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Updated: June 12, 2025
So she and her husband, after distributing the day's work among the servants, set out for Janville station, which they reached just in time to catch the quarter-past ten o'clock train. It was already rolling on again when they recognized the Lepailleurs and their son Antonin in the very compartment where they were seated.
In the yard of the picturesque old building, half covered with ivy, with its mossy wheel slumbering amid water-lilies, they found the Lepailleurs, the man tall, dry, and carroty, the woman as carroty and as dry as himself, but both of them young and hardy. Their child Antonin was sitting on the ground, digging a hole with his little hands. "Eggs?"
Antonin, however, had also begun to laugh with the air of an artful idler who was more particularly attracted by the free dissipation of Paris life. "Oh! minister?" said he, "I haven't much taste for that. I would much sooner win a million at once so as to rest afterwards." Delighted with this display of wit, the Lepailleurs burst into noisy merriment.
The 1250 acres of uncultivated soil which Seguin's father, the old army contractor, had formerly purchased in view of erecting a palatial residence there were now, thanks to unremitting effort, becoming fruitful from end to end. The enclosure belonging to the Lepailleurs, who stubbornly refused to sell it, alone set a strip of dry, stony, desolate land amid the broad green plain.
He had placed his trust in the future, and now the whole harvest was garnered. The Beauchene factory was his through his son Denis; the Seguins' mansion was his through his son Ambroise; the Lepailleurs' mill was his through his son Gregoire. Tragical, even excessive punishment, had blown those sorry Moranges away in a tempest of blood and insanity.
The horse then stopped, and the man in a jeering voice called out: "So this, then, is your work, Monsieur Froment?" Mathieu and Marianne thereupon recognized the Lepailleurs, the people of the mill. They were well aware that folks laughed at Janville over the folly of their attempt that mad idea of growing wheat among the marshes of the plateau.
"I really cannot understand the idle life which you lead here, while all the rest of us are hard at work. I shall wait till October since you have positively promised me that you will then come to a decision and choose the calling which you most fancy. But what is all this tittle-tattle which I hear about appointments which you keep with the daughter of the Lepailleurs?
And as the evening was fine, it occurred to Marianne to go as far as the Lepailleurs' mill down the river, and buy some new-laid eggs there. "I'm willing," said Mathieu. "I'm very fond of their romantic old mill, you know; though if it were mine I should pull it down and build another one with proper appliances."
As we owe her twelve francs for eggs and milk, I believe that she simply called to see if I meant to pay her. I told her that I would go to her place to-morrow." While speaking Marianne had pointed through the gloom towards a big black pile, a little way down the Yeuse. It was an old water-mill which was still worked, and the Lepailleurs had now been installed in it for three generations.
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