The Erckmann-Chatrian Megapack: 20 Classic Novels and Short Stories

by Émile Erckmann

  He never talked of anything else; he even came to tease me at the mayoralty-house, to indorse and seal his letters with attestations as to his good life and character; and yet no answer came.

  One evening, as I was busy signing the registration of the reports drawn up in the week by the school-master, he came in and said, “Nothing yet?”

  “Cousin, I don’t know the meaning of it.”

  “Very well,” said he, sitting before my desk. “Give me some paper. Let me write for once, and then we will see.”

  He was pale with excitement, and began to write, reading it as he went on:

  “MONSIEUR LE SOUS-PRÉFET,—I have requested of you a license to open a public-house at Rothalp. I have even had the honor of writing you three letters upon the subject, and you have given me no answer. Answer me—yes or no! When people are paid, and well paid, they ought to fulfil their duty.

  “Monsieur le Sous-préfet, I have the honor to salute you.

  “GEORGE WEBER,

  “Late Sergeant of Marines.”

  Hearing this letter, my hair positively stood on end.

  “Cousin, don’t send that,” said I; “the sous-préfet would very likely put you under arrest.”

  “Pooh!” said he, “you country people, you seem to look upon these folks as if they were demi-gods; yet they live upon our money. It is we who pay them: they are for our service, and nothing more. Here, Christian, will you put your seal to that?”

  Then, in spite of all that my wife might say, I replied, “George, for the love of Heaven, don’t ask me that. I should most assuredly lose my place.”

  “What place? Your place as mayor,” said he, “in which you receive the commands of the sous-préfet, who receives the commands of the préfet, who receives the orders of a Minister, who does everything that our honest man bids him. I had rather be a ragman than fill such a place.”

  The school-master, who happened to be there, seemed as if he had suddenly dropped from the clouds; his arms hung down the sides of his chair, and he gazed at my cousin with big eyes, just as a man stares at a dangerous lunatic.

  I, too, was sitting upon thorns on hearing such words as these in the mayoralty-house; but at last I told him I had rather go myself to Sarrebourg and ask for the permission than seal that letter.

  “Then we will go together,” said he.

  But I felt sure that if he spoke after this fashion to Monsieur le Sous-préfet, he would lay hands upon both of us; and I said that I should go alone, because his presence would put a constraint upon me.

  “Very well,” he said; “but you will tell me everything that the sous-préfet has been saying to you.”

  He tore up his letter, and we went out together.

  I don’t remember that I ever passed a worse night than that. My wife kept repeating to me that our Cousin George had the precedence over the sous-préfet, who only laughed at us; that the Emperor, too, had cousins, who wanted to inherit everything from him, and that everybody ought to stick to their own belongings.

  Next day, when I left for Sarrebourg, my head was in a whirl of confusion, and I thought that my cousin and his wife would have done well to have stayed in Paris rather than come and trouble us when we were at peace, when every man paid his own rates and taxes, when everybody voted as they liked at the préfecture. I could say that never was a loud word spoken at the public-house; that people attended with regularity both mass and vespers; that the gendarmes never visited our village more than once a week to preserve order; and that I myself was treated with consideration and respect: when I spoke but a word, honest men said, “That’s the truth; that’s the opinion of Monsieur le Maire!”

  Yes, all these things and many more passed through my mind, and I should have liked to see Cousin George at Jericho.

  This is just how we were in our village, and I don’t know even yet by what means other people had made such fools of us. In the end, we have had to pay dearly for it; and our children ought to learn wisdom by it.

  At Sarrebourg, I had to wait two hours before I could see Monsieur le Sous-préfet, who was breakfasting with messieurs the councillors of the arrondissement, in honor of the Plébiscite. Five or six mayors of the neighborhood were waiting like myself; we saw filing down the passage great dishes of fish and game, notwithstanding that the fishing and shooting seasons were over; and then baskets of wine; and we could hear our councillors laughing, “Ha! ha! ha!” They were enjoying themselves mightily.

