and, on the other, the fights which were continually taking place.  In these fights the Mauprats no longer shone, despite their numbers, their complete union, and their herculean strength; since the whole population of the district sided with their opponents and took upon itself the duty of stoning them.  So, rallying his progeny around him, as the wild boar gathers together its young after a hunt, Tristan withdrew into his castle and ordered the drawbridge to be raised.  Shut up with him were ten or twelve peasants, his servants, all of them poachers or refugees, who like himself had some interest in “retiring from the world” (his own expression), and in finding a place of safety behind good stout walls.  An enormous pile of hunting weapons, duck-guns, carbines, blunderbusses, spears, and cutlasses, were raised on the platform, and the porter received orders never to let more than two persons at a time approach within range of his gun.

From that day Mauprat and his sons broke with all civil laws as they had already broken with all moral laws.  They formed themselves into a band of adventurers.  While their well-beloved and trusty poachers supplied the house with game, they levied illegal taxes on the small farms in the neighbourhood.  Now, without being cowards (and they are far from that), the peasants of our province, as you know, are meek and timid, partly from listlessness, partly from distrust of the law, which they have never understood, and of which even to this day they have but a scanty knowledge.  No province of France has preserved more old traditions or longer endured the abuses of feudalism.  Nowhere else, perhaps, has the title of the lord of the manor been handed down, as hitherto with us, to the owners of certain estates; and nowhere is it so easy to frighten the people with reports of some absurd and impossible political event.  At the time of which I speak the Mauprats, being the only powerful family in a district remote from towns and cut off from communication with the outside world, had little difficulty in persuading their vassals that serfdom was about to be re-established, and that it would go hard with all who resisted.  The peasants hesitated, listened timorously to the few among themselves who preached independence, then thought the matter over and decided to submit.  The Mauprats were clever enough not to demand money of them, for money is what the peasant in such a district obtains with the greatest difficulty, and parts from with the greatest reluctance.  “Money is dear,” is one of his proverbs, because in his eyes money stands for something different from manual labour.  It means traffic with men and things outside his world, an effort of foresight or circumspection, a bargain, a sort of intellectual struggle, which lifts him out of his ordinary heedless habits; it means, in a word, mental labour, and this for him is the most painful and the most wearing.