e customers of the Grand-I-Vert assembled there
to hear the tale.

The first to come was Courtecuisse, in whom you would scarcely have
recognized the once jovial forester, the rubicund do-nothing, whose
wife made his morning coffee as we have before seen. Aged, and thin,
and haggard, he presented to all eyes a lesson that no one learned. "He
tried to climb higher than the ladder," was what his neighbors said
when others pitied him and blamed Rigou. "He wanted to be a bourgeois
himself."

In fact, Courtecuisse did intend to pass for a bourgeois in buying the
Bachelerie, and he even boasted of it; though his wife went about the
roads gathering up the horse-droppings. She and Courtecuisse got
up before daylight, dug their garden, which was richly manured, and
obtained several yearly crops from it, without being able to do more
than pay the interest due to Rigou for the rest of the purchase-money.
Their daughter, who was living at service in Auxerre, sent them her
wages; but in spite of all their efforts, in spite of this help, the
last day for the final payment was approaching, and not a penny in
hand with which to meet it. Madame Courtecuisse, who in former times
occasionally allowed herself a bottle of boiled wine or a bit of roast
meat, now drank nothing but water. Courtecuisse was afraid to go to
the Grand-I-Vert lest he should have to leave three sous behind him.
Deprived of power, he had lost his privilege of free drinks, and he
bitterly complained, like all other fools, of man's ingratitude. In
short, he found, according to the experience of all peasants bitten with
the demon of proprietorship, that toil had increased and food decreased.

"Courtecuisse has done too much to the property," the people said,
secretly envying his position. "He ought to have waited till he had paid
the money down and was master before he put up those fruit palings."

With the help of his wife he had managed to manure and cultivate the
three acres of land sold to him by Rigou, together with the garden
adjoining the house, which was beginning to be productive; and he was
in danger of being turned out of it all. Clothed in rags like Fourchon,
poor Courtecuisse, who lately wore the boots and gaiters of a huntsman,
now thrust his feet into sabots and accused "the rich" of Les Aigues of
having caused his destitution. These wearing anxieties had given to the
fat little man and his once smiling and rosy face a gloomy and dazed
expression, as