The Deputy of Arcis | Page 7

him
and some young striplings went so far as to talk of his dotage. The
partisans of Simon Giguet then turned to Phileas Beauvisage, the
mayor, and won him over the more easily to their side because, without
having quarrelled with his father-in-law, he assumed an independence
of him which had ended in coldness,--an independence that the sly old
notary allowed him to maintain, seeing in it an excellent means of
action on the town of Arcis.
The mayor, questioned the evening before in the open street, declared

positively that he should cast his vote for the first-comer on the list of
eligibles rather than give it to Charles Keller, for whom, however, he
had a high esteem.
"Arcis shall be no longer a rotten borough!" he said, "or I'll emigrate to
Paris."
Flatter the passions of the moment and you will always be a hero, even
at Arcis-sur-Aube.
"Monsieur le maire," said everybody, "gives noble proof of his
firmness of character."
Nothing progresses so rapidly as a legal revolt. That evening Madame
Marion and her friends organized for the morrow a meeting of
"independent electors" in the interests of Simon Giguet, the colonel's
son. The morrow had now come and had turned the house topsy-turvy
to receive the friends on whose independence the leaders of the
movement counted. Simon Giguet, the native-born candidate of a little
town jealously desirous to elect a son of its own, had, as we have seen,
put to profit this desire; and yet, the whole prosperity and fortune of the
Giguet family were the work of the Comte de Gondreville. But when it
comes to an election, what are sentiments!
This Scene is written for the information of countries so unfortunate as
not to know the blessings of national representation, and which are,
therefore, ignorant by what intestinal convulsions, what Brutus- like
sacrifices, a little town gives birth to a deputy. Majestic but natural
spectacle, which may, indeed, be compared with that of childbirth,--the
same throes, the same impurities, the same lacerations, the same final
triumph!
It may be asked why an only son, whose fortune was sufficient, should
be, like Simon Giguet, an ordinary barrister in a little country town
where barristers are pretty nearly useless. A word about the candidate is
therefore necessary.
Colonel Giguet had had, between 1806 and 1813, by his wife who died
in 1814, three children, the eldest of whom, Simon, alone survived.
Until he became an only child, Simon was brought up as a youth to
whom the exercise of a profession would be necessary. And about the
time he became by the death of his brothers the family heir, the young
man met with a serious disappointment. Madame Marion had counted
much, for her nephew, on the inheritance of his grandfather the banker

of Hamburg. But when that old German died in 1826, he left his
grandson Giguet a paltry two thousand francs a year. The worthy
banker, endowed with great procreative powers, having soothed the
worries of business by the pleasures of paternity, favored the families
of eleven other children who surrounded him, and who made him
believe, with some appearance of justice, that Simon Giguet was
already a rich man.
Besides all this, the colonel was bent on giving his son an independent
position, and for this reason: the Giguets could not expect any
government favors under the Restoration. Even if Simon had not been
the son of an ardent Bonapartist, he belonged to a family whose
members had justly incurred the animosity of the Cinq-Cygne family,
owing to the part which Giguet, the colonel of gendarmerie, and the
Marions, including Madame Marion, had taken as witnesses on the
famous trial of the Messieurs de Simeuse, unjustly condemned in 1805
for the abduction of the Comte de Gondreville, then senator, and
formerly representative of the people, who had despoiled the Cinq-
Cygne family of their property. [See "An Historical Mystery."]
Grevin was not only one of the most important witnesses at that trial,
but he was one of the chief promoters of the prosecution. That affair
divides to this day the arrondissement of Arcis into two parties; one of
which declares the innocence of the condemned; the other standing by
the Comte de Gondreville and his adherents. Though, under the
Restoration, the Comtesse de Cinq-Cygne used all the influence the
return of the Bourbons gave her to arrange things as she wished in the
department of the Aube, the Comte de Gondreville contrived to
counterbalance this Cinq-Cygne royalty by the secret authority he
wielded over the liberals of the town through the notary Grevin,
Colonel Giguet, his son-in-law Keller (always elected deputy in spite of
the Cinq-Cygnes), and also by the credit he maintained, as long as
Louis XVIII. lived, in the counsels of the crown.