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Eugenie Grandet

by Honoré de Balzac · English · Gutenberg #1715 · 395,179 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Eugenie Grandet

Author: Honoré de Balzac

Translator: Katharine Prescott Wormeley


        
Release date: September 18, 2004 [eBook #1715]
                Most recently updated: November 22, 2016

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1715

Credits: Produced by John Bickers, and Dagny, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EUGENIE GRANDET ***




Produced by John Bickers, and Dagny





EUGENIE GRANDET


By Honore De Balzac



Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley



                              DEDICATION

  To Maria.

  May your name, that of one whose portrait is the noblest ornament
  of this work, lie on its opening pages like a branch of sacred
  box, taken from an unknown tree, but sanctified by religion, and
  kept ever fresh and green by pious hands to bless the house.

          De Balzac.




EUGENIE GRANDET




I

There are houses in certain provincial towns whose aspect inspires
melancholy, akin to that called forth by sombre cloisters, dreary
moorlands, or the desolation of ruins. Within these houses there is,
perhaps, the silence of the cloister, the barrenness of moors, the
skeleton of ruins; life and movement are so stagnant there that a
stranger might think them uninhabited, were it not that he encounters
suddenly the pale, cold glance of a motionless person, whose
half-monastic face peers beyond the window-casing at the sound of an
unaccustomed step.

Such elements of sadness formed the physiognomy, as it were, of a
dwelling-house in Saumur which stands at the end of the steep street
leading to the chateau in the upper part of the town. This street--now
little frequented, hot in summer, cold in winter, dark in certain
sections--is remarkable for the resonance of its little pebbly pavement,
always clean and dry, for the narrowness of its tortuous road-way, for
the peaceful stillness of its houses, which belong to the Old town and
are over-topped by the ramparts. Houses three centuries old are still
solid, though built of wood, and their divers aspects add to the
originality which commends this portion of Saumur to the attention of
artists and antiquaries.

It is difficult to pass these houses without admiring the enormous oaken
beams, their ends carved into fantastic figures, which crown with a
black bas-relief the lower floor of most of them. In one place these
transverse timbers are covered with slate and mark a bluish line along
the frail wall of a dwelling covered by a roof _en colombage_ which
bends beneath the weight of years, and whose rotting shingles are
twisted by the alternate action of sun and rain. In another place
blackened, worn-out window-sills, with delicate sculptures now scarcely
discernible, seem too weak to bear the brown clay pots from which
springs the heart’s-ease or the rose-bush of some poor working-woman.
Farther on are doors studded with enormous nails, where the genius of
our forefathers has traced domestic hieroglyphics, of which the meaning
is now lost forever. Here a Protestant attested his belief; there
a Leaguer cursed Henry IV.; elsewhere some bourgeois has carved the
insignia of his _noblesse de cloches_, symbols of his long-forgotten
magisterial glory. The whole history of France is there.

Next to a tottering house with roughly plastered walls, where an artisan
enshrines his tools, rises the mansion of a country gentleman, on the
stone arch of which above the door vestiges of armorial bearings may
still be seen, battered by the many revolutions that have shaken France
since 1789. In this hilly street the ground-floors of the merchants are
neither shops nor warehouses; lovers of the Middle Ages will here find
the _ouvrouere_ of our forefathers in all its naive simplicity. These
low rooms, which have no shop-frontage, no show-windows, in fact
no glass at all, are deep and dark and without interior or exterior
decoration. Their doors open in two parts, each roughly iron-bound; the
upper half is fastened back within the room, the lower half, fitted with
a spring-bell, swings continually to and fro. Air and light reach the
damp den within, either through the upper half of the door, or through
an open space between the ceiling and a low front wall, breast-high,
which is closed by solid shutters that are taken down every morning, put
up every evening, and held in place by heavy iron bars.

This wall serves as a counter for the merchandise. No delusive display
is there; only samples of the business, whatever it may chance to
be,--such, for instance, as three or four tubs full of codfish and
salt, a few bundles of sail-cloth, cordage, copper wire hanging from
the joists above, iron hoops for casks ranged along the wall, or a
few pieces of cloth upon the shelves. Enter. A neat girl, glowing
with youth, wearing a white kerchief, her arms red and bare, drops her
knitting and calls her father or her mother, one of whom comes forward
and sells you what you want, phlegmatically, civilly, or arrogantly,
according to his or her individual character, whether it be a matter of
two sous’ or twenty thousand francs’ worth of merchandise. You may see a
cooper, for instance, sitting in his doorway and twirling his thumbs as
he talks with a neighbor. To all appearance he owns nothing more than a
few miserable boat-ribs and two or three bundles of laths; but below
in the port his teeming wood-yard supplies all the cooperage trade of
Anjou. He knows to a plank how many casks are needed if the vintage is
good. A hot season makes him rich, a rainy season ruins him; in a single
morning puncheons worth eleven francs have been known to drop to six.
In this country, as in Touraine, atmospheric vicissitudes control
commercial life. Wine-growers, proprietors, wood-merchants, coopers,
inn-keepers, mariners, all keep watch of the sun. They tremble when they
go to bed lest they should hear in the morning of a frost in the night;
they dread rain, wind, drought, and want water, heat, and clouds to
suit their fancy. A perpetual duel goes on between the heavens and their
terrestrial interests. The barometer smooths, saddens, or makes merry
their countenances, turn and turn about. From end to end of this street,
formerly the Grand’Rue de Saumur, the words: “Here’s golden weather,”
 are passed from door to door; or each man calls to his neighbor: “It
rains louis,” knowing well what a sunbeam or the opportune rainfall is
bringing him.

On Saturdays after midday, in the fine season, not one sou’s worth
of merchandise can be bought from these worthy traders. Each has
his vineyard, his enclosure of fields, and all spend two days in the
country. This being foreseen, and purchases, sales, and profits provided
for, the merchants have ten or twelve hours to spend in parties of
pleasure, in making observations, in criticisms, and in continual
spying. A housewife cannot buy a partridge without the neighbors asking
the husband if it were cooked to a turn. A young girl never puts her
head near a window that she is not seen by idling groups in the street.
Consciences are held in the light; and the houses, dark, silent,
impenetrable as they seem, hide no mysteries. Life is almost wholly in
the open air; every household sits at its own threshold, breakfasts,
dines, and quarrels there. No one can pass along the street without
being examined; in fact formerly, when a stranger entered a provincial
town he was bantered and made game of from door to door. From this came
many good stories, and the nickname _copieux_, which was applied to the
inhabitants of Angers, who excelled in such urban sarcasms.

The ancient mansions of the old town of Saumur are at the top of
this hilly street, and were formerly occupied by the nobility of the
neighborhood. The melancholy dwelling where the events of the following
history took place is one of these mansions,--venerable relics of a
century in which men and things bore the characteristics of simplicity
which French manners and customs are losing day by day. Follow the
windings of the picturesque thoroughfare, whose irregularities awaken
recollections that plunge the mind mechanically into reverie, and you
will see a somewhat dark recess, in the centre of which is hidden the
door of the house of Monsieur Grandet. It is impossible to understand
the force of this provincial expression--the house of Monsieur
Grandet--without giving the biography of Monsieur Grandet himself.

Monsieur Grandet enjoyed a reputation in Saumur whose causes and effects
can never be fully understood by those who have not, at one time or
another, lived in the provinces. In 1789 Monsieur Grandet--still called
by certain persons le Pere Grandet, though the number of such old
persons has perceptibly diminished--was a master-cooper, able to read,
write, and cipher. At the period when the French Republic offered for
sale the church property in the arrondissement of Saumur, the cooper,
then forty years of age, had just married the daughter of a rich
wood-merchant. Supplied with the ready money of his own fortune and his
wife’s _dot_, in all about two thousand louis-d’or, Grandet went to the
newly established “district,” where, with the help of two hundred double
louis given by his father-in-law to the surly republican who presided
over the sales of the national domain, he obtained for a song, legally
if not legitimately, one of the finest vineyards in the arrondissement,
an old abbey, and several farms. The inhabitants of Saumur were so
little revolutionary that they thought Pere Grandet a bold man, a
republican, and a patriot with a mind open to all the new ideas; though
in point of fact it was open only to vineyards. He was appointed a
member of the administration of Saumur, and his pacific influence made
itself felt politically and commercially. Politically, he protected the
ci-devant nobles, and prevented, to the extent of his power, the sale of
the lands and property of the _emigres_; commercially, he furnished the
Republican armies with two or three thousand puncheons of white wine,
and took his pay in splendid fields belonging to a community of women
whose lands had been reserved for the last lot.

Under the Consulate Grandet became mayor, governed wisely, and harvested
still better pickings. Under the Empire he was called Monsieur Grandet.
Napoleon, however, did not like republicans, and superseded Monsieur
Grandet (who was supposed to have worn the Phrygian cap) by a man of his
own surroundings, a future baron of the Empire. Monsieur Grandet quitted
office without regret. He had constructed in the interests of the town
certain fine roads which led to his own property; his house and lands,
very advantageously assessed, paid moderate taxes; and since the
registration of his various estates, the vineyards, thanks to his
constant care, had become the “head of the country,”--a local term used
to denote those that produced the finest quality of wine. He might have
asked for the cross of the Legion of honor.

This event occurred in 1806. Monsieur Grandet was then fifty-seven years
of age, his wife thirty-six, and an only daughter, the fruit of their
legitimate love, was ten years old. Monsieur Grandet, whom Providence
no doubt desired to compensate for the loss of his municipal honors,
inherited three fortunes in the course of this year,--that of Madame
de la Gaudiniere, born de la Bertelliere, the mother of Madame Grandet;
that of old Monsieur de la Bertelliere, her grandfather; and, lastly,
that of Madame Gentillet, her grandmother on the mother’s side: three
inheritances, whose amount was not known to any one. The avarice of the
deceased persons was so keen that for a long time they had hoarded their
money for the pleasure of secretly looking at it. Old Monsieur de la
Bertelliere called an investment an extravagance, and thought he got
better interest from the sight of his gold than from the profits of
usury. The inhabitants of Saumur consequently estimated his savings
according to “the revenues of the sun’s wealth,” as they said.

Monsieur Grandet thus obtained that modern title of nobility which
our mania for equality can never rub out. He became the most imposing
personage in the arrondissement. He worked a hundred acres of vineyard,
which in fruitful years yielded seven or eight hundred hogsheads of
wine. He owned thirteen farms, an old abbey, whose windows and arches
he had walled up for the sake of economy,--a measure which preserved
them,--also a hundred and twenty-seven acres of meadow-land, where three
thousand poplars, planted in 1793, grew and flourished; and finally, the
house in which he lived. Such was his visible estate; as to his other
property, only two persons could give even a vague guess at its value:
one was Monsieur Cruchot, a notary employed in the usurious investments
of Monsieur Grandet; the other was Monsieur des Grassins, the richest
banker in Saumur, in whose profits Grandet had a certain covenanted and
secret share.

Although old Cruchot and Monsieur des Grassins were both gifted with
the deep discretion which wealth and trust beget in the provinces, they
publicly testified so much respect to Monsieur Grandet that observers
estimated the amount of his property by the obsequious attention which
they bestowed upon him. In all Saumur there was no one not persuaded
that Monsieur Grandet had a private treasure, some hiding-place full
of louis, where he nightly took ineffable delight in gazing upon great
masses of gold. Avaricious people gathered proof of this when they
looked at the eyes of the good man, to which the yellow metal seemed to
have conveyed its tints. The glance of a man accustomed to draw enormous
interest from his capital acquires, like that of the libertine, the
gambler, or the sycophant, certain indefinable habits,--furtive,
eager, mysterious movements, which never escape the notice of
his co-religionists. This secret language is in a certain way the
freemasonry of the passions. Monsieur Grandet inspired the respectful
esteem due to one who owed no man anything, who, skilful cooper and
experienced wine-grower that he was, guessed with the precision of an
astronomer whether he ought to manufacture a thousand puncheons for his
vintage, or only five hundred, who never failed in any speculation, and
always had casks for sale when casks were worth more than the commodity
that filled them, who could store his whole vintage in his cellars and
bide his time to put the puncheons on the market at two hundred francs,
when the little proprietors had been forced to sell theirs for five
louis. His famous vintage of 1811, judiciously stored and slowly
disposed of, brought him in more than two hundred and forty thousand
francs.

Financially speaking, Monsieur Grandet was something between a tiger and
a boa-constrictor. He could crouch and lie low, watch his prey a long
while, spring upon it, open his jaws, swallow a mass of louis, and
then rest tranquilly like a snake in process of digestion, impassible,
methodical, and cold. No one saw him pass without a feeling of
admiration mingled with respect and fear; had not every man in Saumur
felt the rending of those polished steel claws? For this one, Maitre
Cruchot had procured the money required for the purchase of a domain,
but at eleven per cent. For that one, Monsieur des Grassins discounted
bills of exchange, but at a frightful deduction of interest. Few days
ever passed that Monsieur Grandet’s name was not mentioned either in the
markets or in social conversations at the evening gatherings. To some
the fortune of the old wine-grower was an object of patriotic pride.
More than one merchant, more than one innkeeper, said to strangers
with a certain complacency: “Monsieur, we have two or three millionaire
establishments; but as for Monsieur Grandet, he does not himself know
how much he is worth.”

In 1816 the best reckoners in Saumur estimated the landed property of
the worthy man at nearly four millions; but as, on an average, he had
made yearly, from 1793 to 1817, a hundred thousand francs out of that
property, it was fair to presume that he possessed in actual money a sum
nearly equal to the value of his estate. So that when, after a game of
boston or an evening discussion on the matter of vines, the talk fell
upon Monsieur Grandet, knowing people said: “Le Pere Grandet? le Pere
Grandet must have at least five or six millions.”

“You are cleverer than I am; I have never been able to find out the
amount,” answered Monsieur Cruchot or Monsieur des Grassins, when either
chanced to overhear the remark.

If some Parisian mentioned Rothschild or Monsieur Lafitte, the people of
Saumur asked if he were as rich as Monsieur Grandet. When the Parisian,
with a smile, tossed them a disdainful affirmative, they looked at each
other and shook their heads with an incredulous air. So large a fortune
covered with a golden mantle all the actions of this man. If in early
days some peculiarities of his life gave occasion for laughter or
ridicule, laughter and ridicule had long since died away. His least
important actions had the authority of results repeatedly shown. His
speech, his clothing, his gestures, the blinking of his eyes, were law
to the country-side, where every one, after studying him as a naturalist
studies the result of instinct in the lower animals, had come to
understand the deep mute wisdom of his slightest actions.

“It will be a hard winter,” said one; “Pere Grandet has put on his fur
gloves.”

“Pere Grandet is buying quantities of staves; there will be plenty of
wine this year.”

Monsieur Grandet never bought either bread or meat. His farmers supplied
him weekly with a sufficiency of capons, chickens, eggs, butter, and
his tithe of wheat. He owned a mill; and the tenant was bound, over and
above his rent, to take a certain quantity of grain and return him the
flour and bran. La Grande Nanon, his only servant, though she was no
longer young, baked the bread of the household herself every Saturday.
Monsieur Grandet arranged with kitchen-gardeners who were his tenants
to supply him with vegetables. As to fruits, he gathered such quantities
that he sold the greater part in the market. His fire-wood was cut from
his own hedgerows or taken from the half-rotten old sheds which he built
at the corners of his fields, and whose planks the farmers carted into
town for him, all cut up, and obligingly stacked in his wood-house,
receiving in return his thanks. His only known expenditures were for the
consecrated bread, the clothing of his wife and daughter, the hire of
their chairs in church, the wages of la Grand Nanon, the tinning of the
saucepans, lights, taxes, repairs on his buildings, and the costs of
his various industries. He had six hundred acres of woodland, lately
purchased, which he induced a neighbor’s keeper to watch, under the
promise of an indemnity. After the acquisition of this property he ate
game for the first time.

Monsieur Grandet’s manners were very simple. He spoke little. He usually
expressed his meaning by short sententious phrases uttered in a soft
voice. After the Revolution, the epoch at which he first came into
notice, the good man stuttered in a wearisome way as soon as he was
required to speak at length or to maintain an argument. This stammering,
the incoherence of his language, the flux of words in which he drowned
his thought, his apparent lack of logic, attributed to defects of
education, were in reality assumed, and will be sufficiently explained
by certain events in the following history. Four sentences, precise
as algebraic formulas, sufficed him usually to grasp and solve all
difficulties of life and commerce: “I don’t know; I cannot; I will not;
I will see about it.” He never said yes, or no, and never committed
himself to writing. If people talked to him he listened coldly, holding
his chin in his right hand and resting his right elbow in the back of
his left hand, forming in his own mind opinions on all matters, from
which he never receded. He reflected long before making any business
agreement. When his opponent, after careful conversation, avowed the
secret of his own purposes, confident that he had secured his listener’s
assent, Grandet answered: “I can decide nothing without consulting my
wife.” His wife, whom he had reduced to a state of helpless slavery, was
a useful screen to him in business. He went nowhere among friends; he
neither gave nor accepted dinners; he made no stir or noise, seeming
to economize in everything, even movement. He never disturbed or
disarranged the things of other people, out of respect for the rights
of property. Nevertheless, in spite of his soft voice, in spite of his
circumspect bearing, the language and habits of a coarse nature came
to the surface, especially in his own home, where he controlled himself
less than elsewhere.

Physically, Grandet was a man five feet high, thick-set, square-built,
with calves twelve inches in circumference, knotted knee-joints,
and broad shoulders; his face was round, tanned, and pitted by the
small-pox; his chin was straight, his lips had no curves, his teeth
were white; his eyes had that calm, devouring expression which people
attribute to the basilisk; his forehead, full of transverse wrinkles,
was not without certain significant protuberances; his yellow-grayish
hair was said to be silver and gold by certain young people who did not
realize the impropriety of making a jest about Monsieur Grandet. His
nose, thick at the end, bore a veined wen, which the common people said,
not without reason, was full of malice. The whole countenance showed
a dangerous cunning, an integrity without warmth, the egotism of a man
long used to concentrate every feeling upon the enjoyments of avarice
and upon the only human being who was anything whatever to him,--his
daughter and sole heiress, Eugenie. Attitude, manners, bearing,
everything about him, in short, testified to that belief in himself
which the habit of succeeding in all enterprises never fails to give to
a man.

Thus, though his manners were unctuous and soft outwardly, Monsieur
Grandet’s nature was of iron. His dress never varied; and those who saw
him to-day saw him such as he had been since 1791. His stout shoes
were tied with leathern thongs; he wore, in all weathers, thick woollen
stockings, short breeches of coarse maroon cloth with silver buckles,
a velvet waistcoat, in alternate stripes of yellow and puce, buttoned
squarely, a large maroon coat with wide flaps, a black cravat, and
a quaker’s hat. His gloves, thick as those of a gendarme, lasted him
twenty months; to preserve them, he always laid them methodically on
the brim of his hat in one particular spot. Saumur knew nothing further
about this personage.

Only six individuals had a right of entrance to Monsieur Grandet’s
house. The most important of the first three was a nephew of Monsieur
Cruchot. Since his appointment as president of the Civil courts of
Saumur this young man had added the name of Bonfons to that of Cruchot.
He now signed himself C. de Bonfons. Any litigant so ill-advised as to
call him Monsieur Cruchot would soon be made to feel his folly in court.
The magistrate protected those who called him Monsieur le president, but
he favored with gracious smiles those who addressed him as Monsieur de
Bonfons. Monsieur le president was thirty-three years old, and possessed
the estate of Bonfons (Boni Fontis), worth seven thousand francs a year;
he expected to inherit the property of his uncle the notary and that
of another uncle, the Abbe Cruchot, a dignitary of the chapter of
Saint-Martin de Tours, both of whom were thought to be very rich. These
three Cruchots, backed by a goodly number of cousins, and allied
to twenty families in the town, formed a party, like the Medici in
Florence; like the Medici, the Cruchots had their Pazzi.

Madame des Grassins, mother of a son twenty-three years of age, came
assiduously to play cards with Madame Grandet, hoping to marry her dear
Adolphe to Mademoiselle Eugenie. Monsieur des Grassins, the banker,
vigorously promoted the schemes of his wife by means of secret services
constantly rendered to the old miser, and always arrived in time
upon the field of battle. The three des Grassins likewise had their
adherents, their cousins, their faithful allies. On the Cruchot side the
abbe, the Talleyrand of the family, well backed-up by his brother
the notary, sharply contested every inch of ground with his female
adversary, and tried to obtain the rich heiress for his nephew the
president.

This secret warfare between the Cruchots and des Grassins, the prize
thereof being the hand in marriage of Eugenie Grandet, kept the various
social circles of Saumur in violent agitation. Would Mademoiselle
Grandet marry Monsieur le president or Monsieur Adolphe des Grassins?
To this problem some replied that Monsieur Grandet would never give
his daughter to the one or to the other. The old cooper, eaten up with
ambition, was looking, they said, for a peer of France, to whom an
income of three hundred thousand francs would make all the past,
present, and future casks of the Grandets acceptable. Others replied
that Monsieur and Madame des Grassins were nobles, and exceedingly rich;
that Adolphe was a personable young fellow; and that unless the old man
had a nephew of the pope at his beck and call, such a suitable alliance
ought to satisfy a man who came from nothing,--a man whom Saumur
remembered with an adze in his hand, and who had, moreover, worn the
_bonnet rouge_. Certain wise heads called attention to the fact that
Monsieur Cruchot de Bonfons had the right of entry to the house at all
times, whereas his rival was received only on Sundays. Others, however,
maintained that Madame des Grassins was more intimate with the women of
the house of Grandet than the Cruchots were, and could put into their
minds certain ideas which would lead, sooner or later, to success. To
this the former retorted that the Abbe Cruchot was the most insinuating
man in the world: pit a woman against a monk, and the struggle was even.
“It is diamond cut diamond,” said a Saumur wit.

