"If you want to keep her, carry her off! Clear out--out of my house,
both of you! Thunder! where is the gold? what's become of the gold?"
Eugenie rose, looked proudly at her father, and withdrew to her room.
Grandet turned the key of the door.
"Nanon," he cried, "put out the fire in the hall."
Then he sat down in an armchair beside his wife's fire and said to
her,--
"Undoubtedly she has given the gold to that miserable seducer,
Charles, who only wanted our money."
"I knew nothing about it," she answered, turning to the other side of
the bed, that she might escape the savage glances of her husband. "I
suffer so much from your violence that I shall never leave this room,
if I trust my own presentiments, till I am carried out of it in my
coffin. You ought to have spared me this suffering, monsieur,--you, to
whom I have caused no pain; that is, I think so. Your daughter loves
you. I believe her to be as innocent as the babe unborn. Do not make
her wretched. Revoke your sentence. The cold is very severe; you may
give her some serious illness."
"I will not see her, neither will I speak to her. She shall stay in
her room, on bread and water, until she submits to her father. What
the devil! shouldn't a father know where the gold in his house has
gone to? She owned the only rupees in France, perhaps, and the Dutch
ducats and the _genovines_--"
"Monsieur, Eugenie is our only child; and even if she had thrown them
into the water--"
"Into the water!" cried her husband; "into the water! You are crazy,
Madame Grandet! What I have said is said; you know that well enough.
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