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.”
CHAPTER III—LUC-ESPRIT
At the age of sixteen, one evening at the opera, he had had the honor to be stared at through opera-glasses by two beauties at the same time—ripe and celebrated beauties then, and sung by Voltaire, the Camargo and the Salle.
Caught between two fires, he had beaten a heroic retreat towards a little dancer, a young girl named Nahenry, who was sixteen like himself, obscure as a cat, and with whom he was in love.
He abounded in memories.
He was accustomed to exclaim: “How pretty she was—that Guimard-Guimardini-Guimardinette, the last time I saw her at Longchamps, her hair curled in sustained sentiments, with her come-and-see of turquoises, her gown of the color of persons newly arrived, and her little agitation muff!”
He had worn in his young manhood a waistcoat of Nain-Londrin, which he was fond of talking about effusively.
“I was dressed like a Turk of the Levant Levantin,” said he.
Madame de Boufflers, having seen him by chance when he was twenty, had described him as “a charming fool.”
He was horrified by all the names which he saw in politics and in power, regarding them as vulgar and bourgeois.
He read the journals, the newspapers, the gazettes as he said, stifling outbursts of laughter the while.
“Oh!” he said, “what people these are! Corbiere! Humann! Casimir Perier!
There’s a minister for you!
I can imagine this in a journal:
‘M. Gillenorman, minister!’ that would be a farce.
Well! They are so stupid that it would pass”; he merrily called everything by its name, whether decent or indecent, and did not restrain himself in the least before ladies.
He uttered coarse speeches, obscenities, and filth with a certain tranquillity and lack of astonishment which was elegant.
It was in keeping with the unceremoniousness of his century.
It is to be noted that the age of periphrase in verse was the age of crudities in prose.
His god-father had predicted that he would turn out a man of genius, and had bestowed on him these two significant names: Luc-Esprit.
CHAPTER IV—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,