Have you now taken in all the many details of this hovel, planted about five hundred feet away from the pretty gate of Les Aigues?  Do you see it crouching there, like a beggar beside a palace?  Well, its roof covered with velvet mosses, its clacking hens, its grunting pig, its straying heifer, all its rural graces have a horrible meaning.

Fastened to a pole, which was stuck in the ground beside the entrance through the fence, was a withered bunch of three pine branches and some old oak-leaves tied together with a rag.  Above the door of the house a roving artist had painted, probably in return for his breakfast, a huge capital “I” in green on a white ground two feet square; and for the benefit of those who could read, this witty joke in twelve letters:  “Au Grand-I-Vert” (hiver).  On the left of the door was a vulgar sign bearing, in colored letters, “Good March beer,” and the picture of a foaming pot of the same, with a woman, in a dress excessively low-necked, on one side, and an hussar on the other,—­both coarsely colored.  Consequently, in spite of the blooming flowers and the fresh country air, this cottage exhaled the same strong and nauseous odor of wine and food which assails you in Paris as you pass the door of the cheap cook-shops of the faubourg.

Now you know the surroundings.  Behold the inhabitants and hear their history, which contains more than one lesson for philanthropists.

The proprietor of the Grand-I-Vert, named Francois Tonsard, commends himself to the attention of philosophers by the manner in which he had solved the problem of an idle life and a busy life, so as to make the idleness profitable, and occupation nil.

A jack-of-all-trades, he knew how to cultivate the ground, but for himself only.  For others, he dug ditches, gathered fagots, barked the trees, or cut them down.  In all such work the employer is at the mercy of the workman.  Tonsard owned his plot of ground to the generosity of Mademoiselle Laguerre.  In his early youth he had worked by the day for the gardener at Les Aigues; and he really had not his equal in trimming the shrubbery-trees, the hedges, the horn-beams, and the horse-chestnuts.  His very name shows hereditary talent.  In remote country-places privileges exist which are obtained and preserved with as much care as the merchants of a city display in getting theirs.  Mademoiselle Laguerre was one day walking in the garden, when she overheard Tonsard, then a strapping fellow, say, “All I need to live on, and live happily, is an acre of land.”  The kind creature, accustomed to make others happy, gave him the acre of vineyard near the gate of Blangy, in return for one hundred days’ work (a delicate regard for his feelings which was little understood), and allowed him to stay at Les Aigues, where he lived with her servants, who thought him one of the best fellows in Burgundy.