, the old wheel, and the forked stakes which constituted the manufactory of the village rope-maker.
Soon after midday, while Blondet was seating himself at table opposite the Abbe Brossette and receiving the tender expostulations of the countess, Pere Fourchon and Mouche arrived at this establishment. From that vantage-ground Pere Fourchon, under pretence of rope-making, could watch Les Aigues and see every one who went in and out. Nothing escaped him, the ope
ning of the blinds, tete-a-tete loiterings, or the least little incidents of country life, were spied upon by the old fellow, who had set up this business within the last three years, — a trifling circumstance which neither the masters, nor the servants, nor the keepers of Les Aigues had as yet remarked upon.
“Go round to the house by the gate of the Avonne while I put away the tackle,” said Pere Fourchon to his attendant, “and when you have blabbed about the thing, they’ll no doubt send after me to the Grand-I-Vert, where I am going for a drop of drink, — for it makes one thirsty enough to wade in the water that way. If you do just as I tell you, you’ll hook a good breakfast out of them; try to meet the countess, and give a slap at me, and that will put it into her head to come and preach morality or something! There’s lots of good wine to get out of it.”
After these last instructions, which the sly look in Mouche’s face rendered quite superfluous, the old peasant, hugging the otter under his arm, disappeared along the country road.
Half-way between the gate and the village there stood, at the time when Emile Blondet stayed at Les Aigues, one of those houses which are never seen but in parts of France where stone is scarce. Bits of bricks picked up anywhere, cobblestones set like diamonds in the clay mud, formed very solid walls, though worn in places; the roof was supported by stout branches and covered with rushes and straw, while the clumsy shutters and the broken door — in short, everything about the cottage was the product of lucky finds, or of gifts obtained by begging.
The peasant has an instinct for his habitation like that of an animal for its nest or its burrow, and this instinct was very marked in all the arrangements of this cottage. In the first place, the door and the window looked to the north. The house, placed on a little rise in the stoniest angle of a vineyard, was certainly healthful. It was reached by three steps, carefully made with stakes and planks filled in with broken stone and gravel, so that the water ran off rapidly; and as the rain seldom comes from the northward in Burgundy, no dampness could rot the foundations, slight as they were. Below the steps and along the path ran a rustic paling, hidden beneath a hedge of hawthorn and sweet-brier. An arbor, with a few clumsy tables and wooden benches, filled the space between the cottage and the road, and invited the passers-by to rest themselves. At the upper end of the bank by the house roses grew, and wall-flowers, violets, and other flowers that cost nothing. Jessamine and honey-suckle had fastened their tendrils on the roof, mossy already, though the building was far from old.
To the right of the house, the owner had built a stable for two cows. In front of this erection of old boards, a sunken piece of ground served as a yard where, in a corner, was a huge manure-heap. On the other side of the house and the arbor stood a thatched shed, supported on trunks of trees, under which the various outdoor properties of the peasantry were put away, — the utensils of the vine-dressers, their empty casks, logs of wood piled about a mound which contained the oven, the mouth of which opened, as was usual in the houses of the peasantry, under the mantle-piece of the chimney in the kitchen.
About an acre of land adjoined the house, inclosed by an evergreen hedge and planted with grape-vines; tended as peasants tend them, — that is to say, well-manured, and dug round, and layered so that they usually set their fruit before the vines of the large proprietors in a circuit of ten miles round. A few trees, almond, plum, and apricot, showed their slim heads here and there in this enclosure. Between the rows of vines potatoes and beans were planted. In addition to all this, on the side towards the village and beyond the yard was a bit of damp low ground, favorable for the growth of cabbages and onions (favorite vegetables of the working-classes), which was closed by a wooden gate, through which the cows were driven, trampling the path into mud and covering it with dung.
The house, which had two rooms on the ground-floor, opened upon the vineyard. On this side an outer stairway, roofed with thatch and resting against the wall of the house, led up to the garret, which was lighted by one round window. Under this rustic stairway opened a cellar built of Burgundy brick, containing several casks of wine.
Though the kitchen utensils of the peasantry are usually only two, namely, a frying-pan and an iron pot, with which they manage to do all their cooking, exceptions to this rule, in the shape of two enormous saucepans hanging beneath the mantle-shelf and above a small portable stove, were to be seen in this cottage. In spite, however, of this indication of luxury, the furniture was in keeping with the external appearance of the place. A jar held water, the spoons were of wood or pewter, the dishes, of red clay without and white within, were scaling off and had been mended with pewter rivets; the heavy table and chairs were of pine wood, and for flooring there was nothing better than the hardened earth. Every fifth year the walls received a coat of white-wash and so did the narrow beams of the ceiling, from which hung bacon, strings of onions, bundles of tallow candles, and the bags in which a peasant keeps his seeds; near the bread-box stood an old-fashioned wardrobe in walnut, where the scanty household linen, and the one change of garments together with the holiday attire of the entire family were kept.
