第 一 章 · 第1章

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.