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Updated: May 21, 2025
"Ah ca! cousin; why didn't you tell us you belonged to the Opposition?" asked Leon, seizing Gazonal by the arm. "How stupid of you! One deputy more or less to Right or Left and your bed is made." "We are all for the Others down my way." "Let 'em go," said Bixiou, with a facetious look; "they have Providence on their side, and Providence will bring them back without you and in spite of themselves.
"'Don't be vexed, cousin, I'm at your service! cried out that little Leon, taking me in his arms," related Gazonal on his return home. "The breakfast was splendid. I thought I was going blind when I saw the number of bits of gold it took to pay that bill. Those fellows must earn their weight in gold, for I saw my cousin give the waiter thirty sous the price of a whole day's work!"
Gazonal at first thought it was a hoax prepared by his companions; but the absolute impossibility of such a conspiracy appeared to him almost as soon as the idea itself, and he sat speechless before that truly infernal power, the incarnation of which borrowed from humanity a form which the imagination of painters and poets has throughout all ages regarded as the most awful of created things, namely, a toothless, hideous, wheezing hag, with cold lips, flattened nose, and whitish eyes.
"Rise, my wife! Monsieur is a man of science." Madame Vital rose at her husband's gesture. Gazonal bowed to her. "Shall I have the honor to cover your head?" said Vital, with joyful obsequiousness. "At the same price as mine," interposed Bixiou.
Take special note of my man, friend Gazonal, and you'll see the comedy of money, the cold man who won't give a penny, the hot man who snuffs a profit; listen to him attentively!" All three went up to the second floor of a fine-looking house on the boulevard des Italiens, where they found themselves surrounded by the elegances then in fashion.
The strongest heads are liable to crack there, as if to give vent to their steam. Those who make much money have vices or fancies, no doubt to establish an equilibrium." "And now that the lottery is abolished?" asked Gazonal. "Oh! now she has a nephew for whom she is hoarding."
Vauvinet held out his hand with apparent friendliness to Bixiou, and bowed coldly to Gazonal as he motioned them to enter his office, where bourgeois taste was visible beneath the artistic appearance of the furniture, and in spite of the statuettes and the thousand other little trifles applied to our little apartments by modern art, which has made itself as small as its patrons.
You shall see now a procession defiling before you, one after the other, of men of talent, little and great, artists in seed or flower, who are raising to the glory of France that every-day monument called the Opera, an assemblage of forces, wills, and forms of genius, nowhere collected as in Paris. "I have already seen the Opera," said Gazonal, with a self-sufficient air.
The worthy manufacturer complained of the length of the four-pound bread-loaves, the height of the houses, the indifference of the passengers in the streets to one another, the cold, the rain, the cost of hackney-coaches, all of which and much else he bemoaned in so witty a manner that the two artists took a mighty fancy to cousin Gazonal, and made him relate his lawsuit from beginning to end.
"That's as monsieur pleases; wine is dear," said Carabine, looking Gazonal over from head to foot, and thinking him in no way remarkable. Gazonal, bewildered by the toilets, the lights, the gilding, the chatter of the various groups whom he thought to be discussing him, could only manage to stammer out the words: "Madame madame is very good."
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