that I would go to her place to-morrow."

While speaking Marianne had pointed through the gloom towards a big black
pile, a little way down the Yeuse. It was an old water-mill which was
still worked, and the Lepailleurs had now been installed in it for three
generations. The last of them, Francois Lepailleur, who considered
himself to be no fool, had come back from his military service with
little inclination to work, and an idea that the mill would never enrich
him, any more than it had enriched his father and grandfather. It then
occurred to him to marry a peasant farmer's daughter, Victoire Cornu,
whose dowry consisted of some neighboring fields skirting the Yeuse. And
the young couple then lived fairly at their ease, on the produce of those
fields and such small quantities of corn as the peasants of the district
still brought to be ground at the old mill. If the antiquated and badly
repaired mechanism of the mill had been replaced by modern appliances,
and if the land, instead of being impoverished by adherence to
old-fashioned practices, had fallen into the hands of an intelligent man
who believed in progress, there would no doubt have been a fortune in it
all. But Lepailleur was not only disgusted with work, he treated the soil
with contempt. He indeed typified the peasant who has grown weary of his
eternal mistress, the mistress whom his forefathers loved too much.
Remembering that, in spite of all their efforts to fertilize the soil, it
had never made them rich or happy, he had ended by hating it. All his
faith in its powers had departed; he accused it of having lost its
fertility, of being used up and decrepit, like some old cow which one
sends to the slaughter-house. And, according to him, everything went
wrong: the soil simply devoured the seed sown in it, the weather was
never such as it should be, the seasons no longer came in their proper
order. Briefly, it was all a premeditated disaster brought about by some
evil power which had a spite against the peasantry, who were foolish to