Sons of the Soil Part 28

Of its princ.i.p.al figures, the most original, as you have already suspected, was that of Madame Soudry, whose personality, to be duly rendered, needs a minute and careful brush.

Madame Soudry, respectfully imitating Mademoiselle Laguerre, began by allowing herself a "mere touch of rouge"; but this delicate tint had changed through force of habit to those vermilion patches picturesquely described by our ancestors as "carriage-wheels." The wrinkles growing deeper and deeper, it occurred to the ex-lady's-maid to fill them up with paint. Her forehead becoming unduly yellow, and the temples too s.h.i.+ny, she "laid on" a little white, and renewed the veins of her youth with a tracery of blue. All this color gave an exaggerated liveliness to her eyes which were already tricksy enough, so that the mask of her face would seem to a stranger even more than fantastic, though her friends and acquaintances, accustomed to this fict.i.tious brilliancy, actually declared her handsome.

This ungainly creature, always decolletee, showed a bosom and a pair of shoulders that were whitened and polished by the same process employed upon her face; happily, for the sake of exhibiting her magnificent laces, she partially veiled the charms of these chemical products. She always wore the body of her dress stiffened with whalebone and made in a long point and garnished with knots of ribbon, even on the point! Her petticoats gave forth a creaking noise,--so much did the silk and the furbelows abound.

This attire, which deserves the name of apparel (a word that before long will be inexplicable), was, on the evening in question, of costly brocade,--for Madame Soudry possessed over a hundred dresses, each richer than the others, the remains of Mademoiselle Laguerre's enormous and splendid wardrobe, made over to fit Madame Soudry in the last fas.h.i.+on of the year 1808. Her blond wig, frizzed and powdered, sustained a superb cap with knots of cherry satin ribbon matching those on her dress. If you will kindly imagine beneath this ultra-coquettish cap the face of a monkey of extreme ugliness, on which a flat nose, fleshless as that of Death, is separated by a strong hairy line from a mouth filled with false teeth, whence issue sounds like the confused clacking of hunting-horns, you will have some difficulty in understanding why the leading society of Soulanges (all the town, in fact) thought this quasi-queen a beauty,--unless, indeed, you remember the succinct statement recently made "ex professo," by one of the cleverest women of our time, on the art of making her s.e.x beautiful by surrounding accessories.

As to accessories, in the first place, Madame Soudry was surrounded by the magnificent gifts acc.u.mulated by her late mistress, which the ex-Benedictine called "fructus belli." Then she made the most of her ugliness by exaggerating it, and by a.s.suming that indescribable air and manner which belongs only to Parisian women, the secret of which is known even to the most vulgar among them,--who are always more or less mimics. She laced tight, wore an enormous bustle, also diamond earrings, and her fingers were covered with rings. At the top of her corsage, between two mounds of flesh well plastered with pearl-white, shone a beetle made of topaz with a diamond head, the gift of dear mistress,--a jewel renowned throughout the department. Like the late dear mistress, she wore short sleeves and bare arms, and flirted an ivory fan, painted by Boucher with two little rose-diamonds in the handle.

When she went out Madame Soudry carried a parasol of the true eighteenth-century style; that is to say, a tall cane at the end of which opened a green sun-shade with a green fringe. When she walked about the terrace a stranger on the high-road, seeing her from afar, might have thought her one of Watteau's dames.

In her salon, hung with red damask, with curtains of the same lined with silk, a fire on the hearth, a mantel-shelf adorned with bibelots of the good time of Louis XV., and bearing candelabra in the form of lilies upheld by Cupids--in this salon, filled with furniture in gilded wood of the "pied de b.i.+.c.he" pattern, it is not impossible to understand why the people of Soulanges called the mistress of the house, "The beautiful Madame Soulanges." The mansion had actually become the civic pride of this capital of a canton.

If the leading society of the little town believed in its queen, the queen as surely believed in herself. By a phenomenon not in the least rare, which the vanity of mothers and authors carries on at all moments under our very eyes in behalf of their literary works or their marriageable daughters, the late Mademoiselle Cochet was, at the end of seven years, so completely buried under Madame Soudry, the mayoress, that she not only did not remember her past, but she actually believed herself a well-bred woman. She had studied the airs and graces, the dulcet tones, the gestures, the ways of her mistress, so long that when she found herself in the midst of an opulence of her own she was able to practice the natural insolence of it. She knew her eighteenth century, and the tales of its great lords and all their belongings, by heart.

This back-stairs erudition gave to her conversation a flavor of "oeil-de-boeuf"; her soubrette gossip pa.s.sed muster for courtly wit.

Morally, the mayoress was, if you wish to say so, tinsel; but to savages paste diamonds are as good as real ones.

