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butter, and his tithe of wheat. He owned a mill; and the tenant was
bound, over and above his rent, to take a certain quantity of grain
and return him the flour and bran. La Grande Nanon, his only servant,
though she was no longer young, baked the bread of the household
herself every Saturday. Monsieur Grandet arranged with
kitchen-gardeners who were his tenants to supply him with vegetables.
As to fruits, he gathered such quantities that he sold the greater part
in the market. His fire-wood was cut from his own hedgerows or taken
from the half-rotten old sheds which he built at the corners of his
fields, and whose planks the farmers carted into town for him, all cut
up, and obligingly stacked in his wood-house, receiving in return his
thanks. His only known expenditures were for the consecrated bread, the
clothing of his wife and daughter, the hire of their chairs in church,
the wages of la Grand Nanon, the tinning of the saucepans, lights,
taxes, repairs on his buildings, and the costs of his various
industries. He had six hundred acres of woodland, lately purchased,
which he induced a neighbor's keeper to watch, under the promise of an
indemnity. After the acquisition of this property he ate game for the
first time.
Monsieur Grandet's manners were very simple. He spoke little. He
usually expressed his meaning by short sententious phrases uttered in
a soft voice. After the Revolution, the epoch at which he first came
into notice, the good man stuttered in a wearisome way as soon as he
was required to speak at length or to maintain an argument. This
stammering, the incoherence of his language, the flux of words in
which he drowned his thought, his apparent lack of logic, attributed
to defects of education, were in reality assumed, and will be
sufficiently explained by certain events in the following history.
Four sentences, precise as algebraic formulas, sufficed him usually to
grasp and solve all difficulties of life and commerce: "I don't know;
I cannot; I will not; I will see about it." He never said yes, or no,
and never committed himself to writing. If people talked to him he
listened coldly, holding his chin in his right hand and resting his
right elbow in the back of his left hand, forming in his own mind
opinions on all matters, from which he never receded. He reflected
long before making any business agreement. When his opponent, after
careful conversation, avowed the secret of his own purposes, confident
that he had secured his listener's assent, Grandet answered: "I can
decide nothing without consulting my wife." His wife, whom he had
reduced to a state of helpless slavery, was a useful screen to him in
business. He went nowhere among friends; he neither gave nor accepted
dinners; he made no stir or noise, seeming to economize in everything,
even movement. He never disturbed or disarranged the things of other
people, out of respect for the rights of property.
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