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.