‘C’était une cabane bossue et lépreuse, à peine plus haute qu’un homme; on descendait à l’intérieur par deux marches de granit; il y faisait très sombre, car le jour n’entrait que par une lucarne à deux petits carreaux; l’hiver il y avait de l’eau partout, et cela faisait de la boue qui ne finissait de sécher, sous les lits surtout; il y avait des trous qui empêchaient les tabourets de tenir debout; on les bouchait de temps en temps avec de la terre apportée du jardin.’ Such are the _creux-de-maisons_, still not infrequent round Bressuire in Vendée, though happily rarer every year, as the spread of creameries and co-operatives brings the sense and the means of comfort into the Ireland of France. M. Pérochon is perhaps a little unfair in taking no notice of this clearing of the horizon: he will not allow us a gleam of consolation; Zola himself was never more resolutely lugubrious. His book is conceived in a low tone, a minor key, by a deliberate purpose, and we must accept the artist’s postulate. His theme is the life of a day-labourer from the day he leaves the regiment till the time when, at forty-eight years of age, having buried wife and child, he owns that life has been too much for him. He has had his romance, has married the miller’s lovely daughter, and has seen her die of want in the horrible _creux-de-maison_. He has watched the children grow thinner month by month. ‘Depuis le Mardi-Gras, mes pauvres petits n’ont mangé ni lard, ni œufs, ni lait ... quatre livres de beurre en tout depuis quatre mois.... Je suis fatiguée de n’avoir rien à faire manger aux petits; des haricots et des pommes de terre, des pommes de terre et des haricots! Pas moyen seulement d’élever des poules!’ And indeed in the poorer parts of frugal France, so royally fertile, there are many districts where the married labourer in winter used to have little more in his larder; where a sack of potatoes, a sack of chestnuts, and a sack of buckwheat supplied the chief of his diet, or at least of his children’s diet if he be fed at the farm. I speak in the past tense, but I fear it is so to-day in many a village of Lozère or Brittany, where the food of the agricultural poor is as much worse than it is in England, as it is better and more varied in Normandy or Anjou or Touraine. And this constant strife between hunger and love, between natures naturally tender, gay, and brave, and circumstances continually depressing--has resulted in a stampede towards the towns, a rural exodus, which is the great problem of the day in the poorer provinces of France. The war has singularly respected the writers of Pastoral novels. It has even added to their ranks a new name, that of M. Henri Bachelin, whose village tales, _Le Serviteur_, in 1918, _Le Village_, in 1919, are direct and living sketches of rural France in the minute and finely-stippled taste of Émile Guillaumin.