The Red and the Black (5 page)

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THIS work was ready for publication when the great events of July
^*
supervened and left French minds rather unreceptive to creations of
the imagination. We have reason to believe that the pages which follow
were written in 1827.
^*

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The truth, the truth
in all its harshness.

DANTON
^*

Put thousands together
Less bad.
But the cage less gay.

HOBBES

THE small town of Verrières may be regarded as one of the prettiest in the Franche-Comté.
^*
Its white houses with their steeply pitched roofs of red tile are
spread over a hillside where clumps of sturdy Spanish chestnuts mark
out the slightest dips in the terrain. The river Doubs flows several
hundred feet beneath the old town walls, built in former times by the
Spaniards and now fallen to ruin.

Verrières is sheltered on its northern side by a high mountain ridge,
part of the Jura range. Right from the earliest cold spells in October
the jagged peaks of the Verra are covered with snow. A mountain
stream which comes tumbling down from the heights passes through
Verrières on its way to join the Doubs, and supplies power to numerous
sawmills. This simple form of industry provides a reasonably
comfortable living for the majority of the inhabitants, who are
peasants rather than townsfolk. The wealth acquired by this little
town does not, however, come from the sawmills, but rather from the
factory where painted fabrics are produced in the Mulhouse tradition.
^*
This is the source of the general prosperity which, since the fall
of Napoleon, has enabled all the house-fronts in Verrières to be
refurbished.

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You have scarcely set foot in the town before you are deafened by the
din from a noisy and fearful-looking machine. Twenty massive hammers
come thundering down with a noise to set the cobbles shaking, and are
lifted up again by a wheel driven by the waters of the stream. Each
one of these hammers makes countless thousands of nails every day. It
is the task of pretty, fresh-cheeked girls to hold out the little
pieces of iron which the enormous hammers beat speedily into nails.
This rough-looking work is one of the activities which the traveller
who ventures for the first time into the mountains separating France
from Switzerland finds most surprising. If on his arrival in Verrières
the traveller asks who owns this fine nail factory which deafens
people as they go up the main street, he will be told in the drawling
local accent: 'Ah! that belongs to his worship the mayor.'

If the traveller stops but a moment in the main street of Verrières,
which climbs up from the bank of the Doubs almost to the top of the
hill, you can bet a hundred to one he will see a tall man appearing on
the scene with the look of someone going about important business. As
he passes, all hats are raised with alacrity. His hair is turning
grey, and grey is what he wears. He is a member of several orders of
knighthood,
^*
he has a high forehead and a Roman nose, and his face is not
without a certain overall regularity: people even think at first sight
that it combines the dignity befitting a village mayor with that
special charm which can still be found in someone rising fifty. But
soon the traveller from Paris is shocked by a certain look of
self-satisfaction and complacency mingled with an indefinable hint of
narrow-mindedness and lack of imagination. You feel in the end that the
wit of this man does not go beyond making sure he is paid on the dot
whatever is owed to him, and leaving it to the last possible moment to
pay back what he himself owes.

Such is the mayor of Verrières, M. de Rênal. He walks solemnly across
the road and disappears from sight into the town hall. But if the
traveller continues his stroll he will notice, a hundred yards or so
further up, a rather fine-looking house and, through the iron gate
next to it, some very splendid gardens. The skyline beyond is formed
by the hills of

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Burgundy, and seems expressly created to please the eye. This view
allows the traveller to forget the poisonous atmosphere of petty
financial intrigue which is beginning to stifle him.

He is told that this house belongs to M. de Rênal. The profits from
his sizeable nail factory have enabled the mayor of Verrières to put
up this fine dwelling in solid stone which he is in the process of
completing. His family, it is said, is of Spanish origin from way
back, and has been settled in the region, so they maintain, since well
before it was conquered by Louis XIV.
^*

Since 1815 his involvement with industry has been a source of embarrassment to him: the events of 1815
^*
made him mayor of Verrières. The walls supporting the terraces of his
magnificent garden which runs down step by step to the Doubs are also
a reward for M. de Rênal's expertise in the iron industry.

When in France you must not expect to come across the kind of
picturesque gardens that are found on the outskirts of manufacturing
towns in Germany like Leipzig, Frankfurt or Nuremberg. In the
Franche-Comté, the more walls a man builds, the more his land bristles
with rows of stones laid one on top of another, the greater his claim
to his neighbours' respect. M. de Rênal's gardens with their walls
everywhere are further admired because he spent a fortune purchasing
some of the small plots of land on which they are sited. Take, for
instance, that sawmill which caught your eye by its striking location
on the bank of the Doubs as you entered Verrières, and where you
noticed the name SOREL written in gigantic letters on a board set
above the roof: six years ago it used to occupy the site on which the
wall of the fourth terrace of M. de Rênal's gardens is now being
built.

