h time a little mouth opened and cried its hunger
aloud. Otherwise he would be guilty of criminal improvidence. And such
reflections as these came upon him the more strongly as his penury had
increased since the birth of Gervais--to such a point, indeed, that
Marianne, despite prodigies of economy, no longer knew how to make her
money last her till the end of the month. The slightest expenditure had
to be debated; the very butter had to be spread thinly on the children's
bread; and they had to continue wearing their blouses till they were
well-nigh threadbare. To increase the embarrassment they grew every
year, and cost more money. It had been necessary to send the three boys
to a little school at Janville, which was as yet but a small expense.
But would it not be necessary to send them the following year to a
college, and where was the money for this to come from? A grave problem,
a worry which grew from hour to hour, and which for Mathieu somewhat
spoilt that charming spring whose advent was flowering the countryside.

The worst was that Mathieu deemed himself immured, as it were, in his
position as designer at the Beauchene works. Even admitting that his
salary should some day be doubled, it was not seven or eight thousand
francs a year which would enable him to realize his dream of a numerous
family freely and proudly growing and spreading like some happy forest,
indebted solely for strength, health, and beauty to the good common
mother of all, the earth, which gave to all its sap. And this was why,
since his return to Janville, the earth, the soil had attracted him,
detained him during his frequent walks, while he revolved vague but
ever-expanding thoughts in his mind. He would pause for long minutes,
now before a field of wheat, now on the verge of a leafy wood, now on
the margin of a river whose waters glistened in the sunshine, and now
amid the nettles of some stony moorland. All sorts of vague plans
then rose within him, uncertain reveries of such vast scope, such
singularity, that he had as yet spoken of them to nobody, not even his
wife. Others would doubtless have mocked at him, for he had as yet but
reached that dim, quivering hour when inventors feel the gust of their
discovery sweep over them, before the idea that they are revolving
presents itself with full precision to their minds. Yet why did he not
address himself to the soil, man's everlasting provider and nurse? Why
did he not clear and fertilize tho