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.