In the yard of the picturesque old building, half covered with ivy, with its mossy wheel slumbering amid water-lilies, they found the Lepailleurs, the man tall, dry, and carroty, the woman as carroty and as dry as himself, but both of them young and hardy.  Their child Antonin was sitting on the ground, digging a hole with his little hands.

“Eggs?” La Lepailleur exclaimed; “yes, certainly, madame, there must be some.”

She made no haste to fetch them, however, but stood looking at Gervais, who was asleep in his little vehicle.

“Ah! so that’s your last.  He’s plump and pretty enough, I must say,” she remarked.

But Lepailleur raised a derisive laugh, and with the familiarity which the peasant displays towards the bourgeois whom he knows to be hard up, he said:  “And so that makes you five, monsieur.  Ah, well! that would be a deal too many for poor folks like us.”

“Why?” Mathieu quietly inquired.  “Haven’t you got this mill, and don’t you own fields, to give labor to the arms that would come and whose labor would double and treble your produce?”

These simple words were like a whipstroke that made Lepailleur rear.  And once again he poured forth all his spite.  Ah! surely now, it wasn’t his tumble-down old mill that would ever enrich him, since it had enriched neither his father nor his grandfather.  And as for his fields, well, that was a pretty dowry that his wife had brought him, land in which nothing more would grow, and which, however much one might water it with one’s sweat, did not even pay for manuring and sowing.

“But in the first place,” resumed Mathieu, “your mill ought to be repaired and its old mechanism replaced, or, better still, you should buy a good steam-engine.”

“Repair the mill!  Buy an engine!  Why, that’s madness,” the other replied.  “What would be the use of it?  As it is, people hereabouts have almost renounced growing corn, and I remain idle every other month.”

“And then,” continued Mathieu, “if your fields yield less, it is because you cultivate them badly, following the old routine, without proper care or appliances or artificial manure.”

“Appliances!  Artificial manure!  All that humbug which has only sent poor folks to rack and ruin!  Ah!  I should just like to see you trying to cultivate the land better, and make it yield what it’ll never yield any more.”

Thereupon he quite lost his temper, became violent and brutal, launching against the ungrateful earth all the charges which his love of idleness and his obstinacy suggested.  He had travelled, he had fought in Africa as a soldier, folks could not say that he had always lived in his hole like an ignorant beast.  But, none the less, on leaving his regiment he had lost all taste for work and come to the conclusion that agriculture was doomed, and would never give him aught but dry bread to eat.  The land would soon be bankrupt, and the peasantry no longer believed in it, so old and empty and worn out had it become.  And even the sun got out of order nowadays; they had snow in July and thunderstorms in December, a perfect upsetting of seasons, which wrecked the crops almost before they were out of the ground.