“Go back to your loto, Mme. Grandet, and leave me to settle with this gentleman here.”
With that he slammed the parlor door, and the loto players sat down again, but they were too much excited to go on with the game.
“Is it anyone who lives in Saumur, M. des Grassins?” his wife inquired.
“No, a traveler.”
“Then he must have come from Paris.”
“As a matter of fact,” said the notary, drawing out a heavy antique watch, a couple of fingers’ breadth in thickness, and not unlike a Dutch punt in shape, “as a matter of fact, it is nine o’clock. Peste! the mail coach is not often behind time.”
“Is he young looking?” put in the Abbé Cruchot.
“Yes,” answered M. des Grassins. “The luggage he has with him must weigh three hundred kilos at least.”
“Nanon does not come back,” said Eugénie.
“It must be some relation of yours,” the President remarked.
“Let us put down our stakes,” said Mme. Grandet gently. “M. Grandet was vexed, I could tell that by the sound of his voice, and perhaps he would be displeased if he came in and found us all discussing his affairs.”
“Mademoiselle,” Adolphe addressed his neighbor, “it will be your cousin Grandet no doubt, a very nice looking young fellow whom I once met at a ball at M. de Nucingen’s.”
Adolphe went no further, his mother stamped on his foot under the table. Aloud, she asked him for two sous for his stake, adding in an undertone, meant only for his ears, “Will you hold your tongue, you great silly?”
They could hear the footsteps of Nanon and the porter on the staircase, but Grandet returned to the room almost immediately, and just behind him came the traveler who had excited so much curiosity, and loomed so large in the imaginations of those assembled; indeed, his sudden descent into their midst might be compared to the arrival of a snail in a beehive, or the entrance of a peacock into some humdrum village poultry-yard.
“Take a seat near the fire,” said Grandet, addressing the stranger.
The young man looked around the room and bowed very gracefully before seating himself. The men rose and bowed politely in return, the women curtseyed rather ceremoniously.
“You are feeling cold, I expect, sir,” said Mme. Grandet; “you have no doubt come from—”
“Just like the women!” broke in the goodman, looking up from the letter which he held in his hand. “Do let the gentleman have a little peace.”
“But, father, perhaps the gentleman wants something after his journey,” said Eugénie.
“He has a tongue in his head,” the vinegrower answered severely.
The stranger alone felt any surprise at this scene, the rest were quite used to the worthy man and his arbitrary behavior. But after the two inquiries had received these summary answers, the stranger rose and stood with his back to the fire, held out a foot to the blaze, so as to warm the soles of his boots, and said to Eugénie, “Thank you, cousin, I dined at Tours. And I do not require anything,” he added, glancing at Grandet; “I am not in the least tired.”
“Do you come from Paris?” (it was Mme. des Grassins who now put the inquiry).
M. Charles (for this was the name borne by the son of M. Grandet of Paris), hearing someone question him, took out an eyeglass that hung suspended from his neck by a cord, fixed it in his eye, and made a deliberate survey of the objects upon the table and of the people sitting round it, eyed Mme. des Grassins very coolly, and said (when he had completed his survey), “Yes, madame.—You are playing at loto, aunt,” he added; “pray go on with your game, it is too amusing to be broken off …”
“I knew it was the cousin,” thought Mme. des Grassins, and she gave him a side-glance from time to time.
“Forty-seven,” cried the old Abbé. “Keep count. Mme. des Grassins, that is your number, is it not?”
M. des Grassins put down a counter on his wife’s card; the lady herself was not thinking of loto, her mind was full of melancholy forebodings; she was watching Eugénie and the cousin from Paris. She saw how the heiress now and then stole a glance at her cousin, and the banker’s wife could easily discover in those glances a crescendo of amazement or of curiosity.
There was certainly a strange contrast between M. Charles Grandet, a handsome young man of two-and-twenty, and the worthy provincials, who, tolerably disgusted already with his aristocratic airs, were scornfully studying the stranger with a view to making game of him. This requires some explanation.
At two-and-twenty childhood is not so very far away, and youth, on the borderland, has not finally and forever put away childish things; Charles Grandet’s vanity was childish, but perhaps ninety-nine young men out of a hundred would have been carried away by it and behaved exactly as he did.
Some days previously his father had bidden him to go on a visit of several months to his uncle in Saumur; perhaps M. Grandet (of Paris) had Eugénie in his mind. Charles, launched in this way into a country town for the first time in his life, had his own ideas. He would make his appearance in provincial society with all the superiority of a young man of fashion; he would reduce the neighborhood to despair by his splendor; he would inaugurate a new epoch, and introduce all the latest and most ingenious refinement of Parisian luxury. To be brief, he meant to devote more time at Saumur than in Paris to the care of his nails, and to carry out schemes of elaborate and studied refinements in dress at his leisure; there should be none of the not ungraceful negligence of attire which a young man of fashion sometimes affects.
So Charles took
