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The Country Doctor

by Honoré de Balzac · English · Gutenberg #1350 · 571,293 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Country Doctor

Author: Honoré de Balzac

Translator: Clara Bell
        Ellen Marriage


        
Release date: July 6, 2004 [eBook #1350]
                Most recently updated: October 29, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1350

Credits: Produced by Dagny, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE COUNTRY DOCTOR ***

THE COUNTRY DOCTOR


By Honoré De Balzac



Translated by Ellen Marriage and Clara Bell




             “For a wounded heart--shadow and silence.”


                            To my Mother





INTRODUCTION


In hardly any of his books, with the possible exception of _Eugénie
Grandet_, does Balzac seem to have taken a greater interest than in _Le
Médecin de Campagne_; and the fact of this interest, together with the
merit and intensity of the book in each case, is, let it be repeated, a
valid argument against those who would have it that there was something
essentially sinister both in his genius and his character.

_Le Médecin de Campagne_ was an early book; it was published in 1833, a
date of which there is an interesting mark in the selection of the name
“Evelina,” the name of Madame Hanska, whom Balzac had just met, for the
lost Jansenist love of Benassis; and it had been on the stocks for
a considerable time. It is also noteworthy, as lying almost entirely
outside the general scheme of the _Comedie Humaine_ as far as
personages go. Its chief characters in the remarkable, if not absolutely
impeccable, _répertoire_ of MM. Cerfberr and Christophe (they have,
a rare thing with them, missed Agathe the forsaken mistress) have no
references appended to their articles, except to the book itself; and
I cannot remember that any of the more generally pervading _dramatis
personæ_ of the Comedy makes even an incidental appearance here. The
book is as isolated as its scene and subject--I might have added, as
its own beauty, which is singular and unique, nor wholly easy to give a
critical account of. The transformation of the _cretin_-haunted desert
into a happy valley is in itself a commonplace of the preceding century;
it may be found several times over in Marmontel’s _Contes Moraux_, as
well as in other places. The extreme minuteness of detail, effective
as it is in the picture of the house and elsewhere, becomes a little
tedious even for well-tried and well-affected readers, in reference to
the exact number of cartwrights and harness-makers, and so forth; while
the modern reader pure and simple, though schooled to endure detail,
is schooled to endure it only of the ugly. The minor characters and
episodes, with the exception of the wonderful story or legend of
Napoleon by Private Goguelat, and the private himself, are neither of
the first interest, nor always carefully worked out: La Fosseuse, for
instance, is a very tantalizingly unfinished study, of which it is
nearly certain that Balzac must at some time or other have meant to make
much more than he has made; Genestas, excellent as far as he goes, is
not much more than a type; and there is nobody else in the foreground at
all except the Doctor himself.

It is, however, beyond all doubt in the very subordination of these
other characters to Benassis, and in the skilful grouping of the whole
as background and adjunct to him, that the appeal of the book as art
consists. From that point of view there are grounds for regarding it as
the finest of the author’s work in the simple style, the least indebted
to super-added ornament or to mere variety. The dangerous expedient of
a _recit_, of which the eighteenth-century novelists were so fond, has
never been employed with more successful effect than in the confession
of Benassis, at once the climax and the centre of the story. And
one thing which strikes us immediately about this confession is the
universality of its humanity and its strange freedom from merely
national limitations. To very few French novelists--to few even of those
who are generally credited with a much softer mould and a much purer
morality than Balzac is popularly supposed to have been able to
boast--would inconstancy to a mistress have seemed a fault which could
be reasonably punished, which could be even reasonably represented as
having been punished in fact, by the refusal of an honest girl’s love in
the first place. Nor would many have conceived as possible, or have
been able to represent in lifelike colors, the lifelong penance which
Benassis imposes on himself. The tragic end, indeed, is more in their
general way, but they would seldom have known how to lead up to it.

In almost all ways Balzac has saved himself from the dangers incident
to his plan in this book after a rather miraculous fashion. The Goguelat
myth may seem disconnected, and he did as a matter of fact once publish
it separately; yet it sets off (in the same sort of felicitous manner of
which Shakespeare’s clown-scenes and others are the capital examples
in literature) both the slightly matter-of-fact details of the
beatification of the valley and the various minute sketches of places
and folk, and the almost superhuman goodness of Benassis, and his
intensely and piteously human suffering and remorse. It is like the red
cloak in a group; it lights, warms, inspirits the whole picture.

And perhaps the most remarkable thing of all is the way in which Balzac
in this story, so full of goodness of feeling, of true religion (for if
Benassis is not an ostensible practiser of religious rites, he avows his
orthodoxy in theory, and more than justifies it in practice), has almost
entirely escaped the sentimentality _plus_ unorthodoxy of similar work
in the eighteenth century, and the sentimentality _plus_ orthodoxy of
similar work in the nineteenth. Benassis no doubt plays Providence in
a manner and with a success which it is rarely given to mortal man to
achieve; but we do not feel either the approach to sham, or the more
than approach to gush, with which similar handling on the part of
Dickens too often affects some of us. The sin and the punishment of the
Doctor, the thoroughly human figures of Genestas and the rest, save the
situation from this and other drawbacks. We are not in the Cockaigne of
perfectibility, where Marmontel and Godwin disport themselves; we are in
a very practical place, where time-bargains in barley are made, and
you pay the respectable, if not lavish board of ten francs per day for
entertainment to man and beast.

And yet, explain as we will, there will always remain something
inexplicable in the appeal of such a book as the _Médecin de Campagne_.
This helps, and that, and the other; we can see what change might have
damaged the effect, and what have endangered it altogether. We must, of
course, acknowledge that as it is there are _longueurs_, intrusion of
Saint Simonian jargon, passages of _galimatias_, and of preaching.
But of what in strictness produces the good effect we can only say one
thing, and that is, it was the genius of Balzac working as it listed and
as it knew how to work.

The book was originally published by Mme. Delaunay in September 1833
in two volumes and thirty-six chapters with headings. Next year it was
republished in four volumes by Werdet, and the last fifteen chapters
were thrown together into four. In 1836 it reappeared with dedication
and date, but with the divisions further reduced to seven; being those
which here appear, with the addition of two, “La Fosseuse” and “Propos
de Braves Gens” between “A Travers Champs” and “Le Napoleon du Peuple.”
 These two were removed in 1839, when it was published in a single volume
by Charpentier. In all these issues the book was independent. It became
a “Scene de la Vie de Campagne” in 1846, and was then admitted into the
_Comedie_. The separate issues of Goguelat’s story referred to above
made their appearances first in _L’Europe Litteraire_ for June 19,
1833 (_before_ the book form), and then with the imprint of a sort of
syndicate of publishers in 1842.

                                                   George Saintsbury





CHAPTER I. THE COUNTRYSIDE AND THE MAN


On a lovely spring morning in the year 1829, a man of fifty or
thereabouts was wending his way on horseback along the mountain road
that leads to a large village near the Grande Chartreuse. This village
is the market town of a populous canton that lies within the limits of a
valley of some considerable length. The melting of the snows had filled
the boulder-strewn bed of the torrent (often dry) that flows through
this valley, which is closely shut in between two parallel mountain
barriers, above which the peaks of Savoy and of Dauphine tower on every
side.

All the scenery of the country that lies between the chain of the two
Mauriennes is very much alike; yet here in the district through which
the stranger was traveling there are soft undulations of the land, and
varying effects of light which might be sought for elsewhere in
vain. Sometimes the valley, suddenly widening, spreads out a soft
irregularly-shaped carpet of grass before the eyes; a meadow constantly
watered by the mountain streams that keep it fresh and green at all
seasons of the year. Sometimes a roughly-built sawmill appears in a
picturesque position, with its stacks of long pine trunks with the bark
peeled off, and its mill stream, brought from the bed of the torrent in
great square wooden pipes, with masses of dripping filament issuing
from every crack. Little cottages, scattered here and there, with their
gardens full of blossoming fruit trees, call up the ideas that are
aroused by the sight of industrious poverty; while the thought of ease,
secured after long years of toil, is suggested by some larger houses
farther on, with their red roofs of flat round tiles, shaped like the
scales of a fish. There is no door, moreover, that does not duly exhibit
a basket in which the cheeses are hung up to dry. Every roadside and
every croft is adorned with vines; which here, as in Italy, they train
to grow about dwarf elm trees, whose leaves are stripped off to feed the
cattle.

Nature, in her caprice, has brought the sloping hills on either side
so near together in some places, that there is no room for fields, or
buildings, or peasants’ huts. Nothing lies between them but the torrent,
roaring over its waterfalls between two lofty walls of granite that rise
above it, their sides covered with the leafage of tall beeches and
dark fir trees to the height of a hundred feet. The trees, with their
different kinds of foliage, rise up straight and tall, fantastically
colored by patches of lichen, forming magnificent colonnades, with a
line of straggling hedgerow of guelder rose, briar rose, box and arbutus
above and below the roadway at their feet. The subtle perfume of this
undergrowth was mingled just then with scents from the wild mountain
region and with the aromatic fragrance of young larch shoots, budding
poplars, and resinous pines.

Here and there a wreath of mist about the heights sometimes hid and
sometimes gave glimpses of the gray crags, that seemed as dim and vague
as the soft flecks of cloud dispersed among them. The whole face of the
country changed every moment with the changing light in the sky; the
hues of the mountains, the soft shades of their lower slopes, the very
shape of the valleys seemed to vary continually. A ray of sunlight
through the tree-stems, a clear space made by nature in the woods, or a
landslip here and there, coming as a surprise to make a contrast in the
foreground, made up an endless series of pictures delightful to see amid
the silence, at the time of year when all things grow young, and when
the sun fills a cloudless heaven with a blaze of light. In short, it was
a fair land--it was the land of France!

The traveler was a tall man, dressed from head to foot in a suit of blue
cloth, which must have been brushed just as carefully every morning
as the glossy coat of his horse. He held himself firm and erect in the
saddle like an old cavalry officer. Even if his black cravat and doeskin
gloves, the pistols that filled his holsters, and the valise securely
fastened to the crupper behind him had not combined to mark him out as a
soldier, the air of unconcern that sat on his face, his regular features
(scarred though they were with the smallpox), his determined manner,
self-reliant expression, and the way he held his head, all revealed
the habits acquired through military discipline, of which a soldier can
never quite divest himself, even after he has retired from service into
private life.

Any other traveler would have been filled with wonder at the loveliness
of this Alpine region, which grows so bright and smiling as it becomes
merged in the great valley systems of southern France; but the officer,
who no doubt had previously traversed a country across which the French
armies had been drafted in the course of Napoleon’s wars, enjoyed the
view before him without appearing to be surprised by the many changes
that swept across it. It would seem that Napoleon has extinguished in
his soldiers the sensation of wonder; for an impassive face is a sure
token by which you may know the men who served erewhile under the
short-lived yet deathless Eagles of the great Emperor. The traveler was,
in fact, one of those soldiers (seldom met with nowadays) whom shot
and shell have respected, although they have borne their part on every
battlefield where Napoleon commanded.

There had been nothing unusual in his life. He had fought valiantly in
the ranks as a simple and loyal soldier, doing his duty as faithfully
by night as by day, and whether in or out of his officer’s sight. He had
never dealt a sabre stroke in vain, and was incapable of giving one
too many. If he wore at his buttonhole the rosette of an officer of the
Legion of Honor, it was because the unanimous voice of his regiment had
singled him out as the man who best deserved to receive it after the
battle of Borodino.

He belonged to that small minority of undemonstrative retiring natures,
who are always at peace with themselves, and who are conscious of a
feeling of humiliation at the mere thought of making a request, no
matter what its nature may be. So promotion had come to him tardily, and
by virtue of the slowly-working laws of seniority. He had been made
a sub-lieutenant in 1802, but it was not until 1829 that he became a
major, in spite of the grayness of his moustaches. His life had been so
blameless that no man in the army, not even the general himself, could
approach him without an involuntary feeling of respect. It is possible
that he was not forgiven for this indisputable superiority by those who
ranked above him; but, on the other hand, there was not one of his men
that did not feel for him something of the affection of children for a
good mother. For them he knew how to be at once indulgent and severe. He
himself had also once served in the ranks, and knew the sorry joys and
gaily-endured hardships of the soldier’s lot. He knew the errors that
may be passed over and the faults that must be punished in his men--“his
children,” as he always called them--and when on campaign he readily
gave them leave to forage for provision for man and horse among the
wealthier classes.

His own personal history lay buried beneath the deepest reserve. Like
almost every military man in Europe, he had only seen the world through
cannon smoke, or in the brief intervals of peace that occurred so seldom
during the Emperor’s continual wars with the rest of Europe. Had he
or had he not thought of marriage? The question remained unsettled.
Although no one doubted that Commandant Genestas had made conquests
during his sojourn in town after town and country after country where
he had taken part in the festivities given and received by the officers,
yet no one knew this for a certainty. There was no prudery about him;
he would not decline to join a pleasure party; he in no way offended
against military standards; but when questioned as to his affairs of
the heart, he either kept silence or answered with a jest. To the words,
“How are you, commandant?” addressed to him by an officer over the wine,
his reply was, “Pass the bottle, gentlemen.”

M. Pierre Joseph Genestas was an unostentatious kind of Bayard. There
was nothing romantic nor picturesque about him--he was too thoroughly
commonplace. His ways of living were those of a well-to-do man. Although
he had nothing beside his pay, and his pension was all that he had to
look to in the future, the major always kept two years’ pay untouched,
and never spent his allowances, like some shrewd old men of business
with whom cautious prudence has almost become a mania. He was so little
of a gambler that if, when in company, some one was wanted to cut in
or to take a bet at ecarte, he usually fixed his eyes on his boots; but
though he did not allow himself any extravagances, he conformed in every
way to custom.

His uniforms lasted longer than those of any other officer in his
regiment, as a consequence of the sedulously careful habits that
somewhat straitened means had so instilled into him, that they had come
to be like a second nature. Perhaps he might have been suspected
of meannesss if it had not been for the fact that with wonderful
disinterestedness and all a comrade’s readiness, his purse would be
opened for some harebrained boy who had ruined himself at cards or by
some other folly. He did a service of this kind with such thoughtful
tact, that it seemed as though he himself had at one time lost heavy
sums at play; he never considered that he had any right to control the
actions of his debtor; he never made mention of the loan. He was the
child of his company; he was alone in the world, so he had adopted the
army for his fatherland, and the regiment for his family. Very rarely,
therefore, did any one seek the motives underlying his praiseworthy turn
for thrift; for it pleased others, for the most part, to set it down to
a not unnatural wish to increase the amount of the savings that were
to render his old age comfortable. Till the eve of his promotion to the
rank of lieutenant-colonel of cavalry it was fair to suppose that it was
his ambition to retire in the course of some campaign with a colonel’s
epaulettes and pension.

If Genestas’ name came up when the officers gossiped after drill,
they were wont to classify him among the men who begin with taking the
good-conduct prize at school, and who, throughout the term of
their natural lives, continue to be punctilious, conscientious, and
passionless--as good as white bread, and just as insipid. Thoughtful
minds, however, regarded him very differently. Not seldom it would
happen that a glance, or an expression as full of significance as the
utterance of a savage, would drop from him and bear witness to past
storms in his soul; and a careful study of his placid brow revealed a
power of stifling down and repressing his passions into inner depths,
that had been dearly bought by a lengthy acquaintance with the perils
and disastrous hazards of war. An officer who had only just joined the
regiment, the son of a peer of France, had said one day of Genestas,
that he would have made one of the most conscientious of priests, or the
most upright of tradesmen.

“Add, the least of a courtier among marquises,” put in Genestas,
scanning the young puppy, who did not know that his commandant could
overhear him.

There was a burst of laughter at the words, for the lieutenant’s father
cringed to all the powers that be; he was a man of supple intellect,
accustomed to jump with every change of government, and his son took
after him.

Men like Genestas are met with now and again in the French army; natures
that show themselves to be wholly great at need, and relapse into their
ordinary simplicity when the action is over; men that are little mindful
of fame and reputation, and utterly forgetful of danger. Perhaps there
are many more of them than the shortcomings of our own characters
will allow us to imagine. Yet, for all that, any one who believed that
Genestas was perfect would be strangely deceiving himself. The major was
suspicious, given to violent outbursts of anger, and apt to be tiresome
in argument; he was full of national prejudices, and above all things,
would insist that he was in the right, when he was, as a matter of fact,
in the wrong. He retained the liking for good wine that he had acquired
in the ranks. If he rose from a banquet with all the gravity befitting
his position, he seemed serious and pensive, and had no mind at such
times to admit any one into his confidence.

Finally, although he was sufficiently acquainted with the customs
of society and with the laws of politeness, to which he conformed as
rigidly as if they had been military regulations; though he had real
mental power, both natural and acquired; and although he had mastered
the art of handling men, the science of tactics, the theory of sabre
play, and the mysteries of the farrier’s craft, his learning had been
prodigiously neglected. He knew in a hazy kind of way that Caesar was a
Roman Consul, or an Emperor, and that Alexander was either a Greek or
a Macedonian; he would have conceded either quality or origin in both
cases without discussion. If the conversation turned on science or
history, he was wont to become thoughtful, and to confine his share in
it to little approving nods, like a man who by dint of profound thought
has arrived at scepticism.

When, at Schonbrunn, on May 13, 1809, Napoleon wrote the bulletin
addressed to the Grand Army, then the masters of Vienna, in which he
said that _like Medea, the Austrian princes had slain their children
with their own hands_; Genestas, who had been recently made a captain,
did not wish to compromise his newly conferred dignity by asking who
Medea was; he relied upon Napoleon’s character, and felt quite sure that
the Emperor was incapable of making any announcement not in proper form
to the Grand Army and the House of Austria. So he thought that Medea
was some archduchess whose conduct was open to criticism. Still, as the
matter might have some bearing on the art of war, he felt uneasy about
the Medea of the bulletin until a day arrived when Mlle. Raucourt
revived the tragedy of Medea. The captain saw the placard, and did
not fail to repair to the Theatre Francais that evening, to see the
celebrated actress in her mythological role, concerning which he gained
some information from his neighbors.

A man, however, who as a private soldier had possessed sufficient
force of character to learn to read, write, and cipher, could clearly
understand that as a captain he ought to continue his education. So from
this time forth he read new books and romances with avidity, in this way
gaining a half-knowledge, of which he made a very fair use. He went
so far in his gratitude to his teachers as to undertake the defence of
Pigault-Lebrun, remarking that in his opinion he was instructive and not
seldom profound.

This officer, whose acquired practical wisdom did not allow him to make
any journey in vain, had just come from Grenoble, and was on his way to
the Grande Chartreuse, after obtaining on the previous evening a week’s
leave of absence from his colonel. He had not expected that the journey
would be a long one; but when, league after league, he had been misled
as to the distance by the lying statements of the peasants, he thought
it would be prudent not to venture any farther without fortifying the
inner man. Small as were his chances of finding any housewife in her
dwelling at a time when every one was hard at work in the fields, he
stopped before a little cluster of cottages that stood about a piece of
land common to all of them, more or less describing a square, which was
open to all comers.

The surface of the soil thus held in conjoint ownership was hard and
carefully swept, but intersected by open drains. Roses, ivy, and tall
grasses grew over the cracked and disjointed walls. Some rags were
drying on a miserable currant bush that stood at the entrance of the
square. A pig wallowing in a heap of straw was the first inhabitant
encountered by Genestas. At the sound of horse hoofs the creature
grunted, raised its head, and put a great black cat to flight. A young
peasant girl, who was carrying a bundle of grass on her head, suddenly
appeared, followed at a distance by four little brats, clad in rags, it
is true, but vigorous, sunburned, picturesque, bold-eyed, and riotous;
thorough little imps, looking like angels. The sun shone down with an
indescribable purifying influence upon the air, the wretched cottages,
the heaps of refuse, and the unkempt little crew.

