When contradicted, he raised his cane; he beat people as he had done in the great 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 he would have liked to whip.
She seemed to him to be eight years old. He boxed his servants' ears soundly, and said:
"Ah! carogne!" One of his oaths was:
"By the pantoufloche of the pantouflochade!" He had singular freaks of tranquillity; he had himself shaved every day by a barber who had been mad and who detested him, being jealous of M. Gillenormand on account of his wife, a pretty and coquettish barberess.
M. Gillenormand admired his own discernment in all things, and declared that he was extremely sagacious; here is one of his sayings:
"I have, in truth, some penetration; I am able to say when a flea bites me, from what woman it came."
The words which he uttered the most frequently were:
the sensible man, and nature.
He did not give to this last word the grand acceptation which our epoch has accorded to it, but he made it enter, after his own fashion, into his little chimney-corner satires: "Nature," he said, "in order that civilization may have a little of everything, gives it even specimens of its amusing barbarism. Europe possesses specimens of Asia and Africa on a small scale. The cat is a drawing-room tiger, the lizard is 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, they transform them into oysters and swallow them.
The Caribbeans leave only the bones, they leave only the shell.
Such are our morals.
We do not devour, we gnaw; we do not exterminate, we claw."
BOOK SECOND.--THE GREAT BOURGEOIS
CHAPTER II
LIKE MASTER, LIKE HOUSE
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.