Weather rules everything (metaphor)
The main character – the old Grandet, is a cooper, a wine-grower, and a proprietor. All his business is mostly dependent on the weather: “a hot season makes him rich, a rainy season ruins him; atmospheric vicissitudes control commercial life. Wine-growers, proprietors, wood-merchants, coopers, inn-keepers, mariners, all keep watch of the sun”. These people, like Grandet, whose interests are only in money, are afraid of frost or rain, they dread any natural phenomena like “rain, wind, drought, and want water, heat, and clouds to suit their fancy.” And when it is sunny, in Saumur they use to say: “Here’s golden weather,” which means that sunbeam will be transferred into money soon.
Hercules in a skirt (Simile)
Nanon was Grandet’s the only maid. There was no any other servant in his house, and she was the only one, who did all the work around the house: she cooked, cleaned, and did anything whatever her master ordered. When Nanon was young, her manlike appearance was an obstacle for her to get a job, but Grandet “espied the girl, rejected as she was from door to door”. Being a good judge of physical appearance of people he at once “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”. Nanon became very attached to old Grandet, as he have her a job when she was rejected everywhere, she became very devoted to him and kept his secrets.
Turned in kind of a slave (metaphor)
Nanon did a great service for the old cooper and with time passing “necessity had made the poor girl so niggardly that Grandet had grown to love her as we love a dog, and Nanon had let him fasten a spiked collar round her throat, whose spikes no longer pricked her”. Nanon became more than just devoted to her master, she did everything without arguing, without words, she knew more than Grandet’s wife and daughter Eugenie. “Like a watch-dog, she slept with one ear open, and took her rest with a mind alert” – such was her devotion.
A rose with no scent (metaphor)
In Saumur there were few people who were welcomed into the Grandet’s house, among these was the Grassins family. The author gives Madame des Grassins a sketch description: “she was one of those lively, plump little women, with pink-and-white skins, who, thanks to the claustral calm of the provinces and the habits of a virtuous life, keep their youth until they are past forty”. And the author metaphorically compares her to the “last rose of autumn,—pleasant to the eye, though the petals have a certain frostiness, and their perfume is slight”.