The soldier asked whether it was possible to obtain a cup of milk. All
the answer the girl made him was a hoarse cry. An old woman suddenly
appeared on the threshold of one of the cabins, and the young peasant
girl passed on into a cowshed, with a gesture that pointed out the
aforesaid old woman, towards whom Genestas went; taking care at the
same time to keep a tight hold on his horse, lest the children who were
already running about under his hoofs should be hurt. He repeated his
request, with which the housewife flatly refused to comply. She would
not, she said, disturb the cream on the pans full of milk from
which butter was to be made. The officer overcame this objection by
undertaking to repay her amply for the wasted cream, and then tied up
his horse at the door, and went inside the cottage.

The four children belonging to the woman all appeared to be of the same
age--an odd circumstance which struck the commandant. A fifth clung
about her skirts; a weak, pale, sickly-looking child, who doubtless
needed more care than the others, and who on that account was the best
beloved, the Benjamin of the family.

Genestas seated himself in a corner by the fireless hearth. A sublime
symbol met his eyes on the high mantel-shelf above him--a colored
plaster cast of the Virgin with the Child Jesus in her arms. Bare earth
made the flooring of the cottage. It had been beaten level in the first
instance, but in course of time it had grown rough and uneven, so that
though it was clean, its ruggedness was not unlike that of the magnified
rind of an orange. A sabot filled with salt, a frying-pan, and a
large kettle hung inside the chimney. The farther end of the room was
completely filled by a four-post bedstead, with a scalloped valance
for decoration. The walls were black; there was an opening to admit the
light above the worm-eaten door; and here and there were a few stools
consisting of rough blocks of beech-wood, each set upon three wooden
legs; a hutch for bread, a large wooden dipper, a bucket and some
earthen milk-pans, a spinning-wheel on the top of the bread-hutch, and
a few wicker mats for draining cheeses. Such were the ornaments and
household furniture of the wretched dwelling.

The officer, who had been absorbed in flicking his riding-whip against
the floor, presently became a witness to a piece of by-play, all
unsuspicious though he was that any drama was about to unfold itself.
No sooner had the old woman, followed by her scald-headed Benjamin,
disappeared through a door that led into her dairy, than the four
children, after having stared at the soldier as long as they wished,
drove away the pig by way of a beginning. This animal, their accustomed
playmate, having come as far as the threshold, the little brats made
such an energetic attack upon him, that he was forced to beat a hasty
retreat. When the enemy had been driven without, the children besieged
the latch of a door that gave way before their united efforts, and
slipped out of the worn staple that held it; and finally they bolted
into a kind of fruit-loft, where they very soon fell to munching the
dried plums, to the amusement of the commandant, who watched this
spectacle. The old woman, with the face like parchment and the dirty
ragged clothing, came back at this moment, with a jug of milk for her
visitor in her hand.

“Oh! you good-for-nothings!” cried she.

She ran to the children, clutched an arm of each child, bundled them
into the room, and carefully closed the door of her storeroom of plenty.
But she did not take their prunes away from them.

“Now, then, be good, my pets! If one did not look after them,” she went
on, looking at Genestas, “they would eat up the whole lot of prunes, the
madcaps!”

Then she seated herself on a three-legged stool, drew the little
weakling between her knees, and began to comb and wash his head with a
woman’s skill and with motherly assiduity. The four small thieves
hung about. Some of them stood, others leant against the bed or the
bread-hutch. They gnawed their prunes without saying a word, but they
kept their sly and mischievous eyes fixed upon the stranger. In spite
of grimy countenances and noses that stood in need of wiping, they all
looked strong and healthy.

“Are they your children?” the soldier asked the old woman.

“Asking your pardon, sir, they are charity children. They give me three
francs a month and a pound’s weight of soap for each of them.”

“But it must cost you twice as much as that to keep them, good woman?”

“That is just what M. Benassis tells me, sir; but if other folk will
board the children for the same money, one has to make it do. Nobody
wants the children, but for all that there is a good deal of performance
to go through before they will let us have them. When the milk we give
them comes to nothing, they cost us scarcely anything. Besides that,
three francs is a great deal, sir; there are fifteen francs coming in,
to say nothing of the five pounds’ weight of soap. In our part of the
world you would simply have to wear your life out before you would make
ten sous a day.”

“Then you have some land of your own?” asked the commandant.

“No, sir. I had some land once when my husband was alive; since he died
I have done so badly that I had to sell it.”

“Why, how do you reach the year’s end without debts?” Genestas went on,
“when you bring up children for a livelihood and wash and feed them on
two sous a day?”

“Well, we never go to St. Sylvester’s Day without debt, sir,” she went
on without ceasing to comb the child’s hair. “But so it is--Providence
helps us out. I have a couple of cows. Then my daughter and I do some
gleaning at harvest-time, and in winter we pick up firewood. Then at
night we spin. Ah! we never want to see another winter like this last
one, that is certain! I owe the miller seventy-five francs for flour.
Luckily he is M. Benassis’ miller. M. Benassis, ah! he is a friend to
poor people. He has never asked for his due from anybody, and he will
not begin with us. Besides, our cow has a calf, and that will set us a
bit straighter.”

The four orphans for whom the old woman’s affection represented
all human guardianship had come to an end of their prunes. As their
foster-mother’s attention was taken up by the officer with whom she was
chatting, they seized the opportunity, and banded themselves together in
a compact file, so as to make yet another assault upon the latch of the
door that stood between them and the tempting heap of dried plums. They
advanced to the attack, not like French soldiers, but as stealthily as
Germans, impelled by frank animal greediness.

“Oh! you little rogues! Do you want to finish them up?”

The old woman rose, caught the strongest of the four, administered a
gentle slap on the back, and flung him out of the house. Not a tear did
he shed, but the others remained breathless with astonishment.

“They give you a lot of trouble----”

“Oh! no, sir, but they can smell the prunes, the little dears. If I were
to leave them alone here for a moment, they would stuff themselves with
them.”

“You are very fond of them?”

The old woman raised her head at this, and looked at him with gentle
malice in her eyes.

“Fond of them!” she said. “I have had to part with three of them
already. I only have the care of them until they are six years old,” she
went on with a sigh.

“But where are your own children?”

“I have lost them.”

“How old are you?” Genestas asked, to efface the impression left by his
last question.

“I am thirty-eight years old, sir. It will be two years come next St.
John’s Day since my husband died.”

She finished dressing the poor sickly mite, who seemed to thank her by a
loving look in his faded eyes.

“What a life of toil and self-denial!” thought the cavalry officer.

Beneath a roof worthy of the stable wherein Jesus Christ was born,
the hardest duties of motherhood were fulfilled cheerfully and without
consciousness of merit. What hearts were these that lay so deeply buried
in neglect and obscurity! What wealth, and what poverty! Soldiers,
better than other men, can appreciate the element of grandeur to be
found in heroism in sabots, in the Evangel clad in rags. The Book may be
found elsewhere, adorned, embellished, tricked out in silk and satin
and brocade, but here, of a surety, dwelt the spirit of the Book. It was
impossible to doubt that Heaven had some holy purpose underlying it all,
at the sight of the woman who had taken a mother’s lot upon herself, as
Jesus Christ had taken the form of a man, who gleaned and suffered and
ran into debt for her little waifs; a woman who defrauded herself in
her reckonings, and would not own that she was ruining herself that she
might be a Mother. One was constrained to admit, at the sight of her,
that the good upon earth have something in common with the angels in
heaven; Commandant Genestas shook his head as he looked at her.

“Is M. Benassis a clever doctor?” he asked at last.

“I do not know, sir, but he cures poor people for nothing.”

“It seems to me that this is a man and no mistake!” he went on, speaking
to himself.

“Oh! yes, sir, and a good man too! There is scarcely any one hereabouts
that does not put his name in their prayers, morning and night!”

“That is for you, mother,” said the soldier, as he gave her several
coins, “and that is for the children,” he went on, as he added another
crown. “Is M. Benassis’ house still a long way off?” he asked, when he
had mounted his horse.

“Oh! no, sir, a bare league at most.”

The commandant set out, fully persuaded that two leagues remained ahead
of him. Yet after all he soon caught a glimpse through the trees of the
little town’s first cluster of houses, and then of all the roofs that
crowded about a conical steeple, whose slates were secured to the angles
of the wooden framework by sheets of tin that glittered in the sun. This
sort of roof, which has a peculiar appearance, denotes the nearness of
the borders of Savoy, where it is very common. The valley is wide at
this particular point, and a fair number of houses pleasantly situated,
either in the little plain or along the side of the mountain stream,
lend human interest to the well-tilled spot, a stronghold with no
apparent outlet among the mountains that surround it.

It was noon when Genestas reined in his horse beneath an avenue of
elm-trees half-way up the hillside, and only a few paces from the town,
to ask the group of children who stood before him for M. Benassis’
house. At first the children looked at each other, then they scrutinized
the stranger with the expression that they usually wear when they set
eyes upon anything for the first time; a different curiosity and
a different thought in every little face. Then the boldest and the
merriest of the band, a little bright-eyed urchin, with bare, muddy
feet, repeated his words over again, in child fashion.

“M. Benassis’ house, sir?” adding, “I will show you the way there.”

He walked along in front of the horse, prompted quite as much by a wish
to gain a kind of importance by being in the stranger’s company, as by
a child’s love of being useful, or the imperative craving to be doing
something, that possesses mind and body at his age. The officer followed
him for the entire length of the principal street of the country town.
The way was paved with cobblestones, and wound in and out among the
houses, which their owners had erected along its course in the most
arbitrary fashion. In one place a bake-house had been built out into
the middle of the roadway; in another a gable protruded, partially
obstructing the passage, and yet farther on a mountain stream flowed
across it in a runnel. Genestas noticed a fair number of roofs of tarred
shingle, but yet more of them were thatched; a few were tiled, and
some seven or eight (belonging no doubt to the cure, the justice of the
peace, and some of the wealthier townsmen) were covered with slates.
There was a total absence of regard for appearances befitting a village
at the end of the world, which had nothing beyond it, and no connection
with any other place. The people who lived in it seemed to belong to one
family that dwelt beyond the limits of the bustling world, with which
the collector of taxes and a few ties of the very slenderest alone
served to connect them.

When Genestas had gone a step or two farther, he saw on the mountain
side a broad road that rose above the village. Clearly there must be an
old town and a new town; and, indeed, when the commandant reached a
spot where he could slacken the pace of his horse, he could easily see
between the houses some well-built dwellings whose new roofs brightened
the old-fashioned village. An avenue of trees rose above these new
houses, and from among them came the confused sounds of several
industries. He heard the songs peculiar to busy toilers, a murmur of
many workshops, the rasping of files, and the sound of falling hammers.
He saw the thin lines of smoke from the chimneys of each household, and
the more copious outpourings from the forges of the van-builder, the
blacksmith, and the farrier. At length, at the very end of the village
towards which his guide was taking him, Genestas beheld scattered farms
and well-tilled fields and plantations of trees in thorough order. It
might have been a little corner of Brie, so hidden away in a great fold
of the land, that at first sight its existence would not be suspected
between the little town and the mountains that closed the country round.

Presently the child stopped.

“There is the door of _his_ house,” he remarked.

The officer dismounted and passed his arm through the bridle. Then,
thinking that the laborer is worthy of his hire, he drew a few sous
from his waistcoat pocket, and held them out to the child, who looked
astonished at this, opened his eyes very wide, and stayed on, without
thanking him, to watch what the stranger would do next.

“Civilization has not made much headway hereabouts,” thought Genestas;
“the religion of work is in full force, and begging has not yet come
thus far.”

His guide, more from curiosity than from any interested motive, propped
himself against the wall that rose to the height of a man’s elbow. Upon
this wall, which enclosed the yard belonging to the house, there ran a
black wooden railing on either side of the square pillars of the gates.
The lower part of the gates themselves was of solid wood that had been
painted gray at some period in the past; the upper part consisted of
a grating of yellowish spear-shaped bars. These decorations, which had
lost all their color, gradually rose on either half of the gates till
they reached the centre where they met; their spikes forming, when
both leaves were shut, an outline similar to that of a pine-cone. The
worm-eaten gates themselves, with their patches of velvet lichen, were
almost destroyed by the alternate action of sun and rain. A few aloe
plants and some chance-sown pellitory grew on the tops of the square
pillars of the gates, which all but concealed the stems of a couple of
thornless acacias that raised their tufted spikes, like a pair of green
powder-puffs, in the yard.

The condition of the gateway revealed a certain carelessness of its
owner which did not seem to suit the officer’s turn of mind. He knitted
his brows like a man who is obliged to relinquish some illusion. We
usually judge others by our own standard; and although we indulgently
forgive our own shortcomings in them, we condemn them harshly for the
lack of our special virtues. If the commandant had expected M. Benassis
to be a methodical or practical man, there were unmistakable indications
of absolute indifference as to his material concerns in the state of
the gates of his house. A soldier possessed by Genestas’ passion for
domestic economy could not help at once drawing inferences as to the
life and character of its owner from the gateway before him; and this,
in spite of his habits of circumspection, he in nowise failed to do. The
gates were left ajar, moreover--another piece of carelessness!

Encouraged by this countrified trust in all comers, the officer entered
the yard without ceremony, and tethered his horse to the bars of the
gate. While he was knotting the bridle, a neighing sound from the stable
caused both horse and rider to turn their eyes involuntarily in that
direction. The door opened, and an old servant put out his head. He wore
a red woolen bonnet, exactly like the Phrygian cap in which Liberty is
tricked out, a piece of head-gear in common use in this country.

As there was room for several horses, this worthy individual, after
inquiring whether Genestas had come to see M. Benassis, offered the
hospitality of the stable to the newly-arrived steed, a very fine
animal, at which he looked with an expression of admiring affection. The
commandant followed his horse to see how things were to go with it. The
stable was clean, there was plenty of litter, and there was the same
peculiar air of sleek content about M. Benassis’ pair of horses that
distinguished the cure’s horse from all the rest of his tribe. A
maid-servant from within the house came out upon the flight of steps and
waited. She appeared to be the proper authority to whom the stranger’s
inquiries were to be addressed, although the stableman had already told
him that M. Benassis was not at home.

“The master has gone to the flour-mill,” said he. “If you like to
overtake him, you have only to go along the path that leads to the
meadow; and the mill is at the end of it.”

Genestas preferred seeing the country to waiting about indefinitely
for Benassis’ return, so he set out along the way that led to the
flour-mill. When he had gone beyond the irregular line traced by the
town upon the hillside, he came in sight of the mill and the valley, and
of one of the loveliest landscapes that he had ever seen.

The mountains bar the course of the river, which forms a little lake at
their feet, and raise their crests above it, tier on tier. Their many
valleys are revealed by the changing hues of the light, or by the more
or less clear outlines of the mountain ridges fledged with their dark
forests of pines. The mill had not long been built. It stood just where
the mountain stream fell into the little lake. There was all the charm
about it peculiar to a lonely house surrounded by water and hidden away
behind the heads of a few trees that love to grow by the water-side. On
the farther bank of the river, at the foot of a mountain, with a faint
red glow of sunset upon its highest crest, Genestas caught a glimpse
of a dozen deserted cottages. All the windows and doors had been taken
away, and sufficiently large holes were conspicuous in the dilapidated
roofs, but the surrounding land was laid out in fields that were highly
cultivated, and the old garden spaces had been turned into meadows,
watered by a system of irrigation as artfully contrived as that in use
in Limousin. Unconsciously the commandant paused to look at the ruins of
the village before him.

How is it that men can never behold any ruins, even of the humblest
kind, without feeling deeply stirred? Doubtless it is because they seem
to be a typical representation of evil fortune whose weight is felt so
differently by different natures. The thought of death is called up by
a churchyard, but a deserted village puts us in mind of the sorrows of
life; death is but one misfortune always foreseen, but the sorrows of
life are infinite. Does not the thought of the infinite underlie all
great melancholy?

The officer reached the stony path by the mill-pond before he could
hit upon an explanation of this deserted village. The miller’s lad was
sitting on some sacks of corn near the door of the house. Genestas asked
for M. Benassis.

“M. Benassis went over there,” said the miller, pointing out one of the
ruined cottages.

“Has the village been burned down?” asked the commandant.

“No, sir.”

“Then how did it come to be in this state?” inquired Genestas.

“Ah! how?” the miller answered, as he shrugged his shoulders and went
indoors; “M. Benassis will tell you that.”

The officer went over a rough sort of bridge built up of boulders taken
from the torrent bed, and soon reached the house that had been pointed
out to him. The thatched roof of the dwelling was still entire; it was
covered with moss indeed, but there were no holes in it, and the door
and its fastenings seemed to be in good repair. Genestas saw a fire on
the hearth as he entered, an old woman kneeling in the chimney-corner
before a sick man seated in a chair, and another man, who was standing
with his face turned toward the fireplace. The house consisted of a
single room, which was lighted by a wretched window covered with
linen cloth. The floor was of beaten earth; the chair, a table, and a
truckle-bed comprised the whole of the furniture. The commandant had
never seen anything so poor and bare, not even in Russia, where the
moujik’s huts are like the dens of wild beasts. Nothing within it
spoke of ordinary life; there were not even the simplest appliances
for cooking food of the commonest description. It might have been
a dog-kennel without a drinking-pan. But for the truckle-bed, a
smock-frock hanging from a nail, and some sabots filled with straw,
which composed the invalid’s entire wardrobe, this cottage would have
looked as empty as the others. The aged peasant woman upon her knees
was devoting all her attention to keeping the sufferer’s feet in a tub
filled with a brown liquid. Hearing a footstep and the clank of spurs,
which sounded strangely in ears accustomed to the plodding pace of
country folk, the man turned to Genestas. A sort of surprise, in which
the old woman shared was visible in his face.

“There is no need to ask if you are M. Benassis,” said the soldier. “You
will pardon me, sir, if, as a stranger impatient to see you, I have come
to seek you on your field of battle, instead of awaiting you at your
house. Pray do not disturb yourself; go on with what you are doing. When
it is over, I will tell you the purpose of my visit.”

Genestas half seated himself upon the edge of the table, and remained
silent. The firelight shone more brightly in the room than the faint
rays of the sun, for the mountain crests intercepted them, so that they
seldom reached this corner of the valley. A few branches of resinous
pinewood made a bright blaze, and it was by the light of this fire
that the soldier saw the face of the man towards whom he was drawn by
a secret motive, by a wish to seek him out, to study and to know him
thoroughly well. M. Benassis, the local doctor, heard Genestas with
indifference, and with folded arms he returned his bow, and went back to
his patient, quite unaware that he was being subjected to a scrutiny as
earnest as that which the soldier turned upon him.

Benassis was a man of ordinary height, broad-shouldered and
deep-chested. A capacious green overcoat, buttoned up to the chin,
prevented the officer from observing any characteristic details of his
personal appearance; but his dark and motionless figure served as a
strong relief to his face, which caught the bright light of the blazing
fire. The face was not unlike that of a satyr; there was the same
slightly protruding forehead, full, in this case, of prominences,
all more or less denoting character; the same turned-up nose, with a
sprightly cleavage at the tip; the same high cheek-bones. The lines of
the mouth were crooked; the lips, thick and red. The chin turned sharply
upwards. There was an alert, animated look in the brown eyes, to which
their pearly whites gave great brightness, and which expressed passions
now subdued. His iron-gray hair, the deep wrinkles in his face,
the bushy eyebrows that had grown white already, the veins on his
protuberant nose, the tanned face covered with red blotches, everything
about him, in short, indicated a man of fifty and the hard work of his
profession. The officer could come to no conclusion as to the capacity
of the head, which was covered by a close cap; but hidden though it was,
it seemed to him to be one of the square-shaped kind that gave rise
to the expression “square-headed.” Genestas was accustomed to read the
indications that mark the features of men destined to do great things,
since he had been brought into close relations with the energetic
natures sought out by Napoleon; so he suspected that there must be some
mystery in this life of obscurity, and said to himself as he looked at
the remarkable face before him:

“How comes it that he is still a country doctor?”

