ong windowless walls. This important and well-known establishment
manufactured chiefly agricultural appliances, from the most powerful
machines to those ingenious and delicate implements on which particular
care must be bestowed if perfection is to be attained. In addition to
the hundreds of men who worked there daily, there were some fifty women,
burnishers and polishers.

The entry to the workshops and offices was in the Rue de la Federation,
through a large carriage way, whence one perceived the far-spreading
yard, with its paving stones invariably black and often streaked by
rivulets of steaming water. Dense smoke arose from the high chimneys,
strident jets of steam emerged from the roof, whilst a low rumbling and
a shaking of the ground betokened the activity within, the ceaseless
bustle of labor.

It was thirty-five minutes past eight by the big clock of the central
building when Mathieu crossed the yard towards the office which he
occupied as chief designer. For eight years he had been employed at the
works where, after a brilliant and special course of study, he had made
his beginning as assistant draughtsman when but nineteen years old,
receiving at that time a salary of one hundred francs a month. His
father, Pierre Froment,* had four sons by Marie his wife--Jean the
eldest, then Mathieu, Marc, and Luc--and while leaving them free to
choose a particular career he had striven to give each of them some
manual calling. Leon Beauchene, the founder of the works, had been dead
a year, and his son Alexandre had succeeded him and married Constance
Meunier, daughter of a very wealthy wall-paper manufacturer of the
Marais, at the time when Mathieu entered the establishment, the master
of which was scarcely five years older than himself. It was there
that Mathieu had become acquainted with a poor cousin of Alexandre's,
Marianne, then sixteen years old, whom he had married during the
following year.

* Of _Lourdes_, _Rome_, and _Paris_.

Marianne, when only twelve, had become dependent upon her uncle, Leon
Beauchene. After all sorts of mishaps a brother of the latter, one Felix
Beauchene, a man of adventurous mind but a blunderhead, had gone to
Algeria with his wife and daughter, there to woo fortune afresh; and
the farm he had established was indeed prospering when, during a sudden
revival of Arab brigandage, both he and his wife were murdered and their
home was destroyed. Thus the only place of refuge for the lit