m 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 good
gold,--Well, where's my nephew?"

"He says he doesn't want anything to eat," answered Nanon; "that's not
good for him."

"So much saved," retorted her master.

"That's so," she said.

"Bah! he won't cry long. Hunger drives the wolves out of the woods."

The dinner was eaten in silence.

"My good friend," said Madame Grandet, when the cloth was removed, "we
must put on mourning."

"Upon my word, Madame Grandet! what will you invent next to spend money
on? Mourning is in the heart, and not in the clothes."

"But mourning for a brother is indispensable; and the Church commands us
to--"

"Buy your mourning out of your six louis. Give me a hat-band; that's
enough for me."

Eugenie raised her eyes to heaven without uttering a word. Her generous
instincts, slumbering and long repressed but now suddenly and for the
first time awakened, were galled at every turn. The evening passed to
all appearance like a thousand other evenings of their monotonous life,
yet it was certainly the most horrible. Eugenie sewed without raising
her head, and did not use the workbox which Charles had despised the
night before. Madame Grandet knitted her sleeves. Grandet twirled his
thumbs for four hours, absorbed in calculations whose results were on
the morrow to astonish Saumur. No one came to visit the family that
day. The whole town was ringing with the news of the business trick just
played by Grandet, the failure of his brother, and the arrival of his
nephew. Obeying the desire to gossip over their mutual interests, all
the upper and middle-class wine-growers in Saumur met at Monsieur des
Grassins, where terrible imprecations were being fulminated against the
ex-mayor. Nanon was spinning, and the whirr of her wheel was the only
sound heard beneath the gray rafters of that silent hall.

"We don't waste our tongues," she said, showing her teeth, as large and
white as peeled almonds.

"No