asts covered
with coats of coarse wool, wearing wide leather belts pierced with
copper nails, gigantic in stature, which is increased by high wooden
shoes, and making themselves still taller by standing on tiptoe to see
the battle, stamping with their feet as it progresses and rubbing each
other's flanks with their elbows, their faces haggard and covered with
long matted hair, the upper portion pallid, and the lower distended,
indicative of cruel delight and a sort of ferocious impatience. And
these folks pay the taille! And now they want to take away their salt!
And they know nothing of those they despoil, of those whom they think
they govern, believing that, by a few strokes of a cowardly and careless
pen, they may starve them with impunity up to the final catastrophe!
Poor Jean-Jacques, I said to myself, had any one dispatched you, with
your system, to copy music amongst these folks, he would have had some
sharp replies to make to your discourses!"

Prophetic warning and admirable foresight in one whom an excess of evil
does not blind to the evil of the remedy! Enlightened by his feudal and
rural instincts, the old man at once judges both the government and the
philosophers, the Ancient Regime and the Revolution.

IV. The Peasant Becomes Landowner.

How the peasant becomes a proprietor.--He is no better off.
--Increase of taxes.--He is the "mule" of the Ancient Regime.

Misery begets bitterness in a man; but ownership coupled with misery
renders him still more bitter. He may have submitted to indigence but
not to spoliation--which is the situation of the peasant in 1789, for,
during the eighteenth century, he had become the possessor of land. But
how could he maintain himself in such destitution? The fact is almost
incredible, but it is nevertheless true. We can only explain it by the
character of the French peasant, by his sobriety, his tenacity, his
rigor with himself, his dissimulation, his hereditary passion
for property and especially for that of the soil. He had lived on
privations, and economized sou after sou. Every year a few pieces of
silver are added to his little store of crowns buried in the most secret
recess of his cellar; Rousseau's peasant, concealing his wine and bread
in a pit, assuredly had a yet more secret hiding-place; a little money
in a woollen stocking or in a jug escapes, more readily than elsewhere,
the search of the clerks. Dressed in rags, going barefoot, eating
nothin