Page:French life in town and country (1917).djvu/267

 of the Egyptian plagues, as they floated above the national disaster of "'70."

The hero of M. René Bazin's most charming novel La Terre qui Meurt, is a métayer; and métayage is land worked on the half-profit system, a midway position between labourer and free-*holder. The sermon preached by this mournful little story is that the French land is dying for want of cultivation, as the peasants are swarming into the big towns, where they are not wanted, and leaving to waste the land that needs them. Each name in France is selected with a regard for the dignity of mankind. The cook and the barber call themselves "artists," and thereby efface any menial touch from their calling. The retired servant calls himself a rentier, and the retired labourer decks himself in the gentlemanly title of cultivateur. You may be a cultivateur with "lands and proud dwellings," like the earl in the song, or you may modestly cultivate a single acre.

With such a fine name in prospect, I wonder any peasant lad is lured from the country to the big, unsatisfactory towns, as M. Bazin laments in his tale of the métayer and his sons. In the métairie system the partnership between landlord and métayer is worked in this wise. The landlord supplies stock, land, and implements; the métayer brings the labour, and the profits are equally divided. The métayer boards his labour