BOOK SECOND. — THE GREAT BOURGEOIS
2.M.2.1. NINETY YEARS AND THIRTY-TWO TEETH
IN the Rue Boucherat, Rue de Normandie and the Rue de
Saintonge there still exist a few ancient inhabitants who have
preserved the memory of a worthy man named M. Gillenormand,
and who mention him with complaisance. This good
man was old when they were young. This silhouette has not
yet entirely disappeared — for those who regard with melancholy
that vague swarm of shadows which is called the past —
from the labyrinth of streets in the vicinity of the Temple to
which, under Louis XIV., the names of all the provinces of
France were appended exactly as in our day, the streets of the
new Tivoli quarter have received the names of all the capitals
of Europe; a progression, by the way, in which progress is
visible.
M.Gillenormand, who was as much alive as possible in 1831,
was one of those men who had become curiosities to be viewed,
simply because they have lived a long time, and who are
strange because they formerly resembled everybody, and now
resemble nobody. He was a peculiar old man, and in very
truth, a man of another age, the real, complete and rather
haughty bourgeois of the eighteenth century, who wore his
good, old bourgeoisie with the air with which marquises wear
their marquisates. He was over ninety years of age, his walk
was erect, he talked loudly, saw clearly, drank neat, ate, slept,
and snored. He had all thirty-two of his teeth. He only wore
spectacles when he read. He was of an amorous disposition,
but declared that, for the last ten years, he had wholly and
decidedly
renounced women. He could no longer please, he said;
he did not add: "I am too old," but: "I am too poor." He said:
"If I were not ruined — Heee!" All he had left, in fact, was
an income of about fifteen thousand francs. His dream was to
come into an inheritance and to have a hundred thousand livres
income for mistresses. He did not belong, as the reader will
perceive, to that puny variety of octogenaries who, like M. de
Voltaire, have been dying all their life; his was no longevity of
a cracked pot; this jovial old man had always had good health.
He was superficial, rapid, easily angered. He flew into a
passion
at everything, generally quite contrary to all reason.
When contradicted, he raised his cane; he beat people as he
had done in the great century. He had a daughter over fifty
years of age, and unmarried, whom he chastised severely with
his tongue, when in a rage, and whom he would have liked to
whip. She seemed to him to be eight years old. He boxed his
servants' ears soundly, and said: "Ah! carogne!" One of his
oaths was: "By the pantoufloche of the pantouflochade!" He
had singular freaks of tranquillity; he had himself shaved
every day by a barber who had been mad and who detested
him, being jealous of M. Gillenormand on account of his wife,
a pretty and coquettish barberess. M. Gillenormand admired
his own discernment in all things, and declared that he was
extremely sagacious; here is one of his sayings: "I have, in
truth, some penetration; I am able to say when a flea bites
me, from what woman it came."
The words which he uttered the most frequently were:
the
sensible man, and nature. He did not give to this
last word
the grand acceptation which our epoch has accorded to it, but
he made it enter, after his own fashion, into his little chimney-corner
satires: "Nature," he said, "in order that civilization
may have a little of everything, gives it even specimens of its
amusing barbarism. Europe possesses specimens of Asia and
Africa on a small scale. The cat is a drawing-room tiger, the
lizard is a pocket crocodile. The dancers at the opera are pink
female savages. They do not eat men, they crunch them; or,
magicians that they are, they transform them into oysters and
swallow them. The Caribbeans leave only the bones, they
leave only the shell. Such are our morals. We do not devour,
we gnaw; we do not exterminate, we claw."
2.M.2.2. LIKE MASTER, LIKE HOUSE
HE lived in the Marais, Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, No. 6.
He owned the house. This house has since been demolished
and rebuilt, and the number has probably been changed in
those revolutions of numeration which the streets of Paris
undergo. He occupied an ancient and vast apartment on the
first floor, between street and gardens, furnished to the very
ceilings with great Gobelins and Beauvais tapestries representing
pastoral scenes; the subjects of the ceilings and the panels
were repeated in miniature on the arm-chairs. He enveloped
his bed in a vast, nine-leaved screen of Coromandel lacquer.
