We came on a group of about twelve or thirteen reapers taking their evening meal of enormous loaves of brown bread, basins of butter, and kegs of cider.

M. Roussell, the farmer in whose service they were, was sitting among them.  He was an old friend and constituent of Tocqueville, and for thirty years was Maire of Tocqueville.  He has recently resigned.  He rose and walked with us to his house.

‘I was required,’ he said, ’to support the prefect’s candidate for the Conseil general.  No such proposition was ever made to me before.  I could not submit to it.  The prefect has been unusually busy of late.  The schoolmaster has been required to send in a list of the peasants whose children, on the plea of poverty, receive gratuitous education.  The children of those who do not vote with the prefect are to have it no longer.’

I asked what were the wages of labour.

‘Three francs and half a day,’ he said, ’during the harvest, with food—­which includes cider.  In ordinary times one franc a day with food, or a franc and a half without food.’

‘It seems then,’ I said, ’that you can feed a man for half a franc a day?’

‘He can feed himself,’ said M. Roussell, ’for that, but I cannot, or for double that money.’

The day labourer is generally hired only for one day.  A new bargain is made every day.

The house was not uncomfortable, but very untidy.  There are no ricks, everything is stored in large barns, where it is safe from weather, but terribly exposed to vermin.

A bright-complexioned servant-girl was in the kitchen preparing an enormous bowl of soup, of which bread, potatoes, and onions were the chief solid ingredients.

‘Roussell,’ said Beaumont, ’is superior to his class.  In general they are bad politicians.  It is seldom difficult to get their votes for the nominee of the prefect.  They dislike to vote for anyone whom they know, especially if he be a gentleman, or be supported by the gentry.  Such a candidate excites their democratic envy and suspicion.  But the prefect is an abstraction.  They have never seen him, they have seldom heard of his name or of that of his candidate, and therefore they vote for him.

’Lately, however, in some of my communes, the peasants have adapted a new practice, that of electing peasants.  I suspect that the Government is not displeased.

’The presence of such members will throw discredit on the Conseils generaux, and, if they get there, on the Corps legislatif, much to the pleasure of our democratic master, and they will be easily bribed or frightened.  Besides which the fifteen francs a day will be a fortune to them, and they will be terrified by the threat of a dissolution.  I do not think that even yet we have seen the worst of universal suffrage.’

‘What influence,’ I asked, ‘have the priests?’