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The Village Rector by Honoré de Balzac
page 24 of 328 (07%)

Pierre Graslin, then forty-seven years of age, was supposed to possess
about six hundred thousand francs. The estimate of his fortune had
lately increased throughout the department, in consequence of his
outlay in having built, in a new quarter of the town called the place
d'Arbres (thus assisting to give Limoges an improved aspect), a fine
house, the front of it being on a line with a public building with the
facade of which it corresponded. This house had now been finished six
months, but Pierre Graslin delayed furnishing it; it had cost him so
much that he shrank from the further expense of living in it. His
vanity had led him to transgress the wise laws by which he governed
his life. He felt, with the good sense of a business man, that the
interior of the house ought to correspond with the character of the
outside. The furniture, silver-ware, and other needful accessories to
the life he would have to lead in his new mansion would, he estimated,
cost him nearly as much as the original building. In spite, therefore,
of the gossip of tongues and the charitable suppositions of his
neighbors, he continued to live on in the damp, old, and dirty
ground-floor apartment in the rue Montantmanigne where his fortune had
been made. The public carped, but Graslin had the approval of his
former partners, who praised a resolution that was somewhat uncommon.

A fortune and a position like those of Pierre Graslin naturally
excited the greed of not a few in a small provincial city. During the
last ten years more than one proposition of marriage had been
intimated to Monsieur Graslin. But the bachelor state was so well
suited to a man who was busy from morning till night, overrun with
work, eager in the pursuit of money as a hunter for game, and always
tired out with his day's labor, that Graslin fell into none of the
traps laid for him by ambitious mothers who coveted so brilliant a
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