Chapter 13

While these events were happening in Saumur, Charles was making his
fortune in the Indies. His commercial outfit had sold well. He began
by realizing a sum of six thousand dollars. Crossing the line had
brushed a good many cobwebs out of his brain; he perceived that the
best means of attaining fortune in tropical regions, as well as in
Europe, was to buy and sell men. He went to the coast of Africa and
bought Negroes, combining his traffic in human flesh with that of
other merchandise equally advantageous to his interests. He carried
into this business an activity which left him not a moment of leisure.
He was governed by the desire of reappearing in Paris with all the
prestige of a large fortune, and by the hope of regaining a position
even more brilliant than the one from which he had fallen.

By dint of jostling with men, travelling through many lands, and
studying a variety of conflicting customs, his ideas had been modified
and had become sceptical. He ceased to have fixed principles of right
and wrong, for he saw what was called a crime in one country lauded as
a virtue in another. In the perpetual struggle of selfish interests
his heart grew cold, then contracted, and then dried up. The blood of
the Grandets did not fail of its destiny; Charles became hard, and
eager for prey. He sold Chinamen, Negroes, birds' nests, children,
artists; he practised usury on a large scale; the habit of defrauding
custom-houses soon made him less scrupulous about the rights of his
fellow men. He went to the Island of St. Thomas and bought, for a mere
song, merchandise that had been captured by pirates, and took it to
ports where he could sell it at a good price. If the pure and noble
face of Eugenie went with him on his first voyage, like that image of
the Virgin which Spanish mariners fastened to their masts, if he
attributed his first success to the magic influence of the prayers and
intercessions of his gentle love, later on women of other kinds,
--blacks, mulattoes, whites, and Indian dancing-girls,--orgies and
adventures in many lands, completely effaced all recollection of his
cousin, of Saumur, of the house, the bench, the kiss snatched in the
dark passage. He remembered only the little garden shut in with
crumbling walls, for it was there he learned the fate that had
overtaken him; but he rejected all connection with his family. His
uncle was an old dog who had filched his jewels; Eugenie had no place
in his heart nor in his thoughts, though she did have a place in his
accounts as a creditor for the sum of six thousand francs.

Such conduct and such ideas explain Charles Grandet's silence. In the
Indies, at St. Thomas, on the coast of Africa, at Lisbon, and in the
United States the adventurer had taken the