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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 ins 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.
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