eyes of an old friend ; GrossetSte, bathed in tears, stretched
out his hands entreatingly towards her. "It is enough ! " he
seemed to say. The heroic woman heard such a chorus of
sobs about her, received so much sympathy, that she broke
down ; the balm of the general forgiveness was too much,
weakness overcame her. Seeing that the sources of her
daughter's strength were exhausted, the old mother seemed to
find in herself the vigor of a young woman ; she held out her
arms to carry Veronique.
"Christians," said the archbishop, "you have heard the
penitent's confession ; it confirms the decree of man's justice ;
it may lay all scruples and anxiety on that score to rest. In
this confession you should find new reasons for uniting your
282 THE COUNTRY PARSON.
prayers to those of the church, which offers to God the holy
sacrifice of the mass to implore His mercy for the sinner after
so grand a repentance."
The office was finished. Veronique followed all that was
said with an expression of such inward peace that she no
longer seemed to be the same woman. Her face wore a look
of frank innocence, such as it might have worn in the days
when, a pure and ingenuous girl, she dwelt under her father's
roof. Her brows grew white in the dawn of eternity, her face
glowed golden in the light of heaven. Doubtless she caught
something of its mystic harmonies; and in her longing to be
made one with God on earth for the last time, she exerted all
her powers of vitality to live. M. Bonnet came to the bed-
side and gave her absolution ; the archbishop anointed her
with the holy oil, with a fatherly tenderness that revealed to
those who stood about how dear he held this sheep that had
been lost and was found. With that holy anointing the eyes
that had wrought such mischief on earth were closed to the
things of earth, the seal of the church was set on those two
eloquent lips, and the ears that had listened to the inspiration
of evil were closed for ever. All the senses, mortified by
penitence, were thus sanctified ; the spirit of evil could have
no power over this soul.
Never had all the grandeur and deep meaning of a sacra-
ment been apprehended more thoroughly than by those who
saw the church's care thus justified by the dying woman's
confession. After that preparation, Veronique received the
body of Christ with a look of hope and joy that melted the
icy barrier of unbelief at which the cure had so often knocked
in vain. Roubaud, confounded, became a Catholic from that
moment.
Awful as the scene was, it was no less touching ; and in its
solemnity, as of the culminating-point of a drama, it might
have given some painter the subject of a masterpiece. When
the mournful episode was over, and the words of the Gospel
VERONIQUE LAID IN THE TOMB. 283
of St. John fell on the ears of the dying woman, she beck-
oned to her mother to bring Francis back again. (The tutor
had taken the boy out of the room.) When Francis knelt on
the step by the bedside, the mother whose sins had been for-
given felt free to lay her hands in blessing on his head, and so
she drew her last breath, La Sauviat standing at the post she
had filled for twenty years, faithful to the end. It was she, a
heroine after her manner, who closed the eyes of the daughter
who had suffered so much, and laid a kiss on them.
Then all the priests and assistants came round the bed, and
intoned the dread chant De prqfundis by the light of the
flaming torches ; and from those sounds the people of the
whole countryside kneeling without, together with the friends
and all the servants praying in the hall, knew that the mother
of the canton had passed away. Groans and sobs mingled
with the chanting. The noble woman's confession had not
passed beyond the threshold of the drawing-room ; it had
reached none but friendly ears. When the peasants came
from Montegnac, and all the district round about came in, each
with a green spray, to bid their benefactress a supreme farewell
mingled with tears and prayers, they saw a representative of
man's justice, bowed down with anguish, holding the cold
hand of the woman to whom all unwittingly he had meted out
such a cruel but just punishment.
Two days later and the public prosecutor, with GrossetSte,
the archbishop, and the mayor, bore the pall when Mme.
Graslin was carried to her last resting-place. Amid deep
silence they laid her in the grave ; no one uttered a word, for
no one had the heart to speak, and all eyes were full of tears.
"She is a saint!" Everywhere the words were repeated
along the roads which she had made, in the canton which
owed its prosperity to her. It was as if the words were sown
abroad across her fields to quicken the life in them. It struck
nobody as a strange thing that Mme. Graslin should be buried
beside Jean-Frangois Tascheron. She had not asked this;
284 THE COUNTRY PARSON.
but a trace of pitying tenderness in the old mother prompted
her to bid the sacristan put those together whom earth had
separated by a violent death, whom one repentance should
unite in purgatory.
