The Village Rector by Honoré de Balzac (read more books TXT) 📕

Clousier and respected him for the disinterested fatherly care with which he settled their differences and gave them advice in their daily affairs. The "goodman Clousier" as all Montegnac called him, had a nephew with him as clerk, an intelligent young man, who afterwards contributed much to the prosperity of the district.

Old Clousier's personal appearance was remarkable for a broad, high forehead and two bushes of white hair which stood out from his head on either side of it. His highly colored complexion and well-developed corpulence might have made persons think, in spite of his actual sobriety, that he cultivated Bacchus as well as Troplong and Toullier. His half-extinct voice was the sign of an oppressive asthma. Perhaps the dry air of Montegnac had contributed to fix him there. He lived in a house arranged for him by a well-to-do cobbler to whom it belonged. Clousier had already seen Veronique at church, and he had formed his opinion of her without communicating it to any one, not even to Monsieur Bonnet, with whom he was beginning to be intimate. For the first time in his life the _juge de paix_ was to be thrown in with persons able to appreciate him.

When the company were seated round a table handsomely appointed (for Veronique had sent all her household belongings from Limoges to Montegnac) the six guests felt a momentary embarrassment. The doctor, the mayor and the _juge de paix_ knew nothing of Grossetete and Gerard. But during the first course, old Grossetete's hearty good-humor broke the ice of a first meeting. In addition to this, Madame Graslin's cordiality led on Gerard, and encouraged Roubaud. Under her touch these souls full of fine qualities recognized their relation, and felt they had entered a sympathetic circle. So, by the time the dessert appeared on the table, when the glass and china with gilded edges sparkled, and the choicer wines were served by Aline and Champion and Grossetete's valet, the conversation became sufficiently confidential to allow these four choice minds, thus meeting by chance, to express their real thoughts on matters of importance, such as men like to discuss when they can do so and be sure of the discretion of their companions.

"Your furlough came just in time to let you witness the revolution of July," said Grossetete to Gerard, with an air as if he asked an opinion of him.

"Yes," replied the engineer. "I was in Paris during the three famous days. I saw all; and I came to sad conclusions."

"What were they?" said the rector, eagerly.

"There is no longer any patriotism except under dirty shirts," replied Gerard. "In that lies the ruin of France! July was the voluntary defeat of all superiorities,--name, fortune, talent. The ardent, devoted masses carried the day against the rich and the intelligent, to whom ardor and devotion are repugnant."

"To judge by what has happened during the past year," said Monsieur Clousier, "this change of government is simply a premium given to an evil that is sapping us,--individualism. Fifteen years hence all questions of a generous nature will be met by, _What is that to me?_--the great cry of Freedom of Will descending from the religious heights where Luther, Calvin, Zwinglius, and Knox introduced it, into even political economy. _Every one for himself_; _every man his own master_,--those two terrible axioms form, with the _What is that to me?_ a trinity of wisdom to the burgher and the small land-owner. This egotism results from the vices of our present civil legislation (too hastily made), to which the revolution of July has just given a terrible confirmation."

The _juge de paix_ fell back into his usual silence after thus expressing himself; but the topics he suggested must have occupied the minds of those present. Emboldened by Clousier's words, and moved by the look which Gerard exchanged with Grossetete, Monsieur Bonnet ventured to go further.

"The good King Charles X.," he said, "has just failed in the most far-sighted and salutary enterprise a monarch ever planned for the welfare of the people confided to him; and the Church ought to feel proud of the part she took in his councils. But the upper classes deserted him in heart and mind, just as they had already deserted him on the great question of the law of primogeniture,--the lasting honor of the only bold statesman the Restoration has produced, namely, the Comte de Peyronnet. To reconstitute the nation through the family; to take from the press its venomous action and confine it to its real usefulness; to recall the elective Chamber to its true functions; and to restore to religion its power over the people,--such were the four cardinal points of the internal policy of the house of Bourbon. Well, twenty years from now all France will have recognized the necessity of that grand and sound policy. Charles X. was in greater peril in the situation he chose to leave than in that in which his paternal power has been defeated. The future of our noble country--where all things will henceforth be brought periodically into question, where our rulers will discuss incessantly instead of acting, where the press, become a sovereign power, will be the instrument of base ambitions--this future will only prove the wisdom of the king who has just carried away with him the true principles of government; and history will bear in mind the courage with which he resisted his best friends after having probed the wound and seen the necessity of curative measures, which were not sustained by those for whose sake he put himself into the breach."

