nts of the
day. The principal business was the distribution of pamphlets. The
titles did not lack attractiveness: "God will be pleased with it"; "The
sharing"; "Let us get out of the mess"; "Where are we going?" The finest
things among them were the dialogues in the style of villagers, with
oaths and bad French, to elevate the mental faculties of the peasants.
By a new law, the hawking of pamphlets would be in the hands of the
prefects; and they had just crammed Proudhon into St. Pelagie--gigantic
triumph!

The trees of liberty were generally torn down. Chavignolles obeyed
orders. Bouvard saw with his own eyes the fragments of his poplar on a
wheelbarrow. They helped to warm the gendarmes, and the stump was
offered to the cure, who had blessed it. What a mockery!

The schoolmaster did not hide his way of thinking.

Bouvard and Pecuchet congratulated him on it one day as they were
passing in front of his door. Next day he presented himself at their
residence.

At the end of the week they returned his visit.

The day was declining. The brats had just gone home, and the
schoolmaster, in half-sleeves, was sweeping the yard. His wife, with a
neckerchief tied round her head, was suckling a baby. A little girl was
hiding herself behind her petticoat; a hideous-looking child was playing
on the ground at her feet. The water from the washing she had been doing
in the kitchen was flowing to the lower end of the house.

"You see," said the schoolmaster, "how the government treats us."

And forthwith he began finding fault with capital as an infamous thing.
It was necessary to democratise it, to enfranchise matter.

"I ask for nothing better," said Pecuchet.

At least, they ought to have recognised the right to assistance.

"One more right!" said Bouvard.

No matter! The provisional government had acted in a flabby fashion by
not ordaining fraternity.

"Then try to establish it."

As there was no longer daylight, Petit rudely ordered his wife to carry
a candle to his study.

The lithograph portraits of the orators of the Left were fastened with
pins to the plaster walls. A bookshelf stood above a deal writing-desk.
There were a chair, stool, and an old soap-box for persons to sit down
upon. He made a show of laughing. But want had laid its traces on his
cheeks, and his narrow temples indicated the stubbornness of a ram, an
intractable pride. He never would yield.

"Besides, see what sustains me!"

It was a pile