  At last Monsieur le Sous-préfet came out; he had had an excellent breakfast.

  “Ha! is that you, gentlemen?” said he; “come in, come into the office.”

  And for another quarter of an hour we were left standing in the office. Then came Monsieur le Sous-préfet to get rid of the mayors, who wanted different things for their villages. He looked delighted, and granted everything. At last, having despatched the rest, he said to me, “Oh! Monsieur le Maire, I know the object of your coming. You are come to ask, for the person called George Weber, authorization to open a public-house at Rothalp. Well, it’s out of the question. That George Weber is a Republican; he has already offered opposition to the Plébiscite. You ought to have notified this to me: you have screened him because he is your cousin. Authorizations to keep public-houses are granted to steady men, devoted to his Majesty the Emperor, and who keep a watch over their customers; but they are never granted to men who require watching themselves. You should be aware of that.”

  Then I perceived that my rascally deputy, that miserable Placiard, had denounced us. That old dry-bones did nothing but draw up perpetual petitions, begging for places, pensions, tobacco excise offices, decorations for himself and his honorable family; speaking incessantly of his services, his devotion to the dynasty, and his claims. His claims were the denunciations, the informations which he laid before the sous-préfecture; and, to tell the truth, in those days these were the most valid claims of all.

  I was indignant, but I said nothing; I simply added a few words in favor of Cousin George, assuring Monsieur le Sous-préfet that lies had been told about him, that one should not believe everything, etc. He half concealed a weary yawn; and as the councillors of the arrondissement were laughing in the garden, he rose and said politely, “Monsieur le Maire, you have your answer. Besides, you already have two public-houses in your village; three would be too many.”

  It was useless to stay after that, so I made a bow, at which he seemed pleased, and returned quietly to Rothalp. The same evening I went to repeat to George, word for word, the answer of the sous-préfet. Instead of getting angry, as I expected, my cousin listened calmly. His wife only cried out against that bad lot—she spoke of all the sous-préfets in the most disrespectful manner. But my cousin, smoking his pipe after supper, took it all very easily.

  “Just listen to me, Christian,” said he. “In the first place, I am much obliged to you for the trouble you have taken. All that you tell me I knew beforehand; but I am not sorry to know it for certain. Yet I could wish that the sous-préfet had had my letter. As it is, since I am refused a license to sell a few glasses of wine retail, I will sell wine wholesale. I have already a stock of white wine, and no later than to-morrow I am off to Nancy. I buy a light cart and a good horse; thence I drive to Thiancourt, where I lay in a stock of red wine. After that I rove right and left all over the country, and I sell my wine by the cask or the quarter-cask, according to the solvency of my customers: instead of having one public-house, I will have twenty. I must keep moving. With an inn, Marie Anne would still have been obliged to cook; she has quite enough to do without that.”

  “Oh! yes,” she said; “for thirty years I have been cooking dishes of sauerkraut and sausage at Krantheimer’s, at Montmartre, and at Auber’s, in the cloister St. Benoit.”

  “Exactly so,” said George; “and now you shall cook no longer; but you shall look after the crops, the stacking of the hay, the storage of fruit and potatoes. We shall get in our dividends, and I will trot round the country with my lit
tle pony from village to village. Monsieur le Sous-préfet shall know that George Weber can live without him.”

  Hearing this, I learned that they had money in the funds, besides all the rest; and I reflected that my cousin was quite right to laugh at all the sous-préfets in the world.

  He came with me to the door, shaking hands with me; and I said to myself that it was abominable to have refused a publican’s license to respectable persons, when they gave it to such men as Nicolas Reiter and Jean Kreps, whom their own wives called their best customers because they dropped under the table every evening and had to be carried to bed.

  On the other hand, I saw that it was better for me; for if my cousin had been found infringing the law, I should have had to take depositions, and there would have been a quarrel with Cousin George. So that all was for the best; the wholesale business being only the exciseman’s affair.

