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AN ANCIENT SALON
When M. Gillenormand lived in the Rue Servandoni, he had frequented
many very good and very aristocratic salons.
Although a bourgeois, M. Gillenormand was received in society.
As he had a double measure of wit, in the first place, that
which was born with him, and secondly, that which was attributed
to him, he was even sought out and made much of.
He never went anywhere except on condition of being the chief
person there.
There are people who will have influence at any price, and
who will have other people busy themselves over them; when they
cannot be oracles, they turn wags. M. Gillenormand was not of
this nature; his domination in the Royalist salons which he frequented
cost his self-respect nothing. He was an oracle everywhere.
It had happened to him to hold his own against M. de Bonald,
and even against M. Bengy-Puy-Vallee.
About 1817, he invariably passed two afternoons a week in
a house in his own neighborhood, in the Rue Ferou, with Madame
la Baronne de T., a worthy and respectable person, whose husband
had been Ambassador of France to Berlin under Louis XVI.
Baron de T., who, during his lifetime, had gone very passionately
into ecstasies and magnetic visions, had died bankrupt, during
the emigration, leaving, as his entire fortune, some very curious
Memoirs about Mesmer and his tub, in ten manuscript volumes, bound
in red morocco and gilded on the edges. Madame de T. had not published
the memoirs, out of pride, and maintained herself on a meagre
income which had survived no one knew how.
Madame de T. lived far from the Court; "a very mixed
society," as she said, in a noble isolation, proud and poor.
A few friends assembled twice a week about her widowed hearth,
and these constituted a purely Royalist salon.
They sipped tea there, and uttered groans or cries of horror
at the century, the charter, the Bonapartists, the prostitution
of the blue ribbon, or the Jacobinism of Louis XVIII., according
as the wind veered towards elegy or dithyrambs; and they spoke
in low tones of the hopes which were presented by Monsieur, afterwards
Charles X.
The songs of the fishwomen, in which Napoleon was called Nicolas,
were received there with transports of joy.
Duchesses, the most delicate and charming women in the world,
went into ecstasies over couplets like the following, addressed
to "the federates":-- Refoncez dans vos culottes[20]
Le bout d' chemis' qui vous pend.
Qu'on n' dis' pas qu' les patriotes
Ont arbore l' drapeau blanc?
[20] Tuck into your trousers the shirt-tail that is hanging
out. Let it not be said that patriots have hoisted the white flag.
There they amused themselves with puns which were considered
terrible, with innocent plays upon words which they supposed to
be venomous, with quatrains, with distiches even; thus, upon the
Dessolles ministry, a moderate cabinet, of which MM.
Decazes and Deserre were members:--Pour raffermir le trone
ebranle sur sa base,[21]
Il faut changer de sol, et de serre et de case.
[21] In order to re-establish the shaken throne firmly on
its base, soil (Des solles), greenhouse and house (Decazes) must
be changed.
Or they drew up a list of the chamber of peers, "an
abominably Jacobin chamber," and from this list they combined
alliances of names, in such a manner as to form, for example,
phrases like the following: Damas.
Sabran.
Gouvion-Saint-Cyr.--All this was done merrily. In that society,
they parodied the Revolution.
They used I know not what desires to give point to the same
wrath in inverse sense. They sang their little Ca ira:-- Ah! ca
ira ca ira ca ira!
Les Bonapartistes a la lanterne!
Songs are like the guillotine; they chop away indifferently,
to-day this head, to-morrow that.
It is only a variation.
In the Fualdes affair, which belongs to this epoch, 1816,
they took part for Bastide and Jausion, because Fualdes was "a
Buonapartist." They designated the liberals as friends and
brothers; this constituted the most deadly insult.
Like certain church towers, Madame de T.'s salon had two cocks.
One of them was M. Gillenormand, the other was Comte de Lamothe-Valois,
of whom it was whispered about, with a sort of respect:
"Do you know? That is the Lamothe of the affair of the
necklace."
These singular amnesties do occur in parties.
Let us add the following:
in the bourgeoisie, honored situations decay through too easy
relations; one must beware whom one admits; in the same way that
there is a loss of caloric in the vicinity of those who are cold,
there is a diminution of consideration in the approach of despised
persons.
The ancient society of the upper classes held themselves above
this law, as above every other.
Marigny, the brother of the Pompadour, had his entry with
M. le Prince de Soubise. In spite of?
No, because.
Du Barry, the god-father of the Vaubernier, was very welcome
at the house of M. le Marechal de Richelieu. This society is Olympus.
Mercury and the Prince de Guemenee are at home there.
A thief is admitted there, provided he be a god.
The Comte de Lamothe, who, in 1815, was an old man seventy-five
years of age, had nothing remarkable about him except his silent
and sententious air, his cold and angular face, his perfectly
polished manners, his coat buttoned up to his cravat, and his
long legs always crossed in long, flabby trousers of the hue of
burnt sienna. His face was the same color as his trousers.
This M. de Lamothe was "held in consideration" in
this salon on account of his "celebrity" and, strange
to say, though true, because of his name of Valois.
As for M. Gillenormand, his consideration was of absolutely
first-rate quality.
He had, in spite of his levity, and without its interfering
in any way with his dignity, a certain manner about him which
was imposing, dignified, honest, and lofty, in a bourgeois fashion;
and his great age added to it.
One is not a century with impunity. The years finally produce
around a head a venerable dishevelment.
In addition to this, he said things which had the genuine
sparkle of the old rock.
Thus, when the King of Prussia, after having restored Louis
XVIII., came to pay the latter a visit under the name of the Count
de Ruppin, he was received by the descendant of Louis XIV. somewhat
as though he had been the Marquis de Brandebourg, and with the
most delicate impertinence.
M. Gillenormand approved:
"All kings who are not the King of France," said
he, "are provincial kings." One day, the following question
was put and the following answer returned in his presence:
"To what was the editor of the Courrier Francais condemned?"
"To be suspended."
"Sus is superfluous," observed M. Gillenormand.[22]
Remarks of this nature found a situation.
[22] Suspendu, suspended; pendu, hung.
At the Te Deum on the anniversary of the return of the Bourbons,
he said, on seeing M. de Talleyrand pass by:
"There goes his Excellency the Evil One."
M. Gillenormand was always accompanied by his daughter, that
tall mademoiselle, who was over forty and looked fifty, and by
a handsome little boy of seven years, white, rosy, fresh, with
happy and trusting eyes, who never appeared in that salon without
hearing voices murmur around him:
"How handsome he is! What a pity!
Poor child!"
This child was the one of whom we dropped a word a while ago.
He was called "poor child," because he had for a
father "a brigand of the Loire."
This brigand of the Loire was M. Gillenormand's son-in-law,
who has already been mentioned, and whom M. Gillenormand called
"the disgrace of his family."
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