“Very good; so much the better,” said Grandet, rubbing his hands over the letter in which des Grassins announced the fact.
Others agreed to the demand, but only on condition that their rights should be fully guaranteed; they renounced none, and even reserved the power of ultimately compelling a failure. On this began a long correspondence, which ended in Grandet of Saumur agreeing to all conditions. By means of this concession the placable creditors were able to bring the dissatisfied creditors to reason. The deposit was then made, but not without sundry complaints.
“Your goodman,” they said to des Grassins, “is tricking us.”
Twenty-three months after the death of Guillaume Grandet many of the creditors, carried away by more pressing business in the markets of Paris, had forgotten their Grandet claims, or only thought of them to say:
“I begin to believe that forty-seven per cent is all I shall ever get out of that affair.”
The old cooper had calculated on the power of time, which, as he used to say, is a pretty good devil after all. By the end of the third year des Grassins wrote to Grandet that he had brought the creditors to agree to give up their claims for ten per cent on the two million four hundred thousand francs still due by the house of Grandet. Grandet answered that the notary and the broker whose shameful failures had caused the death of his brother were still living, that they might now have recovered their credit, and that they ought to be sued, so as to get something out of them towards lessening the total of the deficit.
By the end of the fourth year the liabilities were definitely estimated at a sum of twelve hundred thousand francs. Many negotiations, lasting over six months, took place between the creditors and the liquidators, and between the liquidators and Grandet. To make a long story short, Grandet of Saumur, anxious by this time to get out of the affair, told the liquidators, about the ninth month of the fourth year, that his nephew had made a fortune in the Indies and was disposed to pay his father’s debts in full; he therefore could not take upon himself to make any settlement without previously consulting him; he had written to him, and was expecting an answer. The creditors were held in check until the middle of the fifth year by the words, “payment in full,” which the wily old miser threw out from time to time as he laughed in his beard, saying with a smile and an oath, “Those Parisians!”