Sons of the Soil

The Project Guten­berg EBook of Sons of the Soil, by Hon­ore de Balzac

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Ti­tle: Sons of the Soil

Au­thor: Hon­ore de Balzac

Trans­la­tor: Katharine Prescott Worme­ley

Re­lease Date: Oc­to­ber 4, 2005 [EBook #1417]

Lan­guage: En­glish

Char­ac­ter set en­cod­ing: ASCII

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Pro­duced by John Bick­ers; and Dag­ny

SONS OF THE SOIL

BY

HON­ORE DE BALZAC

Trans­lat­ed by Katharine Prescott Worme­ley

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 the no­bil­ity. Lift­ed above the law by its own in­signif­icance, this Robe­spierre, with one head and twen­ty mil­lion arms, is at work per­pet­ual­ly; crouch­ing in coun­try dis­tricts, in­trenched in mu­nic­ipal coun­cils, un­der arms in the na­tion­al guard of ev­ery can­ton in France,--one re­sult of the year 1830, which failed to re­mem­ber that Napoleon pre­ferred the chances of de­feat to the dan­ger of arm­ing the mass­es.

If dur­ing the last eight years I have again and again giv­en up the writ­ing of this book (the most im­por­tant of those I have un­der­tak­en to write), and as of­ten re­turned to it, it was, as you and oth­er friends can well imag­ine, be­cause my courage shrank from the many dif­fi­cul­ties, the many es­sen­tial de­tails of a dra­ma so dou­bly dread­ful and so cru­el­ly bloody. Among the rea­sons which ren­der me now al­most, it may be thought, fool­hardy, I count the de­sire to fin­ish a work long de­signed to be to you a proof of my deep and last­ing grat­itude for a friend­ship that has ev­er been among my great­est con­so­la­tions in mis­for­tune.

De Balzac.

SONS OF THE SOIL

PART I

Whoso land hath, con­tention hath.