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Updated: June 25, 2025
And it was indeed this which had taken place. At noon the Froments already learnt that Lepailleur was creating a terrible scandal about the flight of Therese. He had immediately gone to the gendarmes to shout the story to them, and demand that they should bring the guilty hussy back, chained to her accomplice, and both of them with gyves about their wrists.
Lepailleur regarded the creation of Chantebled as a personal insult, for he had not forgotten his jeers and challenges with respect to those moorlands, from which, in his opinion, one would never reap anything but stones.
Briefly, it was all a premeditated disaster brought about by some evil power which had a spite against the peasantry, who were foolish to give their sweat and their blood to such a thankless creature. "Madame Lepailleur brought her boy with her, a little fellow three years old, called Antonin," resumed Marianne, "and we fell to talking of children together. She quite surprised me.
At home, when the doors were closed, Lepailleur revenged himself on his wife, picking the most frightful quarrels with her since he had discovered her frequent remittances of money to their son. But she held her own against him, for even as she had formerly admired him, so at present she admired her boy.
It seems that they fight one another there now." This was a fact. When that young scamp Antonin had recovered his health, he had been tormented by a longing to return to Paris, and had done all he could with that object, in view of resuming a life of idleness and dissipation. Lepailleur, greatly irritated at having been duped by his son, had at first violently opposed his plans.
With her, moreover, one day was like another; each morning she set herself to live the same life afresh, with never-failing happiness. "To-day, though, we had a visit," said she; "Madame Lepailleur, the woman from the mill over yonder, came to tell me that she had some fine chickens for sale.
If the antiquated and badly repaired mechanism of the mill had been replaced by modern appliances, and if the land, instead of being impoverished by adherence to old-fashioned practices, had fallen into the hands of an intelligent man who believed in progress, there would no doubt have been a fortune in it all. But Lepailleur was not only disgusted with work, he treated the soil with contempt.
On a score of occasions he had almost broken off all relations with his father-in-law, Lepailleur, who certainly abused his seventy years. Though the old miller, in spite of all his prophecies of ruin, had been unable to prevent the building of the new establishment, he none the less sneered and jeered at it, exasperated as he was at having been in the wrong.
And if, on the one hand, Lepailleur consented to the marriage in a churlish, distrustful manner like one who deemed himself robbed, and was simply influenced by the egotistical dread of some day finding himself quite alone again in his gloomy house Mathieu and Marianne, on the other side, were delighted with an arrangement which put an end to an equivocal situation that had caused them the greatest suffering, grieved as they were by the rebellion of one of their children.
He knew that, ever since his property had been increasing, Lepailleur had regarded him with the greatest jealousy and hatred, and he did not think it advisable to apply to him personally, certain as he felt that he would fail in his endeavor. Seguin, however, pretended that if he took up the matter he would know how to bring the miller to reason, and even secure the enclosure for next to nothing.
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