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