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"Are you going to put that on to go to bed with?" she asked.
"Yes."
"Holy Virgin! what a beautiful altar-cloth it would make for the
parish church! My dear darling monsieur, give it to the church, and
you'll save your soul; if you don't, you'll lose it. Oh, how nice you
look in it! I must call mademoiselle to see you."
"Come, Nanon, if Nanon you are, hold your tongue; let me go to bed.
I'll arrange my things to-morrow. If my dressing-gown pleases you so
much, you shall save your soul. I'm too good a Christian not to give
it to you when I go away, and you can do what you like with it."
Nanon stood rooted to the ground, gazing at Charles and unable to put
faith into his words.
"Good night, Nanon."
"What in the world have I come here for?" thought Charles as he went
to sleep. "My father is not a fool; my journey must have some object.
Pshaw! put off serious thought till the morrow, as some Greek idiot
said."
"Blessed Virgin! how charming he is, my cousin!" Eugenie was saying,
interrupting her prayers, which that night at least were never
finished.
Madame Grandet had no thoughts at all as she went to bed. She heard
the miser walking up and down his room through the door of
communication which was in the middle of the partition. Like all timid
women, she had studied the character of her lord. Just as the petrel
foresees the storm, she knew by imperceptible signs when an inward
tempest shook her husband; and at such times, to use an expression of
her own, she "feigned dead."
Grandet gazed at the door lined with sheet-iron which he lately put to
his sanctum, and said to himself,--
"What a crazy idea of my brother to bequeath his son to me! A fine
legacy! I have not fifty francs to give him. What are fifty francs to
a dandy who looked at my barometer as if he meant to make firewood of
it!"
In thinking over the consequences of that legacy of anguish Grandet
was perhaps more agitated than his brother had been at the moment of
writing it.
"I shall have that golden robe," thought Nanon, who went to sleep
tricked out in her altar-cloth, dreaming for the first time in her
life of flowers, embroidery, and damask, just as Eugenie was dreaming
of love.
* * * * *
In the pure and monotonous life of young girls there comes a delicious
hour when the sun sheds its rays into their soul, when the flowers
express their thoughts, when the throbbings of the heart send upward
to the brain their fertilizing warmth and melt all thoughts into a
vague desire,--day of innocent melancholy and of dulcet joys! When
babes begin to see, they smile; when a young girl first perceives the
sentiment of nature, she smiles as she smiled when an infant. If light
is the first love of life, is not love a light to the heart? The
moment to see within the veil of earthly things had come for Eugenie.
An early riser, like all provincial girls, she was up betimes and said
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