Chapter 11 - Page 2

all others. Her mother, that gentle, tender
creature, made beautiful by the light which shone from the inner to
the outer as she approached the tomb,--her mother was perishing from
day to day. Eugenie often reproached herself as the innocent cause of
the slow, cruel malady that was wasting her away. This remorse, though
her mother soothed it, bound her still closer to her love. Every
morning, as soon as her father left the house, she went to the bedside
of her mother, and there Nanon brought her breakfast. The poor girl,
sad, and suffering through the sufferings of her mother, would turn
her face to the old servant with a mute gesture, weeping, and yet not
daring to speak of her cousin. It was Madame Grandet who first found
courage to say,--

"Where is _he_? Why does _he_ not write?"

"Let us think about him, mother, but not speak of him. You are ill
--you, before all."

"All" meant "him."

"My child," said Madame Grandet, "I do not wish to live. God protects
me and enables me to look with joy to the end of my misery."

Every utterance of this woman was unfalteringly pious and Christian.
Sometimes, during the first months of the year, when her husband came
to breakfast with her and tramped up and down the room, she would say
to him a few religious words, always spoken with angelic sweetness,
yet with the firmness of a woman to whom approaching death lends a
courage she had lacked in life.

"Monsieur, I thank you for the interest you take in my health," she
would answer when he made some commonplace inquiry; "but if you really
desire to render my last moments less bitter and to ease my grief,
take back your daughter: be a Christian, a husband, and a father."

When he heard these words, Grandet would sit down by the bed with the
air of a man who sees the rain coming and quietly gets under the
shelter of a gateway till it is over. When these touching, tender, and
religious supplications had all been made, he would say,--

"You are rather pale to-day, my poor wife."

Absolute forgetfulness of his daughter seemed graven on his stony
brow, on his closed lips. He was unmoved by the tears which flowed
down the white cheeks of his unhappy wife as she listened to his
meaningless answers.

"May God pardon you," she said, "even as I pardon you! You will some
day stand in need of mercy."

Since Madame Grandet's illness he had not dared to make use of his
terrible "Ta, ta, ta, ta!" Yet, for all that, his despotic nature was
not disarmed by this angel of gentleness, whose ugliness day by day
decreased, driven out by the ineffable expression of moral