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. He occupied
an ancient and vast apartment on the first floor, between street
and gardens, furnished to the very ceilings with great Gobelins
and Beauvais tapestries representing pastoral scenes; the subjects
of the ceilings and the panels were repeated in miniature on the
arm-chairs. He enveloped his bed in a vast, nine-leaved screen
of Coromandel lacquer. Long, full curtains hung from the windows,
and formed great, broken folds that were very magnificent.
The garden situated immediately under his windows was attached
to that one of them which formed the angle, by means of a staircase
twelve or fifteen steps long, which the old gentleman ascended and
descended with great agility. In addition to a library adjoining
his chamber, he had a boudoir of which he thought a great deal,
a gallant and elegant retreat, with magnificent hangings of straw,
with a pattern of flowers and fleurs-de-lys made on the galleys
of Louis XIV. and ordered of his convicts by M. de Vivonne for
his mistress. M. Gillenormand had inherited it from a grim maternal
great-aunt, who had died a centenarian. He had had two wives.
His manners were something between those of the courtier,
which he had never been, and the lawyer, which he might have been.
He was gay, and caressing when he had a mind. In his youth he
had been one of those men who are always deceived by their wives
and never by their mistresses, because they are, at the same time,
the most sullen of husbands and the most charming of lovers
in existence. He was a connoisseur of painting. He had in his chamber
a marvellous portrait of no one knows whom, painted by Jordaens,
executed with great dashes of the brush, with millions of details,
in a confused and hap-hazard manner. M. Gillenormand's attire
was not the habit of Louis XIV. nor yet that of Louis XVI.;
it was that of the Incroyables of the Directory. He had thought
himself young up to that period and had followed the fashions.
His coat was of light-weight cloth with voluminous revers, a long
swallow-tail and large steel buttons. With this he wore knee-breeches
and buckle shoes. He always thrust his hands into his fobs.
He said authoritatively: "The French Revolution is a heap
of blackguards."