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NINETY YEARS AND THIRTY-TWO TEETH
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."
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