“She has no father!” said the old man. “Can it be you and I, Madame Grandet, who have given birth to such a disobedient child? A fine education,—religious, too! Well! why are you not in your chamber? Come, to prison, to prison, mademoiselle!”
“Would you deprive me of my daughter, monsieur?” said Madame Grandet, turning towards him a face that was now red with fever.
“If you want to keep her, carry her off! Clear out—out of my house, both of you! Thunder! where is the gold? what’s become of the gold?”
Eugenie rose, looked proudly at her father, and withdrew to her room. Grandet turned the key of the door.
“Nanon,” he cried, “put out the fire in the hall.”
Then he sat down in an armchair beside his wife’s fire and said to her,—
“Undoubtedly she has given the gold to that miserable seducer, Charles, who only wanted our money.”
“I knew nothing about it,” she answered, turning to the other side of the bed, that she might escape the savage glances of her husband. “I suffer so much from your violence that I shall never leave this room, if I trust my own presentiments, till I am carried out of it in my coffin. You ought to have spared me this suffering, monsieur,—you, to whom I have caused no pain; that is, I think so. Your daughter loves you. I believe her to be as innocent as the babe unborn. Do not make her wretched. Revoke your sentence. The cold is very severe; you may give her some serious illness.”
“I will not see her, neither will I speak to her. She shall stay in her room, on bread and water, until she submits to her father. What the devil! shouldn’t a father know where the gold in his house has gone to? She owned the only rupees in France, perhaps, and the Dutch ducats and the genovines—”
“Monsieur, Eugenie is our only child; and even if she had thrown them into the water—”