this picture of ethereal, peaceful toil.  Do not imagine that the sight of this marvellous sky, of the sea which spreads out yonder behind the church and presents another, more sensitive sky, flowing over the earth like a great mirror of wisdom and consciousness—­do not imagine that either sea or sky is capable of lifting their thoughts or widening their minds.  They have never looked at them.  Nothing has power to influence or move them save three or four circumscribed fears, that of hunger, of force, of opinion and law, and the terror of hell when they die.  To show what they are, we should have to consider them one by one.  See that tall fellow there on the right, who flings up such mighty sheaves.  Last summer his friends broke his right arm in some tavern row.  I reduced the fracture, which was a bad and compound one.  I tended him for a long time, and gave him the wherewithal to live till he should be able to get back to work.  He came to me every day.  He profited by this to spread the report in the village that he had discovered me in the arms of my sister-in-law, and that my mother drank.  He is not vicious, he bears me no ill-will; on the contrary, see what a broad, open smile spreads over his face as he sees me.  It was not social animosity that induced him to slander me.  The peasant values wealth far too much to hate the rich man.  But I fancy my good corn-thrower there could not understand my tending him without any profit to myself.  He was satisfied that there must be some underhand scheme, and he declined to be my dupe.  More than one before him, richer or poorer, has acted in similar fashion, if not worse.  It did not occur to him that he was lying when he spread those inventions abroad; he merely obeyed a confused command of the morality he saw about him.  He yielded unconsciously, against his will, as it were, to the all-powerful desire of the general malevolence. . . .  But why complete a picture with which all are familiar who have spent some years in the country?  Here we have the second semblance that some will call the real truth.  It is the truth of practical life.  It undoubtedly is based on the most precise, the only, facts that one can observe and test.”

[93]

“Let us sit on these sheaves,” he continued, “and look again.  Let us reject not a single one of the little facts that build up the reality of which I have spoken.  Let us permit them to depart of their own accord into space.  They cumber the foreground, and yet we cannot but be aware of the existence behind them of a great and very curious force that sustains the whole.  Does it only sustain and not raise?  These men whom we see before us are at least no longer the ferocious animals of whom La Bruyere speaks, the wretches who talked in a kind of inarticulate voice, and withdrew at night to their dens, where they lived on black bread, water, and roots.