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."