“You are a pack of fools!” roared Fourchon.  “Better gnaw at the bourgeois than attack him in front; otherwise, you’ll get your backs broke.  If you like the galleys, so be it,—­that’s another thing!  You don’t work as hard there as you do in the fields, true enough; but you don’t have your liberty.”

“Perhaps it would be well,” said Vaudoyer, who was among the more valiant in counsel, “if some of us risked our skins to deliver the neighborhood of that Languedoc fellow who has planted himself at the gate of the Avonne.”

“Do Michaud’s business for him?” said Nicolas; “I’m good for that.”

“Things are not ripe for it,” said old Fourchon.  “We should risk too much, my children.  The best way is to make ourselves look miserable and cry famine; then the Shopman and his wife will want to help us, and you’ll get more out of them that way than you will by gleaning.”

“You are all blind moles,” shouted Tonsard, “let ’em pick a quarrel with their law and their troops, they can’t put the whole country in irons, and we’ve plenty of friends at Ville-aux-Fayes and among the old lords who’ll sustain us.”

“That’s true,” said Courtecuisse; “none of the other land-owners complain, it is only the Shopman; Monsieur de Soulanges and Monsieur de Ronquerolles and others, they are satisfied.  When I think that if that cuirassier had only had the courage to let himself be killed like the rest I should still be happy at the gate of the Avonne, and that it was he that turned my life topsy-turvy, it just puts me beside myself.”

“They won’t call out the troops for a Shopman who has set every one in the district against him,” said Godain.  “The fault’s his own; he tried to ride over everybody here, and upset everything; and the government will just say to him, ‘Hush up.’”

“The government never says anything else; it can’t, poor government!” said Fourchon, seized with a sudden tenderness for the government.  “Yes, I pity it, that good government; it is very unlucky,—­it hasn’t a penny, like us; but that’s very stupid of a government that makes the money itself, very stupid!  Ah! if I were the government—­”

“But,” cried Courtecuisse, “they tell me in Ville-aux-Fayes that Monsieur de Ronquerolles talked about our rights in the Assembly.”

“That’s in Monsieur Rigou’s newspaper,” said Vaudoyer, who in his capacity of ex-field-keeper knew how to read and write; “I read it—­”

In spite of his vinous tenderness, old Fourchon, like many of the lower classes whose faculties are stimulated by drunkenness, was following, with an intelligent eye and a keen ear, this curious discussion which a variety of asides rendered still more curious.  Suddenly, he stood up in the middle of the room.

“Listen to the old one, he’s drunk!” said Tonsard, “and when he is, he is twice as full of deviltry; he has his own and that of the wine—­”