game to eat and to sell as well as they; why not harvest without
sowing the grapes and the grain. Accordingly, the pilfering thefts
which thin the woods and tithe the ploughed lands and meadows and
vineyards became habitual in this valley, and soon existed as a right
throughout the districts of Blangy, Conches, and Cerneux, all adjacent
to the domain of Les Aigues. This sore, for certain reasons which will
be given in due time, did far greater injury to Les Aigues than to the
estates of Ronquerolles or Soulanges. You must not, however, fancy
that Tonsard, his wife and children, and his old mother ever
deliberately said to themselves, "We will live by theft, and commit it
as cleverly as we can." Such habits grow slowly. To the dried sticks
they added, in the first instance, a single bit of good wood; then,
emboldened by habit and a carefully prepared immunity (necessary to
plans which this history will unfold), they ended at last in cutting
"their wood," and stealing almost their entire livelihood. Pasturage
for the cows and the abuses of gleaning were established as customs
little by little. When the Tonsards and the do-nothings of the valley
had tasted the sweets of these four rights (thus captured by rural
paupers, and amounting to actual robbery) we can easily imagine they
would never give them up unless compelled by a power greater than
their own audacity.

At the time when this history begins Tonsard, then about fifty years
of age, tall and strong, rather stout than thin, with curly black
hair, skin highly colored and marbled like a brick with purple
blotches, yellow whites to the eyes, large ears with broad flaps, a
muscular frame, encased, however, in flabby flesh, a retreating
forehead, and a hanging lip,--Tonsard, such as you see him, hid his
real character under an external stupidity, lightened at times by a
show of experience, which seemed all the more intelligent because he