Hourdequin, having filled his glass to the brim, emptied it at a draught.
"It can't end. If the peasant makes a profit out of his corn, the artisan starves; if the artisan feeds well, the peasant dies. What then? I don't know. Let's feed on one another!"
With both his elbows on the table, fairly launched, he relieved his feelings in a violent way. His secret disdain for this absentee landlord, who knew nothing of the land he lived by, betrayed itself by a certain ironical tremor in his voice.
"You've asked me for facts for your speeches. Well, to begin with: it's your own fault if La Chamade doesn't pay. The farmer you've got there is taking things easy, because his lease is expiring, and he suspects your intention of raising the rent. You're never seen; so people snap their fingers at you and rob you. Nothing more natural. Then there's a simpler reason for your ruin: we're all being ruined. La Beauce—fertile La Beauce, our nurse and mother—is worked out!"
So he went on. For instance, in his young days, Le Perche, on the other side of the Loir, was a poor ill-cultivated country, almost grainless, the inhabitants of which used to come to Cloyes, Châteaudun, and Bonneval, and hire themselves out at harvest-time. Now-a-days, thanks to the continued rise in price of manual labour, it was Le Perche that prospered, and would soon outstrip La Beauce; without taking into account that it was growing rich on live stock. For the markets of Mondoubleau, Saint-Calais, and Courtalain supplied the open districts with horses, oxen, and swine. La Beauce only lived thanks to her sheep. Two years earlier, when congestion of the spleen had decimated the flocks, she had gone through a terrible crisis, so much so, that if the plague had continued, she would never have survived.
Then he entered on his own struggles, his own story; his twenty years' battle with the land, which had left him poorer than before. He had always lacked capital. He had not been able to improve certain fields as he would have wished. Marling, alone, was inexpensive, yet no one but him had given any attention to it. It was the same with the manures. No one used aught but farm manure, which was insufficient. All his neighbours scoffed at his trying chemical manures, the inferior quality of which, however, often justified the mockers. As for the rotation of crops, he had been bound to conform to the custom of the country, and use the triennial system without fallows, now that the plan of artificial meadows and the culture of hoed plants was extending. Only one machine, the threshing-machine, was beginning to find acceptance. Such was the deadly, inevitable, numbing influence of routine; and if he, progressive and intelligent, felt that influence, what must it be for the hard-headed peasantry hostile to all improvement? A peasant would starve sooner than take a handful of earth from his field and carry it for analysis to a chemist, who could tell him what it contained in excess and in what it was deficient; the manure it required, and the crops best adapted to it. No; the peasant was always receiving from the soil, and never dreaming of restoring anything; acquainted with no manure but that of his two cows and his horse, of which he was very thrifty. The rest was left to chance; the seed thrown into any kind of soil, and left to germinate at random; and heaven was blasphemed if it never germinated at all. Whenever the peasant's eyes became opened, and he decided to devote himself to a rational and scientific system, the produce would be doubled. Till then, ignorant and headstrong, without a ha'porth of progress in him, he would go on murdering the soil. And thus it was that La Beauce—the ancient granary of France, flat and arid, with nothing but her corn—was gradually wasting away through exhaustion; weary of being bled at every vein, and of nurturing a race of blockheads.
"Ah! Every blasted thing is failing!" he cried, brutally. "Our sons will see the bankruptcy of the soil. Are you aware that our peasants, who once used to save up their coppers to buy a bit of land they had hungered after for years, are now buying stocks and shares—Spanish, Portuguese, even Mexican? And they wouldn't risk fifty francs to improve an acre. They have lost confidence. The parents go round and round in a circle of routine like foundered animals; the sons and daughters think of nothing but letting the cows run loose, and sprucing themselves up to gad off into town. And the worst of it is that education—that famous education, don't you know? that was going to put everything straight—favours this exodus, this depopulation of the country, by inspiring the children with silly vanity and false ideas of comfort. See here, now. At Rognes they've a schoolmaster, that Lequeu, a fellow broken loose from the plough and eaten up with spite against the land he just missed cultivating. Well, how can you expect him to reconcile his boys to their lot, when he treats them every day like savages, like brute beasts, and sends them back to the paternal dung-heap with a scholar's contempt. The remedy, good heavens! The assured remedy would be to have other schools—a practical system of teaching, graduated courses of agriculture. There's a fact for you. I insist upon that. It is there, in those schools perhaps, that salvation lies, if there's yet time."
M. de Chédeville, pre-occupied, and feeling thoroughly uncomfortable under this mighty avalanche of facts, hastened to reply:
"No doubt, no doubt."
Then as the servant brought in the dessert—a cream cheese and some fruit—leaving the kitchen door wide open, he caught sight of Jacqueline's pretty profile. He bent forward, winked, and fidgeted, to attract that amiable personage's attention; and then resumed, in the mellow tones of his old lady-killing days: