t
Herbette, and then Benjamin alone. The other married folks afterwards
installed themselves according to the generation they belonged to; and
then, as had been decided, youth and childhood, the whole troop of
young people and little ones took seats as they pleased amid no little
turbulence.

What a moment of sovereign glory it was for Mathieu and Marianne! They
found themselves there in a triumph of which they would never have dared
to dream. Life, as if to reward them for having shown faith in her,
for having increased her sway with all bravery, seemed to have taken
pleasure in prolonging their existences beyond the usual limits so that
their eyes might behold the marvellous blossoming of their work. The
whole of their dear Chantebled, everything good and beautiful that they
had there begotten and established, participated in the festival. From
the cultivated fields that they had set in the place of marshes came the
broad quiver of great coming harvests; from the pasture lands amid the
distant woods came the warm breath of cattle and innumerable flocks
which ever increased the ark of life; and they heard, too, the loud
babble of the captured springs with which they had fertilized the now
fruitful moorlands, the flow of that water which is like the very blood
of our mother earth. The social task was accomplished, bread was won,
subsistence had been created, drawn from the nothingness of barren soil.

And on what a lovely and well-loved spot did their happy, grateful race
offer them that festival! Those elms and hornbeams, which made the lawn
a great hall of greenery, had been planted by themselves; they had seen
them growing day by day like the most peaceable and most sturdy of their
children. And in particular that oak, now so gigantic, thanks to the
clear waters of the adjoining basin through which one of the sources
ever streamed, was their own big son, one that dated from the day when
they had founded Chantebled, he, Mathieu, digging the hole and she,
Marianne, holding the sapling erect. And now, as that tree stood there,
shading them with its expanse of verdure, was it not like some royal
symbol of the whole family? Like that oak the family had grown and
multiplied, ever throwing out fresh branches which spread far over
the ground; and like that oak it now formed by itself a perfect forest
sprung from a single trunk, vivified by the same sap, strong in the same
health, and full of song, and breeziness, and sunlig