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excavations, tried to explain their manner of operation: the planking laid up the sharp slope, the pole at the top of the embankment, the pulley atop the pole, the horse attached to the rope to help the navvy propel his full barrow up the hillside. Charles-André had witnessed immense loads being raised by this method; he had also seen mud sluicing down wet planks, a panicky horse unable to keep its feet, and a navvy hurling himself aside to avoid being crushed by his own barrow. Only the strongest fellows, the giants of the enterprise, had the fortitude and the audacity to perform such labour.
    ‘Five kilos of beef,’ observed Dr Achille.
    ‘Even so,’ said Mme Julie, reflecting on the considerable dangers of the enterprise, ‘you would think, would you not, that with ingenuity, surely a machine might raise the earth instead?’
    ‘There was one invented, I understand. A moving platform. The navvies judged it a threat to their wages, and destroyed it.’
    ‘I am glad they are not saints,’ rejoined Achille.
    As they strolled back towards the encampment, they heard a language not their own, yet not a foreign tongue either. Two men were repairing a shovel, whose shaft was loose on its blade. The larger fellow giving instruction was an English ganger, and the smaller one, owner of the shovel, a French peasant. Their patois, or lingua franca , was partly English, partly French, and the rest an olla podrida of other languages. Even those words familiar to the listeners, however, were forced into a distorted shape; while grammar was wrenched violently out of its true way. Yet the repairers of the shovel, fluent in this macaronic, understood one another perfectly.
    ‘That is how we shall talk in the future,’ claimed the student with sudden confidence. ‘No more misapprehensions. Nations shall mend their differences as these two fellows are mending their shovel.’
    ‘No more poetry,’ said Mme Julie with a sigh.
    ‘No more wars,’ countered Charles-André.
    ‘Nonsense,’ Dr Achille responded. ‘Merely different poetry, different wars.’

    The curé of Pavilly returned to Chapter XL of the Book of Isaiah. Adèle stared at the priest’s virtuous buttons, but hehad no more to say about the significance of dress. Instead, he began to explain how the trial and condemnation of the polygamists at Ménilmontant for actions prejudicial to the social order had severed one head of the hydra, but how others had grown in its place. That which heretical doctrine had failed to achieve was to be attained instead by engineering. It was known that many members of the disbanded sect were now active as scientists and engineers, spreading like a canker through the body of France. Some of their number had for years proposed the building of a canal at the Isthmus of Suez. Then there was the Jew Pereire, who openly proclaimed the Railway an instrument of civilisation. Blasphemous comparisons had been made with those holy artisans who had constructed the great cathedrals. The curé protested: the truer analogy was with the heathen Pyramid-builders of ancient Egypt. The English engineers and their ungodly navvies came merely to erect the new follies of the modern age, to manifest once more the vanity of Man in his worship of false gods.
    He did not mean that such road building was in itself contrary to the Christian faith. But if the valleys were to be exalted, the mountains and hills to be made low, if the crooked were to be made straight and the rough places plain as had been done with the crossing of the river Cailly near Malaunay and with the proposed viaduct at Barentin, then such deeds must occur, as Isaiah instructed, in order to prepare the way of the Lord, to make a highway in the desert for God. Unless Man’s purpose was guided by the greater purpose of God’s law, then Man remained a brute beast and his greatest labours amounted to no more than the sin of pride.
    In the back row, Adèle dozed. The farmer who kept theland at