The Earth Read online

  Suddenly a landau drawn by two superb percherons drew up in front of the door. Out of it climbed Monsieur de Rochefontaine, who was alone; he was both surprised and offended to see no one there. He was debating whether to go into the inn when Macqueron came up from the cellar with a bottle in each hand. Filled with great confusion and despair, not knowing how to get rid of the bottles, he stammered:

  ‘Oh, Monsieur Rochefontaine, what bad luck! I've been waiting here doing nothing since two o'clock; and the minute I go down to the cellar, yes, with you in mind, Monsieur Rochefontaine… May I offer you a glass of wine, your Honour?’

  Monsieur Rochefontaine, who was not yet an honourable member, but merely a parliamentary candidate, should have taken pity on the poor man's bewilderment but it seemed merely to make him more annoyed. He was a tall young man, in his late thirties, with close-cropped hair and a neatly trimmed beard, correctly and soberly dressed. He had a cold, brusque manner and a clipped autocratic way of speaking; every inch a man used to command and expect obedience from his twelve hundred employees. He seemed, indeed, determined to stand no more nonsense from these peasants.

  Coelina and Berthe now hurried up, the latter with her bright, bold eyes and her tired lids.

  ‘Please come in, Monsieur, do us the honour.’

  But one penetrating glance had sufficed for Monsieur Rochefontaine to see through her, size her up and judge her. However, he did go in but refused to sit down.

  ‘Here are our friends from the council,’ Macqueron went on, now recovering his composure. ‘They're very pleased to make your acquaintance, aren't you, gentlemen? Very pleased!’

  Delhomme, Clou and the others had risen to their feet, startled at Monsieur Rochefontaine's stiff demeanour. And they listened in complete silence to the things he had decided to say to them, his theories which were shared by the Emperor, above all his progressive ideas which had led official opinion to favour him and reject the views of the outgoing candidate. Then he promised them roads, railways, canals, yes, a canal across Beauce to irrigate this thirsty land which had been parched for centuries. The peasants were listening in a daze, open-mouthed. What was he saying? Water for their fields, now? He went on and concluded by threatening those who voted the wrong way with official sanctions and inclement weather. They all looked at each other. Here was someone who was going to shake them up and whom it would be better to be on good terms with.

  ‘Certainly, certainly,’ Macqueron kept saying at the end of every sentence, although rather uneasy at his brusqueness of manner.

  But Bécu was wagging his chin approvingly at this no-nonsense military approach and old Fouan was staring wide-eyed, seeming to say: ‘There's a man for you.’ Even Lequeu, normally so lethargic, had gone very red in the face, although it was difficult to say whether it was with pleasure or rage. Only the two rapscallions, Jesus Christ and his pal Canon, showed obvious contempt, although feeling so superior they merely sneered and shrugged their shoulders.

  As soon as he had finished speaking, Monsieur Rochefontaine made for the door. The deputy mayor uttered a disconsolate cry:

  ‘Oh, Monsieur Rochefontaine, surely you'll do us the honour of joining us in a glass of wine?’

  ‘No, thanks, I'm late as it is. I'm expected at Magnelles, Bazoches, a score of other places. Good afternoon to you!’

  At this Berthe did not even come to the door with him; and back in her haberdashery, she said to Françoise:

  ‘What a boor! I'd vote for the other one, the old man.’

  Monsieur Rochefontaine had just climbed back into his landau when he heard the crack of a whip. Looking round, he saw Hourdequin in his modest gig, driven by Jean. The farmer had heard of the factory-owner's visit purely by chance, one of his drivers having met the landau on the road; and he had hurried along to see the danger face to face, all the more uneasy because, for the last week, he had been unsuccessfully urging Monsieur de Chédeville to make an appearance, the deputy being at the time no doubt tangled up in some woman's skirts, perhaps even with the pretty wife of the parliamentary usher.

  ‘Well, well, it's you,’ he called cheerfully to Monsieur Rochefontaine. ‘I didn't know you'd started electioneering already.’

  The two carriages were wheel to wheel. Neither of the men got out and they chatted for a few minutes, after leaning over to shake hands. They were acquainted, for they had occasionally lunched together at the home of the mayor of Châteaudun.

