Her modesty was carried to the other extreme of blackness.
She cherished a frightful memory of her life; one day, a man had beheld her garter.
Age had only served to accentuate this pitiless modesty.
Her guimpe was never sufficiently opaque, and never ascended sufficiently high. She multiplied clasps and pins where no one would have dreamed of looking.
The peculiarity of prudery is to place all the more sentinels in proportion as the fortress is the less menaced.
Nevertheless, let him who can explain these antique mysteries of innocence, she allowed an officer of the Lancers, her grand nephew, named Theodule, to embrace her without displeasure.
In spite of this favored Lancer, the label: Prude, under which we have classed her, suited her to absolute perfection.
Mademoiselle Gillenormand was a sort of twilight soul.
Prudery is a demi-virtue and a demi-vice.
To prudery she added bigotry, a well-assorted lining.
She belonged to the society of the Virgin, wore a white veil on certain festivals, mumbled special orisons, revered “the holy blood,” venerated “the sacred heart,” remained for hours in contemplation before a rococo-jesuit altar in a chapel which was inaccessible to the rank and file of the faithful, and there allowed her soul to soar among little clouds of marble, and through great rays of gilded wood.
She had a chapel friend, an ancient virgin like herself, named Mademoiselle Vaubois, who was a positive blockhead, and beside whom Mademoiselle Gillenormand had the pleasure of being an eagle.
Beyond the Agnus Dei and Ave Maria, Mademoiselle Vaubois had no knowledge of anything except of the different ways of making preserves.
Mademoiselle Vaubois, perfect in her style, was the ermine of stupidity without a single spot of intelligence.
Let us say it plainly, Mademoiselle Gillenormand had gained rather than lost as she grew older.
This is the case with passive natures.
She had never been malicious, which is relative kindness; and then, years wear away the angles, and the softening which comes with time had come to her.
She was melancholy with an obscure sadness of which she did not herself know the secret.
There breathed from her whole person the stupor of a life that was finished, and which had never had a beginning.
She kept house for her father.
M. Gillenormand had his daughter near him, as we have seen that Monseigneur Bienvenu had his sister with him.
These households comprised of an old man and an old spinster are not rare, and always have the touching aspect of two weaknesses leaning on each other for support.
There was also in this house, between this elderly spinster and this old man, a child, a little boy, who was always trembling and mute in the presence of M. Gillenormand.
M. Gillenormand never addressed this child except in a severe voice, and sometimes, with uplifted cane:
“Here, sir! rascal, scoundrel, come here!—Answer me, you scamp!
Just let me see you, you good-for-nothing!” etc., etc.
He idolized him.
This was his grandson.
We shall meet with this child again later on.
BOOK THIRD.—THE GRANDFATHER AND THE GRANDSON
CHAPTER I—AN ANCIENT SALON
When M. Gillenormand lived in the Rue Servandoni, he had frequented many very good and very aristocratic salons.
Although a bourgeois, M. Gillenormand was received in society.
As he had a double measure of wit, in the first place, that which was born with him, and secondly, that which was attributed to him, he was even sought out and made much of.
He never went anywhere except on condition of being the chief person there.
There are people who will have influence at any price, and who will have other people busy themselves over them; when they cannot be oracles, they turn wags.
M. Gillenormand was not of this nature; his domination in the Royalist salons which he frequented cost his self-respect nothing.
He was an oracle everywhere.
It had happened to him to hold his own against M. de Bonald, and even against M. Bengy-Puy-Vallee.
About 1817, he invariably passed two afternoons a week in a house in his own neighborhood, in the Rue Ferou, with Madame la Baronne de T., a worthy and respectable person, whose husband had been Ambassador of France to Berlin under Louis XVI.
Baron de T., who, during his lifetime, had gone very passionately into ecstasies and magnetic visions, had died bankrupt, during the emigration, leaving, as his entire fortune, some very curious Memoirs about Mesmer and his tub, in ten manuscript volumes, bound in red morocco and gilded on the edges.
Madame de T. had not published the memoirs, out of pride, and maintained herself on a meagre income which had survived no one knew how.
Madame de T. lived far from the Court; “a very mixed society,” as she said, in a noble isolation, proud and poor.
A few friends assembled twice a week about her widowed hearth, and these constituted a purely Royalist salon.
They sipped tea there, and uttered groans or cries of horror at the century, the charter, the Bonapartists, the prostitution of the blue ribbon, or the Jacobinism of Louis XVIII., according as the wind veered towards elegy or dithyrambs; and they spoke in low tones of the hopes which were presented by Monsieur, afterwards Charles X.
The songs of the fishwomen, in which Napoleon was called Nicolas, were received there with transports of joy.
Duchesses, the most delicate and charming women in the world, went into ecstasies over couplets like the following, addressed to “the federates”:—
Refoncez dans vos culottes
Le bout d’ chemis’ qui vous pend.
Qu’on n’ dis’ pas qu’ les patriotes