e pantouflochade!" He had singular
freaks of tranquillity; he had himself shaved every day by a barber who
had been mad and who detested him, being jealous of M. Gillenormand on
account of his wife, a pretty and coquettish barberess. M. Gillenormand
admired his own discernment in all things, and declared that he was
extremely sagacious; here is one of his sayings: "I have, in truth, some
penetration; I am able to say when a flea bites me, from what woman it
came."

The words which he uttered the most frequently were: the sensible man,
and nature. He did not give to this last word the grand acceptation
which our epoch has accorded to it, but he made it enter, after his own
fashion, into his little chimney-corner satires: "Nature," he said, "in
order that civilization may have a little of everything, gives it even
specimens of its amusing barbarism. Europe possesses specimens of Asia
and Africa on a small scale. The cat is a drawing-room tiger, the lizard
is a pocket crocodile. The dancers at the opera are pink female savages.
They do not eat men, they crunch them; or, magicians that they are, they
transform them into oysters and swallow them. The Caribbeans leave only
the bones, they leave only the shell. Such are our morals. We do not
devour, we gnaw; we do not exterminate, we claw."

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 o