The oldest inhabitants, wiser than their fellows, declared that the
Grandets knew better than to let the property go out of the family, and
that Mademoiselle Eugenie Grandet of Saumur would be married to the son
of Monsieur Grandet of Paris, a wealthy wholesale wine-merchant. To this
the Cruchotines and the Grassinists replied: “In the first place, the
two brothers have seen each other only twice in thirty years; and next,
Monsieur Grandet of Paris has ambitious designs for his son. He is mayor
of an arrondissement, a deputy, colonel of the National Guard, judge in
the commercial courts; he disowns the Grandets of Saumur, and means to
ally himself with some ducal family,--ducal under favor of Napoleon.”
 In short, was there anything not said of an heiress who was talked
of through a circumference of fifty miles, and even in the public
conveyances from Angers to Blois, inclusively!

At the beginning of 1811, the Cruchotines won a signal advantage over
the Grassinists. The estate of Froidfond, remarkable for its park,
its mansion, its farms, streams, ponds, forests, and worth about three
millions, was put up for sale by the young Marquis de Froidfond, who was
obliged to liquidate his possessions. Maitre Cruchot, the president, and
the abbe, aided by their adherents, were able to prevent the sale of the
estate in little lots. The notary concluded a bargain with the young
man for the whole property, payable in gold, persuading him that suits
without number would have to be brought against the purchasers of small
lots before he could get the money for them; it was better, therefore,
to sell the whole to Monsieur Grandet, who was solvent and able to pay
for the estate in ready money. The fine marquisate of Froidfond was
accordingly conveyed down the gullet of Monsieur Grandet, who, to the
great astonishment of Saumur, paid for it, under proper discount, with
the usual formalities.

This affair echoed from Nantes to Orleans. Monsieur Grandet took
advantage of a cart returning by way of Froidfond to go and see his
chateau. Having cast a master’s eye over the whole property, he returned
to Saumur, satisfied that he had invested his money at five per cent,
and seized by the stupendous thought of extending and increasing the
marquisate of Froidfond by concentrating all his property there. Then,
to fill up his coffers, now nearly empty, he resolved to thin out his
woods and his forests, and to sell off the poplars in the meadows.




II

It is now easy to understand the full meaning of the term, “the house of
Monsieur Grandet,”--that cold, silent, pallid dwelling, standing above
the town and sheltered by the ruins of the ramparts. The two pillars and
the arch, which made the porte-cochere on which the door opened, were
built, like the house itself, of tufa,--a white stone peculiar to the
shores of the Loire, and so soft that it lasts hardly more than two
centuries. Numberless irregular holes, capriciously bored or eaten out
by the inclemency of the weather, gave an appearance of the vermiculated
stonework of French architecture to the arch and the side walls of this
entrance, which bore some resemblance to the gateway of a jail. Above
the arch was a long bas-relief, in hard stone, representing the four
seasons, the faces already crumbling away and blackened. This bas-relief
was surmounted by a projecting plinth, upon which a variety of chance
growths had sprung up,--yellow pellitory, bindweed, convolvuli, nettles,
plantain, and even a little cherry-tree, already grown to some height.

The door of the archway was made of solid oak, brown, shrunken, and
split in many places; though frail in appearance, it was firmly held
in place by a system of iron bolts arranged in symmetrical patterns.
A small square grating, with close bars red with rust, filled up the
middle panel and made, as it were, a motive for the knocker, fastened to
it by a ring, which struck upon the grinning head of a huge nail.
This knocker, of the oblong shape and kind which our ancestors called
_jaquemart_, looked like a huge note of exclamation; an antiquary who
examined it attentively might have found indications of the figure,
essentially burlesque, which it once represented, and which long usage
had now effaced. Through this little grating--intended in olden times
for the recognition of friends in times of civil war--inquisitive
persons could perceive, at the farther end of the dark and slimy vault,
a few broken steps which led to a garden, picturesquely shut in by
walls that were thick and damp, and through which oozed a moisture that
nourished tufts of sickly herbage. These walls were the ruins of the
ramparts, under which ranged the gardens of several neighboring houses.

The most important room on the ground-floor of the house was a large
hall, entered directly from beneath the vault of the porte-cochere.
Few people know the importance of a hall in the little towns of Anjou,
Touraine, and Berry. The hall is at one and the same time antechamber,
salon, office, boudoir, and dining-room; it is the theatre of domestic
life, the common living-room. There the barber of the neighborhood came,
twice a year, to cut Monsieur Grandet’s hair; there the farmers, the
cure, the under-prefect, and the miller’s boy came on business. This
room, with two windows looking on the street, was entirely of wood. Gray
panels with ancient mouldings covered the walls from top to bottom; the
ceiling showed all its beams, which were likewise painted gray, while
the space between them had been washed over in white, now yellow with
age. An old brass clock, inlaid with arabesques, adorned the mantel
of the ill-cut white stone chimney-piece, above which was a greenish
mirror, whose edges, bevelled to show the thickness of the glass,
reflected a thread of light the whole length of a gothic frame in
damascened steel-work. The two copper-gilt candelabra which decorated
the corners of the chimney-piece served a double purpose: by taking off
the side-branches, each of which held a socket, the main stem--which
was fastened to a pedestal of bluish marble tipped with copper--made a
candlestick for one candle, which was sufficient for ordinary occasions.
The chairs, antique in shape, were covered with tapestry representing
the fables of La Fontaine; it was necessary, however, to know that
writer well to guess at the subjects, for the faded colors and the
figures, blurred by much darning, were difficult to distinguish.

At the four corners of the hall were closets, or rather buffets,
surmounted by dirty shelves. An old card-table in marquetry, of which
the upper part was a chess-board, stood in the space between the two
windows. Above this table was an oval barometer with a black border
enlivened with gilt bands, on which the flies had so licentiously
disported themselves that the gilding had become problematical. On
the panel opposite to the chimney-piece were two portraits in pastel,
supposed to represent the grandfather of Madame Grandet, old Monsieur
de la Bertelliere, as a lieutenant in the French guard, and the deceased
Madame Gentillet in the guise of a shepherdess. The windows were draped
with curtains of red _gros de Tours_ held back by silken cords with
ecclesiastical tassels. This luxurious decoration, little in keeping
with the habits of Monsieur Grandet, had been, together with the steel
pier-glass, the tapestries, and the buffets, which were of rose-wood,
included in the purchase of the house.

By the window nearest to the door stood a straw chair, whose legs were
raised on castors to lift its occupant, Madame Grandet, to a height from
which she could see the passers-by. A work-table of stained cherry-wood
filled up the embrasure, and the little armchair of Eugenie Grandet
stood beside it. In this spot the lives had flowed peacefully onward for
fifteen years, in a round of constant work from the month of April to
the month of November. On the first day of the latter month they took
their winter station by the chimney. Not until that day did Grandet
permit a fire to be lighted; and on the thirty-first of March it was
extinguished, without regard either to the chills of the early spring or
to those of a wintry autumn. A foot-warmer, filled with embers from the
kitchen fire, which la Grande Nanon contrived to save for them, enabled
Madame and Mademoiselle Grandet to bear the chilly mornings and evenings
of April and October. Mother and daughter took charge of the family
linen, and spent their days so conscientiously upon a labor properly
that of working-women, that if Eugenie wished to embroider a collar for
her mother she was forced to take the time from sleep, and deceive her
father to obtain the necessary light. For a long time the miser had
given out the tallow candle to his daughter and la Grande Nanon just as
he gave out every morning the bread and other necessaries for the daily
consumption.

La Grande Nanon was perhaps the only human being capable of accepting
willingly the despotism of her master. The whole town envied Monsieur
and Madame Grandet the possession of her. La Grande Nanon, so called on
account of her height, which was five feet eight inches, had lived with
Monsieur Grandet for thirty-five years. Though she received only sixty
francs a year in wages, she was supposed to be one of the richest
serving-women in Saumur. Those sixty francs, accumulating through
thirty-five years, had recently enabled her to invest four thousand
francs in an annuity with Maitre Cruchot. This result of her long and
persistent economy seemed gigantic. Every servant in the town, seeing
that the poor sexagenarian was sure of bread for her old age, was
jealous of her, and never thought of the hard slavery through which it
had been won.

At twenty-two years of age the poor girl had been unable to find a
situation, so repulsive was her face to almost every one. Yet the
feeling was certainly unjust: the face would have been much admired on
the shoulders of a grenadier of the guard; but all things, so they say,
should be in keeping. Forced to leave a farm where she kept the cows,
because the dwelling-house was burned down, she came to Saumur to find
a place, full of the robust courage that shrinks from no labor. Le Pere
Grandet was at that time thinking of marriage and about to set up his
household. He espied the girl, rejected as she was from door to door.
A good judge of corporeal strength in his trade as a cooper, he guessed
the work that might be got out of a female creature shaped like a
Hercules, as firm on her feet as an oak sixty years old on its roots,
strong in the hips, square in the back, with the hands of a cartman and
an honesty as sound as her unblemished virtue. Neither the warts which
adorned her martial visage, nor the red-brick tints of her skin, nor the
sinewy arms, nor the ragged garments of la Grande Nanon, dismayed the
cooper, who was at that time still of an age when the heart shudders.
He fed, shod, and clothed the poor girl, gave her wages, and put her to
work without treating her too roughly. Seeing herself thus welcomed,
la Grande Nanon wept secretly tears of joy, and attached herself in all
sincerity to her master, who from that day ruled her and worked her with
feudal authority. Nanon did everything. She cooked, she made the lye,
she washed the linen in the Loire and brought it home on her shoulders;
she got up early, she went to bed late; she prepared the food of the
vine-dressers during the harvest, kept watch upon the market-people,
protected the property of her master like a faithful dog, and even, full
of blind confidence, obeyed without a murmur his most absurd exactions.

In the famous year of 1811, when the grapes were gathered with
unheard-of difficulty, Grandet resolved to give Nanon his old
watch,--the first present he had made her during twenty years of
service. Though he turned over to her his old shoes (which fitted her),
it is impossible to consider that quarterly benefit as a gift, for the
shoes were always thoroughly worn-out. Necessity had made the poor girl
so niggardly that Grandet had grown to love her as we love a dog, and
Nanon had let him fasten a spiked collar round her throat, whose spikes
no longer pricked her. If Grandet cut the bread with rather too much
parsimony, she made no complaint; she gaily shared the hygienic benefits
derived from the severe regime of the household, in which no one was
ever ill. Nanon was, in fact, one of the family; she laughed when
Grandet laughed, felt gloomy or chilly, warmed herself, and toiled as he
did. What pleasant compensations there were in such equality! Never did
the master have occasion to find fault with the servant for pilfering
the grapes, nor for the plums and nectarines eaten under the trees.
“Come, fall-to, Nanon!” he would say in years when the branches bent
under the fruit and the farmers were obliged to give it to the pigs.

To the poor peasant who in her youth had earned nothing but harsh
treatment, to the pauper girl picked up by charity, Grandet’s ambiguous
laugh was like a sunbeam. Moreover, Nanon’s simple heart and narrow head
could hold only one feeling and one idea. For thirty-five years she had
never ceased to see herself standing before the wood-yard of Monsieur
Grandet, ragged and barefooted, and to hear him say: “What do you want,
young one?” Her gratitude was ever new. Sometimes Grandet, reflecting
that the poor creature had never heard a flattering word, that she was
ignorant of all the tender sentiments inspired by women, that she might
some day appear before the throne of God even more chaste than the
Virgin Mary herself,--Grandet, struck with pity, would say as he
looked at her, “Poor Nanon!” The exclamation was always followed by an
undefinable look cast upon him in return by the old servant. The words,
uttered from time to time, formed a chain of friendship that nothing
ever parted, and to which each exclamation added a link. Such compassion
arising in the heart of the miser, and accepted gratefully by the old
spinster, had something inconceivably horrible about it. This cruel
pity, recalling, as it did, a thousand pleasures to the heart of the old
cooper, was for Nanon the sum total of happiness. Who does not likewise
say, “Poor Nanon!” God will recognize his angels by the inflexions of
their voices and by their secret sighs.

There were very many households in Saumur where the servants were better
treated, but where the masters received far less satisfaction in return.
Thus it was often said: “What have the Grandets ever done to make their
Grande Nanon so attached to them? She would go through fire and water
for their sake!” Her kitchen, whose barred windows looked into the
court, was always clean, neat, cold,--a true miser’s kitchen, where
nothing went to waste. When Nanon had washed her dishes, locked up the
remains of the dinner, and put out her fire, she left the kitchen, which
was separated by a passage from the living-room, and went to spin
hemp beside her masters. One tallow candle sufficed the family for the
evening. The servant slept at the end of the passage in a species of
closet lighted only by a fan-light. Her robust health enabled her to
live in this hole with impunity; there she could hear the slightest
noise through the deep silence which reigned night and day in that
dreary house. Like a watch-dog, she slept with one ear open, and took
her rest with a mind alert.

A description of the other parts of the dwelling will be found connected
with the events of this history, though the foregoing sketch of the
hall, where the whole luxury of the household appears, may enable the
reader to surmise the nakedness of the upper floors.

In 1819, at the beginning of an evening in the middle of November, la
Grande Nanon lighted the fire for the first time. The autumn had
been very fine. This particular day was a fete-day well known to the
Cruchotines and the Grassinists. The six antagonists, armed at all
points, were making ready to meet at the Grandets and surpass each other
in testimonials of friendship. That morning all Saumur had seen Madame
and Mademoiselle Grandet, accompanied by Nanon, on their way to hear
Mass at the parish church, and every one remembered that the day was
the anniversary of Mademoiselle Eugenie’s birth. Calculating the hour at
which the family dinner would be over, Maitre Cruchot, the Abbe Cruchot,
and Monsieur C. de Bonfons hastened to arrive before the des Grassins,
and be the first to pay their compliments to Mademoiselle Eugenie. All
three brought enormous bouquets, gathered in their little green-houses.
The stalks of the flowers which the president intended to present were
ingeniously wound round with a white satin ribbon adorned with gold
fringe. In the morning Monsieur Grandet, following his usual custom on
the days that commemorated the birth and the fete of Eugenie, went to
her bedside and solemnly presented her with his paternal gift,--which
for the last thirteen years had consisted regularly of a curious
gold-piece. Madame Grandet gave her daughter a winter dress or a summer
dress, as the case might be. These two dresses and the gold-pieces,
of which she received two others on New Year’s day and on her father’s
fete-day, gave Eugenie a little revenue of a hundred crowns or
thereabouts, which Grandet loved to see her amass. Was it not putting
his money from one strong-box to another, and, as it were, training the
parsimony of his heiress? from whom he sometimes demanded an account
of her treasure (formerly increased by the gifts of the Bertellieres),
saying: “It is to be your marriage dozen.”

The “marriage dozen” is an old custom sacredly preserved and still in
force in many parts of central France. In Berry and in Anjou, when a
young girl marries, her family, or that of the husband, must give her a
purse, in which they place, according to their means, twelve pieces,
or twelve dozen pieces, or twelve hundred pieces of gold. The poorest
shepherd-girl never marries without her dozen, be it only a dozen
coppers. They still tell in Issoudun of a certain “dozen” presented to
a rich heiress, which contained a hundred and forty-four _portugaises
d’or_. Pope Clement VII., uncle of Catherine de’ Medici, gave her when
he married her to Henri II. a dozen antique gold medals of priceless
value.

During dinner the father, delighted to see his Eugenie looking well in a
new gown, exclaimed: “As it is Eugenie’s birthday let us have a fire; it
will be a good omen.”

“Mademoiselle will be married this year, that’s certain,” said la
Grande Nanon, carrying away the remains of the goose,--the pheasant of
tradesmen.

“I don’t see any one suitable for her in Saumur,” said Madame Grandet,
glancing at her husband with a timid look which, considering her years,
revealed the conjugal slavery under which the poor woman languished.

Grandet looked at his daughter and exclaimed gaily,--

“She is twenty-three years old to-day, the child; we must soon begin to
think of it.”

Eugenie and her mother silently exchanged a glance of intelligence.

Madame Grandet was a dry, thin woman, as yellow as a quince, awkward,
slow, one of those women who are born to be down-trodden. She had big
bones, a big nose, a big forehead, big eyes, and presented at first
sight a vague resemblance to those mealy fruits that have neither savor
nor succulence. Her teeth were black and few in number, her mouth was
wrinkled, her chin long and pointed. She was an excellent woman, a true
la Bertelliere. L’abbe Cruchot found occasional opportunity to tell her
that she had not done ill; and she believed him. Angelic sweetness,
the resignation of an insect tortured by children, a rare piety, a good
heart, an unalterable equanimity of soul, made her universally pitied
and respected. Her husband never gave her more than six francs at a time
for her personal expenses. Ridiculous as it may seem, this woman, who by
her own fortune and her various inheritances brought Pere Grandet
more than three hundred thousand francs, had always felt so profoundly
humiliated by her dependence and the slavery in which she lived, against
which the gentleness of her spirit prevented her from revolting, that
she had never asked for one penny or made a single remark on the deeds
which Maitre Cruchot brought for her signature. This foolish secret
pride, this nobility of soul perpetually misunderstood and wounded by
Grandet, ruled the whole conduct of the wife.

Madame Grandet was attired habitually in a gown of greenish levantine
silk, endeavoring to make it last nearly a year; with it she wore a
large kerchief of white cotton cloth, a bonnet made of plaited straws
sewn together, and almost always a black-silk apron. As she seldom left
the house she wore out very few shoes. She never asked anything for
herself. Grandet, seized with occasional remorse when he remembered how
long a time had elapsed since he gave her the last six francs, always
stipulated for the “wife’s pin-money” when he sold his yearly vintage.
The four or five louis presented by the Belgian or the Dutchman who
purchased the wine were the chief visible signs of Madame Grandet’s
annual revenues. But after she had received the five louis, her husband
would often say to her, as though their purse were held in common:
“Can you lend me a few sous?” and the poor woman, glad to be able to do
something for a man whom her confessor held up to her as her lord and
master, returned him in the course of the winter several crowns out of
the “pin-money.” When Grandet drew from his pocket the five-franc piece
which he allowed monthly for the minor expenses,--thread, needles, and
toilet,--of his daughter, he never failed to say as he buttoned his
breeches’ pocket: “And you, mother, do you want anything?”

“My friend,” Madame Grandet would answer, moved by a sense of maternal
dignity, “we will see about that later.”

Wasted dignity! Grandet thought himself very generous to his wife.
Philosophers who meet the like of Nanon, of Madame Grandet, of Eugenie,
have surely a right to say that irony is at the bottom of the ways of
Providence.

After the dinner at which for the first time allusion had been made
to Eugenie’s marriage, Nanon went to fetch a bottle of black-currant
ratafia from Monsieur Grandet’s bed-chamber, and nearly fell as she came
down the stairs.

“You great stupid!” said her master; “are you going to tumble about like
other people, hey?”

“Monsieur, it was that step on your staircase which has given way.”

“She is right,” said Madame Grandet; “it ought to have been mended long
ago. Yesterday Eugenie nearly twisted her ankle.”

“Here,” said Grandet to Nanon, seeing that she looked quite pale, “as it
is Eugenie’s birthday, and you came near falling, take a little glass of
ratafia to set you right.”

“Faith! I’ve earned it,” said Nanon; “most people would have broken the
bottle; but I’d sooner have broken my elbow holding it up high.”

“Poor Nanon!” said Grandet, filling a glass.

“Did you hurt yourself?” asked Eugenie, looking kindly at her.

“No, I didn’t fall; I threw myself back on my haunches.”

“Well! as it is Eugenie’s birthday,” said Grandet, “I’ll have the step
mended. You people don’t know how to set your foot in the corner where
the wood is still firm.”

Grandet took the candle, leaving his wife, daughter, and servant without
any other light than that from the hearth, where the flames were lively,
and went into the bakehouse to fetch planks, nails, and tools.

“Can I help you?” cried Nanon, hearing him hammer on the stairs.

“No, no! I’m an old hand at it,” answered the former cooper.

At the moment when Grandet was mending his worm-eaten staircase and
whistling with all his might, in remembrance of the days of his youth,
the three Cruchots knocked at the door.

“Is it you, Monsieur Cruchot?” asked Nanon, peeping through the little
grating.

“Yes,” answered the president.

Nanon opened the door, and the light from the hearth, reflected on the
ceiling, enabled the three Cruchots to find their way into the room.

“Ha! you’ve come a-greeting,” said Nanon, smelling the flowers.

“Excuse me, messieurs,” cried Grandet, recognizing their voices; “I’ll
be with you in a moment. I’m not proud; I am patching up a step on my
staircase.”

“Go on, go on, Monsieur Grandet; a man’s house is his castle,” said the
president sententiously.

Madame and Mademoiselle Grandet rose. The president, profiting by the
darkness, said to Eugenie:

“Will you permit me, mademoiselle, to wish you, on this the day of your
birth, a series of happy years and the continuance of the health which
you now enjoy?”

He offered her a huge bouquet of choice flowers which were rare in
Saumur; then, taking the heiress by the elbows, he kissed her on each
side of her neck with a complacency that made her blush. The president,
who looked like a rusty iron nail, felt that his courtship was
progressing.

“Don’t stand on ceremony,” said Grandet, entering. “How well you do
things on fete-days, Monsieur le president!”

