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dying is said during the hour appointed for the execution of the condemned man, there is no vivid or concentrated presentment of peasant thought or emotion. The second volume of the series -"Le Médecin de Campagne"-presents the inhabitants of the district contiguous to La Grande-Chartreuse in a succession of individual or family monographs. Each monograph serves as an object-lesson in the effects of possible social and sanitary reform. The results of the doctor's attempts to ameliorate the physical and moral state of his poor are discussed and expounded. Balzac, in his propaganda of Catholicism, royalism and authority, plunges into the abyss where the artist is submerged in the dogmatist when the doctor, the curé, the préfet and the doctor's guest, an ex-Napoleonic officer, debate at Socratic length the questions of suffrage, of political ideals and the advantages of religion as a police-control for the populace.

"Les Paysans" 13 belongs to a later date and to a totally different method of craftsmanship. The peasant, it is true, is still, as in "Le Médecin," a problem, a topic, a document. It may also be, as one of Balzac's most enthusiastic critics allows, that if "il a eu un vague soupçon de ce qu'est le paysan, il ne le pénètre pas dans son essence cachée: la rusticité lui échappe au sens presque occulte de son fonctionnement." But the problem has personified itself in living, moving actors; the topic is embodied in figures harshly outlined with all the ruthless force that lay in the brain of the great inaugurator of naturalism. Again, if as in "Le Médecin," there are a disjointed series of group-biographies, there is likewise an emphasized convergent point. The trends of opposing passions are sufficiently consistent to give the sense of aggregate unity in 13 Part I.

14 H. Favre.

impression, if not the seuse of form or unity in structure.

That central point is the figure of the Comte de Moncornet, the overbearing ex-general, a Napoleonic parvenu. His attempt to establish his rights as landed proprietor in his newly acquired estate; the overt hostilities of the peasants, the covert machinations of the petite bourgeoisie of the neighborhood, leagued against the new-comer, constitute the groundwork of the plot. The Comte, the wife his social ambition coveted, an occasional guest, the Abbé Brossette, Blondin the young Parisian journalist, a familiar inmate whose presence dissipates in some measure the tedium of his hostess's days: these form a socially isolated group at the château des Aigues. Blondin plays the part of the. professional observer; the curé that of the moral commentator-as in his memorable phrase "à voir comment ils s'appuient de leur misère, on devine que ces paysans tremblent de perdre le prétexte de leurs débordements." And while Mme. de Moncornet indulges her impulses of charity in casual almsgiving to the debased and worthless suppliants who beset her with threats and entreaties, a sullen conspiracy of hatred spreads its intricate net around. The General-with riches, with gardes champêtres, with the law's armed but impotent aid-is foredoomed to defeat in his struggles with the crouching, obsequious, insolent force which rears its fanged head from every ditch. terre a guerre a." The peasants, their ancient malpractices: wood-stealing, poaching, stolen pasturage and cornpillage, restrained by energetic measures of repression, are abetted by the petty officialdom of justice and the rancors of provincial functionaries, who from divers causes seek advantage in the General's overthrow. These, too, are a specific group, agents in the tissue of events, through whose promptings and connivance the situation

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reaches its climax. Their covetous egoisms, unbridled avarice and shameless duplicity, setting aside the grosser immoralities of the secularized monk (le Maire Rigou), go far to outweigh the unredeemed sensualism, the repulsive brutalities and savage greed, exhibited by the peasant population. The whole picture is of unmitigated depravity and unchequered gloom. One ray of kindliness shines from the windows of the keeper's lodge, to be quenched when Olympe Michaud's adored and adoring husband is murdered in the performance of his duty. One single peasant, the veteran republican, père Niseron, still dreams of a Utopian rule of liberty; the curé alone, among the inhabitants of the little township as among the habitués of the chateau, presents an example of moral purity and disinterested humanity. But these gleams of human affections and human virtues are obscured and ultimately vanish in the environing moral darkness. With a uniformity which does not belong to life, Balzac delineates the lowest levels of vindictive rapacity. He does not allow one among his characters even by accident to give way to those better impulses that beset unstable humanity at its worst: he has totally ignored the fact that vice, no less than virtue, has its lapses, its selfcontradictions of right feeling and right doing. Black, for him, can take no other hue, nor reflect one faintest glimmer of daylight.

