Ninety Years and Thirty-Two Teeth — Les Misérables

In the streets near the Temple, a few ancient inhabitants still mention a worthy man named Gillenormand. He was old when they were young. In 1831 he was as much alive as possible: over ninety, walk erect, talked loudly, saw clearly, drank neat, ate, slept, and snored. He had all thirty-two of his teeth. He only wore spectacles when he read. He was a man of another age, the complete bourgeois of the eighteenth century, wearing his bourgeoisie the way marquises wear their marquisates.

He had declared that for ten years he had wholly renounced women. He did not add that he was too old. He said he was too poor. All he had left was about fifteen thousand francs a year. His dream was a hundred thousand livres for mistresses. This was no longevity of a cracked pot. He was superficial, rapid, easily angered. When contradicted, he raised his cane. He beat people as he had done in the great century. He had a daughter over fifty, unmarried, whom he chastised with his tongue and would have liked to whip. She seemed to him to be eight years old. He boxed his servants' ears. He had himself shaved every day by a barber who had been mad and who detested him, jealous of a pretty barberess.

The words he uttered most frequently were the sensible man, and nature. Nature, he said, gives civilization even specimens of its amusing barbarism. The cat is a drawing-room tiger. The lizard is a pocket crocodile. The dancers at the opera crunch men and transform them into oysters. We do not devour, we gnaw. We do not exterminate, we claw.