hould need anything else, you can call Nanon."

"My dear aunt, I shall need nothing; I have, I believe, brought
everything with me. Permit me to bid you good-night, and my young cousin
also."

Charles took a lighted wax candle from Nanon's hand,--an Anjou candle,
very yellow in color, and so shopworn that it looked like tallow and
deceived Monsieur Grandet, who, incapable of suspecting its presence
under his roof, did not perceive this magnificence.

"I will show you the way," he said.

Instead of leaving the hall by the door which opened under the archway,
Grandet ceremoniously went through the passage which divided the hall
from the kitchen. A swing-door, furnished with a large oval pane of
glass, shut this passage from the staircase, so as to fend off the cold
air which rushed through it. But the north wind whistled none the less
keenly in winter, and, in spite of the sand-bags at the bottom of the
doors of the living-room, the temperature within could scarcely be kept
at a proper height. Nanon went to bolt the outer door; then she closed
the hall and let loose a wolf-dog, whose bark was so strangled that
he seemed to have laryngitis. This animal, noted for his ferocity,
recognized no one but Nanon; the two untutored children of the fields
understood each other.

When Charles saw the yellow, smoke-stained walls of the well of the
staircase, where each worm-eaten step shook under the heavy foot-fall
of his uncle, his expectations began to sober more and more. He fancied
himself in a hen-roost. His aunt and cousin, to whom he turned an
inquiring look, were so used to the staircase that they did not guess
the cause of his amazement, and took the glance for an expression of
friendliness, which they answered by a smile that made him desperate.

"Why the devil did my father send me to such a place?" he said to
himself.

When they reached the first landing he saw three doors painted in
Etruscan red and without casings,--doors sunk in the dusty walls and
provided with iron bars, which in fact were bolts, each ending with the
pattern of a flame, as did both ends of the long sheath of the lock.
The first door at the top of the staircase, which opened into a room
directly above the kitchen, was evidently walled up. In fact, the only
entrance to that room was through Grandet's bedchamber; the room itself
was his office. The single window which lighted it, on the side of the
court, was protected by a lattice of strong iro