Whereupon, "he wrote to demand the dismissal of the officers, declaring that unless this was done every person employed in the Excise should be driven into the Rhine or the sea; some of them were dismissed and the director himself came to give him satisfaction." Finding his canton sterile and the settlers on it idle he organized them into groups, women and children, and, in the foulest weather, puts himself at their head, with his twenty severe wounds and neck supported by a piece of silver.

He pays them to work making them clear off the lands, which he gives them on leases of a hundred years, and he makes them enclose a mountain of rocks with high walls and plant it with olive trees.

"No one, under any pretext could be excused from working unless he was ill, and in this case under treatment, or occupied on his own property, a point in which my father could not be deceived, and nobody would have dared to do it." These are the last offshoots of the old, knotty, savage trunk, but still capable of affording shelter.
Others could still be found in remote cantons, in Brittany and in Auvergne, veritable district commanders, and I am sure that in time of need the peasants would obey them as much out of respect as from fear.
Vigor of heart and of body justifies its own ascendancy, while the superabundance of energy, which begins in violence, ends in beneficence.
Less independent and less harsh a paternal government subsists elsewhere, if not in the law at least through custom.

In Brittany, near Treguier and Lannion, says the bailiff of Mirabeau,[1304] "the entire staff of the coast-guard is composed of people of quality and of stock going back a thousand years.

I have not seen one of them get irritated with a peasant-soldier, while, at the same time, I have seen on the part of the latter an air of filial respect for them.