hter and ridicule had long since died away. His least
important actions had the authority of results repeatedly shown. His
speech, his clothing, his gestures, the blinking of his eyes, were law
to the country-side, where every one, after studying him as a naturalist
studies the result of instinct in the lower animals, had come to
understand the deep mute wisdom of his slightest actions.

"It will be a hard winter," said one; "Pere Grandet has put on his fur
gloves."

"Pere Grandet is buying quantities of staves; there will be plenty of
wine this year."

Monsieur Grandet never bought either bread or meat. His farmers supplied
him weekly with a sufficiency of capons, chickens, eggs, butter, and
his tithe of wheat. He owned a mill; and the tenant was bound, over and
above his rent, to take a certain quantity of grain and return him the
flour and bran. La Grande Nanon, his only servant, though she was no
longer young, baked the bread of the household herself every Saturday.
Monsieur Grandet arranged with kitchen-gardeners who were his tenants
to supply him with vegetables. As to fruits, he gathered such quantities
that he sold the greater part in the market. His fire-wood was cut from
his own hedgerows or taken from the half-rotten old sheds which he built
at the corners of his fields, and whose planks the farmers carted into
town for him, all cut up, and obligingly stacked in his wood-house,
receiving in return his thanks. His only known expenditures were for the
consecrated bread, the clothing of his wife and daughter, the hire of
their chairs in church, the wages of la Grand Nanon, the tinning of the
saucepans, lights, taxes, repairs on his buildings, and the costs of
his various industries. He had six hundred acres of woodland, lately
purchased, which he induced a neighbor's keeper to watch, under the
promise of an indemnity. After the acquisition of this property he ate
game for the first time.

Monsieur Grandet's manners were very simple. He spoke little. He usually
expressed his meaning by short sententious phrases uttered in a soft
voice. After the Revolution, the epoch at which he first came into
notice, the good man stuttered in a wearisome way as soon as he was
required to speak at length or to maintain an argument. This stammering,
the incoherence of his language, the flux of words in which he drowned
his thought, his apparent lack of logic, attributed to defects of
education, were in reality assumed, and wi