Status Updates From La Terre (Les Rougon-Macqua...

Berthe shared her father's dislike of the Lengaignes; she shrugged her shoulders: Lengaigne didn't care; all he was sorry about was that his daughter hadn't stayed at home to attract more customers to his own shop by sleeping with them. Hadn't one of her uncles, an old man of forty, already had her before she went off to Châteaudun, one day while they were scraping carrots together?

...amidst a riot of men, dozens of them, getting up you in the backrooms of wine-shops.
'Yes, my dear, that's what it's like... I bet they're letting her have it good and proper!'
Françoise was listening to the older girl wide-eyed, quite flabbergasted.

They chatted, talking about Suzanne, Victor's sister, whom the Lengaignes had apprenticed to a dressmaker's in Châteaudun and who had run away after six months to lead a gay life in Chartres. It was said that she had gone off with a lawyer's clerk and all the girls in Rognes were secretly gossiping about it amongst themselves and imagining all the details. A gay life meant orgies of redcurrant syrup and soda-water...

But they were not alone, the whole of Rognes was mowing and tossing the hay in the meadows all around. Delhomme had arrived before daybreak because grass is more tender to cut when it is soaked in dew, whereas it hardens up under the heat of the sun. You could hear it now, tough and crackling under the scythe as he swung it continuously to and fro with his bare arms.

Nobody noticed the rain; a dog was howling dismally; women were bursting into tears, as though at the graveside. Despite their rivalry, Macqueron and Lengaigne were helping each other to illuminate their respective plots, going from one to the other uttering cries of 'Christ Almighty!' as they saw one ruined plant after another in the brief dim glimpse they had before darkness again swallowed it up.

Often he would lose patience when she was in one of her bad moods, when she devoured his seed and then, because of too much or too little water, refused to give a harvest; at such times, he was seized by doubt and he would even accuse himself of being an incompetent, or impotent male; if the land had not brought forth a child, the fault must be his.

...despite his annoyance; he was not at all proud of his conduct in all this.

Every sentence had a double meaning and she reminded them that she was leaving that evening: easy come, easy go, and if this was your last chance, you'd be sorry if you didn't put your finger in the sauce for the last time. The shepherd was eating with a blank look while the farmer said nothing, and did not seem to understand either. In order not to betray himself, Jean was obliged to laugh with the others, ...

...the ewes, the oldest of which were sold each year; and the rams covered the young ewes at regular intervals. They were crossbred Leicesters and merinos, splendid animals, gentle and stupid-looking, with heavy heads and big round noses like violently passionate men.

The sheep-pen occupied the entire rear of the farmyard, one single covered building ninety yards long in which the eight hundred sheep belonging to the farm were kept separated by hurdles: in one part the ewes, in various groups; in another the lambs; in yet a third, the rams. The male lambs were castrated when two months old and reared for sale, whereas the females were kept in order to provide replacements for...

Which one of the five was it? It might as well be this one as that, or perhaps the whole lot, one after another.

...appearing stupid, and tor-mented in his turn by his need for this vicious little creature who was so adept at arousing a man's desires.

If truth be known, there was another reason why he liked the farm. While he was mending the doors, the Cognet girl had come to visit him and opened her legs amongst the shavings on the floor. It was she in fact who led him on, unable to resist the sturdy limbs of such a well-built young man, whose massive regular features gave promise of vigorous sexual prowess. He succumbed and went on succumbing, for fear of...

All the farm-hands tumbled her in the hay: not a single man passed through the farmyard gate without climbing on top of her; and one day, when she had gone down into the cellar with Hourdequin, although he had till then held back, he too tried to have a go at this ugly little slattern; but she offered such furious resistance and scratched and bit so much that he was forced to leave her alone.

...over the centuries, this possession seemingly never to be achieved, explained his love for his own plot, his passion for land, the largest possible amount of land, the rich, heavy lump of soil that you can touch and weigh in your hand. Yet how thankless and indifferent that land was!

...; then the constant, intimate link with the land which makes him love and desire it with a passion such as you might feel for someone else's wife whom you care for and take in your arms but can never possess; that land which, after you have coveted it in such suffering for centuries, you finally obtain by conquest and make your own, the sole joy and light of your life. And this desire which had built up over...

...countryside,' Jean read on, in his quiet, careful voice. 'The hour of victory will soon strike on the clock of history...'

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...

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...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillau...