"Of what the Shopman is going to do," answered the steward, humbly. "He started for the Prefecture in a rage."

"Let him go! If the Montcornets and their kind didn't use wheels, what would become of the carriage-makers?"

"I shall bring you three thousand francs to-night," said Sibilet, "but you ought to make over some of your maturing mortgages to me,--say, one or two that would secure to me good lots of land."

"Well, there's that of Courtecuisse. I myself want to be easy on him because he is the best shot in the canton; but if I make over his mortgage to you, you will seem to be hara.s.sing him on the Shopman's account, and that will be killing two birds with one stone; when Courtecuisse finds himself a beggar, like Fourchon, he'll be capable of anything. Courtecuisse has ruined himself on the Bachelerie; he has cultivated all the land, and trained fruit on the walls. The little property is now worth four thousand francs, and the count will gladly pay you that to get possession of the three acres that jut right into his land. If Courtecuisse were not such an idle hound he could have paid his interest with the game he might have killed there."

"Well, transfer the mortgage to me, and I'll make my b.u.t.ter out of it; the count shall buy the three acres, and I shall get the house and garden for nothing."

"What are you going to give me out of it?"

"Good heavens! you'd milk an ox!" exclaimed Sibilet,--"when I have just done you such a service, too. I have at last got the Shopman to enforce the laws about gleaning--"

"Have you, my dear fellow?" said Rigou, who a few days earlier had suggested this means of exasperating the peasantry to Sibilet, telling him to advise the general to try it. "Then we've got him; he's lost! But it isn't enough to hold him with one string; we must wind it round and round him like a roll of tobacco. Slip the bolts of the door, my lad; tell my wife to bring my coffee and the liqueurs, and tell Jean to harness up. I'm off to Soulanges; will see you to-night!--Ah! Vaudoyer, good afternoon," said the late mayor as his former field-keeper entered the room. "What's the news?"

Vaudoyer related the talk which had just taken place at the tavern, and asked Rigou's opinion as to the legality of the rules which the general thought of enforcing.

"He has the law with him," said Rigou, curtly. "We have a hard landlord; the Abbe Brossette is a malignant priest; he advises all such measures because you don't go to ma.s.s, you miserable unbelievers. I go; there's a G.o.d, I tell you. You peasants will have to bear everything, for the Shopman will always get the better of you--"

"We shall glean," said Vaudoyer, in that determined tone which characterizes Burgundians.

"Without a certificate of pauperism?" asked the usurer. "They say the Shopman has gone to the Prefecture to ask for troops so as to force you to keep the law."

"We shall glean as we have always gleaned," repeated Vaudoyer.

"Well, glean then! Monsieur Sarcus will decide whether you have the right to," said Rigou, seeming to promise the help of the justice of the peace.

"We shall glean, and we shall do it in force, or Burgundy won't be Burgundy any longer," said Vaudoyer. "If the gendarmes have sabres we have scythes, and we'll see what comes of it!"

At half-past four o'clock the great green gate of the former parsonage turned on its hinges, and the bay horse, led by Jean, was brought round to the front door. Madame Rigou and Annette came out on the steps and looked at the little wicker carriage, painted green, with a leathern hood, where their lord and master was comfortably seated on good cushions.

"Don't be late home, monsieur," said Annette, with a little pout.

The village folk, already informed of the measures the general proposed to take, were at their doors or standing in the main street as Rigou drove by, believing that he was going to Soulanges in their defence.

"Well, Madame Courtecuisse, so our mayor is on his way to protect us,"

remarked an old woman as she knitted; the question of depredating in the forest was of great interest to her, for her husband sold the stolen wood at Soulanges.

"Ah! the good man, his heart bleeds to see the way we are treated; he is as unhappy as we are about it," replied the poor woman, who trembled at the very name of her husband's creditor, and praised him out of fear.

"And he himself, too,--they've shamefully ill-used him! Good-day, Monsieur Rigou," said the old knitter to the usurer, who bowed to her and to his debtor's wife.

As Rigou crossed the Thune, fordable at all seasons, Tonsard came out of the tavern and met him on the high-road.

