If he had married, ‘twas because he thought a wife a necessary adjunct, because he desired a home wherein to command, because, above all, he had been seduced by the dowry of twenty thousand francs.
For the man had one passion,—money. Under his placid countenance revolved thoughts of the most burning covetousness. He wished to be rich.
Now, as he had no illusion whatever upon his own merits, as he knew himself to be perfectly incapable of any of those daring conceptions which lead to rapid fortune, as he was in no wise enterprising, he conceived but one means to achieve wealth, that is, to save, to economize, to stint himself, to pile penny upon penny.
His profession of accountant had furnished him with a number of instances of the financial power of the penny daily saved, and invested so as to yield its maximum of interest.
If ever his blue eye became animated, it was when he calculated what would be at the present time the capital produced by a simple penny placed at five per cent interest the year of the birth of our Saviour.
For him this was sublime. He conceived nothing beyond. One penny! He wished, he said, he could have lived eighteen hundred years, to follow the evolutions of that penny, to see it grow tenfold, a hundred-fold, produce, swell, enlarge, and become, after centuries, millions and hundreds of millions.
In spite of all, he had, during the early months of his marriage, allowed his wife to have a young servant. He gave her from time to time, a five-franc-piece, and took her to the country on Sundays.
This was the honeymoon; and, as he declared himself, this life of prodigalities could not last.
Under a futile pretext, the little servant was dismissed. He tightened the strings of his purse. The Sunday excursions were suppressed.
To mere economy succeeded the niggardly parsimony which counts the grains of salt in the pot-au-feu, which weighs the soap for the washing, and measures the evening’s allowance of candle.