Sons of the Soil | Page 3

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Etext prepared by John Bickers, [email protected] and
Dagny, [email protected]

SONS OF THE SOIL
BY
HONORE DE BALZAC

Translated By Katharine Prescott Wormeley

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.

SONS OF THE SOIL


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