themselves of a livelihood." These two marked characteristics are as
true of the French peasant now-a-days as of the polite society described
in the "Lettres Persanes." In the eighteenth century cultivated people
did little else but talk. Morning, noon and night, their epigrammatic
tongues were busy. Conversation in historic salons became a fine art.
There are no such literary coteries in our time. What with one
excitement and another, the Parisian world chats but has no time for
real conversation. Perhaps for _Gauloiseries_, true Gallic salt, we must
now go to the unlettered, the sons of the soil, whose ancestors were
boors when wit sparkled among their social superiors.

Here are one or two types illustrating both characteristics, excellent
types in their way of the small peasant proprietor hereabouts, a class
having no counterpart or approximation to a counterpart in England.

The first visit I describe was paid one evening to an old gardener whom
I will call the Pere A--. Bent partly with toil, partly with age, you
would have at once supposed that his working days were well over,
especially on learning his circumstances, for sole owner he was of the
little domain to which he had now retired for the day. Of benevolent
aspect, shrewd, every inch alive despite infirmities, he received his
neighbour and her English guest with rustic but cordial urbanity, at
once entering into conversation. With evident pride and pleasure he
watched my glances at premises and garden, house and outbuildings
ramshackle enough, even poverty-stricken to look at, here not an
indication of comfortable circumstances much less of independent means;
the bit of land half farm, half garden, however, was fairly well kept
and of course productive.

"Yes, this dwelling is mine and the two hectares (four acres four