Repertory of The Comedie Humaine Part 22

GRADOS had in his hands the notes of Vergniaud the herder. By means of funds from Derville the lawyer, Grados was paid in 1818 by Colonel Chabert. [Colonel Chabert.]

GRAFF (Johann), brother of a tailor established in Paris under Louis Philippe. Came himself to Paris after having been head-waiter in the hotel of Gedeon Brunner at Frankfort; and ran the Hotel du Rhin in rue du Mail where Frederic Brunner and Wilhelm Schwab alighted penniless in 1835. The landlord obtained small positions for the two young men; for the former with Keller; for the latter with his brother the tailor. [Cousin Pons.]

GRAFF (Wolfgang), brother of the foregoing, and rich tailor of Paris, at whose shop in 1838 Lisbeth Fischer fitted out Wenceslas Steinbock.

On his brother's recommendation, he employed Wilhelm Schwab, and, six years later, took him into the family by giving him Emilie Graff in marriage. [Cousin Betty. Cousin Pons.]

GRANCEY (Abbe de), born in 1764. Took orders because of a disapointment in love; became priest in 1786, and cure in 1788. A distinguished prelate who refused three bishoprics in order not to leave Besancon. In 1834 he became vicar-general of that diocese. The abbe had a handsome head. He gave free vent to cutting speeches. Was acquainted with Albert Savarus whom he liked and aided. A frequenter of the Watteville salon he found out and rebuked Rosalie, the singular and determined enemy of the advocate. He also intervened between Madame and Mademoiselle de Watteville. He died at the end of the winter of 1836-37. [Albert Savarus.]

GRANCOUR (Abbe de), one of the vicars-general of the bishopric of Limoges, about the end of the Restoration; and the physical ant.i.thesis of the other vicar, the attenuated and moody Abbe Dutheil whose lofty and independent liberal doctrines he, with cowardly caution, secretly shared. Grancour frequented the Graslin salon and doubtless knew of the Tascheron tragedy. [The Country Parson.]

GRANDEMAIN was in 1822 at Paris clerk for Desroches. [A Start in Life.]

GRANDET (Felix), of Saumur, born between 1745 and 1749. Well-to-do master-cooper, pa.s.sably educated. In the first years of the Republic he married the daughter of a rich lumber merchant, by whom he had in 1796 one child, Eugenie. With their united capital, he bought at a bargain the best vineyards about Saumur, in addition to an old abbey and several farms. Under the Consulate he became successively member of the district government and mayor of Saumur. But the Empire, which supposed him to be a Jacobin, retired him from the latter office, although he was the town's largest tax-payer. Under the Restoration the despotism of his extraordinary avarice disturbed the peace of his family. His younger brother, Guillaume, failed and killed himself, leaving in Felix's hands the settlement of his affairs, and sending to him his son Charles, who had hastened to Saumur, not knowing his father's ruin. Eugenie loved her cousin and combated her father's n.i.g.g.ardliness, which looked after his own interests to the neglect of his brother. The struggle between Eugenie and her father broke Mme.

Grandet's heart. The phases of the terrible duel were violent and numerous. Felix Grandet's pa.s.sion resorted to stratagem and stubborn force. Death alone could settle with this domestic tyrant. In 1827, an octogenarian and worth seventeen millions, he was carried off by a stroke of paralysis. [Eugenie Grandet.]

GRANDET (Madame Felix), wife of the preceding; born about 1770; daughter of a rich lumber merchant, M. de la Gaudiniere; married in the beginning of the Republic, and gave birth to one child, Eugenie, in 1796. In 1806 she added considerably to the combined wealth of the family through two large inheritances--from her mother and M. de la Bertelliere, her maternal grandfather. A devout, shrinking, insignificant creature, bowed beneath the domestic yoke, Mme. Grandet never left Saumur, where she died in October, 1822, of lung trouble, aggravated by grief at her daughter's rebellion and her husband's severity. [Eugenie Grandet.]