Mme. Graslin's will fulfilled all expectations. She founded
scholarships in the school at Limoges, and beds in the hospital,
intended for the working classes only. A considerable sum
(three hundred thousand francs in a period of six years) was
left to purchase that part of the village called " Tascheron's,"
and for building an almshouse there. It was to serve as an
asylum for the sick and aged poor of the district, a lying-in
hospital for destitute women, and a home for foundling chil-
dren, and was to be known by the name of Tascheron's Alms-
house. Veronique directed that it was to be placed in the
charge of the Franciscan Sisters, and fixed the salary of the
head physician and house surgeon at four thousand francs.
Mme. Graslin begged Roubaud to be the first head physician,
and to superintend the execution of the sanitary arrangements
and plans to be made by the architect, M. Gerard. She also
endowed the commune of Montegnac with sufficient land to
pay the taxes. A certain fund was put in the hands of the
church to be used as determined in some exceptional cases ;
for the church was to be the guardian of the young ; and if any
of the children in Montegnac should show a special aptitude
for art or science or industrial pursuits, the far-sighted benevo-
lence of the testatrix provided thus for their encouragement.
The tidings of her death were received as the news of a
calamity to the whole country, and no word that reflected on
her memory went with it.
Gerard, appointed Francis Graslin's guardian, was required
by the terms of the will to live at the chateau, and thither he
went ; but not until three months after Veronique's death did
he marry Denise Tascheron, in whom Francis found, as it
were, a second mother.
ALBERT SAVARON
(de Savarus).
To Madame Emile Girardin.
ONE of the few drawing-rooms where, under the Restora-
tion, the archbishop of Besan9on was sometimes to be seen,
was that of the Baronne de Watteville, to whom he was par-
ticularly attached on account of her religious sentiments.
A word as to this lady, the most important lady of Besan-
con.
Monsieur de Watteville, a descendant of the famous Watte-
ville, the most successful and illustrious of murderers and
renegades his extraordinary adventures are too much a part
of history to be related here this nineteenth-century Mon-
sieur de Watteville was as gentle and peaceable as his ancestor
of the Grand Siecle had been passionate and turbulent. After
living in the Comte* like a wood-louse in the crack of a wainscot,
he had married the heiress of the celebrated house of Rupt.
Mademoiselle de Rupt brought twenty thousand francs a year
in the funds to add to the ten thousand francs a year in real
estate of the Baron de Watteville. The Swiss gentleman's
coat-of-arms (the Wattevilles are Swiss) was then borne as an
escutcheon of pretense on the old shield of the Rupts. The
marriage, arranged in 1802, was solemnized in 1815 after the
second Restoration. Within three years of the birth of a
daughter all Madame de Watteville's grandparents were
dead and their estates wound up. Monsieur de Watteville's
house was then sold, and they settled in the Rue de la Prefec-
ture in the fine old mansion of the Rupts, with an immense
garden stretching to the Rue du Perron. Madame de Watte-
* La Tranche Comt6.
(285)
286 ALBERT SAVARON.
ville, devout as a girl, became even more so after her marriage.
She was one of the queens of the saintly brotherhood which
gives the upper circles of Besancon a solemn air and prudish
manners in harmony with the character of the town.
Monsieur le Baron de Watteville, a dry, lean man, devoid
of intelligence, looked worn out without any one knowing
whereby, for he enjoyed the profoundest ignorance ; but as his
wife was a red-haired woman, and of a stern nature that
became proverbial (we still say " as sharp as Madame de Watte-
ville") some wits of the legal profession declared that he had
been worn against that rock Rupt is obviously derived from
rupes. Scientific students of social phenomena will not fail to
have observed that Rosalie was the only offspring of the union
between the Wattevilles and the Rupts.
Monsieur de Watteville spent his existence in a handsome
workshop with a lathe ; he was a turner ! As subsidiary to this
pursuit, he took up a fancy for making collections. Philo-
sophical doctors, devoted to the study of madness, regard
this tendency toward collecting as a first degree of mental
aberration when it is set on small things. The Baron de
Watteville treasured shells and geological fragments of the
neighborhood of Besancon. Some contradictory folk, espe-
cially women, would say of Monsieur de Watteville, " He has
a noble soul ! He perceived from the first days of his married
life that he would never be his wife's master, so he threw
himself into a mechanical occupation and good living."
