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_ 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." _
Read next: VOLUME III: BOOK SECOND - THE GREAT BOURGEOIS: CHAPTER II. Like Master, Like House
Read previous: VOLUME III: BOOK FIRST - PARIS STUDIED IN ITS ATOM: CHAPTER XIII. Little Gavroche
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