Works of Honore De Balzac, page 1046
“I have heard of Saint Aristides for some time,” said the bishop, smiling. “If I have left his light under a bushel I may have been unjust or prejudiced. Your liberals are always crying up Monsieur Bonnet as though he belonged to their party. I should like to judge for myself of this rural apostle. Go at once, messieurs, to Monsieur de Grandville, and ask for the reprieve; I will await his answer before sending our dear Abbe Gabriel to Montegnac to fetch the saintly man. We will give his Blessedness a chance to do miracles.”
As he listened to these words of the prelate the Abbe Dutheil reddened; but he would not allow himself to take notice of the incivilities of the speech. The two grand vicars bowed in silence and withdrew, leaving the prelate alone with his secretary.
“The secrets of the confession we are so anxious to obtain from the unhappy man himself are no doubt buried there,” said the bishop to his young abbe, pointing to the shadow of the poplars where it fell on a lonely house between the island and Saint-Etienne.
“I have always thought so,” replied Gabriel. “I am not a judge and I will not be an informer; but if I were a magistrate I should have known the name of that woman who trembles at every sound, at every word, while forced to keep her features calm and serene under pain of going to the scaffold with her lover. She has nothing to fear, however. I have seen the man; he will carry the secret of that passionate love to the grave with him.”
“Ah! you sly fellow!” said the bishop, twisting the ear of his secretary as he motioned to the space between the island and the suburb of Saint-Etienne which the last gleams of the setting sun were illuminating, and on which the young abbe’s eyes were fixed. “That is the place where justice should have searched; don’t you think so?”
“I went to see the criminal to try the effect of my suspicions upon him,” replied the young man. “I could not speak them out, for fear of compromising the woman for whose sake he dies.”
“Yes,” said the bishop, “we will hold our tongues; we are not the servants of human justice. One head is enough. Besides, sooner or later, the secret will be given to the Church.”
The perspicacity which the habit of meditation gives to priests is far superior to that of lawyers or the police. By dint of contemplating from those terraces the scene of the crime, the prelate and his secretary had ended by perceiving circumstances unseen by others, in spite of all the investigations before and during the trial of the case.
Monsieur de Grandville was playing whist at Madame Graslin’s house; it was necessary to await his return; the bishop did not therefore receive his answer till nearly midnight. The Abbe Gabriel, to whom the prelate lent his carriage, started at two in the morning for Montegnac. This region, which begins about twenty-five miles from the town, is situated in that part of the Limousin which lies at the base of the mountains of the Correze and follows the line of the Creuze. The young abbe left Limoges all heaving with expectation of the spectacle on the morrow, and still unaware that it would not take place.
VII. MONTEGNAC
Priests and religious devotees have a tendency in the matter of payments to keep strictly to the letter of the law. Is this from poverty, or from the selfishness to which their isolation condemns them, thus encouraging the natural inclination of all men to avarice; or is it from a conscientious parsimony which saves all it can for deeds of charity? Each nature will give a different answer to this question. The difficulty of putting the hand into the pocket, sometimes concealed by a gracious kindliness, oftener unreservedly exhibited, is more particularly noticeable in travelling. Gabriel de Rastignac, the prettiest youth who had served before the altar for many a long day, gave only a thirty-sous pour-boire to the postilion. Consequently he travelled slowly. Postilions drive bishops and other clergy with the utmost care when they merely double the legal wage, and they run no risk of damaging the episcopal carriage for any such sum, fearing, they might say, to get themselves into trouble. The Abbe Gabriel, who was travelling alone for the first time, said, at each relay, in his dulcet voice: —
“Pray go faster, postilion.”
“We ply the whip,” replied an old postilion, “according to how the traveller plies his finger and thumb.”
The young abbe flung himself back into a corner of the carriage unable to comprehend that answer. To occupy the time he began to study the country through which he was passing, making several mental excursions on foot among the hills through which the road winds between Bordeaux and Lyon.
About fifteen miles from Limoges the landscape, losing the graceful flow of the Vienne through the undulating meadows of the Limousin, which in certain places remind one of Switzerland, especially about Saint-Leonard, takes on a harsh and melancholy aspect. Here we come upon vast tracts of uncultivated land, sandy plains without herbage, hemmed in on the horizon by the summits of the Correze. These mountains have neither the abrupt rise of the Alpine ranges nor their splendid ridges; neither the warm gorges and desolate peaks of the Appenines, nor the picturesque grandeur of the Pyrenees. Their undulating slopes, due to the action of water, prove the subsidence of some great natural catastrophe in which the floods retired slowly. This characteristic, common to most of the earth convulsions in France, has perhaps contributed, together with the climate, to the epitaph of douce bestowed by all Europe on our sunny France.
Though this abrupt transition from the smiling landscapes of the Limousin to the sterner aspects of La Marche and Auvergne may offer to the thinker and the poet, as he passes them on his way, an image of the Infinite, that terror of certain minds; though it incites to revelry the woman of the world, bored as she travels luxuriously in her carriage, — to the inhabitants of this region Nature is cruel, savage, and without resources. The soil of these great gray plains is thankless. The vicinity of a capital town could alone reproduce the miracle worked in Brie during the last two centuries. Here, however, not only is a town lacking, but also the great residences which sometimes give life to these hopeless deserts, where civilization languishes, where the agriculturist sees only barrenness, and the traveller finds not a single inn, nor that which, perchance, he is there to seek, — the picturesque.