  What George had said, he did next day. At six o’clock he was already at the station, and in five or six days he had returned from Nancy upon his own char-à-banc, drawn by a strong horse, five or six years old, in its prime. The char-à-banc was a new one; a tilt could be put up in wet weather, which could be raised or lowered when necessary to deliver the wine or receive back the empty casks.

  The wine from Thiancourt followed. George stored it immediately, after having paid the bill and settled with the carter. I was standing by.

  As for telling you how many casks he had then in the house, that would be difficult without examining his books; but not a wine-merchant in the neighborhood, not even in town, could boast of such a vault of wine as he had, for excellence of quality, for variety in price, both red and white, of Alsace and Lorraine.

  About that time, my cousin sent for me and Jacob to make a list of safe customers. He wrote on, asking us, “How much may I give to So-and-So?”

  “So much.”

  “How much to that man?”

  “So much.”

  In the course of a single afternoon we had passed in review all the innkeepers and publicans from Droulingen to Quatre Vents, from Quatre Vents to the Dagsberg. Jacob and I knew what they were worth to the last penny; for the man who pays readily for his flour, pays well for his wine; and those who want pulling up by the miller are in no hurry to open their purses to the others.

  That was the way Cousin George conducted his business.

  He took a lad from our place, the son of the cooper Gros, to drive; and he himself was salesman.

  From that day he was only seen passing through Rothalp at a quick trot, his lad loading and unloading.

  My cousin, also, had a notion of distilling in the winter. He bought up a quantity of old second-hand barrels to hold the fruits which he hoped to secure at a cheap rate in autumn, and laid up a great store of firewood. Our country people had nothing to do but to look at him to learn something; but the people down our way all think themselves so amazingly clever, and that does not help to make folks richer.

  Well, it is plain to you that our cousin’s prospects were looking very bright. Every day, returning from his journey to Saverne or to Phalsbourg, he would stop his cart before my door, and come to see me in the mill, crying out: “Hallo! good afternoon, Christian. How are you to-day?”

  Then we used to step into the back parlor, on account of the noise and the dust, and we talked about the price of corn, cattle, provender, and everything that is interesting to people in our condition.

  What astonished him most of all was the number of Germans to be met with in the mountains and in the plains.

  “I see nobody else,” said he; “wood-cutters, brewers’ men, coopers, tinkers, photographers, contractors. I will lay a wager, Christian, that your young man Frantz is a German, too.”

  “Yes; he comes from the Grand Duchy of Baden.”

  “How does this happen?” asked George. “What is the meaning of it all?”

  “They are good workmen,” said I, “and they ask only half the wages.”

  “And ours—what becomes of them?”

  “Ah, you see, Cousin George, that is their business.”

  “I understand,” he said, “that we are making a great mistake. Even in Paris, this crowd of Germans—crossing-sweepers, shop and warehousemen, carters, book-keepers, professors of every kind—astonished me; and since Sadowa, there are twice as many. The more territory they annex, the farther they extend their view. Where is the advantage of our being Frenchmen—paying every year heavier taxes; sending our children to be drawn for the conscription, and paying for their exemption; bearing all the expenses of the State, all the insults of the préfets, the sous-préfets, and the police-inspectors, and the annoyances of common spies and informers, if those fellows, who have nothing at all to bear, enjoy the same advantages with ourselves, and even greater ones; since our own people are sent off to make room for these, who by their great numbers lower the price of hand-labor? This benefits the manufacturers, the contractors, the bourgeois class, but it is misery for the mass of the people. I cannot understand it at all. Our rulers, up there, must be losing their senses. If that goes on, the working-men will cease to care for their country, since it cares so little for them; and the Germans who are favored, and who hate us, will quietly put us out of our own doors.”

  Thus spoke my cousin, and I knew not what answer to make.

  But about this time I had a great trouble, and although this affair is my private business alone, I must tell you about it.

