Palmyre, taking the snuffers to trim the candle with, snuffed it so low as to extinguish it. A tumult followed. The girls laughed, the children stuck their pin into poor Hilarion's buttocks; and the meeting would have been quite upset if the candle brought by Hyacinthe and Bécu, who were nodding over their cards, had not served to re-kindle the other one, despite its long wick, which had swollen at the top into a kind of red mushroom. Conscience-stricken at her awkwardness, Palmyre quaked like a naughty child in terror of the lash.
"Come," said Fouan, "who will read us a bit of this, to finish the evening? Corporal, you ought to read print very well, now!"
He had been to fetch a greasy little book, one of the books of Bonapartist propaganda with which the Empire had flooded the country-side. It had come out of a pedlar's pack, and was a violent onslaught upon the old monarchy: a dramatised history of the peasant before and since the Revolution, with the lament-like title of "The Misfortune and Triumph of Jacques Bonhomme."
Jean had taken the book, and instantly, without waiting to be pressed, he began to read in a colourless, stumbling, schoolboy tone, heedless of punctuation. They listened to him devoutly.
He started with the free Gaul reduced to slavery by the Romans, and then vanquished by the Franks, who transformed slaves into serfs, by establishing the feudal system. Then began the protracted martyrdom of Jacques Bonhomme, tiller of the soil, slave-driven and worked to death, century after century. Many towns-people revolted, founding corporations and acquiring the right of citizenship, but the enthralled peasantry, isolated and dispossessed of everything, only managed to free themselves at a later period, buying their manhood and their liberty for money. And what a delusive liberty it was! They were overwhelmed by exorbitant and ruinous taxes; their rights of ownership were ceaselessly called into question, and the soil was burdened with so many charges as to leave one merely flints to feed upon! Next began the terrible enumeration of the impositions that lay so heavy on the poor peasant No one could draw up a full and accurate list, the taxes poured in so abundantly from king, bishop, and baron all at once. Three beasts of prey tore at the same carcase. The king had the poll-tax and tallage, the bishop the tithes, the baron laid a tax on everything, and turned everything into gold. The peasant had nothing left him to call his own—neither earth, water, fire, nor even the air he breathed. He paid for this, and he paid for that; paid to live, paid to die; paid for his contracts, flocks, business, and pleasure. Paid for having the rain-water from the ditches diverted on to his grounds; paid for the highway dust kicked up by his sheep in the drought of summer. Who ever could not pay was obliged to give his body and his time, taxable and taskable without limit; forced to till the soil, to garner and reap, to trim the vines, clean out the château moat, make and repair the roads. Then there were the dues in kind; and the manor mill, oven, and wine-press, where he was forced to leave a quarter of his crop; and the imposition of watch and ward, which survived in money even after the demolition of the feudal keeps; and the imposition of shelter and purveyance, which, whenever the king or baron passed by, sacked the cottages, dragged mattresses and coverlets from beds, and drove the owner out of his house—lucky not to have his doors and windows torn from their fastenings if he were at all dilatory in turning out. But the most execrated imposition, the remembrance of which still rankled in the hamlets, was the salt-tax; with public store-houses for salt, and every family rated at a certain quantity, which they were, willy-nilly, compelled to purchase of the king; and the system of collection was so iniquitous and despotic that it roused France to rebellion and drowned her in blood.
"My father," interrupted Fouan, "saw the time when salt was ninepence a pound. Truly, times were hard."
Hyacinthe sniggered in his sleeve, and endeavoured to lay stress upon those indelicate rights to which the little book merely made a modest allusion.
"And how about the bridal rights, eh? My word! The baron popped his legs into the bride's bed on the wedding night; and——"
They silenced him. The girls, even Lise, notwithstanding her rotundity of form, had reddened deeply; while La Trouille and the two brats, with their eyes turned downwards, were stuffing their fists into their mouths to restrain their laughter. Hilarion drank in every word open-mouthed, as if he understood it all.
Jean went on. He had now got to the administration of justice, the three-fold justice of king, bishop, and lord, which racked the poor folk toiling on the glebe. There was common law, there was statute law, and, above all, there was the arbitrary right of might. No safeguard, no appeal against the all-powerful sword. Even in the ages which followed, when equity put in a protest, judgeships were bought, and justice was sold. Worse still was the recruiting system: a blood-tax which, for a long time, was only levied upon the inferior rural classes. They fled into the woods, but were driven thence in chains, with musket-stocks, and enrolled like galley-slaves. Promotion was denied them. A younger son, nobly born, dealt in regiments as in goods he had paid for; sold the smaller posts to the highest bidder, and drove the rest of his human cattle to the shambles. Lastly came the hunting rights, rights of dove-cot and warren, which even now, although abolished, have left a fierce resentment in the peasant's heart. The chase was an hereditary madness: an old feudal prerogative authorising the lord to hunt here and everywhere, and punishing with death the vassal audacious enough to hunt over his own ground. It was the caging under the open sky of the free beast and bird for the pleasure of one man. It was the grouping of fields into hunting-captaincies ravaged by game, without it being lawful for the peasant to bring down so much as a sparrow.