When he had made a careful study of this countenance, that, in spite of
its resemblance to other human faces, revealed an inner life nowise
in harmony with a commonplace exterior, he could not help sharing
the doctor’s interest in his patient; and the sight of that patient
completely changed the current of his thoughts.

Much as the old cavalry officer had seen in the course of his soldier’s
career, he felt a thrill of surprise and horror at the sight of a human
face which could never have been lighted up with thought--a livid face
in which a look of dumb suffering showed so plainly--the same look that
is sometimes worn by a child too young to speak, and too weak to cry any
longer; in short, it was the wholly animal face of an old dying cretin.
The cretin was the one variety of the human species with which the
commandant had not yet come in contact. At the sight of the deep,
circular folds of skin on the forehead, the sodden, fish-like eyes, and
the head, with its short, coarse, scantily-growing hair--a head
utterly divested of all the faculties of the senses--who would not have
experienced, as Genestas did, an instinctive feeling of repulsion for a
being that had neither the physical beauty of an animal nor the mental
endowments of man, who was possessed of neither instinct nor reason, and
who had never heard nor spoken any kind of articulate speech? It seemed
difficult to expend any regrets over the poor wretch now visibly drawing
towards the very end of an existence which had not been life in any
sense of the word; yet the old woman watched him with touching anxiety,
and was rubbing his legs where the hot water did not reach them with as
much tenderness as if he had been her husband. Benassis himself, after
a close scrutiny of the dull eyes and corpse-like face, gently took the
cretin’s hand and felt his pulse.

“The bath is doing no good,” he said, shaking his head; “let us put him
to bed again.”

He lifted the inert mass himself, and carried him across to the
truckle-bed, from whence, no doubt, he had just taken him. Carefully he
laid him at full length, and straightened the limbs that were growing
cold already, putting the head and hand in position, with all the heed
that a mother could bestow upon her child.

“It is all over, death is very near,” added Benassis, who remained
standing by the bedside.

The old woman gazed at the dying form, with her hands on her hips. A few
tears stole down her cheeks. Genestas remained silent. He was unable to
explain to himself how it was that the death of a being that concerned
him so little should affect him so much. Unconsciously he shared the
feeling of boundless pity that these hapless creatures excite among the
dwellers in the sunless valleys wherein Nature has placed them. This
sentiment has degenerated into a kind of religious superstition in
families to which cretins belong; but does it not spring from the most
beautiful of Christian virtues--from charity, and from a belief in a
reward hereafter, that most effectual support of our social system,
and the one thought that enables us to endure our miseries? The hope of
inheriting eternal bliss helps the relations of these unhappy creatures
and all others round about them to exert on a large scale, and with
sublime devotion, a mother’s ceaseless protecting care over an apathetic
creature who does not understand it in the first instance, and who in
a little while forgets it all. Wonderful power of religion! that has
brought a blind beneficence to the aid of an equally blind misery.
Wherever cretins exist, there is a popular belief that the presence
of one of these creatures brings luck to a family--a superstition that
serves to sweeten lives which, in the midst of a town population,
would be condemned by a mistaken philanthropy to submit to the harsh
discipline of an asylum. In the higher end of the valley of Isere, where
cretins are very numerous, they lead an out-of-door life with the cattle
which they are taught to herd. There, at any rate, they are at large,
and receive the reverence due to misfortune.

A moment later the village bell clinked at slow regular intervals, to
acquaint the flock with the death of one of their number. In the sound
that reached the cottage but faintly across the intervening space, there
was a thought of religion which seemed to fill it with a melancholy
peace. The tread of many feet echoed up the road, giving notice of
an approaching crowd of people--a crowd that uttered not a word. Then
suddenly the chanting of the Church broke the stillness, calling up the
confused thoughts that take possession of the most sceptical minds, and
compel them to yield to the influence of the touching harmonies of the
human voice. The Church was coming to the aid of a creature that knew
her not. The cure appeared, preceded by a choir-boy, who bore the
crucifix, and followed by the sacristan carrying the vase of holy water,
and by some fifty women, old men, and children, who had all come to add
their prayers to those of the Church. The doctor and the soldier looked
at each other, and silently withdrew to a corner to make room for the
kneeling crowd within and without the cottage. During the consoling
ceremony of the Viaticum, celebrated for one who had never sinned, but
to whom the Church on earth was bidding a last farewell, there were
signs of real sorrow on most of the rough faces of the gathering, and
tears flowed over the rugged cheeks that sun and wind and labor in the
fields had tanned and wrinkled. The sentiment of voluntary kinship was
easy to explain. There was not one in the place who had not pitied the
unhappy creature, not one who would not have given him his daily bread.
Had he not met with a father’s care from every child, and found a mother
in the merriest little girl?

“He is dead!” said the cure.

The words struck his hearers with the most unfeigned dismay. The tall
candles were lighted, and several people undertook to watch with the
dead that night. Benassis and the soldier went out. A group of peasants
in the doorway stopped the doctor to say:

“Ah! if you have not saved his life, sir, it was doubtless because God
wished to take him to Himself.”

“I did my best, children,” the doctor answered.

When they had come a few paces from the deserted village, whose last
inhabitant had just died, the doctor spoke to Genestas.

“You would not believe, sir, what real solace is contained for me in
what those peasants have just said. Ten years ago I was very nearly
stoned to death in this village. It is empty to-day, but thirty families
lived in it then.”

Genestas’ face and gesture so plainly expressed an inquiry, that,
as they went along, the doctor told him the story promised by this
beginning.

“When I first settled here, sir, I found a dozen cretins in this part
of the canton,” and the doctor turned round to point out the ruined
cottages for the officer’s benefit. “All the favorable conditions for
spreading the hideous disease are there; the air is stagnant, the hamlet
lies in the valley bottom, close beside a torrent supplied with water
by the melted snows, and the sunlight only falls on the mountain-top,
so that the valley itself gets no good of the sun. Marriages among these
unfortunate creatures are not forbidden by law, and in this district
they are protected by superstitious notions, of whose power I had no
conception--superstitions which I blamed at first, and afterwards came
to admire. So cretinism was in a fair way to spread all over the valley
from this spot. Was it not doing the country a great service to put
a stop to this mental and physical contagion? But imperatively as the
salutary changes were required, they might cost the life of any man who
endeavored to bring them about. Here, as in other social spheres, if
any good is to be done, we come into collision not merely with
vested interests, but with something far more dangerous to meddle
with--religious ideas crystallized into superstitions, the most
permanent form taken by human thought. I feared nothing.

“In the first place, I sought for the position of mayor in the canton,
and in this I succeeded. Then, after obtaining a verbal sanction from
the prefect, and by paying down the money, I had several of these
unfortunate creatures transported over to Aiguebelle, in Savoy, by
night. There are a great many of them there, and they were certain to
be very kindly treated. When this act of humanity came to be known, the
whole countryside looked upon me as a monster. The cure preached against
me. In spite of all the pains I took to explain to all the shrewder
heads of the little place the immense importance of being rid of the
idiots, and in spite of the fact that I gave my services gratuitously to
the sick people of the district, a shot was fired at me from the corner
of a wood.

“I went to the Bishop of Grenoble and asked him to change the cure.
Monseigneur was good enough to allow me to choose a priest who would
share in my labors, and it was my happy fortune to meet with one of
those rare natures that seemed to have dropped down from heaven. Then
I went on with my enterprise. After preparing people’s minds, I made
another transportation by night, and six more cretins were taken away.
In this second attempt I had the support of several people to whom I had
rendered some service, and I was backed by the members of the Communal
Council, for I had appealed to their parsimonious instincts, showing
them how much it cost to support the poor wretches, and pointing out how
largely they might gain by converting their plots of ground (to which
the idiots had no proper title) into allotments which were needed in the
township.

“All the rich were on my side; but the poor, the old women, the
children, and a few pig-headed people were violently opposed to me.
Unluckily it so fell out that my last removal had not been completely
carried out. The cretin whom you have just seen, not having returned to
his house, had not been taken away, so that the next morning he was the
sole remaining example of his species in the village. There were several
families still living there; but though they were little better than
idiots, they were, at any rate, free from the taint of cretinism. I
determined to go through with my work, and came officially in open day
to take the luckless creature from his dwelling. I had no sooner left
my house than my intention got abroad. The cretin’s friends were there
before me, and in front of his hovel I found a crowd of women and
children and old people, who hailed my arrival with insults accompanied
by a shower of stones.

“In the midst of the uproar I should perhaps have fallen a victim to the
frenzy that possesses a crowd excited by its own outcries and stirred up
by one common feeling, but the cretin saved my life! The poor creature
came out of his hut, and raised the clucking sound of his voice. He
seemed to be an absolute ruler over the fanatical mob, for the sight
of him put a sudden stop to the clamor. It occurred to me that I might
arrange a compromise, and thanks to the quiet so opportunely restored, I
was able to propose and explain it. Of course, those who approved of my
schemes would not dare to second me in this emergency, their support
was sure to be of a purely passive kind, while these superstitious folk
would exert the most active vigilance to keep their last idol among
them; it was impossible, it seemed to me, to take him away from them.
So I promised to leave the cretin in peace in his dwelling, with
the understanding that he should live quite by himself, and that the
remaining families in the village should cross the stream and come to
live in the town, in some new houses which I myself undertook to build,
adding to each house a piece of ground for which the Commune was to
repay me later on.

“Well, my dear sir, it took me fully six months to overcome their
objection to this bargain, however much it may have been to the
advantage of the village families. The affection which they have
for their wretched hovels in country districts is something quite
unexplainable. No matter how unwholesome his hovel may be, a peasant
clings far more to it than a banker does to his mansion. The reason of
it? That I do not know. Perhaps thoughts and feelings are strongest
in those who have but few of them, simply because they have but few.
Perhaps material things count for much in the lives of those who live
so little in thought; certain it is that the less they have, the dearer
their possessions are to them. Perhaps, too, it is with the peasant
as with the prisoner--he does not squander the powers of his soul, he
centres them all upon a single idea, and this is how his feelings come
to be so exceedingly strong. Pardon these reflections on the part of a
man who seldom exchanges ideas with any one. But, indeed, you must
not suppose, sir, that I am much taken up with these far-fetched
considerations. We all have to be active and practical here.

“Alas! the fewer ideas these poor folk have in their heads, the harder
it is to make them see where their real interests lie. There was nothing
for it but to give my whole attention to every trifling detail of my
enterprise. One and all made me the same answer, one of those sayings,
filled with homely sense, to which there is no possible reply, ‘But your
houses are not yet built, sir!’ they used to say. ‘Very good,’ said I,
‘promise me that as soon as they are finished you will come and live in
them.’

“Luckily, sir, I obtained a decision to the effect that the whole of
the mountain side above the now deserted village was the property of the
township. The sum of money brought in by the woods on the higher slopes
paid for the building of the new houses and for the land on which they
stood. They were built forthwith; and when once one of my refractory
families was fairly settled in, the rest of them were not slow to
follow. The benefits of the change were so evident that even the most
bigoted believer in the village, which you might call soulless as well
as sunless, could not but appreciate them. The final decision in this
matter, which gave some property to the Commune, in the possession of
which we were confirmed by the Council of State, made me a person of
great importance in the canton. But what a lot of worry there was over
it!” the doctor remarked, stopping short, and raising a hand which he
let fall again--a gesture that spoke volumes. “No one knows, as I do,
the distance between the town and the Prefecture--whence nothing comes
out--and from the Prefecture to the Council of State--where nothing can
be got in.

“Well, after all,” he resumed, “peace be to the powers of this world!
They yielded to my importunities, and that is saying a great deal. If
you only knew the good that came of a carelessly scrawled signature!
Why, sir, two years after I had taken these momentous trifles in hand,
and had carried the matter through to the end, every poor family in the
Commune had two cows at least, which they pastured on the mountain side,
where (without waiting this time for an authorization from the Council
of State) I had established a system of irrigation by means of cross
trenches, like those in Switzerland, Auvergne, and Limousin. Much to
their astonishment, the townspeople saw some capital meadows springing
up under their eyes, and thanks to the improvement in the pasturage,
the yield of milk was very much larger. The results of this triumph
were great indeed. Every one followed the example set by my system of
irrigation; cattle were multiplied; the area of meadow land and every
kind of out-turn increased. I had nothing to fear after that. I could
continue my efforts to improve this, as yet, untilled corner of the
earth; and to civilize those who dwelt in it, whose minds had hitherto
lain dormant.

“Well, sir, folk like us, who live out of the world, are very talkative.
If you ask us a question, there is no knowing where the answer will come
to an end; but to cut it short--there were about seven hundred souls in
the valley when I came to it, and now the population numbers some two
thousand. I had gained the good opinion of every one in that matter of
the last cretin; and when I had constantly shown that I could rule both
mildly and firmly, I became a local oracle. I did everything that I
could to win their confidence; I did not ask for it, nor did I appear to
seek it; but I tried to inspire every one with the deepest respect
for my character, by the scrupulous way in which I always fulfilled my
engagements, even when they were of the most trifling kind. When I had
pledged myself to care for the poor creature whose death you have just
witnessed, I looked after him much more effectually than any of his
previous guardians had done. He has been fed and cared for as the
adopted child of the Commune. After a time the dwellers in the valley
ended by understanding the service which I had done them in spite of
themselves, but for all that, they still cherish some traces of that old
superstition of theirs. Far be it from me to blame them for it; has not
their cult of the cretin often furnished me with an argument when I have
tried to induce those who had possession of their faculties to help
the unfortunate? But here we are,” said Benassis, when after a moment’s
pause he saw the roof of his own house.

Far from expecting the slightest expression of praise or of thanks from
his listener, it appeared from his way of telling the story of this
episode in his administrative career, that he had been moved by an
unconscious desire to pour out the thoughts that filled his mind, after
the manner of folk that live very retired lives.

“I have taken the liberty of putting my horse in your stable, sir,” said
the commandant, “for which in your goodness you will perhaps pardon me
when you learn the object of my journey hither.”

“Ah! yes, what is it?” asked Benassis, appearing to shake off his
preoccupied mood, and to recollect that his companion was a stranger
to him. The frankness and unreserve of his nature had led him to accept
Genestas as an acquaintance.

“I have heard of the almost miraculous recovery of M. Gravier of
Grenoble, whom you received into your house,” was the soldier’s answer.
“I have come to you, hoping that you will give a like attention to my
case, although I have not a similar claim to your benevolence; and yet,
I am possibly not undeserving of it. I am an old soldier, and wounds
of long standing give me no peace. It will take you at least a week to
study my condition, for the pain only comes back at intervals, and----”

“Very good, sir,” Benassis broke in; “M. Gravier’s room is in readiness.
Come in.”

They went into the house, the doctor flinging open the door with an
eagerness that Genestas attributed to his pleasure at receiving a
boarder.

“Jacquotte!” Benassis called out. “This gentleman will dine with us.”

“But would it not be as well for us to settle about the payment?”

“Payment for what?” inquired the doctor.

“For my board. You cannot keep me and my horse as well, without----”

“If you are wealthy, you will repay me amply,” Benassis replied; “and if
you are not, I will take nothing whatever.”

“Nothing whatever seems to me to be too dear,” said Genestas. “But,
rich or poor, will ten francs a day (not including your professional
services) be acceptable to you?”

“Nothing could be less acceptable to me than payment for the pleasure of
entertaining a visitor,” the doctor answered, knitting his brows; “and
as to my advice, you shall have it if I like you, and not unless. Rich
people shall not have my time by paying for it; it belongs exclusively
to the folk here in the valley. I do not care about fame or fortune, and
I look for neither praise or gratitude from my patients. Any money which
you may pay me will go to the druggists in Grenoble, to pay for the
medicine required by the poor of the neighborhood.”

Any one who had heard the words flung out, abruptly, it is true, but
without a trace of bitterness in them, would have said to himself with
Genestas, “Here is a man made of good human clay.”

“Well, then, I will pay you ten francs a day, sir,” the soldier
answered, returning to the charge with wonted pertinacity, “and you will
do as you choose after that. We shall understand each other better, now
that the question is settled,” he added, grasping the doctor’s hand with
eager cordiality. “In spite of my ten francs, you shall see that I am by
no means a Tartar.”

After this passage of arms, in which Benassis showed not the slightest
sign of a wish to appear generous or to pose as a philanthropist, the
supposed invalid entered his doctor’s house. Everything within it was
in keeping with the ruinous state of the gateway, and with the clothing
worn by its owner. There was an utter disregard for everything not
essentially useful, which was visible even in the smallest trifles.
Benassis took Genestas through the kitchen, that being the shortest way
to the dining-room.

Had the kitchen belonged to an inn, it could not have been more
smoke-begrimed; and if there was a sufficiency of cooking pots within
its precincts, this lavish supply was Jacquotte’s doing--Jacquotte who
had formerly been the cure’s housekeeper--Jacquotte who always said
“we,” and who ruled supreme over the doctor’s household. If, for
instance, there was a brightly polished warming-pan above the
mantelshelf, it probably hung there because Jacquotte liked to sleep
warm of a winter night, which led her incidentally to warm her master’s
sheets. He never took a thought about anything; so she was wont to say.

It was on account of a defect, which any one else would have found
intolerable, that Benassis had taken her into his service. Jacquotte had
a mind to rule the house, and a woman who would rule his house was the
very person that the doctor wanted. So Jacquotte bought and sold,
made alterations about the place, set up and took down, arranged and
disarranged everything at her own sweet will; her master had never
raised a murmur. Over the yard, the stable, the man-servant and the
kitchen, in fact, over the whole house and garden and its master,
Jacquotte’s sway was absolute. She looked out fresh linen, saw to the
washing, and laid in provisions without consulting anybody. She decided
everything that went on in the house, and the date when the pigs were to
be killed. She scolded the gardener, decreed the menu at breakfast
and dinner, and went from cellar to garret, and from garret to cellar,
setting everything to rights according to her notions, without a word
of opposition of any sort or description. Benassis had made but two
stipulations--he wished to dine at six o’clock, and that the household
expenses should not exceed a certain fixed sum every month.

A woman whom every one obeys in this way is always singing, so Jacquotte
laughed and warbled on the staircase; she was always humming something
when she was not singing, and singing when she was not humming.
Jacquotte had a natural liking for cleanliness, so she kept the house
neat and clean. If her tastes had been different, it would have been a
sad thing for M. Benassis (so she was wont to say), for the poor man was
so little particular that you might feed him on cabbage for partridges,
and he would not find it out; and if it were not for her, he would very
often wear the same shirt for a week on end. Jacquotte, however, was an
indefatigable folder of linen, a born rubber and polisher of furniture,
and a passionate lover of a perfectly religious and ceremonial
cleanliness of the most scrupulous, the most radiant, and most fragrant
kind. A sworn foe to dust, she swept and scoured and washed without
ceasing.

The condition of the gateway caused her acute distress. On the first day
of every month for the past ten years, she had extorted from her master
a promise that he would replace the gate with a new one, that the walls
of the house should be lime-washed, and that everything should be made
quite straight and proper about the place; but so far, the master had
not kept his word. So it happened that whenever she fell to lamenting
over Benassis’ deeply-rooted carelessness about things, she nearly
always ended solemnly in these words with which all her praises of her
master usually terminated:

“You cannot say that he is a fool, because he works such miracles, as
you may say, in the place; but, all the same, he is a fool at times,
such a fool that you have to do everything for him as if he were a
child.”

Jacquotte loved the house as if it had belonged to her; and when she had
lived in it for twenty-two years, had she not some grounds for deluding
herself on that head? After the cure’s death the house had been for
sale; and Benassis, who had only just come into the country, had bought
it as it stood, with the walls about it and the ground belonging to
it, together with the plate, wine, and furniture, the old sundial,
the poultry, the horse, and the woman-servant. Jacquotte was the very
pattern of a working housekeeper, with her clumsy figure, and her
bodice, always of the same dark brown print with large red spots on it,
which fitted her so tightly that it looked as if the material must
give way if she moved at all. Her colorless face, with its double chin,
looked out from under a round plaited cap, which made her look paler
than she really was. She talked incessantly, and always in a loud
voice--this short, active woman, with the plump, busy hands. Indeed, if
Jacquotte was silent for a moment, and took a corner of her apron so as
to turn it up in a triangle, it meant that a lengthy expostulation was
about to be delivered for the benefit of master or man. Jacquotte was
beyond all doubt the happiest cook in the kingdom; for, that nothing
might be lacking in a measure of felicity as great as may be known in
this world below, her vanity was continually gratified--the townspeople
regarded her as an authority of an indefinite kind, and ranked her
somewhere between the mayor and the park-keeper.

