And no man in the kingdom was so unenviable as that honest country gentleman, faithful to his father’s fields, of whom, on mention of his name, the king would say, with cold disapproval: “Je ne le vois jamais.” In this connection, it is instructive to read the memoirs of that martinet of courtiers, St. Simon, and the letters of Madame de Sévigné (that admirable country squire), who wrote to her daughter: “J’aime mieux parfois lire un compte de fermier que les Contes de La Fontaine.” Absolute monarchy was the ruin of the French peasant; or at least it was his _moral_ ruin; for the absence of his lord, while depriving him of his one glimpse into a world a little larger than his own, was sometimes incidentally the occasion of enlarging Jacques Bonhomme’s narrow field. My lord spent a terrible deal at Versailles. Dress, play, an outfit for the wars, soon ran away with the income of parental inheritance. Often enough the agent had to sell (and pretty much for what it would fetch) a strip of meadow here, a spinney there. Now, while my lord was always spending, the peasant, on the other hand, was in a peculiarly favourable position for saving. Money scarcely ever left his horny grasp. He paid his rent chiefly in kind, stock, _corvées_, and quit-rents of one sort or another; but he sold his cattle and crops for coin, at the fair, and put the treasured sols and livres in some safe place behind the rafter or beneath the hearthstone. The _corvée_ was the making of the peasant: pure profit, as he thought, since he only paid in sweat and sinew, instead of lessening his hoard of secret silver. He mowed his lord’s meadows, mended his roads, carried his grist, and wood, and fodder, lent his cart and horse for transport, worked on the estate so many days a month with nary a penny of wage, was harassed, hampered, overworked, if you like; but the _corvée_ was a form of rent, and the form his soul preferred. In exchange he had his cot and his fields, the right to fatten his porkers in the oakwood, the right to pasture his cow on the grassy edges of the lane, the right of gleaning his master’s corn in the fields, his faggots in the forest, and also the dried beech-leaves which stuffed his bed, and foddered his kine. Every _corvée_ brought him in some specific advantage; so that, while his masters were running a break-neck race to ruin at Court, Jacques Bonhomme was buying, out of their parental acres, here a strip of rye and there a cabbage-patch: inconsiderable snippets of land scattered here and there, up and down the country-side, presenting no importance to the eye, but representing a small estate increasing with every generation. Jacques’ grandson may be Georges Dandin, even as the great-grandsire of my Lord, perhaps, may have been the wealthy boor of the “Lai de l’Oiselet.” The seventeenth century has little but mockery for the peasant-parvenu who marries the squire’s daughter, yet their son, ennobled by the mother’s gentlehood