“What the devil made my father send me here?” said he to himself.
Arrived on the first landing, he saw before him three doors painted a dull red-brown color; there were no moldings round any of them, so that they would have been scarcely visible in the dust surface of the wall if it had not been for the very apparent heavy bars of iron with which they were embellished, and which terminated in a sort of rough ornamental design, as did the ends of the iron scutcheons which surrounded the keyholes. A door at the head of the stairs, which had once given entrance into the room over the kitchen, was evidently blocked up. As a matter of fact, the only entrance was through Grandet’s own room, and this room over the kitchen was the vinegrower’s sanctum.
Daylight was admitted into it by a single window which looked out upon the yard, and which, for greater security, was protected by a grating of massive iron bars. The master of the house allowed no one, not even Mme. Grandet, to set foot in this chamber; he kept the right of entry to himself, and sat there, undisturbed and alone, like an alchemist in the midst of his crucibles. Here, no doubt, there was some cunningly contrived and secret hiding-place; for here he stored up the title-deeds of his estates; here, too, he kept the delicately adjusted scales in which he weighed his gold louis; and here every night he made out receipts, wrote acknowledgments of sums received, and laid his schemes, so that other business men, seeing Grandet never busy, and always prepared for every emergency, might have been excused for imagining that he had a fairy or familiar spirit at his beck and call. Here, no doubt, when Nanon’s snoring shook the rafters, when the savage watchdog bayed and prowled about the yard, when Mme. Grandet and Eugénie were fast asleep, the old cooper would come to be with his gold, and hug himself upon it, and toy with it, and fondle it, and brood over it, and so, with the intoxication of the gold upon him, at last to sleep. The walls were thick, the closed shutters kept their secret. He alone had the key of this laboratory, where, if reports spoke truly, he pored over plans on which every fruit tree belonging to him was mapped out, so that he could reckon out his crops, so much to every vine stem; and his yield of timber, to a fagot.
The door of Eugénie’s room was opposite this closed-up portal, the room occupied by M. and Mme. Grandet was at the end of the landing, and consisted of the entire front of the house. It was divided within by a partition. Mme. Grandet’s chamber was next to Eugénie’s, with which it communicated by a glass door; the other half of the room, separated from the mysterious cabinet by a thick wall, belonged to the master of the house. Goodman Grandet had cunningly lodged his nephew on the second story, in an airy garret immediately above his own room, so that he could hear every sound and inform himself of the young man’s goings and comings, if the latter should take it into his head to leave his quarters.
Eugénie and her mother, arrived on the first landing, kissed each other, and said good night; they took leave of Charles in a few formal words, spoken with an apparent indifference, which in her heart the girl was far from feeling, and went to their rooms.
“This is your room, nephew,” said Grandet, addressing Charles as he opened the door. “If you should wish to go out, you will have to call Nanon; for if you don’t, it will be ‘no more at present from your most obedient,’ the dog will gobble you down before you know where you are. Good night, sleep well. Ha! ha! the ladies have lighted a fire in your room,” he went on.
Just at that moment big Nanon appeared, armed with a warming-pan.
“Did anyone ever see the like?” said M. Grandet. “Do you take my nephew for a sick woman? he is not an invalid. Just be off, Nanon! you and your hot ashes.”
“But the sheets are damp, sir, and the gentleman looks as delicate as a woman.”
“All right, go through with it, since you have taken it into your head,” said Grandet, shrugging his shoulders, “but mind you don’t set the place on fire,” and the miser groped his way downstairs, muttering vaguely to himself.
Charles, breathless with astonishment, was left among his trunks. He looked round about him, at the sloping roof of the attic, at the wallpaper of a pattern peculiar to little country inns, bunches of flowers symmetrically arranged on a buff-colored background; he looked at the rough stone chimneypiece full of rifts and cracks (the mere sight of it sent a chill through him, in spite of the fire in the grate), at the ramshackle cane-seated chairs, at the open night-table large enough to hold a fair-sized sergeant-at-arms, at the strip of worn rag-carpet beside the canopied bedstead, at the curtains which shook every moment as if the whole worm-eaten structure would fall to pieces; finally, he turned his attention to big Nanon, and said earnestly—
“Look here, my good girl, am I really in M. Grandet’s house? M. Grandet, formerly Mayor of Saumur, and brother of M. Grandet of Paris?”
“Yes, sir, you are; and you are staying with a very kind, a very amiable and excellent gentleman. Am I to help you to unpack those trunks of yours?”
“Faith, yes, old soldier, I wish you would. Did you serve in the horse marines?”
“Oh! oh! oh!” chuckled Nanon. “What may they be? What are the horse marines? Are they old salts? Do they go to sea?”
“Here, look out my dressing-gown; it is in that portmanteau, and this is the key.”
Nanon was overcome
