Kabanata Kabanata 164 · 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 in 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.