CHAPTER I--NINETY YEARS AND THIRTY-TWO TEETH

  In the Rue Boucherat, Rue de Normandie and the Rue de Saintonge therestill exist a few ancient inhabitants who have preserved the memory of aworthy man named M. Gillenormand, and who mention him with complaisance.This good man was old when they were young. This silhouette has not yetentirely disappeared--for those who regard with melancholy that vagueswarm of shadows which is called the past--from the labyrinth of streetsin the vicinity of the Temple to which, under Louis XIV., the names ofall the provinces of France were appended exactly as in our day, thestreets of the new Tivoli quarter have received the names of all thecapitals of Europe; a progression, by the way, in which progress isvisible.

  M.Gillenormand, who was as much alive as possible in 1831, was one ofthose men who had become curiosities to be viewed, simply becausethey have lived a long time, and who are strange because they formerlyresembled everybody, and now resemble nobody. He was a peculiar old man,and in very truth, a man of another age, the real, complete and ratherhaughty bourgeois of the eighteenth century, who wore his good, oldbourgeoisie with the air with which marquises wear their marquisates. Hewas over ninety years of age, his walk was erect, he talked loudly, sawclearly, drank neat, ate, slept, and snored. He had all thirty-two ofhis teeth. He only wore spectacles when he read. He was of an amorousdisposition, but declared that, for the last ten years, he had whollyand decidedly renounced women. He could no longer please, he said; hedid not add: "I am too old," but: "I am too poor." He said: "If I werenot ruined--Héée!" All he had left, in fact, was an income of aboutfifteen thousand francs. His dream was to come into an inheritance andto have a hundred thousand livres income for mistresses. He didnot belong, as the reader will perceive, to that puny variety ofoctogenaries who, like M. de Voltaire, have been dying all their life;his was no longevity of a cracked pot; this jovial old man had alwayshad good health. He was superficial, rapid, easily angered. He flew intoa passion at everything, generally quite contrary to all reason. Whencontradicted, he raised his cane; he beat people as he had done in thegreat century. He had a daughter over fifty years of age, and unmarried,whom he chastised severely with his tongue, when in a rage, and whom hewould have liked to whip. She seemed to him to be eight years old. Heboxed his servants' ears soundly, and said: "Ah! carogne!" One of hisoaths was: "By the pantoufloche of the pantouflochade!" He had singularfreaks of tranquillity; he had himself shaved every day by a barber whohad been mad and who detested him, being jealous of M. Gillenormand onaccount of his wife, a pretty and coquettish barberess. M. Gillenormandadmired his own discernment in all things, and declared that he wasextremely sagacious; here is one of his sayings: "I have, in truth, somepenetration; I am able to say when a flea bites me, from what woman itcame."

  The words which he uttered the most frequently were: _the sensible man_,and _nature_. He did not give to this last word the grand acceptationwhich our epoch has accorded to it, but he made it enter, after his ownfashion, into his little chimney-corner satires: "Nature," he said, "inorder that civilization may have a little of everything, gives it evenspecimens of its amusing barbarism. Europe possesses specimens of Asiaand Africa on a small scale. The cat is a drawing-room tiger, the lizardis a pocket crocodile. The dancers at the opera are pink female savages.They do not eat men, they crunch them; or, magicians that they are, theytransform them into oysters and swallow them. The Caribbeans leave onlythe bones, they leave only the shell. Such are our morals. We do notdevour, we gnaw; we do not exterminate, we claw."