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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
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