kings who are
not the King of France," said he, "are provincial kings." One day, the
following question was put and the following answer returned in his
presence: "To what was the editor of the Courrier Francais condemned?"
"To be suspended." "Sus is superfluous," observed M. Gillenormand.[22]
Remarks of this nature found a situation.

At the Te Deum on the anniversary of the return of the Bourbons, he
said, on seeing M. de Talleyrand pass by: "There goes his Excellency the
Evil One."

M. Gillenormand was always accompanied by his daughter, that tall
mademoiselle, who was over forty and looked fifty, and by a handsome
little boy of seven years, white, rosy, fresh, with happy and trusting
eyes, who never appeared in that salon without hearing voices murmur
around him: "How handsome he is! What a pity! Poor child!" This child
was the one of whom we dropped a word a while ago. He was called "poor
child," because he had for a father "a brigand of the Loire."

This brigand of the Loire was M. Gillenormand's son-in-law, who has
already been mentioned, and whom M. Gillenormand called "the disgrace of
his family."

CHAPTER II--ONE OF THE RED SPECTRES OF THAT EPOCH

Any one who had chanced to pass through the little town of Vernon at
this epoch, and who had happened to walk across that fine monumental
bridge, which will soon be succeeded, let us hope, by some hideous iron
cable bridge, might have observed, had he dropped his eyes over the
parapet, a man about fifty years of age wearing a leather cap, and
trousers and a waistcoat of coarse gray cloth, to which something yellow
which had been a red ribbon, was sewn, shod with wooden sabots, tanned
by the sun, his face nearly black and his hair nearly white, a large
scar on his forehead which ran down upon his cheek, bowed, bent,
prematurely aged, who walked nearly every day, hoe and sickle in hand,
in one of those compartments surrounded by walls which abut on the
bridge, and border the left bank of the Seine like a chain of terraces,
charming enclosures full of flowers of which one could say, were they
much larger: "these are gardens," and were they a little smaller: "these
are bouquets." All these enclosures abut upon the river at one end, and
on a house at the other. The man in the waistcoat and the wooden shoes
of whom we have just spoken, inhabited the smallest of these enclosures
and the most humble of these houses about 1817. He lived there alone and
solitary, s