Unless he be (as he so often is) a peasant-proprietor, the lot of the French husbandman is austere. In a little pamphlet, _En Bourbonnais_, M. Guillaumin has added up the yearly receipts of a day-labourer in good work, turn by turn haymaker, harvester, thresher, wood-cutter, and so on. His annual earnings amount, in English coin, to £21 12_s._ Though he be fed abundantly at the farms where he works all summer long, still his family must live; and he must feed himself all winter-time. And bread is dear in France; out of his twenty guineas a year, the day-labourer must reckon fifteen or sixteen for bread alone. The rent of the cottage will cost another £4; and there remains about 30_s._ for school expenses, shoes, clothing, fuel, doctoring, wine, tobacco--all the pleasures and luxuries of life. No doubt he sells his pig, and his kids and his poultry, and anything he can, to increase his slender revenues; for, in the valley of the Allier, the peasant is too poor to put a fowl in his pot on Sundays, or enjoy a rasher of his own bacon by his own fireside. Farther south, among the hills and high valleys of the Cantal, another peasant-farmer, Antonin Dusserre, offers us, in his _Jean et Louise_, another image of pastoral France: the rich yeomanry, the _Couarrous_ and _Couarros_, who compose the notable society of those isolated villages, where the château is empty four-fifths of the year or more. The _Couarros_ (rich grazing-farmers, intelligent, tenacious, positive, active, and money-loving) compose a rustic middle-class far wealthier than their simple lives would lead us to suppose, proud of their flocks and herds, and their balance at the bankers. M. Dusserre, I believe, is blind; but before that misfortune fell upon him, he has looked long and lovingly at the high-lying heather, the cliffs capped with basalt, the gentian-starred mountain-pastures, and the green glens and _trobers_ of his native land. The landscapes and the types of the Cantal live on in his inner eye. Much farther west, on the borders of Anjou and Vendée, a village schoolmaster, M. Pérochon, has recently given us a picture of peasant life in the style of Guillaumin and Dusserre, in _Les Creux-de-Maisons_. A _creux-de-maison_ is not, as one might expect, one of those cave-dwellings hewn out of the chalky banks of the Indre or the Loire, which look so primitive but which are said to be dry and cosy, possessing the local reputation of keeping off rheumatism; no, a _creux-de-maison_ is a sort of cabin about seven feet high, built of mud or of rough stone cemented with clay, single-roomed, thatch-roofed, with a pane for a window and an earthen floor.