Eugenie Grandet, Honoré de Balzac [the reader ebook TXT] 📗

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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