“When it concerns mademoiselle,” said the abbe, armed with his own
bouquet, “every day is a fete-day for my nephew.”

The abbe kissed Eugenie’s hand. As for Maitre Cruchot, he boldly kissed
her on both cheeks, remarking: “How we sprout up, to be sure! Every year
is twelve months.”

As he replaced the candlestick beside the clock, Grandet, who never
forgot his own jokes, and repeated them to satiety when he thought them
funny, said,--

“As this is Eugenie’s birthday let us illuminate.”

He carefully took off the branches of the candelabra, put a socket on
each pedestal, took from Nanon a new tallow candle with paper twisted
round the end of it, put it into the hollow, made it firm, lit it, and
then sat down beside his wife, looking alternately at his friends, his
daughter, and the two candles. The Abbe Cruchot, a plump, puffy little
man, with a red wig plastered down and a face like an old female
gambler, said as he stretched out his feet, well shod in stout shoes
with silver buckles: “The des Grassins have not come?”

“Not yet,” said Grandet.

“But are they coming?” asked the old notary, twisting his face, which
had as many holes as a collander, into a queer grimace.

“I think so,” answered Madame Grandet.

“Are your vintages all finished?” said Monsieur de Bonfons to Grandet.

“Yes, all of them,” said the old man, rising to walk up and down the
room, his chest swelling with pride as he said the words, “all of them.”
 Through the door of the passage which led to the kitchen he saw la
Grande Nanon sitting beside her fire with a candle and preparing to spin
there, so as not to intrude among the guests.

“Nanon,” he said, going into the passage, “put out that fire and that
candle, and come and sit with us. Pardieu! the hall is big enough for
all.”

“But monsieur, you are to have the great people.”

“Are not you as good as they? They are descended from Adam, and so are
you.”

Grandet came back to the president and said,--

“Have you sold your vintage?”

“No, not I; I shall keep it. If the wine is good this year, it will
be better two years hence. The proprietors, you know, have made an
agreement to keep up the price; and this year the Belgians won’t get the
better of us. Suppose they are sent off empty-handed for once, faith!
they’ll come back.”

“Yes, but let us mind what we are about,” said Grandet in a tone which
made the president tremble.

“Is he driving some bargain?” thought Cruchot.

At this moment the knocker announced the des Grassins family, and
their arrival interrupted a conversation which had begun between Madame
Grandet and the abbe.

Madame des Grassins was one of those lively, plump little women, with
pink-and-white skins, who, thanks to the claustral calm of the provinces
and the habits of a virtuous life, keep their youth until they are
past forty. She was like the last rose of autumn,--pleasant to the
eye, though the petals have a certain frostiness, and their perfume is
slight. She dressed well, got her fashions from Paris, set the tone to
Saumur, and gave parties. Her husband, formerly a quartermaster in the
Imperial guard, who had been desperately wounded at Austerlitz, and had
since retired, still retained, in spite of his respect for Grandet, the
seeming frankness of an old soldier.

“Good evening, Grandet,” he said, holding out his hand and affecting
a sort of superiority, with which he always crushed the Cruchots.
“Mademoiselle,” he added, turning to Eugenie, after bowing to Madame
Grandet, “you are always beautiful and good, and truly I do not know
what to wish you.” So saying, he offered her a little box which his
servant had brought and which contained a Cape heather,--a flower lately
imported into Europe and very rare.

Madame des Grassins kissed Eugenie very affectionately, pressed her
hand, and said: “Adolphe wishes to make you my little offering.”

A tall, blond young man, pale and slight, with tolerable manners and
seemingly rather shy, although he had just spent eight or ten thousand
francs over his allowance in Paris, where he had been sent to study
law, now came forward and kissed Eugenie on both cheeks, offering her a
workbox with utensils in silver-gilt,--mere show-case trumpery, in
spite of the monogram E.G. in gothic letters rather well engraved,
which belonged properly to something in better taste. As she opened it,
Eugenie experienced one of those unexpected and perfect delights which
make a young girl blush and quiver and tremble with pleasure. She
turned her eyes to her father as if to ask permission to accept it, and
Monsieur Grandet replied: “Take it, my daughter,” in a tone which would
have made an actor illustrious.

The three Cruchots felt crushed as they saw the joyous, animated look
cast upon Adolphe des Grassins by the heiress, to whom such riches were
unheard-of. Monsieur des Grassins offered Grandet a pinch of snuff,
took one himself, shook off the grains as they fell on the ribbon of
the Legion of honor which was attached to the button-hole of his blue
surtout; then he looked at the Cruchots with an air that seemed to say,
“Parry that thrust if you can!” Madame des Grassins cast her eyes on the
blue vases which held the Cruchot bouquets, looking at the enemy’s
gifts with the pretended interest of a satirical woman. At this delicate
juncture the Abbe Cruchot left the company seated in a circle round the
fire and joined Grandet at the lower end of the hall. As the two men
reached the embrasure of the farthest window the priest said in the
miser’s ear: “Those people throw money out of the windows.”

“What does that matter if it gets into my cellar?” retorted the old
wine-grower.

“If you want to give gilt scissors to your daughter, you have the
means,” said the abbe.

“I give her something better than scissors,” answered Grandet.

“My nephew is a blockhead,” thought the abbe as he looked at the
president, whose rumpled hair added to the ill grace of his brown
countenance. “Couldn’t he have found some little trifle which cost
money?”

“We will join you at cards, Madame Grandet,” said Madame des Grassins.

“We might have two tables, as we are all here.”

“As it is Eugenie’s birthday you had better play loto all together,”
 said Pere Grandet: “the two young ones can join”; and the old cooper,
who never played any game, motioned to his daughter and Adolphe. “Come,
Nanon, set the tables.”

“We will help you, Mademoiselle Nanon,” said Madame des Grassins gaily,
quite joyous at the joy she had given Eugenie.

“I have never in my life been so pleased,” the heiress said to her; “I
have never seen anything so pretty.”

“Adolphe brought it from Paris, and he chose it,” Madame des Grassins
whispered in her ear.

“Go on! go on! damned intriguing thing!” thought the president. “If you
ever have a suit in court, you or your husband, it shall go hard with
you.”

The notary, sitting in his corner, looked calmly at the abbe, saying
to himself: “The des Grassins may do what they like; my property and my
brother’s and that of my nephew amount in all to eleven hundred thousand
francs. The des Grassins, at the most, have not half that; besides,
they have a daughter. They may give what presents they like; heiress and
presents too will be ours one of these days.”

At half-past eight in the evening the two card-tables were set out.
Madame des Grassins succeeded in putting her son beside Eugenie. The
actors in this scene, so full of interest, commonplace as it seems, were
provided with bits of pasteboard striped in many colors and numbered,
and with counters of blue glass, and they appeared to be listening
to the jokes of the notary, who never drew a number without making
a remark, while in fact they were all thinking of Monsieur Grandet’s
millions. The old cooper, with inward self-conceit, was contemplating
the pink feathers and the fresh toilet of Madame des Grassins, the
martial head of the banker, the faces of Adolphe, the president, the
abbe, and the notary, saying to himself:--

“They are all after my money. Hey! neither the one nor the other shall
have my daughter; but they are useful--useful as harpoons to fish with.”

This family gaiety in the old gray room dimly lighted by two
tallow candles; this laughter, accompanied by the whirr of Nanon’s
spinning-wheel, sincere only upon the lips of Eugenie or her mother;
this triviality mingled with important interests; this young girl, who,
like certain birds made victims of the price put upon them, was
now lured and trapped by proofs of friendship of which she was the
dupe,--all these things contributed to make the scene a melancholy
comedy. Is it not, moreover, a drama of all times and all places, though
here brought down to its simplest expression? The figure of Grandet,
playing his own game with the false friendship of the two families and
getting enormous profits from it, dominates the scene and throws
light upon it. The modern god,--the only god in whom faith is
preserved,--money, is here, in all its power, manifested in a single
countenance. The tender sentiments of life hold here but a secondary
place; only the three pure, simple hearts of Nanon, of Eugenie, and of
her mother were inspired by them. And how much of ignorance there was in
the simplicity of these poor women! Eugenie and her mother knew nothing
of Grandet’s wealth; they could only estimate the things of life by the
glimmer of their pale ideas, and they neither valued nor despised money,
because they were accustomed to do without it. Their feelings, bruised,
though they did not know it, but ever-living, were the secret spring of
their existence, and made them curious exceptions in the midst of these
other people whose lives were purely material. Frightful condition of
the human race! there is no one of its joys that does not come from some
species of ignorance.

At the moment when Madame Grandet had won a loto of sixteen sous,--the
largest ever pooled in that house,--and while la Grande Nanon was
laughing with delight as she watched madame pocketing her riches, the
knocker resounded on the house-door with such a noise that the women all
jumped in their chairs.

“There is no man in Saumur who would knock like that,” said the notary.

“How can they bang in that way!” exclaimed Nanon; “do they want to break
in the door?”

“Who the devil is it?” cried Grandet.




III

Nanon took one of the candles and went to open the door, followed by her
master.

“Grandet! Grandet!” cried his wife, moved by a sudden impulse of fear,
and running to the door of the room.

All the players looked at each other.

“Suppose we all go?” said Monsieur des Grassins; “that knock strikes me
as evil-intentioned.”

Hardly was Monsieur des Grassins allowed to see the figure of a young
man, accompanied by a porter from the coach-office carrying two large
trunks and dragging a carpet-bag after him, than Monsieur Grandet turned
roughly on his wife and said,--

“Madame Grandet, go back to your loto; leave me to speak with monsieur.”

Then he pulled the door quickly to, and the excited players returned to
their seats, but did not continue the game.

“Is it any one belonging to Saumur, Monsieur des Grassins?” asked his
wife.

“No, it is a traveller.”

“He must have come from Paris.”

“Just so,” said the notary, pulling out his watch, which was two inches
thick and looked like a Dutch man-of-war; “it’s nine o’clock; the
diligence of the Grand Bureau is never late.”

“Is the gentleman young?” inquired the Abbe Cruchot.

“Yes,” answered Monsieur des Grassins, “and he has brought luggage which
must weigh nearly three tons.”

“Nanon does not come back,” said Eugenie.

“It must be one of your relations,” remarked the president.

“Let us go on with our game,” said Madame Grandet gently. “I know from
Monsieur Grandet’s tone of voice that he is annoyed; perhaps he would
not like to find us talking of his affairs.”

“Mademoiselle,” said Adolphe to his neighbor, “it is no doubt your
cousin Grandet,--a very good-looking young man; I met him at the ball of
Monsieur de Nucingen.” Adolphe did not go on, for his mother trod on his
toes; and then, asking him aloud for two sous to put on her stake, she
whispered: “Will you hold your tongue, you great goose!”

At this moment Grandet returned, without la Grande Nanon, whose steps,
together with those of the porter, echoed up the staircase; and he was
followed by the traveller who had excited such curiosity and so filled
the lively imaginations of those present that his arrival at this
dwelling, and his sudden fall into the midst of this assembly, can only
be likened to that of a snail into a beehive, or the introduction of a
peacock into some village poultry-yard.

“Sit down near the fire,” said Grandet.

Before seating himself, the young stranger saluted the assembled company
very gracefully. The men rose to answer by a courteous inclination, and
the women made a ceremonious bow.

“You are cold, no doubt, monsieur,” said Madame Grandet; “you have,
perhaps, travelled from--”

“Just like all women!” said the old wine-grower, looking up from a
letter he was reading. “Do let monsieur rest himself!”

“But, father, perhaps monsieur would like to take something,” said
Eugenie.

“He has got a tongue,” said the old man sternly.

The stranger was the only person surprised by this scene; all the others
were well-used to the despotic ways of the master. However, after the
two questions and the two replies had been exchanged, the newcomer rose,
turned his back towards the fire, lifted one foot so as to warm the sole
of its boot, and said to Eugenie,--

“Thank you, my cousin, but I dined at Tours. And,” he added, looking at
Grandet, “I need nothing; I am not even tired.”

“Monsieur has come from the capital?” asked Madame des Grassins.

Monsieur Charles,--such was the name of the son of Monsieur Grandet of
Paris,--hearing himself addressed, took a little eye-glass, suspended by
a chain from his neck, applied it to his right eye to examine what was
on the table, and also the persons sitting round it. He ogled Madame des
Grassins with much impertinence, and said to her, after he had observed
all he wished,--

“Yes, madame. You are playing at loto, aunt,” he added. “Do not let me
interrupt you, I beg; go on with your game: it is too amusing to leave.”

“I was certain it was the cousin,” thought Madame des Grassins, casting
repeated glances at him.

“Forty-seven!” cried the old abbe. “Mark it down, Madame des Grassins.
Isn’t that your number?”

Monsieur des Grassins put a counter on his wife’s card, who sat watching
first the cousin from Paris and then Eugenie, without thinking of her
loto, a prey to mournful presentiments. From time to time the young
heiress glanced furtively at her cousin, and the banker’s wife easily
detected a _crescendo_ of surprise and curiosity in her mind.

Monsieur Charles Grandet, a handsome young man of twenty-two, presented
at this moment a singular contrast to the worthy provincials, who,
considerably disgusted by his aristocratic manners, were all studying
him with sarcastic intent. This needs an explanation. At twenty-two,
young people are still so near childhood that they often conduct
themselves childishly. In all probability, out of every hundred of
them fully ninety-nine would have behaved precisely as Monsieur Charles
Grandet was now behaving.

Some days earlier than this his father had told him to go and spend
several months with his uncle at Saumur. Perhaps Monsieur Grandet was
thinking of Eugenie. Charles, sent for the first time in his life into
the provinces, took a fancy to make his appearance with the superiority
of a man of fashion, to reduce the whole arrondissement to despair by
his luxury, and to make his visit an epoch, importing into those country
regions all the refinements of Parisian life. In short, to explain it in
one word, he mean to pass more time at Saumur in brushing his nails than
he ever thought of doing in Paris, and to assume the extra nicety and
elegance of dress which a young man of fashion often lays aside for
a certain negligence which in itself is not devoid of grace. Charles
therefore brought with him a complete hunting-costume, the finest gun,
the best hunting-knife in the prettiest sheath to be found in all
Paris. He brought his whole collection of waistcoats. They were of all
kinds,--gray, black, white, scarabaeus-colored: some were shot with
gold, some spangled, some _chined_; some were double-breasted and
crossed like a shawl, others were straight in the collar; some had
turned-over collars, some buttoned up to the top with gilt buttons. He
brought every variety of collar and cravat in fashion at that epoch. He
brought two of Buisson’s coats and all his finest linen He brought his
pretty gold toilet-set,--a present from his mother. He brought all his
dandy knick-knacks, not forgetting a ravishing little desk presented to
him by the most amiable of women,--amiable for him, at least,--a fine
lady whom he called Annette and who at this moment was travelling,
matrimonially and wearily, in Scotland, a victim to certain suspicions
which required a passing sacrifice of happiness; in the desk was much
pretty note-paper on which to write to her once a fortnight.

In short, it was as complete a cargo of Parisian frivolities as it was
possible for him to get together,--a collection of all the implements
of husbandry with which the youth of leisure tills his life, from
the little whip which helps to begin a duel, to the handsomely chased
pistols which end it. His father having told him to travel alone and
modestly, he had taken the coupe of the diligence all to himself, rather
pleased at not having to damage a delightful travelling-carriage ordered
for a journey on which he was to meet his Annette, the great lady
who, etc.,--whom he intended to rejoin at Baden in the following June.
Charles expected to meet scores of people at his uncle’s house, to hunt
in his uncle’s forests,--to live, in short, the usual chateau life; he
did not know that his uncle was in Saumur, and had only inquired about
him incidentally when asking the way to Froidfond. Hearing that he was
in town, he supposed that he should find him in a suitable mansion.

In order that he might make a becoming first appearance before his
uncle either at Saumur or at Froidfond, he had put on his most elegant
travelling attire, simple yet exquisite,--“adorable,” to use the word
which in those days summed up the special perfections of a man or a
thing. At Tours a hairdresser had re-curled his beautiful chestnut
locks; there he changed his linen and put on a black satin cravat,
which, combined with a round shirt-collar, framed his fair and smiling
countenance agreeably. A travelling great-coat, only half buttoned up,
nipped in his waist and disclosed a cashmere waistcoat crossed in
front, beneath which was another waistcoat of white material. His watch,
negligently slipped into a pocket, was fastened by a short gold chain to
a buttonhole. His gray trousers, buttoned up at the sides, were set
off at the seams with patterns of black silk embroidery. He gracefully
twirled a cane, whose chased gold knob did not mar the freshness of his
gray gloves. And to complete all, his cap was in excellent taste. None
but a Parisian, and a Parisian of the upper spheres, could thus array
himself without appearing ridiculous; none other could give the harmony
of self-conceit to all these fopperies, which were carried off, however,
with a dashing air,--the air of a young man who has fine pistols, a sure
aim, and Annette.

Now if you wish to understand the mutual amazement of the provincial
party and the young Parisian; if you would clearly see the brilliance
which the traveller’s elegance cast among the gray shadows of the room
and upon the faces of this family group,--endeavor to picture to your
minds the Cruchots. All three took snuff, and had long ceased to repress
the habit of snivelling or to remove the brown blotches which strewed
the frills of their dingy shirts and the yellowing creases of their
crumpled collars. Their flabby cravats were twisted into ropes as soon
as they wound them about their throats. The enormous quantity of linen
which allowed these people to have their clothing washed only once
in six months, and to keep it during that time in the depths of their
closets, also enabled time to lay its grimy and decaying stains upon
it. There was perfect unison of ill-grace and senility about them; their
faces, as faded as their threadbare coats, as creased as their trousers,
were worn-out, shrivelled-up, and puckered. As for the others, the
general negligence of their dress, which was incomplete and wanting
in freshness,--like the toilet of all country places, where insensibly
people cease to dress for others and come to think seriously of the
price of a pair of gloves,--was in keeping with the negligence of
the Cruchots. A horror of fashion was the only point on which the
Grassinists and the Cruchotines agreed.

When the Parisian took up his eye-glass to examine the strange
accessories of this dwelling,--the joists of the ceiling, the color
of the woodwork, and the specks which the flies had left there in
sufficient number to punctuate the “Moniteur” and the “Encyclopaedia of
Sciences,”--the loto-players lifted their noses and looked at him with
as much curiosity as they might have felt about a giraffe. Monsieur des
Grassins and his son, to whom the appearance of a man of fashion was not
wholly unknown, were nevertheless as much astonished as their neighbors,
whether it was that they fell under the indefinable influence of the
general feeling, or that they really shared it as with satirical glances
they seemed to say to their compatriots,--

“That is what you see in Paris!”

They were able to examine Charles at their leisure without fearing to
displease the master of the house. Grandet was absorbed in the long
letter which he held in his hand; and to read it he had taken the
only candle upon the card-table, paying no heed to his guests or their
pleasure. Eugenie, to whom such a type of perfection, whether of dress
or of person, was absolutely unknown, thought she beheld in her cousin
a being descended from seraphic spheres. She inhaled with delight the
fragrance wafted from the graceful curls of that brilliant head. She
would have liked to touch the soft kid of the delicate gloves. She
envied Charles his small hands, his complexion, the freshness and
refinement of his features. In short,--if it is possible to sum up
the effect this elegant being produced upon an ignorant young girl
perpetually employed in darning stockings or in mending her father’s
clothes, and whose life flowed on beneath these unclean rafters, seeing
none but occasional passers along the silent street,--this vision of
her cousin roused in her soul an emotion of delicate desire like that
inspired in a young man by the fanciful pictures of women drawn by
Westall for the English “Keepsakes,” and that engraved by the Findens
with so clever a tool that we fear, as we breathe upon the paper, that
the celestial apparitions may be wafted away. Charles drew from his
pocket a handkerchief embroidered by the great lady now travelling in
Scotland. As Eugenie saw this pretty piece of work, done in the vacant
hours which were lost to love, she looked at her cousin to see if it
were possible that he meant to make use of it. The manners of the
young man, his gestures, the way in which he took up his eye-glass, his
affected superciliousness, his contemptuous glance at the coffer which
had just given so much pleasure to the rich heiress, and which he
evidently regarded as without value, or even as ridiculous,--all these
things, which shocked the Cruchots and the des Grassins, pleased Eugenie
so deeply that before she slept she dreamed long dreams of her phoenix
cousin.

The loto-numbers were drawn very slowly, and presently the game came
suddenly to an end. La Grand Nanon entered and said aloud: “Madame, I
want the sheets for monsieur’s bed.”

Madame Grandet followed her out. Madame des Grassins said in a low
voice: “Let us keep our sous and stop playing.” Each took his or her two
sous from the chipped saucer in which they had been put; then the party
moved in a body toward the fire.

“Have you finished your game?” said Grandet, without looking up from his
letter.

“Yes, yes!” replied Madame des Grassins, taking a seat near Charles.

Eugenie, prompted by a thought often born in the heart of a young girl
when sentiment enters it for the first time, left the room to go and
help her mother and Nanon. Had an able confessor then questioned her
she would, no doubt, have avowed to him that she thought neither of her
mother nor of Nanon, but was pricked by a poignant desire to look after
her cousin’s room and concern herself with her cousin; to supply what
might be needed, to remedy any forgetfulness, to see that all was done
to make it, as far as possible, suitable and elegant; and, in fact, she
arrived in time to prove to her mother and Nanon that everything still
remained to be done. She put into Nanon’s head the notion of passing a
warming-pan between the sheets. She herself covered the old table with a
cloth and requested Nanon to change it every morning; she convinced her
mother that it was necessary to light a good fire, and persuaded Nanon
to bring up a great pile of wood into the corridor without saying
anything to her father. She ran to get, from one of the corner-shelves
of the hall, a tray of old lacquer which was part of the inheritance
of the late Monsieur de la Bertelliere, catching up at the same time
a six-sided crystal goblet, a little tarnished gilt spoon, an antique
flask engraved with cupids, all of which she put triumphantly on the
corner of her cousin’s chimney-piece. More ideas surged through her head
in one quarter of an hour than she had ever had since she came into the
world.

