serfdom was about to be re-established, and that it would go hard with
all who resisted. The peasants hesitated, listened timorously to the few
among themselves who preached independence, then thought the matter over
and decided to submit. The Mauprats were clever enough not to demand
money of them, for money is what the peasant in such a district
obtains with the greatest difficulty, and parts from with the greatest
reluctance. "Money is dear," is one of his proverbs, because in his
eyes money stands for something different from manual labour. It means
traffic with men and things outside his world, an effort of foresight or
circumspection, a bargain, a sort of intellectual struggle, which lifts
him out of his ordinary heedless habits; it means, in a word, mental
labour, and this for him is the most painful and the most wearing.

The Mauprats, knowing how the ground lay, and having no particular need
of money any longer, since they had repudiated their debts, demanded
payments in kind only. They ruled that one man should contribute capons,
another calves, a third corn, a fourth fodder, and so on. They were
careful, too, to tax judiciously, to demand from each the commodity
he could provide with least inconvenience to himself. In return they
promised help and protection to all; and up to a certain point they kept
their word. They cleared the land of wolves and foxes, gave a welcome
and a hiding-place to all deserters, and helped to defraud the state by
intimidating the excise officers and tax-collectors.

They took advantage of their power to give the poor man a false notion
of his real interests, and to corrupt the simple folk by undermining all
sense of their dignity and natural liberty. They made the whole district
combine in a sort of secession from the law, and they so frightened
the functionaries appointed to enforce respect for it, that after a few
years it fell into a veritable desuetude. Thus it happened that, while