بخش 3 کتاب 2

BOOK TWO

THE GRAND BOURGEOIS

NINETY YEARS OLD AND ALL THIRTY-TWO TEETH

IN THE RUE Boucherat, rue de Normandie, and rue de Saintonge, there are still a few old residents around who remember a gentleman called Monsieur Gillenormand and who speak of him favourably. This gentleman was already old when they were young. For those who look with melancholy at that vague swarming of shadows that we call the past, this silhouette has not yet entirely vanished from the labyrinth of streets around the Temple,1 to which, under Louis XIV, the names of all the provinces of France were attached, just as in our day the streets of the new Tivoli quartier2 have been given the names of all the capitals of Europe—a progression, let it be said in passing, in which progress is visible.

Monsieur Gillenormand, who was as alive as it was possible to be in 1831, was one of those men who have become a curiosity solely because they have lived a long while, and who are odd because once upon a time they looked like everyone else and now they don’t look like anyone. He was a peculiar old bird and a genuine specimen from another age, a true and complete bourgeois,3 a trifle haughty, from the eighteenth century, wearing his good old bourgeoisness as marquises wear their marquisates. He was past ninety, walked tall, spoke loudly, saw clearly, knocked back his drink, ate, slept, and snored. He had every one of his thirty-two teeth and he wore glasses only to read. He was the amorous kind, although he maintained that he had definitely and completely given up women for over ten years. He could “no longer please” was how he put it; he did not add, “I’m too old” but, “I’m too poor.” He would say: “If only I weren’t ruined, ha!” All he had left, in fact, was an income of around fifteen thousand livres. His dream was to come by some windfall of an inheritance and to have a hundred thousand francs in income in order to have mistresses. He did not belong, as we see, to that variety of malingering octogenarians who, like Monsieur de Voltaire, have been dying their whole lives; his was not the longevity of a chipped plate—this randy old blade had always been in the pink of health. He was superficial, quick, hot-tempered. He would blow his stack at the slightest provocation, most often completely inappropriately. If anyone contradicted him, he would raise his stick; he beat people just as they did in the grand siècle. He had a daughter over fifty years old, unmarried, whom he thrashed whenever he got into a rage and whom he would happily have whipped. For him, she was about eight years old. He abused his servants with gusto and would say: “Ah, vermin!” One of his favourite curses was: “Par la pantoufloche de la pantouflochade!” Something like: “By the hair on my chinny-chin-chin!” In some respects he was curiously unflappable; he had himself shaved every day, for instance, by a barber who had once been insane and who couldn’t stand Monsieur Gillenormand, being furiously jealous on account of his wife, a pretty tease of a woman and a barber herself. Monsieur Gillenormand admired his own discernment in all things and declared himself to be most sagacious. One of his favourite sayings was: “I do, in all honesty, have some perspicacity; I can tell, when a flea bites me, what woman it comes from.” The words he most often uttered were a sensible fellow and Nature.4 He did not use the latter in its general sense according to the meaning our age has assigned to it. But he would work it in his own way into his little fireside spoofs: “Nature,” he would say, “offers civilization even the most hilariously barbaric specimens, so that it may have a bit of everything. Europe has samples from Asia and Africa, but in a smaller format. The cat is a drawing-room tiger, the lizard a pocket-size crocodile. The Opéra danseuses are rose-pink cannibals.5 They don’t eat men, they bleed them dry. Or, rather, those little enchantresses turn them into oysters and swallow them whole. The Caribbeans6 leave nothing but the bones, the dancers leave nothing but the shells. Such are our customs. We don’t devour, we gnaw; we don’t exterminate, we claw to death.” LIKE MASTER, LIKE ABODE

HE LIVED IN the Marais, rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, no. 6.