“Mamma,” she said, “my cousin will never bear the smell of a tallow
candle; suppose we buy a wax one?” And she darted, swift as a bird, to
get the five-franc piece which she had just received for her monthly
expenses. “Here, Nanon,” she cried, “quick!”

“What will your father say?” This terrible remonstrance was uttered
by Madame Grandet as she beheld her daughter armed with an old
Sevres sugar-basin which Grandet had brought home from the chateau of
Froidfond. “And where will you get the sugar? Are you crazy?”

“Mamma, Nanon can buy some sugar as well as the candle.”

“But your father?”

“Surely his nephew ought not to go without a glass of _eau sucree_?
Besides, he will not notice it.”

“Your father sees everything,” said Madame Grandet, shaking her head.

Nanon hesitated; she knew her master.

“Come, Nanon, go,--because it is my birthday.”

Nanon gave a loud laugh as she heard the first little jest her young
mistress had ever made, and then obeyed her.

While Eugenie and her mother were trying to embellish the bedroom
assigned by Monsieur Grandet for his nephew, Charles himself was the
object of Madame des Grassins’ attentions; to all appearances she was
setting her cap at him.

“You are very courageous, monsieur,” she said to the young dandy, “to
leave the pleasures of the capital at this season and take up your abode
in Saumur. But if we do not frighten you away, you will find there are
some amusements even here.”

She threw him the ogling glance of the provinces, where women put so
much prudence and reserve into their eyes that they impart to them the
prudish concupiscence peculiar to certain ecclesiastics to whom all
pleasure is either a theft or an error. Charles was so completely out
of his element in this abode, and so far from the vast chateau and the
sumptuous life with which his fancy had endowed his uncle, that as he
looked at Madame des Grassins he perceived a dim likeness to Parisian
faces. He gracefully responded to the species of invitation addressed
to him, and began very naturally a conversation, in which Madame des
Grassins gradually lowered her voice so as to bring it into harmony with
the nature of the confidences she was making. With her, as with Charles,
there was the need of conference; so after a few moments spent in
coquettish phrases and a little serious jesting, the clever provincial
said, thinking herself unheard by the others, who were discussing the
sale of wines which at that season filled the heads of every one in
Saumur,--

“Monsieur if you will do us the honor to come and see us, you will give
as much pleasure to my husband as to myself. Our salon is the only one
in Saumur where you will find the higher business circles mingling with
the nobility. We belong to both societies, who meet at our house simply
because they find it amusing. My husband--I say it with pride--is as
much valued by the one class as by the other. We will try to relieve
the monotony of your visit here. If you stay all the time with Monsieur
Grandet, good heavens! what will become of you? Your uncle is a sordid
miser who thinks of nothing but his vines; your aunt is a pious soul who
can’t put two ideas together; and your cousin is a little fool, without
education, perfectly common, no fortune, who will spend her life in
darning towels.”

“She is really very nice, this woman,” thought Charles Grandet as he
duly responded to Madame des Grassins’ coquetries.

“It seems to me, wife, that you are taking possession of monsieur,” said
the stout banker, laughing.

On this remark the notary and the president said a few words that were
more or less significant; but the abbe, looking at them slyly, brought
their thoughts to a focus by taking a pinch of snuff and saying as
he handed round his snuff-box: “Who can do the honors of Saumur for
monsieur so well as madame?”

“Ah! what do you mean by that, monsieur l’abbe?” demanded Monsieur des
Grassins.

“I mean it in the best possible sense for you, for madame, for the town
of Saumur, and for monsieur,” said the wily old man, turning to Charles.

The Abbe Cruchot had guessed the conversation between Charles and Madame
des Grassins without seeming to pay attention to it.

“Monsieur,” said Adolphe to Charles with an air which he tried to make
free and easy, “I don’t know whether you remember me, but I had the
honor of dancing as your _vis-a-vis_ at a ball given by the Baron de
Nucingen, and--”

“Perfectly; I remember perfectly, monsieur,” answered Charles, pleased
to find himself the object of general attention.

“Monsieur is your son?” he said to Madame des Grassins.

The abbe looked at her maliciously.

“Yes, monsieur,” she answered.

“Then you were very young when you were in Paris?” said Charles,
addressing Adolphe.

“You must know, monsieur,” said the abbe, “that we send them to Babylon
as soon as they are weaned.”

Madame des Grassins examined the abbe with a glance of extreme
penetration.

“It is only in the provinces,” he continued, “that you will find women
of thirty and more years as fresh as madame, here, with a son about to
take his degree. I almost fancy myself back in the days when the young
men stood on chairs in the ball-room to see you dance, madame,” said the
abbe, turning to his female adversary. “To me, your triumphs are but of
yesterday--”

“The old rogue!” thought Madame Grassins; “can he have guessed my
intentions?”

“It seems that I shall have a good deal of success in Saumur,” thought
Charles as he unbuttoned his great-coat, put a hand into his waistcoat,
and cast a glance into the far distance, to imitate the attitude which
Chantrey has given to Lord Byron.

The inattention of Pere Grandet, or, to speak more truly, the
preoccupation of mind into which the reading of the letter had plunged
him, did not escape the vigilance of the notary and the president, who
tried to guess the contents of the letter by the almost imperceptible
motions of the miser’s face, which was then under the full light of the
candle. He maintained the habitual calm of his features with evident
difficulty; we may, in fact, picture to ourselves the countenance such
a man endeavored to preserve as he read the fatal letter which here
follows:--

  My Brother,--It is almost twenty-three years since we have seen
  each other. My marriage was the occasion of our last interview,
  after which we parted, and both of us were happy. Assuredly I
  could not then foresee that you would one day be the prop of the
  family whose prosperity you then predicted.

  When you hold this letter within your hands I shall be no longer
  living. In the position I now hold I cannot survive the disgrace
  of bankruptcy. I have waited on the edge of the gulf until the
  last moment, hoping to save myself. The end has come, I must sink
  into it. The double bankruptcies of my broker and of Roguin, my
  notary, have carried off my last resources and left me nothing. I
  have the bitterness of owing nearly four millions, with assets not
  more than twenty-five per cent in value to pay them. The wines in
  my warehouses suffer from the fall in prices caused by the
  abundance and quality of your vintage. In three days Paris will
  cry out: “Monsieur Grandet was a knave!” and I, an honest man,
  shall be lying in my winding-sheet of infamy. I deprive my son of
  a good name, which I have stained, and the fortune of his mother,
  which I have lost. He knows nothing of all this,--my unfortunate
  child whom I idolize! We parted tenderly. He was ignorant,
  happily, that the last beatings of my heart were spent in that
  farewell. Will he not some day curse me? My brother, my brother!
  the curses of our children are horrible; they can appeal against
  ours, but theirs are irrevocable. Grandet, you are my elder
  brother, you owe me your protection; act for me so that Charles
  may cast no bitter words upon my grave! My brother, if I were
  writing with my blood, with my tears, no greater anguish could I
  put into this letter,--nor as great, for then I should weep, I
  should bleed, I should die, I should suffer no more, but now I
  suffer and look at death with dry eyes.

  From henceforth you are my son’s father; he has no relations, as
  you well know, on his mother’s side. Why did I not consider social
  prejudices? Why did I yield to love? Why did I marry the natural
  daughter of a great lord? Charles has no family. Oh, my unhappy
  son! my son! Listen, Grandet! I implore nothing for myself,
  --besides, your property may not be large enough to carry a mortgage
  of three millions,--but for my son! Brother, my suppliant hands
  are clasped as I think of you; behold them! Grandet, I confide my
  son to you in dying, and I look at the means of death with less
  pain as I think that you will be to him a father. He loved me
  well, my Charles; I was good to him, I never thwarted him; he will
  not curse me. Ah, you see! he is gentle, he is like his mother, he
  will cause you no grief. Poor boy! accustomed to all the
  enjoyments of luxury, he knows nothing of the privations to which
  you and I were condemned by the poverty of our youth. And I leave
  him ruined! alone! Yes, all my friends will avoid him, and it is I
  who have brought this humiliation upon him! Would that I had the
  force to send him with one thrust into the heavens to his mother’s
  side! Madness! I come back to my disaster--to his. I send him to
  you that you may tell him in some fitting way of my death, of his
  future fate. Be a father to him, but a good father. Do not tear
  him all at once from his idle life, it would kill him. I beg him
  on my knees to renounce all rights that, as his mother’s heir, he
  may have on my estate. But the prayer is superfluous; he is
  honorable, and he will feel that he must not appear among my
  creditors. Bring him to see this at the right time; reveal to him
  the hard conditions of the life I have made for him: and if he
  still has tender thoughts of me, tell him in my name that all is
  not lost for him. Yes, work, labor, which saved us both, may give
  him back the fortune of which I have deprived him; and if he
  listens to his father’s voice as it reaches him from the grave, he
  will go the Indies. My brother, Charles is an upright and
  courageous young man; give him the wherewithal to make his
  venture; he will die sooner than not repay you the funds which you
  may lend him. Grandet! if you will not do this, you will lay up
  for yourself remorse. Ah, should my child find neither tenderness
  nor succor in you, I would call down the vengeance of God upon
  your cruelty!

  If I had been able to save something from the wreck, I might have
  had the right to leave him at least a portion of his mother’s
  property; but my last monthly payments have absorbed everything. I
  did not wish to die uncertain of my child’s fate; I hoped to feel
  a sacred promise in a clasp of your hand which might have warmed
  my heart: but time fails me. While Charles is journeying to you I
  shall be preparing my assignment. I shall endeavor to show by the
  order and good faith of my accounts that my disaster comes neither
  from a faulty life nor from dishonesty. It is for my son’s sake
  that I strive to do this.

  Farewell, my brother! May the blessing of God be yours for the
  generous guardianship I lay upon you, and which, I doubt not, you
  will accept. A voice will henceforth and forever pray for you in
  that world where we must all go, and where I am now as you read
  these lines.

Victor-Ange-Guillaume Grandet.


“So you are talking?” said Pere Grandet as he carefully folded the
letter in its original creases and put it into his waistcoat-pocket. He
looked at his nephew with a humble, timid air, beneath which he hid his
feelings and his calculations. “Have you warmed yourself?” he said to
him.

“Thoroughly, my dear uncle.”

“Well, where are the women?” said his uncle, already forgetting that
his nephew was to sleep at the house. At this moment Eugenie and Madame
Grandet returned.

“Is the room all ready?” said Grandet, recovering his composure.

“Yes, father.”

“Well then, my nephew, if you are tired, Nanon shall show you your room.
It isn’t a dandy’s room; but you will excuse a poor wine-grower who
never has a penny to spare. Taxes swallow up everything.”

“We do not wish to intrude, Grandet,” said the banker; “you may want to
talk to your nephew, and therefore we will bid you good-night.”

At these words the assembly rose, and each made a parting bow in keeping
with his or her own character. The old notary went to the door to fetch
his lantern and came back to light it, offering to accompany the des
Grassins on their way. Madame des Grassins had not foreseen the incident
which brought the evening prematurely to an end, her servant therefore
had not arrived.

“Will you do me the honor to take my arm, madame?” said the abbe.

“Thank you, monsieur l’abbe, but I have my son,” she answered dryly.

“Ladies cannot compromise themselves with me,” said the abbe.

“Take Monsieur Cruchot’s arm,” said her husband.

The abbe walked off with the pretty lady so quickly that they were soon
some distance in advance of the caravan.

“That is a good-looking young man, madame,” he said, pressing her arm.
“Good-by to the grapes, the vintage is done. It is all over with us. We
may as well say adieu to Mademoiselle Grandet. Eugenie will belong to
the dandy. Unless this cousin is enamoured of some Parisian woman, your
son Adolphe will find another rival in--”

“Not at all, monsieur l’abbe. This young man cannot fail to see that
Eugenie is a little fool,--a girl without the least freshness. Did you
notice her to-night? She was as yellow as a quince.”

“Perhaps you made the cousin notice it?”

“I did not take the trouble--”

“Place yourself always beside Eugenie, madame, and you need never take
the trouble to say anything to the young man against his cousin; he will
make his own comparisons, which--”

“Well, he has promised to dine with me the day after to-morrow.”

“Ah! if you only _would_, madame--” said the abbe.

“What is it that you wish me to do, monsieur l’abbe? Do you mean to
offer me bad advice? I have not reached the age of thirty-nine, without
a stain upon my reputation, thank God! to compromise myself now, even
for the empire of the Great Mogul. You and I are of an age when we both
know the meaning of words. For an ecclesiastic, you certainly have ideas
that are very incongruous. Fie! it is worthy of Faublas!”

“You have read Faublas?”

“No, monsieur l’abbe; I meant to say the _Liaisons dangereuses_.”

“Ah! that book is infinitely more moral,” said the abbe, laughing. “But
you make me out as wicked as a young man of the present day; I only
meant--”

“Do you dare to tell me you were not thinking of putting wicked things
into my head? Isn’t it perfectly clear? If this young man--who I admit
is very good-looking--were to make love to me, he would not think of his
cousin. In Paris, I know, good mothers do devote themselves in this
way to the happiness and welfare of their children; but we live in the
provinces, monsieur l’abbe.”

“Yes, madame.”

“And,” she continued, “I do not want, and Adolphe himself would not
want, a hundred millions brought at such a price.”

“Madame, I said nothing about a hundred millions; that temptation might
be too great for either of us to withstand. Only, I do think that an
honest woman may permit herself, in all honor, certain harmless little
coquetries, which are, in fact, part of her social duty and which--”

“Do you think so?”

“Are we not bound, madame, to make ourselves agreeable to each
other?--Permit me to blow my nose.--I assure you, madame,” he resumed,
“that the young gentleman ogled you through his glass in a more
flattering manner than he put on when he looked at me; but I forgive him
for doing homage to beauty in preference to old age--”

“It is quite apparent,” said the president in his loud voice, “that
Monsieur Grandet of Paris has sent his son to Saumur with extremely
matrimonial intentions.”

“But in that case the cousin wouldn’t have fallen among us like a
cannon-ball,” answered the notary.

“That doesn’t prove anything,” said Monsieur des Grassins; “the old
miser is always making mysteries.”

“Des Grassins, my friend, I have invited the young man to dinner. You
must go and ask Monsieur and Madame de Larsonniere and the du Hautoys,
with the beautiful demoiselle du Hautoy, of course. I hope she will be
properly dressed; that jealous mother of hers does make such a fright of
her! Gentlemen, I trust that you will all do us the honor to come,” she
added, stopping the procession to address the two Cruchots.

“Here you are at home, madame,” said the notary.

After bowing to the three des Grassins, the three Cruchots returned
home, applying their provincial genius for analysis to studying, under
all its aspects, the great event of the evening, which undoubtedly
changed the respective positions of Grassinists and Cruchotines. The
admirable common-sense which guided all the actions of these great
machinators made each side feel the necessity of a momentary alliance
against a common enemy. Must they not mutually hinder Eugenie from
loving her cousin, and the cousin from thinking of Eugenie? Could the
Parisian resist the influence of treacherous insinuations, soft-spoken
calumnies, slanders full of faint praise and artless denials, which
should be made to circle incessantly about him and deceive him?




IV

When the four relations were left alone, Monsieur Grandet said to his
nephew,--

“We must go to bed. It is too late to talk about the matters which have
brought you here; to-morrow we will take a suitable moment. We breakfast
at eight o’clock; at midday we eat a little fruit or a bit of bread, and
drink a glass of white wine; and we dine, like the Parisians, at five
o’clock. That’s the order of the day. If you like to go and see the
town and the environs you are free to do so. You will excuse me if my
occupations do not permit me to accompany you. You may perhaps hear
people say that I am rich,--Monsieur Grandet this, Monsieur Grandet
that. I let them talk; their gossip does not hurt my credit. But I have
not a penny; I work in my old age like an apprentice whose worldly goods
are a bad plane and two good arms. Perhaps you’ll soon know yourself
what a franc costs when you have got to sweat for it. Nanon, where are
the candles?”

“I trust, my nephew, that you will find all you want,” said Madame
Grandet; “but if you should need anything else, you can call Nanon.”

“My dear aunt, I shall need nothing; I have, I believe, brought
everything with me. Permit me to bid you good-night, and my young cousin
also.”

Charles took a lighted wax candle from Nanon’s hand,--an Anjou candle,
very yellow in color, and so shopworn that it looked like tallow and
deceived Monsieur Grandet, who, incapable of suspecting its presence
under his roof, did not perceive this magnificence.

“I will show you the way,” he said.

Instead of leaving the hall by the door which opened under the archway,
Grandet ceremoniously went through the passage which divided the hall
from the kitchen. A swing-door, furnished with a large oval pane of
glass, shut this passage from the staircase, so as to fend off the cold
air which rushed through it. But the north wind whistled none the less
keenly in winter, and, in spite of the sand-bags at the bottom of the
doors of the living-room, the temperature within could scarcely be kept
at a proper height. Nanon went to bolt the outer door; then she closed
the hall and let loose a wolf-dog, whose bark was so strangled that
he seemed to have laryngitis. This animal, noted for his ferocity,
recognized no one but Nanon; the two untutored children of the fields
understood each other.

When Charles saw the yellow, smoke-stained walls of the well of the
staircase, where each worm-eaten step shook under the heavy foot-fall
of his uncle, his expectations began to sober more and more. He fancied
himself in a hen-roost. His aunt and cousin, to whom he turned an
inquiring look, were so used to the staircase that they did not guess
the cause of his amazement, and took the glance for an expression of
friendliness, which they answered by a smile that made him desperate.

“Why the devil did my father send me to such a place?” he said to
himself.

When they reached the first landing he saw three doors painted in
Etruscan red and without casings,--doors sunk in the dusty walls and
provided with iron bars, which in fact were bolts, each ending with the
pattern of a flame, as did both ends of the long sheath of the lock.
The first door at the top of the staircase, which opened into a room
directly above the kitchen, was evidently walled up. In fact, the only
entrance to that room was through Grandet’s bedchamber; the room itself
was his office. The single window which lighted it, on the side of the
court, was protected by a lattice of strong iron bars. No one, not even
Madame Grandet, had permission to enter it. The old man chose to be
alone, like an alchemist in his laboratory. There, no doubt, some
hiding-place had been ingeniously constructed; there the title-deeds of
property were stored; there hung the scales on which to weigh the louis;
there were devised, by night and secretly, the estimates, the profits,
the receipts, so that business men, finding Grandet prepared at all
points, imagined that he got his cue from fairies or demons; there, no
doubt, while Nanon’s loud snoring shook the rafters, while the wolf-dog
watched and yawned in the courtyard, while Madame and Mademoiselle
Grandet were quietly sleeping, came the old cooper to cuddle, to con
over, to caress and clutch and clasp his gold. The walls were thick, the
screens sure. He alone had the key of this laboratory, where--so people
declared--he studied the maps on which his fruit-trees were marked, and
calculated his profits to a vine, and almost to a twig.

The door of Eugenie’s chamber was opposite to the walled-up entrance to
this room. At the other end of the landing were the appartements of
the married pair, which occupied the whole front of the house. Madame
Grandet had a room next to that of Eugenie, which was entered through a
glass door. The master’s chamber was separated from that of his wife by
a partition, and from the mysterious strong-room by a thick wall. Pere
Grandet lodged his nephew on the second floor, in the high mansarde
attic which was above his own bedroom, so that he might hear him if the
young man took it into his head to go and come. When Eugenie and her
mother reached the middle of the landing they kissed each other for
good-night; then with a few words of adieu to Charles, cold upon the
lips, but certainly very warm in the heart of the young girl, they
withdrew into their own chambers.

“Here you are in your room, my nephew,” said Pere Grandet as he opened
the door. “If you need to go out, call Nanon; without her, beware! the
dog would eat you up without a word. Sleep well. Good-night. Ha! why,
they have made you a fire!” he cried.

At this moment Nanon appeared with the warming pan.

“Here’s something more!” said Monsieur Grandet. “Do you take my nephew
for a lying-in woman? Carry off your brazier, Nanon!”

“But, monsieur, the sheets are damp, and this gentleman is as delicate
as a woman.”

“Well, go on, as you’ve taken it into your head,” said Grandet, pushing
her by the shoulders; “but don’t set things on fire.” So saying, the
miser went down-stairs, grumbling indistinct sentences.

Charles stood aghast in the midst of his trunks. After casting his
eyes on the attic-walls covered with that yellow paper sprinkled with
bouquets so well known in dance-houses, on the fireplace of ribbed
stone whose very look was chilling, on the chairs of yellow wood with
varnished cane seats that seemed to have more than the usual four
angles, on the open night-table capacious enough to hold a small
sergeant-at-arms, on the meagre bit of rag-carpet beside the bed, on the
tester whose cloth valance shook as if, devoured by moths, it was about
to fall, he turned gravely to la Grande Nanon and said,--

“Look here! my dear woman, just tell me, am I in the house of Monsieur
Grandet, formerly mayor of Saumur, and brother to Monsieur Grandet of
Paris?”

“Yes, monsieur; and a very good, a very kind, a very perfect gentleman.
Shall I help you to unpack your trunks?”

“Faith! yes, if you will, my old trooper. Didn’t you serve in the
marines of the Imperial Guard?”

