Sons of the Soil. Honore de Balzac

      DEDICATION

       Table of Contents

      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

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