“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 growi
ng 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, to
uched 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?”
Works of Honore De Balzac Page 328