There was
also Gregoire, at the mill, with a big boy who had received the name of
Robert; and there were also the three last married daughters--Louise,
with a girl two years old; Madeleine, with a boy six months of age; and
Marguerite, who in anticipation of a happy event, had decided to call her
child Stanislas, if it were a boy, and Christine, if it should be a girl.
Thus upon every side the family oak spread out its branches, its trunk
forking and multiplying, and boughs sprouting from boughs at each
successive season. And withal Mathieu was not yet sixty, and Marianne not
yet fifty-seven. Both still possessed flourishing health, and strength,
and gayety, and were ever in delight at seeing the family, which had
sprung from them, thus growing and spreading, invading all the country
around, even like a forest born from a single tree.
But the great and glorious festival of Chantebled at that period was the
birth of Mathieu and Marianne's first great-grandchild--a girl, called
Angeline, daughter of their granddaughter, Berthe. In this little girl,
all pink and white, the ever-regretted Blaise seemed to live again. So
closely did she resemble him that Charlotte, his widow, already a
grandmother in her forty-second year, wept with emotion at the sight of
her.
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