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would tear down the ceilings of my house to boil the fellow's eggs."

Hearing these words, mother and daughter slipped back into their rooms
and burrowed in their beds, with the celerity of frightened mice
getting back to their holes.

"Madame Grandet, have you found a mine?" said the man, coming into the
chamber of his wife.

"My friend, wait; I am saying my prayers," said the poor mother in a
trembling voice.

"The devil take your good God!" growled Grandet in reply.

Misers have no belief in a future life; the present is their all in
all. This thought casts a terrible light upon our present epoch, in
which, far more than at any former period, money sways the laws and
politics and morals. Institutions, books, men, and dogmas, all
conspire to undermine belief in a future life,--a belief upon which
the social edifice has rested for eighteen hundred years. The grave,
as a means of transition, is little feared in our day. The future,
which once opened to us beyond the requiems, has now been imported
into the present. To obtain _per fas et nefas_ a terrestrial paradise
of luxury and earthly enjoyment, to harden the heart and macerate the
body for the sake of fleeting possessions, as the martyrs once
suffered all things to reach eternal joys, this is now the universal
thought--a thought written everywhere, even in the very laws which ask
of the legislator, "What do you pay?" instead of asking him, "What do
you think?" When this doctrine has passed down from the bourgeoisie to
the populace, where will this country be?

"Madame Grandet, have you done?" asked the old man.

"My friend, I am praying for you."

"Very good! Good-night; to-morrow morning we will have a talk."

The poor woman went to sleep like a schoolboy who, not having learned
his lessons, knows he will see his master's angry face on the morrow.
At the moment when, filled with fear, she was drawing the sheet above
her head that she might stifle hearing, Eugenie, in her night-gown and
with naked feet, ran to her side and kissed her brow.

"Oh! my good mother," she said, "to-morrow I will tell him it was I."

"No; he would send you to Noyers. Leave me to manage it; he cannot eat
me."

"Do you hear, mamma?"

"What?"

"_He_ is weeping still."

"Go to bed, my daughter; you will take cold in your feet: the floor is
damp."

* * * * *

Thus passed the solemn day which was destined to weight upon the whole
life of the rich and poor heiress, whose sleep was never again to be
so calm, nor yet so pure, as it had been up to this moment. It often
happens that certain actions of human life seem, literally speaking,
improbable, though actual. Is not this because we constantly omit to
turn the stream of psychological light upon our impulsive
determinations, and fail to explain the subtile reasons, mysteriously
conceived in our minds, which impelled them? Perhaps Eugenie's deep

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