“He can have two lumps; I shall go without it myself.”
“You go without sugar! and at your age! I would sooner pay for it out of my own pocket.”
“Mind your own business.”
In spite of the low price of sugar, it was, in Grandet’s eyes, the most precious of all colonial products. For him it was always something to be used sparingly; it was still worth six francs a pound, as in the time of the Empire, and this petty economy had become an inveterate habit with him. But every woman, no matter how simple she may be, can devise some shift to gain her ends; and Nanon allowed the question of the sugar to drop, in order to have her way about the cake.
“Mademoiselle,” she called through the window, “wouldn’t you like some cake?”
“No, no,” answered Eugénie.
“Stay, Nanon,” said Grandet as he heard his daughter’s voice; “there!”
He opened the flour-bin, measured out some flour, and added a few ounces of butter to the piece which he had already cut.
“And firewood; I shall want firewood to heat the oven,” said the inexorable Nanon.
“Ah! well, you can take what you want,” he answered ruefully; “but you will make a fruit tart at the same time, and you must bake the dinner in the oven, that will save lighting another fire.”
“Quien!” cried Nanon; “there is no need to tell me that!”
Grandet gave his trusty prime minister a glance that was almost paternal.
“Mademoiselle,” cried the cook, “we are going to have a cake.”
Grandet came back again with the fruit, and began by setting down a plateful on the kitchen table.
“Just look here, sir,” said Nanon, “what lovely boots your nephew has! What leather, how nice it smells! What are they to be cleaned with? Am I to put your egg-blacking on them?”
“No, Nanon,” said Eugénie; “I expect the egg would spoil the leather. You had better tell him that you have no idea how to clean black morocco. … Yes, it is morocco, and he himself will buy you something in Saumur to clean his boots with. I have heard it said that they put sugar into their blacking, and that is what makes it so shiny.”
“Then is it good to eat?” asked the maid, as she picked up the boots and smelt them. “Quien, quien! they smell of madame’s eau de cologne! Oh, how funny!”
“Funny!” said her master; “people spend more money on their boots than they are worth that stand in them, and you think it funny!” He had just returned from a second and final expedition to the fruit loft, carefully locking the door after him.
“You will have soup once or twice a week while your nephew is here, sir, will you not?”
“Yes.”
“Shall I go round to the butcher’s?”
“You will do nothing of the kind. You can make some chicken-broth; the tenants will keep you going. But I shall tell Cornoiller to kill some ravens for me. That kind of game makes the best broth in the world.”
“Is it true, sir, that they live on dead things?”
“You are a fool, Nanon! They live, like everybody else, on anything that they can pick up. Don’t we all live on dead things? What about legacies?” And Goodman Grandet, having no further order to give, drew out his watch, and finding that there was yet half an hour to spare before breakfast, took up his hat, gave his daughter a kiss, and said, “Would you like to take a walk along the Loire? I have something to see after in the meadows down there.”
Eugénie put on her straw hat lined with rose-colored silk; and then father and daughter went down the crooked street towards the marketplace.
“Where are you off to so early this morning?” said the notary Cruchot, as he met the Grandets.
“We are going to take a look at something,” responded his friend, in no wise deceived by this early move on the notary’s part.
Whenever Grandet was about to “take a look at something,” the notary knew by experience that there was something to be gained by going with him. With him, therefore, he went.
“Come along, Cruchot,” said Grandet, addressing the notary. “You are one of my friends; I am going to show you what a piece of folly it is to plant poplars in good soil—”
“Then the sixty thousand francs that you fingered for those poplars of yours in the meadows by the Loire are a mere trifle to you?” said Cruchot, opening his eyes wide in his bewilderment. “And such luck as you had too! … Felling your timber just when there was no white wood to be had in Nantes, so that every trunk fetched thirty francs!”
Eugénie heard and did not hear, utterly unconscious that the most critical moment of her life was rapidly approaching, that a paternal and sovereign decree was about to be pronounced, and that the old notary was to bring this all about. Grandet had reached the magnificent meadow-land by the Loire, which had come into his hands in his Republican days. Some thirty laborers were busy digging out the roots of the poplars that once stood there, filling up the holes that were left, and leveling the ground.
“Now, M. Cruchot, see how much space a poplar takes up,” said he, addressing the notary. “Jean,” he called to a workman, “m—m—measure r—round the sides with your rule.”
“Eight feet four times over,” said the workman when he had finished.
“Thirty-two feet of loss,” said Grandet to Cruchot. “Now along that line there were three hundred poplars, weren’t there? Well, then, three hundred t—t—times thirty-two f—feet will eat up five hundredweight of hay. Allow twice as much again for the space on either side, and you get fifteen hundredweight; then there is the intervening space—say a thousand t—t—trusses of hay altogether.”
“Well,” said Cruchot, helping his friend out, “and a thousand trusses of that hay would fetch something like six hundred francs.”
“S—s—say t—twelve hundred, because the s—second crop is worth three or four
