Sons of the Soil , livre ebook

The Floating Press - De Balzac Honore ,
traduit par Prescott Wormeley Katharine

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411 pages

English

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French writer Honore de Balzac had many unique strengths, and chief among them is his ability to limn and illuminate subtle differences between social classes. In this pastoral novel, Balzac explores the virtues and follies of country life through the eyes of Emile Blondet, a journalist who was born and raised in the provinces, works in Paris, and has returned to the countryside of his youth for a much-needed vacation.

Informations

Publié par	The Floating Press
Date de parution	01 juin 2014
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781776538447
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0134€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

SONS OF THE SOIL

* * *

HONORE DE BALZAC

Translated by

KATHARINE PRESCOTT WORMELEY

While every effort has been used to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the information contained in The Floating Press edition of this book, The Floating Press does not assume liability or responsibility for any errors or omissions in this book. The Floating Press does not accept responsibility for loss suffered as a result of reliance upon the accuracy or currency of information contained in this book. Do not use while operating a motor vehicle or heavy equipment. Many suitcases look alike.

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Con

Dedication PART I Chapter I - The Chateau Chapter II - A Bucolic Overlooked by Virgil Chapter III - The Tavern Chapter IV - Another Idyll Chapter V - Enemies Face to Face Chapter VI - A Tale of Thieves Chapter VII - Certain Lost Social Species Chapter VIII - The Great Revolutions of a Little Valley Chapter IX - Concerning the Mediocracy Chapter X - The Sadness of a Happy Woman Chapter XI - The Oaristys, Eighteenth Eclogue of Theocritus Chapter XII - Showeth How the Tavern is the People's Parliament Chapter XIII - A Type of the Country Usurer PART II Chapter I - The Leading Society of Soulanges Chapter II - The Conspirators in the Queen's Salon Chapter III - The Cafe de la Paix Chapter IV - The Triumvirate of Ville-aux-Fayes Chapter V - Victory Without a Fight Chapter VI - The Forest and the Harvest Chapter VII - The Greyhound Chapter VIII - Rural Virtue Chapter IX - The Catastrophe Chapter X - The Triumph of the Vanquished

Addendum Endnotes

Dedication

To Monsieur P. S. B. Gavault.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote these words at the beginning of his Nouvelle Heloise: "I have seen the morals of my time and I publish these letters." May I not say to you, in imitation of that great writer, "I have studied the march of my epoch and I publish this work"?

The object of this particular study—startling in its truth so long as society makes philanthropy a principle instead of regarding it as an accident—is to bring to sight the leading characters of a class too long unheeded by the pens of writers who seek novelty as their chief object. Perhaps this forgetfulness is only prudence in these days when the people are heirs of all the sycophants of royalty. We make criminals poetic, we commiserate the hangman, we have all but deified the proletary. Sects have risen, and cried by every pen, "Arise, working-men!" just as formerly they cried, "Arise!" to the "tiers etat." None of these Erostrates, however, have dared to face the country solitudes and study the unceasing conspiracy of those whom we term weak against those others who fancy themselves strong,—that of the peasant against the proprietor. It is necessary to enlighten not only the legislator of to-day but him of to-morrow. In the midst of the present democratic ferment, into which so many of our writers blindly rush, it becomes an urgent duty to

exhibit the peasant who renders Law inapplicable, and who has made the ownership of land to be a thing that is, and that is not.

You are now to behold that indefatigable mole, that rodent which undermines and disintegrates the soil, parcels it out and divides an acre into a hundred fragments,—ever spurred on to his banquet by the lower middle classes who make him at once their auxiliary and their prey. This essentially unsocial element, created by the Revolution, will some day absorb the middle classes, just as the middle classes have destroyed the nobility. Lifted above the law by its own insignificance, this Robespierre, with one head and twenty million arms, is at work perpetually; crouching in country districts, intrenched in municipal councils, under arms in the national guard of every canton in France,—one result of the year 1830, which failed to remember that Napoleon preferred the chances of defeat to the danger of arming the masses.

If during the last eight years I have again and again given up the writing of this book (the most important of those I have undertaken to write), and as often returned to it, it was, as you and other friends can well imagine, because my courage shrank from the many difficulties, the many essential details of a drama so doubly dreadful and so cruelly bloody. Among the reasons which render me now almost, it may be thought, foolhardy, I count the desire to finish a work long designed to be to you a proof of my deep and lasting gratitude for a friendship that has ever been among my greatest consolations in misfortune.

De Balzac.

PART I

Whoso land hath, contention hath.

Chapter I - The Chateau

Les Aigues, August 6, 1823.

To Monsieur Nathan,

My dear Nathan,—You, who provide the public with such delightful dreams through the magic of your imagination, are now to follow me while I make you dream a dream of truth. You shall then tell me whether the present century is likely to bequeath such dreams to the Nathans and the Blondets of the year 1923; you shall estimate the distance at which we now are from the days when the Florines of the eighteenth century found, on awaking, a chateau like Les Aigues in the terms of their bargain.

My dear fellow, if you receive this letter in the morning, let your mind travel, as you lie in bed, fifty leagues or thereabouts from Paris, along the great mail road which leads to the confines of Burgundy, and behold two small lodges built of red brick, joined, or separated, by a rail painted green. It was there that the diligence deposited your friend and correspondent.

On either side of this double pavilion grows a quick-set hedge, from which the brambles straggle like stray locks of hair. Here and there a tree shoots boldly up; flowers bloom on the slopes of the wayside ditch, bathing their feet in its green and sluggish water. The hedge at both ends meets and joins two strips of woodland, and the double meadow thus inclosed is doubtless the result of a clearing.

These dusty and deserted lodges give entrance to a magnificent avenue of centennial elms, whose umbrageous heads lean toward each other and form a long and most majestic arbor. The grass grows in this avenue, and only a few wheel-tracks can be seen along its double width of way. The great age of the trees, the breadth of the avenue, the venerable construction of the lodges, the brown tints of their stone courses, all bespeak an approach to some half-regal residence.

Before reaching this enclosure from the height of an eminence such as we Frenchmen rather conceitedly call a mountain, at the foot of which lies the village of Conches (the last post-house), I had seen the long valley of Aigues, at the farther end of which the mail road turns to follow a straight line into the little sub-prefecture of La Ville-aux-Fayes, over which, as you know, the nephew of our friend des Lupeaulx lords it. Tall forests lying on the horizon, along vast slopes which skirt a river, command this rich valley, which is framed in the far distance by the mountains of a lesser Switzerland, called the Morvan. These forests belong to Les Aigues, and to the Marquis de Ronquerolles and the Comte de Soulanges, whose castles and parks and villages, seen in the distance from these heights, give the scene a strong resemblance to the imaginary landscapes of Velvet Breughel.

If these details do not remind you of all the castles in the air you have desired to possess in France you are not worthy to receive the present narrative of an astounded Parisian. At last I have seen a landscape where art is blended with nature in such a way that neither of them spoils the other; the art is natural, and the nature artistic. I have found the oasis that you and I have dreamed of when reading novels,—nature luxuriant and adorned, rolling lines that are not confused, something wild withal, unkempt, mysterious, not common. Jump that green railing and come on!