lofty chimneys,
which were ever smoking. True, his son had enlarged this city of toil;
the stretch of ground bordered by the Rue de la Federation and the
Boulevard de Grenelle had been utilized for the erection of other
buildings. And facing the quay there still stood the large brick house
with dressings of white stone, of which Constance had been so proud,
and where, with the mien of some queen of industry, she had received her
friends in her little salon hung with yellow silk. Eight hundred men now
worked in the place; the ground quivered with the ceaseless trepidation
of machinery; the establishment had grown to be the most important
of its kind in Paris, the one whence came the finest agricultural
appliances, the most powerful mechanical workers of the soil. And it
was his, Mathieu's, son whom fortune had made prince of that branch of
industry, and it was his daughter-in-law who, with her three strong,
healthy children near her, received her friends in the little salon hung
with yellow silk.

As Mathieu, moved by his recollections, glanced towards the right,
towards the pavilion where he had dwelt with Marianne, and where Gervais
had been born, an old workman who passed, lifted his cap to him, saying,
"Good day, Monsieur Froment."

Mathieu thereupon recognized Victor Moineaud, now five-and-fifty years
old, and aged, and wrecked by labor to even a greater degree than his
father had been at the time when mother Moineaud had come to offer the
Monster her children's immature flesh. Entering the works at sixteen
years of age, Victor, like his father, had spent forty years between
the forge and the anvil. It was iniquitous destiny beginning afresh:
the most crushing toil falling upon a beast of burden, the son hebetated
after the father, ground to death under the millstones of wretchedness
and injustice.

"Good day, Victor," said Mathieu, "are you well?"

"Oh, I'm no longer young, Monsieur Froment," the other replied. "I shall
soon have to look somewhere for a hole to lie in. Still, I hope it won't
be under an omnibus."

He alluded to the death of his father, who had finally been picked up
under an omnibus in the Rue de Grenelle, with his skull split and both
legs broken.

"But after all," resumed Victor, "one may as well die that way as any
other! It's even quicker. The old man was lucky in having Norine and
Cecile to look after him. If it hadn't been for them, it's starvation
that would have killed him, not an