Clearly, therefore, Grandet lay under no obligation to des Grassins.
In every situation a woman is bound to suffer in many ways that a man does not, and to feel her troubles more acutely than he can: for a man’s vigor and energy is constantly brought into play; he acts and thinks, comes and goes, busies himself in the present, and looks to the future for consolation. This was what Charles was doing. But a woman cannot help herself—hers is a passive part; she is left face to face with her trouble, and has nothing to divert her mind from it; she sounds the depths of the abyss of sorrow, and its dark places are filled with her prayers and tears. So it was with Eugénie. She was beginning to understand that the web of a woman’s life will always be woven of love and sorrow and hope and fear and self-sacrifice; hers was to be a woman’s lot in all things without a woman’s consolations and her moments of happiness (to make use of Bossuet’s wonderful illustration) were to be like the scattered nails driven into the wall, when all collected together they scarcely filled the hollow of the hand. Troubles seldom keep us waiting for them, and for Eugénie they were gathering thick and fast.
The day after Charles had gone, the Grandet household fell back into the old ways of life; there was no difference for anyone but Eugénie—for her the house had grown very empty all on a sudden. Charles’ room should remain just as he had left it; Mme. Grandet and Nanon lent themselves to this whim of hers, willingly maintained the statu quo, and said nothing to her father.
“Who knows?” Eugénie said. “He may come back to us sooner than we think.”
“Ah! I wish I could see him here again,” replied Nanon. “I could get on with him well enough! He was very nice, and an excellent gentleman; and he was pretty-like, his hair curled over his head just like a girl’s.”
Eugénie gazed at Nanon.
“Holy Virgin! mademoiselle, with such eyes, you are like to lose your soul. You shouldn’t look at people in that way.”
From that day Mlle. Grandet’s beauty took a new character. The grave thoughts of love that slowly enveloped her soul, the dignity of a woman who is beloved, gave to her face the sort of radiance that early painters expressed by the aureole. Before her cousin came into her life, Eugénie might have been compared to the Virgin as yet unconscious of her destiny; and now that he had passed out of it, she seemed like the Virgin Mother; she, too, bore love in her heart. Spanish art has depicted these two Marys, so different each from each—Christianity, with its many symbols, knows no more glorious types than these.
The day after Charles had left them, Eugénie went to mass (as she had resolved to do daily), and on her way back bought a map of the world from the only bookseller in the town. This she pinned to the wall beside her glass, so that she might follow the course of her cousin’s voyage to the Indies; and night and morning might be beside him for a little while on that far-off vessel, and see him and ask all the endless questions she longed to ask.
“Are you well? Are you not sad? Am I in your thoughts when you see the star that you told me about? You made me see how beautiful it was.”
In the morning she used to sit like one in a dream under the great walnut tree, on the old gray, lichen-covered, worm-eaten bench where they had talked so kindly and so foolishly, where they had built such fair castles in the air in which to live. She thought of the future as she watched the little strip of sky shut in by the high walls on every side, then her eyes wandered over the old buttressed wall and the roof—Charles’ room lay beneath it. In short, this solitary persistent love mingling with all her thoughts became the substance, or, as our forefathers would have said, the “stuff” of her life.
If Grandet’s self-styled friends came in of an evening, she would seem to be in high spirits, but the liveliness was only assumed; she used to talk about Charles with her mother and Nanon the whole morning through, and Nanon—who was of the opinion that without faltering in her duty to her master she might yet feel for her young mistress’ troubles—Nanon spoke on this wise—
“If I had had a sweetheart, I would have … I would have gone with him to hell. I would have … well then, I would just have laid down my life for him, but … no such chance! I shall die without knowing what it is to live. Would you believe it, mam’selle, there is that old Cornoiller, who is a good man all the same, dangling about after my savings, just like the others who come here paying court to you and sniffing after the master’s money. I see through it; I may be as big as a hay stack, but I am as sharp as a needle jet. Well! and yet do you know, mam’selle, it may not be love, but I rather like it.”
In this way two months went by. The secret that bound the three women so closely together had brought a new interest into the household life hitherto so monotonous. For them Charles still dwelt in the house, and came and went beneath the old gray rafters of the parlor. Every morning and evening Eugénie opened the dressing-case and looked at her aunt’s portrait. Her mother, suddenly coming into her room one Sunday morning, found her absorbed in tracing out a likeness to Charles in the lady of the miniature, and Mme. Grandet learned for the first time a terrible secret, how that Eugénie had parted with her treasures and had taken the case in exchange.
“You
