By dint5 of jostling with men, travelling through many lands, and studying a variety of conflicting customs, his ideas had been modified and had become sceptical. He ceased to have fixed6 principles of right and wrong, for he saw what was called a crime in one country lauded7 as a virtue8 in another. In the perpetual struggle of selfish interests his heart grew cold, then contracted, and then dried up. The blood of the Grandets did not fail of its destiny; Charles became hard, and eager for prey9. He sold Chinamen, Negroes, birds’ nests, children, artists; he practised usury10 on a large scale; the habit of defrauding11 custom-houses soon made him less scrupulous12 about the rights of his fellow men. He went to the Island of St. Thomas and bought, for a mere13 song, merchandise that had been captured by pirates, and took it to ports where he could sell it at a good price. If the pure and noble face of Eugenie went with him on his first voyage, like that image of the Virgin14 which Spanish mariners15 fastened to their masts, if he attributed his first success to the magic influence of the prayers and intercessions of his gentle love, later on women of other kinds,—blacks, mulattoes, whites, and Indian dancing-girls,—orgies and adventures in many lands, completely effaced16 all recollection of his cousin, of Saumur, of the house, the bench, the kiss snatched in the dark passage. He remembered only the little garden shut in with crumbling17 walls, for it was there he learned the fate that had overtaken him; but he rejected all connection with his family. His uncle was an old dog who had filched18 his jewels; Eugenie had no place in his heart nor in his thoughts, though she did have a place in his accounts as a creditor19 for the sum of six thousand francs.
Such conduct and such ideas explain Charles Grandet’s silence. In the Indies, at St. Thomas, on the coast of Africa, at Lisbon, and in the United States the adventurer had taken the pseudonym20 of Shepherd, that he might not compromise his own name. Charles Shepherd could safely be indefatigable21, bold, grasping, and greedy of gain, like a man who resolves to snatch his fortune quibus cumque viis, and makes haste to have done with villany, that he may spend the rest of his life as an honest man.
With such methods, prosperity was rapid and brilliant; and in 1827 Charles Grandet returned to Bordeaux on the “Marie Caroline,” a fine brig belonging to a royalist house of business. He brought with him nineteen hundred thousand francs worth of gold-dust, from which he expected to derive22 seven or eight per cent more at the Paris mint. On the brig he met a gentleman-in-ordinary to His Majesty23 Charles X., Monsieur d’Aubrion, a worthy24 old man who had committed the folly25 of marrying a woman of fashion with a fortune derived26 from the West India Islands. To meet the costs of Madame d’Aubrion’s extravagance, he had gone out to the Indies to sell the property, and was now returning with his family to France.
Monsieur and Madame d’Aubrion, of the house of d’Aubrion de Buch, a family of southern France, whose last captal, or chief, died before 1789, were now reduced to an income of about twenty thousand francs, and they possessed27 an ugly daughter whom the mother was resolved to marry without a dot,—the family fortune being scarcely sufficient for the demands of her own life in Paris. This was an enterprise whose success might have seemed problematical to most men of the world, in spite of the cleverness with which such men credit a fashionable woman; in fact, Madame d’Aubrion herself, when she looked at her daughter, almost despaired of getting rid of her to any one, even to a man craving28 connection with nobility. Mademoiselle d’Aubrion was a long, spare, spindling demoiselle, like her namesake the insect; her mouth was disdainful; over it hung a nose that was too long, thick at the end, sallow in its normal condition, but very red after a meal,—a sort of vegetable phenomenon which is particularly disagreeable when it appears in the middle of a pale, dull, and uninteresting face. In one sense she was all that a worldly mother, thirty-eight years of age and still a beauty with claims to admiration29, could have wished. However, to counterbalance her personal defects, the marquise gave her daughter a distinguished30 air, subjected her to hygienic treatment which provisionally kept her nose at a reasonable flesh-tint, taught her the art of dressing31 well, endowed her with charming manners, showed her the trick of melancholy32 glances which interest a man and make him believe that he has found a long-sought angel, taught her the manoeuvre33 of the foot,—letting it peep beneath the petticoat, to show its tiny size, at the moment when the nose became aggressively red; in short, Madame d’Aubrion had cleverly made the very best of her offspring. By means of full sleeves, deceptive34 pads, puffed35 dresses amply trimmed, and high-pressure corsets, she had obtained such curious feminine developments that she ought, for the instruction of mothers, to have exhibited them in a museum.
Charles became very intimate with Madame d’Aubrion precisely36 because she was desirous of becoming intimate with him. Persons who were on board the brig declared that the handsome Madame d’Aubrion neglected no means of capturing so rich a son-in-law. On landing at Bordeaux in June, 1827, Monsieur, Madame, Mademoiselle d’Aubrion, and Charles lodged37 at the same hotel and started together for Paris. The hotel d’Aubrion was hampered38 with mortgages; Charles was destined39 to free it. The mother told him how delighted she would be to give up the ground-floor to a son-in-law. Not sharing Monsieur d’Aubrion’s prejudices on the score of nobility, she promised Charles Grandet to obtain a royal ordinance40 from Charles X. which would authorize41 him, Grandet, to take the name and arms of d’Aubrion and to succeed, by purchasing the entailed42 estate for thirty-six thousand francs a year, to the titles of Captal de Buch and Marquis d’Aubrion. By thus uniting their fortunes, living on good terms, and profiting by sinecures43, the two families might occupy the hotel d’Aubrion with an income of over a hundred thousand francs.
“And when a man has a hundred thousand francs a year, a name, a family, and a position at court,—for I will get you appointed as gentleman-of-the-bedchamber,—he can do what he likes,” she said to Charles. “You can then become anything you choose,—master of the rolls in the council of State, prefect, secretary to an embassy, the ambassador himself, if you like. Charles X. is fond of d’Aubrion; they have known each other from childhood.”
Intoxicated46 with ambition, Charles toyed with the hopes thus cleverly presented to him in the guise47 of confidences poured from heart to heart. Believing his father’s affairs to have been settled by his uncle, he imagined himself suddenly anchored in the Faubourg Saint-Germain,—that social object of all desire, where, under shelter of Mademoiselle Mathilde’s purple nose, he was to reappear as the Comte d’Aubrion, very much as the Dreux reappeared in Breze. Dazzled by the prosperity of the Restoration, which was tottering48 when he left France, fascinated by the splendor49 of aristocratic ideas, his intoxication50, which began on the brig, increased after he reached Paris, and he finally determined51 to take the course and reach the high position which the selfish hopes of his would-be mother-in-law pointed44 out to him. His cousin counted for no more than a speck52 in this brilliant perspective; but he went to see Annette. True woman of the world, Annette advised her old friend to make the marriage, and promised him her support in all his ambitious projects. In her heart she was enchanted54 to fasten an ugly and uninteresting girl on Charles, whose life in the West Indies had rendered him very attractive. His complexion
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