Chương Chương 6 · 第6章

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.