At that epoch, Father Gillenormand was well past his ninety-first birthday. He still lived with Mademoiselle Gillenormand in the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, No. 6, in the old house which he owned.
He was, as the reader will remember, one of those antique old men who await death perfectly erect, whom age bears down without bending, and whom even sorrow cannot curve. Still, his daughter had been saying for some time: 'My father is sinking.
' He no longer boxed the maids’ ears; he no longer thumped the landing-place so vigorously with his cane when Basque was slow in opening the door. The Revolution of July had exasperated him for the space of barely six months.
He had viewed, almost tranquilly, that coupling of words, in the Moniteur: M. Humblot-Conté, peer of France. The fact is, that the old man was deeply dejected.
He did not bend, he did not yield; this was no more a characteristic of his physical than of his moral nature, but he felt himself giving way internally.
For four years he had been waiting for Marius, with his foot firmly planted, that is the exact word, in the conviction that that good-for-nothing young scamp would ring at his door some day or other; now he had reached the point, where, at certain gloomy hours, he said to himself, that if Marius made him wait much longer—It was not death that was insupportable to him; it was the idea that perhaps he should never see Marius again.
The idea of never seeing Marius again had never entered his brain until that day; now the thought began to recur to him, and it chilled him.
Absence, as is always the case in genuine and natural sentiments, had only served to augment the grandfather’s love for the ungrateful child, who