The labourer's harvest here are his potato-fed pigs. In our walks we came upon men and women sowing potatoes on their bit of hired land; for the most part their bit of land is tilled on Sundays, a neighbour's horse being hired or borrowed for the purpose. Thus neither man nor beast rest on the seventh day, and as a natural consequence church-going gradually falls into abeyance. My host deplored this habit of turning Sunday into a veritable corvée for both human beings and cattle, but said that change of system must be very slow.
On the whole, the condition of the agricultural labourer here contrasts very unfavourably with that of the peasant owner described elsewhere.
The same drawbacks exist as in England. Land for the most part being held by large owners, accommodation for poorer neighbours is insufficient. Many able-bodied workmen migrate to the towns, simply because they cannot get houses to live in; such one-storeyed dwellings as exist have an uncared-for look, neither are the village folks so well dressed as in regions of peasant property. In fact, I should say, after a very wide experience, that peasant property invariably uplifts and non-propertied labour drags down. This seems to me a conclusion mathematically demonstrable.
Mayor of his commune, my host was a man of progress and philanthropy in the widest sense of the word. He had lately brought about the opening of an infant school here, and dwelt on the beneficial results; children not being admitted to the communal schools under the age of seven, were otherwise thrown on the streets all day. Infant schools are generally found in the larger communes. Intersecting my host's vast stretches of field and ploughed land lay the old strategic road from Rouen to St. Omer, a broad band of dazzling white thrown across the tremendous panorama. An immense plain is spread before us as a map, now crudely brilliant in hue, two months later to show blending gold and purple. Vast, too, the views obtained on the homeward drive. Over against Hesdin rises its forest—holiday ground of rich and poor, as yet undiscovered by the tourist. From this friendly little town a charming woodland journey may be made by the railway now leading through the forest of Crécy to Abbeville.
Between Hesdin and Arras the geometrically planted cider apple trees and poplars growing in parallel lines are without beauty, but by the railway are bits of waste ground covered with cowslip, wind flowers, cuckoo-pint, and dandelion. On the top of lofty elms here and there are dark masses; these are the nests of the magpie, and apparently quite safe from molestation.
By the wayside we see evidences of peasant ownership on the most modest scale, women cutting their tiny patch of rye, as green food for cattle, sowing their potato field, or keeping a few sheep. Everywhere lilacs are in full bloom, and the pear and cherry trees burdened with blossom as snow. Everything is a month ahead of ordinary years. I write of April 1893.
The Hôtel St. Pol at Arras looks, I should say, precisely as it did in Robespierre's time. The furniture certainly belongs to that epoch, sanitary arrangements have made little advance, and the bare staircases and floors do not appear as if they had been well swept, much less scoured, since the fall of the Bastille. It is a rambling, I should say rat-haunted, old place, but fairly quiet and comfortable, with civil men-servants and no kind of pretence.
Arras itself, that is to say its Petite Place, is a specimen of Renaissance architecture hardly to be matched even in France. The Flemish gables and Spanish arcades, not a vestige of modernization marring the effect, make a unique picture. Above all rises the first of those noble belfry towers met by the traveller on this round, souvenirs of civic rights hardly won and stoutly maintained. The first object looked for will be Robespierre's birthplace, an eminently respectable middle-class abode, now occupied by a personage almost as generally distasteful as that of the Conventionnel himself, namely, a process-server or bailiff. A bright little lad whom I interrogated on the way testified the liveliest interest in my quest, and would not lose sight of me till I had discovered the right house. It is a yellow-walled, yellow-shuttered, symbolically atrabilious-looking place, with twenty-three front windows. Robespierre's parents must have been in decent circumstances when their son Maximilian was born, and perhaps the reverses of early life had no small share in determining his after career. Left an orphan in early life, he owed his education and start in life to charity. The fastidious, poetic, austere country lawyer, unlike his fellow-conventionnels, was no born orator. Thoughts that breathe and words that burn did not drop from his lips as from Danton's. His carefully prepared speeches, even in the apogee of his popularity, were often interrupted by the cry "Cut it short" or "Keep to the point." The exponent of Rousseau was ofttimes "long preaching," like St. Paul.
But there are early utterances of Robespierre's that constitute in themselves a revolution, when, for instance, in 1789 he pleaded for the admission of Jews, non-Catholics, and actors to political rights. "The Jews," he protested, "have been maligned in history. Their reputed vices arise from the ignominy into which they have been plunged." And although his later discourses breathe a spirit of frenzied vindictiveness, certain passages recall that "humane and spiritual element" commented upon by Charles Nodier. This is especially noticeable in what is called his discours-testament, the speech delivered on the eve of Thermidor. At one moment, with positive ferocity, he lashes the memory of former friends and colleagues sent by himself to the guillotine; at another he dilates upon the virtue of magnanimity in lofty, Platonic strains.
[ILLUSTRATION: ARRAS, LA PETITE PALACE]