Two fine novels, each a masterpiece, treat, from different points of view, this resistance of the peasant class, and the consequent disintegration of the great feudal domains. _Jacquou le Croquant_, by an almost unknown novelist, Eugène Le Roy, is the work of a man over sixty, a native of Périgord, working on the traditions of his native place and the tales of his grandfathers. Published in the last years of the nineteenth century, it gives an extraordinarily vivid picture of rural Southern France, as the author may have seen it in his earliest childhood, before 1848. The book is written from the peasants’ point of view, and full of enthusiastic Republican sentiment. Balzac’s _Les Paysans_ hold a brief for the other side. One of Napoleon’s generals, the Comte de Montcornet, purchases in 1815 a feudal estate on the borders of Burgundy and the Morvan, and attempts to dwell there in the due state and pomp of a great noble. He preserves game, vows vengeance on poachers, protects his forest trees against the customary thefts of the village, and, like the farmer in Wordsworth’s ballad, forbids the old women to filch his faggots. And naturally he attracts the hatred and suspicion of the peasant. Even his own agent sides with them against him:-- “On veut vous forcer à vendre les Aigues. Sachez le: depuis Conches jusqu’à la Ville-aux-Fayes, il n’est pas de paysan, de petit bourgeois, de fermier, de cabaretier, qui n’ait son argent prêt pour le jour de la curée.” And the book ends with the triumph of the peasants and the parcelling of the domain. “Le pays n’était plus reconnaissable. Les bois mystérieux, les avenues du parc, tout avait été défriché; la campagne ressemblait à la carte d’échantillons d’un tailleur. Le paysan avait pris possession de la terre en vainqueur et en conquérant. Elle était déjà divisée en plus de mille lots et la population avait triplé entre Conches et Blangy.” “Such is progress!” exclaims Emile Blondet, on an impulse of passionate irony. It is not picturesque certainly. And yet I remember a magnificent picture of Sisley’s, representing just such a scene: small fields of cabbage, and strips of rye, with one bouquet of poplars, basking in the hot blue of a July noonday; and I know no finer landscape. Still, we will admit with Emile Blondet that the mysterious forest glades were infinitely lovelier. On one side, the utmost beauty and luxury reserved for one man; on the other, a thousand fields, and a tripled population living in tripled comfort. On which side is progress? On which side is the price too dear to pay? That is the question. An old French lady, who could recall the _ancien régime_, was wont to say, when invited on a country visit: “No, I never go into the provinces, since they have turned all the castles into farms.” She had a prophetic eye. If the castles are to survive, they must be turned, more or less, into farms, and their owners are becoming increasingly aware of the fact.