Gaubertin had built himself a house on the level of the delta, intending to make a place which should improve the locality and render the lower town as desirable as the upper.It was a modern house built of stone, with a balcony of iron railings, outside blinds, painted windows, and no ornament but a line of fret-work under the eaves, a slate roof, one story in height with a garret, a fine courtyard, and behind it an English garden bathed by the waters of the Avonne.The elegance of the place compelled the department to build a fine edifice nearly opposite to it for the sub-prefecture, provisionally lodged in a mere kennel.The town itself also built a town-hall.The law-courts had lately been installed in a new edifice; so that Ville-aux-Fayes owed to the active influence of its present mayor a number of really imposing public buildings.The gendarmerie had also built barracks which completed the square formed by the marketplace.
These changes, on which the inhabitants prided themselves, were due to the impetus given by Gaubertin, who within a day or two had received the cross of the Legion of honor, in anticipation of the coming birthday of the king.In a town so situated and so modern there was of course, neither aristocracy nor nobility.Consequently, the rich merchants of Ville-aux-Fayes, proud of their own independence, willingly espoused the cause of the peasantry against a count of the Empire who had taken sides with the Restoration.To them the oppressors were the oppressed.The spirit of this commercial town was so well known to the government that they send there as sub-prefect a man with a conciliatory temper, a pupil of his uncle, the well-known des Lupeaulx, one of those men, accustomed to compromise, who are familiar with the difficulties and necessities of administration, but whom puritan politicians, doing infinitely worse things, call corrupt.
The interior of Gaubertin's house was decorated with the unmeaning commonplaces of modern luxury.Rich papers with gold borders, bronze chandeliers, mahogany furniture of a new pattern, astral lamps, round tables with marble tops, white china with gilt lines for dessert, red morocco chairs and mezzo-tint engravings in the dining-room, and blue cashmere furniture in the salon,--all details of a chilling and perfectly unmeaning character, but which to the eyes of Ville-aux-
Fayes seemed the last efforts of Sardanapalian luxury.Madame Gaubertin played the role of elegance with great effect; she assumed little airs and was lackadaisical at forty-five years of age, as though certain of the homage of her court.
We ask those who really know France, if these houses--those of Rigou, Soudry, and Gaubertin--are not a perfect presentation of the village, the little town, and the seat of a sub-prefecture?
Without being a man of mind, or a man of talent, Gaubertin had the appearance of being both.He owed the accuracy of his perception and his consummate art to an extreme keenness after gain.He desired wealth, not for his wife, not for his children, not for himself, not for his family, not for the reputation that money gives; after the gratification of his revenge (the hope of which kept him alive) he loved the touch of money, like Nucingen, who, it was said, kept fingering the gold in his pockets.The rush of business was Gaubertin's wine; and though he had his belly full of it, he had all the eagerness of one who was empty.As with valets of the drama, intrigues, tricks to play, mischief to organize, deceptions, commercial over-reachings, accounts to render and receive, disputes, and quarrels of self-interest, exhilarated him, kept his blood in circulation, and his bile flowing.He went and came on foot, on horseback, in a carriage, by water; he was at all auctions and timber sales in Paris, thinking of everything, keeping hundreds of wires in his hands and never getting them tangled.
Quick, decided in his movements as in his ideas, short and squat in figure, with a thin nose, a fiery eye, an ear on the "qui vive," there was something of the hunting-dog about him.His brown face, very round and sunburned, from which the tanned ears stood out predominantly,--
for he always wore a cap,--was in keeping with that character.His nose turned up; his tightly-closed lips could never have opened to say a kindly thing.His bushy whiskers formed a pair of black and shiny tufts beneath the highly-colored cheek-bones, and were lost in his cravat.Hair that was pepper-and-salt in color and frizzled naturally in stages like those of a judge's wig, seeming scorched by the fury of the fire which heated his brown skull and gleamed in his gray eyes surrounded by circular wrinkles (no doubt from a habit of always blinking when he looked across the country in full sunlight), completed the characteristics of his physiognomy.His lean and vigorous hands were hairy, knobbed, and claw-like, like those of men who do their share of labor.His personality was agreeable to those with whom he had to do, for he wrapped it in a misleading gayety; he knew how to talk a great deal without saying a word of what he meant to keep unsaid.He wrote little, so as to deny anything that escaped him which might prove unfavorable in its after effects upon his interests.His books and papers were kept by a cashier,--an honest man, whom men of Gaubertin's stamp always seek to get hold of, and whom they make, in their own selfish interests, their first dupe.
When Rigou's little green chaise appeared, towards twelve o'clock, in the broad avenue which skirts the river, Gaubertin, in cap, boots, and jacket, was returning from the wharves.He hastened his steps,--
feeling very sure that Rigou's object in coming over could only be "the great affair."
"Good morning, gendarme; good morning, paunch of gall and wisdom," he said, giving a little slap to the stomachs of his two visitors."We have business to talk over, and, faith! we'll do it glass in hand;
that's the true way to take things."