'Well, Lange, is business prospering?' the young man cordially inquired.
'Oh! always well enough to give us bread, Monsieur Luc. As you're aware, that is all that I ask for,' answered Lange.
Indeed, he only carted his wares about when bread was lacking in his home. Throughout his spare time he lingered over pottery which was not intended for sale, remaining for hours in contemplation of the things he thus made, his eyes having the dreamy expression of those of some rustic poet full of a passion to impart life to things. Even the coarse goods which he fashioned, his very pans and stock-pots, displayed a naïveté and purity of lines, a proud and simple gracefulness which bespoke poetic fancy. A son of the people, as he was, he had instinctively lighted upon the old primitive popular beauty, that beauty of the humble domestic utensil which arises from perfection of proportions and absolute adaptability to the uses to which the utensil is intended to be put.
Luc was struck by that beauty on examining a few unsold pieces in the little hand-cart. And the sight of Barefeet, that tall, dark, comely girl, with the strong, slender limbs of a wrestler and the firm bosom of an Amazon, likewise filled him with mingled admiration and astonishment.
'It is hard to push that along all day, isn't it?' he said to her.
But she was a silent creature, and contented herself with smiling with her big, wild eyes, whilst the potter answered in her stead: 'Oh! we rest in the shade by the wayside when we come upon a spring,' said he. 'Things are all right, aren't they, Barefeet, and we are happy.'
The young woman had turned her eyes on him, and they glowed with boundless adoration, as for some beloved, powerful, benign master, a saviour, a god. Then without a word she pushed the little hand-cart into the enclosure and set it in place under a shed.
Lange, on his side, had watched her with a glance of deep affection. At times he feigned some roughness, as if he still regarded her as a mere gipsy picked up by the wayside, But truth to tell she was now the mistress. He loved her with a passion which he did not confess, which he hid beneath the demeanour of an uncouth peasant. In point of fact that thick-set little man with square-shaped head, bushy with a tangle of hair and beard, was of a very gentle and amorous nature.
All at once, again turning towards Luc, whom he affected to treat as a 'comrade,' he said to him in his rough, frank way: 'Well, isn't everybody's happiness getting on, then? Aren't those idiots who consent to shut themselves up in your barracks willing to be happy in the fashion you want?'
Each time that he met Luc he thus jeered at the attempt at Fourierist Communism which was being made at La Crêcherie. And as the young man contented himself with smiling, he added: 'I'm hoping that before another six months have gone by you'll be with us, the Anarchists. I tell you once again that everything is rotten, and that the only thing is to blow old society to pieces with bombs!'