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
calledjaquemart, 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 redgros de
Toursheld 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 fat [...]