"Well, Pere Rigou," he said, "so the Shopman means to make dogs of us?"

"We'll see about that," said the usurer, whipping up his horse.

"He'll protect us," said Tonsard, turning to a group of women and children who were near him.

"Rigou is thinking as much about you as a cook thinks of the gudgeons he is frying in his pan," called out Fourchon.

"Take the clapper out of your throat when you are drunk," said Mouche, pulling his grandfather by the blouse, and tumbling him down on a bank under a poplar tree. "If that hound of a mayor heard you say that, he'd never buy any more of your tales."

The truth was that Rigou was hurrying to Soulanges in consequence of the warning given him by the steward of Les Aigues, which, in his heart, he regarded as threatening the secret coalition of the valley.

PART II

CHAPTER I. THE LEADING SOCIETY OF SOULANGES

About six kilometres (speaking legally) from Blangy, and at the same distance from Ville-aux-Fayes, on an elevation radiating from the long hillside at the foot of which flows the Avonne, stands the little town of Soulanges, surnamed La Jolie, with, perhaps, more right to that t.i.tle than Mantes.

At the foot of the hill, the Thune broadens over a clay bottom to a s.p.a.ce of some seventy acres, at the end of which the Soulanges mills, placed on numerous little islets, present as graceful a group of buildings as any landscape architect could devise. After watering the park of Soulanges, where it feeds various other streams and artificial lakes, the Thune falls into the Avonne through a fine broad channel.

The chateau of Soulanges, rebuilt under Louis XIV. from designs of Jules Mansart, and one of the finest in Burgundy, stands facing the town; so that Soulanges and its chateau mutually present to each other a charming and even elegant vista. The main road winds between the town and the pond, called by the country people, rather pompously, the lake of Soulanges.

The little town is one of those natural compositions which are extremely rare in France, where _prettiness_ of its own kind is absolutely wanting. Here you would indeed find, as Blondet said in his letter, the charm of Switzerland, the prettiness of the environs of Neuf-chatel; while the bright vineyards which encircle Soulanges complete the resemblance,--leaving out, be it said, the Alps and the Jura. The streets, placed one above another on the slope of the hill, have but few houses; for each house stands in its own garden, which produces a ma.s.s of greenery rarely seen in a town. The roofs, red or blue, rising among flower-gardens, trees, and trellised terraces, present an harmonious variety of aspects.

The church, an old Middle-Age structure, built of stone, thanks to the munificence of the lords of Soulanges, who reserved for themselves first a chapel near the chancel, then a crypt as their necropolis, has, by way of portal, an immense arcade, like that of the church at Lonjumeau, and is bordered by flower-beds adorned with statues, and flanked on either side by columns with niches, which terminate in spires. This portal, often seen in churches of the same period when chance has saved them from the ravages of Calvinism, is surmounted by a triglyph, above which stands a statue of the Virgin holding the infant Jesus. The sides of the structure are externally of five arches, defined by stone ribs and lighted by windows with small panes. The apse rests on arched abutments that are worthy of a cathedral. The clock-tower, placed in a transept of the cross, is square and surmounted by a belfry. The church can be seen from a great distance, for it stands at the top of the great square, at the lower end of which the high-road pa.s.ses through the town.

This square, large for the size of the town, is surrounded by very original buildings, all of different epochs. Many, half-wood, half-brick, with their timbers faced with slate, date back to the Middle Ages. Others, of stone, with balconies, show the form of gable so dear to our ancestors, which belongs to the twelfth century. Several charm the eye with those old projecting beams, carved with grotesque faces, which form the roof of a sort of shed, and recall the days when the middle cla.s.ses were exclusively commercial. The finest house among them was that of the chief magistrate of former days,--a house with a sculptured front on a line with the church, to which it forms a fine accompaniment. Sold as national property, it was bought in by the commune, which turned it into a town-hall and court-house, where Monsieur Sarcus had presided ever since the establishment of munic.i.p.al judges.

This slight sketch will give an idea of the square of Soulanges, adorned in the centre with a charming fountain brought from Italy in 1520 by the Marechal de Soulanges, which was not unworthy of a great capital.

