[Sons of the Soil by Honore de Balzac]@TWC D-Link bookSons of the Soil CHAPTER XII 1/23
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SHOWETH HOW THE TAVERN IS THE PEOPLE'S PARLIAMENT. Old Mother Tonsard's screams brought a number of people from Blangy to know what was happening at the Grand-I-Vert, the distance from the village to the inn not being greater than that from the inn to the gate of Blangy.
One of these inquiring visitors was old Niseron, La Pechina's grandfather, who was on his way, after ringing the second Angelus, to dig the vine-rows in his last little bit of ground. Bent by toil, with pallid face and silvery hair, the old vinedresser, now the sole representative of civic virtue in the community, had been, during the Revolution, president of the Jacobin club at Ville-aux-Fayes, and a juror in the revolutionary tribunal of the district.
Jean-Francois Niseron, carved out of the wood that the apostles were made of, was of the type of Saint Peter; whom painters and sculptors have united in representing with the square brow of the people, the thick, naturally curling hair of the laborer, the muscles of the man of toil, the complexion of a fisherman; with the large nose, the shrewd, half-mocking lips that scoff at fate, the neck and shoulders of the strong man who cuts his wood to cook his dinner while the doctrinaires of his opinions talk. Such, at forty years of age on the breaking out of the Revolution, was this man, strong as iron, pure as gold.
Advocate of the people, he believed in a republic through the very roll of that name, more formidable in sound perhaps than in reality.
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