  ‘So you're against me?’ asked Monsieur Rochefontaine suddenly, in his brusque way.

  Being the mayor, Hourdequin was hoping not to have to commit himself too openly and was momentarily taken aback to see how well this fellow was informed. But he was no weakling either and he replied with a laugh, trying to pass the matter off amicably:

  ‘I'm not against anybody, I'm for myself. The man for me is the one who'll protect me. When I think that wheat is down to sixteen francs, which is exactly what it costs me to produce! One might just as well down tools and kick the bucket!’

  The other man immediately flared up:

  ‘Oh yes, I know, you want protection, don't you? A surcharge, prohibitive duties on foreign wheat so that French wheat producers can double their prices! So Frenchmen will be famished, the quartern loaf will cost two francs and the poor will starve! How can a progressive like yourself have the nerve to want to go back to such a monstrous state of affairs!’

  ‘A progressive, a progressive,’ replied Hourdequin, still in the same bantering tone. ‘Well, I suppose I am, but it's costing me so much that I shall soon not be able to afford such a luxury. Machines and artificial fertilizer and all these modern methods are all very well and all very rational but they've got one grave disadvantage and that is that, with the best reasoning in the world, they lead straight to ruin.’

  ‘That's because you're impatient, you expect science to provide you with all the answers straight away and you become so discouraged at all the necessary research and experimentation that you even have doubts about the results already achieved and start throwing everything overboard!’

  ‘That's as may be. So you're saying that all I'm doing is experimenting, am I right? So I'm to get a decoration for that and other simpletons are to follow on after me!’

  Hourdequin gave a loud guffaw at his own joke, which seemed to him to conclude the argument. Monsieur Rochefontaine said sharply:

  ‘So you want the working man to starve?’

  ‘Not at all! I want the farm labourer to earn a living.’

  ‘But I employ twelve hundred workers and I can't raise their wages without going bankrupt. If wheat cost thirty francs, they'd be dying like flies.’

  ‘And how about me? Don't I employ hired labour as well? With wheat at sixteen francs, we have to draw in our belts, there are poor devils kicking the bucket in every ditch in the countryside.’

  Then he added, still with a laugh:

  ‘Ah well! Everyone rides his own hobby-horse! If you get my bread cheap, then French agriculture will be ruined, and if you don't get it cheap, then French industry might as well pack up. Your labour costs go up, the price of manufactured goods goes up, all my tools, my clothes, everything I need. Ah, what a mess we'll all land up in!’

  The two of them, the farmer and the industrialist, the protectionist and the free-trader, stared each other in the face, one with a sly, good-humoured chuckle, the other with blunt hostility. This was the modern form of warfare, the confrontation which faces us today, in the economic struggle for existence.

  ‘We'll force the peasant to feed the workers,’ said Monsieur Rochefontaine.

  ‘But first of all,’ insisted Hourdequin, ‘you must make sure that the peasant has enough to eat.’

  He now at last sprang out of his gig and Rochefontaine was just calling out the name of a village to his driver when Macqueron, annoyed at seeing that his friends from the council had been listening on the doorstep, called out that they must all have a glass of wine together; but once again the candidate re
fused and without shaking hands with anyone sank back into the seat of his landau and the two big percherons trotted briskly away.

  On the opposite corner, standing in his doorway stropping his razor, Lengaigne had observed the whole scene. He gave an offensive laugh and said loudly, for all his neighbours to hear:

  ‘Kiss my arse and say thank you!’

  Hourdequin did go in and accept a glass of wine. As soon as Jean had tied the horse to one of the shutters, he followed his master. Françoise quietly beckoned him over to the haberdashery and told him what had happened and why she had left; he was so affected by her story and so afraid of compromising her in front of the others that he merely whispered to her that they must see each other to arrange what was to be done before he went away. He sat down on a bench in the tap-room.

  ‘Well, damn it all, you're not very choosy if you vote for that young fellow!’ cried Hourdequin, putting down his glass.

