Game belonged to anyone who knew how to kill it.

‘Oh deary me,’ Rose said simply, with a big sigh.

They were all sad at heart and were slowly becoming oppressed as when they listened to a ghost story. Nor did they always fully understand, and this added to their disquiet. Since those things had happened in the past, they might well happen again in the future.

‘Go on your way, poor Jacques Bonhomme,’ Jean droned on in his schoolboy voice. ‘You must sacrifice yet more sweat and blood, the end of your tribulations is not yet in sight…’

Indeed, the whole calvary of the peasant was now unfolded. He had suffered from everything, from man, from the elements and from himself. Under the feudal system, when the nobles set out on the rampage, he was hunted, pursued and carried off as part of the loot. Every private war between one lord and another ruined him, if it did not kill him, his cottage was burnt down, his field laid waste. Later on came the big companies, the worst of the scourges that devastated the countryside, those bands of mercenaries at the service of anyone who could hire them, sometimes for and sometimes against France, killing and burning as they passed and leaving nothing but waste land in their wake. Though towns might hold out, thanks to their walls, the villages were swept away in this mad hurricane of massacre which blew from one end of a century to the next. There were centuries of blood, centuries during which our flatlands, as they were called, resounded with one single, massive cry of pain, of raped women, battered children and hanged men. Then, when there was respite from war, the royal tax-collectors were sufficient torment for the poor wretches on the land, because the number and burden of the taxes was as nothing compared with the brutal capricious methods of collecting them: talliage and salt tax were farmed out and taxes, unjustly allotted in accordance with the merest whim, exacted by armed troops who turned revenue collection into a war levy; so that hardly any of the money reached the coffers of the state, having disappeared on the way, stolen little by little by every dishonest hand through which it passed. And then famine played its part. The idiotic tyranny of the laws hampered trade, prevented the free sale of corn and so brought about dreadful shortages every ten years, either through years of drought or excessive rain, which seemed like punishment from on high. A storm which flooded the rivers, a rainless spring, the slightest cloud or ray of sunshine could affect the crops and carry off thousands of men; terrible seasons of famine, sudden excesses of all sorts, dreadful periods of destitution during which men nibbled the grass beside the ditches, like beasts of the field. And, inevitably, after the wars and famines would come the epidemics which killed off those who'd been spared by hunger or the sword. It was the noisome fruit of ignorance and filth, ever recurring, the Black Death, the Great Plague, which stride like giant skeletons through past centuries, scything down the pale, sad people of the countryside.

So, when his sufferings became unbearable, Jacques Bonhomme would rise in revolt. He had centuries of fear and submission behind him, his shoulders had become hardened to blows, his soul so crushed that he did not recognize his own degradation. You could beat him and starve him and rob him of everything, year in, year out, before he would abandon his caution and stupidity, his mind filled with all sorts of muddled ideas which he could not properly understand; and this went on until a culmination of injustice and suffering flung him at his master's throat like some infuriated domestic animal who had been subjected to too many thrashings. Constantly, from one century to the next, there came the same explosion of exasperation, the ploughmen of the Jacquerie arming themselves with scythe and pitchfork when nothing remained for them but death. Such were the Christian Bagaudes of Gaul, the Pastoureaux of the time of the Crusades, then later on, the Croquants and the Nu-Pieds hurling themselves against the nobles and the soldiers of the king. After four hundred years, the cry of pain and anger from all the Jacques Bonhommes which still resounds over the devastated fields made the masters quake in their castles. Suppose they were to lose patience once again and claim at last their rightful heritage? And the vision of old surged through the land, of tall, ragged, half-naked fellows, lusting and mad with violence, spreading ruin and destruction in the same way as they have themselves been ruined and destroyed, raping in their turn the wives of those who had raped theirs!

‘Rein in your anger, you men and women of the countryside,’ Jean read on, in his quiet, careful voice. ‘The hour of victory will soon strike on the clock of history…’

Buteau suddenly shrugged his shoulders: what was the point of being rebellious? So that the gendarmes could cart you off to prison? Indeed, since the little book had started talking of their ancestors' revolts, they had all been listening with their eyes cast downwards, not daring to make a gesture, full of distrust even although they were with people whom they knew. These were things which were not to be spoken of aloud, there was no need for anyone to know what they thought about them. When Jesus Christ broke in and exclaimed that when the next time came he would wring several people's necks, Bécu spoke up violently to proclaim that all republicans were pigs; and Fouan had to impose solemn silence, in the sad and serious voice of an old man who knows a great deal but does not wish to talk about it. While the other women seemed to be concerned with their knitting, La Grande said sententiously:

‘What you've got, you keep,’ although that remark hardly seemed to have any connexion with the reading.

Only Françoise, who had let her book fall onto her lap, was looking at the Corporal in astonishment that he could read for so long without making any mistakes.

‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ Rose said again, sighing even more deeply.

But now the tone of the book changed and became lyrical in its praise of the Revolution. This was Jacques Bonhomme's triumph, the apothcosis of 1789. After the capture of the Bastille, while the peasants were burning down the castles, the events of the night of August 4th legalized the victories achieved over the centuries by recognizing civil liberty and the equality of man. In the space of one night the tillers of the soil became the equal of their lord and master who, by virtue of ancient title deeds, had been living on the sweat of their brow and devouring the fruits of their sleepless nights. Serfdom was abolished, the privileges of nobility were abolished, ecclesiastical and manorial courts of justice were abolished; all the old rights were commuted into money, there was equal liability to taxation for all; all citizens were to be given equal access to civil and military posts.