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.