Thereupon he listened to the plain and detailed statement which Mathieu felt obliged to make to him.  And he was deeply moved by it, as if the dread of the catastrophe which it foreshadowed would henceforth upset his life.  “What!” he angrily exclaimed, “my brothers are up to these fine pranks with their idiotic quarrel!  I knew that they did not get on well together.  I had heard of things which saddened me, but I never imagined that matters had gone so far, and that you and mamma were so affected that you had shut yourselves up and were dying of it all!  But things must be set to rights!  One must see Ambroise at once.  Let us go and lunch with him, and finish the whole business.”

Before starting he had a few orders to give, so Mathieu went down to wait for him in the factory yard.  And there, during the ten minutes which he spent walking about dreamily, all the distant past arose before his eyes.  He could see himself a mere clerk, crossing that courtyard every morning on his arrival from Janville, with thirty sous for his lunch in his pocket.  The spot had remained much the same; there was the central building, with its big clock, the workshops and the sheds, quite a little town of gray structures, surmounted by two lofty chimneys, which were ever smoking.  True, his son had enlarged this city of toil; the stretch of ground bordered by the Rue de la Federation and the Boulevard de Grenelle had been utilized for the erection of other buildings.  And facing the quay there still stood the large brick house with dressings of white stone, of which Constance had been so proud, and where, with the mien of some queen of industry, she had received her friends in her little salon hung with yellow silk.  Eight hundred men now worked in the place; the ground quivered with the ceaseless trepidation of machinery; the establishment had grown to be the most important of its kind in Paris, the one whence came the finest agricultural appliances, the most powerful mechanical workers of the soil.  And it was his, Mathieu’s, son whom fortune had made prince of that branch of industry, and it was his daughter-in-law who, with her three strong, healthy children near her, received her friends in the little salon hung with yellow silk.

As Mathieu, moved by his recollections, glanced towards the right, towards the pavilion where he had dwelt with Marianne, and where Gervais had been born, an old workman who passed, lifted his cap to him, saying, “Good day, Monsieur Froment.”

Mathieu thereupon recognized Victor Moineaud, now five-and-fifty years old, and aged, and wrecked by labor to even a greater degree than his father had been at the time when mother Moineaud had come to offer the Monster her children’s immature flesh.  Entering the works at sixteen years of age, Victor, like his father, had spent forty years between the forge and the anvil.  It was iniquitous destiny beginning afresh:  the most crushing toil falling upon a beast of burden, the son hebetated after the father, ground to death under the millstones of wretchedness and injustice.