An unfailing jet of water, coming from a spring higher up the hill, was shed by four Cupids in white marble, bearing sh.e.l.ls in their arms and baskets of grapes upon their heads.

Literary travellers who may pa.s.s this way (should any such follow Emile Blondet) might imagine the spot to have inspired Moliere and the Spanish drama, which held its footing so long on French boards, showing that comedy is native to warm countries where so much of life is pa.s.sed in the public streets. The square of Soulanges is all the more a reminder of that cla.s.sic stage because the two princ.i.p.al streets, opening just on a line with the fountain, afford the exit and entrances so necessary for the dramatic masters and valets whose business it is either to meet or to avoid each other. At the corner of one of these streets, called the rue de la Fontaine, shone the notarial escutcheon of Maitre Lupin. The houses of Messieurs Sarcus, Guerbet the collector, Brunet, Gourdon, clerk of the court, and that of his brother the doctor, also that of old Monsieur Gendrin-Vatebled, the keeper of the forests and streams,--all these houses, kept with extreme neatness by their owners, who held firmly to the flattering surname of their native town, stand in the neighborhood of the square and form the aristocratic quarter of Soulanges.

The house of Madame Soudry--for the powerful individuality of Mademoiselle Laguerre's former waiting-maid took the lead of her husband in the community--was modern, having been built by a rich wine-merchant, born in Soulanges, who, after making his money in Paris, returned there in 1793 to buy wheat for his native town. He was slain as an "accapareur," a monopolist, by the populace, instigated by a mason, the uncle of G.o.dain, with whom he had had some quarrel about the building of his ambitious house. The settlement of his estate, sharply contested by collateral heirs, dragged slowly along until, in 1798, Soudry, who had then returned to Soulanges, was able to buy the wine-merchant's palace for three thousand francs in specie. He then let it, in the first instance, to the government for the headquarters of the gendarmerie. In 1811 Mademoiselle Cochet, whom Soudry consulted about all his affairs, strongly objected to the renewal of the lease, making the house uninhabitable, she declared, with barracks. The town of Soulanges, a.s.sisted by the department, then erected a building for the gendarmerie in a street running at right angles from the town-hall. Thereupon Soudry cleaned up his house and restored its primitive l.u.s.tre, not a little dimmed by the stabling of horses and the occupancy of gendarmes.

The house, only one story high, with projecting windows in the roof, has a view on three sides; one to the square, another to a lake, the third to a garden. The fourth side looks on a courtyard which separates the Soudrys from the adjoining house occupied by a grocer named Wattebled, a man of the SECOND-CLa.s.s society of Soulanges, father of the beautiful Madame Plissoud, of whom we shall presently have occasion to speak.

All little towns have a renowned beauty, just as they have a Socquard and a Cafe de la Paix.

It will be apparent to every one that the frontage of the Soudry mansion on the lake must have a terraced garden confined by a stone bal.u.s.trade which overlooks both the lake and the main road. A flight of steps leads down from the terrace to the road, and on it an orange-tree, a pomegranate, a myrtle, and other ornamental shrubs are placed, necessitating a greenhouse. On the side toward the square the house is entered from a portico raised several steps above the level of the street. According to the custom of small towns the gate of the courtyard, used only for the service of the house or for any unusual arrival, was seldom opened. Visitors, who mostly came on foot, entered by the portico.

The style of the Hotel Soudry is plain. The courses are indicated by projecting lines; the windows are framed by mouldings alternately broad and slender, like those of the Gabriel and Perronnet pavilion in the place Louis XV. These ornaments in so small a town give a certain solid and monumental air to the building which has become celebrated.

Opposite to this house, in another angle of the square stands the famous Cafe de la Paix, the characteristics of which, together with the fascinations of its Tivoli, will require, somewhat later, a less succinct description than that we have given of the Soudry mansion.

Rigou very seldom came to Soulanges; everybody was in the habit of going to him,--Lupin and Gaubertin, Soudry and Gendrin,--so much were they afraid of him. But we shall presently understand why any educated man, such as the ex-Benedictine, would have done as Rigou did, and kept away from the little town, after reading the following sketch of the personages who composed what was called in those parts "the leading society of Soulanges."