f nobility which
our mania for equality can never rub out. He became the most imposing
personage in the arrondissement. He worked a hundred acres of vineyard,
which in fruitful years yielded seven or eight hundred hogsheads of
wine. He owned thirteen farms, an old abbey, whose windows and arches
he had walled up for the sake of economy,--a measure which preserved
them,--also a hundred and twenty-seven acres of meadow-land, where three
thousand poplars, planted in 1793, grew and flourished; and finally, the
house in which he lived. Such was his visible estate; as to his other
property, only two persons could give even a vague guess at its value:
one was Monsieur Cruchot, a notary employed in the usurious investments
of Monsieur Grandet; the other was Monsieur des Grassins, the richest
banker in Saumur, in whose profits Grandet had a certain covenanted and
secret share.

Although old Cruchot and Monsieur des Grassins were both gifted with
the deep discretion which wealth and trust beget in the provinces, they
publicly testified so much respect to Monsieur Grandet that observers
estimated the amount of his property by the obsequious attention which
they bestowed upon him. In all Saumur there was no one not persuaded
that Monsieur Grandet had a private treasure, some hiding-place full
of louis, where he nightly took ineffable delight in gazing upon great
masses of gold. Avaricious people gathered proof of this when they
looked at the eyes of the good man, to which the yellow metal seemed to
have conveyed its tints. The glance of a man accustomed to draw enormous
interest from his capital acquires, like that of the libertine, the
gambler, or the sycophant, certain indefinable habits,--furtive,
eager, mysterious movements, which never escape the notice of
his co-religionists. This secret language is in a certain way the
freemasonry of the passions. Monsieur Grandet inspired the respectful
esteem due to one who owed no man anything, who, skilful cooper and
experienced wine-grower that he was, guessed with the precision of an
astronomer whether he ought to manufacture a thousand puncheons for his
vintage, or only five hundred, who never failed in any speculation, and
always had casks for sale when casks were worth more than the commodity
that filled them, who could store his whole vintage in his cellars and
bide his time to put the puncheons on the market at two hundred francs,
when the little proprietors had been forced to sel