Sons of the Soil by Honoré de Balzac (latest ebook reader txt) 📕

the valley, was treated, as you see, with very little ceremony by the valet. But so it is with many illustrious people who are so kind as to walk and to sneeze and to sleep and to eat precisely like common mortals.

Socquard, born a Hercules, could carry a weight of eleven hundred pounds; a blow of his fist applied on a man's back would break the vertebral column in two; he could bend an iron bar, or hold back a carriage drawn by one horse. A Milo of Crotona in the valley, his fame had spread throughout the department, where all sorts of foolish stories were current about him, as about all celebrities. It was told how he had once carried a poor woman and her donkey and her basket on his back to market; how he had been known to eat a whole ox and drink the fourth of a hogshead of wine in one day, etc. Gentle as a marriageable girl, Socquard, who was a stout, short man, with a placid face, broad shoulders, and a deep chest, where his lungs played like the bellows of a forge, possessed a flute-like voice, the limpid tones of which surprised all those who heard them for the first time.

Like Tonsard, whose renown released him from the necessity of giving proofs of his ferocity, in fact, like all other men who are backed by public opinion of one kind or another, Socquard never displayed his extraordinary muscular force unless asked to do so by friends. He now took the horse as the usurer drew up at the steps of the portico.

"Are you all well at home, Monsieur Rigou?" said the illustrious innkeeper.

"Pretty well, my good friend," replied Rigou. "Do Plissoud and Bonnebault and Viollet and Amaury still continue good customers?"

This question, uttered in a tone of good-natured interest, was by no means one of those empty speeches which superiors are apt to bestow upon inferiors. In his leisure moments Rigou thought over the smallest details of "the affair," and Fourchon had already warned him that there was something suspicious in the intimacy between Plissoud, Bonnebault, and the brigadier, Viollet.

Bonnebault, in payment of a few francs lost at cards, might very likely tell the secrets he heard at Tonsard's to Viollet; or he might let them out over his punch without realizing the importance of such gossip. But as the information of the old otter man might be instigated by thirst, Rigou paid no attention except so far as it concerned Plissoud, whose situation was likely to inspire him with a desire to counteract the coalition against Les Aigues, if only to get his paws greased by one or the other of the two parties.

Plissoud combined with his duties of under-sheriff other occupations which were poorly remunerated, that of agent of insurance (a new form of enterprise just beginning to show itself in France), agent, also, of a society providing against the chances of recruitment. His insufficient pay and a love of billiards and boiled wine made his future doubtful. Like Fourchon, he cultivated the art of doing nothing, and expected his fortune through some lucky but problematic chance. He hated the leading society, but he had measured its power. He alone knew the middle-class coalition organized by Gaubertin to its depths; and he continued to sneer at the rich men of Soulanges and Ville-aux-Fayes, as if he alone represented the opposition. Without money and not respected, he did not seem a person to be feared professionally, and so Brunet, glad to have a despised competitor, protected him and helped him along, to prevent him selling his business to some eager young man, like Bonnac for instance, who might force him, Brunet, to divide the patronage of the canton between them.

"Thanks to those fellows, we keep the ball a-rolling," said Socquard. "But folks are trying to imitate my boiled wine."

"Sue them," said Rigou, sententiously.

"That would lead too far," replied the innkeeper.

"Do your clients get on well together?"

"Tolerably, yes; sometimes they'll have a row, but that's only natural for players."

All heads were at the window of the Soudry salon which looked to the square. Recognizing the father of his daughter-in-law, Soudry came to the portico to receive him.

"Well, comrade," said the mayor of Soulanges, "is Annette ill, that you give us your company of an evening?"

Through an old habit acquired in the gendarmerie Soudry always went direct to the point.

"No,--There's trouble brewing," replied Rigou, touching his right fore-finger to the hand which Soudry held out to him. "I came to talk about it, for it concerns our children in a way--"

Soudry, a handsome man dressed in blue, as though he were still a gendarme, with a black collar, and spurs at his heels, took Rigou by the arm and led him up to his imposing better-half. The glass door to the terrace was open, and the guests were walking about enjoying the summer evening, which brought out the full beauty of the glorious landscape which we have already described.

"It is a long time since we have seen you, my dear Rigou," said Madame Soudry, taking the arm of the ex-Benedictine and leading him out upon the terrace.

"My digestion is so troublesome!" he replied; "see! my color is almost as high as yours."

Rigou's appearance on the terrace was the sign for an explosion of jovial greetings on the part of the assembled company.

"And how may the lord of Blangy be?" said little Sarcus, justice of the peace.

"Lord!" replied Rigou, bitterly, "I am not even cock of my own village now."

"The hens don't say so, scamp!" exclaimed Madame Soudry, tapping her fan on his arm.

"All well, my dear master?" said the notary, bowing to his chief client.

