When a French peasant becomes what in rustic phraseology is called a
substantial man, owning or hiring a considerable extent of land, he
ceases to be called 'paysan,' and is designated 'cultivateur.' The very
word 'peasant,' as I have shown elsewhere, will, in process of time,
become a survival, so steady and sure is the social upheaval of rural
France. The most eminent Frenchmen of the day, witness the late Paul
Bert, are often peasant-born; and hardly a village throughout the
country but sends some promising son of the soil to Paris, destined for
one of the learned professions. I know of a village baker's son near
Dijon now studying for the Bar--one instance out of many. In one of her
clever novelettes, 'Un Gascon,' Madame Th. Bentzon gives us for hero
the village doctor, son of a peasant. The portrait of this young man,
devoted to duty, high-minded, self-sacrificing, is no mere ideal, as
experience proves. But if readers, compelled to make the acquaintance
of French peasants on paper, will accept Zola and certain English
writers as a guide to his moral and material condition, they will be
landed on some conclusions strangely at variance with experience.
[Footnote: I may add that I have received appreciative testimony from
various French journals--_L'Economiste_, and others--also from no
less an authority than M. Henri Baudrillart, of the Institut, of my
studies of the French peasant, notably the contribution to the
_Fortnightly Review_, August, 1887, in which I have summed up the
experiences of twelve years' French residence and travel.]




CHAPTER IV.
ON THE TOP OF THE ROOF.