第56章

aux-Fayes.Sibilet is a relative of your enemy Gaubertin.What you have just said about the attorney-general and the others will probably be reported before you have reached the Prefecture.You don't know what the inhabitants of this district are."

"Don't I know them? I know they are the scum of the earth! Do you suppose I am going to yield to such blackguards?" cried the general.

"Good heavens, I'd rather burn Les Aigues myself!"

"No need to burn it; let us adopt a line of conduct which will baffle the schemes of these Lilliputians.Judging by threats, general, they are resolved on war to the knife against you; and therefore since you mention incendiarism, let me beg of you to insure all your buildings, and all your farmhouses."

"Michaud, do you know whom they mean by 'Shopman'? Yesterday, as I was riding along by the Thune, I heard some little rascals cry out, 'The Shopman! here's the Shopman!' and then they ran away."

"Ask Sibilet; the answer is in his line, he likes to make you angry,"

said Michaud, with a pained look."But--if you will have an answer--

well, that's a nickname these brigands have given you, general."

"What does it mean?"

"It means, general--well, it refers to your father."

"Ha! the curs!" cried the count, turning livid."Yes, Michaud, my father was a shopkeeper, an upholsterer; the countess doesn't know it.

Oh! that I should ever--well! after all, I have waltzed with queens and empresses.I'll tell her this very night," he cried, after a pause.

"They also call you a coward," continued Michaud.

"Ha!"

"They ask how you managed to save yourself at Essling when nearly all your comrades perished."

The accusation brought a smile to the general's lips."Michaud, I shall go at once to the Prefecture!" he cried, with a sort of fury, "if it is only to get the policies of insurance you ask for.Let Madame la comtesse know that I have gone.Ha, ha! they want war, do they? Well, they shall have it; I'll take my pleasure in thwarting them,--every one of them, those bourgeois of Soulanges, and their peasantry! We are in the enemy's country, therefore prudence! Tell the foresters to keep within the limits of the law.Poor Vatel, take care of him.The countess is inclined to be timid; she must know nothing of all this; otherwise I could never get her to come back here."

Neither the general nor Michaud understood their real peril.Michaud had been too short a time in this Burgundian valley to realize the enemy's power, though he saw its action.The general, for his part, believed in the supremacy of the law.

The law, such as the legislature of these days manufactures it, has not the virtue we attribute to it.It strikes unequally; it is so modified in many of its modes of application that it virtually refutes its own principles.This fact may be noted more or less distinctly throughout all ages.Is there any historian ignorant enough to assert that the decrees of the most vigilant of powers were ever enforced throughout France?--for instance, that the requisitions of the Convention for men, commodities, and money were obeyed in Provence, in the depths of Normandy, on the borders of Brittany, as they were at the great centres of social life? What philosopher dares deny that a head falls to-day in such or such department, while in a neighboring department another head stays on its shoulders though guilty of a crime identically the same, and often more horrible? We ask for equality in life, and inequality reigns in law and in the death penalty!

When the population of a town falls below a certain figure the administrative system is no longer the same.There are perhaps a hundred cities in France where the laws are vigorously enforced, and there the intelligence of the citizens rises to the conception of the problem of public welfare and future security which the law seeks to solve; but throughout the rest of France nothing is comprehended beyond immediate gratification; people rebel against all that lessens it.Therefore in nearly one half of France we find a power of inertia which defeats all legal action, both municipal and governmental.This resistance, be it understood, does not affect the essential things of public polity.The collection of taxes, recruiting, punishment of great crimes, as a general thing do systematically go on; but outside of such recognized necessities, all legislative decrees which affect customs, morals, private interests, and certain abuses, are a dead letter, owing to the sullen opposition of the people.At the very moment when this book is going to press, this dumb resistance, which opposed Louis XIV.in Brittany, may still be seen and felt.See the unfortunate results of the game-laws, to which we are now sacrificing yearly the lives of some twenty or thirty men for the sake of preserving a few animals.

In France the law is, to at least twenty million of inhabitants, nothing more than a bit of white paper posted on the doors of the church and the town-hall.That gives rise to the term "papers," which Mouche used to express legality.Many mayors of cantons (not to speak of the district mayors) put up their bundles of seeds and herbs with the printed statutes.As for the district mayors, the number of those who do not know how to read and write is really alarming, and the manner in which the civil records are kept is even more so.The danger of this state of things, well-known to the governing powers, is doubtless diminishing; but what centralization (against which every one declaims, as it is the fashion in France to declaim against all things good and useful and strong),--what centralization cannot touch, the Power against which it will forever fling itself in vain, is that which the general was now about to attack, and which we shall take leave to call the Mediocracy.