George Sand, A Winter in Majorca (1838-39)

Not knowing how to fatten cattle, nor utilise wool, nor milk the cows, for he detests milk and butter as much as he hates work—not knowing how to produce enough wheat to bother about eating it, nor grow mulberry trees for the cultivation of the silk-worm—since he has lost the art of carpentry, once flourishing in the island and now completely forgotten —seeing that he has no horses, because Spain in maternal fashion requisitions all the foals in Majorca for use in her army, for which reason the islanders don’t care to appear so silly as to work just to maintain the country[s cavalry—and as he does not consider it necessary to pave a single highway nor a practicable track in the whole of the island, as long as the right of export is surrendered to the whim of a government that has no time to attend to such trifles—the Majorcan then was vegetating, without anything to do other than tell his beads and mend his breeches, more worn out than Don Quixote’s, his patron saint in misery and arrogance, until the pig came along to save everything. When the export of this animal was sanctioned, a new era began, the era of salvation. (A Winter in Majorca, 1838-39 [Un hiver à Majorque] , trans. Lieut. Col. Kirkbride, 3rd edn. Gracia (Barcelona: EMEGE 1983) [copyright Luis Ripoll Arbós, Ed. 1980]. Chap. III; opening, p.41.)