To
increase the embarrassment they grew every year, and cost more money. It
had been necessary to send the three boys to a little school at Janville,
which was as yet but a small expense. But would it not be necessary to
send them the following year to a college, and where was the money for
this to come from? A grave problem, a worry which grew from hour to hour,
and which for Mathieu somewhat spoilt that charming spring whose advent
was flowering the countryside.
The worst was that Mathieu deemed himself immured, as it were, in his
position as designer at the Beauchene works. Even admitting that his
salary should some day be doubled, it was not seven or eight thousand
francs a year which would enable him to realize his dream of a numerous
family freely and proudly growing and spreading like some happy forest,
indebted solely for strength, health, and beauty to the good common
mother of all, the earth, which gave to all its sap. And this was why,
since his return to Janville, the earth, the soil had attracted him,
detained him during his frequent walks, while he revolved vague but
ever-expanding thoughts in his mind. He would pause for long minutes, now
before a field of wheat, now on the verge of a leafy wood, now on the
margin of a river whose waters glistened in the sunshine, and now amid
the nettles of some stony moorland.
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