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

a well-bred woman, doesn't understand their interests better."

"And yet she has a model before her eyes," said the abbe.

"Who is that?" asked Madame Soudry, smirking.

"The Soulanges."

"Ah, yes!" replied the queen after a pause.

"Here I am!" cried Madame Vermut, coming into the room; "and without my re-active,--for Vermut is so inactive in all that concerns me that I can't call him an active of any kind."

"What the devil is that cursed old Rigou doing there?" said Soudry to Guerbet, as they saw the green chaise stop before the gate of the Tivoli. "He is one of those tiger-cats whose every step has an object."

"You may well say cursed," replied the fat little collector.

"He has gone into the Cafe de la Paix," remarked Gourdon, the doctor.

"And there's some trouble there," added Gourdon the poet; "I can hear them yelping from here."

"That cafe," said the abbe, "is like the temple of Janus; it was called the Cafe de la Guerre under the Empire, and then it was peace itself; the most respectable of the bourgeoisie met there for conversation--"

"Conversation!" interrupted the justice of the peace. "What kind of conversation was it which produced all the little Bourniers?"

"--but ever since it has been called, in honor of the Bourbons, the Cafe de la Paix, fights take place there every day," said Abbe Taupin, finishing the sentence which the magistrate had taken the liberty of interrupting.

This idea of the abbe was, like the quotations from "The Cup-and-Ball," of frequent recurrence.

"Do you mean that Burgundy will always be the land of fisticuffs?" asked Pere Guerbet.

"That's not ill said," remarked the abbe; "not at all; in fact it's almost an exact history of our country."

"I don't know anything about the history of France," blurted Soudry; "and before I try to learn it, it is more important to me to know why old Rigou has gone into the Cafe de la Paix with Socquard."

"Oh!" returned the abbe, "wherever he goes and wherever he stays, you may be quite certain it is for no charitable purpose."

"That man gives me goose-flesh whenever I see him," said Madame Vermut.

"He is so much to be feared," remarked the doctor, "that if he had a spite against me I should have no peace till he was dead and buried; he would get out of his coffin to do you an ill-turn."

"If any one can force the Shopman to come to the fair, and manage to catch him in a trap, it'll be Rigou," said Soudry to his wife, in a low tone.

"Especially," she replied, in a loud one, "if Gaubertin and you, my love, help him."

"There! didn't I tell you so?" cried Guerbet, poking the justice of the peace. "I knew he would find some pretty girl at Socquard's,--there he is, putting her into his carriage."

"You are quite wrong, gentlemen," said Madame Soudry; "Monsieur Rigou is thinking of nothing but the great affair; and if I'm not mistaken, that girl is only Tonsard's daughter."

"He is like the chemist who lays in a stock of vipers," said old Guerbet.

"One would think you were intimate with Monsieur Vermut to hear you talk," said the doctor, pointing to the little apothecary, who was then crossing the square.

"Poor fellow!" said the poet, who was suspected of occasionally sharpening his wit with Madame Vermut; "just look at that waddle of his! and they say he is learned!"

"Without him," said the justice of the peace, "we should be hard put to it about post-mortems; he found poison in poor Pigeron's stomach so cleverly that the chemists of Paris testified in the court at Auxerre that they couldn't have done better--"

"He didn't find anything at all," said Soudry; "but, as President Gendrin says, it is a good thing to let people suppose that poison will always be found--"

"Madame Pigeron was very wise to leave Auxerre," said Madame Vermut; "she was silly and wicked both. As if it were necessary to have recourse to drugs to annul a husband! Are not there other ways quite as sure, but innocent, to rid ourselves of that incumbrance? I would like to have a man dare to question my conduct! The worthy Monsieur Vermut doesn't hamper me in the least,--but he has never been ill yet. As for Madame de Montcornet, just see how she walks about the woods and the hermitage with that journalist whom she brought from Paris at her own expense, and how she pets him under the very eyes of the general!"

"At her own expense!" cried Madame Soudry. "Are you sure? If we could only get proof of it, what a fine subject for an anonymous letter to the general!"

"The general!" cried Madame Vermut, "he won't interfere with things; he plays his part."

"What part, my dear?" asked Madame Soudry.

"Oh! the paternal part."

"If poor little Pigeron had had the wisdom to play it, instead of harassing his wife, he'd be alive now," said the poet.

Madame Soudry leaned over to her neighbor, Monsieur Guerbet, and made one of those apish grimaces which she had inherited from dear mistress, together with her silver, by right of conquest, and twisting her face into a series of them she made him look at Madame Vermut, who was coquetting with the author of "The Cup-and-Ball."

"What shocking style that woman has! what talk, what manners!" she said. "I really don't think I can admit her any longer into _our society_,--especially," she added, "when Monsieur Gourdon, the poet, is present."

