Kabanata Kabanata 166 · 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’Angoulême, 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 Présidente 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 Abbé

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. _Silvæ sint consule

dignæ! _” 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.