Do rich folks ever give us anything?
Are one hundred days' work nothing?
It has cost me three hundred francs, and the land is all stones." But that speech never got beyond the regions of his own class.
Tonsard built his house himself, picking up the materials here and there as he could,--getting a day's work out of this one and that one, gleaning in the rubbish that was thrown away, often asking for things and always obtaining them.

A discarded door cut in two for convenience in carrying away became the door of the stable; the window was the sash of a green-house.

In short, the rubbish of the chateau, served to build the fatal cottage.
Saved from the draft by Gaubertin, the steward of Les Aigues, whose father was prosecuting-attorney of the department, and who, moreover, could refuse nothing to Mademoiselle Cochet, Tonsard married as soon as his house was finished and his vines had begun to bear.

A well-grown fellow of twenty-three, in everybody's good graces at Les Aigues, on whom Mademoiselle had bestowed an acre of her land, and who appeared to be a good worker, he had the art to ring the praises of his negative merits, and so obtained the daughter of a farmer on the Ronquerolles estate, which lies beyond the forest of Les Aigues.
This farmer held the lease of half a farm, which was going to ruin in his hands for want of a helpmate.

A widower, and inconsolable for the loss of his wife, he tried to drown his troubles, like the English, in wine, and then, when he had put the poor deceased out of his mind, he found himself married, so the village maliciously declared, to a woman named Boisson.