The Nabob - Alphonse Daudet (read ebook pdf TXT) 📗

(black well). It is a regular well, black with foliage, consisting of fifty small red-stone houses clustered round a long Italian church, at the bottom of a ravine between rigid hills and coloured sandstone rocks, over which stretch immense forests of larch and juniper trees. From my open window, at which I am writing, I see up above there a bit of blue sky, the orifice of the well; down below on the little square--which a huge nut-tree shades as though the shadows were not already thick enough--two shepherds clothed in sheep-skins are playing at cards, with their elbows on the stone of a fountain. Gambling is the bane of this land of idleness, where they get men from Lucca to do their harvesting. The two poor wretches I see probably haven't a farthing between them, but one bets his knife against a cheese wrapped up in vine leaves, and the stakes lie between them on the bench. A little priest smokes his cigar as he watches them, and seems to take the liveliest interest in their game.
And that is not all. Not a sound anywhere except the drops of water on the stone, the oaths of one of the players who swears by the _sango del seminaro_, and from underneath my room in the inn parlour the eager voice of our friend mingling with the sputterings of the illustrious Paganetti, who is interpreter, in his conversation with the not less illustrious Piedigriggio.
M. Piedigriggio (gray feet) is a local celebrity. He is a tall, old man of seventy-five, with a flowing beard and a straight back. He wears a little pilot coat, a brown wool Catalonian cap on his white locks. At his belt he carries a pair of scissors to cut the long leaves of the green tobacco he smokes into the hollow of his hand. A venerable-looking person in fact, and when he crossed the square, shaking hands with the priest, smiling protectingly at the gamblers, I would never have believed that I was looking at the famous brigand Piedigriggio, who held the woods in Monte-Rotondo from 1840 to 1860, outwitted the police and the military, and who to-day, thanks to the proscription by which he benefits, after seven or eight cold-blooded murders, moves peaceably about the country which witnessed his crimes, and enjoys a considerable importance. This is why: Piedigriggio has two sons who, nobly following in his footsteps, have taken to the carbine and the woods, in their turn not to be found, not to be caught, as their father was, for twenty years; warned by the shepherds of the movements of the police, when the latter leave a village, they make their appearance in it. The eldest, Scipio, came to mass last Sunday at Pozzonegro. To say they love them, and that the bloody hand-shake of those wretches is a pleasure to all who harbour them, would be to calumniate the peaceful inhabitants of this parish. But they fear them, and their will is law.
Now, these Piedigriggios have taken it into their heads to favour our opponent in the election. And their influence is a formidable power, for they can make two whole cantons vote against us. They have long legs, the rascals, as long in proportion as the reach of their guns. Naturally, we have the police on our side, but the brigands are far more powerful. As our innkeeper said this morning: "The police, they go away; _ma_ the _banditti_ they stay." In the face of this logical reasoning we understood that the only thing to be done was to treat with the Gray-feet, to try a "job," in fact. The mayor said something of this to the old man, who consulted his sons, and it is the conditions of this treaty they are discussing downstairs. I hear the voice of our general director, "Come, my dear fellow, you know I am an old Corsican myself," and then the other's quiet replies, broken, like his tobacco, by the irritating noise of his scissors. The "dear fellow" does not seem to have much confidence, and until the coin is ringing upon the table I fancy there will not be any advance.
You see, Paganetti is known in his native country. The worth of his word is written on the square in Corte, still waiting for the monument to Paoli, on the vast fields of carrots which he has managed to plant on the Island of Ithaca, in the gaping empty purses of all those unfortunate small tradesmen, village priests, and petty nobility, whose poor savings he has swallowed up dazzling their eyes with chimerical _combinazioni_. Truly, for him to dare to come back here, it needed all his phenomenal audacity, as well as the resources now at his disposal to satisfy all claims.
And, indeed, what truth is there in the fabulous works undertaken by the Territorial Bank?
None.
Mines, which produce nothing and never will produce anything, for they exist only on paper; quarries, which are still innocent of pick or dynamite, tracts of uncultivated sandy land that they survey with a gesture, telling you, "We begin here, and we go right over there, as far as you like." It is the same with the forests. The whole of a wooded hill in Monte-Rotondo belongs to us, it seems, but the felling of the trees is impossible unless aeronauts undertake the woodman's work. It is the same with the watering-places, among which this miserable hamlet of Pozzonegro is one of the most important, with its fountain whose astonishing ferruginous properties Paganetti advertises. Of the streamers, not a shadow. Stay--an old, half-ruined Genoese tower on the shore of the Gulf of Ajaccio bears on a tarnished escutcheon, above its hermetically sealed doors, this inscription: "Paganetti's Agency. Maritime Company. Inquiry Office." Fat, gray lizards tend the office in company with an owl. As for the railways, all these honest Corsicans to whom I spoke of it smiled knowingly, replied with winks and mysterious hints, and it was only this morning that I had the exceedingly buffoonish explanation of all this reticence.
