[Illustration:  Fig. 67.—­The egotistical and envious Villain.—­From a Miniature in “Proverbes et Adages, &c.,” Manuscript of the La Valliere Fund, in the National Library of Paris, with this legend: 

  “Attrapez y sont les plus fins: 
  Qui trop embrasse mal estraint.”

  ("The cleverest burn their fingers at it,
  And those who grasp all may lose all.”)
]

Another little poem entitled, “On the Twenty-four Kinds of Villains,” composed about the same period as the one above referred to, gives us a graphic description of the varieties of character among the feudal peasants.  One example is given of a man who will not tell a traveller the way, but merely in a surly way answers, “You know it better than I” (Fig. 67).  Another, sitting at his door on a Sunday, laughs at those passing by, and says to himself when he sees a gentleman going hawking with a bird on his wrist, “Ah! that bird will eat a hen to-day, and our children could all feast upon it!” Another is described as a sort of madman who equally despises God, the saints, the Church, and the nobility.  His neighbour is an honest simpleton, who, stopping in admiration before the doorway of Notre Dame in Paris in order to admire the statues of Pepin, Charlemagne, and their successors, has his pocket picked of his purse.  Another villain is supposed to make trade of pleading the cause of others before “Messire le Bailli;” he is very eloquent in trying to show that in the time of their ancestors the cows had a free right of pasture in such and such a meadow, or the sheep on such and such a ridge; then there is the miser, and the speculator, who converts all his possessions into ready money, so as to purchase grain against a bad season; but of course the harvest turns out to be excellent, and he does not make a farthing, but runs away to conceal his ruin and rage.  There is also the villain who leaves his plough to become a poacher.  There are many other curious examples which altogether tend to prove that there has been but little change in the villager class since the first periods of History.

[Illustration:  Fig. 68.—­The covetous and avaricious Villain.—­From a Miniature in “Proverbes et Adages, &c,” Manuscript in the National Library of Paris, with this legend: 

  “Je suis icy levant les yeulx
  Eu ce haut lieu des attendens,
  En convoitant pour avoir mieulx
  Prendre la lune avec les dens.”

  ("Even on this lofty height
  We yet look higher,
  As nothing will satisfy us
  But to clutch the moon.”)
]

Notwithstanding the miseries to which they were generally subject, the rural population had their days of rest and amusement, which were then much more numerous than at present.  At that period the festivals of the Church were frequent and rigidly kept, and as each of them was the pretext for a forced holiday from manual labour, the peasants thought of nothing, after church, but of amusing themselves; they drank, talked, sang, danced, and, above all, laughed, for the laugh of our forefathers quite rivalled the Homeric laugh, and burst forth with a noisy joviality (Fig. 69).