mysteries. Life is almost wholly in
the open air; every household sits at its own threshold, breakfasts,
dines, and quarrels there. No one can pass along the street without
being examined; in fact formerly, when a stranger entered a provincial
town he was bantered and made game of from door to door. From this came
many good stories, and the nickname _copieux_, which was applied to the
inhabitants of Angers, who excelled in such urban sarcasms.

The ancient mansions of the old town of Saumur are at the top of
this hilly street, and were formerly occupied by the nobility of the
neighborhood. The melancholy dwelling where the events of the following
history took place is one of these mansions,--venerable relics of a
century in which men and things bore the characteristics of simplicity
which French manners and customs are losing day by day. Follow the
windings of the picturesque thoroughfare, whose irregularities awaken
recollections that plunge the mind mechanically into reverie, and you
will see a somewhat dark recess, in the centre of which is hidden the
door of the house of Monsieur Grandet. It is impossible to understand
the force of this provincial expression--the house of Monsieur
Grandet--without giving the biography of Monsieur Grandet himself.

Monsieur Grandet enjoyed a reputation in Saumur whose causes and effects
can never be fully understood by those who have not, at one time or
another, lived in the provinces. In 1789 Monsieur Grandet--still called
by certain persons le Pere Grandet, though the number of such old
persons has perceptibly diminished--was a master-cooper, able to read,
write, and cipher. At the period when the French Republic offered for
sale the church property in the arrondissement of Saumur, the cooper,
then forty years of age, had just married the daughter of a rich
wood-merchant. Supplied with the ready money of his own fortune and his
wife's _dot_, in all about two thousand louis-d'or, Grandet went to the
newly established "district," where, with the help of two hundred double
louis given by his father-in-law to the surly republican who presided
over the sales of the national domain, he obtained for a song, legally
if not legitimately, one of the finest vineyards in the arrondissement,
an old abbey, and several farms. The inhabitants of Saumur were so
little revolutionary that they thought Pere Grandet a bold man, a
republican, and a patriot with a mind open to all the new ideas; though