family was one of the petty village landholders so common in France; a
labourer who owned and tilled his own tiny patch of farm, with the aid
of his wife and children. We have now no class in England exactly
answering to the French peasant proprietors, who form so large and
important an element in the population just across the Channel. The
small landholder in France belongs by position to about the same level
as our own agricultural labourer, and in many ways is content with a
style of dress and a mode of living against which English labourers
would certainly protest with horror. And yet, he is a proprietor, with a
proprietor's sense of the dignity of his position, and an ardent love of
his own little much-subdivided corner of agricultural land. On this he
spends all his energies, and however many children he may have, he will
try to make a livelihood for all by their united labour out of the soil,
rather than let one of them go to seek his fortune by any other means in
the great cities. Thus the ground is often tilled up to an almost
ridiculous extent, the entire labour of the family being sometimes
expended in cultivating, manuring, weeding, and tending a patch of land
perhaps hardly an acre in size. It is quite touching to see the care and
solicitude with which these toilsome peasants will laboriously lay out
their bit of garden with fruits or vegetables, making every line almost
mathematically regular, planting every pea at a measured distance, or
putting a smooth flat pebble under every strawberry on the evenly
ridged-up vines. It is only in the very last resort that the peasant
proprietor will consent to let one of his daughters go out to service,
or send one of his sons adrift to seek his fortune as an artisan in the
big, unknown, outer world.

Millet the elder, however, had nine children, which is an unusually
large number for a French peasant family (where the women ordinarily
marry late in life); and his little son Jean Francois (the second child