"Pretty well," replied Rigou, again putting his fore-finger into his interlocutor's hand.

This gesture, by which Rigou kept down the process of hand-shaking to the coldest and stiffest of demonstrations would have revealed the whole man to any observer who did not already know him.

"Let us find a corner where we can talk quietly," said the ex-monk, looking at Lupin and at Madame Soudry.

"Let us return to the salon," replied the queen.

"What has the Shopman done now?" asked Soudry, sitting down beside his wife and putting his arm about her waist.

Madame Soudry, like other old women, forgave a great deal in return for such public marks of tenderness.

"Why," said Rigou, in a low voice, to set an example of caution, "he has gone to the Prefecture to demand the enforcement of the penalties; he wants the help of the authorities."

"Then he's lost," said Lupin, rubbing his hands; "the peasants will fight."

"Fight!" cried Soudry, "that depends. If the prefect and the general, who are friends, send a squadron of cavalry the peasants can't fight. They might at a pinch get the better of the gendarmes, but as for resisting a charge of cavalry!--"

"Sibilet heard him say something much more dangerous than that," said Rigou; "and that's what brings me here."

"Oh, my poor Sophie!" cried Madame Soudry, sentimentally, alluding to her _friend_, Mademoiselle Laguerre, "into what hands Les Aigues has fallen! This is what we have gained by the Revolution!--a parcel of swaggering epaulets! We might have foreseen that whenever the bottle was turned upside down the dregs would spoil the wine!"

"He means to go to Paris and cabal with the Keeper of the Seals and others to get the whole judiciary changed down here," said Rigou.

"Ha!" cried Lupin, "then he sees his danger."

"If they appoint my son-in-law attorney-general we can't help ourselves; the general will get him replaced by some Parisian devoted to his interests," continued Rigou. "If he gets a place in Paris for Gendrin and makes Guerbet chief-justice of the court at Auxerre, he'll knock down our skittles! The gendarmerie is on his side now, and if he gets the courts as well, and keeps such advisers as the abbe and Michaud we sha'n't dance at the wedding; he'll play us some scurvy trick or other."

"How is it that in all these five years you have never managed to get rid of that abbe?" said Lupin.

"You don't know him; he's as suspicious as a blackbird," replied Rigou. "He is not a man at all, that priest; he doesn't care for women; I can't find out that he has any passion; there's no point at which one can attack him. The general lays himself open by his temper. A man with a vice is the servant of his enemies if they know how to pull its string. There are no strong men but those who lead their vices instead of being led by them. The peasants are all right; their hatred against the abbe keeps up; but we can do nothing as yet. He's like Michaud, in his way; such men are too good for this world,--God ought to call them to himself."

"It would be a good plan to find some pretty servant-girl to scrub his staircase," remarked Madame Soudry. The words caused Rigou to give the little jump with which crafty natures recognize the craft of others.

"The Shopman has another vice," he said; "he loves his wife; we might get hold of him that way."

"We ought to find out how far she really influences him," said Madame Soudry.

"There's the rub!" said Lupin.

"As for you, Lupin," said Rigou, in a tone of authority, "be off to the Prefecture and see the beautiful Madame Sarcus at once! You must get her to tell you all the Shopman says and does at the Prefecture."

"Then I shall have to stay all night," replied Lupin.

"So much the better for Sarcus the rich; he'll be the gainer," said Rigou. "She is not yet out of date, Madame Sarcus--"

"Oh! Monsieur Rigou," said Madame Soudry, in a mincing tone, "are women ever out of date?"

"You may be right about Madame Sarcus; she doesn't paint before the glass," retorted Rigou, who was always disgusted by the exhibition of the Cochet's ancient charms.

Madame Soudry, who thought she used only a "suspicion" of rouge, did not perceive the sarcasm and hastened to say:--

"Is it possible that women paint?"

"Now, Lupin," said Rigou, without replying to this naivete, "go over to Gaubertin's to-morrow morning. Tell him that my fellow-mayor and I" (striking Soudry on the thigh) "will break bread with him at breakfast somewhere about midday. Tell him everything, so that we may all have thought it over before we meet, for now's the time to make an end of that damned Shopman. As I drove over here I came to the conclusion it would be best to get up a quarrel between the courts and him, so that the Keeper of the Seals would be wary of making the changes he may ask in their members."

"Bravo for the son of the Church!" cried Lupin, slapping Rigou on the shoulder.

Madame Soudry was here struck by an idea which could come only to a former waiting-maid of an Opera divinity.

"If," she said, "one could only get the Shopman to the fete at Soulanges, and throw some fine girl in his way who would turn his head, we could easily set his wife against him by letting her know that the son of an upholsterer has gone back to the style of his early loves."

"Ah, my beauty!" said Soudry, "you have more sense in your head than the Prefecture of police in