“Take some wine,” said Tonsard, offering a full glass to the old man.

“Shall we start?” said Vermichel to the sheriff’s officer.

“Yes,” replied Brunet, “we must do without Pere Fourchon and take the assistant at Conches.  Go on before me; I have a paper to carry to the chateau.  Rigou has gained his second suit, and I’ve got to deliver the verdict.”

So saying, Monsieur Brunet, all the livelier for a couple of glasses of brandy, mounted his gray mare after saying good-bye to Pere Niseron; for the whole valley were desirous in their hearts of the good man’s esteem.

No science, not even that of statistics, can explain the rapidity with which news flies in the country, nor how it spreads over those ignorant and untaught regions which are, in France, a standing reproach to the government and to capitalists.  Contemporaneous history can show that a famous banker, after driving post-horses to death between Waterloo and Paris (everybody knows why—­he gained what the Emperor had lost, a commission!) carried the fatal news only three hours in advance of rumor.  So, not an hour after the encounter between old mother Tonsard and Vatel, a number of the customers of the Grand-I-Vert assembled there to hear the tale.

The first to come was Courtecuisse, in whom you would scarcely have recognized the once jovial forester, the rubicund do-nothing, whose wife made his morning coffee as we have before seen.  Aged, and thin, and haggard, he presented to all eyes a lesson that no one learned.  “He tried to climb higher than the ladder,” was what his neighbors said when others pitied him and blamed Rigou.  “He wanted to be a bourgeois himself.”

In fact, Courtecuisse did intend to pass for a bourgeois in buying the Bachelerie, and he even boasted of it; though his wife went about the roads gathering up the horse-droppings.  She and Courtecuisse got up before daylight, dug their garden, which was richly manured, and obtained several yearly crops from it, without being able to do more than pay the interest due to Rigou for the rest of the purchase-money.  Their daughter, who was living at service in Auxerre, sent them her wages; but in spite of all their efforts, in spite of this help, the last day for the final payment was approaching, and not a penny in hand with which to meet it.  Madame Courtecuisse, who in former times occasionally allowed herself a bottle of boiled wine or a bit of roast meat, now drank nothing but water.  Courtecuisse was afraid to go to the Grand-I-Vert lest he should have to leave three sous behind him.  Deprived of power, he had lost his privilege of free drinks, and he bitterly complained, like all other fools, of man’s ingratitude.  In short, he found, according to the experience of all peasants bitten with the demon of proprietorship, that toil had increased and food decreased.

“Courtecuisse has done too much to the property,” the people said, secretly envying his position.  “He ought to have waited till he had paid the money down and was master before he put up those fruit palings.”