“‘Yes,’ I agreed, ‘perhaps that is true.’
“‘You know how she would have been beaten had it been known that she stole even a morsel of food from the pigs.’
“‘Yes,’ I said again; ‘I know that.’
“‘You may perhaps remember,’ he went on, with a frightful contortion of the countenance, ‘the punishment I suffered for trapping a hare.’
“‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I remember.’
“‘And do you think it just, good God!’ he cried, ‘that a man should suffer like that for a fault so trivial? Yet that is what was happening day by day all over this broad land of France! What could we do? They took our grain for their bread, our flocks for their meat, our daughters for their pleasure. Did we so much as protest we were hanged on the nearest gallows as a warning to others not to lift their heads. We might live or die, starve or rot—what did it matter! We were less to them, as you have seen, than the swine in their pens!’ I do not know,” added Pasdeloup, in another tone, “whether all of this was true, but it had a certain air of truth about it.”
“Most of it was true, I fear,” said M. le Comte in a low voice, “though I had never looked at it in quite that way.”
“There is a great difference, is there not, monsieur,” asked Pasdeloup, “in whether one looks at a thing from above or from below?”
“Yes,” agreed his master still more quietly, “there is.”
“At any rate,” continued Pasdeloup, “Goujon grew more and more excited with each word he uttered. ‘Why is it,’ he demanded, ‘that some people wear lace and jewels and others only rags? Why should a noble’s pigs be treated better than his peasants? Why should the peasants toil from year to year in order that the priests and the aristocrats may live in idleness with their women, and have fine wines to drink, and fine clothes to wear, and great houses to shelter them, while we who make the wine, and spin the cloth, and build the houses, have only swill and rags and hovels? Why should they be warm in winter and we cold? Why should we permit their game to destroy our crops without being permitted to raise a hand to prevent it?’