M. Gillenormand himself was not at all enraged.
He gazed at the brat with the amiable smile of a good man who is flattered by the calumny, and said in an aside: "Well, what now?
What's the matter?
You are finely taken aback, and really, you are excessively ignorant.
M. le Duc d'Angouleme, the bastard of his Majesty Charles IX., married a silly jade of fifteen when he was eighty-five; M. Virginal, Marquis d'Alluye, brother to the Cardinal de Sourdis, Archbishop of Bordeaux, had, at the age of eighty-three, by the maid of Madame la Presidente Jacquin, a son, a real child of love, who became a Chevalier of Malta and a counsellor of state; one of the great men of this century, the Abbe Tabaraud, is the son of a man of eighty-seven. There is nothing out of the ordinary in these things.
And then, the Bible! Upon that I declare that this little gentleman is none of mine. Let him be taken care of.
It is not his fault."
This manner of procedure was good-tempered. The woman, whose name was Magnon, sent him another parcel in the following year.
It was a boy again. Thereupon, M. Gillenormand capitulated.
He sent the two brats back to their mother, promising to pay eighty francs a month for their maintenance, on the condition that the said mother would not do so any more.
He added:
"I insist upon it that the mother shall treat them well.
I shall go to see them from time to time." And this he did.
He had had a brother who was a priest, and who had been rector of the Academy of Poitiers for three and thirty years, and had died at seventy-nine. "I lost him young," said he. This brother, of whom but little memory remains, was a peaceable miser, who, being a priest, thought himself bound to bestow alms on the poor whom he met, but he never gave them anything except bad or demonetized sous, thereby discovering a means of going to hell by way of paradise.
As for M. Gillenormand the elder, he never haggled over his alms-giving, but gave gladly and nobly. He was kindly, abrupt, charitable, and if he had been rich, his turn of mind would have been magnificent.
He desired that all which concerned him should be done in a grand manner, even his rogueries.
One day, having been cheated by a business man in a matter of inheritance, in a gross and apparent manner, he uttered this solemn exclamation:
"That was indecently done! I am really ashamed of this pilfering.
Everything has degenerated in this century, even the rascals.
Morbleu! this is not the way to rob a man of my standing.