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Sons of the Soil by Honoré de Balzac
page 313 of 428 (73%)
time, in a little town of this kind can conceive the air of profound
satisfaction upon the faces of these people, who believed themselves
the solar plexus of France, all of them armed with incredible
dexterity and shrewdness to do mischief,--all, in their wisdom,
declaring that the hero of Essling was a coward, Madame de Montcornet
a manoeuvring Parisian, and the Abbe Brossette an ambitious little
priest.

If Rigou, Soudry, and Gaubertin had lived at Ville-aux-Fayes, they
would have quarrelled; their various pretensions would have clashed;
but fate ordained that the Lucullus of Blangy felt too strongly the
need of solitude, in which to wallow at his ease in usury and
sensuality, to live anywhere but at Blangy; that Madame Soudry had
sense enough to see that she could reign nowhere else except at
Soulanges; and that Ville-aux-Fayes was Gaubertin's place of business.
Those who enjoy studying social nature will admit that General
Montcornet was pursued by special ill-luck in this accidental
separation of his dangerous enemies, who thus accomplished the
evolutions of their individual power and vanity at such distances from
each other that neither star interfered with the orbit of the other,
--a fact which doubled and trebled their powers of mischief.

Nevertheless, though all these worthy bourgeois, proud of their
accomplishments, considered their society as far superior in
attractions to that of Ville-aux-Fayes, and repeated with comic
pomposity the local dictum, "Soulanges is a town of society and social
pleasures," it must not be supposed that Ville-aux-Fayes accepted this
supremacy. The Gaubertin salon ridiculed ("in petto") the salon
Soudry. By the manner in which Gaubertin remarked, "We are a financial
community, engaged in actual business; we have the folly to fatigue
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