The advice was well-meant but somewhat superfluous. The faces I had seen were quite enough. I soon found that my friend was somewhat of a cynic and a humorist in his way, for when I asked him what was the greatest punishment he could inflict on a recalcitrant relégué, he said:
“Make him work. Look at that gang of men yonder,” he went on, pointing to the hillside, which a long row of blue-clad figures was breaking up with picks and spades. “Every stroke of the pick is a punishment to those men. They are wretches whose only idea of life is to get through it without working. They have been thieves and swindlers, beggars and souteneurs—everything that is useless and vile. There is nothing they have not done to save themselves from working. Now, you see, we make them work.”
“And if they won’t?”
“Eh bien! They have stomachs—and soup and fish and meat and coffee and a drink of wine now and then, with a cigarette or a pipe, are better than bread and water, and the open air in a country like this is better than the black cell or the quartier disciplinaire, which you will see later on.”
“In other words,” I said, “you have gone back to the good old law: If a man will not work, neither shall he eat. Well, I must admit that you deal more sensibly with your hopeless vagabonds than we do with ours.”
“Bien possible,” he said, with some justification, “you will see that at least we make some use of them, more than they would in Paris or London, I think. For instance, this is our farm.”
As he said this we pulled up opposite to a rustic arch, over which were the words Ferme Uro.
We went down through a flowery avenue to a pretty verandahed house almost buried in greenery and flowers—the home of the Farm Superintendent. He came out and greeted his territorial lord, and then we went over the farm.
It was as perfect a specimen of what the French call petit culture as could be imagined. It was, in fact, rather a collection of exquisitely kept vegetable gardens than a farm. Every patch was irrigated by water from the low hills which run across the centre of the island. Every kind of vegetable, tropical and temperate, was under cultivation, and outside the gardens there were broad fields of maize and grass pasture.