"Come, fall-to, Nanon!" he would say in years
when the branches bent under the fruit and the farmers were obliged to
give it to the pigs.
To the poor peasant who in her youth had earned nothing but harsh
treatment, to the pauper girl picked up by charity, Grandet's
ambiguous laugh was like a sunbeam. Moreover, Nanon's simple heart and
narrow head could hold only one feeling and one idea. For thirty-five
years she had never ceased to see herself standing before the
wood-yard of Monsieur Grandet, ragged and barefooted, and to hear him
say: "What do you want, young one?" Her gratitude was ever new.
Sometimes Grandet, reflecting that the poor creature had never heard a
flattering word, that she was ignorant of all the tender sentiments
inspired by women, that she might some day appear before the throne of
God even more chaste than the Virgin Mary herself,--Grandet, struck
with pity, would say as he looked at her, "Poor Nanon!" The
exclamation was always followed by an undefinable look cast upon him
in return by the old servant. The words, uttered from time to time,
formed a chain of friendship that nothing ever parted, and to which
each exclamation added a link. Such compassion arising in the heart of
the miser, and accepted gratefully by the old spinster, had something
inconceivably horrible about it. This cruel pity, recalling, as it
did, a thousand pleasures to the heart of the old cooper, was for
Nanon the sum total of happiness.
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