Honoré de Balzac
Sons of the Soil
Published by Good Press, 2019
EAN 4057664586308
Table of Contents
CHAPTER II. A BUCOLIC OVERLOOKED BY VIRGIL
CHAPTER V. ENEMIES FACE TO FACE
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
LITTLE ADMIRED ON THE POLICE CALENDAR
CHAPTER XII. SHOWETH HOW THE TAVERN IS THE PEOPLE’S PARLIAMENT
CHAPTER XIII. A TYPE OF THE COUNTRY USURER
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 X. THE TRIUMPH OF THE VANQUISHED
The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.
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