Le Morvan Étude de géographie humaine (Morvan Etude of human geography)  

The aspect of hamlets and villages is miserable; we find the dirt and the insalubrity there which make the reputation justified thatched cottages. Streets are narrow and sinuous; their plan is a function of the place of houses: it has never preceded them.

Their maintenance is useless. Ruts are there permanent. The farmer will not give the effort to wheelbarrow some cubic meters of stones to level them, not by indifference, but not to give itself a work which the other one will not certainly carry out. If he risks to break itself the neck every day, it is not irritated to see from time to time his neighbour falling down in front of its door.

Finally the dirt increases by the usage spent in sort of common law to spread in the front houses and in the streets of the still green straw of shuttle or buckwheat or ferns recently cut, which retain stagnant waters and get involved in the garbage to facilitate the decomposition and prepare fertilizers.

Under the room of the inhabitants becomes established a cesspool, a puddle, where from brook of black and fetid water escape until the middle of the public highway. Morvandeau returned from the outside dedicates its savings to build a new house, but it has not yet granted to make the expenses of a better maintained public road network.

He remains foreign to the social life, the man of granites, folded up on himself, sometimes even still in the grip of the ignorance and of the superstition, similar to the Low Breton, « simpleton says Michelet, too Gallic to be French ». Morvan is the country of France where the municipal works are the most rudimentary, where the working costs are the least high.