A day seldom passed but he asked
himself, "Where is /he/? What is /he/ doing?" He thought that the Count
was in Italy with the fair Duchesse de Maufrigneuse.
When every franc of a man's fortune has come to him, not by
inheritance, but through his own earning and saving, it is one of his
sweetest pleasures to look back upon the pains that have gone to the
making of it, and then to plan out a future for his crowns. This it is
to conjugate the verb "to enjoy" in every tense. And the old lawyer,
whose affections were all bound up in a single attachment, was
thinking that all the carefully-chosen, well-tilled land which he had
pinched and scraped to buy would one day go to round the d'Esgrignon
estates, and the thought doubled his pleasure. His pride swelled as he
sat at his ease in the old armchair; and the building of glowing
coals, which he raised with the tongs, sometimes seemed to him to be
the old noble house built up again, thanks to his care. He pictured
the young Count's prosperity, and told himself that he had done well
to live for such an aim. Chesnel was not lacking in intelligence;
sheer goodness was not the sole source of his great devotion; he had a
pride of his own; he was like the nobles who used to rebuild a pillar
in a cathedral to inscribe their name upon it; he meant his name to be
remembered by the great house which he had restored.
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