2.M.3.1. AN ANCIENT SALON
WHEN M. Gillenormand lived in the Rue Servandoni, he
had frequented many very good and very aristocratic salons.
Although a bourgeois, M. Gillenormand was received in society.
As he had a double measure of wit, in the first place,
that which was born with him, and secondly, that which was
attributed to him, he was even sought out and made much of.
He never went anywhere except on condition of being the chief
person there. There are people who will have influence at any
price, and who will have other people busy themselves over
them; when they cannot be oracles, they turn wags. M.
Gillenormand
was not of this nature; his domination in the Royalist
salons which he frequented cost his self-respect nothing.
He was an oracle everywhere. It had happened to him to hold
his own against M. de Bonald, and even against M. Bengy-Puy-Vallee.
About 1817, he invariably passed two afternoons a week in
a house in his own neighborhood, in the Rue Ferou, with
Madame la Baronne de T., a worthy and respectable person,
whose husband had been Ambassador of France to Berlin
under Louis XVI. Baron de T., who, during his lifetime, had
gone very passionately into ecstasies and magnetic visions, had
died bankrupt, during the emigration, leaving, as his entire
fortune, some very curious Memoirs about Mesmer and his tub,
in ten manuscript volumes, bound in red morocco and gilded
on the edges. Madame de T. had not published the memoirs,
out of pride, and maintained herself on a meagre income which
had survived no one knew how.
Madame de T. lived far from the Court; "a very mixed
society," as she said, in a noble isolation, proud and poor. A
few friends assembled twice a week about her widowed hearth,
and these constituted a purely Royalist salon. They sipped
tea there, and uttered groans or cries of horror at the century,
the charter, the Bonapartists, the prostitution of the blue
ribbon,
or the Jacobinism of Louis XVIII., according as the wind
veered towards elegy or dithyrambs; and they spoke in low
tones of the hopes which were presented by Monsieur, afterwards
Charles X.
The songs of the fishwomen, in which Napoleon was called
Nicolas, were received there with transports of joy.
Duchesses,
the most delicate and charming women in the world, went into
ecstasies over couplets like the following, addressed to "the
federates": —
Refoncez dans vos culottes
Le bout d' chemis' qui vous pend.
Qu'on n' dis' pas qu' les patriotes
Ont arbore l' drapeau blanc?
There they amused themselves with puns which were considered
terrible, with innocent plays upon words which they supposed
to be venomous, with quatrains, with distiches even;
thus, upon the Dessolles ministry, a moderate cabinet, of
which MM. Decazes and Deserre were members: —
Pour raffermir le trone ebranle sur sa base,
Il faut changer de sol, et de serre et de case.
Or they drew up a list of the chamber of peers, "an abominably
Jacobin chamber," and from this list they combined
alliances of names, in such a manner as to form, for example,
phrases like the following: Damas. Sabran.
Gouvion-Saint-
Cyr. — All this was done merrily. In that society,
they
parodied the Revolution. They used I know not what desires
to give point to the same wrath in inverse sense. They sang
their little
Ca ira: —
Ah! ca ira ca ira ca ira!
Les Bonapartistes a la lanterne!
Songs are like the guillotine; they chop away indifferently,
to-day this head, to-morrow that. It is only a variation.
In
the Fualdes affair, which belongs to this epoch, 1816, they
took part for Bastide and Jausion, because Fualdes was "a
Buonapartist." They designated the liberals as friends and
brothers; this constituted the most deadly insult.
Like certain church towers, Madame de T.'s salon had two
cocks. One of them was M. Gillenormand, the other was
Comte de Lamothe-Valois, of whom it was whispered about,
with a sort of respect: "Do you know? That is the Lamothe
of the affair of the necklace." These singular amnesties do
occur in parties.
Let us add the following: in the bourgeoisie, honored
situations
decay through too easy relations; one must beware
whom one admits; in the same way that there is a loss of
caloric in the vicinity of those who are cold, there is a
diminution
of consideration in the approach of despised persons. The
ancient society of the upper classes held themselves above this
law, as above every other. Marigny, the brother of the
Pompadour,
had his entry with M. le Prince de Soubise. In
spite of? No, because. Du Barry, the god-father of the
Vaubernier, was very welcome at the house of M. le Marechal
de Richelieu. This society is Olympus. Mercury and the
Prince de Guemenee are at home there. A thief is admitted
there, provided he be a god.
The Comte de Lamothe, who, in 1815, was an old man
seventy-five years of age, had nothing remarkable about him
except his silent and sententious air, his cold and angular face,
his perfectly polished manners, his coat buttoned up to his
cravat, and his long legs always crossed in long, flabby trousers
of the hue of burnt sienna. His face was the same color as his
trousers.
This M. de Lamothe was "held in consideration" in this
salon on account of his "celebrity" and, strange to say, though
true, because of his name of Valois.
As for M. Gillenormand, his consideration was of
absolutely
first-rate quality. He had, in spite of his levity, and without
its interfering in any way with his dignity, a certain manner
about him which was imposing, dignified, honest, and lofty, in
a bourgeois fashion; and his great age added to it. One is not
a century with impunity. The years finally produce around a
head a venerable dishevelment.
In addition to this, he said things which had the genuine
sparkle of the old rock. Thus, when the King of Prussia, after
having restored Louis XVIII., came to pay the latter a visit
under the name of the Count de Ruppin, he was received by
the descendant of Louis XIV. somewhat as though he had been
the Marquis de Brandebourg, and with the most delicate
impertinence.
M. Gillenormand approved: "All kings who are
not the King of France," said he, "are provincial kings." One
day, the following question was put and the following answer
returned in his presence: "To what was the editor of the
Courrier
Francais condemned?" "To be suspended." "Sus is
superfluous," observed M. Gillenormand.
Remarks of this
nature found a situation.
At the Te Deum on the anniversary of the return of the
Bourbons, he said, on seeing M. de Talleyrand pass by: "There
goes his Excellency the Evil One."
M. Gillenormand was always accompanied by his daughter,
that tall mademoiselle, who was over forty and looked fifty,
and by a handsome little boy of seven years, white, rosy, fresh,
with happy and trusting eyes, who never appeared in that
salon without hearing voices murmur around him: "How
handsome he is! What a pity! Poor child!" This child was
the one of whom we dropped a word a while ago. He was
called "poor child," because he had for a father "a brigand of
the Loire."
This brigand of the Loire was M. Gillenormand's son-in-law,
who has already been mentioned, and whom M. Gillenormand
called "the disgrace of his family."