Old Mother Tonsard's screams brought a number of people from Blangy to
know what was happening at the Grand-I-Vert, the distance from the
village to the inn not being greater than that from the inn to the
gate of Blangy. One of these inquiring visitors was old Niseron, La
Pechina's grandfather, who was on his way, after ringing the second
Angelus, to dig the vine-rows in his last little bit of ground.

Bent by toil, with pallid face and silvery hair, the old vinedresser,
now the sole representative of civic virtue in the community, had
been, during the Revolution, president of the Jacobin club at
Ville-aux-Fayes, and a juror in the revolutionary tribunal of the
district. Jean-Francois Niseron, carved out of the wood that the
apostles were made of, was of the type of Saint Peter; whom painters
and sculptors have united in representing with the square brow of the
people, the thick, naturally curling hair of the laborer, the muscles
of the man of toil, the complexion of a fisherman; with the large nose,
the shrewd, half-mocking lips that scoff at fate, the neck and
shoulders of the strong man who cuts his wood to cook his dinner while
the doctrinaires of his opinions talk.

Such, at forty years of age on the breaking out of the Revolution, was
this man, strong as iron, pure as gold. Advocate of the people, he
believed in a republic through the very roll of that name, more
formidable in sound perhaps than in reality. He believed in the
republic of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in the brotherhood of man, in the
exchange of noble sentiments, in the proclamation of virtue, in the
choice of merit without intrigue,--in short, in all that the narrow
limits of one arrondissement like Sparta made possible, and which the
vast proportions of an empire make chimerical. He signed his beliefs