The villagers fell silent.
The blacksmith lowered his hammer. The butcher lowered his knife. Even the mathematics teacher put aside the integral he had been unable to solve for three days.
Only my grandmother remained unimpressed.
She was eighty-seven years old and had survived bandits, famine, harvests, weddings, and more price increases than anyone could count. She glanced at the Frenchman and said:
"Why make it sound so mysterious? You're just doing business."
Monsieur Balzac fell silent.
He had written about countless clever men, but never before had he encountered a woman capable of compressing the entire Human Comedy into a single sentence.
