Part 1 Chapter 2
A MayorPrestige! Sir, is it nothing? To be revered by fools, gaped at bychildren, envied by the rich and scorned by the wise.
BARNAVEFortunately for M. de Renal's reputation as an administrator, a hugeretaining wall was required for the public avenue which skirts the hillside a hundred feet above the bed of the Doubs. To this admirable position it is indebted for one of the most picturesque views in France. But,every spring, torrents of rainwater made channels across the avenue,carved deep gullies in it and left it impassable. This nuisance, which affected everybody alike, placed M. de Renal under the fortunate obligation to immortalise his administration by a wall twenty feet in heightand seventy or eighty yards long.
The parapet of this wall, to secure which M. de Renal was obliged tomake three journeys to Paris, for the Minister of the Interior before lasthad sworn a deadly enmity to the Verrieres avenue; the parapet of thiswall now rises four feet above the ground. And, as though to defy allMinisters past and present, it is being finished off at this moment withslabs of dressed stone.
How often, my thoughts straying back to the ball-rooms of Paris,which I had forsaken overnight, my elbows leaning upon those greatblocks of stone of a fine grey with a shade of blue in it, have I swept withmy gaze the vale of the Doubs! Over there, on the left bank, are five orsix winding valleys, along the folds of which the eye can make out quiteplainly a number of little streams. After leaping from rock to rock, theymay be seen falling into the Doubs. The sun is extremely hot in thesemountains; when it is directly overhead, the traveller's rest is shelteredon this terrace by a row of magnificent planes. Their rapid growth, andhandsome foliage of a bluish tint are due to the artificial soil with whichthe Mayor has filled in the space behind his immense retaining wall, for, despite the opposition of the town council, he has widened the avenueby more than six feet (although he is an Ultra and I myself a Liberal, Igive him credit for it), that is why, in his opinion and in that of M. Valenod, the fortunate governor of the Verrieres poorhouse, this terrace isworthy to be compared with that of Saint-Germain-en-Laye.
For my part, I have only one fault to find with the Cours de la Fidelite;one reads this, its official title, in fifteen or twenty places, on marble slabswhich have won M. de Renal yet another Cross; what I should be inclined to condemn in the Cours de la Fidelite is the barbarous manner inwhich the authorities keep these sturdy plane trees trimmed and pollarded. Instead of suggesting, with their low, rounded, flattened heads, thecommonest of kitchen garden vegetables, they would like nothing betterthan to assume those magnificent forms which one sees them wear inEngland. But the Mayor's will is despotic, and twice a year every tree belonging to the commune is pitilessly lopped. The Liberals of the placemaintain, but they exaggerate, that the hand of the official gardener hasgrown much more severe since the Reverend Vicar Maslon formed thehabit of appropriating the clippings.
This young cleric was sent from Besancon, some years ago, to keep aneye upon the abbe Chelan and certain parish priests of the district. Anold Surgeon-Major of the Army of Italy, in retirement at Verrieres, whoin his time had been simultaneously, according to the Mayor, a Jacobinand a Bonapartist, actually ventured one day to complain to him of theperiodical mutilation of these fine trees.
'I like shade,' replied M. de Renal with the touch of arrogance appropriate when one is addressing a surgeon, a Member of the Legion ofHonour; 'I like shade, I have my trees cut so as to give shade, and I donot consider that a tree is made for any other purpose, unless, like theuseful walnut, it yields a return.'
There you have the great phrase that decides everything at Verrieres:
YIELD A RETURN; it by itself represents the habitual thought of morethan three fourths of the inhabitants.
Yielding a return is the consideration that settles everything in this littletown which seemed to you, just now, so attractive. The stranger arrivingthere, beguiled by the beauty of the cool, deep valleys on every side,imagines at first that the inhabitants are influenced by the idea of beauty;they are always talking about the beauty of their scenery: no one candeny that they make a great to-do about it; but this is because it attracts acertain number of visitors whose money goes to enrich the innkeepers, and thus, through the channel of the rate-collector, yields a return to thetown.
It was a fine day in autumn and M. de Renal was strolling along theCours de la Fidelite, his lady on his arm. While she listened to her husband, who was speaking with an air of gravity, Madame de Renal's eyewas anxiously following the movements of three little boys. The eldest,who might be about eleven, was continually running to the parapet asthough about to climb on top. A gentle voice then uttered the nameAdolphe, and the child abandoned his ambitious project. Madame deRenal looked like a woman of thirty, but was still extremely pretty.
'He may live to rue the day, that fine gentleman from Paris,' M. deRenal was saying in a tone of annoyance, his cheek paler even than wasits wont. 'I myself am not entirely without friends at Court… .'
But albeit I mean to speak to you of provincial life for two hundredpages, I shall not be so barbarous as to inflict upon you the tedium andall the clever turns of a provincial dialogue.
This fine gentleman from Paris, so odious to the Mayor of Verrieres,was none other than M. Appert, 1 who, a couple of days earlier, had contrived to make his way not only into the prison and the poorhouse ofVerrieres, but also into the hospital, administered gratuitously by theMayor and the principal landowners of the neighbourhood.
'But,' Madame de Renal put in timidly, 'what harm can this gentlemanfrom Paris do you, since you provide for the welfare of the poor with themost scrupulous honesty?'
'He has only come to cast blame, and then he'll go back and have articles put in the Liberal papers.'
'You never read them, my dear.'
'But people tell us about those Jacobin articles; all that distracts us, andhinders us from doing good. 2 As for me, I shall never forgive the cure.'
1.A contemporary philanthropist and prison visitor.
2.authentic