"What's this? Ever since that dandy put foot in _my_ house everything
goes wrong! You behave as if you had the right to buy sugar-plums and
make feasts and weddings. I won't have that sort of thing. I hope I
know my duty at my time of life! I certainly sha'n't take lessons from
my daughter, or from anybody else. I shall do for my nephew what it is
proper to do, and you have no need to poke your nose into it. As for
you, Eugenie," he added, facing her, "don't speak of this again, or
I'll send you to the Abbaye des Noyers with Nanon, see if I don't; and
no later than to-morrow either, if you disobey me! Where is that
fellow, has he come down yet?"
"No, my friend," answered Madame Grandet.
"What is he doing then?"
"He is weeping for his father," said Eugenie.
Grandet looked at his daughter without finding a word to say; after
all, he was a father. He made a couple of turns up and down the room,
and then went hurriedly to his secret den to think over an investment
he was meditating in the public Funds. The thinning out of his two
thousand acres of forest land had yielded him six hundred thousand
francs: putting this sum to that derived from the sale of his poplars
and to his other gains for the last year and for the current year, he
had amassed a total of nine hundred thousand francs, without counting
the two hundred thousand he had got by the sale just concluded. The
twenty per cent which Cruchot assured him would gain in a short time
from the Funds, then quoted at seventy, tempted him.
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