The house was his. This house has been torn down and rebuilt since and the number has probably changed in these numbering revolutions the streets of Paris undergo. He occupied an old and vast apartment on the first floor, between the street and the gardens, furnished right up to the ceilings with huge Gobelin and Beauvais tapestries representing pastoral scenes; the subjects on the ceilings and the wainscoting were repeated in miniature on the armchairs. He wrapped his bed round with a vast paravent in Coromandel lacquer that had nine panels. Long billowing curtains hung at the casement windows in great broken folds that were truly magnificent. The garden immediately below his windows was reached via the corner window by means of a flight of stairs of twelve or fifteen steps that the good old blade ran up and down most blithely. As well as a library next to his bedroom, he had a boudoir1 he was very much attached to, a real rake’s cubbyhole, which featured a magnificent straw wall-hanging with a pattern of fleurs-de-lis and flowers made in the galleys of Louis XIV and commissioned from his galley slaves by Monsieur de Vivonne2 for his mistress. Monsieur Gillenormand had inherited it from a ferocious great-aunt on his mother’s side who was a hundred when she died. He had had two wives. His manners steered a course between the man of the court he had never been and the man of the robe3 he might have been. He was chirpy and gentle when he wanted to be. When he was young, he had been one of those men who are always betrayed by their wives but never by their mistresses because they are at once the most dismal husbands and the most wonderful lovers in the world. When it came to painting, he was a connoisseur. In his room he had a wonderful portrait of someone-or-other by Jordaens,4 painted with great big bold brushstrokes and a maze of detail all jumbled up seemingly at random. Monsieur Gillenormand’s garb was not the attire of Louis XV, or even the attire of Louis XVI; it was the flamboyant getup of the Incroyables,5 those young dandy reactionaries of the Directoire. He’d thought of himself as quite young till then and had followed the fashions. His coat was made of a light fabric, had wide lapels and a long swallowtail and big steel buttons. Add to this, short breeches and shoes with buckles. He always stuck his hands in his fob pockets. He would say with authority: “The French Revolution was a bunch of rotters.” LUC-ESPRIT

ONE NIGHT AT the Opéra when he was sixteen, he had had the honour of being ogled by two beauties at the same time, both then ripe and celebrated and sung by Voltaire—La Camargo and La Sallé.1 Caught in the crossfire, he had beat a heroic retreat toward a little dancing girl named Nahenry, who was sixteen like him, as inscrutable as a cat, and with whom he was in love. The reminiscences spilled out of him. He would cry: “She was so pretty, that Guimard2-Guimardini-Guimardinette, the last time I saw her at Longchamp,3 bursting with barely restrained feelings, with her garish turquoise baubles and her dress the colour of arrivistes, waving her muff around!” In his adolescence he had sported a jacket made of light wool fabric known as nain Londrin, which he never tired of talking about, effusively. “I dressed like a Turk of the Levantine Levant,” he would say. Madame de Boufflers,4 having stumbled across him by chance when he was twenty, had described him as “a charming madman.” He was scandalized by all the names he saw in politics and in power, finding them crass and bourgeois. He read the papers, “the new newspapers, the gazettes,” as he would say, choking with fits of laughter. “Oh!” he would say. “Who are these people? Corbière! Humann! Casimir Périer!5 That’s your minister for you. Imagine this in the paper: Monsieur Gillenormand, minister! What a joke that would be. But then again, they’re so stupid, it’d go over!” He cheerfully called all things by their true names, proper or improper, and did not hold back in front of women. He would come out with all manner of crude, obscene, and filthy remarks with wondrous calm and an unflappable air of elegance. It was the offhandedness of his century. Interesting that those days of euphemism in verse were the days of bluntness in prose. His godfather had predicted that he would be a man of genius and had given him these two momentous Christian names: Luc-Esprit.6 AN ASPIRING CENTENARIAN

HE HAD WON prizes in his childhood at the college in Moulins, where he was born, and had been handed those prizes by the duc de Nivernais, whom he called the duc de Nevers. Neither the Convention nor the death of Louis XVI, nor Napoléon, nor the return of the Bourbons—nothing had been able to erase the memory of this crowning achievement. The duc de Nevers1 was for him the great figure of the age. “What a charming grand seigneur,” he’d say, “and he looked so distinguished in his blue sash.”2 In the eyes of Monsieur Gillenormand, Catherine II3 had atoned for the crime of partitioning Poland by buying the secret of the gold elixir from Bestuchef for three thousand rubles. Over this, he would grow animated. “The gold elixir,” he would shout, “Bestuchef’s yellow dye, Général Lamotte’s drops,4 were, in the eighteenth century, one louis for a half-ounce vial, the great remedy for the catastrophes of love, the panacea against Venus. Louis XV sent two hundred vials of it to the pope.” He would have been extremely aggravated, in a real flap, if you’d told him that the gold elixir was nothing more than iron perchlorate.

