While these events were happening in Saumur, Charles was making his
fortune in the Indies. His commercial outfit had sold well. He began by
realizing a sum of six thousand dollars. Crossing the line had brushed a
good many cobwebs out of his brain; he perceived that the best means of
attaining fortune in tropical regions, as well as in Europe, was to
buy and sell men. He went to the coast of Africa and bought Negroes,
combining his traffic in human flesh with that of other merchandise
equally advantageous to his interests. He carried into this business an
activity which left him not a moment of leisure. He was governed by the
desire of reappearing in Paris with all the prestige of a large fortune,
and by the hope of regaining a position even more brilliant than the one
from which he had fallen.
By dint of jostling with men, travelling through many lands, and
studying a variety of conflicting customs, his ideas had been modified
and had become sceptical. He ceased to have fixed principles of right
and wrong, for he saw what was called a crime in one country lauded as
a virtue in another. In the perpetual struggle of selfish interests his
heart grew cold, then contracted, and then dried up. The blood of the
Grandets did not fail of its destiny; Charles became hard, and eager
for prey. He sold Chinamen, Negroes, birds’ nests, children, artists; he
practised usury on a large scale; the habit of defrauding custom-houses
soon made him less scrupulous about the rights of his fellow men.
He went to the Island of St. Thomas and bought, for a mere song,
merchandise that had been captured by pirates, and took it to ports
where he could sell it at a good price. If the pure and noble face of
Eugenie went with him on his first voyage, like that image of the Virgin
which Spanish mariners fastened to their masts, if he attributed his
first success to the magic influence of the prayers and intercessions
of his gentle love, later on women of other kinds,--blacks, mulattoes,
whites, and Indian dancing-girls,--orgies and adventures in many lands,
completely effaced all recollection of his cousin, of Saumur, of the
house, the bench, the kiss snatched in the dark passage. He remembered
only the little garden shut in with crumbling walls, for it was there he
learned the fate that had overtaken him; but he rejected all connection
with his family. His uncle was an old dog who had filched his jewels;
Eugenie had no place in his heart nor in his thoughts, though she did
have a place in his accounts as a creditor for the sum of six thousand
francs.
Such conduct and such ideas explain Charles Grandet’s silence. In the
Indies, at St. Thomas, on the coast of Africa, at Lisbon, and in the
United States the adventurer had taken the pseudonym of Shepherd, that
he might not compromise his own name. Charles Shepherd could safely
be indefatigable, bold, grasping, and greedy of gain, like a man who
resolves to snatch his fortune _quibus cumque viis_, and makes haste
to have done with villany, that he may spend the rest of his life as an
honest man.
With such methods, prosperity was rapid and brilliant; and in 1827
Charles Grandet returned to Bordeaux on the “Marie Caroline,” a fine
brig belonging to a royalist house of business. He brought with him
nineteen hundred thousand francs worth of gold-dust, from which he
expected to derive seven or eight per cent more at the Paris mint.
On the brig he met a gentleman-in-ordinary to His Majesty Charles X.,
Monsieur d’Aubrion, a worthy old man who had committed the folly of
marrying a woman of fashion with a fortune derived from the West India
Islands. To meet the costs of Madame d’Aubrion’s extravagance, he had
gone out to the Indies to sell the property, and was now returning with
his family to France.
Monsieur and Madame d’Aubrion, of the house of d’Aubrion de Buch, a
family of southern France, whose last _captal_, or chief, died before
1789, were now reduced to an income of about twenty thousand francs, and
they possessed an ugly daughter whom the mother was resolved to marry
without a _dot_,--the family fortune being scarcely sufficient for the
demands of her own life in Paris. This was an enterprise whose success
might have seemed problematical to most men of the world, in spite of
the cleverness with which such men credit a fashionable woman; in
fact, Madame d’Aubrion herself, when she looked at her daughter, almost
despaired of getting rid of her to any one, even to a man craving
connection with nobility. Mademoiselle d’Aubrion was a long, spare,
spindling demoiselle, like her namesake the insect; her mouth was
disdainful; over it hung a nose that was too long, thick at the end,
sallow in its normal condition, but very red after a meal,--a sort of
vegetable phenomenon which is particularly disagreeable when it appears
in the middle of a pale, dull, and uninteresting face. In one sense she
was all that a worldly mother, thirty-eight years of age and still
a beauty with claims to admiration, could have wished. However, to
counterbalance her personal defects, the marquise gave her daughter
a distinguished air, subjected her to hygienic treatment which
provisionally kept her nose at a reasonable flesh-tint, taught her the
art of dressing well, endowed her with charming manners, showed her the
trick of melancholy glances which interest a man and make him believe
that he has found a long-sought angel, taught her the manoeuvre of the
foot,--letting it peep beneath the petticoat, to show its tiny size,
at the moment when the nose became aggressively red; in short, Madame
d’Aubrion had cleverly made the very best of her offspring. By means
of full sleeves, deceptive pads, puffed dresses amply trimmed,
and high-pressure corsets, she had obtained such curious feminine
developments that she ought, for the instruction of mothers, to have
exhibited them in a museum.