The house of the Rupts was not devoid of a certain magnifi-
cence worthy of Louis XIV., and bore traces of the nobility
of the two families who had mingled in 1815. The chandeliers
of glass cut in the shape of leaves, the brocades, the damask,
the carpets, the gilt furniture, were all in harmony with the
old liveries and the old servants. Though served in blackened
family plate, round a looking-glass tray furnished with Dresden
china, the food was exquisite. The wines selected by Mon-
sieur de Watteville, who, to occupy his time and vary his
ALBERT SAVARON. 287
employments, was his own butler, enjoyed a sort of fame
throughout the department. Madame de Watteville's fortune
was a fine one ; while her husband's, which consisted only of
the estate of Rouxey, worth about ten thousand francs a year,
was not increased by inheritance. It is needless to add that in
consequence of Madame de Watteville's close intimacy with
the archbishop, the three or four clever or remarkable abbes
of the diocese who were not averse to good feeding were very
much at home at her house.
At a ceremonial dinner given in honor of I know not
whose wedding, at the beginning of September, 1834, when
the women were standing in a circle round the drawing-room
fire, and the men in groups by the windows, every one
exclaimed with pleasure at the entrance of Monsieur 1'Abbe
de Grancey, who was announced.
" Well, and the lawsuit ? " they all cried.
"Won ! " replied the vicar-general. " The verdict of the
court, from which we had no hope, you know why "
This was an allusion to the members of the First Court of
Appeal of 1830 ; the Legitimists had almost all withdrawn.
" The verdict is in our favor on every point, and reverses
the decision of the lower court."
" Everybody thougnt you were done for."
" And we should have been, but for me. I told our advo-
cate to be off to Paris, and at the crucial moment I was able
to secure a new pleader, to whom we owe our victory, a
wonderful man "
"At Besancon? " said Monsieur de Watteville, guilelessly.
"At Besancon," replied the Abbe de Grancey.
"Oh yes, Savaron," said a handsome young man sitting
near the Baroness, and named de Soulas.
" He spent five or six nights over it ; he devoured docu-
ments and briefs ; he had seven or eight interviews of several
hours with me," continued Monsieur de Grancey, who had
just reappeared at the Hotel de Rupt for the first time in
288 ALBERT SA VARON.
three weeks. " In short, Monsieur Savaron has just com-
pletely beaten the celebrated lawyer whom our adversaries
had se'nt for from Paris. This young man is wonderful, the
bigwigs say. Thus the chapter is twice victorious ; it has
triumphed in law and also in politics, since it has vanquished.
Liberalism in the person of the counsel of our municipality.
' Our adversaries,' so our advocate said, 'must not expect to
find readiness on all sides to ruin the archbishoprics.' The
president was obliged to enforce silence. All the townsfolk of
Besancon applauded. Thus the possession of the buildings of
the old convent remains with the Chapter of the Cathedral of
Besan^on. Monsieur Savaron, however, invited his Parisian
opponent to dine with him as they came out of court. He
accepted, saying, ' Honor to every conqueror,' and com-
plimented him on his success without bitterness."
"And where did you unearth this lawyer?" said Madame
de Watteville. "I never heard his name before."
"Why, you can see his windows from here," replied the
vicar-general. " Monsieur Savaron lives in the Rue du Per-
ron ; the garden of his house joins on to yours."
"But he is not a native of the county," said Monsieur de
Watteville.
" So little is he a native of any place, that no one knows
where he comes from," said Madame de Chavoncourt.
"But who is he?" asked Madame de Watteville, taking
the abbe's arm to go into the dining-room. " If he is a stran-
ger, by what chance has he settled at Besanc.on ? It is a strange
fancy for a barrister."
" Very strange ! " echoed Amedee de Soulas, whose biog-
raphy is here necessary to the understanding of this tale.
In all ages France and England have carried on an ex-
change of trifles, which is all the more constant because it
evades the tyranny of the custom-house. The fashion that is
called English in Paris is called French in London, and this
ALBERT SAVARON. 289
is reciprocal. The hostility of the two nations is suspended
on two points the uses of words and the fashion of dress.
" God save the King," the national air of England, is a tune
written by Lulli for the chorus of " Esther " or of "Athalie."
