Whereupon, "he wrote to demand the dismissal of the officers,
declaring that unless this was done every person employed in the
Excise should be driven into the Rhine or the sea; some of them were
dismissed and the director himself came to give him satisfaction."
Finding his canton sterile and the settlers on it idle he organized
them into groups, women and children, and, in the foulest weather,
puts himself at their head, with his twenty severe wounds and neck
supported by a piece of silver. He pays them to work making them clear
off the lands, which he gives them on leases of a hundred years, and
he makes them enclose a mountain of rocks with high walls and plant it
with olive trees. "No one, under any pretext could be excused from
working unless he was ill, and in this case under treatment, or
occupied on his own property, a point in which my father could not be
deceived, and nobody would have dared to do it." These are the last
offshoots of the old, knotty, savage trunk, but still capable of
affording shelter. Others could still be found in remote cantons, in
Brittany and in Auvergne, veritable district commanders, and I am sure
that in time of need the peasants would obey them as much out of
respect as from fear. Vigor of heart and of body justifies its own
ascendancy, while the superabundance of energy, which begins in
violence, ends in beneficence.

Less independent and less harsh a paternal government subsists
elsewhere, if not in the law at least through custom. In Brittany,
near Tréguier and Lannion, says the bailiff of Mirabeau,[4] "the entire
staff of the coast-guard is composed of people of quality and of stock
going back a thousand years. I have not seen one of them get irritated
with a peasant-soldier, while, at the same time, I have seen on the
part of the latter an air of filial respect for them . . . . It is a
terrestrial paradise with respect to patriarchal manners, simplicity