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fallen."

These words, uttered in a quiet tone of voice, were nevertheless so
bitterly sarcastic that the inhabitants of Saumur, grouped at this
moment in the market-place and overwhelmed by the news of the sale
Grandet had just effected, would have shuddered had they heard them.
Their panic would have brought the price of wines down fifty per cent
at once.

"Did you have a thousand puncheons this year, father?"

"Yes, little one."

That term applied to his daughter was the superlative expression of
the old miser's joy.

"Then that makes two hundred thousand pieces of twenty sous each?"

"Yes, Mademoiselle Grandet."

"Then, father, you can easily help Charles."

The amazement, the anger, the stupefaction of Belshazzar when he saw
the _Mene-Tekel-Upharsin_ before his eyes is not to be compared with
the cold rage of Grandet, who, having forgotten his nephew, now found
him enshrined in the heart and calculations of his daughter.

"What's this? Ever since that dandy put foot in _my_ house everything
goes wrong! You behave as if you had the right to buy sugar-plums and
make feasts and weddings. I won't have that sort of thing. I hope I
know my duty at my time of life! I certainly sha'n't take lessons from
my daughter, or from anybody else. I shall do for my nephew what it is
proper to do, and you have no need to poke your nose into it. As for
you, Eugenie," he added, facing her, "don't speak of this again, or
I'll send you to the Abbaye des Noyers with Nanon, see if I don't; and
no later than to-morrow either, if you disobey me! Where is that
fellow, has he come down yet?"

"No, my friend," answered Madame Grandet.

"What is he doing then?"

"He is weeping for his father," said Eugenie.

Grandet looked at his daughter without finding a word to say; after
all, he was a father. He made a couple of turns up and down the room,
and then went hurriedly to his secret den to think over an investment
he was meditating in the public Funds. The thinning out of his two
thousand acres of forest land had yielded him six hundred thousand
francs: putting this sum to that derived from the sale of his poplars
and to his other gains for the last year and for the current year, he
had amassed a total of nine hundred thousand francs, without counting
the two hundred thousand he had got by the sale just concluded. The
twenty per cent which Cruchot assured him would gain in a short time
from the Funds, then quoted at seventy, tempted him. He figured out
his calculation on the margin of the newspaper which gave the account
of his brother's death, all the while hearing the moans of his nephew,
but without listening to them. Nanon came and knocked on the wall to
summon him to dinner. On the last step of the staircase he was saying
to himself as he came down,--

"I'll do it; I shall get eight per cent interest. In two years I shall
have fifteen hundred thousand francs, which I will then draw out in

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