GRANDET (Victor-Ange-Guillaume), younger brother of Felix Grandet; became rich at Paris in wine-dealing. In 1815 before the battle of Waterloo, Frederic de Nucingen bought of him one hundred and fifty thousand bottles of champagne at thirty sous, and sold them at six francs; the allies drank them during the invasion--1817-19. [The Firm of Nucingen.] The beginning of the Restoration favored Guillaume. He was the husband of a charming woman, the natural daughter of a great lord, who died young after giving him a child. Was colonel of the National Guard, judge of the Court of Commerce, governor of one of the arrondiss.e.m.e.nts of Paris and deputy. Saumur accused him of aspiring still higher and wis.h.i.+ng to become the father-in-law of a petty d.u.c.h.ess of the imperial court. The bankruptcy of Maitre Roguin was the partial cause of the ruin of Guillaume, who blew out his brains to avoid disgrace, in November, 1819. In his last requests, Guillaume implored his elder brother to care for Charles whom the suicide had rendered doubly an orphan. [Eugenie Grandet.]

GRANDET, (Charles), only lawful child of the foregoing; nephew of Felix Grandet; born in 1797. He led at first the gay life of a young gallant, and maintained relations with a certain Annette, a married woman of good society. The tragic death of his father in November, 1819, astounded him and led him to Saumur. He thought himself in love with his cousin Eugenie to whom he swore fidelity. Shortly thereafter he left for India, where he took the name of Carl Sepherd to escape the consequences of treasonable actions. He returned to France in 1827 enormously wealthy, debarked at Bordeaux in June of that year, accompanying the Aubrions whose daughter Mathilde he married, and allowed Eugenie Grandet to complete the settlement with the creditors of his father. [Eugenie Grandet.] By his marriage he became Comte d'Aubrion. [The Firm of Nucingen.]

GRANDET (Eugenie).* (See Bonfons, Eugenie Cruchot de.)

* The incidents of her life have been dramatized by Bayard for the Gymnase-Dramatique, under the t.i.tle of "The Miser's Daughter."

GRANDLIEU (Comtesse de), related to the Herouvilles; lived in the first part of the seventeenth century; probably ancestress of the Grandlieus, well known in France two centuries later. [The Hated Son.]

GRANDLIEU (Mademoiselle), under the first Empire married an imperial chamberlain, perhaps also the prefect of Orne, and was received, alone, in Alencon among the exclusive and aristocratic set lorded over by the Esgrignons. [Jealousies of a Country Town.]

GRANDLIEU (Duc Ferdinand de), born about 1773; may have descended from the Comtesse de Grandlieu who lived early in the seventeenth century, and consequently connected with the old and worthy n.o.bility of the Duchy of Brittany whose device was "Caveo non timeo." At the end of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries, Ferdinand de Grandlieu was the head of the elder branch, wealthy and ducal, of the house of Grandlieu. Under the Consulate and the Empire his high and a.s.sured rank enabled him to intercede with Talleyrand in behalf of M. d'Hauteserre and M. de Simeuse, compromised in the fict.i.tious abduction of Malin de Gondreville. Grandlieu by his marriage with an Ajuda of the elder branch, connected with the Barganzas and of Portuguese descent, had several daughters, the eldest of whom a.s.sumed the veil in 1822. His other daughters were Clotilde-Frederique, born in 1802; Josephine the third; Sabine born in 1809; Marie-Athenais, born about 1820. An uncle by marriage of Mme. de Langeais, he had at Paris, in Faubourg Saint-Germain, a hotel where, during the reign of Louis XVIII., the Princesse de Blamont-Chauvry, the Vidame de Pamiers and the Duc de Navarreins a.s.sembled to consider a startling escapade of Antoinette de Langeais. At least ten years later Grandlieu availed himself of his intimate friend Henri de Chaulieu and also of Corentin--Saint-Denis--in order to stay the suit against Lucien de Rubempre which was about to compromise his daughter Clotilde-Frederique. [The Gondreville Mystery. The Thirteen. A Bachelor's Establishment. Modeste Mignon. Scenes from a Courtesan's Life.]

GRANDLIEU (d.u.c.h.esse Ferdinand de), of Portuguese descent, born Ajuda and of the elder branch of that house connected with the Braganzas.

Wife of Ferdinand de Grandlieu, and mother of several daughters. Of sedentary habits, proud, pious, good-hearted and beautiful, she wielded in Paris during the Restoration a sort of supremacy over the Faubourg Saint-Germain. The second and the next to the youngest of her children gave her much anxiety. Combating the hostility of those about her she welcomed Rubempre, the suitor of her daughter Clotilde-Frederique--1829-30. The unfortunate results of the marriage of her other daughter Sabine, Baronne Calyste du Guenic, occupied Mme.

de Grandlieu's attention in 1837, and she succeeded in reconciling the young couple, with the a.s.sistance of Abbe Brossette, Maxime de Trailles, and La Palferine. Her religious scruples had made her halt a moment; but they fell like her political fidelity, and, with Mmes.

d'Espard, de Listomere and des Touches, she tacitly recognized the bourgeois royalty, a few years after a new reign began, and re-opened the doors of her salon. [Scenes from a Courtesan's Life. Beatrix. A Daughter of Eve.]

