the department, and who, moreover,
could refuse nothing to Mademoiselle Cochet, Tonsard married as soon
as his house was finished and his vines had begun to bear. A well-grown
fellow of twenty-three, in everybody's good graces at Les Aigues, on
whom Mademoiselle had bestowed an acre of her land, and who appeared
to be a good worker, he had the art to ring the praises of his negative
merits, and so obtained the daughter of a farmer on the Ronquerolles
estate, which lies beyond the forest of Les Aigues.

This farmer held the lease of half a farm, which was going to ruin in
his hands for want of a helpmate. A widower, and inconsolable for the
loss of his wife, he tried to drown his troubles, like the English, in
wine, and then, when he had put the poor deceased out of his mind, he
found himself married, so the village maliciously declared, to a woman
named Boisson. From being a farmer he became once more a laborer, but
an idle and drunken laborer, quarrelsome and vindictive, capable of any
ill-deed, like most of his class when they fall from a well-to-do
state of life into poverty. This man, whose practical information
and knowledge of reading and writing placed him far above his
fellow-workmen, while his vices kept him at the level of pauperism, you
have already seen on the banks of the Avonne, measuring his cleverness
with that of one of the cleverest men in Paris, in a bucolic overlooked
by Virgil.

Pere Fourchon, formerly a schoolmaster at Blangy, lost that place
through misconduct and his singular ideas as to public education.
He helped the children to make paper boats with their alphabets
much oftener than he taught them how to spell; he scolded them in so
remarkable a manner for pilfering fruit that his lectures might really
have passed for lessons on the best way of scaling the walls. From
teacher he became a postman. In this capacity, which serves as a refuge
to many an old soldier, Pere Fourchon was daily reprimanded. Sometimes
he forgot the letters in a tavern, at other times he kept them in his
pocket. When he was drunk he left those for one village in another
village; when he was sober he read them. Consequently, he was soon
dismissed. No longer able to serve the State, Pere Fourchon ended
by becoming a manufacturer. In the country a poor man can always get
something to do, and make at least a pretence of gaining an honest
livelihood. At sixty-eight years of age the old man started his
rope-walk, a manufact