farming, and their fortune would be spent on it! The only
remedy was to sell out.

To do that, it was necessary to consult a notary. The step was a
disagreeable one: Pecuchet took it on himself.

In M. Marescot's opinion, it was better not to put up any posters. He
would speak about the farm to respectable clients, and would let them
make proposals.

"Very well," said Bouvard, "we have time before us." He intended to get
a tenant; then they would see. "We shall not be more unlucky than
before; only now we are forced to practise economy!"

Pecuchet was disgusted with gardening, and a few days later he remarked:

"We ought to give ourselves up exclusively to tree culture--not for
pleasure, but as a speculation. A pear which is the product of three
soils is sometimes sold in the capital for five or six francs. Gardeners
make out of apricots twenty-five thousand livres in the year! At St.
Petersburg, during the winter, grapes are sold at a napoleon per grape.
It is a beautiful industry, you must admit! And what does it cost?
Attention, manuring, and a fresh touch of the pruning-knife."

It excited Bouvard's imagination so much that they sought immediately in
their books for a nomenclature for purchasable plants, and, having
selected names which appeared to them wonderful, they applied to a
nurseryman from Falaise, who busied himself in supplying them with three
hundred stalks for which he had not found a sale. They got a lock-smith
for the props, an iron-worker for the fasteners, and a carpenter for the
rests. The forms of the trees were designed beforehand. Pieces of lath
on the wall represented candelabra. Two posts at the ends of the
plat-bands supported steel threads in a horizontal position; and in the
orchard, hoops indicated the structure of vases, cone-shaped switches
that of pyramids, so well that, in arriving in the midst of them, you
imagined you saw pieces of some unknown machinery or the framework of a
pyrotechnic apparatus.

The holes having been dug, they cut the ends of all the roots, good or
bad, and buried them in a compost. Six months later the plants were
dead. Fresh orders to the nurseryman, and fresh plantings in still
deeper holes. But the rain softening the soil, the grafts buried
themselves in the ground of their own accord, and the trees sprouted
out.

When spring had come, Pecuchet set about the pruning of pear trees. He
did not cut down the shoots, spared the superfluous side branches, a