Long, full curtains hung from the windows, and formed great,
broken folds that were very magnificent. The garden situated
immediately under his windows was attached to that one
of them which formed the angle, by means of a staircase
twelve or fifteen steps long, which the old gentleman
ascended and descended with great agility. In addition to a
library adjoining his chamber, he had a boudoir of which he
thought a great deal, a gallant and elegant retreat, with
magnificent hangings of straw, with a pattern of flowers and
fleurs-de-lys made on the galleys of Louis XIV. and ordered
of his convicts by M. de Vivonne for his mistress. M.
Gillenormand
had inherited it from a grim maternal great-aunt,
who had died a centenarian. He had had two wives. His
manners were something between those of the courtier, which
he had never been, and the lawyer, which he might have been.
He was gay, and caressing when he had a mind. In his youth
he had been one of those men who are always deceived by their
wives and never by their mistresses, because they are, at the
same time, the most sullen of husbands and the most charming
of lovers in existence. He was a connoisseur of painting. He
had in his chamber a marvellous portrait of no one knows
whom, painted by Jordaens, executed with great dashes of the
brush, with millions of details, in a confused and hap-hazard
manner. M. Gillenormand's attire was not the habit of Louis
XIV. nor yet that of Louis XVI.; it was that of the Incroyables
of the Directory. He had thought himself young up to
that period and had followed the fashions. His coat was of
light-weight cloth with voluminous revers, a long swallow-tail
and large steel buttons. With this he wore knee-breeches and
buckle shoes. He always thrust his hands into his fobs. He
said authoritatively: "The French Revolution is a heap of
blackguards."
2.M.2.3. LUC-ESPRIT
AT the age of sixteen, one evening at the opera, he had had
the honor to be stared at through opera-glasses by two beauties
at the same time — ripe and celebrated beauties then, and sung
by Voltaire, the Camargo and the Salle. Caught between two
fires, he had beaten a heroic retreat towards a little dancer, a
young girl named Nahenry, who was sixteen like himself,
obscure as a cat, and with whom he was in love. He abounded
in memories. He was accustomed to exclaim: "How pretty
she was — that Guimard-Guimardini-Guimardinette, the last
time I saw her at Longchamps, her hair curled in sustained
sentiments, with her come-and-see of turquoises, her gown of
the color of persons newly arrived, and her little agitation
muff!" He had worn in his young manhood a waistcoat of
Nain-Londrin, which he was fond of talking about effusively.
"I was dressed like a Turk of the Levant Levantin," said he.
Madame de Boufflers, having seen him by chance when he was
twenty, had described him as "a charming fool." He was
horrified by all the names which he saw in politics and in
power, regarding them as vulgar and bourgeois. He read the
journals, the newspapers, the gazettes as he said,
stifling outbursts
of laughter the while. "Oh!" he said, "what people
these are! Corbiere! Humann! Casimir Perier! There's a
minister for you! I can imagine this in a journal: 'M.
Gillenorman,
minister!' that would be a farce. Well! They are so
stupid that it would pass"; he merrily called everything by its
name, whether decent or indecent, and did not restrain himself
in the least before ladies. He uttered coarse speeches,
obscenities, and filth with a certain tranquillity and lack of
astonishment which was elegant. It was in keeping with the
unceremoniousness of his century. It is to be noted that the
age of periphrase in verse was the age of crudities in prose.
His god-father had predicted that he would turn out a man
of genius, and had bestowed on him these two significant
names: Luc-Esprit.
2.M.2.4. A CENTENARIAN ASPIRANT
HE had taken prizes in his boyhood at the College of Moulins,
where he was born, and he had been crowned by the hand
of the Duc de Nivernais, whom he called the Duc de Nevers.
Neither the Convention, nor the death of Louis XVI., nor the
Napoleon, nor the return of the Bourbons, nor anything else
had been able to efface the memory of this crowning. The
Duc de Nevers was, in his eyes, the great figure of the
century.
"What a charming grand seigneur," he said, "and what a fine
air he had with his blue ribbon!"