“Ho, ho, ho!” laughed Nanon. “What’s that,--the marines of the guard? Is
it salt? Does it go in the water?”

“Here, get me my dressing-gown out of that valise; there’s the key.”

Nanon was wonder-struck by the sight of a dressing-gown made of green
silk, brocaded with gold flowers of an antique design.

“Are you going to put that on to go to bed with?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Holy Virgin! what a beautiful altar-cloth it would make for the parish
church! My dear darling monsieur, give it to the church, and you’ll save
your soul; if you don’t, you’ll lose it. Oh, how nice you look in it! I
must call mademoiselle to see you.”

“Come, Nanon, if Nanon you are, hold your tongue; let me go to bed. I’ll
arrange my things to-morrow. If my dressing-gown pleases you so much,
you shall save your soul. I’m too good a Christian not to give it to you
when I go away, and you can do what you like with it.”

Nanon stood rooted to the ground, gazing at Charles and unable to put
faith into his words.

“Good night, Nanon.”

“What in the world have I come here for?” thought Charles as he went
to sleep. “My father is not a fool; my journey must have some object.
Pshaw! put off serious thought till the morrow, as some Greek idiot
said.”

“Blessed Virgin! how charming he is, my cousin!” Eugenie was saying,
interrupting her prayers, which that night at least were never finished.

Madame Grandet had no thoughts at all as she went to bed. She heard the
miser walking up and down his room through the door of communication
which was in the middle of the partition. Like all timid women, she
had studied the character of her lord. Just as the petrel foresees the
storm, she knew by imperceptible signs when an inward tempest shook
her husband; and at such times, to use an expression of her own, she
“feigned dead.”

Grandet gazed at the door lined with sheet-iron which he lately put to
his sanctum, and said to himself,--

“What a crazy idea of my brother to bequeath his son to me! A fine
legacy! I have not fifty francs to give him. What are fifty francs to a
dandy who looked at my barometer as if he meant to make firewood of it!”

In thinking over the consequences of that legacy of anguish Grandet was
perhaps more agitated than his brother had been at the moment of writing
it.

“I shall have that golden robe,” thought Nanon, who went to sleep
tricked out in her altar-cloth, dreaming for the first time in her life
of flowers, embroidery, and damask, just as Eugenie was dreaming of
love.

              *     *     *     *     *

In the pure and monotonous life of young girls there comes a delicious
hour when the sun sheds its rays into their soul, when the flowers
express their thoughts, when the throbbings of the heart send upward to
the brain their fertilizing warmth and melt all thoughts into a vague
desire,--day of innocent melancholy and of dulcet joys! When babes begin
to see, they smile; when a young girl first perceives the sentiment of
nature, she smiles as she smiled when an infant. If light is the first
love of life, is not love a light to the heart? The moment to see within
the veil of earthly things had come for Eugenie.

An early riser, like all provincial girls, she was up betimes and said
her prayers, and then began the business of dressing,--a business which
henceforth was to have a meaning. First she brushed and smoothed her
chestnut hair and twisted its heavy masses to the top of her head with
the utmost care, preventing the loose tresses from straying, and giving
to her head a symmetry which heightened the timid candor of her face;
for the simplicity of these accessories accorded well with the innocent
sincerity of its lines. As she washed her hands again and again in
the cold water which hardened and reddened the skin, she looked at her
handsome round arms and asked herself what her cousin did to make his
hands so softly white, his nails so delicately curved. She put on
new stockings and her prettiest shoes. She laced her corset straight,
without skipping a single eyelet. And then, wishing for the first time
in her life to appear to advantage, she felt the joy of having a new
gown, well made, which rendered her attractive.

As she finished her toilet the clock of the parish church struck the
hour; to her astonishment, it was only seven. The desire of having
plenty of time for dressing carefully had led her to get up too early.
Ignorant of the art of retouching every curl and studying every effect,
Eugenie simply crossed her arms, sat down by the window, and looked
at the court-yard, the narrow garden, and the high terraced walls that
over-topped it: a dismal, hedged-in prospect, yet not wholly devoid
of those mysterious beauties which belong to solitary or uncultivated
nature. Near the kitchen was a well surrounded by a curb, with a
pulley fastened to a bent iron rod clasped by a vine whose leaves
were withered, reddened, and shrivelled by the season. From thence the
tortuous shoots straggled to the wall, clutched it, and ran the whole
length of the house, ending near the wood-pile, where the logs were
ranged with as much precision as the books in a library. The pavement
of the court-yard showed the black stains produced in time by lichens,
herbage, and the absence of all movement or friction. The thick walls
wore a coating of green moss streaked with waving brown lines, and the
eight stone steps at the bottom of the court-yard which led up to the
gate of the garden were disjointed and hidden beneath tall plants, like
the tomb of a knight buried by his widow in the days of the Crusades.
Above a foundation of moss-grown, crumbling stones was a trellis of
rotten wood, half fallen from decay; over them clambered and intertwined
at will a mass of clustering creepers. On each side of the latticed gate
stretched the crooked arms of two stunted apple-trees. Three parallel
walks, gravelled and separated from each other by square beds, where
the earth was held in by box-borders, made the garden, which terminated,
beneath a terrace of the old walls, in a group of lindens. At the
farther end were raspberry-bushes; at the other, near the house, an
immense walnut-tree drooped its branches almost into the window of the
miser’s sanctum.

A clear day and the beautiful autumnal sun common to the banks of the
Loire was beginning to melt the hoar-frost which the night had laid on
these picturesque objects, on the walls, and on the plants which swathed
the court-yard. Eugenie found a novel charm in the aspect of things
lately so insignificant to her. A thousand confused thoughts came to
birth in her mind and grew there, as the sunbeams grew without along the
wall. She felt that impulse of delight, vague, inexplicable, which wraps
the moral being as a cloud wraps the physical body. Her thoughts were
all in keeping with the details of this strange landscape, and the
harmonies of her heart blended with the harmonies of nature. When the
sun reached an angle of the wall where the “Venus-hair” of southern
climes drooped its thick leaves, lit with the changing colors of a
pigeon’s breast, celestial rays of hope illumined the future to her
eyes, and thenceforth she loved to gaze upon that piece of wall, on its
pale flowers, its blue harebells, its wilting herbage, with which she
mingled memories as tender as those of childhood. The noise made by each
leaf as it fell from its twig in the void of that echoing court gave
answer to the secret questionings of the young girl, who could have
stayed there the livelong day without perceiving the flight of time.
Then came tumultuous heavings of the soul. She rose often, went to her
glass, and looked at herself, as an author in good faith looks at his
work to criticise it and blame it in his own mind.

“I am not beautiful enough for him!” Such was Eugenie’s thought,--a
humble thought, fertile in suffering. The poor girl did not do herself
justice; but modesty, or rather fear, is among the first of love’s
virtues. Eugenie belonged to the type of children with sturdy
constitutions, such as we see among the lesser bourgeoisie, whose
beauties always seem a little vulgar; and yet, though she resembled
the Venus of Milo, the lines of her figure were ennobled by the softer
Christian sentiment which purifies womanhood and gives it a distinction
unknown to the sculptors of antiquity. She had an enormous head, with
the masculine yet delicate forehead of the Jupiter of Phidias, and gray
eyes, to which her chaste life, penetrating fully into them, carried a
flood of light. The features of her round face, formerly fresh and rosy,
were at one time swollen by the small-pox, which destroyed the velvet
texture of the skin, though it kindly left no other traces, and her
cheek was still so soft and delicate that her mother’s kiss made a
momentary red mark upon it. Her nose was somewhat too thick, but it
harmonized well with the vermilion mouth, whose lips, creased in many
lines, were full of love and kindness. The throat was exquisitely round.
The bust, well curved and carefully covered, attracted the eye and
inspired reverie. It lacked, no doubt, the grace which a fitting dress
can bestow; but to a connoisseur the non-flexibility of her figure
had its own charm. Eugenie, tall and strongly made, had none of the
prettiness which pleases the masses; but she was beautiful with a beauty
which the spirit recognizes, and none but artists truly love. A painter
seeking here below for a type of Mary’s celestial purity, searching
womankind for those proud modest eyes which Raphael divined, for those
virgin lines, often due to chances of conception, which the modesty of
Christian life alone can bestow or keep unchanged,--such a painter, in
love with his ideal, would have found in the face of Eugenie the innate
nobleness that is ignorant of itself; he would have seen beneath the
calmness of that brow a world of love; he would have felt, in the shape
of the eyes, in the fall of the eyelids, the presence of the nameless
something that we call divine. Her features, the contour of her head,
which no expression of pleasure had ever altered or wearied, were like
the lines of the horizon softly traced in the far distance across the
tranquil lakes. That calm and rosy countenance, margined with light like
a lovely full-blown flower, rested the mind, held the eye, and imparted
the charm of the conscience that was there reflected. Eugenie was
standing on the shore of life where young illusions flower, where
daisies are gathered with delights ere long to be unknown; and thus she
said, looking at her image in the glass, unconscious as yet of love: “I
am too ugly; he will not notice me.”

Then she opened the door of her chamber which led to the staircase, and
stretched out her neck to listen for the household noises. “He is not
up,” she thought, hearing Nanon’s morning cough as the good soul went
and came, sweeping out the halls, lighting her fire, chaining the dog,
and speaking to the beasts in the stable. Eugenie at once went down and
ran to Nanon, who was milking the cow.

“Nanon, my good Nanon, make a little cream for my cousin’s breakfast.”

“Why, mademoiselle, you should have thought of that yesterday,” said
Nanon, bursting into a loud peal of laughter. “I can’t make cream. Your
cousin is a darling, a darling! oh, that he is! You should have seen
him in his dressing-gown, all silk and gold! I saw him, I did! He wears
linen as fine as the surplice of monsieur le cure.”

“Nanon, please make us a _galette_.”

“And who’ll give me wood for the oven, and flour and butter for the
cakes?” said Nanon, who in her function of prime-minister to Grandet
assumed at times enormous importance in the eyes of Eugenie and her
mother. “Mustn’t rob the master to feast the cousin. You ask him for
butter and flour and wood: he’s your father, perhaps he’ll give you
some. See! there he is now, coming to give out the provisions.”

Eugenie escaped into the garden, quite frightened as she heard the
staircase shaking under her father’s step. Already she felt the effects
of that virgin modesty and that special consciousness of happiness which
lead us to fancy, not perhaps without reason, that our thoughts are
graven on our foreheads and are open to the eyes of all. Perceiving for
the first time the cold nakedness of her father’s house, the poor
girl felt a sort of rage that she could not put it in harmony with her
cousin’s elegance. She felt the need of doing something for him,--what,
she did not know. Ingenuous and truthful, she followed her angelic
nature without mistrusting her impressions or her feelings. The mere
sight of her cousin had wakened within her the natural yearnings of a
woman,--yearnings that were the more likely to develop ardently because,
having reached her twenty-third year, she was in the plenitude of her
intelligence and her desires. For the first time in her life her heart
was full of terror at the sight of her father; in him she saw the master
of the fate, and she fancied herself guilty of wrong-doing in hiding
from his knowledge certain thoughts. She walked with hasty steps,
surprised to breathe a purer air, to feel the sun’s rays quickening her
pulses, to absorb from their heat a moral warmth and a new life. As
she turned over in her mind some stratagem by which to get the cake, a
quarrel--an event as rare as the sight of swallows in winter--broke out
between la Grande Nanon and Grandet. Armed with his keys, the master had
come to dole out provisions for the day’s consumption.

“Is there any bread left from yesterday?” he said to Nanon.

“Not a crumb, monsieur.”

Grandet took a large round loaf, well floured and moulded in one of the
flat baskets which they use for baking in Anjou, and was about to cut
it, when Nanon said to him,--

“We are five, to-day, monsieur.”

“That’s true,” said Grandet, “but your loaves weigh six pounds; there’ll
be some left. Besides, these young fellows from Paris don’t eat bread,
you’ll see.”

“Then they must eat _frippe_?” said Nanon.

_Frippe_ is a word of the local lexicon of Anjou, and means any
accompaniment of bread, from butter which is spread upon it, the
commonest kind of _frippe_, to peach preserve, the most distinguished of
all the _frippes_; those who in their childhood have licked the _frippe_
and left the bread, will comprehend the meaning of Nanon’s speech.

“No,” answered Grandet, “they eat neither bread nor _frippe_; they are
something like marriageable girls.”

After ordering the meals for the day with his usual parsimony, the
goodman, having locked the closets containing the supplies, was about to
go towards the fruit-garden, when Nanon stopped him to say,--

“Monsieur, give me a little flour and some butter, and I’ll make a
_galette_ for the young ones.”

“Are you going to pillage the house on account of my nephew?”

“I wasn’t thinking any more of your nephew than I was of your dog,--not
more than you think yourself; for, look here, you’ve only forked out six
bits of sugar. I want eight.”

“What’s all this, Nanon? I have never seen you like this before. What
have you got in your head? Are you the mistress here? You sha’n’t have
more than six pieces of sugar.”

“Well, then, how is your nephew to sweeten his coffee?”

“With two pieces; I’ll go without myself.”

“Go without sugar at your age! I’d rather buy you some out of my own
pocket.”

“Mind your own business.”

In spite of the recent fall in prices, sugar was still in Grandet’s eyes
the most valuable of all the colonial products; to him it was always
six francs a pound. The necessity of economizing it, acquired under the
Empire, had grown to be the most inveterate of his habits. All women,
even the greatest ninnies, know how to dodge and dodge to get their
ends; Nanon abandoned the sugar for the sake of getting the _galette_.

“Mademoiselle!” she called through the window, “do you want some
_galette_?”

“No, no,” answered Eugenie.

“Come, Nanon,” said Grandet, hearing his daughter’s voice. “See here.”
 He opened the cupboard where the flour was kept, gave her a cupful, and
added a few ounces of butter to the piece he had already cut off.

“I shall want wood for the oven,” said the implacable Nanon.

“Well, take what you want,” he answered sadly; “but in that case you
must make us a fruit-tart, and you’ll cook the whole dinner in the oven.
In that way you won’t need two fires.”

“Goodness!” cried Nanon, “you needn’t tell me that.”

Grandet cast a look that was well-nigh paternal upon his faithful
deputy.

“Mademoiselle,” she cried, when his back was turned, “we shall have the
_galette_.”

Pere Grandet returned from the garden with the fruit and arranged a
plateful on the kitchen-table.

“Just see, monsieur,” said Nanon, “what pretty boots your nephew has.
What leather! why it smells good! What does he clean it with, I wonder?
Am I to put your egg-polish on it?”

“Nanon, I think eggs would injure that kind of leather. Tell him you
don’t know how to black morocco; yes, that’s morocco. He will get you
something himself in Saumur to polish those boots with. I have heard
that they put sugar into the blacking to make it shine.”

“They look good to eat,” said the cook, putting the boots to her nose.
“Bless me! if they don’t smell like madame’s eau-de-cologne. Ah! how
funny!”

“Funny!” said her master. “Do you call it funny to put more money into
boots than the man who stands in them is worth?”

“Monsieur,” she said, when Grandet returned the second time, after
locking the fruit-garden, “won’t you have the _pot-au-feu_ put on once
or twice a week on account of your nephew?”

“Yes.”

“Am I to go to the butcher’s?”

“Certainly not. We will make the broth of fowls; the farmers will bring
them. I shall tell Cornoiller to shoot some crows; they make the best
soup in the world.”

“Isn’t it true, monsieur, that crows eat the dead?”

“You are a fool, Nanon. They eat what they can get, like the rest of the
world. Don’t we all live on the dead? What are legacies?”

Monsieur Grandet, having no further orders to give, drew out his watch,
and seeing that he had half an hour to dispose of before breakfast, he
took his hat, went and kissed his daughter, and said to her:

“Do you want to come for a walk in the fields, down by the Loire? I have
something to do there.”

Eugenie fetched her straw bonnet, lined with pink taffeta; then the
father and daughter went down the winding street to the shore.

“Where are you going at this early hour?” said Cruchot, the notary,
meeting them.

“To see something,” answered Grandet, not duped by the matutinal
appearance of his friend.

When Pere Grandet went to “see something,” the notary knew by experience
there was something to be got by going with him; so he went.

“Come, Cruchot,” said Grandet, “you are one of my friends. I’ll show you
what folly it is to plant poplar-trees on good ground.”

“Do you call the sixty thousand francs that you pocketed for those that
were in your fields down by the Loire, folly?” said Maitre Cruchot,
opening his eyes with amazement. “What luck you have had! To cut down
your trees at the very time they ran short of white-wood at Nantes, and
to sell them at thirty francs!”

Eugenie listened, without knowing that she approached the most solemn
moment of her whole life, and that the notary was about to bring down
upon her head a paternal and supreme sentence. Grandet had now reached
the magnificent fields which he owned on the banks of the Loire, where
thirty workmen were employed in clearing away, filling up, and levelling
the spots formerly occupied by the poplars.

“Maitre Cruchot, see how much ground this tree once took up! Jean,” he
cried to a laborer, “m-m-measure with your r-r-rule, b-both ways.”

“Four times eight feet,” said the man.

“Thirty-two feet lost,” said Grandet to Cruchot. “I had three hundred
poplars in this one line, isn’t that so? Well, then, three h-h-hundred
times thir-thirty-two lost m-m-me five hundred in h-h-hay; add twice as
much for the side rows,--fifteen hundred; the middle rows as much more.
So we may c-c-call it a th-thousand b-b-bales of h-h-hay--”

“Very good,” said Cruchot, to help out his friend; “a thousand bales are
worth about six hundred francs.”

“Say t-t-twelve hundred, be-c-cause there’s three or four hundred francs
on the second crop. Well, then, c-c-calculate that t-twelve thousand
francs a year for f-f-forty years with interest c-c-comes to--”

“Say sixty thousand francs,” said the notary.

“I am willing; c-c-comes t-t-to sixty th-th-thousand. Very good,”
 continued Grandet, without stuttering: “two thousand poplars forty years
old will only yield me fifty thousand francs. There’s a loss. I have
found that myself,” said Grandet, getting on his high horse. “Jean, fill
up all the holes except those at the bank of the river; there you are
to plant the poplars I have bought. Plant ‘em there, and they’ll get
nourishment from the government,” he said, turning to Cruchot, and
giving a slight motion to the wen on his nose, which expressed more than
the most ironical of smiles.

“True enough; poplars should only be planted on poor soil,” said
Cruchot, amazed at Grandet’s calculations.

“Y-y-yes, monsieur,” answered the old man satirically.

Eugenie, who was gazing at the sublime scenery of the Loire, and paying
no attention to her father’s reckonings, presently turned an ear to the
remarks of Cruchot when she heard him say,--

“So you have brought a son-in-law from Paris. All Saumur is talking
about your nephew. I shall soon have the marriage-contract to draw up,
hey! Pere Grandet?”

“You g-g-got up very early to t-t-tell me that,” said Grandet,
accompanying the remark with a motion of his wen. “Well, old
c-c-comrade, I’ll be frank, and t-t-tell you what you want t-t-to know.
I would rather, do you see, f-f-fling my daughter into the Loire than
g-g-give her to her c-c-cousin. You may t-t-tell that everywhere,--no,
never mind; let the world t-t-talk.”

This answer dazzled and blinded the young girl with sudden light. The
distant hopes upspringing in her heart bloomed suddenly, became real,
tangible, like a cluster of flowers, and she saw them cut down and
wilting on the earth. Since the previous evening she had attached
herself to Charles by those links of happiness which bind soul to soul;
from henceforth suffering was to rivet them. Is it not the noble destiny
of women to be more moved by the dark solemnities of grief than by the
splendors of fortune? How was it that fatherly feeling had died out of
her father’s heart? Of what crime had Charles been guilty? Mysterious
questions! Already her dawning love, a mystery so profound, was wrapping
itself in mystery. She walked back trembling in all her limbs; and when
she reached the gloomy street, lately so joyous to her, she felt its
sadness, she breathed the melancholy which time and events had printed
there. None of love’s lessons lacked. A few steps from their own door
she went on before her father and waited at the threshold. But Grandet,
who saw a newspaper in the notary’s hand, stopped short and asked,--

“How are the Funds?”

“You never listen to my advice, Grandet,” answered Cruchot. “Buy soon;
you will still make twenty per cent in two years, besides getting an
excellent rate of interest,--five thousand a year for eighty thousand
francs fifty centimes.”

“We’ll see about that,” answered Grandet, rubbing his chin.

“Good God!” exclaimed the notary.

“Well, what?” cried Grandet; and at the same moment Cruchot put the
newspaper under his eyes and said:

“Read that!”

  “Monsieur Grandet, one of the most respected merchants in Paris,
  blew his brains out yesterday, after making his usual appearance
  at the Bourse. He had sent his resignation to the president of the
  Chamber of Deputies, and had also resigned his functions as a
  judge of the commercial courts. The failures of Monsieur Roguin
  and Monsieur Souchet, his broker and his notary, had ruined him.
  The esteem felt for Monsieur Grandet and the credit he enjoyed
  were nevertheless such that he might have obtained the necessary
  assistance from other business houses. It is much to be regretted
  that so honorable a man should have yielded to momentary despair,”
   etc.

“I knew it,” said the old wine-grower to the notary.

The words sent a chill of horror through Maitre Cruchot, who,
notwithstanding his impassibility as a notary, felt the cold running
down his spine as he thought that Grandet of Paris had possibly implored
in vain the millions of Grandet of Saumur.

“And his son, so joyous yesterday--”

“He knows nothing as yet,” answered Grandet, with the same composure.

“Adieu! Monsieur Grandet,” said Cruchot, who now understood the state of
the case, and went off to reassure Monsieur de Bonfons.

