He excels, above all things, in ridding me of the troublesome folk whom I meet upon my rambles. The peasant is naturally curious, as fond of asking questions as a child; but his curiosity is flavoured with a spice of malice and in all his questions there is an undercurrent of chaff. What he fails to understand he turns into ridicule. And what can be more ludicrous than a gentleman looking through a glass at a Fly captured with a gauze net, or a bit of rotten wood picked up from the ground? Favier cuts short the bantering catechism with a word. We were hunting along the ground, step by step, with bent backs, for some of the evidences of prehistoric times that abound on the south side of the mountain: serpentine-stone axes, black potsherds, flint arrow-heads and spear-heads, flakes, side-scrapers, cores. ‘What does your master do with those ‘payrards?’ [44] asked a new arrival. ‘He makes them into putty for the glaziers,’ replied Favier, with an air of solemn assurance. Another time, I had just gathered a handful of Rabbit-droppings in which the magnifying-glass had shown me a cryptogamous growth worthy of further inspection. Up comes an inquisitive person who has seen me carefully packing the precious windfall in a paper bag. He suspects a money-making business, some crazy trade or other. Everything, to the countryman, is translatable into terms of francs and sous. In his eyes, I am making a steady income out of these Rabbit-droppings. ‘What does your master do with those pétourles?’ [45] he asks Favier, in ingratiating tones. ‘He distils them to extract the essential oils,’ replies my man, with magnificent self-possession. Stunned by this revelation, the questioner turns his back and goes away.