“I said treason!” continued the count.  “I maintain the word.  Remember well, viscount, power has been, and always will be, on the side of wealth, especially on the side of those who hold the soil.  The men of ’93 well understood this principle, and acted upon it.  By impoverishing the nobles, they destroyed their prestige more effectually than by abolishing their titles.  A prince dismounted, and without footmen, is no more than any one else.  The Minister of July, who said to the people, ‘Make yourselves rich,’ was not a fool.  He gave them the magic formula for power.  But they have not the sense to understand it.  They want to go too fast.  They launch into speculations, and become rich, it is true; but in what?  Stocks, bonds, paper,—­rags, in short.  It is smoke they are locking in their coffers.  They prefer to invest in merchandise, which pays eight or ten per cent, to investing in vines or corn which will return but three.  The peasant is not so foolish.  From the moment he owns a piece of ground the size of a handkerchief, he wants to make it as large as a tablecloth.  He is slow as the oxen he ploughs with, but as patient, as tenacious, and as obstinate.  He goes directly to his object, pressing firmly against the yoke; and nothing can stop or turn him aside.  He knows that stocks may rise or fall, fortunes be won or lost on ’change; but the land always remains,—­the real standard of wealth.  To become landholders, the peasant starves himself, wears sabots in winter; and the imbeciles who laugh at him will be astonished by and by when he makes his ’93, and the peasant becomes a baron in power if not in name.”

“I do not understand the application,” said the viscount.

“You do not understand?  Why, what the peasant is doing is what the nobles ought to have done!  Ruined, their duty was to reconstruct their fortunes.  Commerce is interdicted to us; be it so:  agriculture remains.  Instead of grumbling uselessly during the half-century, instead of running themselves into debt, in the ridiculous attempt to support an appearance of grandeur, they ought to have retreated to their provinces, shut themselves up in their chateaux; there worked, economised, denied themselves, as the peasant is doing, purchased the land piece by piece.  Had they taken this course, they would to-day possess France.  Their wealth would be enormous; for the value of land rises year after year.  I have, without effort, doubled my fortune in thirty years.  Blauville, which cost my father a hundred crowns in 1817, is worth to-day more than a million:  so that, when I hear the nobles complain, I shrug the shoulder.  Who but they are to blame?  They impoverish themselves from year to year.  They sell their land to the peasants.  Soon they will be reduced to beggary, and their escutcheons.  What consoles me is, that the peasant, having become the proprietor of our domains will then be all-powerful, and will yoke to his chariot wheels these traders in scrip and stocks, whom he hates as much as I execrate them myself.”