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."