The jeweler remarked, jokingly: 

“There was a person who invested all her savings in precious stones.”

Monsieur Lantin replied, seriously: 

“It is only another way of investing one’s money.”

That day he lunched at Voisin’s, and drank wine worth twenty francs a bottle.  Then he hired a carriage and made a tour of the Bois.  He gazed at the various turnouts with a kind of disdain, and could hardly refrain from crying out to the occupants: 

“I, too, am rich!—­I am worth two hundred thousand francs.”

Suddenly he thought of his employer.  He drove up to the bureau, and entered gaily, saying: 

“Sir, I have come to resign my position.  I have just inherited three hundred thousand francs.”

He shook hands with his former colleagues, and confided to them some of his projects for the future; he then went off to dine at the Cafe Anglais.

He seated himself beside a gentleman of aristocratic bearing; and, during the meal, informed the latter confidentially that he had just inherited a fortune of four hundred thousand francs.

For the first time in his life, he was not bored at the theatre, and spent the remainder of the night in a gay frolic.

Six months afterward, he married again.  His second wife was a very virtuous woman; but had a violent temper.  She caused him much sorrow.

FASCINATION

I can tell you neither the name of the country, nor the name of the man.  It was a long, long way from here on a fertile and burning shore.  We had been walking since the morning along the coast, with the blue sea bathed in sunlight on one side of us, and the shore covered with crops on the other.  Flowers were growing quite close to the waves, those light, gentle, lulling waves.  It was very warm, a soft warmth permeated with the odor of the rich, damp, fertile soil.  One fancied one was inhaling germs.

I had been told, that evening, that I should meet with hospitality at the house of a Frenchman who lived in an orange grove at the end of a promontory.  Who was he?  I did not know.  He had come there one morning ten years before, and had bought land which he planted with vines and sowed with grain.  He had worked, this man, with passionate energy, with fury.  Then as he went on from month to month, year to year, enlarging his boundaries, cultivating incessantly the strong virgin soil, he accumulated a fortune by his indefatigable labor.

But he kept on working, they said.  Rising at daybreak, he would remain in the fields till evening, superintending everything without ceasing, tormented by one fixed idea, the insatiable desire for money, which nothing can quiet, nothing satisfy.  He now appeared to be very rich.  The sun was setting as I reached his house.  It was situated as described, at the end of a promontory in the midst of a grove of orange trees.  It was a large square house, quite plain, and overlooked the sea.  As I approached, a man wearing a long beard appeared in the doorway.  Having greeted him, I asked if he would give me shelter for the night.  He held out his hand and said, smiling: