“My friend, wait; I am saying my prayers,” said the poor mother in a trembling voice.
“The devil take your good God!” growled Grandet in reply.
Misers have no belief in a future life; the present is their all in all. This thought casts a terrible light upon our present epoch, in which, far more than at any former period, money sways the laws and politics and morals. Institutions, books, men, and dogmas, all conspire to undermine belief in a future life,—a belief upon which the social edifice has rested for eighteen hundred years. The grave, as a means of transition, is little feared in our day. The future, which once opened to us beyond the requiems, has now been imported into the present. To obtain per fas et nefas a terrestrial paradise of luxury and earthly enjoyment, to harden the heart and macerate the body for the sake of fleeting possessions, as the martyrs once suffered all things to reach eternal joys, this is now the universal thought—a thought written everywhere, even in the very laws which ask of the legislator, “What do you pay?” instead of asking him, “What do you think?” When this doctrine has passed down from the bourgeoisie to the populace, where will this country be?
“Madame Grandet, have you done?” asked the old man.
“My friend, I am praying for you.”
“Very good! Good-night; to-morrow morning we will have a talk.”
The poor woman went to sleep like a schoolboy who, not having learned his lessons, knows he will see his master’s angry face on the morrow. At the moment when, filled with fear, she was drawing the sheet above her head that she might stifle hearing, Eugenie, in her night-gown and with naked feet, ran to her side and kissed her brow.
“Oh! my good mother,” she said, “to-morrow I will tell him it was I.”
“No; he would send you to Noyers. Leave me to manage it; he cannot eat me.”
“Do you hear, mamma?”