Chapter 9

The following day the family, meeting at eight o'clock for the early
breakfast, made a picture of genuine domestic intimacy. Grief had
drawn Madame Grandet, Eugenie, and Charles _en rapport_; even Nanon
sympathized, without knowing why. The four now made one family. As to
the old man, his satisfied avarice and the certainty of soon getting
rid of the dandy without having to pay more than his journey to
Nantes, made him nearly indifferent to his presence in the house. He
left the two children, as he called Charles and Eugenie, free to
conduct themselves as they pleased, under the eye of Madame Grandet,
in whom he had implicit confidence as to all that concerned public and
religious morality. He busied himself in straightening the boundaries
of his fields and ditches along the high-road, in his
poplar-plantations beside the Loire, in the winter work of his
vineyards, and at Froidfond. All these things occupied his whole time.

For Eugenie the springtime of love had come. Since the scene at night
when she gave her little treasure to her cousin, her heart had
followed the treasure. Confederates in the same secret, they looked at
each other with a mutual intelligence which sank to the depth of their
consciousness, giving a closer communion, a more intimate relation to
their feelings, and putting them, so to speak, beyond the pale of
ordinary life. Did not their near relationship warrant the gentleness
in their tones, the tenderness in their glances? Eugenie took delight
in lulling her cousin's pain with the pretty childish joys of a
new-born love. Are there no sweet similitudes between the birth of love
and the birth of life? Do we not rock the babe with gentle songs and
softest glances? Do we not tell it marvellous tales of the golden
future? Hope herself, does she not spread her radiant wings above its
head? Does it not shed, with infant fickleness, its tears of sorrow
and its tears of joy? Does it not fret for trifles, cry for the pretty
pebbles with which to build its shifting palaces, for the flowers
forgotten as soon as plucked? Is it not eager to grasp the coming
time, to spring forward into life? Love is our second transformation.
Childhood and love were one and the same thing to Eugenie and to
Charles; it was a first passion, with all its child-like play,--the
more caressing to their hearts because they now were wrapped in
sadness. Struggling at birth against the gloom of mourning, their love
was only the more in harmony with the provincial plainness of that
gray and ruined house. As they exchanged a few words beside the well
in the silent court, or lingered in the garden for the sunset hour,
sitting on a mossy seat saying to each other the infinite nothings of
love, or mused in the silent calm which