Chapter 162 The Great Gentleman Volume II

There are still a few old residents in Rue Boucherard, Rue Normandie, and Rue Saint-Donger. They all still remember an old man named M. Gillenormand, and they always talk about him with some longing.The old man was old when they were young.His image, to those who look back with melancholy upon those half-shadowed shadows-the so-called past-has not quite disappeared in the labyrinthine streets around the Great Temple.In those places, in the time of Louis XIV, the streets were named after all the provinces of France, just as in our Tivoli today, the streets are named after all the capitals of Europe.Incidentally, this is progress, in which the sense of progress is obvious.

That Monsieur Gillenormand, who in 1831 was as healthy as ever, was such a marvelous man worth looking at merely because of his longevity, and such a man who was once like everyone and now is like no one. Same weirdo.It was a peculiar old man, truly of another time, a genuinely intact and somewhat haughty gentleman of the eighteenth century, clinging to his rotten and stinking gentlemanly ways, just as The Marquis cherishes his title as the Marquis.He was over ninety years old, with steady steps, loud voice, piercing eyes, drinking without water, eating, sleeping, and snoring.He has thirty-two teeth.Except for reading, he doesn't wear glasses.He is still interested in boasting that he is passionate, but he often says that in the past ten years, he has completely given up on women.He said he was no longer popular with others.Also, instead of saying "I'm too old", he says "I'm too poor".He used to say: "If my fortune survives... Hey!" Indeed, he had only about fifteen thousand livres left in annual interest.His sweet dream is to inherit an inheritance.To have an annuity of one hundred thousand francs, so that I can find little girls.We can see that he is not the same as Mr. Voltaire, he is by no means the kind of eighty-year-old man who has been half-dead all his life and neighbors with ghosts. The surviving old man has always been very healthy.He is shallow, impatient, and easily irritable.He was prone to tantrums, often against reason.If anyone refused to meet his will, he raised his stick and beat people often, as if he was still living in the great age.He has a daughter who is in her early fifties and is not married. When he loses his temper, he beats that daughter hard, wishing he could use a whip.It seemed to him that she was only eight years old.He often cursed his servants severely, and often said: "Ha! Bad woman!" One of his curse words was "a broken shoe in a pile of broken shoes"!Sometimes, he was surprisingly calm.He had a mad barber come to shave him every day, and the barber hated him because of his woman, a beautiful and coquettish barber shop owner, and was a little bitter towards M. Gillenormand.Monsieur Gillenormand admired his ability to analyze everything, and thought he was very clever.He said something like this: "To be honest, I'm quite discerning. When a flea bites me, I can tell with certainty which woman the flea jumped from." Sensitive people" and "good fortune".His interpretation of "creation" differs from how the term is understood in our day.He sat by the fire and wove it into his witticisms as he pleased. "Nature," he said, "gives culture a little of everything, even specimens in an interesting state of savagery. Europe has specimens from Asia and Africa, but on a smaller scale. Cats are The tiger in the living room, the gecko is a pocket crocodile. The dancers in the opera house are rosy brutes. They don't eat people, but they chew people up. Or say: 'A bunch of succubi!' They turn people into Oysters, swallow 'em. The Caribs have nothing to eat but the bones, and they have nothing to eat but the shells. This is our fashion. We don't eat, but we bite, we don't kill, but we choke people."