第39章

whereas the judge of the court of a small town has none,--the attorney-general and the sub-prefect being removable at will.Young Soudry, a companion of Gaubertin's son in Paris as well as at Les Aigues, had just been appointed assistant attorney in the capital of the department.Before the elder Soudry, a quartermaster in the artillery, became a brigadier of gendarmes, he had been wounded in a skirmish while defending Monsieur de Soulanges, then adjutant-general.

At the time of the creation of the gendarmerie, the Comte de Soulanges, who by that time had become a colonel, asked for a brigade for his former protector, and later still he solicited the post we have named for the younger Soudry.Besides all these influences, the marriage of Mademoiselle Gaubertin with a wealthy banker of the quai Bethume made the unjust steward feel that he was far stronger in the community than a lieutenant-general driven into retirement.

If this history provided no other instruction that that offered by the quarrel between the general and his steward, it would still be useful to many persons as a lesson for their conduct in life.He who reads Machiavelli profitably, knows that human prudence consists in never threatening; in doing but not saying; in promoting the retreat of an enemy and never stepping, as the saying is, on the tail of the serpent; and in avoiding, as one would murder, the infliction of a blow to the self-love of any one lower than one's self.An injury done to a person's interest, no matter how great it may be at the time, is forgiven or explained in the long run; but self-love, vanity, never ceases to bleed from a wound given, and never forgives it.The moral being is actually more sensitive, more living as it were, than the physical being.The heart and the blood are less impressible than the nerves.In short, our inward being rules us, no matter what we do.You may reconcile two families who have half-killed each other, as in Brittany and in La Vendee during the civil wars, but you can no more reconcile the calumniators and the calumniated than you can the spoilers and the despoiled.It is only in epic poems that men curse each other before they kill.The savage, and the peasant who is much like a savage, seldom speak unless to deceive an enemy.Ever since 1789 France has been trying to make man believe, against all evidence, that they are equal.To say to a man, "You are a swindler," may be taken as a joke; but to catch him in the act and prove it to him with a cane on his back, to threaten him with a police-court and not follow up the threat, is to remind him of the inequality of conditions.If the masses will not brook any species of superiority, is it likely that a swindler will forgive that of an honest man?

Montcornet might have dismissed his steward under pretext of paying off a military obligation by putting some old soldier in his place;

Gaubertin and the general would have understood the matter, and the latter, by sparing the steward's self-love would have given him a chance to withdraw quietly.Gaubertin, in that case, would have left his late employer in peace, and possibly he might have taken himself and his savings to Paris for investment.But being, as he was, ignominiously dismissed, the man conceived against his late master one of those bitter hatreds which are literally a part of existence in provincial life, the persistency, duration, and plots of which would astonish diplomatists who are trained to let nothing astonish them.A

burning desire for vengeance led him to settle at Ville-aux-Fayes, and to take a position where he could injure Montcornet and stir up sufficient enmity against to force him to sell Les Aigues.

The general was deceived by appearances; for Gaubertin's external behavior was not of a nature to warn or to alarm him.The late steward followed his old custom of pretending, not exactly poverty, but limited means.For years he had talked of his wife and three children, and the heavy expenses of a large family.Mademoiselle Laguerre, to whom he had declared himself too poor to educate his son in Paris, paid the costs herself, and allowed her dear godson (for she was Claude Gaubertin's sponsor) two thousand francs a year.