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—Héée!” 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.”