Eugenie Grandet

“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.”