“The various workmen wished to buy their bread ready baked, so we came to have a baker.  Buckwheat could no longer be the food of a population which, awakened from its lethargy, had become essentially active.  They lived on buckwheat when I first came among them, and I wished to effect a change to rye, or a mixture of rye and wheat in the first instance, and finally to see a loaf of white bread even in the poorest household.  Intellectual progress, to my thinking, was entirely dependent on a general improvement in the conditions of life.  The presence of a butcher in the district says as much for its intelligence as for its wealth.  The worker feeds himself, and a man who feeds himself thinks.  I had made a very careful study of the soil, for I foresaw a time when it would be necessary to grow wheat.  I was sure of launching the place in a very prosperous agricultural career, and of doubling the population, when once it had begun to work.  And now the time had come.

“M.  Gravier, of Grenoble, owned a great deal of land in the commune, which brought him in no rent, but which might be turned into corn-growing land.  He is the head of a department in the Prefecture, as you know.  It was a kindness for his own countryside quite as much as my earnest entreaties that won him over.  He had very benevolently yielded to my importunities on former occasions, and I succeeded in making it clear to him that in so doing he had wrought unconsciously for his own benefit.  After several days spent in pleadings, consultation, and talk, the matter was thrashed out.  I undertook to guarantee him against all risks in the undertaking, from which his wife, a woman of no imagination, sought to frighten him.  He agreed to build four farmhouses with a hundred acres of land attached to each, and promised to advance the sums required to pay for clearing the ground, for seeds, ploughing gear, and cattle, and for making occupation roads.

“I myself also started two farms, quite as much for the sake of bringing my waste land into cultivation as with a view to giving an object-lesson in the use of modern methods in agriculture.  In six weeks’ time the population of the town increased to three hundred people.  Homes for several families must be built on the six farms; there was a vast quantity of land to be broken up; the work called for laborers.  Wheelwrights, drainmakers, journeymen, and laborers of all kinds flocked in.  The road to Grenoble was covered with carts that came and went.  All the countryside was astir.  The circulation of money had made every one anxious to earn it, apathy had ceased, the place had awakened.

“The story of M. Gravier, one of those who did so much for this canton, can be concluded in a few words.  In spite of cautious misgivings, not unnatural in a man occupying an official position in a provincial town, he advanced more than forty thousand francs, on the faith of my promises, without knowing whether he should ever see them back again.  To-day every one of his farms is let for a thousand francs.  His tenants have thriven so well that each of them owns at least a hundred acres, three hundred sheep, twenty cows, ten oxen, and five horses, and employs more than twenty persons.