I had read among the documents which the director-general flaunts in our eyes from time to time, like a fan to puff up his impostures, the bill of sale of a marble quarry at a place said to be "Taverna," two hours' distance from Pozzonegro. Profiting by our stay here, I got on a mule this morning, without telling any one, and guided by a tall scamp of a fellow with legs like a deer--true type of a Corsican poacher or smuggler, his thick, red pipe in his mouth, his gun in a bandoleer--I went to Taverna. After a fearful progress across cracked rocks and bogs, past abysses of unsoundable depths--on the very edges of which my mule maliciously walked as though to mark them out with her shoes--we arrived, by an almost perpendicular descent, at the end of our journey. It was a vast desert of rocks, absolutely bare, all white with the droppings of gulls and sea-fowl, for the sea is at the bottom, quite near, and the silence of the place was broken only by the flow of the waves and the shrill cries of the wheeling circles of birds. My guide, who has a holy horror of excisemen and the police, stayed above on the cliff, because of a little coastguard station posted like a watchman on the shore. I made for a large red building which still maintained, in this burning solitude its three stories, in spite of broken windows and ruinous tiles. Over the worm-eaten door was an immense sign-board: "Territorial Bank. Carr----bre----54." The wind, the sun, the rain, have wiped out the rest.
There has been there, certainly, a commencement of operations, for a large square, gaping hole, cut out with a punch, is still open in the ground, showing along its crumbling sides, like a leopard's spots, red slabs with brown veins, and at the bottom, in the brambles, enormous blocks of the marble, called in the trade "black-heart" (marble spotted with red and brown), condemned blocks that no one could make anything of for want of a road leading to the quarry or a harbour to make the coast accessible for freight ships, and for want, above all, of subsidies considerable enough to carry out one or the other of these two projects. So the quarry remains abandoned, at a few cable-lengths from the shore, as cumbrous and useless as Robinson Crusoe's canoe in the same unfortunate circumstances. These details of the heart-rending story of our sole territorial wealth were furnished by a miserable caretaker, shaking with fever, whom I found in the low-ceilinged room of the yellow house trying to roast a piece of kid over the acrid smoke of a pistachio bush.
This man, who in himself is the whole staff of the Territorial Bank in Corsica, is Paganetti's foster-father, an old lighthouse-keeper upon whom the solitude does not weigh. Our director-general leaves him there partly for charity and partly because letters dated from the Taverna quarry, now and again, make a good show at the shareholders' meetings. I had the greatest difficulty extracting a little information from this poor creature, three parts savage, who looked upon me with cautious mistrust, half hidden behind the long hair of his goat-skin _pelone_. He told me, however, without intending it, what the Corsicans understand by the word "railway," and why they put on mysterious airs when they speak of it. As I was trying to find out if he knew anything about the scheme for a railway in the country, this old man, instead of smiling knowingly like his compatriots, said, quite naturally, in passable French, his voice rusty and benumbed like an ancient, little-used lock:
"Oh, sir, no need of a railway here."
"But it would be most valuable, most useful; it would facilitate communications."
"I don't say no; but with the police we have enough here."
"The policemen?"
"Certainly."
This _quid pro quo_ went on for some five minutes before I discovered that here the secret police service is called "the railway." As there are many Corsican policemen on the Continent they use this euphemism to designate the ignoble calling they follow. You inquire of the relations, "Where is your brother Ambrosini? What is your uncle Barbicaglia doing?" They will answer with a little wink, "He has a place on the railway," and every one knows what that means. Among the people, the peasants, who have never seen a railway and don't know what it is, it is quite seriously believed that the great occult administration of the Imperial police has no other name than that. Our principal agent in the country shares this touching simplicity of belief. It shows you the real state of the "Line from Ajaccio to Bastia, passing by Bonifacio, Porto Vecchio, etc.," as it is written on the big, green-backed books of the house of Paganetti. In fact all the goods of the Territorial Bank consist of a few sign-boards and two ruins, the whole not worthy of lying in the "old materials" yard in the Rue Saint-Ferdinand; every night as I go to sleep I hear the old vanes grating and the old doors banging on emptiness.
But in this case, where have gone, where are going now, the enormous sums M. Jansoulet has spent during the last five months--not to count what came from the outside, attracted by the magic of his name? I thought, as you did, that all these soundings, borings, purchasings of land that the books set forth in fine round-hand were exaggerated beyond measure. But who could suspect such effrontery? This is why the director was so opposed to the idea of bringing me on the electioneering trip. I don't want to have an explanation now. My poor Nabob has quite enough trouble in this election. Only, whenever we get back, I shall lay before him all the details