"Ah! monsieur," cried Gerard, "you are frank; you go straight to your thought without disguise, and I won't contradict you. Napoleon in his Russian campaign was forty years in advance of the spirit of his age; he was never understood. The Russia and England of 1830 explains the campaign of 1812. Charles X. has been misunderstood in the same way. It is quite possible that in twenty-five years from now his ordinances may become the laws of the land."

"France, too eloquent not to gabble, too full of vanity to bow down before real talent, is, in spite of the sublime good sense of its language and the mass of its people, the very last nation in which two deliberative chambers should have been attempted," said the _juge de paix_. "Or, at any rate, the weaknesses of our national character should have been guarded against by the admirable restrictions which Napoleon's experience laid upon them. Our present system may succeed in a country whose action is circumscribed by the nature of its soil, like England; but the law of primogeniture applied to the transmission of land is absolutely necessary; when that law is suppressed the system of legislative representation becomes absurd. England owes her existence to the quasi-feudal law which entails landed property and family mansions on the eldest son. Russia is based on the feudal right of autocracy. Consequently those two nations are to-day on the high-road of startling progress. Austria could only resist our invasions and renew the way against Napoleon by virtue of that law of primogeniture which preserves in the family the active forces of a nation, and supplies the great productions necessary to the State. The house of Bourbon, feeling that it was slipping to the third rank in Europe, by reason of liberalism, wanted to regain its rightful place and there maintain itself, and the nation has thrown it over at the very time it was about to save the nation. I am sure I don't know how low down the present system will drop us."

"If we have a war, France will be without horses, as Napoleon was in 1813, when, being reduced to those of France only, he could not profit by his two victories of Lutzen and Botzen, and so was crushed at Leipzig," cried Grossetete. "If peace continues, the evil will only increase. Twenty-five years from now the race of cattle and horses will have diminished in France by one half."

"Monsieur Grossetete is right," remarked Gerard. "So that the work you are undertaking here, madame," he added, addressing Veronique, "is really a service done to the country."

"Yes," said the _juge de paix_, "because Madame has but one son, and the inheritance will not be divided up; but how long will that condition last? For a certain length of time the magnificent culture which you are about to introduce will, let us hope, belong to only one proprietor, who will continue to breed horned beasts and horses; but sooner or later the day must come when these forests and fields will be divided up and sold in small parcels. Divided and redivided, the six thousand acres of that plain will have a thousand or twelve hundred owners, and thenceforth--no more horses and cattle!"

"Oh! as for those days"--began the mayor.

"There! don't you hear the _What is that to me?_ Monsieur Clousier talked of?" cried Monsieur Grossetete. "Taken in the act! But, monsieur," resumed the banker, gravely addressing the dumfounded mayor, "those days have really come. In a radius of thirty miles round Paris the land is so divided up into small holdings that milch cows are no longer seen. The Commune of Argenteuil contains thirty-eight thousand eight hundred and eighty-five parcels of land, many of which do not return a farthing of revenue. If it were not for the rich refuse of Paris, which produces a fodder of strong quality, I don't know how dairymen would get along. As it is, this over-stimulating food and confinement in close stables produce inflammatory diseases, of which the cows often die. They use cows in the neighborhood of Paris as they do horses in the street. Crops more profitable than hay--vegetables, fruit, apple orchards, vineyards--are taking the place of meadow-lands. In a few years we shall see milk sent to Paris by the mail-coaches as they now send fish. What is going on around Paris is also going on round all the large cities of France; the land will thus be used up before many years are gone. Chaptel states that in 1800 there were barely two million acres of vineyard in France; a careful estimate would give ten million to-day. Divided _ad infinitum_ by our present system of inheritance, Normandy will lose half her production of horses and cattle; but she will have a monopoly of milk in Paris, for her climate, happily, forbids grape culture. We shall soon see a curious phenomenon in the progressive rise in the cost of meat. In twenty years from now, in 1850, Paris, which paid seven to eleven sous for a pound of beef in 1814, will be paying twenty--unless there comes a man of genius who can carry out the plan of Charles X."

"You have laid your finger on the mortal wound of France," said the _juge de paix_. "The root of our evils lies in the section relating to inheritance in the Civil Code, in which the equal division of property among heirs is ordained. That's the pestle that pounds territory into crumbs, individualizes fortunes, and takes from them their needful stability; decomposing ever and never recomposing,--a state of things which must end in the ruin of France. The French Revolution emitted a destructive virus to which the July days have given fresh activity. This vitiating element is the accession of the peasantry to the ownership of land. In the section 'On Inheritance' is the principle of the evil, the peasant is the means through which it works. No sooner does that class get a parcel of land into its maw than it begins to subdivide it, till there are scarcely three furrows left in each lot. And even then the peasant does not stop! He divides the three furrows across their length, as Monsieur Grossetete