"Money cannot buy the things that Frenchmen love. We are not a race of hucksters," says the Seigneur.Fournel is delighted to see the Seigneur's fingers twitch with fury. "But since you can't buy the things you love, how do you get them? When a spider makes love to his lady, he dances before her to infatuate her, and then snatches her! Is yours the way of the spider?"With a snarl, Louis Racine springs forward and strikes Fournel in the face, then snatches two antique swords from the wall. Throwing one on the floor before the Englishman, he runs to the door, locks it, and swings around, the sword firmly in his hand and his face white with rage!In tales such as "Parpon the Dwarf" and "Times Were Hard in Pontiac," we see French Canada through the eyes of Gilbert Parker, who called it a land "without poverty and yet without riches; too well educated to have a peasantry, and too poor to have an aristocracy."