It is now easy to understand the full meaning of the term, “the house of
Monsieur Grandet,”--that cold, silent, pallid dwelling, standing above
the town and sheltered by the ruins of the ramparts. The two pillars and
the arch, which made the porte-cochere on which the door opened, were
built, like the house itself, of tufa,--a white stone peculiar to the
shores of the Loire, and so soft that it lasts hardly more than two
centuries. Numberless irregular holes, capriciously bored or eaten out
by the inclemency of the weather, gave an appearance of the vermiculated
stonework of French architecture to the arch and the side walls of this
entrance, which bore some resemblance to the gateway of a jail. Above
the arch was a long bas-relief, in hard stone, representing the four
seasons, the faces already crumbling away and blackened. This bas-relief
was surmounted by a projecting plinth, upon which a variety of chance
growths had sprung up,--yellow pellitory, bindweed, convolvuli, nettles,
plantain, and even a little cherry-tree, already grown to some height.
The door of the archway was made of solid oak, brown, shrunken, and
split in many places; though frail in appearance, it was firmly held
in place by a system of iron bolts arranged in symmetrical patterns.
A small square grating, with close bars red with rust, filled up the
middle panel and made, as it were, a motive for the knocker, fastened to
it by a ring, which struck upon the grinning head of a huge nail.
This knocker, of the oblong shape and kind which our ancestors called
_jaquemart_, looked like a huge note of exclamation; an antiquary who
examined it attentively might have found indications of the figure,
essentially burlesque, which it once represented, and which long usage
had now effaced. Through this little grating--intended in olden times
for the recognition of friends in times of civil war--inquisitive
persons could perceive, at the farther end of the dark and slimy vault,
a few broken steps which led to a garden, picturesquely shut in by
walls that were thick and damp, and through which oozed a moisture that
nourished tufts of sickly herbage. These walls were the ruins of the
ramparts, under which ranged the gardens of several neighboring houses.
The most important room on the ground-floor of the house was a large
hall, entered directly from beneath the vault of the porte-cochere.
Few people know the importance of a hall in the little towns of Anjou,
Touraine, and Berry. The hall is at one and the same time antechamber,
salon, office, boudoir, and dining-room; it is the theatre of domestic
life, the common living-room. There the barber of the neighborhood came,
twice a year, to cut Monsieur Grandet’s hair; there the farmers, the
cure, the under-prefect, and the miller’s boy came on business. This
room, with two windows looking on the street, was entirely of wood. Gray
panels with ancient mouldings covered the walls from top to bottom; the
ceiling showed all its beams, which were likewise painted gray, while
the space between them had been washed over in white, now yellow with
age. An old brass clock, inlaid with arabesques, adorned the mantel
of the ill-cut white stone chimney-piece, above which was a greenish
mirror, whose edges, bevelled to show the thickness of the glass,
reflected a thread of light the whole length of a gothic frame in
damascened steel-work. The two copper-gilt candelabra which decorated
the corners of the chimney-piece served a double purpose: by taking off
the side-branches, each of which held a socket, the main stem--which
was fastened to a pedestal of bluish marble tipped with copper--made a
candlestick for one candle, which was sufficient for ordinary occasions.
The chairs, antique in shape, were covered with tapestry representing
the fables of La Fontaine; it was necessary, however, to know that
writer well to guess at the subjects, for the faded colors and the
figures, blurred by much darning, were difficult to distinguish.
At the four corners of the hall were closets, or rather buffets,
surmounted by dirty shelves. An old card-table in marquetry, of which
the upper part was a chess-board, stood in the space between the two
windows. Above this table was an oval barometer with a black border
enlivened with gilt bands, on which the flies had so licentiously
disported themselves that the gilding had become problematical. On
the panel opposite to the chimney-piece were two portraits in pastel,
supposed to represent the grandfather of Madame Grandet, old Monsieur
de la Bertelliere, as a lieutenant in the French guard, and the deceased
Madame Gentillet in the guise of a shepherdess. The windows were draped
with curtains of red _gros de Tours_ held back by silken cords with
ecclesiastical tassels. This luxurious decoration, little in keeping
with the habits of Monsieur Grandet, had been, together with the steel
pier-glass, the tapestries, and the buffets, which were of rose-wood,
included in the purchase of the house.