For all his pride, the mayor
had to enter into lengthy negotiations with old Sorel, a tough and
stubborn peasant if ever there was one. He had to hand over a handsome
sum in gold coin to get him to move his mill elsewhere. As for the
public
stream which powered the saw, M. de Rênal managed to have it
diverted, using the influence he commands in Paris. This favour was
granted him after the 182- elections.
^*
For each acre he took from Sorel, he gave him four on a site five hundred yards downstream on the banks of the Doubs. And

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although this position was much more advantageous for his trade in
deal planks, old Mr Sorel, as he is called now that he has grown rich,
found a way to screw out of his neighbour's impatience and
obsessive greed for land
the sum of 6,000 francs as well.

It is true that this arrangement has come in for some criticism from
the right-thinking individuals in the neighbourhood. Once on a Sunday
four years ago when M. de Rênal was on his way back from church in his
mayor's robes, he noticed from a distance how old Mr Sorel, with his
three sons gathered round him, smiled as he looked in the mayor's
direction. That smile was a fatal flash of illumination for the mayor:
now he can't help thinking he might have been able to drive a better
bargain over the exchange.

To win
public esteem in Verrières, the main thing, while of course building
walls in great number, is to avoid any design brought over from Italy
by the stonemasons who come through the gorges in the Jura in the
springtime on their way up to Paris. An innovation of this kind would
earn the foolhardy landowner a lasting reputation for unsound views,
and discredit him for ever in the eyes of the wise and sensible folk
who mete out esteem in the Franch-Comté.

In actual fact, these wise folk keep everyone there in the grip of the most irksome
despotism
.
This dirty word sums up why it is that life in a small town is
unbearable to anyone who has dwelt in the great republic called Paris.
Public opinion-and you can just imagine what it's like!--exercises a
tyranny that is every bit as mindless
^*
in small towns in France as it is in the United States of America.

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Does dignity then count for nothing, sir? It is respected by fools,
held in awe by children, envied by the rich, and despised by any
wise man.

BARNAVE
^*

FORTUNATELY for M. de Rênal's reputation as an administrator, a massive
retaining-wall
was needed to shore up the public promenade which runs along the
hillside a hundred feet or so above the course of the Doubs. From this
excellent vantage-point you get one of the most picturesque views in
the whole of France. But every spring, rainwater used to erode the
path away, leaving deep gullies and making it quite impassable. This
drawback affected everyone, and put M. de Rênal in the fortunate
position of having to immortalize his term of office by building a
wall twenty foot high and some eighty yards long.

The parapet of this wall cost M. de Rênal three journeys to Paris,
because the last Minister of the Interior but one had declared himself
utterly opposed to the promenade at Verrières. The parapet now rises
four feet above ground level, and, as if in defiance of all ministers
past and present, it is now being dressed with slabs of solid stone.

How many times, as I stood there leaning my chest against those great
blocks of fine blue-grey stone, musing on the Paris balls I had left
behind the day before, have I gazed down into the valley of the Doubs!
Beyond it on the left bank there are five or six winding valleys with
tiny streams at the bottom clearly visible to the naked eye. You can
see them cascading down into the Doubs. The heat of the sun is fierce
in the mountains here, and when it shines overhead the musing
traveller is sheltered by the magnificent plane trees on this terrace.
They owe their rapid growth and their fine blue-green foliage to the
new soil which the mayor had the builders bring

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up to put behind his huge retaining-wall. For in spite of opposition
from the town council, he widened the promenade by more than six feet
(which I welcome, although he is an
Ultra
^*
and I am a liberal), and in his opinion and that of M. Valenod, who
has the good fortune to be master of the workhouse in Verrières, this
terrace is now fit to be compared to the one at Saint-Germain-en-Laye.
^*

For my part, I have only one criticism of the AVENUE DE LA FIDÉLITÉ
(you can read its official name in fifteen or twenty places on marble
plaques which have earned M. de Rênal yet one more decoration); what I
dislike about it is the barbarous way the municipality pollards these
leafy planes to the quick, giving them low, round, smooth heads which
make them look like the commonest of vegetables from the allotment,
when they are crying out to be left in the magnificent shapes they
display in England. But the mayor's will is tyrannical, and twice a
year all the trees belonging to the commune have their branches
mercilessly amputated. Local liberals claim, not without some
exaggeration, that the hand of the official gardener has become far
heavier since M. Maslon the curate adopted the habit of appropriating
the cuttings for himself.

This
young clergyman was sent from Besançon some years ago to keep an eye
on Father Chélan and a number of other incumbents of neighbouring
parishes. An old army surgeon who had fought in the Italian campaigns
and had retired to Verrières--a man who in his lifetime managed to be
both a Jacobin
^*
and a Bonapartist at once, according to the mayor-was bold enough one
day to complain to his worship about the way these fine trees were
being periodically mutilated.

'I like
shade,' replied M. de Rênal with the right degree of aloofness for
addressing a surgeon who is a Member of the Legion of Honour.
^*
'I like shade, and I have
my
trees pruned to give shade; I can see no other use for a tree when, unlike the serviceable walnut, it
doesn't bring in any money
.'

BRINGING IN MONEY:
this is the key phrase which settles everything in Verrières. It sums
up the habitual thinking of more than three-quarters of its
inhabitants.

Bringing in money
is the consideration which settles every-

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