GREGOIRE (HONORE), great-grandfather of Leon Gregoire.  He was in 1760 steward on the estate of Piolaine, a property which belonged to Baron Desrumaux.  When the Montsou treaty was made, Honore, who had laid up savings to the amount of some fifty thousand francs, yielded tremblingly to his master’s unshakable faith.  He gave up ten thousand francs, and took a share in the Montsou Company, though with the fear of robbing his children of that sum.  When he died his share passed to his son Eugene.  Germinal.

GREGOIRE (LEON), great-grandson of Honore Gregoire.  It was he who profited at a stupefying rate of progress by the timid investment of his ancestor.  Those poor ten thousand francs grew and multiplied with the company’s prosperity.  Since 1820 they had brought in cent for cent ten thousand francs.  In 1844 they had produced twenty thousand; in 1850, forty.  During two years the dividend had reached the prodigious figure of fifty thousand francs; the value of the share, quoted at the Lille Bourse at a million, had centrupled in a century.  Six months later an industrial crisis broke out; the share fell to six hundred thousand francs.  But Leon refused to be alarmed, for he maintained an obstinate faith in the mine.  When the great strike broke out he would not be persuaded of its seriousness, and refused to admit any danger, until he saw his daughter struck by a stone and savagely assaulted by the crowd.  Afterwards he desired to show the largeness of his views, and spoke of forgetting and forgiving everything.  With his wife and daughter Cecile he went to carry assistance to the Maheus, a family who had suffered sadly in the strike.  Cecile was unfortunately left alone with old Bonnemort, Maheu’s father, who in a sudden frenzy attacked the girl and strangled her.  This terrible blow entirely shadowed the lives of Gregoire and his wife.  Germinal.

GREGOIRE (MADAME LEON), wife of the preceding, was the daughter of a druggist at Marchiennes.  She was a plain, penniless girl, whom he adored, and who repaid him with happiness.  She shut herself up in her household, having no other will but her husband’s.  No difference of tastes separated them, their desires were mingled in one idea of comfort; and they had thus lived for forty years, in affection and little mutual services.  Germinal.

GRESHAM, a jockey who, it was said, had always bad luck.  He rode Lusignan in the Grand Prix de Paris.  Nana.

GROGNET, a perfumer in Rue de Grammont, whose business was ruined by the growth of Octave Mouret’s great establishment.  Au Bonheur des Dames.

GROSBOIS, a Government surveyor who had also a small farm at Magnolles, a little village near Rognes.  Liable to be summoned from Orgeres to Beaugency for purposes of survey, he left the management of his own land to his wife, and in the course of these constant excursions he acquired such a habit of drinking that he was never seen sober.  That mattered little, however; the more drunk he was the better he seemed to see; he never made a wrong measurement or an error in calculation.  People listened to him with respect, for he had the reputation of being a sly, acute man.  La Terre.