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.