The master of the house found nobody in the kitchen when he entered it.

“Where the devil are they all gone?” he asked. “Pardon me for bringing
you in this way,” he went on, turning to Genestas. “The front entrance
opens into the garden, but I am so little accustomed to receive visitors
that--Jacquotte!” he called in rather peremptory tones.

A woman’s voice answered to the name from the interior of the house. A
moment later Jacquotte, assuming the offensive, called in her turn to
Benassis, who forthwith went into the dining-room.

“Just like you, sir!” she exclaimed; “you never do like anybody else.
You always ask people to dinner without telling me beforehand, and
you think that everything is settled as soon as you have called for
Jacquotte! You are not going to have the gentleman sit in the kitchen,
are you? Is not the salon to be unlocked and a fire to be lighted?
Nicolle is there, and will see after everything. Now take the gentleman
into the garden for a minute; that will amuse him; if he likes to look
at pretty things, show him the arbor of hornbeam trees that the poor
dear old gentleman made. I shall have time then to lay the cloth, and to
get everything ready, the dinner and the salon too.”

“Yes. But, Jacquotte,” Benassis went on, “the gentleman is going to stay
with us. Do not forget to give a look round M. Gravier’s room, and see
about the sheets and things, and----”

“Now you are not going to interfere about the sheets, are you?” asked
Jacquotte. “If he is to sleep here, I know what must be done for him
perfectly well. You have not so much as set foot in M. Gravier’s room
these ten months past. There is nothing to see there, the place is as
clean as a new pin. Then will the gentleman make some stay here?” she
continued in a milder tone.

“Yes.”

“How long will he stay?”

“Faith, I do not know: What does it matter to you?”

“What does it matter to me, sir? Oh! very well, what does it matter
to me? Did any one ever hear the like! And the provisions and all that
and----”

At any other time she would have overwhelmed her master with reproaches
for his breach of trust, but now she followed him into the kitchen
before the torrent of words had come to an end. She had guessed that
there was a prospect of a boarder, and was eager to see Genestas, to
whom she made a very deferential courtesy, while she scanned him from
head to foot. A thoughtful and dejected expression gave a harsh look
to the soldier’s face. In the dialogue between master and servant the
latter had appeared to him in the light of a nonentity; and although he
regretted the fact, this revelation had lessened the high opinion that
he had formed of the man whose persistent efforts to save the district
from the horrors of cretinism had won his admiration.

“I do not like the looks of that fellow at all!” said Jacquotte to
herself.

“If you are not tired, sir,” said the doctor to his supposed patient,
“we will take a turn round the garden before dinner.”

“Willingly,” answered the commandant.

They went through the dining-room, and reached the garden by way of a
sort of vestibule at the foot of the staircase between the salon and
the dining-room. Beyond a great glass door at the farther end of the
vestibule lay a flight of stone steps which adorned the garden side
of the house. The garden itself was divided into four large squares of
equal size by two paths that intersected each other in the form of a
cross, a box edging along their sides. At the farther end there was a
thick, green alley of hornbeam trees, which had been the joy and pride
of the late owner. The soldier seated himself on a worm-eaten bench, and
saw neither the trellis-work nor the espaliers, nor the vegetables of
which Jacquotte took such great care. She followed the traditions of the
epicurean churchman to whom this valuable garden owed its origin; but
Benassis himself regarded it with sufficient indifference.

The commandant turned their talk from the trivial matters which had
occupied them by saying to the doctor:

“How comes it, sir, that the population of the valley has been trebled
in ten years? There were seven hundred souls in it when you came, and
to-day you say that they number more than two thousand.”

“You are the first person who has put that question to me,” the doctor
answered. “Though it has been my aim to develop the capabilities of this
little corner of the earth to the utmost, the constant pressure of a
busy life has not left me time to think over the way in which (like the
mendicant brother) I have made ‘broth from a flint’ on a large scale.
M. Gravier himself, who is one of several who have done a great deal for
us, and to whom I was able to render a service by re-establishing his
health, has never given a thought to the theory, though he has been
everywhere over our mountain sides with me, to see its practical
results.”

There was a moment’s silence, during which Benassis followed his own
thoughts, careless of the keen glance by which his guest friend tried to
fathom him.

“You ask how it came about, my dear sir?” the doctor resumed. “It came
about quite naturally through the working of the social law by which the
need and the means of supplying it are correlated. Herein lies the whole
story. Races who have no wants are always poor. When I first came
to live here in this township, there were about a hundred and thirty
peasant families in it, and some two hundred hearths in the valley.
The local authorities were such as might be expected in the prevailing
wretchedness of the population. The mayor himself could not write, and
the deputy-mayor was a small farmer, who lived beyond the limits of the
Commune. The justice of the peace was a poor devil who had nothing but
his salary, and who was forced to relinquish the registration of births,
marriages, and deaths to his clerk, another hapless wretch who was
scarcely able to understand his duties. The old cure had died at the age
of seventy, and his curate, a quite uneducated man, had just succeeded
to his position. These people comprised all the intelligence of the
district over which they ruled.

“Those who dwelt amidst these lovely natural surroundings groveled in
squalor and lived upon potatoes, milk, butter, and cheese. The only
produce that brought in any money was the cheese, which most of them
carried in small baskets to Grenoble or its outskirts. The richer or
the more energetic among them sowed buckwheat for home consumption;
sometimes they raised a crop of barley or oats, but wheat was unknown.
The only trader in the place was the mayor, who owned a sawmill and
bought up timber at a low price to sell again. In the absence of roads,
his tree trunks had to be transported during the summer season; each log
was dragged along one at a time, and with no small difficulty, by means
of a chain attached to a halter about his horse’s neck, and an iron hook
at the farther end of the chain, which was driven into the wood. Any
one who went to Grenoble, whether on horseback or afoot, was obliged to
follow a track high up on the mountain side, for the valley was quite
impassable. The pretty road between this place and the first village
that you reach as you come into the canton (the way along which you must
have come) was nothing but a slough at all seasons of the year.

“Political events and revolutions had never reached this inaccessible
country--it lay completely beyond the limits of social stir and change.
Napoleon’s name, and his alone, had penetrated hither; he is held in
great veneration, thanks to one or two old soldiers who have returned to
their native homes, and who of evenings tell marvelous tales about his
adventures and his armies for the benefit of these simple folk. Their
coming back is, moreover, a puzzle that no one can explain. Before I
came here, the young men who went into the army all stayed in it for
good. This fact in itself is a sufficient revelation of the wretched
condition of the country. I need not give you a detailed description of
it.

“This, then, was the state of things when I first came to the canton,
which has several contented, well-tilled, and fairly prosperous communes
belonging to it upon the other side of the mountains. I will say nothing
about the hovels in the town; they were neither more nor less than
stables, in which men and animals were indiscriminately huddled
together. As there was no inn in the place, I was obliged to ask the
curate for a bed, he being in possession, for the time being, of this
house, then offered for sale. Putting to him question after question,
I came to have some slight knowledge of the lamentable condition of the
country with the pleasant climate, the fertile soil, and the natural
productiveness that had impressed me so much.

“At that time, sir, I was seeking to shape a future for myself that
should be as little as possible like the troubled life that had left me
weary; and one of those thoughts came into my mind that God gives us at
times, to enable us to take up our burdens and bear them. I resolved to
develop all the resources of this country, just as a tutor develops
the capacities of a child. Do not think too much of my benevolence; the
pressing need that I felt for turning my thoughts into fresh channels
entered too much into my motives. I had determined to give up the
remainder of my life to some difficult task. A lifetime would be
required to bring about the needful changes in a canton that Nature had
made so wealthy, and man so poor; and I was tempted by the practical
difficulties that stood in the way. As soon as I found that I could
secure the cure’s house and plenty of waste land at a small cost, I
solemnly devoted myself to the calling of a country surgeon--the very
last position that a man aspires to take. I determined to become the
friend of the poor, and to expect no reward of any kind from them. Oh! I
did not indulge in any illusions as to the nature of the country people,
nor as to the hindrances that lie in the way of every attempt to bring
about a better state of things among men or their surroundings. I have
never made idyllic pictures of my people; I have taken them at their
just worth--as poor peasants, neither wholly good nor wholly bad, whose
constant toil never allows them to indulge in emotion, though they can
feel acutely at times. Above all things, in fact, I clearly understood
that I should do nothing with them except through an appeal to their
selfish interests, and by schemes for their immediate well-being.
The peasants are one and all the sons of St. Thomas, the doubting
apostle--they always like words to be supported by visible facts.

“Perhaps you will laugh at my first start, sir,” the doctor went on
after a pause. “I began my difficult enterprise by introducing the
manufacture of baskets. The poor folks used to buy the wicker mats
on which they drain their cheeses, and all the baskets needed for the
insignificant trade of the district. I suggested to an intelligent young
fellow that he might take a lease on a good-sized piece of land by the
side of the torrent. Every year the floods deposited a rich alluvial
soil on this spot, where there should be no difficulty in growing
osiers. I reckoned out the quantity of wicker-work of various kinds
required from time to time by the canton, and went over to Grenoble,
where I found a young craftsman, a clever worker, but without any
capital. When I had discovered him, I soon made up my mind to set him
up in business here. I undertook to advance the money for the osiers
required for his work until my osier-farmer should be in a position to
supply him. I induced him to sell his baskets at rather lower prices
than they asked for them in Grenoble, while, at the same time, they were
better made. He entered into my views completely. The osier-beds and
the basket-making were two business speculations whose results were only
appreciated after a lapse of four years. Of course, you know that osiers
must be three years old before they are fit to cut.

“At the commencement of operations, the basket-maker was boarded and
lodged gratuitously. Before very long he married a woman from Saint
Laurent du Pont, who had a little money. Then he had a house built, in
a healthy and very airy situation which I chose, and my advice was
followed as to the internal arrangements. Here was a triumph! I had
created a new industry, and had brought a producer and several workers
into the town. I wonder if you will regard my elations as childish?

“For the first few days after my basket-maker had set up his business,
I never went past his shop but my heart beat somewhat faster. And when
I saw the newly-built house, with the green-painted shutters, the vine
beside the doorway, and the bench and bundles of osiers before it; when
I saw a tidy, neatly-dressed woman within it, nursing a plump, pink
and white baby among the workmen, who were singing merrily and busily
plaiting their wicker-work under the superintendence of a man who but
lately had looked so pinched and pale, but now had an atmosphere of
prosperity about him; when I saw all this, I confess that I could not
forego the pleasure of turning basket-maker for a moment, of going into
the shop to hear how things went with them, and of giving myself up to
a feeling of content that I cannot express in words, for I had all
their happiness as well as my own to make me glad. All my hopes became
centered on this house, where the man dwelt who had been the first to
put a steady faith in me. Like the basket-maker’s wife, clasping her
first nursling to her breast, did not I already fondly cherish the hopes
of the future of this poor district?

“I had to do so many things at once,” he went on, “I came into collision
with other people’s notions, and met with violent opposition, fomented
by the ignorant mayor to whose office I had succeeded, and whose
influence had dwindled away as mine increased. I determined to make him
my deputy and a confederate in my schemes of benevolence. Yes, in the
first place, I endeavored to instil enlightened ideas into the densest
of all heads. Through his self-love and cupidity I gained a hold upon my
man. During six months as we dined together, I took him deeply into my
confidence about my projected improvements. Many people would think this
intimacy one of the most painful inflictions in the course of my task;
but was he not a tool of the most valuable kind? Woe to him who despises
his axe, or flings it carelessly aside! Would it not have been very
inconsistent, moreover, if I, who wished to improve a district, had
shrunk back at the thought of improving one man in it?

“A road was our first and most pressing need in bringing about a better
state of things. If we could obtain permission from the Municipal
Council to make a hard road, so as to put us in communication with the
highway to Grenoble, the deputy-mayor would be the first gainer by it;
for instead of dragging his timber over rough tracks at a great expense,
a good road through the canton would enable him to transport it more
easily, and to engage in a traffic on a large scale, in all kinds of
wood, that would bring in money--not a miserable six hundred francs a
year, but handsome sums which would mean a certain fortune for him some
day. Convinced at last, he became my proselytizer.

“Through the whole of one winter the ex-mayor got into the way of
explaining to our citizens that a good road for wheeled traffic would be
a source of wealth to the whole country round, for it would enable
every one to do a trade with Grenoble; he held forth on this head at the
tavern while drinking with his intimates. When the Municipal Council had
authorized the making of the road, I went to the prefect and obtained
some money from the charitable funds at the disposal of the department,
in order to pay for the hire of carts, for the Commune was unable to
undertake the transport of road metal for lack of wheeled conveyances.
The ignorant began to murmur against me, and to say that I wanted to
bring the days of the corvee back again; this made me anxious to finish
this important work, that they might speedily appreciate its benefits.
With this end in view, every Sunday during my first year of office I
drew the whole population of the township, willing or unwilling, up on
to the mountain, where I myself had traced out on a hard bottom the road
between our village and the highway to Grenoble. Materials for making it
were fortunately to be had in plenty along the site.

“The tedious enterprise called for a great deal of patience on my part.
Some who were ignorant of the law would refuse at times to give their
contribution of labor; others again, who had not bread to eat, really
could not afford to lose a day. Corn had to be distributed among these
last, and the others must be soothed with friendly words. Yet by the
time we had finished two-thirds of the road, which in all is about
two leagues in length, the people had so thoroughly recognized its
advantages that the remaining third was accomplished with a spirit that
surprised me. I added to the future wealth of the Commune by planting
a double row of poplars along the ditch on either side of the way. The
trees are already almost worth a fortune, and they make our road
look like a king’s highway. It is almost always dry, by reason of its
position, and it was so well made that the annual cost of maintaining it
is a bare two hundred francs. I must show it to you, for you cannot
have seen it; you must have come by the picturesque way along the valley
bottom, a road which the people decided to make for themselves three
years later, so as to connect the various farms that were made there
at that time. In three years ideas had rooted themselves in the common
sense of this township, hitherto so lacking in intelligence that a
passing traveler would perhaps have thought it hopeless to attempt to
instil them. But to continue.

“The establishment of the basket-maker was an example set before these
poverty-stricken folk that they might profit by it. And if the road was
to be a direct cause of the future wealth of the canton, all the primary
forms of industry must be stimulated, or these two germs of a better
state of things would come to nothing. My own work went forward by slow
degrees, as I helped my osier farmer and wicker-worker and saw to the
making of the road.

“I had two horses, and the timber merchant, the deputy-mayor, had three.
He could only have them shod whenever he went over to Grenoble, so I
induced a farrier to take up his abode here, and undertook to find him
plenty of work. On the same day I met with a discharged soldier, who
had nothing but his pension of a hundred francs, and was sufficiently
perplexed about his future. He could read and write, so I engaged him
as secretary to the mayor; as it happened, I was lucky enough to find a
wife for him, and his dreams of happiness were fulfilled.

“Both of these new families needed houses, as well as the basket-maker
and twenty-two others from the cretin village, soon afterwards twelve
more households were established in the place. The workers in each of
these families were at once producers and consumers. They were masons,
carpenters, joiners, slaters, blacksmiths, and glaziers; and there was
work enough to last them for a long time, for had they not their own
houses to build when they had finished those for other people? Seventy,
in fact, were build in the Commune during my second year of office. One
form of production demands another. The additions to the population
of the township had created fresh wants, hitherto unknown among these
dwellers in poverty. The wants gave rise to industries, and industries
to trade, and the gains of trade raised the standard of comfort, which
in its turn gave them practical ideas.

“The various workmen wished to buy their bread ready baked, so we came
to have a baker. Buckwheat could no longer be the food of a population
which, awakened from its lethargy, had become essentially active. They
lived on buckwheat when I first came among them, and I wished to effect
a change to rye, or a mixture of rye and wheat in the first instance,
and finally to see a loaf of white bread even in the poorest household.
Intellectual progress, to my thinking, was entirely dependent on a
general improvement in the conditions of life. The presence of a butcher
in the district says as much for its intelligence as for its wealth. The
worker feeds himself, and a man who feeds himself thinks. I had made a
very careful study of the soil, for I foresaw a time when it would be
necessary to grow wheat. I was sure of launching the place in a very
prosperous agricultural career, and of doubling the population, when
once it had begun to work. And now the time had come.

“M. Gravier, of Grenoble, owned a great deal of land in the commune,
which brought him in no rent, but which might be turned into
corn-growing land. He is the head of a department in the Prefecture, as
you know. It was a kindness for his own countryside quite as much as my
earnest entreaties that won him over. He had very benevolently yielded
to my importunities on former occasions, and I succeeded in making it
clear to him that in so doing he had wrought unconsciously for his own
benefit. After several days spent in pleadings, consultation, and talk,
the matter was thrashed out. I undertook to guarantee him against
all risks in the undertaking, from which his wife, a woman of no
imagination, sought to frighten him. He agreed to build four farmhouses
with a hundred acres of land attached to each, and promised to advance
the sums required to pay for clearing the ground, for seeds, ploughing
gear, and cattle, and for making occupation roads.

“I myself also started two farms, quite as much for the sake of bringing
my waste land into cultivation as with a view to giving an object-lesson
in the use of modern methods in agriculture. In six weeks’ time the
population of the town increased to three hundred people. Homes for
several families must be built on the six farms; there was a vast
quantity of land to be broken up; the work called for laborers.
Wheelwrights, drainmakers, journeymen, and laborers of all kinds flocked
in. The road to Grenoble was covered with carts that came and went. All
the countryside was astir. The circulation of money had made every one
anxious to earn it, apathy had ceased, the place had awakened.

“The story of M. Gravier, one of those who did so much for this canton,
can be concluded in a few words. In spite of cautious misgivings, not
unnatural in a man occupying an official position in a provincial
town, he advanced more than forty thousand francs, on the faith of my
promises, without knowing whether he should ever see them back again.
To-day every one of his farms is let for a thousand francs. His tenants
have thriven so well that each of them owns at least a hundred acres,
three hundred sheep, twenty cows, ten oxen, and five horses, and employs
more than twenty persons.

“But to resume. Our farms were ready by the end of the fourth year. Our
wheat harvest seemed miraculous to the people in the district, heavy as
the first crop off the land ought to be. How often during that year
I trembled for the success of my work! Rain or drought might spoil
everything by diminishing the belief in me that was already felt. When
we began to grow wheat, it necessitated the mill that you have seen,
which brings me in about five hundred francs a year. So the peasants say
that ‘there is luck about me’ (that is the way they put it), and believe
in me as they believe in their relics. These new undertakings--the
farms, the mill, the plantations, and the roads--have given employment
to all the various kinds of workers whom I had called in. Although the
buildings fully represent the value of the sixty thousand francs
of capital, which we sunk in the district, the outlay was more
than returned to us by the profits on the sales which the consumers
occasioned. I never ceased my efforts to put vigor into this industrial
life which was just beginning. A nurseryman took my advice and came
to settle in the place, and I preached wholesome doctrine to the poor
concerning the planting of fruit trees, in order that some day they
should obtain a monopoly of the sale of fruit in Grenoble.

“‘You take your cheeses there as it is,’ I used to tell them, ‘why not
take poultry, eggs, vegetables, game, hay and straw, and so forth?’ All
my counsels were a source of fortune; it was a question of who should
follow them first. A number of little businesses were started; they went
on at first but slowly, but from day to day their progress became more
rapid; and now sixty carts full of the various products of the district
set out every Monday for Grenoble, and there is more buckwheat grown for
poultry food than they used to sow for human consumption. The trade in
timber grew to be so considerable that it was subdivided, and since
the fourth year of our industrial era, we have had dealers in firewood,
squared timber, planks, bark, and later on, in charcoal. In the end four
new sawmills were set up, to turn out the planks and beams of timber.