Above the mantel of the chimney gleamed a poacher’s old gun, not worth five francs, — the wood scorched, the barrel to all appearances never cleaned. An observer might reflect that the protection of a hovel with only a latch, and an outer gate that was only a paling and never closed, needed no better weapon; but still the wonder was to what use it was put. In the first place, though the wood was of the commonest kind, the barrel was carefully selected, and came from a valuable gun, given in all probability to a game-keeper. Moreover, the owner of this weapon never missed his aim; there was between him and his gun the same intimate acquaintance that there is between a workman and his tool. If the muzzle must be raised or lowered the merest fraction in its aim, because it carries just an atom above or below the range, the poacher knows it; he obeys the rule and never misses. An officer of artillery would have found the essential parts of this weapon in good condition notwithstanding its uncleanly appearance. In all that the peasant appropriates to his use, in all that serves him, he displays just the amount of force that is needed, neither more nor less; he attends to the essential and to nothing beyond. External perfection he has no conception of. An unerring judge of the necessary in all things, he thoroughly understands degrees of strength, and knows very well when working for an employer how to give the least possible for the most he can get. This contemptible-looking gun will be found to play a serious part in the life of the family inhabiting this cottage, and you will presently learn how and why.
Have you now taken in all the many details of this hovel, planted about five hundred feet away from the pretty gate of Les Aigues? Do you see it crouching there, like a beggar beside a palace? Well, its roof covered with velvet mosses, its clacking hens, its grunting pig, its straying heifer, all its rural graces have a horrible meaning.
Fastened to a pole, which was stuck in the ground beside the entrance through the fence, was a withered bunch of three pine branches and some old oak-leaves tied together with a rag. Above the door of the house a roving artist had painted, probably in return for his breakfast, a huge capital “I” in green on a white ground two feet square; and for the benefit of those who could read, this witty joke in twelve letters: “Au Grand-I-Vert” (hiver). On the left of the door was a vulgar sign bearing, in colored letters, “Good March beer,” and the picture of a foaming pot of the same, with a woman, in a dress excessively low-necked, on one side, and an hussar on the other, — both coarsely colored. Consequently, in spite of the blooming flowers and the fresh country air, this cottage exhaled the same strong and nauseous odor of wine and food which assails you in Paris as you pass the door of the cheap cook-shops of the faubourg.
Now you know the surroundings. Behold the inhabitants and hear their history, which contains more than one lesson for philanthropists.
The proprietor of the Grand-I-Vert, named Francois Tonsard, commends himself to the attention of philosophers b
y the manner in which he had solved the problem of an idle life and a busy life, so as to make the idleness profitable, and occupation nil.
A jack-of-all-trades, he knew how to cultivate the ground, but for himself only. For others, he dug ditches, gathered fagots, barked the trees, or cut them down. In all such work the employer is at the mercy of the workman. Tonsard owned his plot of ground to the generosity of Mademoiselle Laguerre. In his early youth he had worked by the day for the gardener at Les Aigues; and he really had not his equal in trimming the shrubbery-trees, the hedges, the horn-beams, and the horse-chestnuts. His very name shows hereditary talent. In remote country-places privileges exist which are obtained and preserved with as much care as the merchants of a city display in getting theirs. Mademoiselle Laguerre was one day walking in the garden, when she overheard Tonsard, then a strapping fellow, say, “All I need to live on, and live happily, is an acre of land.” The kind creature, accustomed to make others happy, gave him the acre of vineyard near the gate of Blangy, in return for one hundred days’ work (a delicate regard for his feelings which was little understood), and allowed him to stay at Les Aigues, where he lived with her servants, who thought him one of the best fellows in Burgundy.
Poor Tonsard (that is what everybody called him) worked about thirty days out of the hundred that he owed; the rest of the time he idled about, talking and laughing with Mademoiselle’s women, particularly with Mademoiselle Cochet, the lady’s maid, though she was ugly, like all confidential maids of handsome actresses. Laughing with Mademoiselle Cochet signified so many things that Soudry, the fortunate gendarme mentioned in Blondet’s letter, still looked askance at Tonsard after the lapse of nearly twenty-five years. The walnut wardrobe, the bedstead with the tester and curtains, and the ornaments about the bedroom were doubtless the result of the said laughter.
Once in possession of his care, Tonsard replied to the first person who happened to mention that Mademoiselle Laguerre had given it to him, “I’ve bought it deuced hard, and paid well for it. Do rich folks ever give us anything? Are one hundred days’ work nothing? It has cost me three hundred francs, and the land is all stones.” But that speech never got beyond the regions of his own class.
Works of Honore De Balzac Page 977