"There's social morality!" said the abbe, who had heard and observed all without saying a word.

After this epigram, or rather, this satire on the company, so true and so concise that it hit every one, the usual game of boston was proposed.

Is not this a picture of life as it is at all stages of what we agree to call society? Change the style, and you will find that nothing more and nothing less is said in the gilded salons of Paris.


CHAPTER III. THE CAFE DE LA PAIX

It was about seven o'clock when Rigou drove by the Cafe de la Paix. The setting sun, slanting its beams across the little town, was diffusing its ruddy tints, and the clear mirror of the lake contrasted with the flashing of the resplendent window-panes, which originated the strangest and most improbable colors.

The deep schemer, who had grown pensive as he revolved his plots, let his horse proceed so slowly that in passing the Cafe de la Paix he heard his own name banded about in one of those noisy disputes which, according to the Abbe Taupin, made the name of the establishment a gain-saying of its customary condition.

For a clear understanding of the following scene we must explain the topography of this region of plenty and of misrule, which began with the cafe on the square, and ended on the country road with the famous Tivoli where the conspirators proposed to entrap the general. The ground-floor of the cafe, which stood at the angle of the square and the road, and was built in the style of Rigou's house, had three windows on the road and two on the square, the latter being separated by a glass door through which the house was entered. The cafe had, moreover, a double door which opened on a side alley that separated it from the neighboring house (that of Vallet the Soulanges mercer), which led to an inside courtyard.

The house, which was painted wholly in yellow, except the blinds, which were green, is one of the few houses in the little town which has two stories and an attic. And this is why: Before the astonishing rise in the prosperity of Ville-aux-Fayes the first floor of this house, which had four chambers, each containing a bed and the meagre furniture thought necessary to justify the term "furnished lodgings," was let to strangers who were obliged to come to Soulanges on matters connected with the courts, or to visitors who did not sleep at the chateau; but for the last twenty-five years these rooms had had no other occupants than the mountebanks, the merchants, the vendors of quack medicines who came to the fair, or else commercial travellers. During the fair-time they were let for four francs a day; and brought Socquard about two hundred and fifty francs, not to speak of the profits on the consumption of food which the guests took in his cafe.

The front of the house on the square was adorned with painted signs; on the spaces that separated the windows from the glass door billiard-cues were represented, lovingly tied together with ribbons, and above these bows were depicted smoking bowls of punch, the bowls being in the form of Greek vases. The words "Cafe de la Paix" were over the door, brilliantly painted in yellow on a green ground, at each end of which rose pyramids of tricolored billiard-balls. The window-sashes, painted green, had small panes of the commonest glass.

A dozen arbor-vitae, which ought to be called cafe-trees, stood to the left and right in pots, and presented their usual pretensions and sickly appearance. Awnings, with which shopkeepers of the large cities protect their windows from the head of the sun, were as yet an unknown luxury in Soulanges. The beneficent liquids in the bottles which stood on boards just behind the window-panes went through a periodic cooking. When the sun concentrated its rays through the lenticular knobs in the glass it boiled the Madeira, the syrups, the liqueurs, the preserved plums, and the cherry-brandy set out for show; for the heat was so great that Aglae, her father, and the waiter were forced to sit outside on benches poorly shaded by the wilted shrubs,--which Mademoiselle kept alive with water that was almost hot. All three, father, daughter, and servant, might be seen at certain hours of the day stretched out there, fast asleep, like domestic animals.

In 1804, the period when "Paul and Virginia" was the rage, the inside of the cafe was hung with a paper which represented the chief scenes of that romance. There could be seen Negroes gathering the coffee-crop, though coffee was seldom seen in the establishment, not twenty cups of that beverage being served in the month. Colonial products were of so little account in the consumption of the place that if a stranger had asked for a cup of chocolate Socquard would have been hard put to it to serve him. Still, he would have done so with a nauseous brown broth made from tablets in which there were more flour, crushed almonds, and brown sugar than pure sugar and cacao, concoctions which were sold at two sous a cake by village grocers, and manufactured for the purpose of ruining the sale of the Spanish commodity.

As for coffee, Pere Socquard simply boiled it in a utensil known to all such households as the "big brown pot"; he let the dregs (that were half chicory) settle, and served the decoction, with a coolness worthy of a Parisian waiter, in a china cup which, if flung to the ground, would not have cracked.

At this period the sacred respect felt for sugar under the Emperor was not yet dispelled in the town of Soulanges, and Aglae Socquard boldly served three bits of it of the size of hazel-nuts to a foreign merchant who had rashly asked for the literary beverage.

The wall decoration of the cafe, relieved by mirrors in gilt frames and brackets on which the hats