“When the ex-mayor had acquired a few business notions, he felt the
necessity of learning to read and write. He compared the prices that
were asked for wood in various neighborhoods, and found such differences
in his favor, that he secured new customers in one place after another,
and now a third of the trade in the department passes through his
hands. There has been such a sudden increase in our traffic that we find
constant work for three wagon-builders and two harness-makers, each of
them employing three hands at least. Lastly, the quantity of ironware
that we use is so large that an agricultural implement and tool-maker
has removed into the town, and is very well satisfied with the result.

“The desire of gain develops a spirit of ambition, which has ever since
impelled our workers to extend their field from the township to the
canton, and from the canton to the department, so as to increase their
profits by increasing their sales. I had only to say a word to point out
new openings to them, and their own sense did the rest. Four years had
been sufficient to change the face of the township. When I had come
through it first, I did not catch the slightest sound; but in less than
five years from that time, there was life and bustle everywhere. The gay
songs, the shrill or murmuring sounds made by the tools in the workshops
rang pleasantly in my ears. I watched the comings and goings of a busy
population congregated in the clean and wholesome new town, where plenty
of trees had been planted. Every one of them seemed conscious of a happy
lot, every face shone with the content that comes through a life of
useful toil.

“I look upon these five years as the first epoch of prosperity in the
history of our town,” the doctor went on after a pause. “During that
time I have prepared the ground and sowed the seed in men’s minds as
well as in the land. Henceforward industrial progress could not be
stayed, the population was bound to go forward. A second epoch was
about to begin. This little world very soon desired to be better clad. A
shoemaker came, and with him a haberdasher, a tailor, and a hatter. This
dawn of luxury brought us a butcher and a grocer, and a midwife, who
became very necessary to me, for I lost a great deal of time over
maternity cases. The stubbed wastes yielded excellent harvests, and the
superior quality of our agricultural produce was maintained through
the increased supply of manure. My enterprise could now develop itself;
everything followed on quite naturally.

“When the houses had been rendered wholesome, and their inmates
gradually persuaded to feed and clothe themselves better, I wanted the
dumb animals to feel the benefit of these beginnings of civilization.
All the excellence of cattle, whether as a race or as individuals, and,
in consequence, the quality of the milk and meat, depends upon the care
that is expended upon them. I took the sanitation of cowsheds for the
text of my sermons. I showed them how an animal that is properly housed
and well cared for is more profitable than a lean neglected beast, and
the comparison wrought a gradual change for the better in the lot of
the cattle in the Commune. Not one of them was ill treated. The cows
and oxen were rubbed down as in Switzerland and Auvergne. Sheep-folds,
stables, byres, dairies, and barns were rebuilt after the pattern of
the roomy, well-ventilated, and consequently healthy steadings that M.
Gravier and I had constructed. Our tenants became my apostles. They
made rapid converts of unbelievers, demonstrating the soundness of my
doctrines by their prompt results. I lent money to those who needed it,
giving the preference to hardworking poor people, because they served as
an example. Any unsound or sickly cattle or beasts of poor quality were
quickly disposed of by my advice, and replaced by fine specimens. In
this way our dairy produce came, in time, to command higher prices in
the market than that sent by other communes. We had splendid herds, and
as a consequence, capital leather.

“This step forward was of great importance, and in this wise. In rural
economy nothing can be regarded as trifling. Our hides used to fetch
scarcely anything, and the leather we made was of little value, but
when once our leather and hides were improved, tanneries were easily
established along the waterside. We became tanners, and business rapidly
increased.

“Wine, properly speaking, had been hitherto unknown; a thin, sour
beverage like verjuice had been their only drink, but now wineshops were
established to supply a natural demand. The oldest tavern was enlarged
and transformed into an inn, which furnished mules to pilgrims to the
Grand Chartreuse who began to come our way, and after two years there
was just enough business for two innkeepers.

“The justice of the peace died just as our second prosperous epoch
began, and luckily for us, his successor had formerly been a notary in
Grenoble who had lost most of his fortune by a bad speculation, though
enough of it yet remained to cause him to be looked upon in the village
as a wealthy man. It was M. Gravier who induced him to settle among
us. He built himself a comfortable house and helped me by uniting his
efforts to mine. He also laid out a farm, and broke up and cleaned some
of the waste land, and at this moment he has three chalets up above on
the mountain side. He has a large family. He dismissed the old registrar
and the clerk, and in their place installed better-educated men, who
worked far harder, moreover, than their predecessors had done. One
of the heads of these two new households started a distillery of
potato-spirit, and the other was a wool-washer; each combined these
occupations with his official work, and in this way two valuable
industries were created among us.

“Now that the Commune had some revenues of its own, no opposition was
raised in any quarter when they were spent on building a town-hall, with
a free school for elementary education in the building and accommodation
for a teacher. For this important post I had selected a poor priest who
had taken the oath, and had therefore been cast out by the department,
and who at last found a refuge among us for his old age. The
schoolmistress is a very worthy woman who had lost all that she had, and
was in great distress. We made up a nice little sum for her, and she
has just opened a boarding-school for girls to which the wealthy farmers
hereabouts are beginning to send their daughters.

“If so far, sir, I have been entitled to tell you the story of my own
doings as the chronicle of this little spot of earth, I have reached
the point where M. Janvier, the new parson, began to divide the work of
regeneration with me. He has been a second Fenelon, unknown beyond the
narrow limits of a country parish, and by some secret of his own has
infused a spirit of brotherliness and of charity among these folk that
has made them almost like one large family. M. Dufau, the justice of
the peace, was a late comer, but he in an equal degree deserves the
gratitude of the people here.

“I will put the whole position before you in figures that will make
it clearer than any words of mine. At this moment the Commune owns two
hundred acres of woodland, and a hundred and sixty acres of meadow.
Without running up the rates, we give a hundred crowns to supplement the
cure’s stipend, we pay two hundred francs to the rural policeman, and
as much again to the schoolmaster and schoolmistress. The maintenance of
the roads costs us five hundred francs, while necessary repairs to the
townhall, the parsonage, and the church, with some few other expenses,
also amount to a similar sum. In fifteen years’ time there will be a
thousand francs worth of wood to fell for every hundred francs’ worth
cut now, and the taxes will not cost the inhabitants a penny. This
Commune is bound to become one of the richest in France. But perhaps I
am taxing your patience, sir?” said Benassis, suddenly discovering that
his companion wore such a pensive expression that it seemed as though
his attention was wandering.

“No! no!” answered the commandant.

“Our trade, handicrafts, and agriculture so far only supplied the needs
of the district,” the doctor went on. “At a certain point our prosperity
came to a standstill. I wanted a post-office, and sellers of tobacco,
stationery, powder and shot. The receiver of taxes had hitherto
preferred to live elsewhere, but now I succeeded in persuading him
to take up his abode in the town, holding out as inducements the
pleasantness of the place and of the new society. As time and place
permitted I had succeeded in producing a supply of everything for which
I had first created a need, in attracting families of hardworking people
into the district, and in implanting a desire to own land in them all.
So by degrees, as they saved a little money, the waste land began to
be broken up; spade husbandry and small holdings increased; so did the
value of property on the mountain.

“Those struggling folk who, when I knew them first, used to walk over
to Grenoble carrying their few cheeses for sale, now made the journey
comfortably in a cart, and took fruit, eggs, chickens and turkeys, and
before they were aware of it, everyone was a little richer. Even those
who came off worst had a garden at any rate, and grew early vegetables
and fruit. It became the children’s work to watch the cattle in the
fields, and at last it was found to be a waste of time to bake bread at
home. Here were signs of prosperity!

“But if this place was to be a permanent forge of industry, fuel must
be constantly added to the fire. The town had not as yet a renascent
industry which could maintain this commercial process, an industry which
should make great transactions, a warehouse, and a market necessary. It
is not enough that a country should lose none of the money that forms
its capital; you will not increase its prosperity by more or less
ingenious devices for causing this amount to circulate, by means of
production and consumption, through the greatest possible number of
hands. That is not where your problem lies. When a country is fully
developed and its production keeps pace with its consumption, if private
wealth is to increase as well as the wealth of the community at large,
there must be exchanges with other communities, which will keep a
balance on the right side of the balance-sheet. This thought has let
states with a limited territorial basis like Tyre, Carthage, Venice,
Holland, and England, for instance, to secure the carrying trade. I cast
about for some such notion as this to apply to our little world, so as
to inaugurate a third commercial epoch. Our town is so much like any
other, that our prosperity was scarcely visible to a passing stranger;
it was only for me that it was astonishing. The folk had come together
by degrees; they themselves were a part of the change, and could not
judge of its effects as a whole.

“Seven years had gone by when I met with two strangers, the real
benefactors of the place, which perhaps some day they will transform
into a large town. One of them is a Tyrolese, an exceedingly clever
fellow, who makes rough shoes for country people’s wear, and boots for
people of fashion in Grenoble as no one can make them, not even in Paris
itself. He was a poor strolling musician, who, singing and working, had
made his way through Italy; one of those busy Germans who fashion the
tools of their own work, and make the instrument that they play upon.
When he came to the town he asked if any one wanted a pair of shoes.
They sent him to me, and I gave him an order for two pairs of boots, for
which he made his own lasts. The foreigner’s skill surprised me. He gave
accurate and consistent answers to the questions I put, and his face and
manner confirmed the good opinion I had formed of him. I suggested that
he should settle in the place, undertaking to assist him in business in
every way that I could; in fact, I put a fairly large sum of money at
his disposal. He accepted my offer. I had my own ideas in this. The
quality of our leather had improved; and why should we not use it
ourselves, and before very long make our own shoes at moderate prices?

“It was the basket-maker’s business over again on a larger scale. Chance
had put an exceedingly clever hard-working man in my way, and he must
be retained so that a steady and profitable trade might be given to
the place. There is a constant demand for foot-gear, and a very slight
difference in price is felt at once by the purchaser.

“This was my reasoning, sir, and fortunately events have justified it.
At this time we have five tanyards, each of which has its bark-mill.
They take all the hides produced in the department itself, and even
draw part of their supply from Provence; and yet the Tyrolese uses more
leather than they can produce, and has forty work-people in his employ!

“I happened on the other man after a fashion no whit less strange, but
you might find the story tedious. He is just an ordinary peasant, who
discovered a cheaper way of making the great broad-brimmed hats that are
worn in this part of the world. He sells them in other cantons, and even
sends them into Switzerland and Savoy. So long as the quality and the
low prices can be maintained, here are two inexhaustible sources
of wealth for the canton, which suggested to my mind the idea of
establishing three fairs in the year. The prefect, amazed at our
industrial progress, lent his aid in obtaining the royal ordinance which
authorized them, and last year we held our three fairs. They are known
as far as Savoy as the Shoe Fair and the Hat Fair.

“The head clerk of a notary in Grenoble heard of these changes. He was
poor, but he was a well-educated, hardworking young fellow, and Mlle.
Gravier was engaged to be married to him. He went to Paris to ask for an
authorization to establish himself here as a notary, and his request was
granted. As he had not to pay for his appointment, he could afford to
build a house in the market square of the new town, opposite the
house of the justice of the peace. We have a market once a week, and a
considerable amount of business is transacted in corn and cattle.

“Next year a druggist surely ought to come among us, and next we want a
clockmaker, a furniture dealer, and a bookseller; and so, by degrees,
we shall have all the desirable luxuries of life. Who knows but that at
last we shall have a number of substantial houses, and give ourselves
all the airs of a small city? Education has made such strides that there
has never been any opposition made at the council-board when I proposed
that we should restore our church and build a parsonage; nor when I
brought forward a plan for laying out a fine open space, planted with
trees, where the fairs could be held, and a further scheme for a
survey of the township, so that its future streets should be wholesome,
spacious, and wisely planned.

“This is how we came to have nineteen hundred hearths in the place of a
hundred and thirty-seven; three thousand head of cattle instead of
eight hundred; and for a population of seven hundred, no less than two
thousand persons are living in the township, or three thousand, if the
people down the valley are included. There are twelve houses belonging
to wealthy people in the Commune, there are a hundred well-to-do
families, and two hundred more which are thriving. The rest have their
own exertions to look to. Every one knows how to read and write, and we
subscribe to seventeen different newspapers.

“We have poor people still among us--there are far too many of them, in
fact; but we have no beggars, and there is work enough for all. I have
so many patients that my daily round taxes the powers of two horses. I
can go anywhere for five miles round at any hour without fear; for if
any one was minded to fire a shot at me, his life would not be worth
ten minutes’ purchase. The undemonstrative affection of the people is
my sole gain from all these changes, except the radiant ‘Good-day, M.
Benassis,’ that every one gives me as I pass. You will understand, of
course, that the wealth incidentally acquired through my model farms has
only been a means and not an end.”

“If every one followed your example in other places, sir, France would
be great indeed, and might laugh at the rest of Europe!” cried Genestas
enthusiastically.

“But I have kept you out here for half an hour,” said Benassis; “it is
growing dark, let us go in to dinner.”



The doctor’s house, on the side facing the garden, consists of a ground
floor and a single story, with a row of five windows in each, dormer
windows also project from the tiled mansard-roof. The green-painted
shutters are in startling contrast with the gray tones of the walls.
A vine wanders along the whole side of the house, a pleasant strip of
green like a frieze, between the two stories. A few struggling Bengal
roses make shift to live as best they may, half drowned at times by the
drippings from the gutterless eaves.

As you enter the large vestibule, the salon lies to your right; it
contains four windows, two of which look into the yard, and two into the
garden. Ceiling and wainscot are paneled, and the walls are hung with
seventeenth century tapestry--pathetic evidence that the room had been
the object of the late owner’s aspiration, and that he had lavished all
that he could spare upon it. The great roomy armchairs, covered with
brocaded damask; the old fashioned, gilded candle-sconces above the
chimney-piece, and the window curtains with their heavy tassels, showed
that the cure had been a wealthy man. Benassis had made some additions
to this furniture, which was not without a character of its own. He
had placed two smaller tables, decorated with carved wooden garlands,
between the windows on opposite sides of the room, and had put a clock,
in a case of tortoise shell, inlaid with copper, upon the mantel-shelf.
The doctor seldom occupied the salon; its atmosphere was damp and close,
like that of a room that is always kept shut. Memories of the dead cure
still lingered about it; the peculiar scent of his tobacco seemed to
pervade the corner by the hearth where he had been wont to sit. The
two great easy-chairs were symmetrically arranged on either side of the
fire, which had not been lighted since the time of M. Gravier’s visit;
the bright flames from the pine logs lighted the room.

“The evenings are chilly even now,” said Benassis; “it is pleasant to
see a fire.”

Genestas was meditating. He was beginning to understand the doctor’s
indifference to his every-day surroundings.

“It is surprising to me, sir, that you, who possess real public
spirit, should have made no effort to enlighten the Government, after
accomplishing so much.”

Benassis began to laugh, but without bitterness; he said, rather sadly:

“You mean that I should draw up some sort of memorial on various ways of
civilizing France? You are not the first to suggest it, sir; M. Gravier
has forestalled you. Unluckily, Governments cannot be enlightened, and a
Government which regards itself as a diffuser of light is the least open
to enlightenment. What we have done for our canton, every mayor ought,
of course, to do for his; the magistrate should work for his town, the
sub-prefect for his district, the prefect for the department, and the
minister for France, each acting in his own sphere of interest. For the
few miles of country road that I persuaded our people to make,
another would succeed in constructing a canal or a highway; and for
my encouragement of the peasants’ trade in hats, a minister would
emancipate France from the industrial yoke of the foreigner by
encouraging the manufacture of clocks in different places, by helping to
bring to perfection our iron and steel, our tools and appliances, or by
bringing silk or dyer’s woad into cultivation.

“In commerce, ‘encouragement,’ does not mean protection. A really wise
policy should aim at making a country independent of foreign supply,
but this should be effected without resorting to the pitiful shifts
of customs duties and prohibitions. Industries must work out their own
salvation, competition is the life of trade. A protected industry goes
to sleep, and monopoly, like the protective tariff, kills it outright.
The country upon which all others depend for their supplies will be the
land which will promulgate free trade, for it will be conscious of its
power to produce its manufactures at prices lower than those of any of
its competitors. France is in a better position to attain this end than
England, for France alone possesses an amount of territory sufficiently
extensive to maintain a supply of agricultural produce at prices that
will enable the worker to live on low wages; the Administration should
keep this end in view, for therein lies the whole modern question. I
have not devoted my life to this study, dear sir; I found my work by
accident, and late in the day. Such simple things as these are too
slight, moreover, to build into a system; there is nothing wonderful
about them, they do not lend themselves to theories; it is their
misfortune to be merely practically useful. And then work cannot be done
quickly. The man who means to succeed in these ways must daily look to
find within himself the stock of courage needed for the day, a courage
in reality of the rarest kind, though it does not seem hard to practise,
and meets with little recognition--the courage of the schoolmaster, who
must say the same things over and over again. We all honor the man who
has shed his blood on the battlefield, as you have done; but we ridicule
this other whose life-fire is slowly consumed in repeating the same
words to children of the same age. There is no attraction for any of us
in obscure well-doing. We know nothing of the civic virtue that led the
great men of ancient times to serve their country in the lowest rank
whenever they did not command. Our age is afflicted with a disease that
makes each of us seek to rise above his fellows, and there are more
saints than shrines among us.

“This is how it has come to pass. The monarchy fell, and we lost Honor,
Christian Virtue faded with the religion of our forefathers, and our own
ineffectual attempts at government have destroyed Patriotism. Ideas can
never utterly perish, so these beliefs linger on in our midst, but
they do not influence the great mass of the people, and Society has no
support but Egoism. Every individual believes in himself. For us the
future means egoism; further than that we cannot see. The great man who
shall save us from the shipwreck which is imminent will no doubt avail
himself of individualism when he makes a nation of us once more; but
until this regeneration comes, we bide our time in a materialistic and
utilitarian age. Utilitarianism--to this conclusion we have come. We
are all rated, not at our just worth, but according to our social
importance. People will scarcely look at an energetic man if he is
in shirt-sleeves. The Government itself is pervaded by this idea. A
minister sends a paltry medal to a sailor who has saved a dozen lives
at the risk of his own, while the deputy who sells his vote to those in
power receives the Cross of the Legion of Honor.

“Woe to a people made up of such men as these! For nations, like men,
owe all the strength and vitality that is in them to noble thoughts
and aspirations, and men’s feelings shape their faith. But when
self-interest has taken the place of faith and each one of us thinks
only of himself, and believes in himself alone, how can you expect to
find among us much of that civil courage whose very essence consists in
self-renunciation? The same principle underlies both military and civil
courage, although you soldiers are called upon to yield your lives up
once and for all, while ours are given slowly drop by drop, and the
battle is the same for both, although it takes different forms.

“The man who would fain civilize the lowliest spot on earth needs
something besides wealth for the task. Knowledge is still more
necessary; and knowledge, and patriotism, and integrity are worthless
unless they are accompanied by a firm determination on his part to set
his own personal interests completely aside, and to devote himself to a
social idea. France, no doubt, possesses more than one well-educated
man and more than one patriot in every commune; but I am fully
persuaded that not every canton can produce a man who to these valuable
qualifications unites the unflagging will and pertinacity with which a
blacksmith hammers out iron.

“The Destroyer and the Builder are two manifestations of Will; the one
prepares the way, and the other accomplishes the work; the first appears
in the guise of a spirit of evil, and the second seems like the spirit
of good. Glory falls to the Destroyer, while the Builder is forgotten;
for evil makes a noise in the world that rouses little souls to
admiration, while good deeds are slow to make themselves heard.
Self-love leads us to prefer the more conspicuous part. If it should
happen that any public work is undertaken without an interested motive,
it will only be by accident, until the day when education has changed
our ways of regarding things in France.