In the eyes of M. Gillenormand, Catherine the Second had
made reparation for the crime of the partition of Poland by
purchasing, for three thousand roubles, the secret of the elixir
of gold, from Bestucheff. He grew animated on this subject:
"The elixir of gold," be exclaimed, "the yellow dye of
Bestucheff,
General Lamotte's drops, in the eighteenth century, —
this was the great remedy for the catastrophes of love, the
panacea
against Venus, at one louis the half-ounce phial. Louis
XV. sent two hundred phials of it to the Pope." He would
have been greatly irritated and thrown off his balance, had
any one told him that the elixir of gold is nothing but the
perchloride of iron. M. Gillenormand adored the Bourbons,
and had a horror of 1789; he was forever narrating in what
manner he had saved himself during the Terror, and how he
had been obliged to display a vast deal of gayety and cleverness
in order to escape having his head cut off. If any young
man ventured to pronounce an eulogium on the Republic in
his presence, he turned purple and grew so angry that he
was on the point of swooning. He sometimes alluded to his
ninety years, and said, "I hope that I shall not see ninety-three
twice." On these occasions, he hinted to people that he
meant to live to be a hundred.
2.M.2.5. BASQUE AND NICOLETTE
HE had theories. Here is one of them: "When a man is
passionately fond of women, and when he has himself a wife
for whom he cares but little, who is homely, cross, legitimate,
with plenty of rights, perched on the code, and jealous at need,
there is but one way of extricating himself from the quandry
and of procuring peace, and that is to let his wife control the
purse-strings. This abdication sets him free. Then his wife
busies herself, grows passionately fond of handling coin, gets
her fingers covered with verdigris in the process, undertakes
the education of half-share tenants and the training of farmers,
convokes lawyers, presides over notaries, harangues
scriveners, visits limbs of the law, follows lawsuits, draws up
leases, dictates contracts, feels herself the sovereign, sells,
buys, regulates, promises and compromises, binds fast and
annuls, yields, concedes and retrocedes, arranges, disarranges,
hoards, lavishes; she commits follies, a supreme and personal
delight, and that consoles her. While her husband disdains
her, she has the satisfaction of ruining her husband." This
theory M. Gillenormand had himself applied, and it had
become his history. His wife — the second one — had
administered
his fortune in such a manner that, one fine day, when
M. Gillenormand found himself a widower, there remained to
him just sufficient to live on, by sinking nearly the whole of
it in an annuity of fifteen thousand francs, three-quarters of
which would expire with him. He had not hesitated on this
point, not being anxious to leave a property behind him.
Besides, he had noticed that patrimonies are subject to
adventures, and, for instance, become
national property;
he
had been present at the avatars of consolidated three per cents,
and he had no great faith in the Great Book of the Public
Debt. "All that's the Rue Quincampois!" he said. His
house in the Rue Filles-du-Clavaire belonged to him, as we
have already stated. He had two servants, "a male and a
female." When a servant entered his establishment, M.
Gillenormand
re-baptized him. He bestowed on the men the name
of their province: Nimois, Comtois, Poitevin, Picard. His
last valet was a big, foundered, short-winded fellow of fifty-five,
who was incapable of running twenty paces; but, as he
had been born at Bayonne, M. Gillenormand called him
Basque. All the female servants in his house were
called
Nicolette (even the Magnon, of whom we shall hear more
farther on). One day, a haughty cook, a cordon bleu, of the
lofty race of porters, presented herself. "How much wages
do you want a month?" asked M. Gillenormand. "Thirty
francs." "What is your name?" "Olympie." "You shall
have fifty francs, and you shall be called Nicolette."
2.M.2.6. IN WHICH MAGNON AND HER TWO CHILDREN ARE SEEN
WITH M. Gillenormand, sorrow was converted into wrath;
he was furious at being in despair. He had all sorts of
prejudices
and took all sorts of liberties. One of the facts of which
his exterior relief and his internal satisfaction was composed,
was, as we have just hinted, that he had remained a brisk
spark, and that he passed energetically for such. This he
called having "royal renown." This royal renown sometimes
drew down upon him singular windfalls. One day, there
was brought to him in a basket, as though it had been a
basket of oysters, a stout, newly born boy, who was yelling
like the deuce, and duly wrapped in swaddling-clothes, which
a servant-maid, dismissed six months previously, attributed to
him. M. Gillenormand had, at that time, fully completed his
eighty-fourth year. Indignation and uproar in the establishment.
