place, who talked communism after their manner, not a very clear one,
in excited tones and with the feverish glances of conspirators. But it
meant little, and came to less. The weather and the price of wheat were
dearer matters to them; and in the end they usually drank their red wine
in amity, and went up the village street arm in arm, singing patriotic
songs until their angry wives flung open their lattices and thrust their
white head-gear out into the moonlight, and called to them shrewishly
to get to bed and not make fools of themselves in that fashion; which
usually silenced and sobered them all instantly; so that the revolutions
of the Berceau de Dieu, if not quenched in a wine-pot, were always
smothered in a nightcap, and never by any chance disturbed its repose.

But of these noisy patriots Bernadou was never one. He had the
instinctive conservatism of the French peasant, which is in such direct
and tough antagonism with the feverish socialism of the French artisan.
His love was for the soil--a love deep-rooted as the oaks that grew in
it. Of Paris he had a dim, vague dread, as of a superb beast continually
draining and devouring. Of all forms of government he was alike
ignorant. So long as he tilled his little angle of land in peace, so
long as the sun ripened his fruits and corn, so long as famine was away
from his door and his neighbours dwelt in good-fellowship with him,
so long he was happy, and cared not whether he was thus happy under
a monarchy, an empire, or a republic. This wisdom, which the peddler
called apathy and cursed, the young man had imbibed from nature and the
teachings of Reine Allix. "Look at home and mind thy word," she had said
always to him. "It is labour enough for a man to keep his own life clean
and his own hands honest. Be not thou at any time as they are who are
for ever telling the good God how He might have made the world on a
better plan, while the rats gnaw at their hay-stacks and the children
cry over an empty platter."