The _corvée_ is supposed to be extinct, but the smaller country roads are still mended by “prestation,” that is to say, by the personal labour of the farmer or his men, and he must find both the material and the means of transport. The feudal _banalités_ were solemnly declared defunct in 1789--that is to say, the peasant no longer could be forced to grind his corn, or to press his wine, olives, and walnuts, in the seigneurial mills. Yet, to take one contemporary instance among many: the farmers of the Isle of Bouin in Vendée are compelled by contract to bring their sheaves to the thrashing machines of their landlord; the only difference being that this landlord is no longer a noble, but a great agricultural syndicate--the Société des Polders. In the same commune, the same society exacts the feudal rights of terrage--that is to say, it requires a sum of money, a yearly premium, paid in addition to the annual rent in kind--and it also levies a tax on the winepress, just as if the Revolution had never taken place. “C’est l’Ancien Régime à peine modifié,” writes M. Léon Dubreuil.[2] At Olmet, our village in the Cantal, the farmers pay a quit-rent, or _redevance_, to their landlords in addition to the rent: so many brace of poultry, so many cheeses, so many pounds of butter; a special kind of cheese, the most delicate if the smallest, weighing from two to twenty kilos, is made for this purpose, and still bears its ancient name, the _fromage de maître_. To-day, even as six score years ago, the farmers of the Bourbonnais do all their landlord’s carrying--wood from the forest, corn to and from the mill, stones from the quarry, according to the mediæval _corvée de transport_; and here, too, the quit-rent flourishes undiminished: butter, fowls, turkeys, are exacted in tribute from the tenant. It may happen that he sell his milk straight from the cow to a dealer in Paris or to an hotel at Vichy; in this case, he must buy milk from his neighbours in order to churn the seigneurial butter, as nearly always he buys his turkeys, the birds being very delicate and difficult to rear. Here, also, reigns the right of terrage under the name of _impôt colonique_. And, in this part of the country, the game laws seem scarcely altered by the Revolution; the crops being often destroyed by the abundance of wild creatures, without any indemnity offered to the farmer. But everywhere in rural France an eye educated in feudal custom sees the survival of the Elder Order. Readers of Zola’s novel, _La Terre_ (scarcely, one would think, a treatise of seigneurial rights), will remember the telling scene when the old peasant, no longer able to cultivate his lands, cedes them to his children in return for a yearly rent of four and twenty pounds. “You’ll pay me the rent,” says he, “and then, besides, there’s the quit-rent: a barrel of wine _per annum_, a hundred faggots, and every week ten litres of milk, a dozen eggs and three cream cheeses.”