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 pseudonym of Shepherd, that
he might not compromise his own name. Charles Shepherd could safely be
indefatigable, bold, grasping, and greedy of gain, like a man who
resolves to snatch his fortune _quibus cumque viis_, and makes haste
to have done with villany, that he may spend the rest of his life as
an honest man.
With such methods, prosperity was rapid and brilliant; and in 1827
Charles Grandet returned to Bordeaux on the "Marie Caroline," a fine
brig belonging to a royalist house of business.
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