[XLIV]
It was a mild night and not very dark, despite the heavy black clouds which the wind drove across the sky, opening long furrows filled with stars, which suddenly closed to open anew in another place.
It is said that our noble or bourgeois ancestors were unquestionably more robust than we are to-day, while, on the contrary, our workmen and peasant ancestors were less so.
Such is the belief of the old men of my province, and it seems to me to be well-founded; well-to-do people were accustomed to an abundance of fresh air and exercise of which modern life deprives us, or which it makes unnecessary. The poorer classes were more poorly housed and not so well fed as in our day, to say nothing of the immense number of unfortunate wretches who were not housed or fed at all. The gentleman, with his régime of fighting and hunting, retained his health and strength to a very advanced age.
Bois-Doré, despite his sixty-nine years and the comparative effeminacy of his habits, still had strong sight, lungs impervious to the cold, and was sure-footed on the bare ground or on wet grass.
He slipped once or twice as he skirted the bushes, but he saved himself by clinging to the branches, like a man who knows how to take care of himself in a locality where the irregularities of the ground vary little over a large extent of territory.
Thanks to the short cut he had taken, he reached the farm of Brilbault in ten minutes.
Knowing the timid and superstitious character of the peasants, he coughed and spoke before knocking; then, as he knocked, he gave his name, and was received without alarm, at all events, if not without surprise.
Although the condition of the farming class was still very wretched, it was much less so, morally speaking, in Berry, which had long been a province of freeholds, than in those provinces where serfdom still existed. Moreover, in that region which is called the Black Valley, material resources have always assured the farmer, whether proprietor or tenant, a relative well-being which has saved him from great disasters and great epidemics.
At this period the leprosy hospitals were already empty; the pest, still so frequent in La Brenne and the neighborhood of Bourges, rarely scourged Fromental. The dwelling-houses, which were filthy and pestilential in the Marche and the Bourbonnais, were, at least in our neighborhood, stoutly built and healthy, as is proved by a large number of old country houses of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which are still standing and easily recognizable by their vast tiled roofs, their windows framed with stone cut in the shape of prisms, and their attic windows surmounted by great sheaves of grain moulded in terra cotta.[5]