“Yet suppose that this change had come to pass, and that all of us
were public-spirited citizens; in spite of our comfortable lives among
trivialities, should we not be in a fair way to become the most wearied,
wearisome, and unfortunate race of philistines under the sun?

“I am not at the helm of State, the decision of great questions of this
kind is not within my province; but, setting these considerations aside,
there are other difficulties in the way of laying down hard and fast
rules as to government. In the matter of civilization, everything
is relative. Ideas that suit one country admirably are fatal in
another--men’s minds are as various as the soils of the globe. If we
have so often been ill governed, it is because a faculty for government,
like taste, is the outcome of a very rare and lofty attitude of mind.
The qualifications for the work are found in a natural bent of the soul
rather than in the possession of scientific formulae. No one need fear,
however, to call himself a statesman, for his actions and motives cannot
be justly estimated; his real judges are far away, and the results of
his deeds are even more remote. We have a great respect here in France
for men of ideas--a keen intellect exerts a great attraction for us;
but ideas are of little value where a resolute will is the one thing
needful. Administration, as a matter of fact, does not consist in
forcing more or less wise methods and ideas upon the great mass of
the nation, but in giving to the ideas, good or bad, that they already
possess a practical turn which will make them conduce to the general
welfare of the State. If old-established prejudices and customs bring a
country into a bad way, the people will renounce their errors of their
own accord. Are not losses the result of economical errors of every
kind? And is it not, therefore, to every one’s interest to rectify them
in the long run?

“Luckily I found a _tabula rasa_ in this district. They have followed my
advice, and the land is well cultivated; but there had been no previous
errors in agriculture, and the soil was good to begin with, so that it
has been easy to introduce the five-ply shift, artificial grasses,
and potatoes. My methods did not clash with people’s prejudices. The
faultily constructed plowshares in use in some parts of France were
unknown here, the hoe sufficed for the little field work that they did.
Our wheelwright extolled my wheeled plows because he wished to increase
his own business, so I secured an ally in him; but in this matter, as in
all others, I sought to make the good of one conduce to the good of all.

“Then I turned my attention to another kind of production, that should
increase the welfare rather than the wealth of these poor folk. I
have brought nothing from without into this district; I have simply
encouraged the people to seek beyond its limits for a market for their
produce, a measure that could not but increase their prosperity in a
way that they felt immediately. They had no idea of the fact, but they
themselves were my apostles, and their works preached my doctrines.
Something else must also be borne in mind. We are barely five leagues
from Grenoble. There is plenty of demand in a large city for produce of
all kinds, but not every commune is situated at the gates of a city. In
every similar undertaking the nature, situation, and resources of the
country must be taken into consideration, and a careful study must be
made of the soil, of the people themselves, and of many other things;
and no one should expect to have vines grow in Normandy. So no tasks
can be more various than those of government, and its general principles
must be few in number. The law is uniform, but not so the land and the
minds and customs of those who dwell in it; and the administration of
the law is the art of carrying it out in such a manner that no injury is
done to people’s interests. Every place must be considered separately.

“On the other side of the mountain at the foot of which our deserted
village lies, they find it impossible to use wheeled plows, because the
soil is not deep enough. Now if the mayor of the commune were to take
it into his head to follow in our footsteps, he would be the ruin of
his neighborhood. I advised him to plant vineyards; they had a capital
vintage last year in the little district, and their wine is exchanged
for our corn.

“Then, lastly, it must be remembered that my words carried a certain
weight with the people to whom I preached, and that we were continually
brought into close contact. I cured my peasants’ complaints; an easy
task, for a nourishing diet is, as a rule, all that is needed to restore
them to health and strength. Either through thrift, or through sheer
poverty, the country people starve themselves; any illness among them is
caused in this way, and as a rule they enjoy very fair health.

“When I first decided to devote myself to this life of obscure
renunciation, I was in doubt for a long while whether to become a cure,
a country doctor, or a justice of the peace. It is not without reason
that people speak collectively of the priest, the lawyer, and the doctor
as ‘men of the black robe’--so the saying goes. They represent the three
principal elements necessary to the existence of society--conscience,
property, and health. At one time the first, and at a later period the
second, was all-important in the State. Our predecessors on this earth
thought, perhaps not without reason, that the priest, who prescribed
what men should think, ought to be paramount; so the priest was king,
pontiff, and judge in one, for in those days belief and faith were
everything. All this has been changed in our day; and we must even take
our epoch as we find it. But I, for one, believe that the progress of
civilization and the welfare of the people depend on these three men.
They are the three powers who bring home to the people’s minds the ways
in which facts, interests, and principles affect them. They themselves
are three great results produced in the midst of the nation by the
operation of events, by the ownership of property, and by the growth of
ideas. Time goes on and brings changes to pass, property increases or
diminishes in men’s hands, all the various readjustments have to be duly
regulated, and in this way principles of social order are established.
If civilization is to spread itself, and production is to be increased,
the people must be made to understand the way in which the interests
of the individual harmonize with national interests which resolve
themselves into facts, interests, and principles. As these three
professions are bound to deal with these issues of human life, it seemed
to me that they must be the most powerful civilizing agencies of our
time. They alone afford to a man of wealth the opportunity of mitigating
the fate of the poor, with whom they daily bring him in contact.

“The peasant is always more willing to listen to the man who lays down
rules for saving him from bodily ills than to the priest who exhorts him
to save his soul. The first speaker can talk of this earth, the scene
of the peasant’s labors, while the priest is bound to talk to him of
heaven, with which, unfortunately, the peasant nowadays concerns himself
very little indeed; I say unfortunately, because the doctrine of a
future life is not only a consolation, but a means by which men may be
governed. Is not religion the one power that sanctions social laws? We
have but lately vindicated the existence of God. In the absence of a
religion, the Government was driven to invent the Terror, in order to
carry its laws into effect; but the terror was the fear of man, and it
has passed away.

“When a peasant is ill, when he is forced to lie on his pallet, and
while he is recovering, he cannot help himself, he is forced to listen
to logical reasoning, which he can understand quite well if it is put
clearly before him. This thought made a doctor of me. My calculations
for the peasants were made along with them. I never gave advice unless
I was quite sure of the results, and in this way compelled them to admit
the wisdom of my views. The people require infallibility. Infallibility
was the making of Napoleon; he would have been a god if he had not
filled the world with the sound of his fall at Waterloo. If Mahomet
founded a permanent religion after conquering the third part of the
globe, it was by dint of concealing his deathbed from the crowd. The
same rules hold good for the great conqueror and for the provincial
mayor, and a nation or a commune is much the same sort of crowd; indeed,
the great multitude of mankind is the same everywhere.

“I have been exceedingly firm with those whom I have helped with money;
if I had not been inflexible on this point, they all would have laughed
at me. Peasants, no less than worldlings, end by despising the man that
they can deceive. He has been cheated? Clearly, then, he must have been
weak; and it is might alone that governs the world. I have never charged
a penny for my professional advice, except to those who were evidently
rich people; but I have not allowed the value of my services to be
overlooked at all, and I always make them pay for medicine unless the
patient is exceedingly poor. If my peasants do not pay me in money, they
are quite aware that they are in my debt; sometimes they satisfy their
consciences by bringing oats for my horses, or corn, when it is cheap.
But if the miller were to send me some eels as a return for my advice,
I should tell him that he is too generous for such a small matter. My
politeness bears fruit. In the winter I shall have some sacks of flour
for the poor. Ah! sir, they have kind hearts, these people, if one does
not slight them, and to-day I think more good and less evil of them than
I did formerly.”

“What a deal of trouble you have taken!” said Genestas.

“Not at all,” answered Benassis. “It was no more trouble to say
something useful than to chatter about trifles; and whether I chatted
or joked, the talk always turned on them and their concerns wherever
I went. They would not listen to me at first. I had to overcome their
dislikes; I belonged to the middle classes--that is to say, I was
a natural enemy. I found the struggle amusing. An easy or an uneasy
conscience--that is all the difference that lies between doing well or
ill; the trouble is the same in either case. If scoundrels would but
behave themselves properly, they might be millionaires instead of being
hanged. That is all.”

“The dinner is growing cold, sir!” cried Jacquotte, in the doorway.

Genestas caught the doctor’s arm.

“I have only one comment to offer on what I have just heard,” he
remarked. “I am not acquainted with any account of the wars of Mahomet,
so that I can form no opinions as to his military talents; but if you
had only watched the Emperor’s tactics during the campaign in France,
you might well have taken him for a god; and if he was beaten on the
field of Waterloo, it was because he was more than mortal, it was
because the earth found his weight too heavy to bear, and sprang from
under his feet! On every other subject I entirely agree with you, and
_tonnerre de Dieu_! whoever hatched you did a good day’s work.”

“Come,” exclaimed Benassis with a smile, “let us sit down to dinner.”

The walls of the dining-room were paneled from floor to ceiling, and
painted gray. The furniture consisted of a few straw-bottomed chairs,
a sideboard, some cupboards, a stove, and the late owner’s celebrated
clock; there were white curtains in the window, and a white cloth on the
table, about which there was no sign of luxury. The dinner service was
of plain white earthenware; the soup, made after the traditions of the
late cure, was the most concentrated kind of broth that was ever set
to simmer by any mortal cook. The doctor and his guest had scarcely
finished it when a man rushed into the kitchen, and in spite of
Jacquotte, suddenly invaded the dining-room.

“Well, what is it?” asked the doctor.

“It is this, sir. The mistress, our Mme. Vigneau, has turned as white as
white can be, so that we are frightened about her.”

“Oh, well, then,” Benassis said cheerfully, “I must leave the table,”
 and he rose to go.

In spite of the doctor’s entreaties, Genestas flung down his
table-napkin, and swore in a soldierly fashion that he would not finish
his dinner without his host. He returned indeed to the salon; and as he
warmed himself by the fire, he thought over the troubles that no man may
escape, the troubles that are found in every lot that it falls to man to
endure here upon earth.

Benassis soon came back, and the two future friends sat down again.

“Taboureau has just come up to speak to you,” said Jacquotte to her
master, as she brought in the dishes that she had kept hot for them.

“Who can be ill at his place?” asked the doctor.

“No one is ill, sir. I think from what he said that it is some matter of
his own that he wants to ask you about; he is coming back again.”

“Very good. This Taboureau,” Benassis went on, addressing Genestas, “is
for me a whole philosophical treatise; take a good look at him when
he comes, he is sure to amuse you. He was a laborer, a thrifty,
hard-working man, eating little and getting through a good deal of
work. As soon as the rogue came to have a few crowns of his own, his
intelligence began to develop; he watched the progress which I had
originated in this little district with an eye to his own profit. He had
made quite a fortune in eight year’s time, that is to say, a fortune
for our part of the world. Very likely he may have a couple of score
thousand francs by now. But if I were to give you a thousand guesses,
you would never find out how he made the money. He is a usurer, and
his scheme of usury is so profoundly and so cleverly based upon the
requirements of the whole canton, that I should merely waste my time if
I were to take it upon myself to undeceive them as to the benefits which
they reap, in their own opinion, from their dealings with Taboureau.
When this devil of a fellow saw every one cultivating his own plot of
ground, he hurried about buying grain so as to supply the poor with the
requisite seed. Here, as everywhere else, the peasants and even some
of the farmers had no ready money with which to pay for seed. To some,
Master Taboureau would lend a sack of barley, for which he was to
receive a sack of rye at harvest time, and to others a measure of wheat
for a sack of four. At the present day the man has extended this curious
business of his all over the department; and unless something happens to
prevent him, he will go on and very likely make a million. Well, my
dear sir, Taboureau the laborer, an obliging, hard-working, good-natured
fellow, used to lend a helping hand to any one who asked him; but as
his gains have increased _Monsieur_ Taboureau has become litigious,
arrogant, and somewhat given to sharp practice. The more money he makes,
the worse he grows. The moment that the peasant forsakes his life
of toil pure and simple for the leisured existence of the landowning
classes, he becomes intolerable. There is a certain kind of character,
partly virtuous, partly vicious, half-educated, half-ignorant, which
will always be the despair of governments. You will see an example of it
in Taboureau. He looks simple, and even doltish; but when his interests
are in question, he is certainly profoundly clever.”

A heavy footstep announced the approach of the grain lender.

“Come in, Taboureau!” cried Benassis.

Thus forewarned by the doctor, the commandant scrutinized the peasant in
the doorway. Taboureau was decidedly thin, and stooped a little. He
had a bulging forehead, covered with wrinkles, and a cavernous face, in
which two small gray eyes with a dark spot in either of them seemed to
be pierced rather than set. The lines of the miser’s mouth were close
and firm, and his narrow chin turned up to meet an exaggeratedly
hooked nose. His hair was turning gray already, and deep furrows which
converged above the prominent cheek-bones spoke of the wily shrewdness
of a horse-dealer and of a life spent in journeying about. He wore a
blue coat in fairly clean condition, the square side-pocket flaps stuck
out above his hips, and the skirts of the coats hung loose in front,
so that a white-flowered waistcoat was visible. There he stood firmly
planted on both feet, leaning upon a thick stick with a knob at the
end of it. A little spaniel had followed the grain-dealer, in spite of
Jacquotte’s efforts, and was crouching beside him.

“Well, what is it?” Benassis asked as he turned to this being.

Taboureau gave a suspicious glance at the stranger seated at the
doctor’s table, and said:

“It is not a case of illness, _M. le Maire_, but you understand how to
doctor the ailments of the purse just as well as those of the body. We
have had a little difficulty with a man over at Saint-Laurent, and I
have come to ask your advice about it.”

“Why not see the justice of the peace or his clerk?”

“Oh, because you are so much cleverer, sir, and I shall feel more sure
about my case if I can have your countenance.”

“My good Taboureau, I am willing to give medical advice to the poor
without charging for it; but I cannot look into the lawsuits of a
man who is as wealthy as you are for nothing. It costs a good deal to
acquire that kind of knowledge.”

Taboureau began to twist his hat about.

“If you want my advice, in order to save the hard coin you would have to
pay to the lawyer folk over in Grenoble, you must send a bag of rye to
the widow Martin, the woman who is bringing up the charity children.”

“_Dame_! I will do it with all my heart, sir, if you think it necessary.
Can I talk about this business of mine without troubling the gentleman
there?” he added, with a look at Genestas.

The doctor nodded, so Taboureau went on.

“Well, then, sir, two months ago a man from Saint-Laurent came over here
to find me. ‘Taboureau,’ said he to me, ‘could you sell me a hundred and
thirty-seven measures of barley?’ ‘Why not?’ say I, ‘that is my trade.
Do you want it immediately?’ ‘No,’ he says, ‘I want it for the beginning
of spring, in March.’ So far, so good. Well, we drive our bargain, and
we drink a glass, and we agree that he is to pay me the price that the
barley fetched at Grenoble last market day, and I am to deliver it
in March. I am to warehouse it at owner’s risk, and no allowance for
shrinkage of course. But barley goes up and up, my dear sir; the barley
rises like boiling milk. Then I am hard up for money, and I sell my
barley. Quite natural, sir, was it not?”

“No,” said Benassis, “the barley had passed out of your possession, you
were only warehousing it. And suppose the barley had gone down in value,
would you not have compelled your buyer to take it at the price you
agreed upon?”

“But very likely he would not have paid me, sir. One must look out for
oneself! The seller ought to make a good profit when the chance comes in
his way; and, after, all the goods are not yours until you have paid for
them. That is so, _Monsieur l’Officier_, is it not? For you can see that
the gentleman has been in the army.”

“Taboureau,” Benassis said sternly, “ill luck will come to you. Sooner
or later God punishes ill deeds. How can you, knowing as much as you do,
a capable man moreover, and a man who conducts his business honorably,
set examples of dishonesty to the canton? If you allow such proceedings
as this to be taken against you, how can you expect that the poor will
remain honest people and will not rob you? Your laborers will cheat
you out of part of their working hours, and every one here will be
demoralized. You are in the wrong. Your barley was as good as delivered.
If the man from Saint-Laurent had fetched it himself, you would not have
gone there to take it away from him; you have sold something that was no
longer yours to sell, for your barley had already been turned into money
which was to be paid down at the stipulated time. But go on.”

Genestas gave the doctor a significant glance, to call his attention
to Taboureau’s impassive countenance. Not a muscle had stirred in the
usurer’s face during this reprimand; there was no flush on his forehead,
and no sign of emotion in his little eyes.

“Well, sir, I am called upon to supply the barley at last winter’s
price. Now _I_ consider that I am not bound to do so.”

“Look here, Taboureau, deliver that barley and be very quick about it,
or make up your mind to be respected by nobody in the future. Even if
you gained the day in a case like this, you would be looked upon as
an unscrupulous man who does not keep to his word, and is not bound by
promises, or by honor, or----”

“Go on, there is nothing to be afraid of; tell me that I am a scamp, a
scoundrel, a thief outright. You can say things like that in business
without insulting anybody, M. le Maire. ‘Tis each for himself in
business, you know.”

“Well, then, why deliberately put yourself in a position in which you
deserve to be called by such names?”

“But if the law is on my side, sir?”

“But the law will certainly _not_ be on your side.”

“Are you quite sure about it, sir? Certain sure? For you see it is an
important matter.”

“Certainly I am. Quite sure. If I were not at dinner, I would have down
the code, and you should see for yourself. If the case comes on, you
will lose it, and you will never set foot in my house again, for I do
not wish to receive people whom I do not respect. Do you understand? You
will lose your case.”

“Oh! no, not at all, I shall not lose it, sir,” said Taboureau. “You
see, sir, it is this way; it is the man from Saint-Laurent who owes _me_
the barley; I bought it of him, and now he refuses to deliver it. I just
wanted to make quite certain that I should gain my case before going to
any expense at court about it.”

Genestas and the doctor exchanged glances; each concealed his amazement
at the ingenious device by which the man had sought to learn the truth
about this point of law.

“Very well, Taboureau, your man is a swindler; you should not make
bargains with such people.”

“Ah! sir, they understand business, those people do.”

“Good-bye, Taboureau.”

“Your servant, gentlemen.”

“Well, now,” remarked Benassis, when the usurer had gone, “if that
fellow were in Paris, do you not think that he would be a millionaire
before very long?”

After dinner, the doctor and his visitor went back to the salon, and
all the rest of the evening until bedtime they talked about war and
politics; Genestas evincing a most violent dislike of the English in the
course of conversation.

“May I know whom I have the honor of entertaining as a guest?” asked the
doctor.

“My name is Pierre Bluteau,” answered Genestas; “I am a captain
stationed at Grenoble.”

“Very well, sir. Do you care to adopt M. Gravier’s plan? In the morning
after breakfast he liked to go on my rounds with me. I am not at all
sure that you would find anything to interest you in the things that
occupy me--they are so very commonplace. For, after all, you own no land
about here, nor are you the mayor of the place, and you will see nothing
in the canton that you cannot see elsewhere; one thatched cottage is
just like another. Still you will be in the open air, and you will have
something to take you out of doors.”

“No proposal could give me more pleasure. I did not venture to make it
myself, lest I should thrust myself upon you.”

Commandant Genestas (who shall keep his own name in spite of the
fictitious appellation which he had thought fit to give himself)
followed his host to a room on the first floor above the salon.

“That is right,” said Benassis, “Jacquotte has lighted a fire for you.
If you want anything, there is a bell-pull close to the head of the
bed.”

“I am not likely to want anything, however small, it seems to me,”
 exclaimed Genestas. “There is even a boot-jack. Only an old trooper
knows what a boot-jack is worth! There are times, when one is out on a
campaign, sir, when one is ready to burn down a house to come by a knave
of a boot-jack. After a few marches, one on the top of another, or above
all, after an engagement, there are times when a swollen foot and the
soaked leather will not part company, pull as you will; I have had to
lie down in my boots more than once. One can put up with the annoyance
so long as one is by oneself.”