On entering, Grandet found breakfast ready. Madame Grandet, round whose
neck Eugenie had flung her arms, kissing her with the quick effusion of
feeling often caused by secret grief, was already seated in her chair on
castors, knitting sleeves for the coming winter.

“You can begin to eat,” said Nanon, coming downstairs four steps at a
time; “the young one is sleeping like a cherub. Isn’t he a darling with
his eyes shut? I went in and I called him: no answer.”

“Let him sleep,” said Grandet; “he’ll wake soon enough to hear
ill-tidings.”

“What is it?” asked Eugenie, putting into her coffee the two little bits
of sugar weighing less than half an ounce which the old miser amused
himself by cutting up in his leisure hours. Madame Grandet, who did not
dare to put the question, gazed at her husband.

“His father has blown his brains out.”

“My uncle?” said Eugenie.

“Poor young man!” exclaimed Madame Grandet.

“Poor indeed!” said Grandet; “he isn’t worth a sou!”

“Eh! poor boy, and he’s sleeping like the king of the world!” said Nanon
in a gentle voice.

Eugenie stopped eating. Her heart was wrung, as the young heart is wrung
when pity for the suffering of one she loves overflows, for the first
time, the whole being of a woman. The poor girl wept.

“What are you crying about? You didn’t know your uncle,” said her
father, giving her one of those hungry tigerish looks he doubtless threw
upon his piles of gold.

“But, monsieur,” said Nanon, “who wouldn’t feel pity for the poor young
man, sleeping there like a wooden shoe, without knowing what’s coming?”

“I didn’t speak to you, Nanon. Hold your tongue!”

Eugenie learned at that moment that the woman who loves must be able to
hide her feelings. She did not answer.

“You will say nothing to him about it, Ma’ame Grandet, till I return,”
 said the old man. “I have to go and straighten the line of my hedge
along the high-road. I shall be back at noon, in time for the second
breakfast, and then I will talk with my nephew about his affairs. As
for you, Mademoiselle Eugenie, if it is for that dandy you are crying,
that’s enough, child. He’s going off like a shot to the Indies. You will
never see him again.”

The father took his gloves from the brim of his hat, put them on with
his usual composure, pushed them in place by shoving the fingers of both
hands together, and went out.

“Mamma, I am suffocating!” cried Eugenie when she was alone with her
mother; “I have never suffered like this.”

Madame Grandet, seeing that she turned pale, opened the window and let
her breathe fresh air.

“I feel better!” said Eugenie after a moment.

This nervous excitement in a nature hitherto, to all appearance, calm
and cold, reacted on Madame Grandet; she looked at her daughter with the
sympathetic intuition with which mothers are gifted for the objects of
their tenderness, and guessed all. In truth the life of the Hungarian
sisters, bound together by a freak of nature, could scarcely have been
more intimate than that of Eugenie and her mother,--always together
in the embrasure of that window, and sleeping together in the same
atmosphere.

“My poor child!” said Madame Grandet, taking Eugenie’s head and laying
it upon her bosom.

At these words the young girl raised her head, questioned her mother by
a look, and seemed to search out her inmost thought.

“Why send him to the Indies?” she said. “If he is unhappy, ought he not
to stay with us? Is he not our nearest relation?”

“Yes, my child, it seems natural; but your father has his reasons: we
must respect them.”

The mother and daughter sat down in silence, the former upon her raised
seat, the latter in her little armchair, and both took up their work.
Swelling with gratitude for the full heart-understanding her mother had
given her, Eugenie kissed the dear hand, saying,--

“How good you are, my kind mamma!”

The words sent a glow of light into the motherly face, worn and blighted
as it was by many sorrows.

“You like him?” asked Eugenie.

Madame Grandet only smiled in reply. Then, after a moment’s silence, she
said in a low voice: “Do you love him already? That is wrong.”

“Wrong?” said Eugenie. “Why is it wrong? You are pleased with him, Nanon
is pleased with him; why should he not please me? Come, mamma, let us
set the table for his breakfast.”

She threw down her work, and her mother did the same, saying, “Foolish
child!” But she sanctioned the child’s folly by sharing it. Eugenie
called Nanon.

“What do you want now, mademoiselle?”

“Nanon, can we have cream by midday?”

“Ah! midday, to be sure you can,” answered the old servant.

“Well, let him have his coffee very strong; I heard Monsieur des
Grassins say that they make the coffee very strong in Paris. Put in a
great deal.”

“Where am I to get it?”

“Buy some.”

“Suppose monsieur meets me?”

“He has gone to his fields.”

“I’ll run, then. But Monsieur Fessard asked me yesterday if the Magi
had come to stay with us when I bought the wax candle. All the town will
know our goings-on.”

“If your father finds it out,” said Madame Grandet, “he is capable of
beating us.”

“Well, let him beat us; we will take his blows on our knees.”

Madame Grandet for all answer raised her eyes to heaven. Nanon put on
her hood and went off. Eugenie got out some clean table-linen, and went
to fetch a few bunches of grapes which she had amused herself by hanging
on a string across the attic; she walked softly along the corridor, so
as not to waken her cousin, and she could not help listening at the door
to his quiet breathing.

“Sorrow is watching while he sleeps,” she thought.

She took the freshest vine-leaves and arranged her dish of grapes as
coquettishly as a practised house-keeper might have done, and placed it
triumphantly on the table. She laid hands on the pears counted out by
her father, and piled them in a pyramid mixed with leaves. She went
and came, and skipped and ran. She would have liked to lay under
contribution everything in her father’s house; but the keys were in his
pocket. Nanon came back with two fresh eggs. At sight of them Eugenie
almost hugged her round the neck.

“The farmer from Lande had them in his basket. I asked him for them, and
he gave them to me, the darling, for nothing, as an attention!”




V

After two hours’ thought and care, during which Eugenie jumped up twenty
times from her work to see if the coffee were boiling, or to go and
listen to the noise her cousin made in dressing, she succeeded in
preparing a simple little breakfast, very inexpensive, but which,
nevertheless, departed alarmingly from the inveterate customs of the
house. The midday breakfast was always taken standing. Each took a slice
of bread, a little fruit or some butter, and a glass of wine. As Eugenie
looked at the table drawn up near the fire with an arm-chair placed
before her cousin’s plate, at the two dishes of fruit, the egg-cup, the
bottle of white wine, the bread, and the sugar heaped up in a saucer,
she trembled in all her limbs at the mere thought of the look her father
would give her if he should come in at that moment. She glanced often
at the clock to see if her cousin could breakfast before the master’s
return.

“Don’t be troubled, Eugenie; if your father comes in, I will take it all
upon myself,” said Madame Grandet.

Eugenie could not repress a tear.

“Oh, my good mother!” she cried, “I have never loved you enough.”

Charles, who had been tramping about his room for some time, singing to
himself, now came down. Happily, it was only eleven o’clock. The true
Parisian! he had put as much dandyism into his dress as if he were in
the chateau of the noble lady then travelling in Scotland. He came into
the room with the smiling, courteous manner so becoming to youth,
which made Eugenie’s heart beat with mournful joy. He had taken the
destruction of his castles in Anjou as a joke, and came up to his aunt
gaily.

“Have you slept well, dear aunt? and you, too, my cousin?”

“Very well, monsieur; did you?” said Madame Grandet.

“I? perfectly.”

“You must be hungry, cousin,” said Eugenie; “will you take your seat?”

“I never breakfast before midday; I never get up till then. However, I
fared so badly on the journey that I am glad to eat something at once.
Besides--” here he pulled out the prettiest watch Breguet ever made.
“Dear me! I am early, it is only eleven o’clock!”

“Early?” said Madame Grandet.

“Yes; but I wanted to put my things in order. Well, I shall be glad to
have anything to eat,--anything, it doesn’t matter what, a chicken, a
partridge.”

“Holy Virgin!” exclaimed Nanon, overhearing the words.

“A partridge!” whispered Eugenie to herself; she would gladly have given
the whole of her little hoard for a partridge.

“Come and sit down,” said his aunt.

The young dandy let himself drop into an easy-chair, just as a pretty
woman falls gracefully upon a sofa. Eugenie and her mother took ordinary
chairs and sat beside him, near the fire.

“Do you always live here?” said Charles, thinking the room uglier by
daylight than it had seemed the night before.

“Always,” answered Eugenie, looking at him, “except during the vintage.
Then we go and help Nanon, and live at the Abbaye des Noyers.”

“Don’t you ever take walks?”

“Sometimes on Sunday after vespers, when the weather is fine,”
 said Madame Grandet, “we walk on the bridge, or we go and watch the
haymakers.”

“Have you a theatre?”

“Go to the theatre!” exclaimed Madame Grandet, “see a play! Why,
monsieur, don’t you know it is a mortal sin?”

“See here, monsieur,” said Nanon, bringing in the eggs, “here are your
chickens,--in the shell.”

“Oh! fresh eggs,” said Charles, who, like all people accustomed to
luxury, had already forgotten about his partridge, “that is delicious:
now, if you will give me the butter, my good girl.”

“Butter! then you can’t have the _galette_.”

“Nanon, bring the butter,” cried Eugenie.

The young girl watched her cousin as he cut his sippets, with as much
pleasure as a grisette takes in a melodrama where innocence and virtue
triumph. Charles, brought up by a charming mother, improved, and trained
by a woman of fashion, had the elegant, dainty, foppish movements of
a coxcomb. The compassionate sympathy and tenderness of a young girl
possess a power that is actually magnetic; so that Charles, finding
himself the object of the attentions of his aunt and cousin, could not
escape the influence of feelings which flowed towards him, as it were,
and inundated him. He gave Eugenie a bright, caressing look full of
kindness,--a look which seemed itself a smile. He perceived, as his eyes
lingered upon her, the exquisite harmony of features in the pure face,
the grace of her innocent attitude, the magic clearness of the eyes,
where young love sparkled and desire shone unconsciously.

“Ah! my dear cousin, if you were in full dress at the Opera, I assure
you my aunt’s words would come true,--you would make the men commit the
mortal sin of envy, and the women the sin of jealousy.”

The compliment went to Eugenie’s heart and set it beating, though she
did not understand its meaning.

“Oh! cousin,” she said, “you are laughing at a poor little country
girl.”

“If you knew me, my cousin, you would know that I abhor ridicule; it
withers the heart and jars upon all my feelings.” Here he swallowed his
buttered sippet very gracefully. “No, I really have not enough mind to
make fun of others; and doubtless it is a great defect. In Paris, when
they want to disparage a man, they say: ‘He has a good heart.’ The
phrase means: ‘The poor fellow is as stupid as a rhinoceros.’ But as I
am rich, and known to hit the bull’s-eye at thirty paces with any kind
of pistol, and even in the open fields, ridicule respects me.”

“My dear nephew, that bespeaks a good heart.”

“You have a very pretty ring,” said Eugenie; “is there any harm in
asking to see it?”

Charles held out his hand after loosening the ring, and Eugenie blushed
as she touched the pink nails of her cousin with the tips of her
fingers.

“See, mamma, what beautiful workmanship.”

“My! there’s a lot of gold!” said Nanon, bringing in the coffee.

“What is that?” exclaimed Charles, laughing, as he pointed to an oblong
pot of brown earthenware, glazed on the inside, and edged with a fringe
of ashes, from the bottom of which the coffee-grounds were bubbling up
and falling in the boiling liquid.

“It is boiled coffee,” said Nanon.

“Ah! my dear aunt, I shall at least leave one beneficent trace of my
visit here. You are indeed behind the age! I must teach you to make good
coffee in a Chaptal coffee-pot.”

He tried to explain the process of a Chaptal coffee-pot.

“Gracious! if there are so many things as all that to do,” said Nanon,
“we may as well give up our lives to it. I shall never make coffee that
way; I know that! Pray, who is to get the fodder for the cow while I
make the coffee?”

“I will make it,” said Eugenie.

“Child!” said Madame Grandet, looking at her daughter.

The word recalled to their minds the sorrow that was about to fall upon
the unfortunate young man; the three women were silent, and looked at
him with an air of commiseration that caught his attention.

“Is anything the matter, my cousin?” he said.

“Hush!” said Madame Grandet to Eugenie, who was about to answer;
“you know, my daughter, that your father charged us not to speak to
monsieur--”

“Say Charles,” said young Grandet.

“Ah! you are called Charles? What a beautiful name!” cried Eugenie.

Presentiments of evil are almost always justified. At this moment Nanon,
Madame Grandet, and Eugenie, who had all three been thinking with a
shudder of the old man’s return, heard the knock whose echoes they knew
but too well.

“There’s papa!” said Eugenie.

She removed the saucer filled with sugar, leaving a few pieces on the
table-cloth; Nanon carried off the egg-cup; Madame Grandet sat up like a
frightened hare. It was evidently a panic, which amazed Charles, who was
wholly unable to understand it.

“Why! what is the matter?” he asked.

“My father has come,” answered Eugenie.

“Well, what of that?”

Monsieur Grandet entered the room, threw his keen eye upon the table,
upon Charles, and saw the whole thing.

“Ha! ha! so you have been making a feast for your nephew; very good,
very good, very good indeed!” he said, without stuttering. “When the
cat’s away, the mice will play.”

“Feast!” thought Charles, incapable of suspecting or imagining the rules
and customs of the household.

“Give me my glass, Nanon,” said the master

Eugenie brought the glass. Grandet drew a horn-handled knife with a big
blade from his breeches’ pocket, cut a slice of bread, took a small bit
of butter, spread it carefully on the bread, and ate it standing. At
this moment Charlie was sweetening his coffee. Pere Grandet saw the
bits of sugar, looked at his wife, who turned pale, and made three steps
forward; he leaned down to the poor woman’s ear and said,--

“Where did you get all that sugar?”

“Nanon fetched it from Fessard’s; there was none.”

It is impossible to picture the profound interest the three women took
in this mute scene. Nanon had left her kitchen and stood looking into
the room to see what would happen. Charles, having tasted his coffee,
found it bitter and glanced about for the sugar, which Grandet had
already put away.

“What do you want?” said his uncle.

“The sugar.”

“Put in more milk,” answered the master of the house; “your coffee will
taste sweeter.”

Eugenie took the saucer which Grandet had put away and placed it on the
table, looking calmly at her father as she did so. Most assuredly,
the Parisian woman who held a silken ladder with her feeble arms to
facilitate the flight of her lover, showed no greater courage than
Eugenie displayed when she replaced the sugar upon the table. The lover
rewarded his mistress when she proudly showed him her beautiful bruised
arm, and bathed every swollen vein with tears and kisses till it was
cured with happiness. Charles, on the other hand, never so much as knew
the secret of the cruel agitation that shook and bruised the heart of
his cousin, crushed as it was by the look of the old miser.

“You are not eating your breakfast, wife.”

The poor helot came forward with a piteous look, cut herself a piece of
bread, and took a pear. Eugenie boldly offered her father some grapes,
saying,--

“Taste my preserves, papa. My cousin, you will eat some, will you not? I
went to get these pretty grapes expressly for you.”

“If no one stops them, they will pillage Saumur for you, nephew. When
you have finished, we will go into the garden; I have something to tell
you which can’t be sweetened.”

Eugenie and her mother cast a look on Charles whose meaning the young
man could not mistake.

“What is it you mean, uncle? Since the death of my poor mother”--at
these words his voice softened--“no other sorrow can touch me.”

“My nephew, who knows by what afflictions God is pleased to try us?”
 said his aunt.

“Ta, ta, ta, ta,” said Grandet, “there’s your nonsense beginning. I
am sorry to see those white hands of yours, nephew”; and he showed the
shoulder-of-mutton fists which Nature had put at the end of his own
arms. “There’s a pair of hands made to pick up silver pieces. You’ve
been brought up to put your feet in the kid out of which we make the
purses we keep our money in. A bad look-out! Very bad!”

“What do you mean, uncle? I’ll be hanged if I understand a single word
of what you are saying.”

“Come!” said Grandet.

The miser closed the blade of his knife with a snap, drank the last of
his wine, and opened the door.

“My cousin, take courage!”

The tone of the young girl struck terror to Charles’s heart, and he
followed his terrible uncle, a prey to disquieting thoughts. Eugenie,
her mother, and Nanon went into the kitchen, moved by irresistible
curiosity to watch the two actors in the scene which was about to take
place in the garden, where at first the uncle walked silently ahead of
the nephew. Grandet was not at all troubled at having to tell Charles of
the death of his father; but he did feel a sort of compassion in knowing
him to be without a penny, and he sought for some phrase or formula by
which to soften the communication of that cruel truth. “You have lost
your father,” seemed to him a mere nothing to say; fathers die before
their children. But “you are absolutely without means,”--all the
misfortunes of life were summed up in those words! Grandet walked round
the garden three times, the gravel crunching under his heavy step.

In the crucial moments of life our minds fasten upon the locality where
joys or sorrows overwhelm us. Charles noticed with minute attention the
box-borders of the little garden, the yellow leaves as they fluttered
down, the dilapidated walls, the gnarled fruit-trees,--picturesque
details which were destined to remain forever in his memory, blending
eternally, by the mnemonics that belong exclusively to the passions,
with the recollections of this solemn hour.

“It is very fine weather, very warm,” said Grandet, drawing a long
breath.

“Yes, uncle; but why--”

“Well, my lad,” answered his uncle, “I have some bad news to give you.
Your father is ill--”

“Then why am I here?” said Charles. “Nanon,” he cried, “order
post-horses! I can get a carriage somewhere?” he added, turning to his
uncle, who stood motionless.

“Horses and carriages are useless,” answered Grandet, looking at
Charles, who remained silent, his eyes growing fixed. “Yes, my poor boy,
you guess the truth,--he is dead. But that’s nothing; there is something
worse: he blew out his brains.”

“My father!”

“Yes, but that’s not the worst; the newspapers are all talking about it.
Here, read that.”

Grandet, who had borrowed the fatal article from Cruchot, thrust the
paper under his nephew’s eyes. The poor young man, still a child, still
at an age when feelings wear no mask, burst into tears.

“That’s good!” thought Grandet; “his eyes frightened me. He’ll be all
right if he weeps,--That is not the worst, my poor nephew,” he said
aloud, not noticing whether Charles heard him, “that is nothing; you
will get over it: but--”

“Never, never! My father! Oh, my father!”

“He has ruined you, you haven’t a penny.”

“What does that matter? My father! Where is my father?”

His sobs resounded horribly against those dreary walls and reverberated
in the echoes. The three women, filled with pity, wept also; for tears
are often as contagious as laughter. Charles, without listening further
to his uncle, ran through the court and up the staircase to his chamber,
where he threw himself across the bed and hid his face in the sheets, to
weep in peace for his lost parents.

“The first burst must have its way,” said Grandet, entering the
living-room, where Eugenie and her mother had hastily resumed their
seats and were sewing with trembling hands, after wiping their eyes.
“But that young man is good for nothing; his head is more taken up with
the dead than with his money.”

Eugenie shuddered as she heard her father’s comment on the most sacred
of all griefs. From that moment she began to judge him. Charles’s sobs,
though muffled, still sounded through the sepulchral house; and his deep
groans, which seemed to come from the earth beneath, only ceased towards
evening, after growing gradually feebler.

“Poor young man!” said Madame Grandet.

Fatal exclamation! Pere Grandet looked at his wife, at Eugenie, and at
the sugar-bowl. He recollected the extraordinary breakfast prepared for
the unfortunate youth, and he took a position in the middle of the room.

“Listen to me,” he said, with his usual composure. “I hope that you
will not continue this extravagance, Madame Grandet. I don’t give you MY
money to stuff that young fellow with sugar.”

“My mother had nothing to do with it,” said Eugenie; “it was I who--”

“Is it because you are of age,” said Grandet, interrupting his daughter,
“that you choose to contradict me? Remember, Eugenie--”

“Father, the son of your brother ought to receive from us--”

“Ta, ta, ta, ta!” exclaimed the cooper on four chromatic tones; “the son
of my brother this, my nephew that! Charles is nothing at all to us; he
hasn’t a farthing, his father has failed; and when this dandy has cried
his fill, off he goes from here. I won’t have him revolutionize my
household.”

“What is ‘failing,’ father?” asked Eugenie.

“To fail,” answered her father, “is to commit the most dishonorable
action that can disgrace a man.”

“It must be a great sin,” said Madame Grandet, “and our brother may be
damned.”

“There, there, don’t begin with your litanies!” said Grandet, shrugging
his shoulders. “To fail, Eugenie,” he resumed, “is to commit a theft
which the law, unfortunately, takes under its protection. People have
given their property to Guillaume Grandet trusting to his reputation for
honor and integrity; he has made away with it all, and left them nothing
but their eyes to weep with. A highway robber is better than a bankrupt:
the one attacks you and you can defend yourself, he risks his own life;
but the other--in short, Charles is dishonored.”

The words rang in the poor girl’s heart and weighed it down with their
heavy meaning. Upright and delicate as a flower born in the depths of
a forest, she knew nothing of the world’s maxims, of its deceitful
arguments and specious sophisms; she therefore believed the atrocious
explanation which her father gave her designedly, concealing the
distinction which exists between an involuntary failure and an
intentional one.

“Father, could you not have prevented such a misfortune?”

“My brother did not consult me. Besides, he owes four millions.”

“What is a ‘million,’ father?” she asked, with the simplicity of a child
which thinks it can find out at once all that it wants to know.

“A million?” said Grandet, “why, it is a million pieces of twenty sous
each, and it takes five twenty sous pieces to make five francs.”

