One of the two cows, which had stood up, was dropping her dung and they heard the regular plop-plop as it spread out on the ground. In the gloom of the roof-timbers they could hear the mournful chirruping of a cricket, while the shadows of the women's nimble fingers busy with their knitting seemed like giant spiders' legs dancing along the wall in the all-pervading blackness.

But when Palmyre tried to snuff the candle she did it so awkwardly that it went out. There were startled exclamations, the girls laughed while the children pushed a pin into Hilarion's backside; and they would have been in trouble but for the candle of Jesus Christ and Bécu, who were drowsing over their cards; with its aid they relit the other one, despite its long wick, which had spread out like a red mushroom. Terrified at her clumsiness, Palmyre was trembling like a little girl expecting a thrashing.

‘Well now,’ said Fouan, ‘who's going to read us this, to finish the evening? Corporal, you must be good at reading printed books…’

He had been to fetch a greasy little book, one of those books of Bonapartist propaganda which every village and hamlet in France had been flooded with under the Empire. This one had turned up from the pack of some itinerant pedlar and it was a violent attack on the old monarchy, a dramatized history of the peasantry before and after the Revolution, under the doleful title The Misfortunes and Triumph of Jacques Bonhomme.

Jean took the book and without any urging started to read in the flat drone of a schoolboy ignoring any punctuation. They listened with rapt attention.

First it was the story of the Gauls, a free people reduced to slavery by the Romans and then conquered by the Franks; the latter, by establishing the feudal system, turned slavery into serfdom. And then the long martyrdom of Jacques Bonhomme began, the martyrdom of the tiller of the soil, exploited and exterminated through the centuries. While the townspeople revolted, founded communes and achieved status as a middle class, the peasant, isolated and possessing nothing, not even himself, did not succeed in freeing himself until later, by buying with his own money the freedom to be a man; and only an illusory freedom at that, for the landowner was hamstrung by vicious and ruinous taxes, his tenure was always precarious, his property burdened with so many tolls and levies that he was left with little more than stones to eat. Then followed a terrifying catalogue of all the dues the wretched peasant had to pay. No one could draw up an accurate and complete list because they were legion; an icy blast that blew from the king, the bishop and the lord all together. Three ravening beasts were devouring the same body: the king had the quit-rent and talliage, the bishop had the tithes, the lord taxed and filled his coffers with everything. And now the common man no longer owned anything, neither land nor water nor fire nor even the air he breathed. He had to pay and keep on paying, pay to live, pay to die, pay for his deeds of contract, his herds, even his pleasure. He paid in order to channel the rainwater from the moat into his land, he paid for the cloud of dust raised by the feet of his sheep along the paths in the summer, during the droughts. Anyone who failed to pay in cash paid with his body and his time, talliable and liable to forced labour at his lord's pleasure, forced to plough and harvest and reap and prune the vine and clean out the moat of his castle, to build and maintain the roads. And then there were payments in kind; and the rights of banality, the mill, the oven, the winepress, which cost him a quarter of his crops; and then watch and guard duty, which, when dungeons were abolished, were commuted into money payments. And then there were the rights of capture, purveyance and lodging, so that when the king or the lord passed through, cottages were ransacked, coverlets and palliasses seized, the inhabitants driven out of their homes and doors and windows wrenched from their frames if the occupant failed to take himself off quickly enough. But the tax most loathed, the one which still aroused the bitterest memories in every hamlet, was the hateful salt tax, with the storehouses full of salt and every family forced to buy a certain quantity of it at a fixed price from the king, an arbitrary and iniquitous revenue that caused rebellion and bloodshed all over France.

‘My father,’ Fouan broke in, ‘could remember salt at nearly a franc a pound… Ah, those were hard times!’

Jesus Christ was chuckling in his beard. He tried to bring the conversation round to the more salacious rights, such as the jus primae noctis, which the little book was content modestly to hint at.

‘How about that? The lord stuck his thigh into the bride's bed and then on the first night he'd stick…’

They prevented him from finishing his sentence. The girls, even Lise with her round belly, had blushed violently while La Trouille and the two young scamps stuck their fists into their mouths to stifle their laughter. Hilarion, open-mouthed, was not missing a single word, as if he understood.

Jean continued his reading. Now they were hearing about justice, the threefold justice of king, bishop and lord, crucifying the poor peasant as he sweated over the soil. There was common law and written law and, above all, there was the capricious law of the strongest: no guarantee or appeals, nothing but the supreme power of the sword. Even in later centuries, when the voice of equity was raised in protest, offices were bought and justice was sold. And it was worse when armies had to be recruited, a blood tax which for many a long year was confined only to the lower orders; when they fled into the woods the peasants would be fetched back in chains, driven along by gun butts and enrolled in the army like galley-slaves. They would never gain promotion. A younger son of a noble family used his regiment as a business, rather like a commodity which he had bought; he would put the rank and file up for auction and send the rest of his human cattle off to slaughter. Then finally there were the hunting rights, the right to have a dovecot, the right to shoot rabbits, rights which, even now they have been abolished, have still left a ferment of ill feeling in the hearts of the peasantry. Shooting game was the old feudal prerogative, a fanatical insistence on hereditary rights which gave the lord authority to hunt whenever he wanted and made the villein liable to death if he had the temerity to shoot over his own ground. The wild beast or bird kept in confinement beneath the open sky for the pleasure of one man; fields penned into royal hunts which any game was free to devastate while the owners were not allowed to shoot even a dunnock.

‘That's understandable,’ muttered Bécu, who used to talk of shooting poachers like rabbits.

But Jesus Christ had pricked up his ears at the sound of the word ‘shooting’ and was whistling between his teeth with a facetious air.