  His encounter with Monsieur Rochefontaine had made him determined to oppose him openly, even if it meant defeat. So he made no attempt to pull his punches, he compared him to Monsieur de Chédeville, such a decent sort, not a bit snobbish, always happy to oblige, a real old-fashioned French aristocrat! Whereas that tall, stuck-up martinet, that modern-style millionaire, well?… See how he looked down on people and even refused to drink the local wine, no doubt because he was afraid of being poisoned! They really must see that he was impossible! You don't change a decent horse for a boss-eyed one!

  ‘Tell me what you've got against Monsieur de Chédeville? He's been representing you for years, he's always suited you up till now. And now you're deserting him for a fellow whom you used to describe as a scoundrel at the last elections, when the government opposed him! Just think back, for heaven's sake!’

  Not wanting to commit himself directly, Macqueron was pretending to be helping his wife serve. The peasants had all listened with stony faces, and not a pucker of an eyelid revealed their secret thoughts. It was Delhomme who replied:

  ‘Well, when you don't know somebody…’

  ‘But you do really know that fellow now! You've just heard him say that he wants cheap wheat and that he'll vote for foreign wheat to come in and undercut ours. I've already explained to you that it's going to be a complete disaster. And if you're stupid enough to believe everything that he promised you for later on… well, all right, vote for him, he won't give a damn for you afterwards.’

  A vague smile had appeared on Delhomme's leathery face, and in a few slow sentences, he revealed all the dormant craftiness concealed underneath his straightforward, limited intelligence:

  ‘He can say what he wants to say and we can believe what we want to believe. Whether it's him or someone else, well, what the devil! We've only got one concern and that is for a government strong enough to keep business going; and in that case, if we don't want to make a mistake, the best thing is to provide the government with the representative they want. As far as we're concerned, it's quite enough for him to be friendly with the Emperor.’

  At this last remark, Hourdequin was quite dumbfounded. But previously it had been Monsieur de Chédeville who was friendly with the Emperor! What a slave race, always prepared to follow its lord and master, who flogs it and feeds it; still as abject in its congenital selfishness as it ever was, unable to see or know anything beyond its daily ration of bread!

  ‘Well, I swear that the day that Rochefontaine fellow is elected, I'll hand in my resignation, so help me God! Do you take me for a mountebank, saying “Yes, sir, no, sir, three bags full, sir”? If those blasted republicans were in the Tuileries, I bet you'd support them!’

  Macqueron's eyes had lit up. At last he was home and dry. The mayor had just signed his own death-warrant, because, unpopular as he was, the mayor's statement would certainly make the village vote against Monsieur de Chédeville.

  But at that moment Jesus Christ, who had been sitting forgotten in a corner with his friend Canon, gave such a loud laugh that everyone looked at him. Resting his elbows on the table and cupping his chin in his hands, he was jeering contemptuously at the villagers present and repeating:

  ‘Bunch of cunts! Bunch of cunts!’

  And it was at that word that Buteau came in. As soon as he was through the door, a quick glance showed him that Françoise was in the haberdashery and he immediately recognized Jean sitting against the wall, listening while he was waiting for his master. ‘Good, the girl and her lover were both there, now we'd see!’

  ‘Well, well, here's my brother, the biggest cunt of the lot!’ shouted Jesus Christ.

  There were threatening rumbles from the others and people spoke of chucking him out when Leroi, otherwise known as Canon, intervened, in his rasping, working-class accent which had been heard spouting arguments in every socialist meeting in Paris:

  ‘Shut your mug, old boy! They're not as stupid as they seem. Listen to me, you lot, you land-workers, what would you say if you saw a notice stuck up on the door of the town-hall opposite, printed in large capital letters: THE REVOLUTIONARY COMMUNE OF PARIS: First, all taxes are abolished; secondly, military service is abolished. Well, what would you say, you clodhoppers?’

  The effect was so extraordinary that Delhomme, Fouan, Clou and Bécu sat wide-eyed and open-mouthed. Lequeu dropped his paper, Hourdequin, who was about to leave, came back in again, while Buteau, forgetting all about Françoise, sat down on the corner of a table. And they all looked at this ruffian, this rolling stone, the terror of the countryside, who lived on blackmailed charity and pilfering. The other week they had chased him off La Borderie where he had turned up like a ghost as night was falling. This was why he was at the moment sleeping at that rascal Jesus Christ's place, where he would disappear next day, perhaps.

