icard. His last valet was a big, foundered,
short-winded fellow of fifty-five, who was incapable of running twenty
paces; but, as he had been born at Bayonne, M. Gillenormand called him
Basque. All the female servants in his house were called Nicolette (even
the Magnon, of whom we shall hear more farther on). One day, a haughty
cook, a cordon bleu, of the lofty race of porters, presented herself.
"How much wages do you want a month?" asked M. Gillenormand. "Thirty
francs." "What is your name?" "Olympie." "You shall have fifty francs,
and you shall be called Nicolette."

CHAPTER VI--IN WHICH MAGNON AND HER TWO CHILDREN ARE SEEN

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'Angouleme, 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 Presidente 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 Abbe Tabaraud, is the
son of a man of eighty-seven. There is nothing out of the ordinary in
these things. And then, the Bible! Upon that I declare that this little
gentleman is none