e square in front of the railway station were
roundabouts, booths, shooting galleries, and refreshment stalls. Stormy
showers during the night had cleansed the sky, which was of a pure blue,
with a flaming sun, whose heat in fact was excessive for the season. A
good many people were already assembled on the square--all the idlers
of the district, bands of children, and peasants of the surrounding
country, eager to see the sights; and into the midst of this crowd fell
the Froments--first the bicyclists, next the wagon, and then the others
who had been met at the entry of the village.

"We are producing our little effect!" exclaimed Rose as she sprang from
her wheel.

This was incontestable. During the earlier years the whole of Janville
had looked harshly on those Froments, those bourgeois who had come
nobody knew whence, and who, with overweening conceit, had talked of
making corn grow in land where there had been nothing but crops of
stones for centuries past. Then the miracle, Mathieu's extraordinary
victory, had long hurt people's vanity and thereby increased their
anger. But everything passes away; one cannot regard success with
rancor, and folks who grow rich always end by being in the right. Thus,
nowadays, Janville smiled complacently on that swarming family which had
grown up beside it, forgetting that in former times each fresh birth
at Chantebled had been regarded as quite scandalous by the gossips.
Besides, how could one resist such a happy display of strength and
power, such a merry invasion, when, as on that festive Sunday, the whole
family came up at a gallop, conquering the roads, the streets, and the
squares? What with the father and mother, the eleven children--six boys
and five girls--and two grandchildren already, there were fifteen of
them. The eldest boys, the twins, were now four-and twenty, and still
so much alike that people occasionally mistook one for the other as in
their cradle days, when Marianne had been obliged to open their eyes
to identify them, those of Blaise being gray, and those of Denis black.
Nicolas, the youngest boy, at the other end of the family scale, was as
yet but five years old; a delightful little urchin was he, a precocious
little man whose energy and courage were quite amusing. And between the
twins and that youngster came the eight other children: Ambroise, the
future husband, who was already on the road to every conquest; Rose, so
brimful of life; who likewise was on