den shoes. "It
is not in the power of an English imagination," says Arthur Young,
"to imagine the animals that waited on us here at the Chapeau
Rouge,--creatures that were called by courtesy Souillac women, but in
reality walking dung-hills. But a neatly dressed, clean waiting-girl at
an inn, will be looked for in vain in France." On reading descriptions
made on the spot we see in France a similar aspect of country and of
peasantry as in Ireland, at least in its broad outlines.

III. The Countryside.

Aspects of the country and of the peasantry.

In the most fertile regions, for instance, in Limagne, both cottages and
faces denote "misery and privation."[5139] "The peasants are generally
feeble, emaciated and of slight stature." Nearly all derive wheat and
wine from their homesteads, but they are forced to sell this to pay
their rents and taxes; they eat black bread, made of rye and barley,
and their sole beverage is water poured on the lees and the husks. "An
Englishman[5140] who has not traveled can not imagine the figure made
by infinitely the greater part of the countrywomen in France." Arthur
Young, who stops to talk with one of these in Champagne, says that "this
woman, at no great distance, might have been taken for sixty or
seventy, her figure was so bent and her face so hardened and furrowed by
labor,--but she said she was only twenty-eight." This woman, her
husband and her household, afford a sufficiently accurate example of the
condition of the small proprietary husbandmen. Their property consists
simply of a patch of ground, with a cow and a poor little horse; their
seven children consume the whole of the cow's milk. They owe to one
seignior a franchard (forty-two pounds) of flour, and three chickens; to
another three franchards of oats, one chicken and one sou, to which must
be added the taille and other taxes. "God keep us!" she said, "for the
tailles and the dues crush us."--What must it be in districts where the
soil is poor!--

"From Ormes, (near Chatellerault), as far as Poitiers," writes a
lady,[5141] "there is a good deal of ground which brings in nothing,
and from Poitiers to my residence (in Limousin) 25,000 arpents of ground
consist wholly of heath and sea-grass. The peasantry live on rye, of
which they do not remove the bran, and which is as black and heavy as
lead.--In Poitou, and here, they plow up only the skin of the ground
with a miserable little plow without wheels. . . . From Poi