At twenty-two years of age the poor girl had been unable to find a
situation, so repulsive was her face to almost every one. Yet the
feeling was certainly unjust: the face would have been much admired on
the shoulders of a grenadier of the guard; but all things, so they
say, should be in keeping. Forced to leave a farm where she kept the
cows, because the dwelling-house was burned down, she came to Saumur
to find a place, full of the robust courage that shrinks from no
labor. Le Pere Grandet was at that time thinking of marriage and about
to set up his household. He espied the girl, rejected as she was from
door to door. A good judge of corporeal strength in his trade as a
cooper, he guessed the work that might be got out of a female creature
shaped like a Hercules, as firm on her feet as an oak sixty years old
on its roots, strong in the hips, square in the back, with the hands
of a cartman and an honesty as sound as her unblemished virtue.
Neither the warts which adorned her martial visage, nor the red-brick
tints of her skin, nor the sinewy arms, nor the ragged garments of la
Grande Nanon, dismayed the cooper, who was at that time still of an
age when the heart shudders. He fed, shod, and clothed the poor girl,
gave her wages, and put her to work without treating her too roughly.
Seeing herself thus welcomed, la Grande Nanon wept secretly tears of
joy, and attached herself in all sincerity to her master, who from
that day ruled her and worked her with feudal authority. Nanon did
everything. She cooked, she made the lye, she washed the linen in the
Loire and brought it home on her shoulders; she got up early, she went
to bed late; she prepared the food of the vine-dressers during the
harvest, kept watch upon the market-people, protected the property of
her master like a faithful dog, and even, full of blind confidence,
obeyed without a murmur his most absurd exactions.