A blue-clad peasant rides home, with a harrow smoking
behind him among the dry clods. Another still works with his wife in
their little strip. An immense shadow fills the plain; these people
stand in it up to their shoulders; and their heads, as they stoop
over their work and rise again, are relieved from time to time
against the golden sky.
These peasant farmers are well off nowadays, and not by any means
overworked; but somehow you always see in them the historical
representative of the serf of yore, and think not so much of present
times, which may be prosperous enough, as of the old days when the
peasant was taxed beyond possibility of payment, and lived, in
Michelet's image, like a hare between two furrows. These very people
now weeding their patch under the broad sunset, that very man and his
wife, it seems to us, have suffered all the wrongs of France. It is
they who have been their country's scapegoat for long ages; they who,
generation after generation, have sowed and not reaped, reaped and
another has garnered; and who have now entered into their reward, and
enjoy their good things in their turn.
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