The Best Works of Balzac. Оноре де Бальзак

great precaution lest it should creak, and yet enough to let her see into the corridor.

      Suddenly her eye encountered that of her father; and his glance, vague and unnoticing as it was, terrified her. The goodman and Nanon were yoked together by a stout stick, each end of which rested on their shoulders; a stout rope was passed over it, on which was slung a small barrel or keg like those Pere Grandet still made in his bakehouse as an amusement for his leisure hours.

      “Holy Virgin, how heavy it is!” said the voice of Nanon.

      “What a pity that it is only copper sous!” answered Grandet. “Take care you don’t knock over the candlestick.”

      The scene was lighted by a single candle placed between two rails of the staircase.

      “Cornoiller,” said Grandet to his keeper in partibus, “have you brought your pistols?”

      “No, monsieur. Mercy! what’s there to fear for your copper sous?”

      “Oh! nothing,” said Pere Grandet.

      “Besides, we shall go fast,” added the man; “your farmers have picked out their best horses.”

      “Very good. You did not tell them where I was going?”

      “I didn’t know where.”

      “Very good. Is the carriage strong?”

      “Strong? hear to that, now! Why, it can carry three thousand weight. How much does that old keg weigh?”

      “Goodness!” exclaimed Nanon. “I ought to know! There’s pretty nigh eighteen hundred—”

      “Will you hold your tongue, Nanon! You are to tell my wife I have gone into the country. I shall be back to dinner. Drive fast, Cornoiller; I must get to Angers before nine o’clock.”

      The carriage drove off. Nanon bolted the great door, let loose the dog, and went off to bed with a bruised shoulder, no one in the neighborhood suspecting either the departure of Grandet or the object of his journey. The precautions of the old miser and his reticence were never relaxed. No one had ever seen a penny in that house, filled as it was with gold. Hearing in the morning, through the gossip of the port, that exchange on gold had doubled in price in consequence of certain military preparations undertaken at Nantes, and that speculators had arrived at Angers to buy coin, the old wine-grower, by the simple process of borrowing horses from his farmers, seized the chance of selling his gold and of bringing back in the form of treasury notes the sum he intended to put into the Funds, having swelled it considerably by the exchange.

VIII

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      “My father has gone,” thought Eugenie, who heard all that took place from the head of the stairs. Silence was restored in the house, and the distant rumbling of the carriage, ceasing by degrees, no longer echoed through the sleeping town. At this moment Eugenie heard in her heart, before the sound caught her ears, a cry which pierced the partitions and came from her cousin’s chamber. A line of light, thin as the blade of a sabre, shone through a chink in the door and fell horizontally on the balusters of the rotten staircase.

      “He suffers!” she said, springing up the stairs. A second moan brought her to the landing near his room. The door was ajar, she pushed it open. Charles was sleeping; his head hung over the side of the old armchair, and his hand, from which the pen had fallen, nearly touched the floor. The oppressed breathing caused by the strained posture suddenly frightened Eugenie, who entered the room hastily.

      “He must be very tired,” she said to herself, glancing at a dozen letters lying sealed upon the table. She read their addresses: “To Messrs. Farry, Breilmann, & Co., carriage-makers”; “To Monsieur Buisson, tailor,” etc.

      “He has been settling all his affairs, so as to leave France at once,” she thought. Her eyes fell upon two open letters. The words, “My dear Annette,” at the head of one of them, blinded her for a moment. Her heart beat fast, her feet were nailed to the floor.

      “His dear Annette! He loves! he is loved! No hope! What does he say to her?”

      These thoughts rushed through her head and heart. She saw the words everywhere, even on the bricks of the floor, in letters of fire.

      “Resign him already? No, no! I will not read the letter. I ought to go away—What if I do read it?”

      She looked at Charles, then she gently took his head and placed it against the back of the chair; he let her do so, like a child which, though asleep, knows its mother’s touch and receives, without awaking, her kisses and watchful care. Like a mother Eugenie raised the drooping hand, and like a mother she gently kissed the chestnut hair—“Dear Annette!” a demon shrieked the words in her ear.

      “I am doing wrong; but I must read it, that letter,” she said. She turned away her head, for her noble sense of honor reproached her. For the first time in her life good and evil struggled together in her heart. Up to that moment she had never had to blush for any action. Passion and curiosity triumphed. As she read each sentence her heart swelled more and more, and the keen glow which filled her being as she did so, only made the joys of first love still more precious.

      My dear Annette,—Nothing could ever have separated us but the

       great misfortune which has now overwhelmed me, and which no human

       foresight could have prevented. My father has killed himself; his

       fortune and mine are irretrievably lost. I am orphaned at an age

       when, through the nature of my education, I am still a child; and

       yet I must lift myself as a man out of the abyss into which I am

       plunged. I have just spent half the night in facing my position.

       If I wish to leave France an honest man,—and there is no doubt of

       that,—I have not a hundred francs of my own with which to try my

       fate in the Indies or in America. Yes, my poor Anna, I must seek

       my fortune in those deadly climates. Under those skies, they tell

       me, I am sure to make it. As for remaining in Paris, I cannot do

       so. Neither my nature nor my face are made to bear the affronts,

       the neglect, the disdain shown to a ruined man, the son of a

       bankrupt! Good God! think of owing two millions! I should be

       killed in a duel the first week; therefore I shall not return

       there. Your love—the most tender and devoted love which ever

       ennobled the heart of man—cannot draw me back. Alas! my beloved,

       I have no money with which to go to you, to give and receive a

       last kiss from which I might derive some strength for my forlorn

       enterprise.

      “Poor Charles! I did well to read the letter. I have gold; I will give it to him,” thought Eugenie.

      She wiped her eyes, and went on reading.

      I have never thought of the miseries of poverty. If I have the

       hundred louis required for the mere costs of the journey, I have

       not a sou for an outfit. But no, I have not the hundred louis, not

       even one louis. I don’t know that anything will be left after I

       have paid my debts in Paris. If I have nothing, I shall go quietly

       to Nantes and ship as a common sailor; and I will begin in the new

       world like other men who have started young without a sou and

       brought back the wealth of the Indies. During this long day