thout experiencing any
opposition. But, having had a large family, endowed like himself with a
goodly number of vices, he finally found himself pestered and besieged
by creditors who, instead of being frightened by his threats, as of old,
were themselves threatening to make him suffer. He was obliged to devise
some means of avoiding the bailiffs on the one hand, and, on the other,
the fights which were continually taking place. In these fights the
Mauprats no longer shone, despite their numbers, their complete union,
and their herculean strength; since the whole population of the district
sided with their opponents and took upon itself the duty of stoning
them. So, rallying his progeny around him, as the wild boar gathers
together its young after a hunt, Tristan withdrew into his castle and
ordered the drawbridge to be raised. Shut up with him were ten or twelve
peasants, his servants, all of them poachers or refugees, who like
himself had some interest in "retiring from the world" (his own
expression), and in finding a place of safety behind good stout walls.
An enormous pile of hunting weapons, duck-guns, carbines, blunderbusses,
spears, and cutlasses, were raised on the platform, and the porter
received orders never to let more than two persons at a time approach
within range of his gun.

From that day Mauprat and his sons broke with all civil laws as they had
already broken with all moral laws. They formed themselves into a band
of adventurers. While their well-beloved and trusty poachers supplied
the house with game, they levied illegal taxes on the small farms in the
neighbourhood. Now, without being cowards (and they are far from that),
the peasants of our province, as you know, are meek and timid, partly
from listlessness, partly from distrust of the law, which they have
never understood, and of which even to this day they have but a scanty
knowledge. No province of France has preserved more old traditions or
longer endured the abuses of feudalism. Nowhere else, perhaps, has the
title of the lord of the manor been handed down, as hitherto with us, to
the owners of certain estates; and nowhere is it so easy to frighten the
people with reports of some absurd and impossible political event. At
the time of which I speak the Mauprats, being the only powerful family
in a district remote from towns and cut off from communication with the
outside world, had little difficulty in persuading their vassals that
serfdom was