Hoops, introduced at Paris by an Englishwoman, were in-
vented in London, it is known why, by a Frenchwoman, the
notorious Duchess of Portsmouth. They were at first so
jeered at that the first Englishwoman who appeared in them
at the Tuileries narrowly escaped being crushed by the crowd;
but they were adopted. This fashion tyrannized over the
ladies of Europe for half a century. At the peace of 1815,
for a year, the long waists of the English were a standing jest;
all Paris went to see Pothier and Brunei in "The Funny
Englishwomen;" but in 1816 and 1817 the belt of the
Frenchwoman, which in 1814 cut her across the bosom,
gradually descended till it reached the hips.
Within ten years England has made two little gifts to our
language. The Incroyable, the Merveilleux, the Elegant, the
three successors of the petit- maitre of discreditable etymology,
have made way for the "dandy" and the "lion." The
lion is not the parent of the lionne. The lionne is due to the
famous song by Alfred de Musset
" Have you seen in Barcelona
She that is my mistress and my lionne."
There has been a fusion or, if you prefer it, a confusion
of the two words and the leading ideas. When an absurdity
can amuse Paris, which devours as many masterpieces as ab-
surdities, the provinces can hardly be deprived of them. So,
as soon as the lion paraded Paris with his mane, his beard
and mustaches, his waistcoats and his eyeglass, maintained in
its place, without the help of his hands, by the contraction
of his cheek and eye-socket, the chief towns of some depart-
ments had their sub-lions, who protested by the smartness of
19
290 ALBERT S AVAR ON.
their trousers-straps against the untidiness of their fellow-
townsmen.
Thus, in 1834, Besancon could boast of a lion, in the per-
son of Monsieur Amedee-Sylvain de Soulas, spelt Souleyas at
the time of the Spanish occupation. Amedee de Soulas is,
perhaps, the only man in Besangon descended from a Spanish
family. Spain sent men to manage her business in the Comte,
but very few Spaniards settled there. The Soulas remained
in consequence of their connection with Cardinal Gran-
velle.
Young Monsieur de Soulas was always talking of leaving Be-
san9on, a dull town, church-going, and not literary, a military
centre and garrison town, of which the manners and customs
and physiognomy are worth describing. This opinion allowed
of his lodging, like a man uncertain of the future, in three
very scantily furnished rooms at the end of the Rue Neuve,
just where it opens into the Rue de la Prefecture.
Young Monsieur de Soulas could not possibly live without
a tiger. This tiger was the son of one of his farmers, a small
servant aged fourteen, thick-set, and named Babylas. The
lion dressed his tiger very smartly a short tunic coat of iron-
gray cloth, belted with patent leather, bright blue plush
breeches, a red waistcoat, polished leather top-boots, a shiny
hat with black lacing, and brass buttons with the arms of
Soulas. Amedee gave this boy white cotton gloves and his
washing, and thirty-six francs a month to keep himself a
sum that seemed enormous to the grisettes of Besancon : four
hundred and twenty francs a year to a child of fifteen, with-
out counting extras ! The extras consisted in the price for
which he could sell his turned clothes, a present when Soulas
exchanged one of his horses, and the perquisite of the manure.
The two horses, treated with sordid economy, cost, one with
another, eight hundred a year. His bills for articles received
from Paris, such as perfumery, cravats, jewelry, patent black-
ing, and clothes, ran to another twelve hundred francs. Add
ALBERT SAVARON. 291
to this the groom, or tiger, the horses, a very superior style
of dress, and six hundred francs a year for rent, and you will
see a grand total of three thousand francs.
Now, Monsieur de Soulas' father had left him only four
thousand francs a year, the income from some cottage farms
in rather bad repair, which required keeping up, a charge
which lent painful uncertainty to the rents. The lion had
hardly three francs a day left for food, amusements, and
gambling. He very often dined out, and breakfasted with
remarkable frugality. When he was positively obliged to
dine at his own cost, he sent his tiger to bring a couple of
dishes from a cook-shop, never spending more than twenty-
five sous.
Young Monsieur de Soulas was supposed to be a spendthrift,
recklessly extravagant, whereas the poor man made the two
ends meet in the year with a keenness and skill which would
have done honor to a thrifty housewife. At Besancon in
those days no one knew how great a tax on a man's capital
were six francs spent in polish to spread on his boots or
shoes, yellow gloves at fifty sous a pair, cleaned in the deepest
secrecy to make them three times renewed, cravats costing ten
francs, and lasting three months, four waistcoats at twenty-
five francs, and trousers fitting close to the boots. How could
he do otherwise, since we see women in Paris bestowing their
special attention on simpletons who visit them, and cut out
the most remarkable men by means of these frivolous advan-
tages, which a man can buy for fifteen louis, and get his hair
curled and a fine linen shirt into the bargain?