And whom did that bold hussy think she could persuade
to believe that? What audacity! What an abominable
calumny! M. Gillenormand himself was not at all enraged.
He gazed at the brat with the amiable smile of a good man
who is flattered by the calumny, and said in an aside: "Well,
what now? What's the matter? You are finely taken aback,
and really, you are excessively ignorant. M. le Duc d'Angouleme,
the bastard of his Majesty Charles IX., married a silly
jade of fifteen when he was eighty-five; M. Virginal, Marquis
d'Alluye, brother to the Cardinal de Sourdis, Archbishop of
Bordeaux, had, at the age of eighty-three, by the maid of
Madame la Presidente Jacquin, a son, a real child of love,
who became a Chevalier of Malta and a counsellor of state;
one of the great men of this century, the Abbe Tabaraud, is
the son of a man of eighty-seven. There is nothing out of the
ordinary in these things. And then, the Bible! Upon that
I declare that this little gentleman is none of mine. Let him
be taken care of. It is not his fault." This manner of procedure
was good-tempered. The woman, whose name was
Magnon, sent him another parcel in the following year. It
was a boy again. Thereupon, M. Gillenormand capitulated.
He sent the two brats back to their mother, promising to pay
eighty francs a month for their maintenance, on the condition
that the said mother would not do so any more. He added:
"I insist upon it that the mother shall treat them well. I
shall go to see them from time to time." And this he did. He
had had a brother who was a priest, and who had been rector
of the Academy of Poitiers for three and thirty years, and had
died at seventy-nine. "I lost him young," said he. This
brother, of whom but little memory remains, was a peaceable
miser, who, being a priest, thought himself bound to bestow
alms on the poor whom he met, but he never gave them
anything except bad or demonetized sous, thereby discovering
a means of going to hell by way of paradise. As for M.
Gillenormand the elder, he never haggled over his alms-giving,
but gave gladly and nobly. He was kindly, abrupt,
charitable, and if he had been rich, his turn of mind would
have been magnificent. He desired that all which concerned
him should be done in a grand manner, even his rogueries.
One day, having been cheated by a business man in a matter
of inheritance, in a gross and apparent manner, he uttered
this solemn exclamation: "That was indecently done! I am
really ashamed of this pilfering. Everything has degenerated
in this century, even the rascals. Morbleu! this is not the way
to rob a man of my standing. I am robbed as though in a
forest, but badly robbed.
Silva, sint consule dignae!"
He had
had two wives, as we have already mentioned; by the first he
had had a daughter, who had remained unmarried, and by the
second another daughter, who had died at about the age of
thirty, who had wedded, through love, or chance, or otherwise,
a soldier of fortune who had served in the armies of the
Republic and of the Empire, who had won the cross at Austerlitz
and had been made colonel at Waterloo.
"He is the disgrace
of my family," said the old bourgeois. He took an
immense amount of snuff, and had a particularly graceful
manner of plucking at his lace ruffle with the back of one
hand. He believed very little in God.
2.M.2.7. RULE: RECEIVE NO ONE EXCEPT IN THE EVENING
SUCH was M. Luc-Esprit Gillenormand, who had not lost
his hair, — which was gray rather than white, — and which was
always dressed in "dog's ears." To sum up, he was venerable
in spite of all this.
He had something of the eighteenth century about him;
frivolous and great.
In 1814 and during the early years of the Restoration, M.
Gillenormand, who was still young, — he was only seventy-four,
— lived in the Faubourg Saint Germain, Rue Servandoni, near
Saint-Sulpice. He had only retired to the Marais when he
quitted society, long after attaining the age of eighty.
And, on abandoning society, he had immured himself in his
habits. The principal one, and that which was invariable, was
to keep his door absolutely closed during the day, and never to
receive any one whatever except in the evening. He dined at
five o'clock, and after that his door was open. That had been
the fashion of his century, and he would not swerve from it.
"The day is vulgar," said he, "and deserves only a closed
shutter. Fashionable people only light up their minds when
the zenith lights up its stars." And he barricaded himself
against every one, even had it been the king himself. This was
the antiquated elegance of his day.
2.M.2.8. TWO DO NOT MAKE A PAIR
WE have just spoken of M. Gillenormand's two daughters.