Charles became very intimate with Madame d’Aubrion precisely because she
was desirous of becoming intimate with him. Persons who were on board
the brig declared that the handsome Madame d’Aubrion neglected no means
of capturing so rich a son-in-law. On landing at Bordeaux in June, 1827,
Monsieur, Madame, Mademoiselle d’Aubrion, and Charles lodged at the same
hotel and started together for Paris. The hotel d’Aubrion was hampered
with mortgages; Charles was destined to free it. The mother told him how
delighted she would be to give up the ground-floor to a son-in-law. Not
sharing Monsieur d’Aubrion’s prejudices on the score of nobility, she
promised Charles Grandet to obtain a royal ordinance from Charles
X. which would authorize him, Grandet, to take the name and arms
of d’Aubrion and to succeed, by purchasing the entailed estate for
thirty-six thousand francs a year, to the titles of Captal de Buch and
Marquis d’Aubrion. By thus uniting their fortunes, living on good terms,
and profiting by sinecures, the two families might occupy the hotel
d’Aubrion with an income of over a hundred thousand francs.
“And when a man has a hundred thousand francs a year, a name, a
family, and a position at court,--for I will get you appointed as
gentleman-of-the-bedchamber,--he can do what he likes,” she said to
Charles. “You can then become anything you choose,--master of the
rolls in the council of State, prefect, secretary to an embassy, the
ambassador himself, if you like. Charles X. is fond of d’Aubrion; they
have known each other from childhood.”
Intoxicated with ambition, Charles toyed with the hopes thus cleverly
presented to him in the guise of confidences poured from heart to heart.
Believing his father’s affairs to have been settled by his uncle, he
imagined himself suddenly anchored in the Faubourg Saint-Germain,--that
social object of all desire, where, under shelter of Mademoiselle
Mathilde’s purple nose, he was to reappear as the Comte d’Aubrion, very
much as the Dreux reappeared in Breze. Dazzled by the prosperity of the
Restoration, which was tottering when he left France, fascinated by the
splendor of aristocratic ideas, his intoxication, which began on the
brig, increased after he reached Paris, and he finally determined to
take the course and reach the high position which the selfish hopes of
his would-be mother-in-law pointed out to him. His cousin counted for
no more than a speck in this brilliant perspective; but he went to see
Annette. True woman of the world, Annette advised her old friend to
make the marriage, and promised him her support in all his ambitious
projects. In her heart she was enchanted to fasten an ugly and
uninteresting girl on Charles, whose life in the West Indies had
rendered him very attractive. His complexion had bronzed, his manners
had grown decided and bold, like those of a man accustomed to make sharp
decisions, to rule, and to succeed. Charles breathed more at his ease in
Paris, conscious that he now had a part to play.
Des Grassins, hearing of his return, of his approaching marriage and
his large fortune, came to see him, and inquired about the three hundred
thousand francs still required to settle his father’s debts. He found
Grandet in conference with a goldsmith, from whom he had ordered jewels
for Mademoiselle d’Aubrion’s _corbeille_, and who was then submitting
the designs. Charles had brought back magnificent diamonds, and the
value of their setting, together with the plate and jewelry of the new
establishment, amounted to more than two hundred thousand francs. He
received des Grassins, whom he did not recognize, with the impertinence
of a young man of fashion conscious of having killed four men in as many
duels in the Indies. Monsieur des Grassins had already called several
times. Charles listened to him coldly, and then replied, without fully
understanding what had been said to him,--
“My father’s affairs are not mine. I am much obliged, monsieur, for the
trouble you have been good enough to take,--by which, however, I really
cannot profit. I have not earned two millions by the sweat of my brow to
fling them at the head of my father’s creditors.”
“But suppose that your father’s estate were within a few days to be
declared bankrupt?”
“Monsieur, in a few days I shall be called the Comte d’Aubrion; you will
understand, therefore, that what you threaten is of no consequence to
me. Besides, you know as well as I do that when a man has an income of
a hundred thousand francs his father has _never failed_.” So saying, he
politely edged Monsieur des Grassins to the door.
* * * * *
At the beginning of August in the same year, Eugenie was sitting on the
little wooden bench where her cousin had sworn to love her eternally,
and where she usually breakfasted if the weather were fine. The poor
girl was happy, for the moment, in the fresh and joyous summer air,
letting her memory recall the great and the little events of her love
and the catastrophes which had followed it. The sun had just reached
the angle of the ruined wall, so full of chinks, which no one, through
a caprice of the mistress, was allowed to touch, though Cornoiller often
remarked to his wife that “it would fall and crush somebody one of these
days.” At this moment the postman knocked, and gave a letter to Madame
Cornoiller, who ran into the garden, crying out:
“Mademoiselle, a letter!” She gave it to her mistress, adding, “Is it
the one you expected?”
The words rang as loudly in the heart of Eugenie as they echoed in sound
from wall to wall of the court and garden.
“Paris--from him--he has returned!”
Eugenie turned pale and held the letter for a moment. She trembled
so violently that she could not break the seal. La Grande Nanon stood
before her, both hands on her hips, her joy puffing as it were like
smoke through the cracks of her brown face.
“Read it, mademoiselle!”
“Ah, Nanon, why did he return to Paris? He went from Saumur.”
“Read it, and you’ll find out.”
Eugenie opened the letter with trembling fingers. A cheque on the house
of “Madame des Grassins and Coret, of Saumur,” fluttered down. Nanon
picked it up.