GRANDLIEU (Mademoiselle de), eldest daughter of the Duc and d.u.c.h.esse de Grandlieu, took the veil in 1822. [A Bachelor's Establishment.

Scenes from a Courtesan's Life.]

GRANDLIEU (Clotilde-Frederique de), born in 1802; second daughter of the Duc and d.u.c.h.esse de Grandlieu; a long, flat creature, the caricature of her mother. She had no consent save that of her mother when she fell in love with and wished to marry the ambitious Lucien de Rubempre in the spring of 1830. She saw him for the last time on the road to Italy in the forest of Fontainbleu near Bouron and under very painful circ.u.mstances the young man was arrested before her very eyes.

[Scenes from a Courtesan's Life.]

GRANDLIEU (Josephine de). (See Ajuda-Pinto, Marquise Miguel d'.)

GRANDLIEU (Sabine de). (See Guenic, Baronne Calyste du.)

GRANDLIEU (Marie-Athenais de). (See Grandlieu, Vicomtesse Juste de.)

GRANDLIEU (Vicomtesse de), sister of Comte de Born; descended more directly than the duke from the countess of the seventeenth century.

From 1813, the time of her husband's death, the head of the younger Grandlieu house whose device was "Grands faits, grand lieu." Mother of Camille and of Juste de Grandlieu, and the mother-in-law of Ernest de Restaud. Returned to France with Louis XVIII. At first she lived on royal bounty, but afterwards regained a considerable portion of her property through the efforts of Maitre Derville, about the beginning of the Restoration. She was very grateful to the lawyer, who also took her part against the Legion of Honor, was admitted to her confidential circle and told her the secrets of the Restaud household, one evening in the winter of 1830 when Ernest de Restaud, son of the Comtesse Anastasie, was paying court to Camille whom he finally married.

[Scenes from a Courtesan's Life. Colonel Chabert. Gobseck.]

GRANDLIEU (Camille de). (See Restaud, Comtesse Ernest de.)

GRANDLIEU (Vicomte Juste de), son of Vicomtesse de Grandlieu; brother of Comtesse Ernest de Restaud; cousin and afterwards husband of Marie-Athenais de Grandlieu, combining by this marriage the fortunes of the two houses of Grandlieu and obtaining the t.i.tle of duke.

[Scenes from a Courtesan's Life. Gobseck.]

GRANDLIEU (Vicomtesse Juste de), born about 1820, Marie-Athenais de Grandlieu; last daughter of Duc and d.u.c.h.esse de Grandlieu; married to her cousin, the Vicomte Juste de Grandlieu. She received at Paris in the first days of the July government, a young married woman like herself, Mme. Felix de Vandenesse, then in the midst of a flirtation with Raoul Nathan. [Scenes from a Courtesan's Life. Gobseck. A Daughter of Eve.]

GRANET, deputy-mayor of the second arrondiss.e.m.e.nt of Paris, in 1818, under La Billardiere. With his homely wife he was invited to the Birotteau ball. [Cesar Birotteau.]

GRANET, one of the leading men of Besancon, under Louis Philippe. In grat.i.tude for a favor done him by Albert Savarus he nominated the latter for deputy. [Albert Savarus.]

GRANSON (Madame), poor widow of a lieutenant-colonel of artillery killed at Jena, by whom she had a son, Athanase. From 1816 she lived at No. 8 rue du Bercail in Alencon, where the benevolence of a distant relative, Mme. du Bousquier, put in her charge the treasury of a maternal society against infanticide, and brought her into contact, under peculiar circ.u.mstances, with the woman who afterwards became Mme. Theodore Gaillard. [Jealousies of a Country Town.]

GRANSON (Athanase), son of the preceding; born in 1793; subordinate in the mayor's office at Alencon in charge of registry. A sort of poet, liberal in politics and filled with ambition; weary of poverty and overflowing with grandiose sentiments. In 1816 he loved, with a pa.s.sion that his commonsense combated, Mme. du Bousquier, then Mlle.