The commandant’s wink gave a kind of profound slyness to his last
utterance; then he began to make a survey. Not without surprise, he saw
that the room was neatly kept, comfortable, and almost luxurious.

“What splendor!” was his comment. “Your own room must be something
wonderful.”

“Come and see,” said the doctor; “I am your neighbor, there is nothing
but the staircase between us.”

Genestas was again surprised when he entered the doctor’s room,
a bare-looking apartment with no adornment on the walls save an
old-fashioned wall-paper of a yellowish tint with a pattern of brown
roses over it; the color had gone in patches here and there. There was
a roughly painted iron bedstead, two gray cotton curtains were suspended
from a wooden bracket above it, and a threadbare strip of carpet lay
at the foot; it was like a bed in a hospital. By the bed-head stood a
rickety cupboard on four feet with a door that continually rattled with
a sound like castanets. Three chairs and a couple of straw-bottomed
armchairs stood about the room, and on a low chest of drawers in walnut
wood stood a basin, and a ewer of obsolete pattern with a lid, which
was kept in place by a leaden rim round the top of the vessel. This
completed the list of the furniture.

The grate was empty. All the apparatus required for shaving lay about in
front of an old mirror suspended above the painted stone chimney-piece
by a bit of string. The floor was clean and carefully swept, but it was
worn and splintered in various places, and there were hollows in it here
and there. Gray cotton curtains bordered with a green fringe adorned the
two windows. The scrupulous cleanliness maintained by Jacquotte gave a
certain air of distinction to this picture of simplicity, but everything
in it, down to the round table littered with stray papers, and the very
pens on the writing-desk, gave the idea of an almost monastic life--a
life so wholly filled with thought and feeling of a wider kind that
outward surroundings had come to be matters of no moment. An open door
allowed the commandant to see the smaller room, which doubtless the
doctor seldom occupied. It was scarcely kept in the same condition as
the adjoining apartment; a few dusty books lay strewn about over the no
less dusty shelves, and from the rows of labeled bottles it was easy to
guess that the place was devoted rather to the dispensing of drugs than
scientific studies.

“Why this difference between your room and mine, you will ask?” said
Benassis. “Listen a moment. I have always blushed for those who put
their guests in the attics, who furnish them with mirrors that distort
everything to such a degree that any one beholding himself might think
that he was smaller or larger than nature made him, or suffering from
apoplectic stroke or some other bad complaint. Ought we not to do our
utmost to make a room as pleasant as possible during the time that
our friend can be with us? Hospitality, to my thinking, is a virtue,
a pleasure, and a luxury; but in whatever light it is considered, nay,
even if you regard it as a speculation, ought not our guest or our
friend to be made much of? Ought not every refinement of luxury to be
reserved for him?

“So the best furniture is put into your room, where a thick carpet is
laid down; there are hangings on the walls, and a clock and wax candles;
and for you Jacquotte will do her best, she has no doubt brought
a night-light, and a pair of new slippers and some milk, and her
warming-pan too for your benefit. I hope that you will find that
luxurious armchair the most comfortable seat you have ever sat in, it
was a discovery of the late cure’s; I do not know where he found it, but
it is a fact that if you wish to meet with the perfection of comfort,
beauty, or convenience, you must ask counsel of the Church. Well, I hope
that you will find everything in your room to your liking. You will find
some good razors and excellent soap, and all the trifling details that
make one’s own home so pleasant. And if my views on the subject of
hospitality should not at once explain the difference between your room
and mine, to-morrow, M. Bluteau, you will arrive at a wonderfully clear
comprehension of the bareness of my room and the untidy condition of my
study, when you see all the continual comings and goings here. Mine is
not an indoor life, to begin with. I am almost always out of the house,
and if I stay at home, peasants come in at every moment to speak to
me. My body and soul and house are all theirs. Why should I worry about
social conventions in these matters, or trouble myself over the damage
unintentionally done to floors and furniture by these worthy folk? Such
things cannot be helped. Luxury properly belongs to the boudoir and the
guest-chamber, to great houses and chateaux. In short, as I scarcely do
more than sleep here, what do I want with superfluities of wealth? You
do not know, moreover, how little I care for anything in this world.”

They wished each other a friendly good-night with a warm shake of the
hand, and went to bed. But before the commandant slept, he came to more
than one conclusion as to the man who hour by hour grew greater in his
eyes.




CHAPTER II. A DOCTOR’S ROUND


The first thing next morning Genestas went to the stable, drawn thither
by the affection that every man feels for the horse that he rides.
Nicolle’s method of rubbing down the animal was quite satisfactory.

“Up already, Commandant Bluteau?” cried Benassis, as he came upon his
guest. “You hear the drum beat in the morning wherever you go, even in
the country! You are a regular soldier!”

“Are you all right?” replied Genestas, holding out his hand with a
friendly gesture.

“I am never really all right,” answered Benassis, half merrily, half
sadly.

“Did you sleep well, sir?” inquired Jacquotte.

“Faith, yes, my beauty; the bed as you made it was fit for a queen.”

Jacquotte’s face beamed as she followed her master and his guest,
and when she had seen them seat themselves at table, she remarked to
Nicolle:

“He is not a bad sort, after all, that officer gentleman.”

“I am sure he is not, he has given me two francs already.”



“We will begin to-day by calling at two places where there have been
deaths,” Benassis said to his visitor as they left the dining-room.
“Although doctors seldom deign to confront their supposed victims, I
will take you round to the two houses, where you will be able to make
some interesting observations of human nature; and the scenes to which
you will be a witness will show you that in the expression of their
feelings our folk among the hills differ greatly from the dwellers in
the lowlands. Up among the mountain peaks in our canton they cling to
customs that bear the impress of an older time, and that vaguely recall
scenes in the Bible. Nature has traced out a line over our mountain
ranges; the whole appearance of the country is different on either side
of it. You will find strength of character up above, flexibility and
quickness below; they have larger ways of regarding things among the
hills, while the bent of the lowlands is always towards the material
interests of existence. I have never seen a difference so strongly
marked, unless it has been in the Val d’Ajou, where the northern side is
peopled by a tribe of idiots, and the southern by an intelligent race.
There is nothing but a stream in the valley bottom to separate these two
populations, which are utterly dissimilar in every respect, as different
in face and stature as in manners, customs, and occupation. A fact
of this kind should compel those who govern a country to make very
extensive studies of local differences before passing laws that are to
affect the great mass of the people. But the horses are ready, let us
start!”

In a short time the two horsemen reached a house in a part of the
township that was overlooked by the mountains of the Grande Chartreuse.
Before the door of the dwelling, which was fairly clean and tidy, they
saw a coffin set upon two chairs, and covered with a black pall. Four
tall candles stood about it, and on a stool near by there was a shallow
brass dish full of holy water, in which a branch of green box-wood was
steeping. Every passer-by went into the yard, knelt by the side of the
dead, said a _Pater noster_, and sprinkled a few drops of holy water on
the bier. Above the black cloth that covered the coffin rose the green
sprays of a jessamine that grew beside the doorway, and a twisted vine
shoot, already in leaf, overran the lintel. Even the saddest ceremonies
demand that things shall appear to the best advantage, and in obedience
to this vaguely-felt requirement a young girl had been sweeping the
front of the house. The dead man’s eldest son, a young peasant
about twenty-two years of age, stood motionless, leaning against the
door-post. The tears in his eyes came and went without falling, or
perhaps he furtively brushed them away. Benassis and Genestas saw
all the details of this scene as they stood beyond the low wall; they
fastened their horses to one of the row of poplar trees that grew along
it, and entered the yard just as the widow came out of the byre. A woman
carrying a jug of milk was with her, and spoke.

“Try to bear up bravely, my poor Pelletier,” she said.

“Ah! my dear, after twenty-five years of life together, it is very hard
to lose your man,” and her eyes brimmed over with tears. “Will you pay
the two sous?” she added, after a moment, as she held out her hand to
her neighbor.

“There, now! I had forgotten about it,” said the other woman, giving her
the coin. “Come, neighbor, don’t take on so. Ah! there is M. Benassis!”

“Well, poor mother, how are you going on? A little better?” asked the
doctor.

“_Dame_!” she said, as the tears fell fast, “we must go on, all the
same, that is certain. I tell myself that my man is out of pain now. He
suffered so terribly! But come inside, sir. Jacques, set some chairs for
these gentlemen. Come, stir yourself a bit. Lord bless you! if you were
to stop there for a century, it would not bring your poor father back
again. And now, you will have to do the work of two.”

“No, no good woman, leave your son alone, we will not sit down. You have
a boy there who will take care of you, and who is quite fit to take his
father’s place.”

“Go and change your clothes, Jacques,” cried the widow; “you will be
wanted directly.”

“Well, good-bye, mother,” said Benassis.

“Your servant, gentlemen.”

“Here, you see, death is looked upon as an event for which every one is
prepared,” said the doctor; “it brings no interruption to the course of
family life, and they will not even wear mourning of any kind. No one
cares to be at the expense of it; they are all either too poor or too
parsimonious in the villages hereabouts, so that mourning is unknown
in country districts. Yet the custom of wearing mourning is something
better than a law or a usage, it is an institution somewhat akin to all
moral obligations. But in spite of our endeavors neither M. Janvier nor
I have succeeded in making our peasants understand the great importance
of public demonstrations of feeling for the maintenance of social
order. These good folk, who have only just begun to think and act for
themselves, are slow as yet to grasp the changed conditions which should
attach them to these theories. They have only reached those ideas which
conduce to economy and to physical welfare; in the future, if some one
else carries on this work of mine, they will come to understand the
principles that serve to uphold and preserve public order and justice.
As a matter of fact, it is not sufficient to be an honest man, you must
appear to be honest in the eyes of others. Society does not live by
moral ideas alone; its existence depends upon actions in harmony with
those ideas.

“In most country communes, out of a hundred families deprived by death
of their head, there are only a few individuals capable of feeling more
keenly than the others, who will remember the deaths for very long; in
a year’s time the rest will have forgotten all about it. Is not this
forgetfulness a sore evil? A religion is the very heart of a nation; it
expresses their feelings and their thoughts, and exalts them by giving
them an object; but unless outward and visible honor is paid to a God,
religion cannot exist; and, as a consequence, human ordinances lose all
their force. If the conscience belongs to God and to Him only, the body
is amenable to social law. Is it not therefore, a first step towards
atheism to efface every sign of pious sorrow in this way, to neglect to
impress on children who are not yet old enough to reflect, and on all
other people who stand in need of example, the necessity of obedience to
human law, by openly manifested resignation to the will of Providence,
who chastens and consoles, who bestows and takes away worldly wealth? I
confess that, after passing through a period of sneering incredulity,
I have come during my life here to recognize the value of the rites of
religion and of religious observances in the family, and to discern the
importance of household customs and domestic festivals. The family will
always be the basis of human society. Law and authority are first felt
there; there, at any rate, the habit of obedience should be learned.
Viewed in the light of all their consequences, the spirit of the family
and paternal authority are two elements but little developed as yet
in our new legislative system. Yet in the family, the commune, the
department, lies the whole of our country. The laws ought therefore to
be based on these three great divisions.

“In my opinion, marriages, the birth of infants, and the deaths of
heads of households cannot be surrounded with too much circumstance. The
secret of the strength of Catholicism, and of the deep root that it has
taken in the ordinary life of man, lies precisely in this--that it steps
in to invest every important event in his existence with a pomp that
is so naively touching, and so grand, whenever the priest rises to
the height of his mission and brings his office into harmony with the
sublimity of Christian doctrine.

“Once I looked upon the Catholic religion as a cleverly exploited mass
of prejudices and superstitions, which an intelligent civilization
ought to deal with according to its desserts. Here I have discovered its
political necessity and its usefulness as a moral agent; here, moreover,
I have come to understand its power, through a knowledge of the actual
thing which the word expresses. Religion means a bond or tie, and
certainly a cult--or, in other words, the outward and visible form of
religion is the only force that can bind the various elements of society
together and mould them into a permanent form. Lastly, it was also here
that I have felt the soothing influence that religion sheds over the
wounds of humanity, and (without going further into the subject) I have
seen how admirably it is suited to the fervid temperaments of southern
races.

“Let us take the road up the hillside,” said the doctor, interrupting
himself; “we must reach the plateau up there. Thence we shall look down
upon both valleys, and you will see a magnificent view. The plateau lies
three thousand feet above the level of the Mediterranean; we shall see
over Savoy and Dauphine, and the mountain ranges of the Lyonnais and
Rhone. We shall be in another commune, a hill commune, and on a farm
belonging to M. Gravier you will see the kind of scene of which I have
spoken. There the great events of life are invested with a solemnity
which comes up to my ideas. Mourning for the dead is vigorously
prescribed. Poor people will beg in order to purchase black clothing,
and no one refuses to give in such a case. There are few days in which
the widow does not mention her loss; she always speaks of it with tears,
and her grief is as deep after ten days of sorrow as on the morning
after her bereavement. Manners are patriarchal: the father’s authority
is unlimited, his word is law. He takes his meals sitting by himself at
the head of the table; his wife and children wait upon him, and those
about him never address him without using certain respectful forms of
speech, while every one remains standing and uncovered in his presence.
Men brought up in this atmosphere are conscious of their dignity; to my
way of thinking, it is a noble education to be brought up among
these customs. And, for the most part, they are upright, thrifty, and
hardworking people in this commune. The father of every family, when he
is old and past work, divides his property equally among his children,
and they support him; that is the usual way here. An old man of ninety,
in the last century, who had divided everything he had among his four
children, went to live with each in turn for three months in the year.
As he left the oldest to go to the home of a younger brother, one of
his friends asked him, ‘Well, are you satisfied with the arrangement?’
‘Faith! yes,’ the old man answered; ‘they have treated me as if I had
been their own child.’ That answer of his seemed so remarkable to an
officer then stationed at Grenoble, that he repeated it in more than one
Parisian salon. That officer was the celebrated moralist Vauvenargues,
and in this way the beautiful saying came to the knowledge of another
writer named Chamfort. Ah! still more forcible phrases are often struck
out among us, but they lack a historian worthy of them.”

“I have come across Moravians and Lollards in Bohemia and Hungary,” said
Genestas. “They are a kind of people something like your mountaineers,
good folk who endure the sufferings of war with angelic patience.”

“Men living under simple and natural conditions are bound to be almost
alike in all countries. Sincerity of life takes but one form. It is true
that a country life often extinguishes thought of a wider kind; but evil
propensities are weakened and good qualities are developed by it. In
fact, the fewer the numbers of the human beings collected together in a
place, the less crime, evil thinking, and general bad behavior will
be found in it. A pure atmosphere counts for a good deal in purity of
morals.”

The two horsemen, who had been climbing the stony road at a foot pace,
now reached the level space of which Benassis had spoken. It is a strip
of land lying round about the base of a lofty mountain peak, a bare
surface of rock with no growth of any kind upon it; deep clefts are
riven in its sheer inaccessible sides. The gray crest of the summit
towers above the ledge of fertile soil which lies around it, a domain
sometimes narrower, sometimes wider, and altogether about a hundred
acres in extent. Here, through a vast break in the line of the hills to
the south, the eye sees French Maurienne, Dauphine, the crags of Savoy,
and the far-off mountains of the Lyonnais. Genestas was gazing from this
point, over a land that lay far and wide in the spring sunlight, when
there arose the sound of a wailing cry.

“Let us go on,” said Benassis; “the wail for the dead has begun, that is
the name they give to this part of the funeral rites.”

On the western slope of the mountain peak, the commandant saw the
buildings belonging to a farm of some size. The whole place formed a
perfect square. The gateway consisted of a granite arch, impressive in
its solidity, which added to the old-world appearance of the buildings
with the ancient trees that stood about them, and the growth of plant
life on the roofs. The house itself lay at the farther end of the yard.
Barns, sheepfolds, stables, cowsheds, and other buildings lay on either
side, and in the midst was the great pool where the manure had been laid
to rot. On a thriving farm, such a yard as this is usually full of life
and movement, but to-day it was silent and deserted. The poultry was
shut up, the cattle were all in the byres, there was scarcely a sound of
animal life. Both stables and cowsheds had been carefully swept across
the yard. The perfect neatness which reigned in a place where everything
as a rule was in disorder, the absence of stirring life, the stillness
in so noisy a spot, the calm serenity of the hills, the deep shadow cast
by the towering peak--everything combined to make a strong impression on
the mind.

Genestas was accustomed to painful scenes, yet he could not help
shuddering as he saw a dozen men and women standing weeping outside the
door of the great hall. “_The master is dead!_” they wailed; the unison
of voices gave appalling effect to the words which they repeated twice
during the time required to cross the space between the gateway and the
farmhouse door. To this wailing lament succeeded moans from within the
house; the sound of a woman’s voice came through the casements.

“I dare not intrude upon such grief as this,” said Genestas to Benassis.

“I always go to visit a bereaved family,” the doctor answered, “either
to certify the death, or to see that no mischance caused by grief has
befallen the living. You need not hesitate to come with me. The scene is
impressive, and there will be such a great many people that no one will
notice your presence.”

As Genestas followed the doctor, he found, in fact, that the first room
was full of relations of the dead. They passed through the crowd and
stationed themselves at the door of a bedroom that opened out of
the great hall which served the whole family for a kitchen and a
sitting-room; the whole colony, it should rather be called, for the
great length of the table showed that some forty people lived in
the house. Benassis’ arrival interrupted the discourse of a tall,
simply-dressed woman, with thin locks of hair, who held the dead man’s
hand in hers in a way that spoke eloquently.

The dead master of the house had been arrayed in his best clothes, and
now lay stretched out cold and stiff upon the bed. They had drawn the
curtains aside; the thought of heaven seemed to brood over the quiet
face and the white hair--it was like the closing scene of a drama. On
either side of the bed stood the children and the nearest relations of
the husband and wife. These last stood in a line on either side; the
wife’s kin upon the left, and those of her husband on the right. Both
men and women were kneeling in prayer, and almost all of them were in
tears. Tall candles stood about the bed. The cure of the parish and his
assistants had taken their places in the middle of the room, beside the
bier. There was something tragical about the scene, with the head of the
family lying before the coffin, which was waiting to be closed down upon
him forever.

“Ah!” cried the widow, turning as she saw Benassis, “if the skill of
the best of men could not save you, my dear lord, it was because it was
ordained in heaven that you should precede me to the tomb! Yes, this
hand of yours, that used to press mine so kindly, is cold! I have lost
my dear helpmate for ever, and our household has lost its beloved head,
for truly you were the guide of us all! Alas! there is not one of those
who are weeping with me who has not known all the worth of your nature,
and felt the light of your soul, but I alone knew all the patience and
the kindness of your heart. Oh! my husband, my husband! must I bid you
farewell for ever? Farewell to you, our stay and support! Farewell to
you, my dear master! And we, your children,--for to each of us you gave
the same fatherly love,--all we, your children, have lost our father!”

The widow flung herself upon the dead body and clasped it in a tight
embrace, as if her kisses and the tears with which she covered it could
give it warmth again; during the pause, came the wail of the servants:

“_The master is dead!_”

“Yes,” the widow went on, “he is dead! Our beloved who gave us our
bread, who sowed and reaped for us, who watched over our happiness, who
guided us through life, who ruled so kindly among us. _Now_, I may speak
in his praise, and say that he never caused me the slightest sorrow; he
was good and strong and patient. Even while we were torturing him for
the sake of his health, so precious to us, ‘Let it be, children, it is
all no use,’ the dear lamb said, just in the same tone of voice with
which he had said, ‘Everything is all right, friends,’ only a few days
before. Ah! _grand Dieu_! a few days ago! A few days have been enough to
take away the gladness from our house and to darken our lives, to close
the eyes of the best, most upright, most revered of men. No one could
plow as he could. Night or day, he would go about over the mountains, he
feared nothing, and when he came back he had always a smile for his wife
and children. Ah! he was our beloved! It was dull here by the fireside
when _he_ was away, and our food lost all its relish. Oh! how will it be
now, when our guardian angel will be laid away under the earth, and we
shall never see him any more? Never any more, dear kinsfolk and friends;
never any more, my children! Yes, my children have lost their kind
father, our relations and friends have lost their good kinsman and
their trusty friend, the household has lost its master, and I have lost
everything!”

