Non-Fiction > Uncollected essays > Volumes 33-38, 1876-1878 - Cornhill magazine > Volume 33

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On the Plain.
Felhafs the reader knows alrrady the asjxct of the great levels of the
Gatinais, Avhere they border with the wooded hills of Fontainebleau.
Here and there, a few grey rocks creep out of the forest as if to sun them-
selves. Here and there, a few apple-trees stand together on a knoll. The
quaint undignified tartan of a myriad small fields dies out into the dis-
tance ; the strips blend and disappear ; and the dead flat lies forth open and
empty, with no accident save pei'haps a tliin line of trees or fiiint church-
spire against the sky. Solemn and vast at all times, in spite of pettiness in
the near details, the impression becomes more solemn and vast toAvards
evening. The sun goes down, a swollen orange, as it were, into the sea.
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 fulfils the plain ; these people stand in it
up to their shoulders ; aiad 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 oflT now-a-days, and not by any means
over-worked; but .somehow you always see in them the histo:ical repre-
sentative of the serf of yore, and think not so much of present times,
which may be pro.sperous 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 Avho
have now entered into their reward, and enjoy their good things in
theii" turn. For the da3-s are gone by when the Seigneur ruled and pro-
fited. " Le Seigneur," says the old foi'mula, " enferme ses manants
comme sous porte et gonds, du ciel a la terre. Tout est a lui, foret chenue,
piseau dans Fair, poisson dans I'eau, bete au buisson, I'onde qvii coule, la
cloche dont le son au loin roule." Such was his old state of sovei-eignty,
a local god rather than a mere king. And now you may ask yourself
where he is, and look round for vestiges of my late lord, and in all the
countryside there is no trace of him but his forlorn and fallen mansion.
At the end of a long avenue, now sown with grain, in the midst of a
close full of cypresses and lilacs, ducks and crowing chanticleers and
droning bees, the old chateau lifts its red chimneys and peaked roofs and
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