He would have to seek the depths of Brittany, the heart of the Cantal, the wastes of the Lozère, to find some faint image of the world he knew. There, indeed, save for the frequent crops of potatoes and buckwheat, which he would not recognise, he would find little changed; the one-toothed wooden plough still scores its furrow on the steep hillside; the thud of the flails is loud in the dusk of autumn evenings; in the fields the women stoop and gather the buckwheat into stooks and bind it standing, even as the reapers cut the stalks from the ground; the old pastoral life continues, not greatly changed for better or for worse. But even here the century-old country life of France is menaced, and that threat hanging over it renders it more dear, and almost sacred, that the rural novel in France is at once more exact and more tender in its record than it was in the century gone by. When I came to live in France in 1888, there was a pastoral novel of course--there has always been a pastoral novel in France, as I said--but it was of a most calumniatory and reviling sort. Great was my surprise, when I spent my summers in the country, to find that the old gaffers on the farms were _not_ left to die of hunger and neglect when they could no longer work, but, on the other hand, were treated with the utmost honour and consideration, given invariably the best seat on the settle, the best wine, expensive tonics from the doctor’s shop, and all that filial kindness could devise. Maupassant’s wonderful stories, Zola’s _La Terre_, must evidently have some foundation in fact. But my personal experience has not corroborated their pessimism. Then, after the pastoral novel _genre rosse_, came, with the very last years of the Nineteenth Century, the reign of the social novel; and, as a matter of course, the pastoral novel followed suit. The best stories of those times, I think, are René Bazin’s, especially that most picturesque and touching idyll of a farm in Vendée gradually destroyed by the rural exodus, _La Terre qui Meurt_. In _Donatienne_, the same writer paints the poverty of a Breton village, and the temptation--almost the dire necessity--which induces the young mother to quit home and children in order to earn the large wages, and live the facile days of a wet-nurse in Paris. And, naturally, he shows the moral (and finally the material) ruin which follow on that ill-judged step. In _Le Blé qui Lève_ (The Growing Corn), René Bazin describes the life of the woodland labourers--the foresters, wood-cutters, charcoal-burners, and so on--who form an important part of the rural population in France; and he shows them ravaged by strikes, syndicates, etc.; for M. Bazin is nothing if not Catholic and Conservative.