"Try to make my fortune! And where shall I try? If I wish to leave my own province, I must get a passport, and that costs forty sous.Here's forty years that I've never had a slut of a forty-sous piece jingling against another in my pocket.If you want to travel you need as many crowns as there are villages, and there are mighty few Fourchons who have enough to get to six of 'em.It is only the draft that gives us a chance to get away.And what good does the army do us? The colonels live by the solider, just as the rich folks live by the peasant; and out of every hundred of 'em you won't find more than one of our breed.
It is just as it is the world over, one rolling in riches, for a hundred down in the mud.Why are we in the mud? Ask God and the usurers.The best we can do is to stay in our own parts, where we are penned like sheep by the force of circumstances, as our fathers were by the rule of the lords.As for me, what do I care what shackles they are that keep me here? let it be the law of public necessity or the tyranny of the old lords, it is all the same; we are condemned to dig the soil forever.There, where we are born, there we dig it, that earth! and spade it, and manure it, and delve in it, for you who are born rich just as we are born poor.The masses will always be what they are, and stay what they are.The number of us who manage to rise is nothing like the number of you who topple down! We know that well enough, if we have no education! You mustn't be after us with your sheriff all the time,--not if you're wise.We let you alone, and you must let us alone.If not, and things get worse, you'll have to feed us in your prisons, where we'd be much better off than in our homes.
You want to remain our masters, and we shall always be enemies, just as we were thirty years ago.You have everything, we have nothing; you can't expect we should ever be friends."