discovered in the last thirty years that old Rigou has been sucking
the marrow out of your bones that the middle-class folks are worse
than the lords? Mark my words, when that affair happens, my children,
the Soudrys, the Gaubertins, the Rigous, will make you kick your heels
in the air. 'I've the good tobacco, it never shall be thine,' that's
the national air of the rich man, hey? The peasant will always be the
peasant. Don't you see (but you never did understand anything of
politics!) that government puts such heavy taxes on wine only to
hinder our profits and keep us poor? The middle classes and the
government, they are all one. What would become of them if everybody
was rich? Could they till their fields? Would they gather the harvest?
No, they _want_ the poor! I was rich for ten years and I know what I
thought of paupers."

"Must hunt with them, though," replied Tonsard, "because they mean to
cut up the great estates; after that's done, we can turn against them.
If I'd been Courtecuisse, whom that scoundrel Rigou is ruining, I'd
have long ago paid his bill with other balls than the poor fellow
gives him."

"Right enough, too," replied Fourchon. "As Pere Niseron says (and he
stayed republican long after everybody else), 'The people are tough;
they don't die; they have time before them.'"

Fourchon fell into a sort of reverie; Tonsard profited by his
inattention to take back the trap, and as he took it up he cut a slip
below the coin in his father-in-law's pocket at the moment when the
old man raised his glass to his lips; then he set his foot on the
five-franc piece as it dropped on the earthen floor just where it was
always kept damp by the heel-taps which the customers flung from their