nd began to dine with good
appetites. Grandet was grave, Charles silent, Eugenie dumb, and Madame
Grandet did not say more than usual; so that the dinner was, very
properly, a repast of condolence. When they rose from table Charles said
to his aunt and uncle,--

"Will you permit me to retire? I am obliged to undertake a long and
painful correspondence."

"Certainly, nephew."

As soon as the goodman was certain that Charles could hear nothing and
was probably deep in his letter-writing, he said, with a dissimulating
glance at his wife,--

"Madame Grandet, what we have to talk about will be Latin to you; it
is half-past seven; you can go and attend to your household accounts.
Good-night, my daughter."

He kissed Eugenie, and the two women departed. A scene now took place in
which Pere Grandet brought to bear, more than at any other moment of his
life, the shrewd dexterity he had acquired in his intercourse with
men, and which had won him from those whose flesh he sometimes bit
too sharply the nickname of "the old dog." If the mayor of Saumur had
carried his ambition higher still, if fortunate circumstances, drawing
him towards the higher social spheres, had sent him into congresses
where the affairs of nations were discussed, and had he there employed
the genius with which his personal interests had endowed him, he would
undoubtedly have proved nobly useful to his native land. Yet it is
perhaps equally certain that outside of Saumur the goodman would have
cut a very sorry figure. Possibly there are minds like certain animals
which cease to breed when transplanted from the climates in which they
are born.

"M-m-mon-sieur le p-p-president, you said t-t-that b-b-bankruptcy--"

The stutter which for years the old miser had assumed when it suited
him, and which, together with the deafness of which he sometimes
complained in rainy weather, was thought in Saumur to be a natural
defect, became at this crisis so wearisome to the two Cruchots that
while they listened they unconsciously made faces and moved their lips,
as if pronouncing the words over which he was hesitating and stuttering
at will. Here it may be well to give the history of this impediment
of the speech and hearing of Monsieur Grandet. No one in Anjou heard
better, or could pronounce more crisply the French language (with an
Angevin accent) than the wily old cooper. Some years earlier, in spite
of his shrewdness, he had been taken in by an Israelite, who in