Originally published in French in 1904, this first English translation was published in 1919. Emile Guillaumin, under the guise of fiction, wrote this story of "Tiennon," a French peasant. A peasant himself, Guillaumin was unique in that, after a few years of schooling, he continued to work his small farm in central France to the end of his life, reserving nights for study and writing. Guillaumin felt that the French peasant had been misrepresented in contemporary literature - either romanticized as in George Sand or depicted as a dumb victim of the forces of nature as in Zola - and wanted to correct the picture. The result is this moving first-person story that can be read as a very interesting and entertaining fictionalized but true-to-life account, as well as the best kind of material for historians seeking to understand how nineteenth-century French peasants really lived.