Grandet himself.

Monsieur Grandet enjoyed a reputation in Saumur whose causes and
effects can never be fully understood by those who have not, at one
time or another, lived in the provinces. In 1789 Monsieur Grandet
--still called by certain persons le Pere Grandet, though the number
of such old persons has perceptibly diminished--was a master-cooper,
able to read, write, and cipher. At the period when the French Republic
offered for sale the church property in the arrondissement of Saumur,
the cooper, then forty years of age, had just married the daughter of
a rich wood-merchant. Supplied with the ready money of his own fortune
and his wife's _dot_, in all about two thousand louis-d'or, Grandet
went to the newly established "district," where, with the help of two
hundred double louis given by his father-in-law to the surly
republican who presided over the sales of the national domain, he
obtained for a song, legally if not legitimately, one of the finest
vineyards in the arrondissement, an old abbey, and several farms. The
inhabitants of Saumur were so little revolutionary that they thought
Pere Grandet a bold man, a republican, and a patriot with a mind open
to all the new ideas; though in point of fact it was open only to
vineyards. He was appointed a member of the administration of Saumur,
and his pacific influence made itself felt politically and
commercially. Politically, he protected the ci-devant nobles, and
prevented, to the extent of his power, the sale of the lands and
property of the _emigres_; commercially, he furnished the Republican
armies with two or three thousand puncheons of white wine, and took
his pay in splendid fields belonging to a community of women whose
lands had been reserved for the last lot.

Under the Consulate Grandet became mayor, governed wisely, and