France, on the other hand, is self-sufficing, almost self-supporting, and always has been so. If we consider the Duke of Berry’s _Book of Hours_ we realise that in many parts of France the business of life has continued almost unchanged since the Fourteenth Century. From the pruning of the vine in February (our month of March) to the fattening of the swine in the oak-woods in November, while the wood-cutters mark the trees for felling, here are just such scenes as the dweller in rural France has constantly before his eyes to-day, unaltered--scenes which the accumulated associations of countless generations have invested with a human interest more poignant, more intimate, than any which mere landscape can afford. And we admire the French peasant; his frugality, his industry, his endurance are indeed beyond all praise; his economy is marvellous, and such is his good humour that he makes a pleasure of his self-denial; miserably lodged, poorly fed, he is conscious of no inferiority; he knows himself to be the backbone of France. The peasant and the landscape for ages have remained unchanged. France is so large a country, with so great a variety of soil and climate, that there are all sorts of French peasants: materialistic, clean, bright, and gay, in Touraine and the Charentes; superstitious, poverty-stricken, imaginative, in Vendée and Brittany; good-humoured, ambitious, and positive in Auvergne--and so on through all the nations of France. When you knew the place, you knew the peasant--until quite lately. The ‘regionalist’ (the provincial) novel has come into being just when the field labourer himself has ceased to be regionalist, or provincial; for military service is a wonderful leveller and unifier. Until the middle of the last century (until, that is to say, the days of George Eliot in England and the latter days of George Sand in France), a Fourteenth-Century peasant might have revisited his country parish almost anywhere in France, and have noted little alteration to mark the flight of time. The last fifty years have made more difference in rural matters than the five centuries that went before them. The dairy farms of Normandy with their patent separators, their ferments for cheese flavours, sent down in neat little tubes from the Pasteur Institute; the arable lands with their great red, throbbing mechanical sowers, reapers, binders, automatic ploughs, threshing machines, etc.; the network of roads with their motor-cars and bicycles; the train whirling past in a white puff of smoke behind the screen of poplars; such homely sights of our everyday Twentieth Century would cause a mediæval husbandman to open his eyes considerably.