The Van Paemel Family

Flanders' countryside in Belgium's early decades didn't belong to the hard-working farmers, like patriarch Van Paemel. He rules his family expecting similar servitude, but cruel fate sees to it that his gentle son Desiré has a terrible, ill-compensated, never trialled life-long crippling rifle-accident, reducing the good, now unproductive boy to dreaming about emigration to America in never-ending pain, at the idle hands of the hunting party hosted by the baron who owns everything, and takes like his ruling class a very dim view at the demands, spearheaded by the young Socialist party, of the less docile new generation, whose protests are put down violently by gendarmes (paramiltary police)...