With M. Gillenormand, sorrow was converted into wrath; he was furious at being in despair. He had all sorts of prejudices and took all sorts of liberties.
One of the facts of which his exterior relief and his internal satisfaction was composed, was, as we have just hinted, that he had remained a brisk spark, and that he passed energetically for such. This he called having 'royal renown.
' This royal renown sometimes drew down upon him singular windfalls.
One day, there was brought to him in a basket, as though it had been a basket of oysters, a stout, newly born boy, who was yelling like the deuce, and duly wrapped in swaddling-clothes, which a servant-maid, dismissed six months previously, attributed to him. M.
Gillenormand had, at that time, fully completed his eighty-fourth year. Indignation and uproar in the establishment. And whom did that bold hussy think she could persuade to believe that? What audacity! What an abominable calumny! 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’Angoulême, 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 Présidente 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 Abbé Tabaraud, is the son of a man of eighty-seven.
There is nothing out of the ordinary