ah for happiness!"

He threw ten silver pieces of six francs each upon the bed, and took his
wife's head between his hands and kissed her forehead.

"My good wife, you are getting well, are not you?"

"How can you think of receiving the God of mercy in your house when you
refuse to forgive your daughter?" she said with emotion.

"Ta, ta, ta, ta!" said Grandet in a coaxing voice. "We'll see about
that."

"Merciful heaven! Eugenie," cried the mother, flushing with joy, "come
and kiss your father; he forgives you!"

But the old man had disappeared. He was going as fast as his legs could
carry him towards his vineyards, trying to get his confused ideas into
order. Grandet had entered his seventy-sixth year. During the last two
years his avarice had increased upon him, as all the persistent passions
of men increase at a certain age. As if to illustrate an observation
which applies equally to misers, ambitious men, and others whose lives
are controlled by any dominant idea, his affections had fastened upon
one special symbol of his passion. The sight of gold, the possession
of gold, had become a monomania. His despotic spirit had grown in
proportion to his avarice, and to part with the control of the smallest
fraction of his property at the death of his wife seemed to him a thing
"against nature." To declare his fortune to his daughter, to give an
inventory of his property, landed and personal, for the purposes of
division--

"Why," he cried aloud in the midst of a field where he was pretending to
examine a vine, "it would be cutting my throat!"

He came at last to a decision, and returned to Saumur in time for
dinner, resolved to unbend to Eugenie, and pet and coax her, that he
might die regally, holding the reins of his millions in his own hands so
long as the breath was in his body. At the moment when the old man, who
chanced to have his pass-key in his pocket, opened the door and climbed
with a stealthy step up the stairway to go into his wife's room, Eugenie
had brought the beautiful dressing-case from the oak cabinet and placed
it on her mother's bed. Mother and daughter, in Grandet's absence,
allowed themselves the pleasure of looking for a likeness to Charles in
the portrait of his mother.

"It is exactly his forehead and his mouth," Eugenie was saying as the
old man opened the door. At the look which her husband cast upon the
gold, Madame Grandet cried out,--

"O God, have pity upon us!"

The old man sp