Monsieur Gillenormand adored the Bourbons and held 1789 in horror; he never tired of recounting how he had saved himself in the Terror and how much gaiety and wit he had needed not to get his head lopped off. If any young man dared sing the praises of the Republic in front of him, he would go blue in the face and practically keel over with apoplexy.

Sometimes he would allude to his ninety years and say: “I do hope I won’t see ninety-three twice.” At other times he let people know he intended to live to a hundred.

BASQUE AND NICOLETTE

HE HAD HIS theories. This is one: “When a man loves women with a passion, and he has a wife of his own he doesn’t think much of—ugly, grumpy, legitimate, full of her so-called rights, sitting like a hawk on the Civil Code and jealous whenever the occasion arises—there is only one way he can extricate himself and have a bit of peace and that is to let his wife hold the purse strings. This abdication makes him a free man. The wife then has something to keep herself occupied, becomes crazy about handling cash, stains her fingers green in the process, takes on the disciplining of the sharecroppers and the breaking in of the farmers, hauls in attorneys, presides over notaries, harangues scriveners, visits pettifoggers, follows lawsuits, draws up leases, dictates contracts, feels herself supreme, sells, buys, regulates, wheels and deals, promises and compromises, binds and resiles, cedes, concedes, and retrocedes, arranges, disarranges, hoards and squanders; she makes silly mistakes, that magisterial and personal pleasure, and this consoles her. While her husband scorns her, she has the satisfaction of ruining her husband.” Monsieur Gillenormand had applied this theory in practice and it had become the story of his life. His wife, the second one, had managed his fortune in such a way that all that was left to Monsieur Gillenormand, when one fine day he found himself a widower, was just enough to live on, and that, only by turning virtually the whole amount into an annuity,1 fifteen thousand francs in income, three quarters of which would expire with him. He had not hesitated, so little was he concerned with leaving an inheritance. Besides, he had seen for himself that personal assets had their ups and downs, turning, for example, into “national property”2 and being confiscated; he had witnessed the vicissitudes of the tiers consolidé,3 the consolidated third policy of 1797, and he did not have much faith in the ledger. “It reeks of the rue Quincampoix, all that!” he reckoned. His house in the rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, as we said, belonged to him. He had two servants, “a male and a female.” Whenever a domestic entered his service, he would rebaptize them. He called the men after their original province: Nimois, Comtois, Poitevin, Picard.4 His last valet was a fat, burnt-out, wheezy man of fifty-five, incapable of running twenty feet, but, because he was born in Bayonne, Monsieur Gillenormand called him Basque.5 As for female servants, in his house all of them were called Nicolette—even La Magnon, whom we will hear more about later. One day an arrogant cook, a cordon bleu,6 of the noble race of concierges, presented herself. “How much do you hope to earn a month in wages?” Monsieur Gillenormand asked her. “Thirty francs.” “What’s your name?” “Olympie.” “You will be paid fifty francs and you will be called Nicolette.” IN WHICH WE CATCH A GLIMPSE OF LA MAGNON AND HER TWO LITTLE BOYS

