The Project Gutenberg EBook of Sons of the Soil, by Honore de Balzac

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Title: Sons of the Soil

Author: Honore de Balzac

Translator: Katharine Prescott Wormeley

Release Date: August, 1998 [Etext #1417]
Posting Date: February 24, 2010

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SONS OF THE SOIL ***

Produced by John Bickers, and Dagny

SONS OF THE SOIL

By Honore De Balzac

Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley

DEDICATION

To Monsieur P. S. B. Gavault.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote these words at the beginning of his
Nouvelle Heloise: "I have seen the morals of my time and I publish
these letters." May I not say to you, in imitation of that great
writer, "I have studied the march of my epoch and I publish this
work"?

The object of this particular study--startling in its truth so
long as society makes philanthropy a principle instead of
regarding it as an accident--is to bring to sight the leading
characters of a class too long unheeded by the pens of writers who
seek novelty as their chief object. Perhaps this forgetfulness is
only prudence in these days when the people are heirs of all the
sycophants of royalty. We make criminals poetic, we commiserate
the hangman, we have all but deified the proletary. Sects have
risen, and cried by every pen, "Arise, working-men!" just as
formerly they cried, "Arise!" to the "tiers etat." None of these
Erostrates, however, have dared to face the country solitudes and
study the unceasing conspiracy of those whom we term weak against
those others who fancy themselves strong,--that of the peasant
against the proprietor. It is necessary to enlighten not only the
legislator of to-day but him of to-morrow. In the midst of the
present democratic ferment, into which so many of our writers
blindly rush, it becomes an urgent duty to exhibit the peasant who
renders Law inapplicable, and who has made the ownership of land
to be a thing that is, and that is not.

You are now to behold that indefatigable mole, that rodent which
undermines and disintegrates the soil, parcels it