Meantime the blows of the pickaxes rang out, the trench rapidly made its way through the fat, moist soil, and soon the water would flow into the parched veins of the neighboring sandy tracts to endow them with fruitfulness.  And the light trickling of the mother’s milk also continued with the faint murmur of an inexhaustible source, flowing from her breast into the mouth of her babe, like a fountain of eternal life.  It ever and ever flowed, it created flesh, intelligence, and labor, and strength.  And soon its whispering would mingle with the babble of the delivered spring as it descended along the trenches to the dry hot lands.  And at last there would be but one and the same stream, one and the same river, gradually overflowing and carrying life to all the earth, a mighty river of nourishing milk flowing through the world’s veins, creating without a pause, and producing yet more youth and more health at each return of springtide.

Four months later, when Mathieu and his men had finished the autumn ploughing, there came the sowing on the same spot.  Marianne was there again, and it was such a very mild gray day that she was still able to sit down, and once more gayly give the breast to little Gervais.  He was already eight months old and had become quite a personage.  He grew a little more every day, always in his mother’s arms, on that warm breast whence he sucked life.  He was like the seed which clings to the seed-pod so long as it is not ripe.  And at that first quiver of November, that approach of winter through which the germs would slumber in the furrows, he pressed his chilly little face close to his mother’s warm bosom, and nursed on in silence as if the river of life were lost, buried deep beneath the soil.

“Ah!” said Marianne, laughing, “you are not warm, young gentleman, are you?  It is time for you to take up your winter quarters.”

Just then Mathieu, with his sower’s bag at his waist, was returning towards them, scattering the seed with broad rhythmical gestures.  He had heard his wife, and he paused to say to her:  “Let him nurse and sleep till the sun comes back.  He will be a man by harvest time.”  And, pointing to the great field which he was sowing with his assistants, he added:  “All this will grow and ripen when our Gervais has begun to walk and talk—­just look, see our conquest!”

He was proud of it.  From ten to fifteen acres of the plateau were now rid of the stagnant pools, cleared and levelled; and they spread out in a brown expanse, rich with humus, while the water-furrows which intersected them carried the streams to the neighboring slopes.  Before cultivating those dry lands one must yet wait until the moisture should have penetrated and fertilized them.  That would be the work of the future, and thus, by degrees, life would be diffused through the whole estate.

“Evening is coming on,” resumed Mathieu, “I must make haste.”