The château des Aigues is the citadel of defence; the cabaret of the Grand-IVert, the rendezvous of the enemies' forces, is minutely portrayed by the novelist, for whom characters exist, not, as with the romantics, mainly in emotional inter-relationships, but preeminently in relation to life and the material conditions of things," and whose interminable descriptive passages are toujours explicatives des causes qui 15 F. Brunetière.

ont façonné dans le cours du temps, les êtres ou les lieux.".The customs, the appurtenances of the cabaret, are painted as carefully as its master, Maître Tonsard, and its frequenters. Upon its shabby benches, set by broken tables where drinkers sit at ease, with the background of wooden cowsheds, tool-houses and outbuildings, thieves and libertines hatch their felonies and pursue their pleasures. There Tonsard plies his trade, blustering, gluttonous, jovial, venomous; there la Tonsard plies hers, acquiring, with Tonsard's connivance, what gross luxuries of food and dress she may. There the old grandmother and the daughters of the house add to their means of livelihood by daily depredations: green wood cut from young trees, game, illicit gleanings and other spoils rifled from the General's domains. The Grand-I-Vert is a nucleus of malice, “vrai nid de vipères, s'entretenant vivace et vénimeuse, chaude et agissante, la haine du prolétaire et du paysan contre le maître et le riche." Customers and clients each in turn, as they come and go, betray their own specific baseness. The otter-catcher, Maître Tonsard's drunken father-in-law, père Fourchon, mendicant and rogue, resigns himself, as his ill-gotten gains are snatched from him by his daughter, to be the butt and prey of natures more vigorous, if not more vicious, than his own. And the innkeeper steals the last five-francpiece he has detected hidden in the sodden drunkard's ragged pocket as Fourchon, seated on the bench within the threshold, garrulously discourses on social wrongs. Meanwhile the cabaret fills. Vermichel, concierge at the hôtel de ville, huissier Brunet, valet Charles from the château, lover to Tonsard's disreputable daughter, are assembled there, when, crashing through the doorway with her enormous fagot of stolen boughs, Tonsard's old mother, "a hideous black parchment of age," makes

menace.

...

"Le peuple a la vie dure, il ne meurt pas, il a le temps pour lui"... "Vous voulez rester les maîtres, nous serons toujours ennemis, aujord'hui comme il y a trente ans. La malédiction des pauvres, monseigneur, ça pousse, et ça devient pus grand que le pus grand ed vos chênes, et le chêne fournit la potence. . . . Personne ici ne vous dit la varité; la v'là, la varité!"

Let the General yield or ill will come of it. "C't avis-là, et la loute," ends the old ruffian, "ça vant ben vingt francs, allez!"

precipitate entry, pursued by the keeper chon threads his speech with covert who has detected her ravages among the young plantations. The scene, as, at a sign from the old vagabond la Tonsard blinds the keeper with a handful of live ashes, is a complete, if not the most offensive, illustration of the ferocious savagery pervading the book. Chapter follows chapter, recording every phase of the contest, although the aggregate effect obtained by multiplication of sordid details, the continual sense a succession of almost imperceptible touches imparts of the reserves of vice indicated by open outrages, cannot be conveyed by quotation. Père Fourchon is utilized as a mouthpiece of peasant sentiment. He enunciates his philosophy before the inmates of the château. "Work, and you will win the reward of labor," moralizes the Abbé. But Fourchon knows better-he grasps by experience the speciousness of moral maxims. problem does not lend itself to such facile solution; the peasant will always live in penury, the rich in wealth. And this without relevance to desert, for if the peasant steals in the gutter, the rich steal by the fireside! Work? he asks. Why? The just-the unjust fare alike. The peasant who toils, toils in rags; the peasant who thieves, thieves in rags.

