2272 Les Miserables
M. Gillenormand talked nonsense in connection with
the wedding, and all the fripperies of the eighteenth cen-
tury passed pell-mell through his dithyrambs.
‘You are ignorant of the art of festivals. You do not know
how to organize a day of enjoyment in this age,’ he ex-
claimed. ‘Your nineteenth century is weak. It lacks excess.
It ignores the rich, it ignores the noble. In everything it is
clean-shaven. Your third estate is insipid, colorless, odor-
less, and shapeless. The dreams of your bourgeois who set
up, as they express it: a pretty boudoir freshly decorated,
violet, ebony and calico. Make way! Make way! the Sieur
Curmudgeon is marrying Mademoiselle Clutch-penny.
Sumptuousness and splendor. A louis d’or has been stuck
to a candle. There’s the epoch for you. My demand is that I
may flee from it beyond the Sarmatians. Ah! in 1787, I pre-
dict that all was lost, from the day when I beheld the Duc de
Rohan, Prince de Leon, Duc de Chabot, Duc de Montbazon,
Marquis de Sonbise, Vicomte de Thouars, peer of France, go
to Longchamps in a tapecu! That has borne its fruits. In this
century, men attend to business, they gamble on ‘Change,
they win money, they are stingy. People take care of their
surfaces and varnish them; every one is dressed as though
just out of a band-box, washed, soaped, scraped, shaved,
combed, waked, smoothed, rubbed, brushed, cleaned on
the outside, irreproachable, polished as a pebble, discreet,
neat, and at the same time, death of my life, in the depths of
their consciences they have dung-heaps and cesspools that
are enough to make a cow-herd who blows his nose in his
fingers, recoil. I grant to this age the device: ‘Dirty Cleanli-