“Dear me!” cried Eugenie, “how could my uncle possibly have had
four millions? Is there any one else in France who ever had so many
millions?” Pere Grandet stroked his chin, smiled, and his wen seemed to
dilate. “But what will become of my cousin Charles?”

“He is going off to the West Indies by his father’s request, and he will
try to make his fortune there.”

“Has he got the money to go with?”

“I shall pay for his journey as far as--yes, as far as Nantes.”

Eugenie sprang into his arms.

“Oh, father, how good you are!”

She kissed him with a warmth that almost made Grandet ashamed of
himself, for his conscience galled him a little.

“Will it take much time to amass a million?” she asked.

“Look here!” said the old miser, “you know what a napoleon is? Well, it
takes fifty thousand napoleons to make a million.”

“Mamma, we must say a great many _neuvaines_ for him.”

“I was thinking so,” said Madame Grandet.

“That’s the way, always spending my money!” cried the father. “Do you
think there are francs on every bush?”

At this moment a muffled cry, more distressing than all the others,
echoed through the garrets and struck a chill to the hearts of Eugenie
and her mother.

“Nanon, go upstairs and see that he does not kill himself,” said
Grandet. “Now, then,” he added, looking at his wife and daughter, who
had turned pale at his words, “no nonsense, you two! I must leave you; I
have got to see about the Dutchmen who are going away to-day. And then I
must find Cruchot, and talk with him about all this.”

He departed. As soon as he had shut the door Eugenie and her mother
breathed more freely. Until this morning the young girl had never felt
constrained in the presence of her father; but for the last few hours
every moment wrought a change in her feelings and ideas.

“Mamma, how many louis are there in a cask of wine?”

“Your father sells his from a hundred to a hundred and fifty francs,
sometimes two hundred,--at least, so I’ve heard say.”

“Then papa must be rich?”

“Perhaps he is. But Monsieur Cruchot told me he bought Froidfond two
years ago; that may have pinched him.”

Eugenie, not being able to understand the question of her father’s
fortune, stopped short in her calculations.

“He didn’t even see me, the darling!” said Nanon, coming back from her
errand. “He’s stretched out like a calf on his bed and crying like the
Madeleine, and that’s a blessing! What’s the matter with the poor dear
young man!”

“Let us go and console him, mamma; if any one knocks, we can come down.”

Madame Grandet was helpless against the sweet persuasive tones of her
daughter’s voice. Eugenie was sublime: she had become a woman. The two,
with beating hearts, went up to Charles’s room. The door was open.
The young man heard and saw nothing; plunged in grief, he only uttered
inarticulate cries.

“How he loves his father!” said Eugenie in a low voice.

In the utterance of those words it was impossible to mistake the hopes
of a heart that, unknown to itself, had suddenly become passionate.
Madame Grandet cast a mother’s look upon her daughter, and then
whispered in her ear,--

“Take care, you will love him!”

“Love him!” answered Eugenie. “Ah! if you did but know what my father
said to Monsieur Cruchot.”

Charles turned over, and saw his aunt and cousin.

“I have lost my father, my poor father! If he had told me his secret
troubles we might have worked together to repair them. My God! my poor
father! I was so sure I should see him again that I think I kissed him
quite coldly--”

Sobs cut short the words.

“We will pray for him,” said Madame Grandet. “Resign yourself to the
will of God.”

“Cousin,” said Eugenie, “take courage! Your loss is irreparable;
therefore think only of saving your honor.”

With the delicate instinct of a woman who intuitively puts her mind
into all things, even at the moment when she offers consolation, Eugenie
sought to cheat her cousin’s grief by turning his thoughts inward upon
himself.

“My honor?” exclaimed the young man, tossing aside his hair with an
impatient gesture as he sat up on his bed and crossed his arms.
“Ah! that is true. My uncle said my father had failed.” He uttered a
heart-rending cry, and hid his face in his hands. “Leave me, leave me,
cousin! My God! my God! forgive my father, for he must have suffered
sorely!”

There was something terribly attractive in the sight of this young
sorrow, sincere without reasoning or afterthought. It was a virgin
grief which the simple hearts of Eugenie and her mother were fitted to
comprehend, and they obeyed the sign Charles made them to leave him
to himself. They went downstairs in silence and took their accustomed
places by the window and sewed for nearly an hour without exchanging
a word. Eugenie had seen in the furtive glance that she cast about the
young man’s room--that girlish glance which sees all in the twinkling
of an eye--the pretty trifles of his dressing-case, his scissors, his
razors embossed with gold. This gleam of luxury across her cousin’s
grief only made him the more interesting to her, possibly by way of
contrast. Never before had so serious an event, so dramatic a sight,
touched the imaginations of these two passive beings, hitherto sunk in
the stillness and calm of solitude.

“Mamma,” said Eugenie, “we must wear mourning for my uncle.”

“Your father will decide that,” answered Madame Grandet.

They relapsed into silence. Eugenie drew her stitches with a uniform
motion which revealed to an observer the teeming thoughts of her
meditation. The first desire of the girl’s heart was to share her
cousin’s mourning.




VI

About four o’clock an abrupt knock at the door struck sharply on the
heart of Madame Grandet.

“What can have happened to your father?” she said to her daughter.

Grandet entered joyously. After taking off his gloves, he rubbed his
hands hard enough to take off their skin as well, if his epidermis had
not been tanned and cured like Russia leather,--saving, of course, the
perfume of larch-trees and incense. Presently his secret escaped him.

“Wife,” he said, without stuttering, “I’ve trapped them all! Our wine
is sold! The Dutch and the Belgians have gone. I walked about the
market-place in front of their inn, pretending to be doing nothing. That
Belgian fellow--you know who I mean--came up to me. The owners of all
the good vineyards have kept back their vintages, intending to wait;
well, I didn’t hinder them. The Belgian was in despair; I saw that. In
a minute the bargain was made. He takes my vintage at two hundred francs
the puncheon, half down. He paid me in gold; the notes are drawn. Here
are six louis for you. In three months wines will have fallen.”

These words, uttered in a quiet tone of voice, were nevertheless so
bitterly sarcastic that the inhabitants of Saumur, grouped at this
moment in the market-place and overwhelmed by the news of the sale
Grandet had just effected, would have shuddered had they heard them.
Their panic would have brought the price of wines down fifty per cent at
once.

“Did you have a thousand puncheons this year, father?”

“Yes, little one.”

That term applied to his daughter was the superlative expression of the
old miser’s joy.

“Then that makes two hundred thousand pieces of twenty sous each?”

“Yes, Mademoiselle Grandet.”

“Then, father, you can easily help Charles.”

The amazement, the anger, the stupefaction of Belshazzar when he saw
the _Mene-Tekel-Upharsin_ before his eyes is not to be compared with the
cold rage of Grandet, who, having forgotten his nephew, now found him
enshrined in the heart and calculations of his daughter.

“What’s this? Ever since that dandy put foot in _my_ house everything
goes wrong! You behave as if you had the right to buy sugar-plums and
make feasts and weddings. I won’t have that sort of thing. I hope I know
my duty at my time of life! I certainly sha’n’t take lessons from my
daughter, or from anybody else. I shall do for my nephew what it is
proper to do, and you have no need to poke your nose into it. As for
you, Eugenie,” he added, facing her, “don’t speak of this again, or I’ll
send you to the Abbaye des Noyers with Nanon, see if I don’t; and no
later than to-morrow either, if you disobey me! Where is that fellow,
has he come down yet?”

“No, my friend,” answered Madame Grandet.

“What is he doing then?”

“He is weeping for his father,” said Eugenie.

Grandet looked at his daughter without finding a word to say; after all,
he was a father. He made a couple of turns up and down the room, and
then went hurriedly to his secret den to think over an investment he
was meditating in the public Funds. The thinning out of his two thousand
acres of forest land had yielded him six hundred thousand francs:
putting this sum to that derived from the sale of his poplars and to his
other gains for the last year and for the current year, he had amassed a
total of nine hundred thousand francs, without counting the two hundred
thousand he had got by the sale just concluded. The twenty per cent
which Cruchot assured him would gain in a short time from the Funds,
then quoted at seventy, tempted him. He figured out his calculation
on the margin of the newspaper which gave the account of his brother’s
death, all the while hearing the moans of his nephew, but without
listening to them. Nanon came and knocked on the wall to summon him to
dinner. On the last step of the staircase he was saying to himself as he
came down,--

“I’ll do it; I shall get eight per cent interest. In two years I shall
have fifteen hundred thousand francs, which I will then draw out in good
gold,--Well, where’s my nephew?”

“He says he doesn’t want anything to eat,” answered Nanon; “that’s not
good for him.”

“So much saved,” retorted her master.

“That’s so,” she said.

“Bah! he won’t cry long. Hunger drives the wolves out of the woods.”

The dinner was eaten in silence.

“My good friend,” said Madame Grandet, when the cloth was removed, “we
must put on mourning.”

“Upon my word, Madame Grandet! what will you invent next to spend money
on? Mourning is in the heart, and not in the clothes.”

“But mourning for a brother is indispensable; and the Church commands us
to--”

“Buy your mourning out of your six louis. Give me a hat-band; that’s
enough for me.”

Eugenie raised her eyes to heaven without uttering a word. Her generous
instincts, slumbering and long repressed but now suddenly and for the
first time awakened, were galled at every turn. The evening passed to
all appearance like a thousand other evenings of their monotonous life,
yet it was certainly the most horrible. Eugenie sewed without raising
her head, and did not use the workbox which Charles had despised the
night before. Madame Grandet knitted her sleeves. Grandet twirled his
thumbs for four hours, absorbed in calculations whose results were on
the morrow to astonish Saumur. No one came to visit the family that
day. The whole town was ringing with the news of the business trick just
played by Grandet, the failure of his brother, and the arrival of his
nephew. Obeying the desire to gossip over their mutual interests, all
the upper and middle-class wine-growers in Saumur met at Monsieur des
Grassins, where terrible imprecations were being fulminated against the
ex-mayor. Nanon was spinning, and the whirr of her wheel was the only
sound heard beneath the gray rafters of that silent hall.

“We don’t waste our tongues,” she said, showing her teeth, as large and
white as peeled almonds.

“Nothing should be wasted,” answered Grandet, rousing himself from his
reverie. He saw a perspective of eight millions in three years, and he
was sailing along that sheet of gold. “Let us go to bed. I will bid
my nephew good-night for the rest of you, and see if he will take
anything.”

Madame Grandet remained on the landing of the first storey to hear the
conversation that was about to take place between the goodman and his
nephew. Eugenie, bolder than her mother, went up two stairs.

“Well, nephew, you are in trouble. Yes, weep, that’s natural. A father
is a father; but we must bear our troubles patiently. I am a good uncle
to you, remember that. Come, take courage! Will you have a little glass
of wine?” (Wine costs nothing in Saumur, and they offer it as tea is
offered in China.) “Why!” added Grandet, “you have got no light! That’s
bad, very bad; you ought to see what you are about,” and he walked to
the chimney-piece. “What’s this?” he cried. “A wax candle! How the
devil did they filch a wax candle? The spendthrifts would tear down the
ceilings of my house to boil the fellow’s eggs.”

Hearing these words, mother and daughter slipped back into their rooms
and burrowed in their beds, with the celerity of frightened mice getting
back to their holes.

“Madame Grandet, have you found a mine?” said the man, coming into the
chamber of his wife.

“My friend, wait; I am saying my prayers,” said the poor mother in a
trembling voice.

“The devil take your good God!” growled Grandet in reply.

Misers have no belief in a future life; the present is their all in all.
This thought casts a terrible light upon our present epoch, in which,
far more than at any former period, money sways the laws and politics
and morals. Institutions, books, men, and dogmas, all conspire to
undermine belief in a future life,--a belief upon which the social
edifice has rested for eighteen hundred years. The grave, as a means of
transition, is little feared in our day. The future, which once opened
to us beyond the requiems, has now been imported into the present. To
obtain _per fas et nefas_ a terrestrial paradise of luxury and earthly
enjoyment, to harden the heart and macerate the body for the sake of
fleeting possessions, as the martyrs once suffered all things to reach
eternal joys, this is now the universal thought--a thought written
everywhere, even in the very laws which ask of the legislator, “What do
you pay?” instead of asking him, “What do you think?” When this doctrine
has passed down from the bourgeoisie to the populace, where will this
country be?

“Madame Grandet, have you done?” asked the old man.

“My friend, I am praying for you.”

“Very good! Good-night; to-morrow morning we will have a talk.”

The poor woman went to sleep like a schoolboy who, not having learned
his lessons, knows he will see his master’s angry face on the morrow. At
the moment when, filled with fear, she was drawing the sheet above her
head that she might stifle hearing, Eugenie, in her night-gown and with
naked feet, ran to her side and kissed her brow.

“Oh! my good mother,” she said, “to-morrow I will tell him it was I.”

“No; he would send you to Noyers. Leave me to manage it; he cannot eat
me.”

“Do you hear, mamma?”

“What?”

“_He_ is weeping still.”

“Go to bed, my daughter; you will take cold in your feet: the floor is
damp.”

              *     *     *     *     *

Thus passed the solemn day which was destined to weight upon the whole
life of the rich and poor heiress, whose sleep was never again to be
so calm, nor yet so pure, as it had been up to this moment. It often
happens that certain actions of human life seem, literally speaking,
improbable, though actual. Is not this because we constantly omit
to turn the stream of psychological light upon our impulsive
determinations, and fail to explain the subtile reasons, mysteriously
conceived in our minds, which impelled them? Perhaps Eugenie’s deep
passion should be analyzed in its most delicate fibres; for it became,
scoffers might say, a malady which influenced her whole existence. Many
people prefer to deny results rather than estimate the force of ties and
links and bonds, which secretly join one fact to another in the moral
order. Here, therefore, Eugenie’s past life will offer to observers
of human nature an explanation of her naive want of reflection and the
suddenness of the emotions which overflowed her soul. The more tranquil
her life had been, the more vivid was her womanly pity, the more
simple-minded were the sentiments now developed in her soul.

Made restless by the events of the day, she woke at intervals to listen
to her cousin, thinking she heard the sighs which still echoed in her
heart. Sometimes she saw him dying of his trouble, sometimes she dreamed
that he fainted from hunger. Towards morning she was certain that she
heard a startling cry. She dressed at once and ran, in the dawning
light, with a swift foot to her cousin’s chamber, the door of which
he had left open. The candle had burned down to the socket. Charles,
overcome by nature, was sleeping, dressed and sitting in an armchair
beside the bed, on which his head rested; he dreamed as men dream on
an empty stomach. Eugenie might weep at her ease; she might admire
the young and handsome face blotted with grief, the eyes swollen with
weeping, that seemed, sleeping as they were, to well forth tears.
Charles felt sympathetically the young girl’s presence; he opened his
eyes and saw her pitying him.

“Pardon me, my cousin,” he said, evidently not knowing the hour nor the
place in which he found himself.

“There are hearts who hear you, cousin, and _we_ thought you might need
something. You should go to bed; you tire yourself by sitting thus.”

“That is true.”

“Well, then, adieu!”

She escaped, ashamed and happy at having gone there. Innocence alone can
dare to be so bold. Once enlightened, virtue makes her calculations as
well as vice. Eugenie, who had not trembled beside her cousin, could
scarcely stand upon her legs when she regained her chamber. Her ignorant
life had suddenly come to an end; she reasoned, she rebuked herself with
many reproaches.

“What will he think of me? He will think that I love him!”

That was what she most wished him to think. An honest love has its own
prescience, and knows that love begets love. What an event for this poor
solitary girl thus to have entered the chamber of a young man! Are there
not thoughts and actions in the life of love which to certain souls bear
the full meaning of the holiest espousals? An hour later she went to
her mother and dressed her as usual. Then they both came down and sat
in their places before the window waiting for Grandet, with that cruel
anxiety which, according to the individual character, freezes the
heart or warms it, shrivels or dilates it, when a scene is feared, a
punishment expected,--a feeling so natural that even domestic animals
possess it, and whine at the slightest pain of punishment, though they
make no outcry when they inadvertently hurt themselves. The goodman came
down; but he spoke to his wife with an absent manner, kissed Eugenie,
and sat down to table without appearing to remember his threats of the
night before.

“What has become of my nephew? The lad gives no trouble.”

“Monsieur, he is asleep,” answered Nanon.

“So much the better; he won’t want a wax candle,” said Grandet in a
jeering tone.

This unusual clemency, this bitter gaiety, struck Madame Grandet with
amazement, and she looked at her husband attentively. The goodman--here
it may be well to explain that in Touraine, Anjou, Pitou, and Bretagne
the word “goodman,” already used to designate Grandet, is bestowed as
often upon harsh and cruel men as upon those of kindly temperament, when
either have reached a certain age; the title means nothing on the score
of individual gentleness--the goodman took his hat and gloves, saying as
he went out,--

“I am going to loiter about the market-place and find Cruchot.”

“Eugenie, your father certainly has something on his mind.”

Grandet, who was a poor sleeper, employed half his nights in the
preliminary calculations which gave such astonishing accuracy to his
views and observations and schemes, and secured to them the unfailing
success at sight of which his townsmen stood amazed. All human power is
a compound of time and patience. Powerful beings will and wait. The life
of a miser is the constant exercise of human power put to the service of
self. It rests on two sentiments only,--self-love and self-interest;
but self-interest being to a certain extent compact and intelligent
self-love, the visible sign of real superiority, it follows that
self-love and self-interest are two parts of the same whole,--egotism.
From this arises, perhaps, the excessive curiosity shown in the habits
of a miser’s life whenever they are put before the world. Every nature
holds by a thread to those beings who challenge all human sentiments by
concentrating all in one passion. Where is the man without desire? and
what social desire can be satisfied without money?

Grandet unquestionably “had something on his mind,” to use his wife’s
expression. There was in him, as in all misers, a persistent craving to
play a commercial game with other men and win their money legally. To
impose upon other people was to him a sign of power, a perpetual proof
that he had won the right to despise those feeble beings who suffer
themselves to be preyed upon in this world. Oh! who has ever truly
understood the lamb lying peacefully at the feet of God?--touching
emblem of all terrestrial victims, myth of their future, suffering and
weakness glorified! This lamb it is which the miser fattens, puts in his
fold, slaughters, cooks, eats, and then despises. The pasture of misers
is compounded of money and disdain. During the night Grandet’s ideas had
taken another course, which was the reason of his sudden clemency. He
had hatched a plot by which to trick the Parisians, to decoy and dupe
and snare them, to drive them into a trap, and make them go and come and
sweat and hope and turn pale,--a plot by which to amuse himself, the old
provincial cooper, sitting there beneath his gloomy rafters, or passing
up and down the rotten staircase of his house in Saumur. His nephew
filled his mind. He wished to save the honor of his dead brother without
the cost of a penny to the son or to himself. His own funds he was about
to invest for three years; he had therefore nothing further to do than
to manage his property in Saumur. He needed some nutriment for his
malicious activity, and he found it suddenly in his brother’s failure.
Feeling nothing to squeeze between his own paws, he resolved to crush
the Parisians in behalf of Charles, and to play the part of a good
brother on the cheapest terms. The honor of the family counted for so
little in this scheme that his good intentions might be likened to the
interest a gambler takes in seeing a game well played in which he has no
stake. The Cruchots were a necessary part of his plan; but he would not
seek them,--he resolved to make them come to him, and to lead up that
very evening to a comedy whose plot he had just conceived, which should
make him on the morrow an object of admiration to the whole town without
its costing him a single penny.

In her father’s absence Eugenie had the happiness of busying herself
openly with her much-loved cousin, of spending upon him fearlessly
the treasures of her pity,--woman’s sublime superiority, the sole she
desires to have recognized, the sole she pardons man for letting
her assume. Three or four times the young girl went to listen to her
cousin’s breathing, to know if he were sleeping or awake; then, when he
had risen, she turned her thoughts to the cream, the eggs, the fruits,
the plates, the glasses,--all that was a part of his breakfast became
the object of some special care. At length she ran lightly up the old
staircase to listen to the noise her cousin made. Was he dressing? Did
he still weep? She reached the door.

“My cousin!”

“Yes, cousin.”

“Will you breakfast downstairs, or in your room?”

“Where you like.”

“How do you feel?”

“Dear cousin, I am ashamed of being hungry.”

This conversation, held through the closed door, was like an episode in
a poem to Eugenie.

“Well, then, we will bring your breakfast to your own room, so as not to
annoy my father.”

She ran to the kitchen with the swiftness and lightness of a bird.

“Nanon, go and do his room!”

That staircase, so often traversed, which echoed to the slightest noise,
now lost its decaying aspect in the eyes of Eugenie. It grew luminous;
it had a voice and spoke to her; it was young like herself,--young like
the love it was now serving. Her mother, her kind, indulgent mother,
lent herself to the caprices of the child’s love, and after the room
was put in order, both went to sit with the unhappy youth and keep him
company. Does not Christian charity make consolation a duty? The two
women drew a goodly number of little sophistries from their religion
wherewith to justify their conduct. Charles was made the object of the
tenderest and most loving care. His saddened heart felt the sweetness
of the gentle friendship, the exquisite sympathy which these two souls,
crushed under perpetual restraint, knew so well how to display when, for
an instant, they were left unfettered in the regions of suffering, their
natural sphere.

Claiming the right of relationship, Eugenie began to fold the linen and
put in order the toilet articles which Charles had brought; thus she
could marvel at her ease over each luxurious bauble and the various
knick-knacks of silver or chased gold, which she held long in her hand
under a pretext of examining them. Charles could not see without emotion
the generous interest his aunt and cousin felt in him; he knew society
in Paris well enough to feel assured that, placed as he now was, he
would find all hearts indifferent or cold. Eugenie thus appeared to him
in the splendor of a special beauty, and from thenceforth he admired
the innocence of life and manners which the previous evening he had been
inclined to ridicule. So when Eugenie took from Nanon the bowl of coffee
and cream, and began to pour it out for her cousin with the simplicity
of real feeling, giving him a kindly glance, the eyes of the Parisian
filled with tears; he took her hand and kissed it.