If this unhappy youth should seem to you to have become
a lion on very cheap terms, you must know that Amedee de
Soulas had been three times to Switzerland, by coach and in
short stages, twice to Paris, and once from Paris to England.
He passed as a well-informed traveler, and could say, "In
England, where I went " The dowagers of the town
would say to him, "You, who have been in England "
292 ALBERT S AVAR ON.
He had been as far as Lombardy, and seen the shores of the
Italian lakes. He read new books. Finally, when he was
cleaning his gloves, the tiger Babylas replied to callers,
"Monsieur is very busy." An attempt had been made to
withdraw Monsieur Am6dee de Soulas from circulation by
pronouncing him "A man of advanced ideas." Amedee had
the gift of uttering with the gravity of a native the common-
places that were in fashion, which gave him the credit of be-
ing one of the most enlightened of the nobility. His person
was garnished with fashionable trinkets, and his head furnished
with ideas hall-marked by the press.
In 1834 Amed6e was a young man of five-and-twenty, of
medium height, dark, with a very prominent thorax, well-
made shoulders, rather plump legs, feet already fat, white
dimpled hands, a beard under his chin, mustaches worthy of
the garrison, a good-natured, fat, rubicund face, a flat nose,
and brown expressionless eyes; nothing Spanish about him.
He was progressing rapidly in the direction of obesity, which
would be fatal to his pretensions. His nails were well kept,
his beard trimmed, the smallest details of his dress attended to
with English precision. Hence Amedee de Soulas was looked
upon as the finest man in Besanon. A hairdresser who waited
upon him at a fixed hour another luxury, costing sixty francs
a year held him up as the sovereign authority in matters of
fashion and elegance.
Amede slept late, dressed and went out towards noon, to
go to one of his farms and practice pistol-shooting. He
attached as much importance to this exercise as Lord Byron
did in his later days. Then at three o'clock he came home,
admired on horseback by the grisettes and the ladies who
happened to be at their windows. After an affectation of
study or business, which seemed to engage him till four, he
dressed to dine out, spent the evening in the drawing-rooms
of the aristocracy of Besancon playing whist, and went home
to bed at eleven. No life could be more above-board, more
ALBERT SAVARON. 293
prudent, or more irreproachable, for he punctually attended
the services at church on Sundays and holy days.
To enable you to understand how exceptional is such a life,
it is necessary to devote a few words to an account of Besancon.
No town ever offered more deaf and dumb resistance to pro-
gress. At Besancon the officials, the employes, the military,
in short, every one engaged in governing it, sent thither from
Paris to fill a post of any kind, are all spoken of by the
expressive general name of "The Colony." The colony is
neutral ground, the only ground where, as in church, the
upper rank and the townsfolk of the place can meet. Here,
fired by a word, a look, or gesture, are started those feuds
between house and house, between a woman of rank and a
citizen's wife, which endure till death, and widen the impass-
able gulf which parts the two classes of society. With the
exception of the Clermont-Mont-Saint-Jean, the Beauffremont,
the de Scey, and the Gramont families, with a few others who
come only to stay on their estates in the Comte, the aristoc-
racy of Besancon dates no further back than a couple of
centuries, the time of the conquest by Louis XIV. This
little world is essentially of the par -lenient, and arrogant, stiff,
solemn, uncompromising, haughty beyond all comparison,
even with the Court of Vienna, for in this the nobility of
Besancon would put the Viennese drawing-rooms to shame.
As to Victor Hugo, Nodier, Fourier, the glories of the town,
they are never mentioned, no one thinks about them. The
marriages in these families are arranged in the cradle, so
rigidly are the greatest things settled as well as the smallest.
No stranger, no intruder, ever finds his way into one of these
houses, and to obtain an introduction for the colonels or
officers of title belonging to the first families in France when
quartered there requires efforts of diplomacy which Prince
Talleyrand would gladly have mastered to use at a congress.
In 1834 Amedee was the only man in Besancon who wore
trousers-straps ; this will account for the young man's being
294 ALBERT SAVARON.
regarded as a lion. And a little anecdote will enable you to
understand the city of Besancon.
Some time before the opening of this story, the need arose
at the prefecture for bringing an editor from Paris for the