From these fripperies, the grandfather extracted a bit of wisdom.
“Love is all very well; but there must be something else to go with it.
The useless must be mingled with happiness.
Happiness is only the necessary.
Season that enormously with the superfluous for me.
A palace and her heart.
Her heart and the Louvre.
Her heart and the grand waterworks of Versailles.
Give me my shepherdess and try to make her a duchess.
Fetch me Phyllis crowned with corn-flowers, and add a hundred thousand francs income.
Open for me a bucolic perspective as far as you can see, beneath a marble colonnade.
I consent to the bucolic and also to the fairy spectacle of marble and gold.
Dry happiness resembles dry bread.
One eats, but one does not dine.
I want the superfluous, the useless, the extravagant, excess, that which serves no purpose.
I remember to have seen, in the Cathedral of Strasburg, a clock, as tall as a three-story house which marked the hours, which had the kindness to indicate the hour, but which had not the air of being made for that; and which, after having struck midday, or midnight,—midday, the hour of the sun, or midnight, the hour of love,—or any other hour that you like, gave you the moon and the stars, the earth and the sea, birds and fishes, Ph?bus and Ph?be, and a host of things which emerged from a niche, and the twelve apostles, and the Emperor Charles the Fifth, and Eponine, and Sabinus, and a throng of little gilded goodmen, who played on the trumpet to boot.
Without reckoning delicious chimes which it sprinkled through the air, on every occasion, without any one’s knowing why.
Is a petty bald clock-face which merely tells the hour equal to that?
For my part, I am of the opinion of the big clock of Strasburg, and I prefer it to the cuckoo clock from the Black Forest.”
M. Gillenormand talked nonsense in connection with the wedding, and all the fripperies of the eighteenth century passed pell-mell through his dithyrambs. “You are ignorant of the art of festivals.
You do not know how to organize a day of enjoyment in this age,” he exclaimed.
“Your nineteenth century is weak.
It lacks excess.
It ignores the rich, it ignores the noble.
In everything it is clean-shaven.
Your third estate is insipid, colorless, odorless, and shapeless.
The dreams of your bourgeois who set up, as they express it: a pretty boudoir freshly decorated, violet, ebony and calico. Make way!
Make way! the Sieur Curmudgeon is marrying Mademoiselle Clutch-penny.
Sumptuousness and splendor.
A louis d’or has been stuck to a candle.
There’s the epoch for you.
My demand is that I may flee from it beyond the Sarmatians.
Ah! in 1787, I predict that all was lost, from the day when I beheld the Duc de Rohan, Prince de Leon, Duc de Chabot, Duc de Montbazon, Marquis de Soubise, Vicomte de Thouars, peer of France, go to Longchamps in a tapecu!
That has borne its fruits. In this century, men attend to business, they gamble on
‘Change, they win money, they are stingy.
People take care of their surfaces and varnish them; every one is dressed as though just out of a bandbox, washed, soaped, scraped, shaved, combed, waked, smoothed, rubbed, brushed, cleaned on the outside, irreproachable, polished as a pebble, discreet, neat, and at the same time, death of my life, in the depths of their consciences they have dung-heaps and cesspools that are enough to make a cow-herd who blows his nose in his fingers, recoil. I grant to this age the device:
‘Dirty Cleanliness.’
Don’t be vexed, Marius, give me permission to speak; I say no evil of the people as you see, I am always harping on your people, but do look favorably on my dealing a bit of a slap to the bourgeoisie.
I belong to it.
He who loves well lashes well.
Thereupon, I say plainly, that nowadays people marry, but that they no longer know how to marry.
Ah! it is true, I regret the grace of the ancient manners.
I regret everything about them, their elegance, their chivalry, those courteous and delicate ways, that joyous luxury which every one possessed, music forming part of the wedding, a symphony above stairs, a beating of drums below stairs, the dances, the joyous faces round the table, the fine-spun gallant compliments, the songs, the fireworks, the frank laughter, the devil’s own row, the huge knots of ribbon.
I regret the bride’s garter.
The bride’s garter is cousin to the girdle of Venus.
On what does the war of Troy turn?
On Helen’s garter, parbleu!
Why did they fight, why did Diomed the divine break over the head of Meriones that great brazen helmet of ten points? why did Achilles and Hector hew each other up with vast blows of their lances?
Because Helen allowed Paris to take her garter.
With Cosette’s garter, Homer would construct the Iliad.