WITH MONSIEUR GILLENORMAND PAIN was translated as rage; despair made him furious. He had every prejudice and took every possible liberty. One of the things he boasted of to buoy himself and that gave him intimate satisfaction was, as we have just indicated, having remained a young blade and passing emphatically for one. He called this having “a right royal reputation.” This right royal reputation occasionally attracted some strange godsends. One day someone left him a wicker hamper, like an oyster basket, with a big newborn baby boy in it, duly swaddled in baby blankets and bawling his head off. A servant girl that he had sent packing six months previously claimed the baby was his. Monsieur Gillenormand was at the time eighty-four if he was a day. Indignation and clamour all around. Just who did that brazen hussy think would believe that? What gall! What outrageous calumny! Monsieur Gillenormand, however, was not the least bit upset. He gazed at the blanketed bundle with the amiable smile of a man flattered by such calumny and said for all to hear: “Well, what? What is it? What’s the matter? What can the matter be? You seem mightily impressed—like true ignoramuses, I might add. Monsieur le duc d’Angoulême,1 one of his majesty Charles IX’s bastards, got married when he was eighty-five to a ninny of fifteen; when Monsieur Virginal, marquis d’Alluye, brother of the cardinal de Sourdis, archbishop of Bordeaux, was eighty-three, he had a son with a chambermaid attached to President Jacquin’s wife, a real love child who became a knight of Malta2 and a knighted councillor of state; one of the great men of the century, the abbé Taranbaud, is the son of a man who was eighty-seven years old at the time. These sorts of things are nothing if not normal. And what about the Bible! I swear on it that this little fellow is not mine. Look after him. He can’t help it.” This behaviour was most debonair. The hussy in question, the one who called herself Magnon, sent him a second bundle the following year. That one was a boy, too. This time, Monsieur Gillenormand capitulated. He handed the two brats back to the mother, committed himself to paying eighty francs a month for their upkeep on condition that said mother did not try that one again. He added: “I want the mother to treat them well. I’ll pop in and check on them from time to time.” And he was as good as his word.

He had a brother who was a priest and who, after having been the rector of the Académie de Poitiers, had died at the age of seventy-nine. “He died young on me,” he said. This brother, who has all but disappeared from memory, was a peaceable skinflint who, being a priest, felt obliged to give alms to any poor he happened to come across, but he only ever gave them coins that were out of commission, thereby finding the way to hell by the path to paradise. As for Monsieur Gillenormand the elder, he did not barter when it came to giving alms and gave willingly and generously. He was benevolent, brusque, charitable, and if he had been rich, he would have tended to the lavish. He wanted everything that he had anything to do with to be done on a grand scale, even practical jokes. One day, having been swindled in a vulgar and patently obvious manner by a businessman in an inheritance matter, he let fly with this solemn exclamation: “Lord! Talk about dirty tricks! I’m appalled by such petty theft. Everything has gone downhill in this century, even the scoundrels. Heavens! That’s no way to fleece a man of my stature. I’ve been robbed like a man in the woods, but pathetically robbed. Sylvae sint consule dignae!” He had had, as we said, two wives; from the first, a daughter who remained unmarried and from the second, another daughter who had died at around thirty years of age and who had married out of love or chance or something of the sort a soldier of fortune4 who had served in the armies of the Republic and the Empire, had earned the cross at Austerlitz and been made colonel at Waterloo. “He is the disgrace of the family,” said the old bourgeois. He took a lot of snuff and had a particularly graceful way of dusting off his lace ruffle with the back of his hand. He did not much believe in God.

GOLDEN RULE: ONLY RECEIVE VISITORS IN THE EVENING

AND THAT IS about it for Monsieur Luc-Esprit Gillenormand, who had not lost any of his hair, which was more grey than white and was always worn dog-ear style.1 In short, and all in all, he was venerable. Very eighteenth century: frivolous and grand.

In the early years of the Restoration, Monsieur Gillenormand, who was still young at the time, being only seventy-four in 1814, lived in the faubourg Saint-Germain, rue Servandoni, near Saint-Sulpice. He had only retired to the Marais2 after withdrawing from society, well after he turned eighty.

In withdrawing from the world, he had immured himself in his habits. The main one, which was immutable, was to keep his door shut during the day and to only ever receive in the evening, no matter what the business. He dined at five o’clock, then his door was thrown open. This was the fashion of his century and he was not about to budge from it. “Daytime is for the rabble,” he would say, “and merits only a closed shutter. Everybody who is anybody turns on their wit when the firmament turns on its stars.” And he barricaded himself away from everybody, the king included, if it came to that. The old elegant way of his day.

