Since Mathieu’s victory, since the whole of the estate of Chantebled had been conquered and fertilized, Lepailleur had shown some respect for his bourgeois rival.  Nevertheless, although he could not deny the results hitherto obtained, he did not altogether surrender, but continued sneering, as if he expected that some rending of heaven or earth would take place to prove him in the right.  He would not confess that he had made a mistake; he repeated that he knew the truth, and that folks would some day see plainly enough that a peasant’s calling was the very worst calling there could be, since the dirty land had gone bankrupt and would yield nothing more.  Besides, he held his revenge—­that enclosure which he left barren, uncultivated, by way of protest against the adjoining estate which it intersected.  The thought of this made him ironical.

“Well,” he resumed in his ridiculously vain, scoffing way, “we are going to Paris too.  Yes, we are going to install this young gentleman there.”

He pointed as he spoke to his son Antonin, now a tall, carroty fellow of eighteen, with an elongated head.  A few light-colored bristles were already sprouting on his chin and cheeks, and he wore town attire, with a silk hat and gloves, and a bright blue necktie.  After astonishing Janville by his success at school, he had displayed so much repugnance to manual work that his father had decided to make “a Parisian” of him.

“So it is decided; you have quite made up your mind?” asked Mathieu in a friendly way.

“Why, yes; why should I force him to toil and moil without the least hope of ever enriching himself?  Neither my father nor I ever managed to put a copper by with that wretched old mill of ours.  Why, the mill-stones wear away with rot more than with grinding corn.  And the wretched fields, too, yield far more pebbles than crowns.  And so, as he’s now a scholar, he may as well try his fortune in Paris.  There’s nothing like city life to sharpen a man’s wits.”

Madame Lepailleur, who never took her eyes from her son, but remained in admiration before him as formerly before her husband, now exclaimed with an air of rapture:  “Yes, yes, he has a place as a clerk with Maitre Rousselet, the attorney.  We have rented a little room for him; I have seen about the furniture and the linen, and to-day’s the great day; he will sleep there to-night, after we have dined, all three, at a good restaurant.  Ah! yes, I’m very pleased; he’s making a start now.”

“And he will perhaps end by being a minister of state,” said Mathieu, with a smile; “who knows?  Everything is possible nowadays.”

It all typified the exodus from the country districts towards the towns, the feverish impatience to make a fortune, which was becoming general.  Even the parents nowadays celebrated their child’s departure, and accompanied the adventurer on his way, anxious and proud to climb the social ladder with him.  And that which brought a smile to the lips of the farmer of Chantebled, the bourgeois who had become a peasant, was the thought of the double change:  the miller’s son going to Paris, whereas he had gone to the earth, the mother of all strength and regeneration.