Bab Bab 162 · LIKE MASTER, LIKE HOUSE

He lived in the Marais, Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, No. 6. He owned the

house. This house has since been demolished and rebuilt, and the number

has probably been changed in those revolutions of numeration which the

streets of Paris undergo. He occupied an ancient and vast apartment on

the first floor, between street and gardens, furnished to the very

ceilings with great Gobelins and Beauvais tapestries representing

pastoral scenes; the subjects of the ceilings and the panels were

repeated in miniature on the armchairs. He enveloped his bed in a vast,

nine-leaved screen of Coromandel lacquer. Long, full curtains hung from

the windows, and formed great, broken folds that were very magnificent.

The garden situated immediately under his windows was attached to that

one of them which formed the angle, by means of a staircase twelve or

fifteen steps long, which the old gentleman ascended and descended with

great agility. In addition to a library adjoining his chamber, he had a

boudoir of which he thought a great deal, a gallant and elegant

retreat, with magnificent hangings of straw, with a pattern of flowers

and fleurs-de-lys made on the galleys of Louis XIV. and ordered of his

convicts by M. de Vivonne for his mistress. M. Gillenormand had

inherited it from a grim maternal great-aunt, who had died a

centenarian. He had had two wives. His manners were something between

those of the courtier, which he had never been, and the lawyer, which

he might have been. He was gay, and caressing when he had a mind. In

his youth he had been one of those men who are always deceived by their

wives and never by their mistresses, because they are, at the same

time, the most sullen of husbands and the most charming of lovers in

existence. He was a connoisseur of painting. He had in his chamber a

marvellous portrait of no one knows whom, painted by Jordaens, executed

with great dashes of the brush, with millions of details, in a confused

and hap-hazard manner. M. Gillenormand’s attire was not the habit of

Louis XIV. nor yet that of Louis XVI.; it was that of the Incroyables

of the Directory. He had thought himself young up to that period and

had followed the fashions. His coat was of light-weight cloth with

voluminous revers, a long swallow-tail and large steel buttons. With

this he wore knee-breeches and buckle shoes. He always thrust his hands

into his fobs. He said authoritatively: “The French Revolution is a

heap of blackguards.”