  Since the arrival of George, my daughter Grédel, instead of looking after our business as she used to do, washing clothes, milking cows, and so on, was all the blessed day at Marie Anne’s. Jacob complained, and said: “What is she about down there? By and by I shall have to prepare the clothes for the wash and hang them upon the hedges to dry, and churn butter. Cannot Grédel do her own work? Does she think we are her servants?”

  He was right. But Grédel never troubled herself. She never has thought of any one besides herself. She was down there along with George’s wife, who talked to her from morning till night about Paris, the grand squares, the markets, the price of eggs and of meat, what was charged at the barrières; of this, that, and the other: cooking, and what not.

  Marie Anne wanted company. But this did not suit me at all; and the less because Grédel had had a lover in the village for some time, and when this is the case, the best thing to be done is always to keep your daughter at home and watch her closely.

  It was only a common clerk at a stone-quarry in Wilsberg, a late artillery sergeant, Jean Baptiste Werner, who had taken the liberty to cast his eyes upon our daughter. We had nothing to say against this young man. He was a fine, tall man, thin, with a bold expression and brown mustaches, and who did his duty very well at the quarry by Father Heitz; but he could earn no more than his three francs a day: and any one may see that the daughter of Christian Weber was not to be thrown away upon a man who earns three francs a day. No, that would never do.

  Nevertheless, I had often seen this Jean Baptiste Werner going in the morning to his work with his foot-rule under his arm, stopping at the mill-dam, as if to watch the geese and the ducks paddling about the sluice or the hens circling around the cock on the dunghill; and at the same moment Grédel would be slowly combing her hair at her window before the little looking-glass, leaning her head outside. I had also noticed that they said good-morning to each other a good way off, and that that clerk always looked excited and flurried at the sight of my daughter; and I had even been obliged to give Grédel notice to go and comb her hair somewhere else when that man passed, or to shut her window.

  This is my case, simply told.

  That young man worried me. My wife, too, was on her guard.

  You may now understand why I should have preferred to have seen our daughter at home; but it was not so easy to forbid her to go to my cousin’s. George and his wife might have been angry; and that troubled us.

  Fortunately about that time the eldest son of Father Heitz,* the owner of the quarry, asked for Grédel
in marriage.

  * It is usual there for fathers of families to be distinguished as Father So-and-So.

  For a long while, Monsieur Mathias Heitz, junior, had come every Sunday from Wilsberg to the “Cruchon d’Or,” to amuse himself with Jacob, as young men do when they have intentions with regard to a family. He was a fine young man, fat, with red cheeks and ears, and always well dressed, with a flowered velvet waistcoat, and seals to his watch-chain; in a word, just such a young man as a girl with any good sense would be glad to have for a husband.

  He had property too; he was the eldest of five children. I reckoned that his own share might be fifteen to twenty thousand francs after the death of his parents.

  Well, this young man demanded Grédel in marriage, and at once Jacob, my wife, and myself were agreed to accept him.

  Only my wife thought that we ought to consult Cousin George and Marie Anne. Grédel was just there when I went in with Catherine; but behold! on the first mention of the thing she began to melt into tears, and to say she would rather die than marry Mathias Heitz. You may imagine how angry we were. My wife was going to slap her face or box her ears; but my cousin became angry now, and told us that we ought never to oblige a girl to marry against her will, because this was the way to make miserable households. Then he led us out into the passage, telling us that he took the responsibility of this affair: that he wished to obtain information, and that we were to tell the young man that we required a month for reflection.

  We could not refuse him that. Grédel would no longer come home; my cousin’s wife begged us not to plague her, and we had to give way to them; but it was one of the greatest troubles of my life. And I thought: “Now you cannot give your daughter to whoever you like; is not this really abominable?”

  I felt angry with myself for having listened to my cousin: but, nevertheless, Grédel stayed with them a whole week, in consequence of which we were obliged to hire a charwoman; and Jacob exclaimed that Grédel could not have offered him a worse insult than to refuse his best comrade, a rich fellow, who boldly paid down his money for ten, fifteen, and twenty bottles at the club without winking.