“Never more!” cried Mathieu in tears.

And Marianne repeated in a great sob which rose from the very depths of her being:  “Never more!  Never more!”

There was now no longer any mere question of increasing a family, of building up the country afresh, of re-peopling France for the struggles of the future, the question was one of the expansion of humanity, of the reclaiming of deserts, of the peopling of the entire earth.  After one’s country came the earth; after one’s family, one’s nation, and then mankind.  And what an invading flight, what a sudden outlook upon the world’s immensity!  All the freshness of the oceans, all the perfumes of virgin continents, blended in a mighty gust like a breeze from the offing.  Scarcely fifteen hundred million souls are to-day scattered through the few cultivated patches of the globe, and is that not indeed paltry, when the globe, ploughed from end to end, might nourish ten times that number?  What narrowness of mind there is in seeking to limit mankind to its present figure, in admitting simply the continuance of exchanges among nations, and of capitals dying where they stand—­as Babylon, Nineveh, and Memphis died—­while other queens of the earth arise, inherit, and flourish amid fresh forms of civilization, and this without population ever more increasing!  Such a theory is deadly, for nothing remains stationary:  whatever ceases to increase decreases and disappears.  Life is the rising tide whose waves daily continue the work of creation, and perfect the work of awaited happiness, which shall come when the times are accomplished.  The flux and reflux of nations are but periods of the forward march:  the great centuries of light, which dark ages at times replace, simply mark the phases of that march.  Another step forward is ever taken, a little more of the earth is conquered, a little more life is brought into play.  The law seems to lie in a double phenomenon; fruitfulness creating civilization, and civilization restraining fruitfulness.  And equilibrium will come from it all on the day when the earth, being entirely inhabited, cleared, and utilized, shall at last have accomplished its destiny.  And the divine dream, the generous utopian thought soars into the heavens; families blended into nations, nations blended into mankind, one sole brotherly people making of the world one sole city of peace and truth and justice!  Ah! may eternal fruitfulness ever expand, may the seed of humanity be carried over the frontiers, peopling the untilled deserts afar, and increasing mankind through the coming centuries until dawns the reign of sovereign life, mistress at last both of time and of space!