Great minds, however, do not dislike these barren wastes, necessary shadows in Nature’s vast picture. Quite recently Fenimore Cooper has magnificently developed with his melancholy genius the poesy of such solitudes, in his “Prairie.” These regions, unknown to botanists, covered by mineral refuse, round pebbles, and a sterile soil, cast defiance to civilization. France should adopt the only solution to these difficulties, as the British have done in Scotland, where patient, heroic agriculture has changed the arid wastes into fertile farms. Left in their savage and primitive state these uncultivated social and natural wastes give birth to discouragement, laziness, weakness resulting from poor food, and crime when needs become importunate.
These few words present the past history of Montegnac. What could be done in that great tract of barren land, neglected by the government, abandoned by the nobility, useless to industry, — what but war against society which disregarded its duty? Consequently, the inhabitants of Montegnac lived to a recent period, as the Highlands of Scotland lived in former times, by murder and rapine. From the mere aspect of this region a thinking man would understand how, twenty years earlier, the inhabitants were at war with society. The great upland plain, flanked on one side by the valley of the Vienne, on the other by the charming valleys of La Marche, then by Auvergne, and bounded by the mountains of the Correze, is like (agriculture apart) the plateau of La Beauce, which separates the basin of the Loire from that of the Seine, also like those of Touraine and Berry, and many other of the great upland plains which are cut like facets on the surface of France and are numerous enough to claim the attention of the wisest administrators. It is amazing that while complaint is made of the influx of population to the social centres, the government does not employ the natural remedy of redeeming a region where, as statistics show, there are many million acres of waste land, certain parts of which, especially in Berry, have a soil from seven to eight feet deep.
Many of these plains which might be covered by villages and made splendidly productive belong to obstinate communes, the authorities of which refuse to sell to those who would develop them, merely to keep the right to pasture cows upon them! On all these useless, unproductive lands is written the word “Incapacity.” All soils have some special fertility of their own. Arms and wills are ready; the thing lacking is a sense of duty combined with talent on the part of the government. In France, up to the present time, these upland plains have been sacrificed to the valleys; the government has chosen to give all its help to those regions of country which can take care of themselves.
Most of these luckless uplands are without water, the first essential for production. The mists which ought to fertilize the gray, dead soil by discharging oxygen upon it, sweep across it rapidly, driven by the wind, for want of trees which might arrest them and so obtain their nourishment. Merely to plant trees in such a region would be carrying a gospel to it. Separated from the nearest town or city by a distance as insurmountable to poor folk as though a desert lay between them, with no means of reaching a market for their products (if they produced anything), close to an unexplored forest which supplied them with wood and the uncertain livelihood of poaching, the inhabitants often suffered from hunger during the winters. The soil not being suitable for wheat, and the unfortunate peasantry having neither cattle of any kind nor farming implements, they lived for the most part on chestnuts.
Any one who has studied zoological productions in a museum, or become personally aware of the indescribable depression caused by the brown tones of all European products, will understand how the constant sight of these gray, arid plains must have affected the moral nature of the inhabitants, through the desolate sense of utter barrenness which they present to the eye. There, in those dismal regions, is neither coolness nor brightness, nor shade nor contrast, — none of all those ideas and spectacles of Nature which awaken and rejoice the heart; even a stunted apple-tree would be hailed as a friend.
A country road, recently made, runs through the centre of this great plain, and meets the high-road. Upon it, at a distance of some fifteen miles from the high-road, stands Montegnac, at the foot of a hill, as its name designates, the chief town of a canton or district in the Haute-Vienne. The hill is part of Montegnac, which thus unites a mountainous scenery with that of the plains. This district is a miniature Scotland, with its lowlands and highlands. Behind the hill, at the foot of which lies the village, rises, at a distance of about three miles, the first peak of the Correze mountains. The space between is covered by the great forest of Montegnac, which clothes the hill, extends over the valley, and along the slopes of the mountain (though these are bare in some places), continuing as far as the highway to Aubusson, where it diminishes to a point near a steep embankment on that road. This embankment commands a ravine through which the post-road between Bordeaux and Lyon passes. Travellers, either afoot or in carriages, were often stopped in the depths of this dangerous gorge by highwaymen, whose deeds of violence went unpunished, for the site favored them; they could instantly disappear, by ways known to them alone, into the inaccessible parts of the forest.