The

Me voilà-n'est-ce pas? Moi, le paresseux, le fainéant l'ivrogne, le propre à rien de pare Fourchon, qu'a eu de l'édncation, qu'a tombé dans le malheur et ne s'en est pas erlevé!... Eh bien quê différence entre moi et ce brave, c't honnête père Niseron . . . qui pendant soixante ans a pioché la terre, qui s'est levé tous les matins avant le jour pour aller au labeur. . . corps ed' fer, et eune belle âme-je le vois tout aussi pauvre que moi. . . . Que le pesan vive de bien ou de mal faire il s'en va comme il est venu, dans des haillons, et vous dans de beau linge.

Cringing, fawning, obsequious, Four

The book takes its place as a masterpiece among all other works of realism in peasant fiction. Applying to it the criterion of truth to life, inevitably judgments will vary. Balzac has carried the argument from facts to character to its extreme limit. From an immense collection of statements he leaves his reader to infer the nature of that root-basis of action which we call character, and the method undoubtedly rests upon a logical and rational foundation. Yet, however logical as method, the procedure when applied to literary inventions usually proves singularly inconclusive. Outward actions, good or ill, do not cover the ground, and appraisement of a man's complex nature resulting solely from knowledge of his deeds and words will always inspire distrust. Moreover, truth to life is a matter of truth to proportion no less than of truth to fact. Tonsards, Rigous, Fourchons, no doubt exist, but they exist as monstrosities of vice, cruelty, and degradation exist in a mass where morality shades with innumerable gradations from white to black. And if the truth of averages is not so much as suggested, the accurate presentment of what lies below, as of what lies above, remains an imperfect register of reality.

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"Les Paysans" was the outcome of polemical intention:

Le but de cette étude d'une effrayante vérité, est de mettre en relief les principales figures d'un peuple oublié par tant de plumes. . . . Cet oubli n'est peut-être que de la prudence par un temps où le peuple hérite de tous les courtisans de la royauté. . . . On a fait de la poésie avec les criminels, on a presque déifié le prolétaire On voit bien qu'aucun . . . n'a eu le courage d'aller au fond des campagnes étudier la conspiration permanente de ceux que nous appelons encore les faibles contre ceux qui se croient les forts.

Balzac threw himself into the breach. His theme is this "Robespierre à une tête et à vingt millions de bras," who seeks possession of the soil he tills. And in accomplishing his task, in creating his Tonsards, his Fourchons, he lent his genius to the further estranging of sympathies, added his quota of bricks to the barrier of social antipathies that separate class and class, rich and poor.

Thus Balzac, if his preface may be believed, composed "Les Paysans" with an intent and purpose over and above the aims of art. George Sand equally avowed her moral, though converse, literary mission.

Dans le temps où le mal vient de ce que les hommes se méconnaissent et se détestent, la mission de l'artiste est de célébrer la douceur, la confiance, l'amitié, et de rappeler ainsi aux hommes

que les mœurs pures, les sentiments tendres, et l'équité primitive, sont, ou peuvent être, encore de ce monde.

But before the peasant theme escaped from the hands of literary missionaries, whether propagandists of idealism or of hatred, Barbey d'Aurevilly, the strange harlequin of ultraromanticism, nine years after the publication of "Les Paysans," expended the graphic energy of his uncertain tal

ent in the composition of his decadent extravaganza "L'Ensorcelée." Here the counter-spirit of revolt, a fanatical feudal devotion, is embodied in the person of the palsied village Herodias of his Chouan légende. Idealist d'Aurevilly was not, and frequently his ultra-romanticism evinces incongruous impulses of realistic insight. Nevertheless, dwelling, according to the wont of the school he survived so long,18 upon the abnormal and the fantastic, carrying to æsthetic excess the juxtaposition of moral contrasts, he occasionally vindicates in his own productions his belief "que l'imagination continuera d'être d'ici longtemps la plus puissante réalité qu'il y ait dans la vie des hommes."

La Clotte is only a secondary personage, yet her figure is memorable as a romantic's typical rendering of peasant character. The opening chapter of the wild melodrama is a preliminary page, as it were torn from the author's diary, in which he recounts the circumstances of his meeting with Maître Tainnebouy, who, as his road companion, retails to him the légende of l'Abbé de la CroixJugan and Jeanne le Hardouey. The isolation of the lande when dusk overtakes the two riders, and entrapped by dense fog, "l'immensité des espaces que nous n'apercevions pas se révélait par la profondeur du silence," comes before us, a gray curtain, painted with the skill of a true artist. The modulations, from the common incidents of the road-the laming of a horse, a lost track-to the paragraph that precludes the raising of that curtain, are the work of a master of scenic effect.

