es are drawn. Here
are six louis for you. In three months wines will have 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 hi