  ‘I can see that it wouldn't be too bad,’ he went on with a smile.

  ‘No, it wouldn't, damn it,’ confessed Buteau. ‘When you think that only yesterday I took some more money to the tax-collector. There's no end to it, they'd take the shirt off our backs.’

  ‘And not to see our lads having to go away, by God,’ exclaimed Delhomme. ‘I'm paying for Nénesse's exemption, so I know what it costs.’

  ‘Apart from the fact,’ added Fouan, ‘that if you haven't got the money they take them away and send them off to be killed.’

  Canon laughed and nodded triumphantly:

  ‘So you see,’ he said to Jesus Christ, ‘they're not as stupid as all that, these clodhoppers!’

  Then, turning back, he said:

  ‘People keep dinning into our ears that you're conservative, that you won't let things get done. Yes, you're conservative in your own interests, aren't you? So you will let things get done, and you will help to do anything that'll pay dividends, isn't that right? To hang onto your money and your children, you'd do all sorts of things! Otherwise, you'd be right idiots!’

  They had all stopped drinking and an uneasy look was beginning to spread over their dull faces. He continued in his bantering tone, smiling in anticipation at the effect that he was about to produce.

  ‘And that's why I'm not worried. I've got to know you while you've been throwing stones at me to drive me away. As this bigwig was saying, you'll be with us, the Reds and the Commies, once we've taken over the Tuileries.’

  ‘Oh no we shan't, never!’ Buteau, Delhomme and the others all exclaimed together.

  Hourdequin, who had been listening intently, shrugged his shoulders:

  ‘You're wasting your breath, old man!’

  But Canon was still smiling with the blind faith of a believer. He was leaning backwards, unconsciously rubbing one shoulder after the other against the wall like a cat caressing itself. And he explained what he meant by this mysterious revolution which he had been going round preaching from farm to farm without being properly understood, to the terror of both servants and masters. First of all, their Paris comrades could seize power: it might take place without fuss, they'd have to shoot fewer people than they thought, the whole show was so rotten it
would collapse on its own. Then, the very evening they gained control, private incomes would be abolished, there'd be no more interest paid out by the state, all large fortunes would be confiscated, so that all capital and the means of production would return to the nation and a new society would be organized, a vast financial, industrial and commercial undertaking where work and welfare would be fairly distributed. In the countryside, it would be even easier. They'd begin by expropriating the landowners, they would seize the land…

  ‘Just try,’ Hourdequin interrupted. ‘You'll be met by pitchforks, not one single smallholder would let you take even a handful of soil.’

  ‘Did I say that we must grind down the poor?’ jeered Canon. ‘We'd have to be really silly to quarrel with the small landowners. Oh dear me no, at first we shan't interfere with the land of those poor wretches who are killing themselves trying to scrape together a few more acres. All that we'll do is to take the five hundred acres of bigwigs like you who make their labourers sweat to earn money for you. No, damn it, I can't see any of your neighbours coming along with pitchforks to defend you. They'll be all too pleased!’

  Macqueron gave a guffaw, as if taking the whole thing as a joke, and the others followed suit while the farmer went pale as he sensed this age-old feud: this rogue was right, there wasn't a single peasant, however decent, who wouldn't have helped turn him out of La Borderie.

  ‘So as an owner of ten acres,’ Buteau asked seriously, ‘I shall be able to keep them, no one will come and take them off me?’

  ‘Of course not, comrade. Only we're certain that later on, when you see what results have been achieved, all around you, on the nationalized farms, you'll come of your own accord, without being asked, to add your own bit of land to them. Large-scale agriculture, with lots of capital, machines and all sorts of other things, everything that science has got to offer. I don't understand such things; but you ought to hear the people in Paris who can explain pat that agriculture is done for if we don't decide to do it like that. Yes, you'll hand over the land of your own accord.’