By the window nearest to the door stood a straw chair, whose legs were
raised on castors to lift its occupant, Madame Grandet, to a height from
which she could see the passers-by. A work-table of stained cherry-wood
filled up the embrasure, and the little armchair of Eugenie Grandet
stood beside it. In this spot the lives had flowed peacefully onward for
fifteen years, in a round of constant work from the month of April to
the month of November. On the first day of the latter month they took
their winter station by the chimney. Not until that day did Grandet
permit a fire to be lighted; and on the thirty-first of March it was
extinguished, without regard either to the chills of the early spring or
to those of a wintry autumn. A foot-warmer, filled with embers from the
kitchen fire, which la Grande Nanon contrived to save for them, enabled
Madame and Mademoiselle Grandet to bear the chilly mornings and evenings
of April and October. Mother and daughter took charge of the family
linen, and spent their days so conscientiously upon a labor properly
that of working-women, that if Eugenie wished to embroider a collar for
her mother she was forced to take the time from sleep, and deceive her
father to obtain the necessary light. For a long time the miser had
given out the tallow candle to his daughter and la Grande Nanon just as
he gave out every morning the bread and other necessaries for the daily
consumption.
La Grande Nanon was perhaps the only human being capable of accepting
willingly the despotism of her master. The whole town envied Monsieur
and Madame Grandet the possession of her. La Grande Nanon, so called on
account of her height, which was five feet eight inches, had lived with
Monsieur Grandet for thirty-five years. Though she received only sixty
francs a year in wages, she was supposed to be one of the richest
serving-women in Saumur. Those sixty francs, accumulating through
thirty-five years, had recently enabled her to invest four thousand
francs in an annuity with Maitre Cruchot. This result of her long and
persistent economy seemed gigantic. Every servant in the town, seeing
that the poor sexagenarian was sure of bread for her old age, was
jealous of her, and never thought of the hard slavery through which it
had been won.
At twenty-two years of age the poor girl had been unable to find a
situation, so repulsive was her face to almost every one. Yet the
feeling was certainly unjust: the face would have been much admired on
the shoulders of a grenadier of the guard; but all things, so they say,
should be in keeping. Forced to leave a farm where she kept the cows,
because the dwelling-house was burned down, she came to Saumur to find
a place, full of the robust courage that shrinks from no labor. Le Pere
Grandet was at that time thinking of marriage and about to set up his
household. He espied the girl, rejected as she was from door to door.
A good judge of corporeal strength in his trade as a cooper, he guessed
the work that might be got out of a female creature shaped like a
Hercules, as firm on her feet as an oak sixty years old on its roots,
strong in the hips, square in the back, with the hands of a cartman and
an honesty as sound as her unblemished virtue. Neither the warts which
adorned her martial visage, nor the red-brick tints of her skin, nor the
sinewy arms, nor the ragged garments of la Grande Nanon, dismayed the
cooper, who was at that time still of an age when the heart shudders.
He fed, shod, and clothed the poor girl, gave her wages, and put her to
work without treating her too roughly. Seeing herself thus welcomed,
la Grande Nanon wept secretly tears of joy, and attached herself in all
sincerity to her master, who from that day ruled her and worked her with
feudal authority. Nanon did everything. She cooked, she made the lye,
she washed the linen in the Loire and brought it home on her shoulders;
she got up early, she went to bed late; she prepared the food of the
vine-dressers during the harvest, kept watch upon the market-people,
protected the property of her master like a faithful dog, and even, full
of blind confidence, obeyed without a murmur his most absurd exactions.
In the famous year of 1811, when the grapes were gathered with
unheard-of difficulty, Grandet resolved to give Nanon his old
watch,--the first present he had made her during twenty years of
service. Though he turned over to her his old shoes (which fitted her),
it is impossible to consider that quarterly benefit as a gift, for the
shoes were always thoroughly worn-out. Necessity had made the poor girl
so niggardly that Grandet had grown to love her as we love a dog, and
Nanon had let him fasten a spiked collar round her throat, whose spikes
no longer pricked her. If Grandet cut the bread with rather too much
parsimony, she made no complaint; she gaily shared the hygienic benefits
derived from the severe regime of the household, in which no one was
ever ill. Nanon was, in fact, one of the family; she laughed when
Grandet laughed, felt gloomy or chilly, warmed herself, and toiled as he
did. What pleasant compensations there were in such equality! Never did
the master have occasion to find fault with the servant for pilfering
the grapes, nor for the plums and nectarines eaten under the trees.
“Come, fall-to, Nanon!” he would say in years when the branches bent
under the fruit and the farmers were obliged to give it to the pigs.
