GERMINAL
mines. But being an enterprising engineer, tormented by the desire for a royal fortune, he had hastened to sell out when the denier had reached a million. For some months he had been maturing a scheme. His wife possessed, through an uncle, the little concession of Vandame, where only two pits were open—Jean-Bart and Gaston-Marie—but in an abandoned state, and with such defective material that the output hardly covered the cost. Now he was meditating the repair of Jean-Bart, the renewal of the engine, and the enlargement of the shaft so as to facilitate the descent, keeping Gaston-Marie only for exhaustion purposes. They ought to be able to shovel up gold there, he said. The idea was sound. Only the million had been spent over it, and this damnable industrial crisis broke out at the moment when large profits would have shown that he was right. Besides, he was a bad manager, with a rough kindness towards his workmen, and since his wife’s death he allowed himself to be pillaged, and also gave the rein to his daughters, the elder of whom talked of going on the stage, while the younger had already had three landscapes refused at the Salon, both of them joyous amid the downfall, and exhibiting in poverty their capacity for good household management.
“You see, Léon,” he went on, in a hesitating voice, “you were wrong not to sell out at the same time as I did; now everything is going down. You run risk, and if you had confided your money to me you would see what we should have done at Vandame in our mine!”
M. Grégoire finished his chocolate without haste. He replied peacefully:
“Never! You know that I don’t want to speculate. I live quietly, and it would be too foolish to worry my head over business affairs. And as for Montsou it may continue to go down, we shall always get our living out of it. It doesn’t do to be so diabolically greedy! Then, listen, it is you who who will bite your fingers one day, for Montsou will rise again and Cécile’s grandchildren will still get their white bread out of it.”
Deneulin listened with a constrained smile.
“Then,” he murmured, “if I were to ask you to put a hundred thousand francs in my affair you would refuse?”
[71]
