Sons of the Soil

On the Burgundian estate of the retired general Comte de Montcornet, a war of attrition runs on for years between the château and the villages around it: the peasants who work the land steal its produce and its timber a little at a time, gathering dead wood they are permitted to take and pilfering the standing trees they are not, while the landowners look on, unable to prosecute a theft too diffuse and too universal to punish. Balzac follows the maneuvering of poachers, moneylenders, local officials, and a scheming café-keeper as the balance of power slides, almost invisibly, from the great house to the village around it — a slow siege rather than a revolution, and one the château loses.

Balzac had been planning Les Paysans since the 1830s and left it unfinished at his death in 1850; his widow, Ewelina Hańska, completed the novel from his own notes, and it was published in Paris in 1855. Unusual among his novels for withholding its sympathy from the peasantry rather than the landowners, it is among the bleakest of the Comédie Humaine's studies of provincial life. Katharine Prescott Wormeley's translation, part of her rendering of most of Balzac's work into English, was first published as Sons of the Soil by Roberts Brothers in 1890 and later reissued by Little, Brown and Company.

This Bibliomancer edition presents the complete text of Wormeley's translation.