"Ah! my friend," she continued, "I am more dead than the poor fellow whom they are about to lower into that grave. Come and have a chat with me some day. You are the only person to whom I can tell everything." The coffin was lowered, the ropes gave out a creaking sound, and there came a little thud--the last. Beauchêne, supported by a relative, looked on with dim, vacant eyes. Constance, who had had the bitter courage to come, and had now wept all the tears in her body, almost fainted. She was carried away, driven back to her home, which would now forever be empty, like one of those stricken fields that remain barren, fated to perpetual sterility. Mother earth had taken back her all. And at Chantebled Mathieu and Marianne founded, created, increased, and multiplied, again proving victorious in the eternal battle which life wages against death, thanks to that continual increase, both of offspring and of fertile land, which was like their very existence, their joy and their strength. Desire passed like a gust of flame, desire divine and fruitful, since they possessed the power of love, kindliness, and health. And their energy did the rest--that will of action, that quiet bravery in the presence of the labor that is requisite, the labor that has made and that regulates the world. Still, during those two years it was not without constant battling that victory remained to them. At last it was complete. Piece by piece Séguin had sold the entire estate, of which Mathieu was now king, thanks to his prudent system of conquest, that of increasing his empire by degrees as he gradually felt himself stronger. The fortune which the idler had disdained and dissipated had passed into the hands of the toiler, the creator. There were 1250 acres, spreading from horizon to horizon; there were woods intersected by broad meadows, where flocks and herds pastured; there was fat land overflowing with harvests, in the place of marshes that had been drained; there was other land, each year of increasing fertility, in the place of the moors which the captured springs now irrigated. The Lepailleurs' uncultivated enclosure alone remained, as if to bear witness to the prodigy, the great human effort which had quickened that desert of sand and mud, whose crops would henceforth nourish so many happy people. Mathieu devoured no other man's share; he had brought his share into being, increasing the common wealth, subjugating yet another small portion of this vast world, which is still so scantily peopled and so badly utilized for human happiness. The farm, the homestead, had sprung up and grown in the centre of the estate like a prosperous township, with inhabitants, servants, and live stock, a perfect focus of ardent triumphal life. And what sovereign power was that of the happy fruitfulness which had never wearied of creating, which had yielded all these beings and things that had been increasing and multiplying for twelve years past, that invading town which was but a