Kabanata Kabanata 161 · 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—Héée!” 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.”