She took the hand of the dead again, and knelt, so that she might press
her face close to his as she kissed it. The servants’ cry, “_The master
is dead!_” was again repeated three times.

Just then the eldest son came to his mother to say, “The people from
Saint-Laurent have just come, mother; we want some wine for them.”

“Take the keys,” she said in a low tone, and in a different voice from
that in which she had just expressed her grief; “you are the master of
the house, my son; see that they receive the welcome that your father
would have given them; do not let them find any change.

“Let me have one more long look,” she went on. “But alas! my good
husband, you do not feel my presence now, I cannot bring back warmth to
you! I only wish that I could comfort you still, could let you know that
so long as I live you will dwell in the heart that you made glad, could
tell you that I shall be happy in the memory of my happiness--that
the dear thought of you will live on in this room. Yes, as long as God
spares me, this room shall be filled with memories of you. Hear my vow,
dear husband! Your couch shall always remain as it is now. I will sleep
in it no more, since you are dead; henceforward, while I live, it shall
be cold and empty. With you, I have lost all that makes a woman: her
master, husband, father, friend, companion, and helpmate: I have lost
all!”

“_The master is dead!_” the servants wailed. Others raised the cry, and
the lament became general. The widow took a pair of scissors that hung
at her waist, cut off her hair, and laid the locks in her husband’s
hand. Deep silence fell on them all.

“That act means that she will not marry again,” said Benassis; “this
determination was expected by many of the relatives.”

“Take it, dear lord!” she said; her emotion brought a tremor to her
voice that went to the hearts of all who heard her. “I have sworn to be
faithful; I give this pledge to you to keep in the grave. We shall thus
be united for ever, and through love of your children I will live on
among the family in whom you used to feel yourself young again. Oh! that
you could hear me, my husband! the pride and joy of my heart! Oh! that
you could know that all my power to live, now you are dead, will yet
come from you; for I shall live to carry out your sacred wishes and to
honor your memory.”

Benassis pressed Genestas’ hand as an invitation to follow him, and they
went out. By this time the first room was full of people who had come
from another mountain commune; all of them waited in meditative silence,
as if the sorrow and grief that brooded over the house had already
taken possession of them. As Benassis and the commandant crossed the
threshold, they overheard a few words that passed between one of the
newcomers and the eldest son of the late owner.

“Then when did he die?”

“Oh!” exclaimed the eldest son, a man of five-and-twenty years of age,
“I did not see him die. He asked for me, and I was not there!” His voice
was broken with sobs, but he went on: “He said to me the night before,
‘You must go over to the town, my boy, and pay our taxes; my funeral
will put that out of your minds, and we shall be behindhand, a thing
that has never happened before.’ It seemed the best thing to do, so
I went; and while I was gone, he died, and I never received his last
embrace. I have always been at his side, but he did not see me near him
at the last in my place where I had always been.”

“_The master is dead!_”

“Alas! he is dead, and I was not there to receive his last words and
his latest sigh. And what did the taxes matter? Would it not have been
better to lose all our money than to leave home just then? Could all
that we have make up to me for the loss of his last farewell. No. _Mon
Dieu!_ If _your_ father falls ill, Jean, do not go away and leave him,
or you will lay up a lifelong regret for yourself.”

“My friend,” said Genestas, “I have seen thousands of men die on the
battlefield; death did not wait to let their children bid them farewell;
take comfort, you are not the only one.”

“But a father who was such a good man!” he replied, bursting into fresh
tears.

Benassis took Genestas in the direction of the farm buildings.

“The funeral oration will only cease when the body has been laid in its
coffin,” said the doctor, “and the weeping woman’s language will grow
more vivid and impassioned all the while. But a woman only acquires
the right to speak in such a strain before so imposing an audience by a
blameless life. If the widow could reproach herself with the smallest
of shortcomings, she would not dare to utter a word; for if she did, she
would pronounce her own condemnation, she would be at the same time her
own accuser and judge. Is there not something sublime in this custom
which thus judges the living and the dead? They only begin to wear
mourning after a week has elapsed, when it is publicly worn at a meeting
of all the family. Their near relations spend the week with the widow
and children, to help them to set their affairs in order and to console
them. A family gathering at such a time produces a great effect on the
minds of the mourners; the consideration for others which possesses men
when they are brought into close contact acts as a restraint on violent
grief. On the last day, when the mourning garb has been assumed, a
solemn banquet is given, and their relations take leave of them. All
this is taken very seriously. Any one who was slack in fulfilling his
duties after the death of the head of a family would have no one at his
own funeral.”

The doctor had reached the cowhouse as he spoke; he opened the door and
made the commandant enter, that he might show it to him.

“All our cowhouses have been rebuilt after this pattern, captain. Look!
Is it not magnificent?”

Genestas could not help admiring the huge place. The cows and oxen stood
in two rows, with their tails towards the side walls, and their heads
in the middle of the shed. Access to the stalls was afforded by a fairly
wide space between them and the wall; you could see their horned heads
and shining eyes through the lattice work, so that it was easy for the
master to run his eyes over the cattle. The fodder was placed on some
staging erected above the stalls, so that it fell into the racks below
without waste of labor or material. There was a wide-paved space down
the centre, which was kept clean, and ventilated by a thorough draught
of air.

“In the winter time,” Benassis said, as he walked with Genestas down the
middle of the cowhouse, “both men and women do their work here together
in the evenings. The tables are set out here, and in this way the people
keep themselves warm without going to any expense. The sheep are housed
in the same way. You would not believe how quickly the beasts fall into
orderly ways. I have often wondered to see them come in; each knows her
proper place, and allows those who take precedence to pass in before
her. Look! there is just room enough in each stall to do the milking
and to rub the cattle down; and the floor slopes a little to facilitate
drainage.”

“One can judge of everything else from the sight of this cowhouse,” said
Genestas; “without flattery, these are great results indeed!”

“We have had some trouble to bring them about,” Benassis answered; “but
then, see what fine cattle they are!”

“They are splendid beasts certainly; you had good reason to praise them
to me,” answered Genestas.

“Now,” said the doctor, when he had mounted his horse and passed under
the gateway, “we are going over some of the newly cleared waste, and
through the corn land. I have christened this little corner of our
Commune, ‘La Beauce.’”

For about an hour they rode at a foot pace across fields in a state of
high cultivation, on which the soldier complimented the doctor; then
they came down the mountain side into the township again, talking
whenever the pace of their horses allowed them to do so. At last they
reached a narrow glen, down which they rode into the main valley.

“I promised yesterday,” Benassis said to Genestas, “to show you one of
the two soldiers who left the army and came back to us after the fall of
Napoleon. We shall find him somewhere hereabouts, if I am not mistaken.
The mountain streams flow into a sort of natural reservoir or tarn up
here; the earth they bring down has silted it up, and he is engaged in
clearing it out. But if you are to take any interest in the man, I must
tell you his history. His name is Gondrin. He was only eighteen years
old when he was drawn in the great conscription of 1792, and drafted
into a corps of gunners. He served as a private soldier in Napoleon’s
campaigns in Italy, followed him to Egypt, and came back from the East
after the Peace of Amiens. In the time of the Empire he was incorporated
in the Pontoon Troop of the Guard, and was constantly on active service
in Germany, lastly the poor fellow made the Russian campaign.”

“We are brothers-in-arms then, to some extent,” said Genestas; “I have
made the same campaigns. Only an iron frame would stand the tricks
played by so many different climates. My word for it, those who are
still standing on their stumps after marching over Italy, Egypt,
Germany, Portugal, and Russia must have applied to Providence and taken
out a patent for living.”

“Just so, you will see a solid fragment of a man,” answered Benassis.
“You know all about the Retreat from Moscow; it is useless to tell you
about it. This man I have told you of is one of the pontooners of the
Beresina; he helped to construct the bridge by which the army made the
passage, and stood waist-deep in water to drive in the first piles.
General Eble, who was in command of the pontooners, could only find
forty-two men who were plucky enough, in Gondrin’s phrase, to tackle
that business. The general himself came down to the stream to hearten
and cheer the men, promising each of them a pension of a thousand francs
and the Cross of the Legion of Honor. The first who went down into the
Beresina had his leg taken off by a block of ice, and the man himself
was washed away; but you will better understand the difficulty of the
task when you hear the end of the story. Of the forty-two volunteers,
Gondrin is the only one alive to-day. Thirty-nine of them lost their
lives in the Beresina, and the two others died miserably in a Polish
hospital.

“The poor fellow himself only returned from Wilna in 1814, to find the
Bourbons restored to power. General Eble (of whom Gondrin cannot speak
without tears in his eyes) was dead. The pontooner was deaf, and his
health was shattered; and as he could neither read nor write, he found
no one left to help him or to plead his cause. He begged his way to
Paris, and while there made application at the War Office, not for the
thousand francs of extra pension which had been promised to him, nor yet
for the Cross of the Legion of Honor, but only for the bare pension due
to him after twenty-two years of service, and I do not know how many
campaigns. He did not obtain his pension or his traveling expenses;
he did not even receive his arrears of pay. He spent a year in making
fruitless solicitations, holding out his hands in vain to those whom he
had saved; and at the end of it he came back here, sorely disheartened
but resigned to his fate. This hero unknown to fame does draining work
on the land, for which he is paid ten sous the fathom. He is accustomed
to working in a marshy soil, and so, as he says, he gets jobs which no
one else cares to take. He can make about three francs a day by clearing
out ponds, or draining meadows that lie under water. His deafness makes
him seem surly, and he is not naturally inclined to say very much, but
there is a good deal in him.

“We are very good friends. He dines with me on the day of Austerlitz,
on the Emperor’s birthday, and on the anniversary of the disaster at
Waterloo, and during the dessert he always receives a napoleon to pay
for his wine very quarter. Every one in the Commune shares in my feeling
of respect for him; if he would allow them to support him, nothing would
please them better. At every house to which he goes the people follow my
example, and show their esteem by asking him to dine with them. It is a
feeling of pride that leads him to work, and it is only as a portrait of
the Emperor that he can be induced to take my twenty-franc piece. He has
been deeply wounded by the injustice that has been done to him; but I
think regret for the Cross is greater than the desire for his pension.

“He has one great consolation. After the bridges had been constructed
across the Beresina, General Eble presented such of the pontooners
as were not disabled to the Emperor, and Napoleon embraced poor
Gondrin--perhaps but for that accolade he would have died ere now. This
memory and the hope that some day Napoleon will return are all that
Gondrin lives by. Nothing will ever persuade him that Napoleon is dead,
and so convinced is he that the Emperor’s captivity is wholly and solely
due to the English, that I believe he would be ready on the slightest
pretext to take the life of the best-natured alderman that ever traveled
for pleasure in foreign parts.”

“Let us go on as fast as possible!” cried Genestas. He had listened
to the doctor’s story with rapt attention, and now seemed to recover
consciousness of his surroundings. “Let us hurry! I long to see that
man!”

Both of them put their horses to a gallop.

“The other soldier that I spoke of,” Benassis went on, “is another of
those men of iron who have knocked about everywhere with our armies.
His life, like that of all French soldiers, has been made up of bullets,
sabre strokes, and victories; he has had a very rough time of it, and
has only worn the woolen epaulettes. He has a fanatical affection for
Napoleon, who conferred the Cross upon him on the field of Valontina. He
is of a jovial turn of mind, and like a genuine Dauphinois, has always
looked after his own interests, has his pension, and the honors of the
Legion. Goguelat is his name. He was an infantry man, who exchanged into
the Guard in 1812. He is Gondrin’s better half, so to speak, for the two
have taken up house together. They both lodge with a peddler’s widow,
and make over their money to her. She is a kind soul, who boards them
and looks after them, and their clothes as if they were her children.

“In his quality of local postman, Goguelat carries all the news of the
countryside, and a good deal of practice acquired in this way has made
him an orator in great request at up-sittings, and the champion teller
of stories in the district. Gondrin looks upon him as a very knowing
fellow, and something of a wit; and whenever Goguelat talks about
Napoleon, his comrade seems to understand what he is saying from the
movement of his lips. There will be an up-sitting (as they call it)
in one of my barns to-night. If these two come over to it, and we can
manage to see without being seen, I shall treat you to a view of the
spectacle. But here we are, close to the ditch, and I do not see my
friend the pontooner.”

The doctor and the commandant looked everywhere about them; Gondrin’s
soldier’s coat lay there beside a heap of black mud, and his
wheelbarrow, spade, and pickaxe were visible, but there was no sign of
the man himself along the various pebbly watercourses, for the wayward
mountain streams had hollowed out channels that were almost overgrown
with low bushes.

“He cannot be so very far away. Gondrin! Where are you?” shouted
Benassis.

Genestas first saw the curling smoke from a tobacco pipe rise among the
brushwood on a bank of rubbish not far away. He pointed it out to the
doctor, who shouted again. The old pontooner raised his head at this,
recognized the mayor, and came towards them down a little pathway.

“Well, old friend,” said Benassis, making a sort of speaking-trumpet
with his hand. “Here is a comrade of yours, who was out in Egypt, come
to see you.”

Gondrin raised is face at once and gave Genestas a swift, keen, and
searching look, one of those glances by which old soldiers are wont at
once to take the measure of any impending danger. He saw the red ribbon
that the commandant wore, and made a silent and respectful military
salute.

“If the Little Corporal were alive,” the officer cried, “you would have
the Cross of the Legion of Honor and a handsome pension besides, for
every man who wore epaulettes on the other side of the river owed his
life to you on the 1st of October 1812. But I am not the Minister of
War, my friend,” the commandant added as he dismounted, and with a
sudden rush of feeling he grasped the laborer’s hand.

The old pontooner drew himself up at the words, he knocked the ashes
from his pipe, and put it in his pocket.

“I only did my duty, sir,” he said, with his head bent down; “but others
have not done their duty by me. They asked for my papers! Why, the
Twenty-ninth Bulletin, I told them, must do instead of my papers!”

“But you must make another application, comrade. You are bound to have
justice done you in these days, if influence is brought to bear in the
right quarter.”

“Justice!” cried the veteran. The doctor and the commandant shuddered at
the tone in which he spoke.

In the brief pause that followed, both the horsemen looked at the man
before them, who seemed like a fragment of the wreck of great armies
which Napoleon had filled with men of bronze sought out from among three
generations. Gondrin was certainly a splendid specimen of that seemingly
indestructible mass of men which might be cut to pieces but never gave
way. The old man was scarcely five feet high, wide across the shoulders,
and broad-chested; his face was sunburned, furrowed with deep wrinkles,
but the outlines were still firm in spite of the hollows in it, and
one could see even now that it was the face of a soldier. It was a
rough-hewn countenance, his forehead seemed like a block of granite;
but there was a weary expression about his face, and the gray hairs
hung scantily about his head, as if life were waning there already.
Everything about him indicated unusual strength; his arms were covered
thickly with hair, and so was the chest, which was visible through the
opening of his coarse shirt. In spite of his almost crooked legs, he
held himself firm and erect, as if nothing could shake him.

“Justice,” he said once more; “there will never be justice for the like
of us. We cannot send bailiffs to the Government to demand our dues for
us; and as the wallet must be filled somehow,” he said, striking his
stomach, “we cannot afford to wait. Moreover, these gentry who lead snug
lives in government offices may talk and talk, but their words are not
good to eat, so I have come back here again to draw my pay out of the
commonalty,” he said, striking the mud with his spade.

“Things must not be left in that way, old comrade,” said Genestas. “I
owe my life to you, and it would be ungrateful of me if I did not lend
you a hand. I have not forgotten the passage over the bridges in the
Beresina, and it is fresh in the memories of some brave fellows of my
acquaintance; they will back me up, and the nation shall give you the
recognition you deserve.”

“You will be called a Bonapartist! Please do not meddle in the matter,
sir. I have gone to the rear now, and I have dropped into my hole here
like a spent bullet. But after riding on camels through the desert,
and drinking my glass by the fireside in Moscow, I never thought that I
should come back to die here beneath the trees that my father planted,”
 and he began to work again.

“Poor old man!” said Genestas, as they turned to go. “I should do the
same if I were in his place; we have lost our father. Everything seems
dark to me now that I have seen that man’s hopelessness,” he went on,
addressing Benassis; “he does not know how much I am interested in him,
and he will think that I am one of those gilded rascals who cannot feel
for a soldier’s sufferings.”

He turned quickly and went back, grasped the veteran’s hand, and spoke
loudly in his ear:

“I swear by the Cross I wear--the Cross of Honor it used to be--that I
will do all that man can do to obtain your pension for you; even if I
have to swallow a dozen refusals from the minister, and to petition the
king and the dauphin and the whole shop!”

Old Gondrin quivered as he heard the words. He looked hard at Genestas
and said, “Haven’t you served in the ranks?” The commandant nodded. The
pontooner wiped his hand and took that of Genestas, which he grasped
warmly and said:

“I made the army a present of my life, general, when I waded out into
the river yonder, and if I am still alive, it is all so much to the
good. One moment! Do you care to see to the bottom of it? Well, then,
ever since _somebody_ was pulled down from his place, I have ceased
to care about anything. And, after all,” he went on cheerfully, as he
pointed to the land, “they have made over twenty thousand francs to me
here, and I am taking it out in detail, as _he_ used to say!”

“Well, then, comrade,” said Genestas, touched by the grandeur of this
forgiveness, “at least you shall have the only thing that you cannot
prevent me from giving to you, here below.” The commandant tapped his
heart, looked once more at the old pontooner, mounted his horse again,
and went his way side by side with Benassis.

“Such cruelty as this on the part of the government foments the strife
between rich and poor,” said the doctor. “People who exercise a little
brief authority have never given a serious thought to the consequences
that must follow an act of injustice done to a man of the people. It is
true that a poor man who needs must work for his daily bread cannot long
keep up the struggle; but he can talk, and his words find an echo in
every sufferer’s heart, so that one bad case of this kind is multiplied,
for every one who hears of it feels it as a personal wrong, and the
leaven works. Even this is not so serious, but something far worse comes
of it. Among the people, these causes of injustice bring about a chronic
state of smothered hatred for their social superiors. The middle class
becomes the poor man’s enemy; they lie without the bounds of his moral
code, he tells lies to them and robs them without scruple; indeed, theft
ceases to be a crime or a misdemeanor, and is looked upon as an act of
vengeance.

“When an official, who ought to see that the poor have justice done
them, uses them ill and cheats them of their due, how can we expect the
poor starving wretches to bear their troubles meekly and to respect the
rights of property? It makes me shudder to think that some understrapper
whose business it is to dust papers in a government office, has pocketed
Gondrin’s promised thousand francs of pension. And yet there are folk
who, never having measured the excess of the people’s sufferings, accuse
the people of excess in the day of their vengeance! When a government
has done more harm than good to individuals, its further existence
depends on the merest accident, the masses square the account after
their fashion by upsetting it. A statesman ought always to imagine
Justice with the poor at her feet, for justice was only invented for the
poor.”

When they had come within the compass of the township, Benassis saw
two people walking along the road in front of them, and turned to his
companion, who had been absorbed for some time in thought.

“You have seen a veteran soldier resigned to his life of wretchedness,
and now you are about to see an old agricultural laborer who is
submitting to the same lot. The man there ahead of us has dug and sown
and toiled for others all his life.”

Genestas looked and saw an old laborer making his way along the road, in
company with an aged woman. He seemed to be afflicted with some form
of sciatica, and limped painfully along. His feet were encased in a
wretched pair of sabots, and a sort of wallet hung over his shoulder.
Several tools lay in the bottom of the bag; their handles, blackened
with long use and the sweat of toil, rattled audibly together; while the
other end of the wallet behind his shoulder held bread, some walnuts,
and a few fresh onions. His legs seemed to be warped, as it

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