he terrible catastrophe. So she and her
husband, after distributing the day's work among the servants, set
out for Janville station, which they reached just in time to catch the
quarter-past ten o'clock train. It was already rolling on again when
they recognized the Lepailleurs and their son Antonin in the very
compartment where they were seated.

Seeing the Froments thus together in full dress, the miller imagined
that they were going to a wedding, and when he learnt that they had
a visit of condolence to make, he exclaimed: "Oh! so it's just
the contrary. But no matter, it's an outing, a little diversion
nevertheless."

Since Mathieu's victory, since the whole of the estate of Chantebled had
been conquered and fertilized, Lepailleur had shown some respect for his
bourgeois rival. Nevertheless, although he could not deny the results
hitherto obtained, he did not altogether surrender, but continued
sneering, as if he expected that some rending of heaven or earth would
take place to prove him in the right. He would not confess that he had
made a mistake; he repeated that he knew the truth, and that folks would
some day see plainly enough that a peasant's calling was the very worst
calling there could be, since the dirty land had gone bankrupt and would
yield nothing more. Besides, he held his revenge--that enclosure which
he left barren, uncultivated, by way of protest against the adjoining
estate which it intersected. The thought of this made him ironical.

"Well," he resumed in his ridiculously vain, scoffing way, "we are going
to Paris too. Yes, we are going to install this young gentleman there."

He pointed as he spoke to his son Antonin, now a tall, carroty fellow
of eighteen, with an elongated head. A few light-colored bristles were
already sprouting on his chin and cheeks, and he wore town attire, with
a silk hat and gloves, and a bright blue necktie. After astonishing
Janville by his success at school, he had displayed so much repugnance
to manual work that his father had decided to make "a Parisian" of him.

"So it is decided; you have quite made up your mind?" asked Mathieu in a
friendly way.

"Why, yes; why should I force him to toil and moil without the least
hope of ever enriching himself? Neither my father nor I ever managed
to put a copper by with that wretched old mill of ours. Why, the
mill-stones wear away with rot more than with grinding corn. And the
wretched fields, too, yield far more pebbles