136 PEASANT- PKOPKIETOES 



Progress and education are alike difficult ; the rural popu- 

 lation often remains ignorant, narrow-minded, jealous, and 

 obstructive. 



Holiday writers seem to believe that the French peasant 

 always enjoj^s summer weather. If Englishmen spend a 

 winter in the country, it is probably in the sunny south. 

 It is not thus that they can understand the melancholy 

 timbre in the voice of the Auvergnat, or the wail of his 

 ' II faut travailler pour vivre.' No one who has read the 

 * Satires Picardes ' of Hector Crinon, the ' laboureur, poete 

 et Bculpteur ' of Peronne, can doubt the hardships of 

 peasant life in France. The peasant working in the fields, 

 as Crinon describes him, eats nothing but bread — hard, 

 green, and mouldy — with a beard as long as that of a 

 sapper. The food sticks in his throat, but he has nothing 

 to wash it down. Drenched to the skin with the showers 

 that sweep over the treeless plains, cut to the bone with 

 the bitter cold, exhausted by a long day's work, he finds 

 nothing ready for his refreshment when he returns home. 

 No fire has been lighted ; the water for his soup is still at 

 the bottom of the well ; it must be drawn up, the pot put 

 on, and the fire kindled. His soup, when he gets it, is 

 only water with the chill taken ofi", in which float a few 

 raw vegetables. Small farmers are the first in the barn in 

 the winter, the first in the fields in the summer, and the 

 last to leave their work. They only rest in the grave. 

 The sleeping fox catches no hen, and the gain is so small 

 that labour is unremitting. As the ass that earns rarely 

 eats the oats, so the peasant fats fowls for his richer 

 neighbours. ' Pour tout regal nous n'avons que de la flam- 

 miche,' a thick dough cake baked on the hearth. For meat 

 he eats once a year, at the ' fete de Paques,' a small piece of 

 tough, skinny cow beef. At other times his food is cab- 