Cormon, his senior by more than seventeen years. In 1816 the marriage dreaded by him took place. He could not brook the blow and drowned himself in the Sarthe. He was mourned only by his mother and Suzanne du Val-n.o.ble. [Jealousies of a Country Town.] Nevertheless, eight years after it was said of him: "The Athanase Gransons must die, withered up, like the grains which fall on barren rock." [The Government Clerks.]

GRANVILLE (Comte de), had a defective civil status, the orthography of the name varying frequently through the insertion of the letter "d"

between the "n" and "v." In 1805 at an advanced age he lived at Bayeux, where he was probably born. His father was a president of the Norman Parliament. At Bayeux the Comte married his son to the wealthy Angelique Bontems. [A Second Home.]

GRANVILLE (Vicomte de), son of Comte de Granville, and comte upon his father's death; born about 1779; a magistrate through family tradition. Under the guidance of Cambaceres he pa.s.sed through all the administrative and judicial grades. He studied with Maitre Bordin, defended Michu in the trial resulting from the "Gondreville Mystery,"

and learned officially and officiously of one of its results a short time after his marriage with a young girl of Bayeux, a rich heiress and the acquirer of extensive public lands. Paris was generally the theatre for the brilliant career of Maitre Granville who, during the Empire, left the Augustin quai where he had lived to take up his abode with his wife on the ground-floor of a mansion in the Marais, between rue Vielle-du-Temple and rue Nueve-Saint-Francois. He became successively advocate-general at the court of the Seine, and president of one of its chambers. At this time a domestic drama was being enacted in his life. Hampered in his open and broad-minded nature by the bigotry of Mme. de Granville, he sought domestic happiness outside his home, though he already had a family of four children. He had met Caroline Crochard on rue du Tourniquet-Saint-Jean. He installed her on rue Taitbout and found in this relation, though it was of brief duration, the happiness vainly sought in his proper home. Granville screened this fleeting joy under the name of Roger. A daughter Eugenie, and a son Charles, were born of this adulterous union which was ended by the desertion of Mlle. Crochard and the misconduct of Charles. Until the death of Mme. Crochard, the mother of Caroline, Granville was able to keep up appearances before his wife. Thus it happened that he accompanied her to the country, Seine-et-Oise, when he a.s.sisted M. d'Albon and M. de Sucy. The remainder of Granville's life, after his wife and his mistress left him, was pa.s.sed in comparative solitude in the society of intimate friends like Octave de Bauvan and Serizy. Hard work and honors partially consoled him. His request as attorney-general caused the reinstatement of Cesar Birotteau, one of the tenants at No. 397 rue Saint-Honore. He and his wife had been invited to the famous ball given by Birotteau more than three years previously. As attorney-general of the Court of Ca.s.sation, Granville secretly protected Rubempre during the poet's famous trial, thus drawing upon himself the powerful affection of Jacques Collin, counterbalanced by the enmity of Amelie Camusot. The Revolution of July upheld Granville's high rank. He was peer of France under the new regime, owning and occupying a small mansion on rue Saint-Lazare, or traveling in Italy. At this time he was one of Dr. Bianchon's patients. [The Gondreville Mystery. A Second Home. Farewell. Cesar Birotteau. Scenes from a Courtesan's Life. A Daughter of Eve. Cousin Pons.]

GRANVILLE (Comtesse Angelique de), wife of preceding, and daughter of Bontems, a farmer and sort of Jacobin whom the Revolution enriched through the purchase of evacuated property at low prices. She was born at Bayeux in 1787, and received from her mother a very bigoted education. At the beginning of the Empire she married the son of one of the neighbors of the family, then Vicomte and later Comte de Granville; and, under the influence of Abbe Fontanon, she maintained at Paris the manners and customs of an extreme devotee. She thus evoked the infidelity of her husband who had begun by simply neglecting her. Of her four children she retained charge of the education of her two daughters. She broke off entirely from her husband when she discovered the existence of her rival, Mlle. de Bellefeuille--Caroline Crochard--and returned to Bayeux to end her days, remaining to the last the austere, stingy sanctified creature who had formerly been scandalized by the openness of the affair of Montriveau and Mme. de Langeais. She died in 1822. [A Second Home. The Thirteen. A Daughter of Eve.]

GRANVILLE (Vicomte de), elder son of the preceding. Was reared by his father. In 1828 he was deputy-attorney at Limoges, where he afterwards became advocate-general. He fell in love with Veronique Graslin, but incurred her secret disfavor by his proceedings against the a.s.sa.s.sin Tascheron. The vicomte had a career almost identical with that of his father. In 1833 he was made first president at Orleans, and in 1844 attorney-general. Later near Limoges he came suddenly upon a scene which moved him deeply: the public confession of Veronique Graslin.

