was like their very existence,
their joy and their strength. Desire passed like a gust of flame, desire
divine and fruitful, since they possessed the power of love, kindliness,
and health. And their energy did the rest--that will of action, that
quiet bravery in the presence of the labor that is requisite, the labor
that has made and that regulates the world.

Still, during those two years it was not without constant battling that
victory remained to them. At last it was complete. Piece by piece Seguin
had sold the entire estate, of which Mathieu was now king, thanks to his
prudent system of conquest, that of increasing his empire by degrees
as he gradually felt himself stronger. The fortune which the idler had
disdained and dissipated had passed into the hands of the toiler, the
creator. There were 1250 acres, spreading from horizon to horizon;
there were woods intersected by broad meadows, where flocks and herds
pastured; there was fat land overflowing with harvests, in the place
of marshes that had been drained; there was other land, each year of
increasing fertility, in the place of the moors which the captured
springs now irrigated. The Lepailleurs' uncultivated enclosure alone
remained, as if to bear witness to the prodigy, the great human effort
which had quickened that desert of sand and mud, whose crops would
henceforth nourish so many happy people. Mathieu devoured no other
man's share; he had brought his share into being, increasing the common
wealth, subjugating yet another small portion of this vast world, which
is still so scantily peopled and so badly utilized for human happiness.
The farm, the homestead, had sprung up and grown in the centre of the
estate like a prosperous township, with inhabitants, servants, and live
stock, a perfect focus of ardent triumphal life. And what sovereign
power was that of the happy fruitfulness which had never wearied of
creating, which had yielded all these beings and things that had been
increasing and multiplying for twelve years past, that invading town
which was but a family's expansion, those trees, those plants, those
grain crops, those fruits whose nourishing stream ever rose under the
dazzling sun! All pain and all tears were forgotten in that joy of
creation, the accomplishment of due labor, the conquest of the future
conducting to the infinite of Action.

Then, while Mathieu completed his work of conquest, Marianne during
those two years had the happiness of se