of the country than this.  Come, what do you mean? do I own property? don’t I go half-naked, and Mouche too?  Fine sheets we slept in, washed by the dew every morning! and unless you want the air we breathe and the sunshine we drink, I should like to know what we have that you can take away from us!  The rich folks rob as they sit in their chimney-corners,—­and more profitably, too, than by picking up a few sticks in the woods.  I don’t see no game-keepers or patrols after Monsieur Gaubertin, who came here as naked as a worm and is now worth his millions.  It’s easy said, ‘Robbers!’ Here’s fifteen years that old Guerbet, the tax-gatherer at Soulanges, carries his money along the roads by the dead of night, and nobody ever took a farthing from him; is that like a land of robbers? has robbery made us rich?  Show me which of us two, your class or mine, live the idlest lives and have the most to live on without earning it.”

“If you were to work,” said the abbe, “you would have property.  God blesses labor.”

“I don’t want to contradict you, M’sieur l’abbe, for you are wiser than I, and perhaps you’ll know how to explain something that puzzles me.  Now see, here I am, ain’t I?—­that drunken, lazy, idle, good-for-nothing old Fourchon, who had an education and was a farmer, and got down in the mud and never got up again,—­well, what difference is there between me and that honest and worthy old Niseron, seventy years old (and that’s my age) who has dug the soil for sixty years and got up every day before it was light to go to his work, and has made himself an iron body and a fine soul?  Well, isn’t he as bad off as I am?  His little granddaughter, Pechina, is at service with Madame Michaud, whereas my little Mouche is as free as air.  So that poor good man gets rewarded for his virtues in exactly the same way that I get punished for my vices.  He don’t know what a glass of good wine is, he’s as sober as an apostle, he buries the dead, and I—­I play for the living to dance.  He is always in a peck o’ troubles, while I slip along in a devil-may-care way.  We have come along about even in life; we’ve got the same snow on our heads, the same funds in our pockets, and I supply him with rope to ring his bell.  He’s a republican and I’m not even a publican,—­that’s all the difference as far as I can see.  A peasant may do good or do evil (according to your ideas) and he’ll go out of the world just as he came into it, in rags; while you wear the fine clothes.”

No one interrupted Pere Fourchon, who seemed to owe his eloquence to his potations.  At first Sibilet tried to cut him short, but desisted at a sign from Blondet.  The abbe, the general, and the countess, all understood from the expression of the writer’s eye that he wanted to study the question of pauperism from life, and perhaps take his revenge on Pere Fourchon.

“What sort of education are you giving Mouche?” asked Blondet.  “Do you expect to make him any better than your daughters?”