Mathieu naturally tried to intervene.  But at the very outset he felt that if he should fail, if his paternal authority should be disregarded, the disaster would become irreparable.  Without renouncing the struggle, he therefore waited for some opportunity which he might turn to good account.  At the same time, each successive day of discord increased his anxiety.  It was really all his own life-work, the little people which had sprung from him, the little kingdom which he had founded under the benevolent sun, that was threatened with sudden ruin.  A work such as this can only live by force of love.  The love which created it can alone perpetuate it; it crumbles as soon as the bond of fraternal solidarity is broken.  Thus it seemed to Mathieu that instead of leaving his work behind him in full florescence of kindliness, joy, and vigor, he would see it cast to the ground in fragments, soiled, and dead even before he were dead himself.  Yet what a fruitful and prosperous work had hitherto been that estate of Chantebled, whose overflowing fertility increased at each successive harvest; and that mill too, so enlarged and so flourishing, which was the outcome of his own inspiring suggestions, to say nothing of the prodigious fortunes which his conquering sons had acquired in Paris!  Yet it was all this admirable work, which faith in life had created, that a fratricidal onslaught upon life was about to destroy!

One evening, in the mournful gloaming of one of the last days of September, the couch on which Marianne lay dying of silent grief was, by her desire, rolled to the window.  Charlotte alone nursed her, and of all her sons she had but the last one, Benjamin, beside her in the now over-spacious house which had replaced the old shooting-box.  Since the family had been at war she had kept the doors closed, intent on opening them only to her children when they became reconciled, if they should then seek to make her happy by coming to embrace one another beneath her roof.  But she virtually despaired of that sole cure for her grief, the only joy that would make her live again.

That evening, as Mathieu came to sit beside her, and they lingered there hand in hand according to their wont, they did not at first speak, but gazed straight before them at the spreading plain; at the estate, whose interminable fields blended with the mist far away; at the mill yonder on the banks of the Yeuse, with its tall, smoking chimney; and at Paris itself on the horizon, where a tawny cloud was rising as from the huge furnace of some forge.

The minutes slowly passed away.  During the afternoon Mathieu had taken a long walk in the direction of the farms of Mareuil and Lillebonne, in the hope of quieting his torment by physical fatigue.  And in a low voice, as if speaking to himself, he at last said: 

“The ploughing could not take place under better conditions.  Yonder on the plateau the quality of the soil has been much improved by the recent methods of cultivation; and here, too, on the slopes, the sandy soil has been greatly enriched by the new distribution of the springs which Gervais devised.  The estate has almost doubled in value since it has been in his hands and Claire’s.  There is no break in the prosperity; labor yields unlimited victory.”