Free The Sugar Islands by Alec Waugh

wrapped round his head, lay without sound or movement. When his father with a kick and a last curse left him, he rose to his feet, shook himself, hobbled over to the fire, and knelt on one knee before it. There was not an inch unbruised upon his body. For days sleep would be an agony to him, but his head was held high, his lips were firm and his eyes bright.
    His father had not denied that he was the Chevalier’s son.
    Never again was he to make any reference to his father. Like a stored heirloom the knowledge of his birth remained shut within his heart. It gave him a sense of superiority over his surroundings and a distaste for them. As boyhood passed his contempt deepened for his home and for the life his parents and their neighbours were content to lead.
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    It was a hard and rugged life. The days of the kindly monarch who had wished for every peasant a fowl in his pot on Sundays were at an end. The era of the Sun King had dawned; Richelieu and Mazarin were preparing the way for Colbert and for Vauban.France and her possessions were to be bled so that Paris might impose her culture on the world. Through every district the flock of inspectors swarmed like bees over a garden, carrying away the honey of their spoils. The peasant bound to the soil, labouring under the caprice of chance, dependent upon favourable or unkindly seasons, upon the sun that ripened and the frost that withered the early grapes and the tender shoots, accepted mutely and uncomplainingly the demands made upon him first by the seigneurs and later by the centralized officialdom of Paris; accepted them as he would accept a succession of bad harvests, adopting the same protective measures. In summer you laid away the stores that would see you through the dark days of winter. You let the good harvest insure you against the bad. When the demands of the inspector grew oppressive you concealed your profits, hiding them in a stocking beneath the bed for the day when taxes would be increased. You were not going to invest your profits in any improvement of your property when these improvements would only be accepted by the intendant as a proof of increased prosperity, and as an excuse for heavier taxation.
    Right through his boyhood Roger listened to talk of tithes and taxes; listened to it contemptuously knowing that for his father and his half-brothers on the hill there were no such taxes, that their lives were free and unfettered of such cares.
    They called him a ne’er-do-well. He was; as resolute a ne’er-do-well as was to be found in a village well-stocked with ruffians. Whenever the chance came his way he would escape down the steep mountain roadway to Marseilles, to linger in the taverns beside the quay as long as his pennies and the charity of the sailors lasted. He was nowhere happier than in those dark little rooms, ranged on either side of the narrow, mounting streets, in which sailors would spend in five hours the labour of five months. With avid interest he would listen to the talk of ships and seamen. It was more romantic than any fairy-tale. To think that the carved and painted poops of the high galleons that rested so quietly now against the quay should have breasted and overcome the hostile seas; that those bags which bare-shouldered labourers were unloading from the holds had come from the lands of sunshine; that it was from Alexandria those spices came; from Cairo those rugs and feathers; that Persia had sent opiumand rhubarb; Constantinople her wool and sheep; Venice her casks of wine; Algiers her leatherwork.
    Seated beside the sailors in those taverns he could not believe that these ordinary-looking men, with their rough clothes, hard faces, and slow voices, had encountered the innumerable perils of the sea: the hurricanes that lashed across the gulf of Lyons, the pirates of the Barbary coast, the hidden rocks of the Grecian Archipelago. As he stood on the quay when the ship sailed, with its volley of cheers and waving flags, he