TWO DO NOT MAKE A PAIR

AS FOR MONSIEUR GILLENORMAND’S two daughters, whom we have just mentioned, they were born ten years apart. As children they had not resembled each other much at all and were as little like sisters as it is possible to be, either in character or in feature. The younger one was a charming soul attracted by all that is bright, interested in flowers, poetry, and music, off with the fairies in glorious places, enthusiastic, ethereal, engaged since childhood to some vague heroic figure in an ideal world. The elder one also had her dreamboat; she saw a purveyor of some kind written in the skies, some good fat munitions contractor who was filthy rich, a husband who was splendidly stupid, a million francs made man, or else a prefect; prefecture receptions, an antechamber usher with a chain around his neck, official balls, speeches at the mairie, being Madame la préfète, the prefect’s wife—all this whirled around in her imagination. The two sisters thus lost themselves, each in her own dream, in the days when they were young girls. They both had wings, one the wings of an angel, the other of a goose.

No ambition is fully realized, not in this world, at least. There is no heaven on earth in the age in which we live. The younger one had married the man of her dreams, but she had died. The elder one had not married.

At the point at which she makes her entrance in the story we are telling, she was a pious old biddy, an incombustible prude, one of the sharpest beaks and dullest minds you could come across. A characteristic detail: Outside her immediate family, no one had ever known her first name. She was called Mademoiselle Gillenormand the elder.

When it came to cant, Mademoiselle Gillenormand could have held her own against a governess. She was modesty taken to a bleak extreme. She had one awful memory in her life: One day, a man had seen her garter.

Age had only intensified this merciless modesty. Her bodice was never opaque enough, never climbed high enough. She multiplied hooks and pins where nobody would have thought of looking. The peculiar thing about prudery is that, the less the fortress is under threat, the more it puts sentries around.

And yet, explain if you can these age-old mysteries of innocence, she let herself be kissed without displeasure by an officer of the lancers who happened to be her great-nephew and whose name was Théodule.

Despite this favoured lancer, the label prude, under which we have classified her, suited her to a tee. Mademoiselle Gillenormand was a kind of crepuscular soul. Prudery is half virtue and half vice.

To prudery she added bigotry,1 the perfect double. She was of the Confraternity of the Virgin,2 wore a white veil on certain feast days, mumbled special prayers, revered the Holy Blood, venerated the Sacred Heart, remained for hours in contemplation before a rococo Jesuit altar in a chapel closed to the majority of the faithful, and let her soul soar there among little marble clouds and along great shafts of gilded wood.

She had a chapel friend, an old virgin like herself, called Mademoiselle Vaubois, an absolute numskull next to whom Mademoiselle Gillenormand had the pleasure of being an eagle. Beyond the Agnus Deis and the Ave Marias,3 the only thing Mademoiselle Vaubois had an inkling about was the different ways of making jams. Mademoiselle Vaubois, a perfect example of her kind, was the very picture of stupidity without a single blot of intelligence.

We should say that, in growing old, Mademoiselle Gillenormand had actually gained more than she had lost. That is how it goes with passive natures. She had never been nasty, which is a relative good; and then again, the years wear away any sharp angles and the softening that endurance brings had come to her. She was sad with an obscure sadness that baffled even the woman herself. Her whole being was full of the torpor of a life that is over before it has begun.

She kept her father’s house. She was to Monsieur Gillenormand what we saw Monseigneur Bienvenu’s sister was to him, always by his side. These households consisting of an old man and an old maid are not rare and always have the touching feel of two feeble people leaning on each other, propping one another up.

On top of the old maid and the old man, there was one other person in the household—a child, a little boy who was always trembling and mute in front of Monsieur Gillenormand. Monsieur Gillenormand never spoke to this boy except in a harsh voice, sometimes with his stick raised: “Here, Monsieur! You little duffer, you ninny, come here! Answer me, you nincompoop! Let me look at you, you good-for-nothing pipsqueak!” And so on and so forth. He idolized him.

The boy was his grandson. We will meet up with him again.