Nous ne pouvions guère, dans une obscurité aussi complète, apprécier le chemin que nous faisions. Cependant les heures retentirent à un clocher qui nous parut assez rapproché. . . . L'horloge qui sonna avait un timbre grêle et clair qui marqua minuit. . . .

...

16 Barbey d'Aurevilly died at the age of eighty in 1889.

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Mais le dernier coup de minuit n'avait pas encore fini d'osciller à nos oreilles, qu'à un point plus distant et plus enfoncé dans l'horizon, nous entendîmes résonner non plus une horloge de clocher, mais une grosse cloche, sombre, lente et pleine. "Entendez-vous, maître Tainnebouy?" dis-je un peu ému de cette sinistre clameur d'airain dans la nuit. "On sonne à cette heure: seraitce le feu?" "Non," répondit-il. tocsin sonne plus vite, et ceci est lent comme une agonie. Attendez! voilà cinq coups! en voilà six!-sept! huit et neuf! C'est fini; on ne sonnera plus."

"Le

Truly, for we have heard the bell of Blanchelande, the ancient Abbey of ill fame, and it rings with ominous clang for "la messe de l'abbé de la CroixJugan-une messe des morts."

Barbey d'Aurevilly, with the thread of genius that runs through his literary and moral charlantanism, could have found no fitter introduction to attune the imagination to a romance trembling always upon the brink of the supernatural; in which Jeanne le Hardouey falls a spellbound victim to a consuming passion for the Chouan Abbé, "ce Balafré en capuchon," with his scorched and mutilated features; and the Abbé himself, re-admitted after long years to the exercise of his sacerdotal office, is shot at the altar-as the mass-bell of Blanchelande rings-by the hand of Jeanne's husband.

Framed in this old life tragedy. La Clotte-as no other among the actors— is a portrait drawn with singular vivid ness and emotional veracity. Refusing in her youth the lot of a peasant's wife, Clotilde Mauduit, devoured by "le regret, plus affreux qu'un remords, d'avoir perdu sa jeunesse," had become the Herodias of the Château de Haut-Mesnil, where Rémy Sang-d'Aiglon gathered around him the dissolute nobles from whom Chouannerie recruited its heroes and martyrs. The old woman, outcast and alone, broods forever on that past. She has attached

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herself body and soul to those who degraded her beauty, has identified her lot with their lot, has been racked with their tortures and suffered ignominy in their defeat. They are dead, the old comrades of her sins, but she, their victim and their devotee, lives on. Her face is of furrowed bronze, her tall figure distorted, her limbs crippled; her wheel stands silent, her knitting drops from the knotted fingers. long since burnt themselves from her eyes. But hour by hour, year by year, impenitent and fierce, with her gray hair "qui semblait être la couronne de fer de sa sombre vieillesse," she nurses the ashes of lost passions, loves and hates, and the flame, smouldering but unextinguishable, of an exasperated caste-worship for those criminal companions of bygone days "Ah, vous autres seigneurs, qu'est-ce qui peut effacer en vous la marque de votre race? Et qui ne reconnaîtrait pas ce que vous étiez aux seuls os de vos corps quand ils seraient couchés dans la tombe?" cries the withered fanatic to their sole survivor, the Abbé de la Croix-Jugan. Her passionate attachment to Jeanne le Hardouey is part and parcel of the same feudal homage, for the ancient blood of the Feuardents runs in the veins of the farmer's wife, resentful of its abasement. And Jeanne, "I'Ensorcelée," on whose ashamed uprightness the doom of a sudden love-madness has fallen, the dreary serenity of whose heart has kindled to fire at her first meeting with the priest, "une âme de sa race," finds in La Clotte's frenzied memories the echo of her own obsession and the interpretation of her own despair. Jeanne's doom accomplishes itself: she ends a life where sanity had striven in vain for mastery. As the death-bell tolls consternation over Le Hardouey's fields. La Clotte divines that the knell, calling importunately to those who live to plead for the soul which has gone

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