"No doubt," he resumed after a pause, "nothing has yet been discovered which equals farmyard manure; but one never can get a sufficient quantity of it. And then the men just toss it on to the ground. They don't know how to prepare it or how to manipulate it. See, now, that dung of yours has been burnt by the sun; you don't keep it covered."
Then he launched out into invectives against routine, when Jean confessed that he still made use of Buteau's old dung-hole in front of the cow-house. For some years past he himself, he said, had introduced layers of soil and turf into his pits, and had set up a system of pipes to convey the slops of the kitchen, with the urine of the family and cattle, and indeed all the drainings of the farm, down to a reservoir; and twice a week the dung-hill was watered with this liquid-manure. Now-a-days he even carefully saved and utilised all the contents of the privies.
"It is downright folly," he exclaimed, "to waste the good things that God gives us! For a long time I had scruples of delicacy about it, just as the peasants have. But old Mother Caca converted me. You know old Mother Caca, don't you? She's a neighbour of yours. Well, it was she alone who went about matters in the right way; and the cabbage over whose roots she used to empty her slops was the king of cabbages, both in size and flavour, and it was so simply on account of what the old woman did."
Jean laughed as he jumped down from his cart, which was now empty, then he began to divide his manure into little heaps. Hourdequin walked on after him, amid the warm reek which floated round them.
"The yearly refuse of Paris alone would be sufficient to fertilise some seventy thousand acres," said the farmer. "It has all been properly calculated. And yet this is all wasted! There is only just a small quantity of dried night-soil utilised. Just think of it; seventy thousand acres! Ah, if we could only have it here, it would cover all La Beauce, and then you would see the wheat grow!"
He embraced the whole level extent of La Beauce in a sweeping gesture; and in his enthusiasm he mentally beheld all Paris pouring out its fertilising flood of human manure over the spreading tract. Streamlets were trickling along in all directions, overflowing the fields as the sea of sewage mounted higher and higher beneath the glowing sun, sped onward by a breeze which wafted the odour far and wide. The great city was restoring to the soil the life it had received from it. The earth slowly absorbed the fertilising tide, and from the glutted and fattened soil there burst forth great teeming harvests of white bread.
"We should want boats in that case," remarked Jean, who was at once amused and disgusted by the novel idea of submerging the land beneath a sea of sewage.
Just at that moment the sound of a voice made him turn his head, and he was astonished to see Lise in her light cart, which was drawn up at the side of the road. She was shouting to Buteau at the top of her voice:
"I'm just off to Cloyes to fetch Monsieur Finet. Your father has fallen down in a fit in his bedroom. I'm afraid he's dying. You'd better go home and see to him."
Then, without waiting for a reply, she whipped her horse forward, and rattled along the straight road, disappearing out of sight in the distance.