They had come into the world ten years apart. In their youth
they had borne very little resemblance to each other, either in
character or countenance, and had also been as little like
sisters
to each other as possible. The youngest had a charming soul,
which turned towards all that belongs to the light, was occupied
with flowers, with verses, with music, which fluttered
away into glorious space, enthusiastic, ethereal, and was
wedded from her very youth, in ideal, to a vague and heroic
figure. The elder had also her chimera; she espied in the azure
some very wealthy purveyor, a contractor, a splendidly stupid
husband, a million made man, or even a prefect; the receptions
of the Prefecture, an usher in the antechamber with a chain on
his neck, official balls, the harangues of the town-hall, to be
"Madame la Prefete," — all this had created a whirlwind in
her imagination. Thus the two sisters strayed, each in her own
dream, at the epoch when they were young girls. Both had
wings, the one like an angel, the other like a goose.
No ambition is ever fully realized, here below at least.
No
paradise becomes terrestrial in our day. The younger wedded
the man of her dreams, but she died. The elder did not marry
at all.
At the moment when she makes her entrance into this
history
which we are relating, she was an antique virtue, an
incombustible
prude, with one of the sharpest noses, and one of
the most obtuse minds that it is possible to see. A
characteristic
detail; outside of her immediate family, no one had ever
known her first name. She was called Mademoiselle
Gillenormand,
the elder.
In the matter of cant, Mademoiselle Gillenormand
could
have given points to a miss. Her modesty was carried to the
other extreme of blackness. She cherished a frightful memory
of her life; one day, a man had beheld her garter.
Age had only served to accentuate this pitiless modesty.
Her guimpe was never sufficiently opaque, and never ascended
sufficiently high. She multiplied clasps and pins where no one
would have dreamed of looking. The peculiarity of prudery is
to place all the more sentinels in proportion as the fortress is
the less menaced.
Nevertheless, let him who can explain these antique
mysteries
of innocence, she allowed an officer of the Lancers, her
grand nephew, named Theodule, to embrace her without displeasure.
In
spite of this favored Lancer, the label: Prude, under
which we have classed her, suited her to absolute perfection.
Mademoiselle Gillenormand was a sort of twilight soul. Prudery
is a demi-virtue and a demi-vice.
To prudery she added bigotry, a well-assorted lining. She
belonged to the society of the Virgin, wore a white veil on
certain festivals, mumbled special orisons, revered "the holy
blood," venerated "the sacred heart," remained for hours in
contemplation before a rococo-jesuit altar in a chapel which
was inaccessible to the rank and file of the faithful, and there
allowed her soul to soar among little clouds of marble, and
through great rays of gilded wood.
She had a chapel friend, an ancient virgin like herself,
named Mademoiselle Vaubois, who was a positive blockhead,
and beside whom Mademoiselle Gillenormand had the pleasure
of being an eagle. Beyond the Agnus Dei and Ave Maria,
Mademoiselle Vaubois had no knowledge of anything except of
the different ways of making preserves. Mademoiselle Vaubois,
perfect in her style, was the ermine of stupidity without
a single spot of intelligence.
Let us say it plainly, Mademoiselle Gillenormand had
gained rather than lost as she grew older. This is the case with
passive natures. She had never been malicious, which is relative
kindness; and then, years wear away the angles, and the
softening which comes with time had come to her. She was
melancholy with an obscure sadness of which she did not herself
know the secret. There breathed from her whole person
the stupor of a life that was finished, and which had never had
a beginning.
She kept house for her father. M. Gillenormand had his
daughter near him, as we have seen that Monseigneur Bienvenu
had his sister with him. These households comprised of
an old man and an old spinster are not rare, and always have
the touching aspect of two weaknesses leaning on each other
for support.
There was also in this house, between this elderly
spinster
and this old man, a child, a little boy, who was always trembling
and mute in the presence of M. Gillenormand. M. Gillenormand
never addressed this child except in a severe voice,
and sometimes, with uplifted cane: "Here, sir! rascal,
scoundrel, come here! — Answer me, you scamp! Just let
me see you, you good-for-nothing!" etc., etc. He idolized
him.
This was his grandson. We shall meet with this child
again
later on.