f other merchandise
equally advantageous to his interests. He carried into this business an
activity which left him not a moment of leisure. He was governed by the
desire of reappearing in Paris with all the prestige of a large fortune,
and by the hope of regaining a position even more brilliant than the one
from which he had fallen.

By dint of jostling with men, travelling through many lands, and
studying a variety of conflicting customs, his ideas had been modified
and had become sceptical. He ceased to have fixed principles of right
and wrong, for he saw what was called a crime in one country lauded as
a virtue in another. In the perpetual struggle of selfish interests his
heart grew cold, then contracted, and then dried up. The blood of the
Grandets did not fail of its destiny; Charles became hard, and eager
for prey. He sold Chinamen, Negroes, birds' nests, children, artists; he
practised usury on a large scale; the habit of defrauding custom-houses
soon made him less scrupulous about the rights of his fellow men.
He went to the Island of St. Thomas and bought, for a mere song,
merchandise that had been captured by pirates, and took it to ports
where he could sell it at a good price. If the pure and noble face of
Eugenie went with him on his first voyage, like that image of the Virgin
which Spanish mariners fastened to their masts, if he attributed his
first success to the magic influence of the prayers and intercessions
of his gentle love, later on women of other kinds,--blacks, mulattoes,
whites, and Indian dancing-girls,--orgies and adventures in many lands,
completely effaced all recollection of his cousin, of Saumur, of the
house, the bench, the kiss snatched in the dark passage. He remembered
only the little garden shut in with crumbling walls, for it was there he
learned the fate that had overtaken him; but he rejected all connection
with his family. His uncle was an old dog who had filched his jewels;
Eugenie had no place in his heart nor in his thoughts, though she did
have a place in his accounts as a creditor for the sum of six thousand
francs.

Such conduct and such ideas explain Charles Grandet's silence. In the
Indies, at St. Thomas, on the coast of Africa, at Lisbon, and in the
United States the adventurer had taken the pseudonym of Shepherd, that
he might not compromise his own name. Charles Shepherd could safely
be indefatigable, bold, grasping, and greedy of gain, like a man who
resolves to sna