The woman found herself courted and wors.h.i.+pped by the society in which she lived, just as her mistress had been wors.h.i.+pped in former days. She gave weekly dinners, with coffee and liqueurs to those who came in after the dessert. No female head could have resisted the exhilarating force of such continual adulation. In winter the warm salon, always well-lighted with wax candles, was well-filled with the richest people of Soulanges, who paid for the good liqueurs and the fine wines which came from dear mistress's cellars, with flatteries to their hostess.

These visitors and their wives had a life-interest, as it were, in this luxury; which was to them a saving of lights and fuel. Thus it came to pa.s.s that in a circuit of fifteen miles and even as far as Ville-aux-Fayes, every voice was ready to declare: "Madame Soudry does the honors admirably. She keeps open house; every one enjoys her salon; she knows how to carry herself and her fortune; she always says the witty thing, she makes you laugh. And what splendid silver! There is not another house like it short of Paris--"

The silver had been given to Mademoiselle Laguerre by Bouret. It was a magnificent service made by the famous Germain, and Madame Soudry had literally stolen it. At Mademoiselle Laguerre's death she merely took it into her own room, and the heirs, who knew nothing of the value of their inheritance, never claimed it.

For some time past the twelve or fifteen personages who composed the leading society of Soulanges spoke of Madame Soudry as the _intimate friend_ of Mademoiselle Laguerre, recoiling at the term "waiting-woman,"

and making believe that she had sacrificed herself to the singer as her friend and companion.

Strange yet true! all these illusions became realities, and spread even to the actual regions of the heart; Madame Soudry reigned supreme, in a way, over her husband.

The gendarme, required to love a woman ten years older than himself who kept the management of her fortune in her own hands, behaved to her in the spirit of the ideas she had ended by adopting about her beauty. But sometimes, when persons envied him or talked to him of his happiness, he wished they were in his place, for, to hide his peccadilloes, he was forced to take as many precautions as the husband of a young and adoring wife; and it was not until very recently that he had been able to introduce into the family a pretty servant-girl.

This portrait of the Queen of Soulanges may seem a little grotesque, but many specimens of the same kind could be found in the provinces at that period,--some more or less n.o.ble in blood, others belonging to the higher banking-circles, like the widow of a receiver-general in Touraine who still puts slices of veal upon her cheeks. This portrait, drawn from nature, would be incomplete without the diamonds in which it is set; without the surrounding courtiers, a sketch of whom is necessary, if only to explain how formidable such Lilliputians are, and who are the makers of public opinion in remote little towns. Let no one mistake me, however; there are many localities which, like Soulanges, are neither hamlets, villages, nor little towns, which have, nevertheless, the characteristics of all. The inhabitants are very different from those of the large and busy and vicious provincial cities. Country life influences the manners and morals of the smaller places, and this mixture of tints will be found to produce some truly original characters.

The most important personage after Madame Soudry was Lupin, the notary.

Though forty-five springs had bloomed for Lupin, he was still fresh and rosy, thanks to the plumpness which fills out the skin of sedentary persons; and he still sang ballads. Also, he retained the elegant evening dress of society warblers. He looked almost Parisian in his carefully-varnished boots, his sulphur-yellow waistcoats, his tight-fitting coats, his handsome silk cravats, his fas.h.i.+onable trousers. His hair was curled by the barber of Soulanges (the gossip of the town), and he maintained the att.i.tude of a man "a bonne fortunes" by his liaison with Madame Sarcus, wife of Sarcus the rich, who was to his life, without too close a comparison, what the campaigns of Italy were to Napoleon. He alone of the leading society of Soulanges went to Paris, where he was received by the Soulanges family. It was enough to hear him talk to imagine the supremacy he wielded in his capacity as dandy and judge of elegance. He pa.s.sed judgment on all things by the use of three terms: "out of date," "antiquated," "superannuated."[*] A man, a woman, or a piece of furniture might be "out of date"; next, by a greater degree of imperfection, "antiquated"; but as to the last term, it was the superlative of contempt. The first might be remedied, the second was hopeless, but the third,--oh, better far never to have left the void of nothingness! As to praise, a single word sufficed him, doubly and trebly uttered: "Charming!" was the positive of his admiration. "Charming, charming!" made you feel you were safe; but after "Charming, charming, charming!" the ladder might be discarded, for the heaven of perfection was attained.

[*] "Croute," "crouton," and "croute-au-pot,"

untranslatable, and without equivalent in English. A "croute" is the slang term for a man behind the age.--Tr.

The tabellion,--he called himself "tabellion," petty notary, and keeper of notes (making fun of his calling in order to seem above it),--the tabellion was on terms of spoken gallantry with Madame Soudry, who had a weakness for Lupin, though he was blond and wore spectacles. Hitherto the late Cochet had loved none but dark men, with moustachios and hairy hands, of the Alcides type. But she made an exception in favor of Lupin on account of his elegance, and, moreover, because she thought her glory at Soulanges was not complete without an adorer; but, to Soudry's despair, the queen's adorers never carried their adoration so far as to threaten his rights.

