Villiers is one of the prettiest towns in Franche-Comté.Houses with white walls, red tiles and spires are spread out on the slope of a hill.Thick chestnut trees, thick and dense, paint the slightest bumps and valleys of the hill.Hundreds of steps away from the city wall, there is the Du River.The city wall was built by the Spaniards in the early years, but it is now dilapidated. To the north of Villiers is the shade of high mountains, a branch of the Jura Mountains.In the early cold of October, the crumbling Wera peak was covered with snow, and a torrent descending from the mountain, passing through the town and pouring into the Du River, turned a large number of wooden saws into motion.This is a very simple industry, and the residents of the small town are more like country folks, so the lives of most people are somewhat comfortable.But it wasn't the wood saw that made the town rich.The general affluence depended on the production of a calico, known to the world as the Mirouze calico, so that after the fall of Napoleon, almost every house in Verrières had its fronts refurbished.

As soon as you enter the city, you will hear the rumble of a noisy and scary-looking machine, which will make your head dizzy.Twenty heavy hammers were raised and lowered by a single wheel driven by the rushing water, making the road tremble.Nor can I tell how many thousand nails a hammer produces in a day.During the ups and downs, some watery and pretty girls sent the small iron block under the huge hammer, and the iron block turned into a nail immediately.This labor looks so clumsy, but it amazes the traveler who enters the mountainous area between France and Switzerland for the first time. If the traveler who enters Verrières asks the deaf pedestrians on the street, what is the beautiful castle? Whoever owns the nail factory, someone will say in a drawn-out tone: "Hey, it belongs to Mr. Mayor!"

Verrières has a boulevard that runs from the banks of the Doubs to the top of the hill.As long as a traveler stops for a while, nine times out of ten he will meet a tall man with a hasty expression and a very great look.Passers-by took off their hats as soon as they saw him.The recipient of several orders of knighthood is dressed in gray clothes, with gray hair, large forehead, hooked nose, and roughly correct features: at first sight, people even think that this face has the majesty and dignity of the mayor of a small city. The same attraction that still exists in men between forty-eight and fifty.However, the traveler from Paris is instantly displeased, and his self-satisfied air is mingled with an indescribable narrowness and lack of creativity.The traveler finally realized that this man's talent was limited to making the debts paid by the people who owed them on time, and if he owed the debts, he would delay it beyond delay.

This is Mr. de Renal, the mayor of Verrières.He walked solemnly, crossed the street, entered the town hall, and disappeared before the traveler's eyes.Had the traveler continued his wandering, and gone up a hundred paces, he would have glimpsed a house of rather handsome appearance, with an iron fence attached to it, and a splendid garden.In the distance is a line of sky formed by the hills of Burgundy, with twists and turns, as expected, as if it is for people to look at comfortably.This scenery made the traveler forget the smell of pennies and pennies, and he was already suffocated by it.

He was told that the house belonged to M. de Renal and had just been completed.The mayor of Verrières had paid for this handsome ashlar dwelling with his great nail factory.His ancestry is said to be Spanish, an ancient family which seems to have settled down long before the conquest of Louis XIV. He had been ashamed of being a factory owner since 1815, which had made him mayor of Verrières.In return for M. de Renal's shrewdness in the iron business, the several tiers of the splendid gardens, each with a parapet, stretched down to the banks of the Doub. In France, you don't expect to see the kind of beautiful gardens around the industrial cities of Leipzig, Frankfurt, Nuremberg and so on in Germany.At Franche-Comté, the more a wall is built, the more layers of stones are piled up on a property, the more one has a right to be respected by one's neighbours.M. de Rênal's garden is all the more admirable for its high walls, especially for the small plots of land which he has acquired at great expense.Let’s talk about the sawmill. Its special location on the banks of the Doubs impresses you as soon as you enter the city. You also notice the word “Solaire” written in huge letters on a large wooden board on the roof. surname, and on this land that was a sawmill six years ago, the parapet of the fourth terrace of the garden is currently being built.

Although the mayor is proud, he has to take a lot of effort to beg the cold and stubborn peasant old Soler, and has to pay him a shining louis d'or to move his factory elsewhere.As for the public stream that set the saw in motion, he diverted it by his influence in Paris.This favor came to him after the election of 182×.M. de Renal gave Soler the four arbons, five hundred paces below the Doub, for the one arbon.Although the location of the land was far more favorable to his fir-board business, Papa Sole (as he's been called since he started) cleverly took advantage of his neighbor's urgency and possessiveness, knocking him six thousand francs.

Sure enough, this transaction was criticized by some local people of insight.Once, four years later, on a Sunday, M. de Renal was returning home from church in mayor's coat, and from a distance he saw old Sorel, guarded by his three sons, looking at him and smiling.This smile gave the mayor a sudden realization, and he has been thinking ever since that he could have made the deal cheaper. In Verrières, where many parapets are to be erected, to command public respect, it is essential that the Italian plans not be adopted by the masons, who come every spring to Paris via the Pass of the Jura; The reputation of the original wall-builder was never to be washed away, and he was forever ruined in the eyes of those wise and sound men who held the honorable prize in Franche-Comté. power.

In fact, these wise men exercised the most disgusting despotism in the country; and it was because of this ugly word that life in a small city was almost unbearable to those who lived in Paris in the great republic known to the world.The tyranny of public opinion, and what kind of public opinion!Small cities in France are as stupid as they are in the United States of America.