“Try to make my fortune!  And where shall I try?  If I wish to leave my own province, I must get a passport, and that costs forty sous.  Here’s forty years that I’ve never had a slut of a forty-sous piece jingling against another in my pocket.  If you want to travel you need as many crowns as there are villages, and there are mighty few Fourchons who have enough to get to six of ’em.  It is only the draft that gives us a chance to get away.  And what good does the army do us?  The colonels live by the solider, just as the rich folks live by the peasant; and out of every hundred of ’em you won’t find more than one of our breed.  It is just as it is the world over, one rolling in riches, for a hundred down in the mud.  Why are we in the mud?  Ask God and the usurers.  The best we can do is to stay in our own parts, where we are penned like sheep by the force of circumstances, as our fathers were by the rule of the lords.  As for me, what do I care what shackles they are that keep me here? let it be the law of public necessity or the tyranny of the old lords, it is all the same; we are condemned to dig the soil forever.  There, where we are born, there we dig it, that earth! and spade it, and manure it, and delve in it, for you who are born rich just as we are born poor.  The masses will always be what they are, and stay what they are.  The number of us who manage to rise is nothing like the number of you who topple down!  We know that well enough, if we have no education!  You mustn’t be after us with your sheriff all the time,—­not if you’re wise.  We let you alone, and you must let us alone.  If not, and things get worse, you’ll have to feed us in your prisons, where we’d be much better off than in our homes.  You want to remain our masters, and we shall always be enemies, just as we were thirty years ago.  You have everything, we have nothing; you can’t expect we should ever be friends.”

“That’s what I call a declaration of war,” said the general.

“Monseigneur,” retorted Fourchon, “when Les Aigues belonged to that poor Madame (God keep her soul and forgive her the sins of her youth!) we were happy. She let us get our food from the fields and our fuel from the forest; and was she any the poorer for it?  And you, who are at least as rich as she, you hunt us like wild beasts, neither more nor less, and drag the poor before the courts.  Well, evil will come of it! you’ll be the cause of some great calamity.  Haven’t I just seen your keeper, that shuffling Vatel, half kill a poor old woman for a stick of wood?  It is such fellows as that who make you an enemy to the poor; and the talk is very bitter against you.  They curse you every bit as hard as they used to bless the late Madame.  The curse of the poor, monseigneur, is a seed that grows,—­grows taller than your tall oaks, and oak-wood builds the scaffold.  Nobody here tells you the truth; and here it is, yes, the truth!  I expect to die before long, and I risk very little