To the poor peasant who in her youth had earned nothing but harsh
treatment, to the pauper girl picked up by charity, Grandet’s ambiguous
laugh was like a sunbeam. Moreover, Nanon’s simple heart and narrow head
could hold only one feeling and one idea. For thirty-five years she had
never ceased to see herself standing before the wood-yard of Monsieur
Grandet, ragged and barefooted, and to hear him say: “What do you want,
young one?” Her gratitude was ever new. Sometimes Grandet, reflecting
that the poor creature had never heard a flattering word, that she was
ignorant of all the tender sentiments inspired by women, that she might
some day appear before the throne of God even more chaste than the
Virgin Mary herself,--Grandet, struck with pity, would say as he
looked at her, “Poor Nanon!” The exclamation was always followed by an
undefinable look cast upon him in return by the old servant. The words,
uttered from time to time, formed a chain of friendship that nothing
ever parted, and to which each exclamation added a link. Such compassion
arising in the heart of the miser, and accepted gratefully by the old
spinster, had something inconceivably horrible about it. This cruel
pity, recalling, as it did, a thousand pleasures to the heart of the old
cooper, was for Nanon the sum total of happiness. Who does not likewise
say, “Poor Nanon!” God will recognize his angels by the inflexions of
their voices and by their secret sighs.
There were very many households in Saumur where the servants were better
treated, but where the masters received far less satisfaction in return.
Thus it was often said: “What have the Grandets ever done to make their
Grande Nanon so attached to them? She would go through fire and water
for their sake!” Her kitchen, whose barred windows looked into the
court, was always clean, neat, cold,--a true miser’s kitchen, where
nothing went to waste. When Nanon had washed her dishes, locked up the
remains of the dinner, and put out her fire, she left the kitchen, which
was separated by a passage from the living-room, and went to spin
hemp beside her masters. One tallow candle sufficed the family for the
evening. The servant slept at the end of the passage in a species of
closet lighted only by a fan-light. Her robust health enabled her to
live in this hole with impunity; there she could hear the slightest
noise through the deep silence which reigned night and day in that
dreary house. Like a watch-dog, she slept with one ear open, and took
her rest with a mind alert.
A description of the other parts of the dwelling will be found connected
with the events of this history, though the foregoing sketch of the
hall, where the whole luxury of the household appears, may enable the
reader to surmise the nakedness of the upper floors.
In 1819, at the beginning of an evening in the middle of November, la
Grande Nanon lighted the fire for the first time. The autumn had
been very fine. This particular day was a fete-day well known to the
Cruchotines and the Grassinists. The six antagonists, armed at all
points, were making ready to meet at the Grandets and surpass each other
in testimonials of friendship. That morning all Saumur had seen Madame
and Mademoiselle Grandet, accompanied by Nanon, on their way to hear
Mass at the parish church, and every one remembered that the day was
the anniversary of Mademoiselle Eugenie’s birth. Calculating the hour at
which the family dinner would be over, Maitre Cruchot, the Abbe Cruchot,
and Monsieur C. de Bonfons hastened to arrive before the des Grassins,
and be the first to pay their compliments to Mademoiselle Eugenie. All
three brought enormous bouquets, gathered in their little green-houses.
The stalks of the flowers which the president intended to present were
ingeniously wound round with a white satin ribbon adorned with gold
fringe. In the morning Monsieur Grandet, following his usual custom on
the days that commemorated the birth and the fete of Eugenie, went to
her bedside and solemnly presented her with his paternal gift,--which
for the last thirteen years had consisted regularly of a curious
gold-piece. Madame Grandet gave her daughter a winter dress or a summer
dress, as the case might be. These two dresses and the gold-pieces,
of which she received two others on New Year’s day and on her father’s
fete-day, gave Eugenie a little revenue of a hundred crowns or
thereabouts, which Grandet loved to see her amass. Was it not putting
his money from one strong-box to another, and, as it were, training the
parsimony of his heiress? from whom he sometimes demanded an account
of her treasure (formerly increased by the gifts of the Bertellieres),
saying: “It is to be your marriage dozen.”
The “marriage dozen” is an old custom sacredly preserved and still in
force in many parts of central France. In Berry and in Anjou, when a
young girl marries, her family, or that of the husband, must give her a
purse, in which they place, according to their means, twelve pieces,
or twelve dozen pieces, or twelve hundred pieces of gold. The poorest
shepherd-girl never marries without her dozen, be it only a dozen
coppers. They still tell in Issoudun of a certain “dozen” presented to
a rich heiress, which contained a hundred and forty-four _portugaises
d’or_. Pope Clement VII., uncle of Catherine de’ Medici, gave her when
he married her to Henri II. a dozen antique gold medals of priceless
value.
During dinner the father, delighted to see his Eugenie looking well in a
new gown, exclaimed: “As it is Eugenie’s birthday let us have a fire; it
will be a good omen.”
“Mademoiselle will be married this year, that’s certain,” said la
Grande Nanon, carrying away the remains of the goose,--the pheasant of
tradesmen.
“I don’t see any one suitable for her in Saumur,” said Madame Grandet,
glancing at her husband with a timid look which, considering her years,
revealed the conjugal slavery under which the poor woman languished.