nor addition, nor multiplication,--you are very unjust to us, that you
are! You call us a nest of brigands, but you are the cause of the
misunderstandings between our good landlord here, who is a worthy man,
and the rest of us, who are all worthy men,--there ain't an honester
part of the country than this. Come, what do you mean? do I own
property? don't I go half-naked, and Mouche too? Fine sheets we slept
in, washed by the dew every morning! and unless you want the air we
breathe and the sunshine we drink, I should like to know what we have
that you can take away from us! The rich folks rob as they sit in
their chimney-corners,--and more profitably, too, than by picking up a
few sticks in the woods. I don't see no game-keepers or patrols after
Monsieur Gaubertin, who came here as naked as a worm and is now worth
his millions. It's easy said, 'Robbers!' Here's fifteen years that old
Guerbet, the tax-gatherer at Soulanges, carries his money along the
roads by the dead of night, and nobody ever took a farthing from him;
is that like a land of robbers? has robbery made us rich? Show me
which of us two, your class or mine, live the idlest lives and have
the most to live on without earning it."

"If you were to work," said the abbe, "you would have property. God
blesses labor."

"I don't want to contradict you, M'sieur l'abbe, for you are wiser
than I, and perhaps you'll know how to explain something that puzzles
me. Now see, here I am, ain't I?--that drunken, lazy, idle,
good-for-nothing old Fourchon, who had an education and was a farmer,
and got down in the mud and never got up again,--well, what difference
is there between me and that honest and worthy old Niseron, seventy
years old (and that's my age) who has dug the soil for sixty years and
got up every day before it was light to go to his work, and has made