Le Rouge et le Noir

The small town of Verrières might be one of the prettiest in the Franche-Comté region. Its white houses with their pointed, red-tiled roofs stretch along the slope of a hill, whose slightest curves are revealed by clumps of sturdy chestnut trees. The Doubs River runs a few hundred feet below its fortresses built long ago by the Spanish, and now in ruins.

Verrières is sheltered on the northern side by a high mountain; it’s one of the branches of the Jura. The jagged peaks of the Verra are covered in snow from the first October frosts. A torrent, which plunges down from the mountain, crosses Verrières before throwing itself into the Doubs, and powers a great number of wood saws; it’s a very simple industry which provides a decent living for the majority of the inhabitants, who are closer to peasants than to the middle class.

However, it’s not the wood saws that have enriched this little town. It’s the fabrication of painted linen, called "Mulhouse cloth," that deserves credit for the general affluence which, since the fall of Napoleon, allowed the rebuilding of the façades of nearly all the houses in Verrières.

No sooner does one enter the town than he is stunned by the roar of a noisy and fearsome-looking machine. Twenty heavy hammers, striking with a noise that makes the cobblestones tremble, are lifted by a wheel turned by the river. Every day, each of these hammers creates I don’t know how many thousands of nails. Fresh and pretty young girls feed the little bits of iron for these enormous hammers’ blows, which quickly transform them into nails.

This rough-looking work is one of those that most astonish the traveler who enters the mountains that separate France from Helvetia for the first time. If, upon entering Verrières, the traveler asks who owns this nice nail factory that deafens people walking up the main street, the answer comes in a drawl: Hey! It belongs to the mayor.

If the traveler stops for a few moments on Verrières’s main street, which climbs from the bank of the Doubs up near the summit of the hill, there are a hundred to one odds that he’ll see a great man who looks busy and important.

At the sight of him, all hats are quickly raised. His hair is graying and he’s dressed in gray. He’s a chevalier in several Orders, he has a big forehead and an aquiline nose, and all in all, his face isn’t lacking in a certain regularity. You can even see, at first glance, that it unites the dignity of a town mayor with that sort of charm that can still be found at 48 or 50.

But the Parisian traveler is soon shocked by a certain air of self-satisfaction and of smugness mixed with something limited and uninventive. In the end, one feels that this man’s talent is restricted to getting paid exactly what he is owed, and to paying, himself, as late as possible when it is he who owes.

Such is the mayor of Verrières, Mr. Rênal. After solemnly crossing the street, he enters the townhall and disappears from the traveler’s sight. But, a hundred steps higher, if the latter continues walking, he’ll spot a fairly nice-looking house, and through an iron fence adjoining the house, magnificent gardens. Beyond that, the line of the horizon is formed by Burgundy’s hills, and seems custom-made for the pleasure of the eyes. This view makes the traveler forget the atmosphere poisoned by petty money squabbles that he’s starting to choke on.