Chapter Chapter 168 · TWO DO NOT MAKE A PAIR

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