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
youngest had a charming soul, which turned towards all that belongs to
the light, was occupied with flowers, with verses, with music, which
fluttered away into glorious space, enthusiastic, ethereal, and was
wedded from her very youth, in ideal, to a vague and heroic figure. The
elder had also her chimera; she espied in the azure some very wealthy
purveyor, a contractor, a splendidly stupid husband, a million made
man, or even a prefect; the receptions of the Prefecture, an usher in
the antechamber with a chain on his neck, official balls, the harangues
of the town-hall, to be “Madame la Préfète,”—all this had created a
whirlwind in her imagination. Thus the two sisters strayed, each in her
own dream, at the epoch when they were young girls. Both had wings, the
one like an angel, the other like a goose.
No ambition is ever fully realized, here below at least. No paradise
becomes terrestrial in our day. The younger wedded the man of her
dreams, but she died. The elder did not marry at all.
At the moment when she makes her entrance into this history which we
are relating, she was an antique virtue, an incombustible prude, with
one of the sharpest noses, and one of the most obtuse minds that it is
possible to see. A characteristic detail; outside of her immediate
family, no one had ever known her first name. She was called
_Mademoiselle Gillenormand, the elder_.
In the matter of _cant_, Mademoiselle Gillenormand could have given
points to a miss. Her modesty was carried to the other extreme of
blackness. She cherished a frightful memory of her life; one day, a man
had beheld her garter.
Age had only served to accentuate this pitiless modesty. Her guimpe was
never sufficiently opaque, and never ascended sufficiently high. She
multiplied clasps and pins where no one would have dreamed of looking.
The peculiarity of prudery is to place all the more sentinels in
proportion as the fortress is the less menaced.
Nevertheless, let him who can explain these antique mysteries of
innocence, she allowed an officer of the Lancers, her grand nephew,
named Théodule, to embrace her without displeasure.
In spite of this favored Lancer, the label: _Prude_, under which we
have classed her, suited her to absolute perfection. Mademoiselle
Gillenormand was a sort of twilight soul. Prudery is a demi-virtue and
a demi-vice.
To prudery she added bigotry, a well-assorted lining. She belonged to
the society of the Virgin, wore a white veil on certain festivals,
mumbled special orisons, revered “the holy blood,” venerated “the
sacred heart,” remained for hours in contemplation before a
rococo-jesuit altar in a chapel which was inaccessible to the rank and
file of the faithful, and there allowed her soul to soar among little
clouds of marble, and through great rays of gilded wood.
She had a chapel friend, an ancient virgin like herself, named
Mademoiselle Vaubois, who was a positive blockhead, and beside whom
Mademoiselle Gillenormand had the pleasure of being an eagle. Beyond
the Agnus Dei and Ave Maria, Mademoiselle Vaubois had no knowledge of
anything except of the different ways of making preserves. Mademoiselle
Vaubois, perfect in her style, was the ermine of stupidity without a
single spot of intelligence.
Let us say it plainly, Mademoiselle Gillenormand had gained rather than
lost as she grew older. This is the case with passive natures. She had
never been malicious, which is relative kindness; and then, years wear
away the angles, and the softening which comes with time had come to
her. She was melancholy with an obscure sadness of which she did not
herself know the secret. There breathed from her whole person the
stupor of a life that was finished, and which had never had a
beginning.
She kept house for her father. M. Gillenormand had his daughter near
him, as we have seen that Monseigneur Bienvenu had his sister with him.
These households comprised of an old man and an old spinster are not
rare, and always have the touching aspect of two weaknesses leaning on
each other for support.
There was also in this house, between this elderly spinster and this
old man, a child, a little boy, who was always trembling and mute in
the presence of M. Gillenormand. M. Gillenormand never addressed this
child except in a severe voice, and sometimes, with uplifted cane:
“Here, sir! rascal, scoundrel, come here!—Answer me, you scamp! Just
let me see you, you good-for-nothing!” etc., etc. He idolized him.
This was his grandson. We shall meet with this child again later on.
BOOK THIRD—THE GRANDFATHER AND THE GRANDSON