Such elements of sadness formed the physiognomy, as it were, of a dwelling11-house in Saumur which stands at the end of the steep street leading to the chateau12 in the upper part of the town. This street—now little frequented, hot in summer, cold in winter, dark in certain sections—is remarkable13 for the resonance14 of its little pebbly15 pavement, always clean and dry, for the narrowness of its tortuous16 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 divers17 aspects add to the originality18 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 slate19 and mark a bluish line along the frail20 wall of a dwelling covered by a roof en colombage which bends beneath the weight of years, and whose rotting shingles21 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 forefathers22 has traced domestic hieroglyphics23, of which the meaning is now lost forever. Here a Protestant attested24 his belief; there a Leaguer cursed Henry IV.; elsewhere some bourgeois25 has carved the insignia of his noblesse de cloches, symbols of his long-forgotten magisterial26 glory. The whole history of France is there.
Next to a tottering27 house with roughly plastered walls, where an artisan enshrines his tools, rises the mansion28 of a country gentleman, on the stone arch of which above the door vestiges29 of armorial bearings may still be seen, battered30 by the many revolutions that have shaken France since 1789. In this hilly street the ground-floors of the merchants are neither shops nor warehouses31; lovers of the Middle Ages will here find the ouvrouere of our forefathers in all its naive32 simplicity33. 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 exterior34 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 den10 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 shutters35 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 delusive36 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, copper37 wire hanging from the joists above, iron hoops38 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, phlegmatically39, civilly, or arrogantly40, 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 doorway41 and twirling his thumbs as he talks with a neighbor. To all appearance he owns nothing more than a few miserable42 boat-ribs and two or three bundles of laths; but below in the port his teeming44 wood-yard supplies all the cooperage trade of Anjou. He knows to a plank45 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, atmospheric46 vicissitudes47 control commercial life. Wine-growers, proprietors48, wood-merchants, coopers, inn-keepers, mariners49, 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 dread50 rain, wind, drought, and want water, heat, and clouds to suit their fancy. A perpetual duel51 goes on between the heavens and their terrestrial interests. The barometer52 smooths, saddens, or makes merry their countenances53, turn and turn about. From end to end of this street, formerly55 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 opportune56 rainfall is bringing him.
On Saturdays after midday, in the fine season, not one sou’s worth of merchandise can be bought from these worthy57 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 bantered58 and made game of from door to door. From this came many good stories, and the nickname copieux, which was applied59 to the inhabitants of Angers, who excelled in such urban sarcasms60.
The ancient mansions61 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 relics62 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 windings63 of the picturesque64 thoroughfare, whose irregularities awaken65 recollections that plunge66 the mind mechanically into reverie, and you will see a somewhat dark recess67, 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 fully68 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 cipher69. 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 domain70, he obtained for a song, legally if not legitimately72, 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 patriot73 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 Consulate74 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 superseded75 Monsieur Grandet (who was supposed to have worn the Phrygian cap) by a man of his own surroundings, a future baron76 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 registration77 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 legitimate71 love, was ten years old. Monsieur Grandet, whom Providence78 no doubt desired to compensate79 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 avarice80 of the deceased persons was so keen that for a long time they had hoarded81 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 usury82. The inhabitants of Saumur consequently estimated his savings83 according to “the revenues of the sun’s wealth,” as they said.
Monsieur Grandet thus obtained that modern title of nobility which our mania84 for equality can never rub out. He became the most imposing85 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 notary86 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 covenanted87 and secret share.
Although old Cruchot and Monsieur des Grassins were both gifted with the deep discretion88 which wealth and trust beget89 in the provinces, they publicly testified so much respect to Monsieur Grandet that observers estimated the amount of his property by the obsequious90 attention which they bestowed91 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 ineffable92 delight in gazing upon great masses of gold. Avaricious93 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 tints94. The glance of a man accustomed to draw enormous interest from his capital acquires, like that of the libertine95, the gambler, or the sycophant96, 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 esteem97 due to one who owed no man anything, who, skilful98 cooper and experienced wine-grower that he was, guessed with the precision of an astronomer99 whether he ought to manufacture a thousand puncheons for his vintage, or only five hundred, who never failed in any speculation100, 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 bide101 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, judiciously102 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 crouch103 and lie low, watch his prey104 a long while, spring upon it, open his jaws105, swallow a mass of louis, and then rest tranquilly106 like a snake in process of digestion107, impassible, methodical, and cold. No one saw him pass without a feeling of admiration108 mingled109 with respect and fear; had not every man in Saumur felt the rending110 of those polished steel claws? For this one, Maitre Cruchot had procured111 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 frightful112 deduction113 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 gatherings114. To some the fortune of the old wine-grower was an object of patriotic115 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 possessed116 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 mantle117 all the actions of this man. If in early days some peculiarities118 of his life gave occasion for laughter or ridicule119, 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 naturalist120 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 tithe121 of wheat. He owned a mill; and the tenant122 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 tenants123 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 planks124 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 expenditures125 were for the consecrated126 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 indemnity127. After the acquisition of this property he ate game for the first time.
Monsieur Grandet’s manners were very simple. He spoke128 little. He usually expressed his meaning by short sententious phrases uttered in a soft voice. After the Revolution, the epoch129 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 stammering130, the incoherence of his language, the flux131 of words in which he drowned his thought, his apparent lack of logic132, attributed to defects of education, were in reality assumed, and will be sufficiently133 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 receded134. He reflected long before making any business agreement. When his opponent, after careful conversation, avowed135 the secret of his own purposes, confident that he had secured his listener’s assent136, 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 economize137 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 circumspect138 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.
Physically139, Grandet was a man five feet high, thick-set, square-built, with calves140 twelve inches in circumference141, 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, devouring142 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 malice143. The whole countenance54 showed a dangerous cunning, an integrity without warmth, the egotism of a man long used to concentrate every feeling upon the enjoyments144 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 unctuous145 and soft outwardly, Monsieur Grandet’s nature was of iron. His dress never varied146; and those who saw him to-day saw him such as he had been since 1791. His stout147 shoes were tied with leathern thongs148; he wore, in all weathers, thick woollen stockings, short breeches of coarse maroon149 cloth with silver buckles150, a velvet151 waistcoat, in alternate stripes of yellow and puce, buttoned squarely, a large maroon coat with wide flaps, a black cravat152, and a quaker’s hat. His gloves, thick as those of a gendarme153, 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 litigant154 so ill-advised as to call him Monsieur Cruchot would soon be made to feel his folly155 in court. The magistrate156 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 allied157 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 miser43, and always arrived in time upon the field of battle. The three des Grassins likewise had their adherents158, 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 adversary159, and tried to obtain the rich heiress for his nephew the president.
This secret warfare160 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 agitation161. 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 bonnet162 rouge163. 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 insinuating164 man in the world: pit a woman against a monk165, 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 wholesale166 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 conveyances167 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 liquidate168 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, payable169 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 solvent170 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 astonishment171 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.