The vicomte had unknowingly been the executioner of the chatelaine of Montegnac. [A Second Home. A Daughter of Eve. The Country Parson.]

GRANVILLE (Baron Eugene de), younger brother of the foregoing. King's attorney at Paris from May, 1830. Three years later he still held this office, when he informed his father of the arrest of a thief named Charles Crochard, who was the count's natural son. [Scenes from a Courtesan's Life. A Second Home.]

GRANVILLE (Marie-Angelique de). (See Vandenesse, Comtesse Felix de.)

GRANVILLE (Marie-Eugenie de). (See Tillet, Madame Ferdinand du.)

GRASLIN (Pierre), born in 1775. An Auvergnat, compatriot and friend of Sauviat, whose daughter Veronique he married in 1822. He began as a bank-clerk with Grosstete & Perret, a first-cla.s.s firm of the town. A man of business and a hard worker he became successor to his employers. His fortune, increased by lucky speculations with Brezac, enabled him to buy one of the finest places in the chief city of Haute-Vienne. But he was not able to win his wife's heart. His physical unattractiveness, added to by his carelessness and grinding avarice, were complicated by a domestic tyranny which soon showed itself. Thus it was that he was only the legal father of a son named Francis, but he was ignorant of this fact, for, in the capacity of juror in the Court of a.s.sizes dealing with the fate of Tascheron, the real father of the child, he urged but in vain the acquittal of the prisoner. Two years after the boy's birth and the execution of the mother's lover, in April, 1831, Pierre Graslin died of weakness and grief. The July Revolution suddenly breaking forth had shaken his financial standing, which was regained only with an effort. It was at the time when he had brought Montegnac from the Navarreins. [The Country Parson.]

GRASLIN (Madame Pierre), wife of preceding; born Veronique Sauviat, at Limoges in May, 1802; beautiful in spite of traces of small-pox; had had the spoiled though simple childhood of an only daughter. When twenty she married Pierre Graslin. Soon after marriage her ingenuous nature, romantic and refined, suffered in secret from the harsh tyranny of the man whose name she bore. Veronique, however, held aloof from the gallants who frequented her salon, especially the Vicomte de Granville. She had become the secret mistress of J.-F. Tascheron, a porcelain worker. She was on the point of eloping with him when a crime committed by him was discovered. Mme. Graslin suffered the most poignant anguish, giving birth to the child of the condemned man at the very moment when the father was led to execution. She inflicted upon herself the bitterest flagellations. She could devote herself more freely to penance after her husband's death, which occurred two years later. She left Limoges for Montegnac, where she made herself truly famous by charitable works on a huge scale. The sudden return of the sister of her lover dealt her the final blow. Still she had energy enough to bring about the union of Denise Tascheron and Gregoire Gerard, gave her son into their keeping, left important bequests destined to keep alive her memory, and died during the summer of 1844 after confessing in public in the presence of Bianchon, Dutheil, Granville, Mme. Sauviat and Bonnet who were all seized with admiration and tenderness for her. [The Country Parson.]

GRASLIN (Francis), born at Limoges in August, 1829. Only child of Veronique Graslin, legal son of Pierre Graslin, but natural son of J.-F. Tascheron. He lost his legal father two years after his birth, and his mother thirteen years later. His tutor M. Ruffin, his maternal grandmother Mme. Sauviat, and above all the Gregoire Gerards watched over his boyhood at Montegnac. [The Country Parson.]

GRa.s.sET, bailiff and successor of Louchard. On the demand of Lisbeth Fischer and by Rivet's advice, in 1838, he arrested W. Steinbock in Paris and took him to Clichy prison. [Cousin Betty.]

GRa.s.sINS (Des), ex-quartermaster of the Guard, seriously wounded at Austerlitz, pensioned and decorated. Time of Louis XVIII. he became the richest banker in Saumur, which he left for Paris where he located with the purpose of settling the unfortunate affairs of the suicide, Guillaume Grandet and where he was later made a deputy. Although the father of a family he conceived a pa.s.sion for Florine, a pretty actress of the Theatre du Madame,* to the havoc of his fortune.

[Eugenie Grandet.]

* The name of this theatre was changed, in 1830, to Gymnase-Dramatique.