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IN WHICH MAGNON AND HER TWO CHILDREN ARE SEEN
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'Angouleme, 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 Presidente 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 Abbe 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.
Silva, sint consule dignae!"
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.
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