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.

CHAPTER I. THE CHATEAU

Les Aigues, August 6, 1823.

To Monsieur Nathan,

My dear Nathan,--You, who provide the public with such delightful dreams
through the magic of your imagination, are now to follow me while I make
you dream a dream of truth. You shall then tell me whether the present
century is likely to bequeath such dreams to the Nathans and the
Blondets of the year 1923; you shall estimate the distance at which we
now are from the days when the Florines of the eighteenth century found,
on awaking, a chateau like Les Aigues in the terms of their bargain.

My dear fellow, if you receive this letter in the morning, let your
mind travel, as you lie in bed, fifty leagues or thereabouts from Paris,
along the great mail road which leads to the confines of Burgundy, and
behold two small lodges built of red brick, joined, or separated, by
a rail painted green. It was there that the diligence