So, in those first days of October, the vintage was in full swing at La Marinière. All the peasants came to help, men and women, old and young. Dark, grave faces that matched oddly with a babel of voices and gay laughter; broad straw hats as sunburnt as their owners, white caps, blue shoulders, bobbing among the long rows of bronzed vines loaded with fruit. The vintagers cut off the bunches with sharp knives and dropped them into wooden pails; these were emptied into great _hottes_ on men's backs, and carried to the carts, full of barrels, waiting in the lane. Slowly the patient white horses tramped down to the yard of La Marinière. There, in its own whitewashed building with the wide-arched door, the stone wine-press was ready; the grapes were thrown in in heaps, the barefooted men, splashed red to their waists, trod and crushed with a swishing sound; the red juice ran down in a stream, foaming into the vault beneath, into the vats where it was to ferment and become wine. Angelot worked in the vineyard like anybody else, sometimes cutting grapes, sometimes leading the carts up and down, and feeding the horses with bunches of grapes, which they munched contentedly. So did the dogs who waited on the vintagers, not daring to venture in among the vines, but sitting outside with eager eyes and wagging tails till their portion of fruit was thrown to them. And the workers themselves, and the little bullet-headed boys and white-capped girls who played about the vineyard, all ate grapes to their satisfaction; for the crop was splendid, and there was no need to stint anybody. A festal spirit reigned over all. Though most of these people were good Christians, ready to thank God for His gifts without any intention of misusing them, there was something of the old pagan feeling about. Purely a country feeling, a natural religion much older than Christianity, as Urbain remarked to the old Curé, who agreed with Madame Urbain in not quite caring for this way of looking at it. But he was accustomed to such views from Urbain, who never, for instance, let the Rogation processions pass singing through the fields without pointing out their descent from something ancient, pagan, devilish. "But if you have cast out the devil, dear Curé, what does it matter?" said Urbain. "The beauty alone is left. And all true beauty is good by nature; and what is not beautiful is not good. You want nothing more, it seems to me." "Ah, your philosophies!" sighed the old man.