tried to intervene. But at the very outset he felt
that if he should fail, if his paternal authority should be disregarded,
the disaster would become irreparable. Without renouncing the struggle,
he therefore waited for some opportunity which he might turn to good
account. At the same time, each successive day of discord increased his
anxiety. It was really all his own life-work, the little people which
had sprung from him, the little kingdom which he had founded under the
benevolent sun, that was threatened with sudden ruin. A work such as
this can only live by force of love. The love which created it can alone
perpetuate it; it crumbles as soon as the bond of fraternal solidarity
is broken. Thus it seemed to Mathieu that instead of leaving his work
behind him in full florescence of kindliness, joy, and vigor, he would
see it cast to the ground in fragments, soiled, and dead even before he
were dead himself. Yet what a fruitful and prosperous work had hitherto
been that estate of Chantebled, whose overflowing fertility increased
at each successive harvest; and that mill too, so enlarged and so
flourishing, which was the outcome of his own inspiring suggestions,
to say nothing of the prodigious fortunes which his conquering sons had
acquired in Paris! Yet it was all this admirable work, which faith in
life had created, that a fratricidal onslaught upon life was about to
destroy!

One evening, in the mournful gloaming of one of the last days of
September, the couch on which Marianne lay dying of silent grief was, by
her desire, rolled to the window. Charlotte alone nursed her, and of
all her sons she had but the last one, Benjamin, beside her in the now
over-spacious house which had replaced the old shooting-box. Since the
family had been at war she had kept the doors closed, intent on opening
them only to her children when they became reconciled, if they should
then seek to make her happy by coming to embrace one another beneath her
roof. But she virtually despaired of that sole cure for her grief, the
only joy that would make her live again.

That evening, as Mathieu came to sit beside her, and they lingered there
hand in hand according to their wont, they did not at first speak, but
gazed straight before them at the spreading plain; at the estate, whose
interminable fields blended with the mist far away; at the mill yonder
on the banks of the Yeuse, with its tall, smoking chimney; and at Paris
itself on the horizon,