Reader, pardon these reflections, and deign to accept them by way of
preface. There will be no other to the little tale I propose to tell
you, and it will be so short and so simple that I felt that I must
apologize beforehand by telling you what I think of terrifying tales.

I allowed myself to be drawn into this digression apropos of a
ploughman. It is the story of a ploughman that I set out to tell you,
and will tell you forthwith.




II

THE PLOUGHING


I had been gazing for a long time and with profound sadness at Holbein's
ploughman, and I was walking in the fields, musing upon country-life and
the destiny of the husbandman. Doubtless it is a depressing thing to
consume one's strength and one's life driving the plough through the
bosom of the jealous earth, which yields the treasures of its fecundity
only under duress, when a bit of the blackest and coarsest bread at the
end of the day is the only reward and the only profit of such laborious
toil. The wealth that covers the ground, the crops, the fruit, the proud
cattle fattening on the long grass, are the property of a few, and the
instruments of fatigue and slavery of the majority. As a general rule,
the man of leisure does not love, for themselves, the fields, or the
meadows, or the spectacle of nature, or the superb beasts that are to be