Such a region was naturally out of reach of law. No one now travelled through it. Without circulation, neither commerce, industry, exchange of ideas, nor any of the means to wealth, can exist; the material triumphs of civilization are always the result of the application of primitive ideas. Thought is invariably the point of departure and the goal of all social existence. The history of Montegnac is a proof of that axiom of social science. When at last the administration was able to concern itself with the needs and the material prosperity of this region of country, it cut down this strip of forest, and stationed a detachment of gendarmerie near the ravine, which escorted the mail-coaches between the two relays; but, to the shame of the gendarmerie be it said, it was the gospel, and not the sword, the rector Monsieur Bonnet, and not Corporal Chervin, who won a civil victory by changing the morals of a population. This priest, filled with Christian tenderness for the poor, hapless region, attempted to regenerate it, and succeeded in the attempt.
After travelling for about an hour over these plains, alternately stony and dusty, where the partridges flocked in tranquil coveys, their wings whirring with a dull, heavy sound as the carriage came toward them, the Abbe Gabriel, like all other travellers on the same road, saw with satisfaction the roofs of Montegnac in the distance. At the entrance of the village was one of those curious post-relays which are seen only in the remote parts of France. Its sign was an oak board on which some pretentious postilion had carved the words, Pauste o chevos, blackening the letters with ink, and then nailing the board by its four corners above the door of a wretched stable in which there were no horses. The door, which was nearly always open, had a plank laid on the soil for its threshold, to protect the stable floor, which was lower than the road, from inundation when it rained. The discouraged traveller could see within worn-out, mildewed, and mended harnesses, certain to break at a plunge of the horses. The horses themselves were hard at work in the fields, or anywhere but in the stable. If by any chance they happen to be in their stalls, they are eating; if they have finished eating, the postilion has gone to see his aunt or his cousin, or is getting in the hay, or else he is asleep; no one can say where he is; the traveller has to wait till he is found, and he never comes till he has finished what he is about. When he does come he loses an immense amount of time looking for his jacket and his whip, or putting the collars on his horses. Near by, at the door of the post-house, a worthy woman is fuming even more than the traveller, in order to prevent the latter from complaining loudly. This is sure to be the wife of the post-master, whose husband is away in the fields.
The bishop’s secretary left his carriage before a post-house of this kind, the walls of which resembled a geographical map, while the thatched roof, blooming like a flower-garden, seemed to be giving way beneath the weight of stone-crop. After begging the post-mistress to have everything in readiness for his departure in an hour’s time, the abbe asked the way to the parsonage. The good woman showed him a lane which led to the church, telling him the rectory was close beside it.
While the young abbe followed this lane, which was full of stones and closed on either side by hedges, the post-mistress questioned the postilion. Since starting from Limoges each postilion had informed his successor of the conjectures of the Limoges postilion as to the mission of the bishop’s messenger. While the inhabitants of the town were getting out of bed and talking of the coming execution, a rumor spread among the country people that the bishop had obtained the pardon of the innocent man; and much was said about the mistakes to which human justice was liable. If Jean-Francois was executed later, it was certain that he was regarded in the country regions as a martyr.
After taking a few steps along the lane, reddened by the autumn leaves, and black with mulberries and damsons, the Abbe Gabriel turned round with the instinctive impulse which leads us all to make acquaintance with a region which we see for the first time, — a sort of instinctive physical curiosity shared by dogs and horses.
The position of Montegnac was explained to him as his eyes rested on various little streams flowing down the hillsides and on a little river, along the bank of which runs the country road which connects the chief town of the arrondissement with the prefecture. Like all the villages of this upland plain, Montegnac is built of earth baked in the sun and moulded into square blocks. After a fire a house looks as if it had been built of brick. The roofs are of thatch. Poverty is everywhere visible.
Before the village lay several fields of potatoes, radishes, and rye, redeemed from the barren plain. On the slope of the hill were irrigated meadows where the inhabitants raised horses, the famous Limousin breed, which is said to be a legacy of the Arabs when they descended by the Pyrenees into France and were cut to pieces by the battle-axes of the Franks under Charles Martel. The heights are barren. A hot, baked, reddish soil shows a region where chestnuts flourish. The springs, carefully applied to irrigation, water the meadows only, nourishing the sweet, crisp grass, so fine and choice, which produces this race of delicate and high-strung horses, — not over-strong to bear fatigue, but showy, excellent for the country of their birth, though subject to changes if transplanted. A few mulberry trees lately imported showed an intention of cultivating silk-worms.
Like most of the villages in this world Montegnac had but one street, through which the high road passed. Nevertheless there was an upper and a lower Montegnac, reached by lanes going up or going down from the main street. A line of houses standing along the brow of the hill presented the cheerful sight of terraced gardens, which were entered by flights of steps from the main street. Some had their steps of earth, others of pebbles; here and there old women were sitting on them, knitting or watching children, and keeping up a conversation from the upper to the lower town across the usually peaceful street of the little village; thus rumors spread easily and rapidly in Montegnac. All the gardens, which were full of fruit-trees, cabbages, onions, and other vegetables, had bee-hives along their terraces.
Another line of houses, running down from the main street to the river, the course of which was outlined by thriving little fields of hemp and the sorts of fruit trees which like moisture, lay parallel with the upper town; some of the houses, that of the post-house, for instance, were in a hollow, and were well-situated for certain kinds of work, such as weaving. Nearly all of them were shared by walnut-trees, the tree par excellence of strong soils.