“What troubles you?” she said.

“Oh! these are tears of gratitude,” he answered.

Eugenie turned abruptly to the chimney-piece to take the candlesticks.

“Here, Nanon, carry them away!” she said.

When she looked again towards her cousin she was still blushing, but her
looks could at least deceive, and did not betray the excess of joy which
innundated her heart; yet the eyes of both expressed the same sentiment
as their souls flowed together in one thought,--the future was theirs.
This soft emotion was all the more precious to Charles in the midst
of his heavy grief because it was wholly unexpected. The sound of the
knocker recalled the women to their usual station. Happily they were
able to run downstairs with sufficient rapidity to be seated at their
work when Grandet entered; had he met them under the archway it would
have been enough to rouse his suspicions. After breakfast, which the
goodman took standing, the keeper from Froidfond, to whom the promised
indemnity had never yet been paid, made his appearance, bearing a hare
and some partridges shot in the park, with eels and two pike sent as
tribute by the millers.

“Ha, ha! poor Cornoiller; here he comes, like fish in Lent. Is all that
fit to eat?”

“Yes, my dear, generous master; it has been killed two days.”

“Come, Nanon, bestir yourself,” said Grandet; “take these things,
they’ll do for dinner. I have invited the two Cruchots.”

Nanon opened her eyes, stupid with amazement, and looked at everybody in
the room.

“Well!” she said, “and how am I to get the lard and the spices?”

“Wife,” said Grandet, “give Nanon six francs, and remind me to get some
of the good wine out of the cellar.”

“Well, then, Monsieur Grandet,” said the keeper, who had come prepared
with an harangue for the purpose of settling the question of the
indemnity, “Monsieur Grandet--”

“Ta, ta, ta, ta!” said Grandet; “I know what you want to say. You are a
good fellow; we will see about it to-morrow, I’m too busy to-day. Wife,
give him five francs,” he added to Madame Grandet as he decamped.

The poor woman was only too happy to buy peace at the cost of eleven
francs. She knew that Grandet would let her alone for a fortnight after
he had thus taken back, franc by franc, the money he had given her.

“Here, Cornoiller,” she said, slipping ten francs into the man’s hand,
“some day we will reward your services.”

Cornoiller could say nothing, so he went away.

“Madame,” said Nanon, who had put on her black coif and taken her
basket, “I want only three francs. You keep the rest; it’ll go fast
enough somehow.”

“Have a good dinner, Nanon; my cousin will come down,” said Eugenie.

“Something very extraordinary is going on, I am certain of it,” said
Madame Grandet. “This is only the third time since our marriage that
your father has given a dinner.”

              *     *     *     *     *

About four o’clock, just as Eugenie and her mother had finished setting
the table for six persons, and after the master of the house had brought
up a few bottles of the exquisite wine which provincials cherish with
true affection, Charles came down into the hall. The young fellow was
pale; his gestures, the expression of his face, his glance, and the
tones of his voice, all had a sadness which was full of grace. He was
not pretending grief, he truly suffered; and the veil of pain cast over
his features gave him an interesting air dear to the heart of women.
Eugenie loved him the more for it. Perhaps she felt that sorrow drew him
nearer to her. Charles was no longer the rich and distinguished young
man placed in a sphere far above her, but a relation plunged into
frightful misery. Misery begets equality. Women have this in common with
the angels,--suffering humanity belongs to them. Charles and Eugenie
understood each other and spoke only with their eyes; for the poor
fallen dandy, orphaned and impoverished, sat apart in a corner of the
room, and was proudly calm and silent. Yet, from time to time, the
gentle and caressing glance of the young girl shone upon him and
constrained him away from his sad thoughts, drawing him with her into
the fields of hope and of futurity, where she loved to hold him at her
side.




VII

At this moment the town of Saumur was more excited about the dinner
given by Grandet to the Cruchots than it had been the night before at
the sale of his vintage, though that constituted a crime of high-treason
against the whole wine-growing community. If the politic old miser had
given his dinner from the same idea that cost the dog of Alcibiades his
tail, he might perhaps have been called a great man; but the fact is,
considering himself superior to a community which he could trick on all
occasions, he paid very little heed to what Saumur might say.

The des Grassins soon learned the facts of the failure and the violent
death of Guillaume Grandet, and they determined to go to their client’s
house that very evening to commiserate his misfortune and show him some
marks of friendship, with a view of ascertaining the motives which had
led him to invite the Cruchots to dinner. At precisely five o’clock
Monsieur C. de Bonfons and his uncle the notary arrived in their
Sunday clothes. The party sat down to table and began to dine with good
appetites. Grandet was grave, Charles silent, Eugenie dumb, and Madame
Grandet did not say more than usual; so that the dinner was, very
properly, a repast of condolence. When they rose from table Charles said
to his aunt and uncle,--

“Will you permit me to retire? I am obliged to undertake a long and
painful correspondence.”

“Certainly, nephew.”

As soon as the goodman was certain that Charles could hear nothing and
was probably deep in his letter-writing, he said, with a dissimulating
glance at his wife,--

“Madame Grandet, what we have to talk about will be Latin to you; it
is half-past seven; you can go and attend to your household accounts.
Good-night, my daughter.”

He kissed Eugenie, and the two women departed. A scene now took place in
which Pere Grandet brought to bear, more than at any other moment of his
life, the shrewd dexterity he had acquired in his intercourse with
men, and which had won him from those whose flesh he sometimes bit
too sharply the nickname of “the old dog.” If the mayor of Saumur had
carried his ambition higher still, if fortunate circumstances, drawing
him towards the higher social spheres, had sent him into congresses
where the affairs of nations were discussed, and had he there employed
the genius with which his personal interests had endowed him, he would
undoubtedly have proved nobly useful to his native land. Yet it is
perhaps equally certain that outside of Saumur the goodman would have
cut a very sorry figure. Possibly there are minds like certain animals
which cease to breed when transplanted from the climates in which they
are born.

“M-m-mon-sieur le p-p-president, you said t-t-that b-b-bankruptcy--”

The stutter which for years the old miser had assumed when it suited
him, and which, together with the deafness of which he sometimes
complained in rainy weather, was thought in Saumur to be a natural
defect, became at this crisis so wearisome to the two Cruchots that
while they listened they unconsciously made faces and moved their lips,
as if pronouncing the words over which he was hesitating and stuttering
at will. Here it may be well to give the history of this impediment
of the speech and hearing of Monsieur Grandet. No one in Anjou heard
better, or could pronounce more crisply the French language (with an
Angevin accent) than the wily old cooper. Some years earlier, in spite
of his shrewdness, he had been taken in by an Israelite, who in the
course of the discussion held his hand behind his ear to catch sounds,
and mangled his meaning so thoroughly in trying to utter his words that
Grandet fell a victim to his humanity and was compelled to prompt the
wily Jew with the words and ideas he seemed to seek, to complete himself
the arguments of the said Jew, to say what that cursed Jew ought to have
said for himself; in short, to be the Jew instead of being Grandet. When
the cooper came out of this curious encounter he had concluded the only
bargain of which in the course of a long commercial life he ever had
occasion to complain. But if he lost at the time pecuniarily, he gained
morally a valuable lesson; later, he gathered its fruits. Indeed, the
goodman ended by blessing that Jew for having taught him the art of
irritating his commercial antagonist and leading him to forget his own
thoughts in his impatience to suggest those over which his tormentor
was stuttering. No affair had ever needed the assistance of deafness,
impediments of speech, and all the incomprehensible circumlocutions with
which Grandet enveloped his ideas, as much as the affair now in hand. In
the first place, he did not mean to shoulder the responsibility of
his own scheme; in the next, he was determined to remain master of the
conversation and to leave his real intentions in doubt.

“M-m-monsieur de B-B-Bonfons,”--for the second time in three years
Grandet called the Cruchot nephew Monsieur de Bonfons; the
president felt he might consider himself the artful old fellow’s
son-in-law,--“you-ou said th-th-that b-b-bankruptcy c-c-could, in some
c-c-cases, b-b-be p-p-prevented b-b-by--”

“By the courts of commerce themselves. It is done constantly,” said
Monsieur C. de Bonfons, bestriding Grandet’s meaning, or thinking he
guessed it, and kindly wishing to help him out with it. “Listen.”

“Y-yes,” said Grandet humbly, with the mischievous expression of a boy
who is inwardly laughing at his teacher while he pays him the greatest
attention.

“When a man so respected and important as, for example, your late
brother--”

“M-my b-b-brother, yes.”

“--is threatened with insolvency--”

“They c-c-call it in-ins-s-solvency?”

“Yes; when his failure is imminent, the court of commerce, to which he
is amenable (please follow me attentively), has the power, by a decree,
to appoint a receiver. Liquidation, you understand, is not the same
as failure. When a man fails, he is dishonored; but when he merely
liquidates, he remains an honest man.”

“T-t-that’s very d-d-different, if it d-d-doesn’t c-c-cost m-m-more,”
 said Grandet.

“But a liquidation can be managed without having recourse to the courts
at all. For,” said the president, sniffing a pinch of snuff, “don’t you
know how failures are declared?”

“N-n-no, I n-n-never t-t-thought,” answered Grandet.

“In the first place,” resumed the magistrate, “by filing the schedule
in the record office of the court, which the merchant may do himself, or
his representative for him with a power of attorney duly certified. In
the second place, the failure may be declared under compulsion from the
creditors. Now if the merchant does not file his schedule, and if no
creditor appears before the courts to obtain a decree of insolvency
against the merchant, what happens?”

“W-w-what h-h-happens?”

“Why, the family of the deceased, his representatives, his heirs, or
the merchant himself, if he is not dead, or his friends if he is only
hiding, liquidate his business. Perhaps you would like to liquidate your
brother’s affairs?”

“Ah! Grandet,” said the notary, “that would be the right thing to do.
There is honor down here in the provinces. If you save your name--for it
is your name--you will be a man--”

“A noble man!” cried the president, interrupting his uncle.

“Certainly,” answered the old man, “my b-b-brother’s name was
G-G-Grandet, like m-m-mine. Th-that’s c-c-certain; I d-d-don’t d-d-deny
it. And th-th-this l-l-liquidation might be, in m-m-many ways, v-v-very
advan-t-t-tageous t-t-to the interests of m-m-my n-n-nephew, whom
I l-l-love. But I must consider. I don’t k-k-know the t-t-tricks of
P-P-Paris. I b-b-belong to Sau-m-mur, d-d-don’t you see? M-m-my vines,
my d-d-drains--in short, I’ve my own b-b-business. I never g-g-give
n-n-notes. What are n-n-notes? I t-t-take a good m-m-many, but I
have never s-s-signed one. I d-d-don’t understand such things. I have
h-h-heard say that n-n-notes c-c-can be b-b-bought up.”

“Of course,” said the president. “Notes can be bought in the market,
less so much per cent. Don’t you understand?”

Grandet made an ear-trumpet of his hand, and the president repeated his
words.

“Well, then,” replied the man, “there’s s-s-something to be g-g-got out
of it? I k-know n-nothing at my age about such th-th-things. I l-l-live
here and l-l-look after the v-v-vines. The vines g-g-grow, and it’s the
w-w-wine that p-p-pays. L-l-look after the v-v-vintage, t-t-that’s my
r-r-rule. My c-c-chief interests are at Froidfond. I c-c-can’t l-l-leave
my h-h-house to m-m-muddle myself with a d-d-devilish b-b-business
I kn-know n-n-nothing about. You say I ought to l-l-liquidate my
b-b-brother’s af-f-fairs, to p-p-prevent the f-f-failure. I c-c-can’t be
in two p-p-places at once, unless I were a little b-b-bird, and--”

“I understand,” cried the notary. “Well, my old friend, you have
friends, old friends, capable of devoting themselves to your interests.”

“All right!” thought Grandet, “make haste and come to the point!”

“Suppose one of them went to Paris and saw your brother Guillaume’s
chief creditor and said to him--”

“One m-m-moment,” interrupted the goodman, “said wh-wh-what? Something
l-l-like this. Monsieur Gr-Grandet of Saumur this, Monsieur Grandet of
Saumur that. He l-loves his b-b-brother, he loves his n-nephew. Grandet
is a g-g-good uncle; he m-m-means well. He has sold his v-v-vintage.
D-d-don’t declare a f-f-failure; c-c-call a meeting; l-l-liquidate; and
then Gr-Gr-Grandet will see what he c-c-can do. B-b-better liquidate
than l-let the l-l-law st-st-stick its n-n-nose in. Hein? isn’t it so?”

“Exactly so,” said the president.

“B-because, don’t you see, Monsieur de B-Bonfons, a man must l-l-look
b-b-before he l-leaps. If you c-c-can’t, you c-c-can’t. M-m-must know
all about the m-m-matter, all the resources and the debts, if you
d-d-don’t want to be r-r-ruined. Hein? isn’t it so?”

“Certainly,” said the president. “I’m of opinion that in a few months
the debts might be bought up for a certain sum, and then paid in full
by an agreement. Ha! ha! you can coax a dog a long way if you show him a
bit of lard. If there has been no declaration of failure, and you hold
a lien on the debts, you come out of the business as white as the driven
snow.”

“Sn-n-now,” said Grandet, putting his hand to his ear, “wh-wh-what about
s-now?”

“But,” cried the president, “do pray attend to what I am saying.”

“I am at-t-tending.”

“A note is merchandise,--an article of barter which rises and falls in
prices. That is a deduction from Jeremy Bentham’s theory about usury.
That writer has proved that the prejudice which condemned usurers to
reprobation was mere folly.”

“Whew!” ejaculated the goodman.

“Allowing that money, according to Bentham, is an article of
merchandise, and that whatever represents money is equally merchandise,”
 resumed the president; “allowing also that it is notorious that the
commercial note, bearing this or that signature, is liable to the
fluctuation of all commercial values, rises or falls in the market,
is dear at one moment, and is worth nothing at another, the courts
decide--ah! how stupid I am, I beg your pardon--I am inclined to think
you could buy up your brother’s debts for twenty-five per cent.”

“D-d-did you c-c-call him Je-Je-Jeremy B-Ben?”

“Bentham, an Englishman.’

“That’s a Jeremy who might save us a lot of lamentations in business,”
 said the notary, laughing.

“Those Englishmen s-sometimes t-t-talk sense,” said Grandet. “So,
ac-c-cording to Ben-Bentham, if my b-b-brother’s n-notes are worth
n-n-nothing; if Je-Je--I’m c-c-correct, am I not? That seems c-c-clear
to my m-m-mind--the c-c-creditors would be--No, would not be; I
understand.”

“Let me explain it all,” said the president. “Legally, if you acquire a
title to all the debts of the Maison Grandet, your brother or his heirs
will owe nothing to any one. Very good.”

“Very g-good,” repeated Grandet.

“In equity, if your brother’s notes are negotiated--negotiated, do you
clearly understand the term?--negotiated in the market at a reduction
of so much per cent in value, and if one of your friends happening to be
present should buy them in, the creditors having sold them of their
own free-will without constraint, the estate of the late Grandet is
honorably released.”

“That’s t-true; b-b-business is b-business,” said the cooper. “B-b-but,
st-still, you know, it is d-d-difficult. I h-have n-no m-m-money and
n-no t-t-time.”

“Yes, but you need not undertake it. I am quite ready to go to Paris
(you may pay my expenses, they will only be a trifle). I will see
the creditors and talk with them and get an extension of time, and
everything can be arranged if you will add something to the assets so as
to buy up all title to the debts.”

“We-we’ll see about th-that. I c-c-can’t and I w-w-won’t bind myself
without--He who c-c-can’t, can’t; don’t you see?”

“That’s very true.”

“I’m all p-p-put ab-b-bout by what you’ve t-t-told me. This is the
f-first t-t-time in my life I have b-been obliged to th-th-think--”

“Yes, you are not a lawyer.”

“I’m only a p-p-poor wine-g-grower, and know n-nothing about wh-what you
have just t-told me; I m-m-must th-think about it.”

“Very good,” said the president, preparing to resume his argument.

“Nephew!” said the notary, interrupting him in a warning tone.

“Well, what, uncle?” answered the president.

“Let Monsieur Grandet explain his own intentions. The matter in question
is of the first importance. Our good friend ought to define his meaning
clearly, and--”

A loud knock, which announced the arrival of the des Grassins family,
succeeded by their entrance and salutations, hindered Cruchot from
concluding his sentence. The notary was glad of the interruption, for
Grandet was beginning to look suspiciously at him, and the wen gave
signs of a brewing storm. In the first place, the notary did not think
it becoming in a president of the Civil courts to go to Paris and
manipulate creditors and lend himself to an underhand job which clashed
with the laws of strict integrity; moreover, never having known old
Grandet to express the slightest desire to pay anything, no matter what,
he instinctively feared to see his nephew taking part in the affair.
He therefore profited by the entrance of the des Grassins to take the
nephew by the arm and lead him into the embrasure of the window,--

“You have said enough, nephew; you’ve shown enough devotion. Your desire
to win the girl blinds you. The devil! you mustn’t go at it tooth and
nail. Let me sail the ship now; you can haul on the braces. Do you think
it right to compromise your dignity as a magistrate in such a--”

He stopped, for he heard Monsieur des Grassins saying to the old cooper
as they shook hands,--

“Grandet, we have heard of the frightful misfortunes which have just
befallen your family,--the failure of the house of Guillaume Grandet and
the death of your brother. We have come to express our grief at these
sad events.”

“There is but one sad event,” said the notary, interrupting the
banker,--“the death of Monsieur Grandet, junior; and he would never have
killed himself had he thought in time of applying to his brother for
help. Our old friend, who is honorable to his finger-nails, intends
to liquidate the debts of the Maison Grandet of Paris. To save him the
worry of legal proceedings, my nephew, the president, has just offered
to go to Paris and negotiate with the creditors for a satisfactory
settlement.”

These words, corroborated by Grandet’s attitude as he stood silently
nursing his chin, astonished the three des Grassins, who had been
leisurely discussing the old man’s avarice as they came along, very
nearly accusing him of fratricide.

“Ah! I was sure of it,” cried the banker, looking at his wife. “What did
I tell you just now, Madame des Grassins? Grandet is honorable to the
backbone, and would never allow his name to remain under the slightest
cloud! Money without honor is a disease. There is honor in the
provinces! Right, very right, Grandet. I’m an old soldier, and I can’t
disguise my thoughts; I speak roughly. Thunder! it is sublime!”

“Th-then s-s-sublime th-things c-c-cost d-dear,” answered the goodman,
as the banker warmly wrung his hand.

“But this, my dear Grandet,--if the president will excuse me,--is a
purely commercial matter, and needs a consummate business man. Your
agent must be some one fully acquainted with the markets,--with
disbursements, rebates, interest calculations, and so forth. I am going
to Paris on business of my own, and I can take charge of--”

“We’ll see about t-t-trying to m-m-manage it b-b-between us, under the
p-p-peculiar c-c-circumstances, b-b-but without b-b-binding m-m-myself
to anything th-that I c-c-could not do,” said Grandet, stuttering;
“because, you see, monsieur le president naturally expects me to pay the
expenses of his journey.”

The goodman did not stammer over the last words.

“Eh!” cried Madame des Grassins, “why it is a pleasure to go to Paris. I
would willingly pay to go myself.”

She made a sign to her husband, as if to encourage him in cutting
the enemy out of the commission, _coute que coute_; then she glanced
ironically at the two Cruchots, who looked chap-fallen. Grandet seized
the banker by a button and drew him into a corner of the room.

“I have a great deal more confidence in you than in the president,” he
said; “besides, I’ve other fish to fry,” he added, wriggling his wen. “I
want to buy a few thousand francs in the Funds while they are at eighty.
They fall, I’m told, at the end of each month. You know all about these
things, don’t you?”

“Bless me! then, am I to invest enough to give you a few thousand francs
a year?”

“That’s not much to begin with. Hush! I don’t want any one to know I am
going to play that game. You can make the investment by the end of
the month. Say nothing to the Cruchots; that’ll annoy them. If you are
really going to Paris, we will see if there is anything to be done for
my poor nephew.”

“Well, it’s all settled. I’ll start to-morrow by the mail-post,” said
des Grassins aloud, “and I will come and take your last directions
at--what hour will suit you?”

“Five o’clock, just before dinner,” said Grandet, rubbing his hands.

The two parties stayed on for a short time. Des Grassins said, after a
pause, striking Grandet on the shoulder,--

“It is a good thing to have a relation like him.”

“Yes, yes; without making a show,” said Grandet, “I am a g-good
relation. I loved my brother, and I will prove it, unless it
c-c-costs--”

“We must leave you, Grandet,” said the banker, interrupting him
fortunately before he got to the end of his sentence. “If I hurry my
departure, I must attend to some matters at once.”

“Very good, very good! I myself--in c-consequence of what I t-told
you--I must retire to my own room and ‘d-d-deliberate,’ as President
Cruchot says.”

“Plague take him! I am no longer Monsieur de Bonfons,” thought the
magistrate ruefully, his face assuming the expression of a judge bored
by an argument.

The heads of the two factions walked off together. Neither gave any
further thought to the treachery Grandet had been guilty of in the
morning against the whole wine-growing community; each tried to fathom
what the other was thinking about the real intentions of the wily old
man in this new affair, but in vain.

“Will you

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