Lupin had married an heiress in wooden shoes and blue woollen stockings, the only daughter of a salt-dealer, who made his money during the Revolution,--a period when contraband salt-traders made enormous profits by reason of the reaction that set in against the gabelle. He prudently left his wife at home, where Bebelle, as he called her, was supported under his absence by a platonic pa.s.sion for a handsome clerk who had no other means than his salary,--a young man named Bonnac, belonging to the second-cla.s.s society, where he played the same role that his master, the notary, played in the first.

Madame Lupin, a woman without any education whatever, appeared on great occasions only, under the form of an enormous Burgundian barrel dressed in velvet and surmounted by a little head sunken in shoulders of a questionable color. No efforts could retain her waist-belt in its natural place. "Bebelle" candidly admitted that prudence forbade her wearing corsets. The imagination of a poet or, better still, that of an inventor, could not have found on Bebelle's back the slightest trace of that seductive sinuosity which the vertebrae of all women who are women usually produce. Bebelle, round as a tortoise, belonged to the genus of invertebrate females. This alarming development of cellular tissue no doubt rea.s.sured Lupin on the subject of the platonic pa.s.sion of his fat wife, whom he boldly called Bebelle without raising a laugh.

"Your wife, what is she?" said Sarcus the rich, one day, when unable to digest the fatal word "superannuated," applied to a piece of furniture he had just bought at a bargain.

"My wife is not like yours," replied Lupin; "she is not defined as yet."

Beneath his rosy exterior the notary possessed a subtle mind, and he had the sense to say nothing about his property, which was fully as large as that of Rigou.

Monsieur Lupin's son, Amaury, was a great trouble to his father. An only son, and one of the Don Juans of the valley, he utterly refused to follow the paternal profession. He took advantage of his position as only son to bleed the strong-box cruelly, without, however, exhausting the patience of his father, who would say after every escapade, "Well, I was like that in my young days." Amaury never came to Madame Soudry's; he said she bored him; for, with a recollection of her early days, she attempted to "educate" him, as she called it, whereas he much preferred the pleasures and billiards of the Cafe de la Paix. He frequented the worst company of Soulanges, even down to Bonnebault. He continued sowing his wild oats, as Madame Soudry remarked, and replied to all his father's remonstrances with one perpetual request: "Send me back to Paris, for I am bored to death here."

Lupin ended, alas! like other gallants, by an attachment that was semi-conjugal. His known pa.s.sion, in spite of his former liaison with Madame Sarcus, was for the wife of the under-sheriff of the munic.i.p.al court,--Madame Euphemie Plissoud, daughter of Wattebled the grocer, who reigned in the second-cla.s.s society as Madame Soudry did in the first.

Monsieur Plissoud, a compet.i.tor of Brunet, belonged to the under-world of Soulanges on account of his wife's conduct, which it was said he authorized,--a report that drew upon him the contempt of the leading society.

If Lupin was the musician of the leading society, Monsieur Gourdon, the doctor, was its man of science. The town said of him, "We have here in our midst a scientific man of the first order." Madame Soudry (who believed she understood music because she had ushered in Piccini and Gluck and had dressed Mademoiselle Laguerre for the Opera) persuaded society, and even Lupin himself, that he might have made his fortune by his voice, and, in like manner, she was always regretting that the doctor did not publish his scientific ideas.

Monsieur Gourdon merely repeated the ideas of Cuvier and Buffon, which might not have enabled him to pose as a scientist before the Soulanges world; but besides this he was making a collection of sh.e.l.ls, and he possessed an herbarium, and he knew how to stuff birds. He lived upon the glory of having bequeathed his cabinet of natural history to the town of Soulanges. After this was known he was considered throughout the department as a great naturalist and the successor of Buffon. Like a certain Genevese banker, whose pedantry, coldness, and puritan propriety he copied, without possessing either his money or his shrewdness, Monsieur Gourdon exhibited with great complacency the famous collection, consisting of a bear and a monkey (both of which had died on their way to Soulanges), all the rodents of the department, mice and field-mice and dormice, rats, muskrats, and moles, etc.; all the interesting birds ever shot in Burgundy, and an Alpine eagle caught in the Jura. Gourdon also possessed a collection of lepidoptera,--a word which led society to hope for monstrosities, and to say, when it saw them, "Why, they are only b.u.t.terflies!" Besides these things he had a fine array of fossil sh.e.l.ls, mostly the collections of his friends which they bequeathed to him, and all the minerals of Burgundy and the Jura.

