Chapter 2

It is now easy to understand the full meaning of the term, "the house
of Monsieur Grandet,"--that cold, silent, pallid dwelling, standing
above the town and sheltered by the ruins of the ramparts. The two
pillars and the arch, which made the porte-cochere on which the door
opened, were built, like the house itself, of tufa,--a white stone
peculiar to the shores of the Loire, and so soft that it lasts hardly
more than two centuries. Numberless irregular holes, capriciously
bored or eaten out by the inclemency of the weather, gave an
appearance of the vermiculated stonework of French architecture to the
arch and the side walls of this entrance, which bore some resemblance
to the gateway of a jail. Above the arch was a long bas-relief, in
hard stone, representing the four seasons, the faces already crumbling
away and blackened. This bas-relief was surmounted by a projecting
plinth, upon which a variety of chance growths had sprung up,--yellow
pellitory, bindweed, convolvuli, nettles, plantain, and even a little
cherry-tree, already grown to some height.

The door of the archway was made of solid oak, brown, shrunken, and
split in many places; though frail in appearance, it was firmly held
in place by a system of iron bolts arranged in symmetrical patterns. A
small square grating, with close bars red with rust, filled up the
middle panel and made, as it were, a motive for the knocker, fastened
to it by a ring, which struck upon the grinning head of a huge nail.
This knocker, of the oblong shape and kind which our ancestors called
_jaquemart_, looked like a huge note of exclamation; an antiquary who
examined it attentively might have found indications of the figure,
essentially burlesque, which it once represented, and which long usage
had now effaced. Through this little grating--intended in olden times
for the recognition of friends in times of civil war--inquisitive
persons could perceive, at the farther end of the dark and slimy
vault, a few broken steps which led to a garden, picturesquely shut in
by walls that were thick and damp, and through which oozed a moisture
that nourished tufts of sickly herbage. These walls were the ruins of
the ramparts, under which ranged the gardens of several neighboring
houses.

The most important room on the ground-floor of the house was a large
hall, entered directly from beneath the vault of the porte-cochere.
Few people know the importance of a hall in the little towns of Anjou,
Touraine, and Berry. The hall is at one and the same time antechamber,
salon, office, boudoir, and dining-room; it is the theatre of domestic
life, the common living-room. There the barber of the neighborhood
came, twice a year, to cut Monsieur Grandet's hair; there the farmers,