"he wrote to demand the dismissal
of the officers, declaring that unless this was done every person
employed in the Excise should be driven into the Rhine or the sea;
some of them were dismissed and the director himself came to give him
satisfaction." Finding his canton sterile and the settlers on it idle
he organized them into groups, women and children, and, in the foulest
weather, puts himself at their head, with his twenty severe wounds and
neck supported by a piece of silver. He pays them to work making them
clear off the lands, which he gives them on leases of a hundred years,
and he makes them enclose a mountain of rocks with high walls and plant
it with olive trees. "No one, under any pretext could be excused from
working unless he was ill, and in this case under treatment, or occupied
on his own property, a point in which my father could not be deceived,
and nobody would have dared to do it." These are the last offshoots of
the old, knotty, savage trunk, but still capable of affording shelter.
Others could still be found in remote cantons, in Brittany and in
Auvergne, veritable district commanders, and I am sure that in time of
need the peasants would obey them as much out of respect as from fear.
Vigor of heart and of body justifies its own ascendancy, while the
superabundance of energy, which begins in violence, ends in beneficence.

Less independent and less harsh a paternal government subsists
elsewhere, if not in the law at least through custom. In Brittany, near
Treguier and Lannion, says the bailiff of Mirabeau,[1304] "the entire
staff of the coast-guard is composed of people of quality and of stock
going back a thousand years. I have not seen one of them get irritated
with a peasant-soldier, while, at the same time, I have seen on the
part of the latter an air of filial respect for them. . . . It is a
terrestrial paradise with respect to patriarchal manners, simplicity
and true grandeur; the attitude of the peasants towards the seigniors
is that of an affectionate son with his father; and the seigniors in
talking with the peasants use their rude and coarse language, and speak
only in a kind and genial way. We see mutual regard between masters and
servants." Farther south, in the Bocage, a wholly agricultural region,
and with no roads, where ladies are obliged to travel on horseback and
in ox-carts, where the seignior has no farmers, but only twenty-five or
thirty metayers who work for him on shares, the