Les Misérables
arrived, and her little agitation muff!” He had worn in his young
manhood a waistcoat of Nain-Londrin, which he was fond of talking about
effusively. “I was dressed like a Turk of the Levant Levantin,” said
he. Madame de Boufflers, having seen him by chance when he was twenty,
had described him as “a charming fool.” He was horrified by all the
names which he saw in politics and in power, regarding them as vulgar
and bourgeois. He read the journals, the _newspapers, the gazettes_ as
he said, stifling outbursts of laughter the while. “Oh!” he said, “what
people these are! Corbière! Humann! Casimir Périer! There’s a minister
for you! I can imagine this in a journal: ‘M. Gillenorman, minister!’
that would be a farce. Well! They are so stupid that it would pass”; he
merrily called everything by its name, whether decent or indecent, and
did not restrain himself in the least before ladies. He uttered coarse
speeches, obscenities, and filth with a certain tranquillity and lack
of astonishment which was elegant. It was in keeping with the
unceremoniousness of his century. It is to be noted that the age of
periphrase in verse was the age of crudities in prose. His god-father
had predicted that he would turn out a man of genius, and had bestowed
on him these two significant names: Luc-Esprit.
CHAPTER IV—A CENTENARIAN ASPIRANT
He had taken prizes in his boyhood at the College of Moulins, where he
was born, and he had been crowned by the hand of the Duc de Nivernais,
whom he called the Duc de Nevers. Neither the Convention, nor the death
of Louis XVI., nor the Napoleon, nor the return of the Bourbons, nor
anything else had been able to efface the memory of this crowning. _The
Duc de Nevers_ was, in his eyes, the great figure of the century. “What
a charming grand seigneur,” he said, “and what a fine air he had with
his blue ribbon!”
In the eyes of M. Gillenormand, Catherine the Second had made
reparation for the crime of the partition of Poland by purchasing, for
three thousand roubles, the secret of the elixir of gold, from
Bestucheff. He grew animated on this subject: “The elixir of gold,” he
exclaimed, “the yellow dye of Bestucheff, General Lamotte’s drops, in
the eighteenth century,—this was the great remedy for the catastrophes
of love, the panacea against Venus, at one louis the half-ounce phial.
Louis XV. sent two hundred phials of it to the Pope.” He would have
been greatly irritated and thrown off his balance, had any one told him
that the elixir of gold is nothing but the perchloride of iron. M.
Gillenormand adored the Bourbons, and had a horror of 1789; he was
forever narrating in what manner he had saved himself during the
Terror, and how he had been obliged to display a vast deal of gayety
and cleverness in order to escape having his head cut off. If any young
man ventured to pronounce an eulogium on the Republic in his presence,
he turned purple and grew so angry that he was on the point of
swooning. He sometimes alluded to his ninety years, and said, “I hope
that I shall not see ninety-three twice.” On these occasions, he hinted
to people that he meant to live to be a hundred.
CHAPTER V—BASQUE AND NICOLETTE
He had theories. Here is one of them: “When a man is passionately fond
of women, and when he has himself a wife for whom he cares but little,
who is homely, cross, legitimate, with plenty of rights, perched on the
code, and jealous at need, there is but one way of extricating himself
from the quandry and of procuring peace, and that is to let his wife
control the purse-strings. This abdication sets him free. Then his wife
busies herself, grows passionately fond of handling coin, gets her
fingers covered with verdigris in the process, undertakes the education
of half-share tenants and the training of farmers, convokes lawyers,
presides over notaries, harangues scriveners, visits limbs of the law,
follows lawsuits, draws up leases, dictates contracts, feels herself
the sovereign, sells, buys, regulates, promises and compromises, binds
fast and annuls, yields, concedes and retrocedes, arranges,
disarranges, hoards, lavishes; she commits follies, a supreme and
personal delight, and that consoles her. While her husband disdains
her, she has the satisfaction of ruining her husband.” This theory M.
Gillenormand had himself applied, and it had become his history. His
wife—the second one—had administered his fortune in such a manner that,
one fine day, when M. Gillenormand found himself a widower, there
remained to him just sufficient to live on, by sinking nearly the whole
of it in an annuity of fifteen thousand francs, three-quarters of which
would expire with him. He had not hesitated on this point, not being
anxious to leave a property behind him. Besides, he had noticed that
patrimonies are subject to adventures, and, for instance, become
_national property_; he had been present at the avatars of consolidated
three per cents, and he had no great faith in the Great Book of the
Public Debt. “All that’s the Rue Quincampois!” he said. His house in
the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire belonged to him, as we have already
stated. He had two servants, “a male and a female.” When a servant
entered his establishment, M. Gillenormand re-baptized him. He bestowed
on the men the name of their province: Nîmois, Comtois, Poitevin,
Picard. His last valet was a big, foundered, short-winded fellow of
fifty-five, who was incapable of running twenty paces; but, as he had
been born at Bayonne, M. Gillenormand called him _Basque_. All the
female servants in his house were called Nicolette (even the Magnon, of
whom we shall hear more farther on). One day, a haughty cook, a cordon
bleu, of the lofty race of porters, presented herself. “How much wages
do you want a month?” asked M. Gillenormand. “Thirty francs.” “What is
your name?” “Olympie.” “You shall have fifty francs, and you shall be
called Nicolette.”
CHAPTER VI—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’Angoulême, 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 Présidente 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 Abbé
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. _Silvæ sint consule
dignæ! _” 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.
CHAPTER VII—RULE: RECEIVE NO ONE EXCEPT IN THE EVENING
Such was M. Luc-Esprit Gillenormand, who had not lost his hair,—which
was gray rather than white,—and which was always dressed in “dog’s
ears.” To sum up, he was venerable in spite of all this.
He had something of the eighteenth century about him; frivolous and
great.
In 1814 and during the early years of the Restoration, M. Gillenormand,
who was still young,—he was only seventy-four,—lived in the Faubourg
Saint Germain, Rue Servandoni, near Saint-Sulpice. He had only retired
to the Marais when he quitted society, long after attaining the age of
eighty.
And, on abandoning society, he had immured himself in his habits. The
principal one, and that which was invariable, was to keep his door
absolutely closed during the day, and never to receive any one whatever
except in the evening. He dined at five o’clock, and after that his
door was open. That had been the fashion of his century, and he would
not swerve from it. “The day is vulgar,” said he, “and deserves only a
closed shutter. Fashionable people only light up their minds when the
zenith lights up its stars.” And he barricaded himself against every
one, even had it been the king himself. This was the antiquated
elegance of his day.
CHAPTER VIII—TWO DO NOT MAKE A PAIR
We have just spoken of M. Gillenormand’s two daughters. They had come
into the world ten years apart. In their youth they had borne very
little resemblance to each other, either in character or countenance,
and had also been as little like sisters to each other as possible. The