Two Do Not Make a Pair — Les Misérables

They had come into the world ten years apart. In their youth they had borne very little resemblance to each other, either in character or countenance, and had also been as little like sisters as possible. The youngest had a charming soul that turned toward the light: flowers, verses, music, a vague heroic figure she had already wedded in ideal. The elder had her chimera too. She espied in the azure a wealthy contractor, a splendidly stupid husband, a million-made man, or even a prefect: official balls, an usher with a chain on his neck, the title of Madame la Préfète. Both had wings, the one like an angel, the other like a goose.

No ambition is ever fully realized. The younger wedded the man of her dreams, but she died. The elder did not marry at all. When she enters this history she is an antique virtue, an incombustible prude, with one of the sharpest noses and one of the most obtuse minds it is possible to see. Outside her immediate family no one had ever known her first name. She was called Mademoiselle Gillenormand, the elder. She cherished a frightful memory of her life: one day a man had beheld her garter. Age had only accentuated this pitiless modesty. She multiplied clasps and pins where no one would have dreamed of looking. Nevertheless she allowed an officer of the Lancers, her grand nephew Théodule, to embrace her without displeasure. Prudery is a demi-virtue and a demi-vice. To it she added bigotry, a well-assorted lining: the society of the Virgin, a white veil, hours before a rococo-jesuit altar in a chapel the rank and file could not enter. She had a chapel friend, Mademoiselle Vaubois, a blockhead beside whom she had the pleasure of being an eagle, the ermine of stupidity without a single spot of intelligence.

She had gained rather than lost as she grew older. She had never been malicious, which is relative kindness. She was melancholy with an obscure sadness of which she did not herself know the secret. There breathed from her whole person the stupor of a life that was finished and which had never had a beginning. She kept house for her father. These households of an old man and an old spinster have the touching aspect of two weaknesses leaning on each other. There was also in this house, between the elderly spinster and the old man, a child, a little boy, always trembling and mute in Gillenormand's presence. The old man never addressed him except in a severe voice, and sometimes with uplifted cane: rascal, scoundrel, scamp, good-for-nothing. He idolised him. This was his grandson. We shall meet with this child again later on.