Keith [on semi hiatus]’s Reviews > The Earth > Status Update

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...