"We are producing our little effect!" exclaimed Rose as she sprang from
her wheel.
This was incontestable. During the earlier years the whole of Janville
had looked harshly on those Froments, those bourgeois who had come nobody
knew whence, and who, with overweening conceit, had talked of making corn
grow in land where there had been nothing but crops of stones for
centuries past. Then the miracle, Mathieu's extraordinary victory, had
long hurt people's vanity and thereby increased their anger. But
everything passes away; one cannot regard success with rancor, and folks
who grow rich always end by being in the right. Thus, nowadays, Janville
smiled complacently on that swarming family which had grown up beside it,
forgetting that in former times each fresh birth at Chantebled had been
regarded as quite scandalous by the gossips. Besides, how could one
resist such a happy display of strength and power, such a merry invasion,
when, as on that festive Sunday, the whole family came up at a gallop,
conquering the roads, the streets, and the squares? What with the father
and mother, the eleven children--six boys and five girls--and two
grandchildren already, there were fifteen of them.
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