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We get magnificent views of Mende and the Valley of the Lot--some slight recompense for having had to retrace our footsteps--and what was equally valuable, much useful information. 'Is the land cut up into small parcels here?' I asked. We were just then on the outskirts of the town, and he pointed with his whip to a large, well-built farmhouse, with solid, walled-in buildings. 'Most of the land round about Mende is farmed by the monsieur who lives there,' he replied. 'There he is, true enough, with his wife and children.' Just then we passed a hooded carriage, in which were seated father, mother, two little ones, and nursemaid, all taking a holiday jaunt, the day being Sunday. 'That is the owner of the farm,' he went on: 'several hundred acres--I can't say how many--but it is stocked with two hundred sheep, ten oxen, besides cows and pigs. There you have an idea of the size,' 'Are there no small farms here, then?' 'There are all sorts: little farms, big ones, and betwixt and between,' he replied. 'Everybody has his little bit' (Tout le monde a son petit lot); 'but the land immediately round the town is farmed by the neighbour you saw in the calèche.' 'Is he a peasant?' I asked. 'A peasant if you like. He is a cultivator' (Un paysan si vous voulez. C'est un cultivateur), was the answer. When a French peasant becomes what in rustic phraseology is called a substantial man, owning or hiring a considerable extent of land, he ceases to be called 'paysan,' and is designated 'cultivateur.' The very word 'peasant,' as I have shown elsewhere, will, in process of time, become a survival, so steady and sure is the social upheaval of rural France. The most eminent Frenchmen of the day, witness the late Paul Bert, are often peasant-born; and hardly a village throughout the country but sends some promising son of the soil to Paris, destined for one of the learned professions. I know of a village baker's son near Dijon now studying for the Bar--one instance out of many. In one of her clever novelettes, 'Un Gascon,' Madame Th. Bentzon gives us for hero the village doctor, son of a peasant. The portrait of this young man, devoted to duty, high-minded, self-sacrificing, is no mere ideal, as experience proves. But if readers, compelled to make the acquaintance of French peasants on paper, will accept Zola and certain English writers as a guide to his moral and material condition, they will be landed on some conclusions strangely at variance with experience. [Footnote: I may add that I have received appreciative testimony from various French journals--_L'Economiste_, and others--also from no less an authority than M. Henri Baudrillart, of the Institut, of my studies of the French peasant, notably the contribution to the _Fortnightly Review_, August, 1887, in which I have summed up the experiences of twelve years' French residence and travel.]
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