These treasures, laid out on shelves with gla.s.s doors (the drawers beneath containing the insects), occupied the whole of the first floor of the doctor's house, and produced a certain effect through the oddity of the names on the tickets, the magic effect of the colors, and the gathering together of so many things which no one pays the slightest attention to when seen in nature, though much admired under gla.s.s.

Society took a regular day to go and look at Monsieur Gourdon's collection.

"I have," he said to all inquirers, "five hundred ornithological objects, two hundred mammifers, five thousand insects, three thousand sh.e.l.ls, and seven thousand specimens of minerals."

"What patience you have had!" said the ladies.

"One must do something for one's country," replied the collector.

He drew an enormous profit from his carca.s.ses by the mere repet.i.tion of the words, "I have bequeathed everything to the town by my will."

Visitors lauded his philanthropy; the authorities talked of devoting the second floor of the town hall to the "Gourdon Museum," after the collector's death.

"I rely upon the grat.i.tude of my fellow-citizens to attach my name to the gift," he replied; "for I dare not hope they would place a marble bust of me--"

"It would be the very least we could do for you," they rejoined; "are you not the glory of our town?"

Thus the man actually came to consider himself one of the celebrities of Burgundy. The surest incomes are not from consols after all; those our vanity obtains for us have better security. This man of science was, to employ Lupin's superlatives, happy! happy!! happy!!!

Gourdon, the clerk of the court, brother of the doctor, was a pitiful little creature, whose features all gathered about his nose, so that the nose seemed the point of departure for the forehead, the cheeks, and the mouth, all of which were connected with it just as the ravines of a mountain begin at the summit. This pinched little man was thought to be one of the greatest poets in Burgundy,--a Piron, it was the fas.h.i.+on to say. The dual merits of the two brothers gave rise to the remark: "We have the brothers Gourdon at Soulanges--two very distinguished men; men who could hold their own in Paris."

Devoted to the game of cup-and-ball, the clerk of the court became possessed by another mania,--that of composing an ode in honor of an amus.e.m.e.nt which amounted to a pa.s.sion in the eighteenth century. Manias among mediocrats often run in couples. Gourdon junior gave birth to his poem during the reign of Napoleon. That fact is sufficient to show the sound and healthy school of poesy to which he belonged; Luce de Lancival, Parny, Saint-Lambert, Rouche, Vigee, Andrieux, Berchoux were his heroes. Delille was his G.o.d, until the day when the leading society of Soulanges raised the question as to whether Gourdon were not superior to Delille; after which the clerk of the court always called his compet.i.tor "Monsieur l'Abbe Delille," with exaggerated politeness.

The poems manufactured between 1780 and 1814 were all of one pattern, and the one which Gourdon composed upon the Cup-and-Ball will give an idea of them. They required a certain knack or proficiency in the art.

"The Chorister" is the Saturn of this abortive generation of jocular poems, all in four cantos or thereabouts, for it was generally admitted that six would wear the subject threadbare.

Gourdon's poem ent.i.tled "Ode to the Cup-and-Ball" obeyed the poetic rules which governed these works, rules that were invariable in their application. Each poem contained in the first canto a description of the "object sung," preceded (as in the case of Gourdon) by a species of invocation, of which the following is a model:--

I sing the good game that belongeth to all, The game, be it known, of the Cup and the Ball; Dear to little and great, to the fools and the wise; Charming game! where the cure of all tedium lies; When we toss up the ball on the point of a stick Palamedus himself might have envied the trick; O Muse of the Loves and the Laughs and the Games, Come down and a.s.sist me, for, true to your aims, I have ruled off this paper in syllable squares.

Come, help me--

After explaining the game and describing the handsomest cup-and-b.a.l.l.s recorded in history, after relating what fabulous custom it had formerly brought to the Singe-Vert and to all dealers in toys and turned ivories, and finally, after proving that the game attained to the dignity of statics, Gourdon ended the first canto with the following conclusion, which will remind the erudite reader of all the conclusions of the first cantos of all these poems:--

'Tis thus that the arts and the sciences, too, Find wisdom in things that seemed silly to you.

The second canto, invariably employed to depict the manner of using "the object," explaining how to exhibit it in society and before women, and the benefit to be derived therefrom, will be readily conceived by the friends of this virtuous literature from the following quotation, which depicts the player going through his performance under the eyes of his chosen lady:--

Now look at the player who sits in your midst, On that ivory ball how his sharp eye is fixt; He waits and he watches with keenest attention, Its least little movement in all its precision; The ball its parabola thrice has gone round, At the end of the string to which it is bound.

Up it goes! but the player his triumph has missed, For the disc has come down on his maladroit wrist; But little he cares for the sting of the ball, A smile from his mistress consoles for it all.