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reputation for unsound views,
and discredit him for ever in the eyes of the wise and sensible folk
who mete out esteem in the Franch-Comté.
    In actual fact, these wise folk keep everyone there in the grip of the most irksome despotism .
This dirty word sums up why it is that life in a small town is
unbearable to anyone who has dwelt in the great republic called Paris.
Public opinion-and you can just imagine what it's like!--exercises a
tyranny that is every bit as mindless * in small towns in France as it is in the United States of America.
    -6-

CHAPTER 2
A mayor
Does dignity then count for nothing, sir? It is respected by fools,
held in awe by children, envied by the rich, and despised by any
wise man.
    BARNAVE *
    FORTUNATELY for M. de Rênal's reputation as an administrator, a massive retaining-wall was needed to shore up the public promenade which runs along the
hillside a hundred feet or so above the course of the Doubs. From this
excellent vantage-point you get one of the most picturesque views in
the whole of France. But every spring, rainwater used to erode the
path away, leaving deep gullies and making it quite impassable. This
drawback affected everyone, and put M. de Rênal in the fortunate
position of having to immortalize his term of office by building a
wall twenty foot high and some eighty yards long.
    The parapet of this wall cost M. de Rênal three journeys to Paris,
because the last Minister of the Interior but one had declared himself
utterly opposed to the promenade at Verrières. The parapet now rises
four feet above ground level, and, as if in defiance of all ministers
past and present, it is now being dressed with slabs of solid stone.
    How many times, as I stood there leaning my chest against those great
blocks of fine blue-grey stone, musing on the Paris balls I had left
behind the day before, have I gazed down into the valley of the Doubs!
Beyond it on the left bank there are five or six winding valleys with
tiny streams at the bottom clearly visible to the naked eye. You can
see them cascading down into the Doubs. The heat of the sun is fierce
in the mountains here, and when it shines overhead the musing
traveller is sheltered by the magnificent plane trees on this terrace.
They owe their rapid growth and their fine blue-green foliage to the
new soil which the mayor had the builders bring
    -7-

up to put behind his huge retaining-wall. For in spite of opposition
from the town council, he widened the promenade by more than six feet
(which I welcome, although he is an Ultra * and I am a liberal), and in his opinion and that of M. Valenod, who
has the good fortune to be master of the workhouse in Verrières, this
terrace is now fit to be compared to the one at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. *
    For my part, I have only one criticism of the AVENUE DE LA FIDÉLITÉ
(you can read its official name in fifteen or twenty places on marble
plaques which have earned M. de Rênal yet one more decoration); what I
dislike about it is the barbarous way the municipality pollards these
leafy planes to the quick, giving them low, round, smooth heads which
make them look like the commonest of vegetables from the allotment,
when they are crying out to be left in the magnificent shapes they
display in England. But the mayor's will is tyrannical, and twice a
year all the trees belonging to the commune have their branches
mercilessly amputated. Local liberals claim, not without some
exaggeration, that the hand of the official gardener has become far
heavier since M. Maslon the curate adopted the habit of appropriating
the cuttings for himself.
    This
young clergyman was sent from Besançon some years ago to keep an eye
on Father Chélan and a number of other incumbents of neighbouring
parishes. An old army surgeon who had fought in the Italian campaigns
and had retired to Verrières--a man who in his lifetime managed to be
both a Jacobin * and a Bonapartist at once, according to the