The sound of Pere Fourchon’s broken sabots was now heard; after depositing them in the antechamber, he was brought to the door of the dining-room by Francois. At a sign from the countess, Francois allowed him to pass in, followed by Mouche with his mouth full and carrying the otter, hanging by a string tied to its yellow paws, webbed like those of a palmiped. He cast upon his four superiors sitting at table, and also upon Sibilet, that look of mingled distrust and servility which serves as a veil to the thoughts of the peasantry; then he brandished his amphibian with a triumphant air.
“Here it is!” he cried, addressing Blondet.
“My otter!” returned the Parisian, “and well paid for.”
“Oh, my dear gentleman,” replied Pere Fourchon, “yours got away; she is now in her burrow, and she won’t come out, for she’s a female,—this is a male; Mouche saw him coming just as you went away. As true as you live, as true as that Monsieur le comte covered himself and his cuirassiers with glory at Waterloo, the otter is mine, just as much as Les Aigues belongs to Monseigneur the general. But the otter is yours for twenty francs; if not I’ll take it to the sub-prefect. If Monsieur Gourdon thinks it too dear, then I’ll give you the preference; that’s only fair, as we hunted together this morning!”
“Twenty francs!” said Blondet. “In good French you can’t call that giving the preference.”
“Hey, my dear gentleman,” cried the old fellow. “Perhaps I don’t know French, and I’ll ask it in good Burgundian; as long as I get the money, I don’t care, I’ll talk Latin: ‘latinus, latina, latinum’! Besides, twenty francs is what you promised me this morning. My children have already stolen the silver you gave me; I wept about it, coming along,—ask Charles if I didn’t. Not that I’d arrest ‘em for the value of ten francs and have ‘em up before the judge, no! But just as soon as I earn a few pennies, they make me drink and get ‘em out of me. Ah! it is hard, hard to be reduced to go and get my wine elsewhere. But just see what children are these days! That’s what we got by the Revolution; it is all for the children now-a-days, and parents are suppressed. I’m bringing up Mouche on another tack; he loves me, the little scamp,”—giving his grandson a poke.
“It seems to me you are making him a little thief, like all the rest,” said Sibilet; “he never lies down at night without some sin on his conscience.”
“Ha! Monsieur Sibilet, his conscience is as clean as yours any day! Poor child! what can he steal? A little grass! that’s better than throttling a man! He don’t know mathematics like you, nor subtraction, nor addition, nor multiplication,—you are very unjust to us, that you are! You call us a nest of brigands, but you are the cause of the misunderstandings between our good landlord here, who is a worthy man, and the rest of us, who are all worthy men,—there ain’t an honester part of the country than this. Come, what do you mean? do I own property? don’t I go half-naked, and Mouche too? Fine sheets we slept in, washed by the dew every morning! and unless you want the air we breathe and the sunshine we drink, I should like to know what we have that you can take away from us! The rich folks rob as they sit in their chimney-corners,—and more profitably, too, than by picking up a few sticks in the woods. I don’t see no game-keepers or patrols after Monsieur Gaubertin, who came here as naked as a worm and is now worth his millions. It’s easy said, ‘Robbers!’ Here’s fifteen years that old Guerbet, the tax-gatherer at Soulanges, carries his money along the roads by the dead of night, and nobody ever took a farthing from him; is that like a land of robbers? has robbery made us rich? Show me which of us two, your class or mine, live the idlest lives and have the most to live on without earning it.”
“If you were to work,” said the abbe, “you would have property. God blesses labor.”
“I don’t want to contradict you, M’sieur l’abbe, for you are wiser than I, and perhaps you’ll know how to explain something that puzzles me. Now see, here I am, ain’t I?—that drunken, lazy, idle, good-for-nothing old Fourchon, who had an education and was a farmer, and got down in the mud and never got up again,—well, what difference is there between me and that honest and worthy old Niseron, seventy years old (and that’s my age) who has dug the soil for sixty years and got up every day before it was light to go to his work, and has made himself an iron body and a fine soul? Well, isn’t he as bad off as I am? His little granddaughter, Pechina, is at service with Madame Michaud, whereas my little Mouche is as free as air. So that poor good man gets rewarded for his virtues in exactly the same way that I get punished for my vices. He don’t know what a glass of good wine is, he’s as sober as an apostle, he buries the dead, and I—I play for the living to dance. He is always in a peck o’ troubles, while I slip along in a devil-may-care way. We have come along about even in life; we’ve got the same snow on our heads, the same funds in our pockets, and I supply him with rope to ring his bell. He’s a republican and I’m not even a publican,—that’s all the difference as far as I can see. A peasant may do good or do evil (according to your ideas) and he’ll go out of the world just as he came into it, in rags; while you wear the fine clothes.”