Story + 

II + 

The Vicar of Tours + 

The duration of the work on which I write your name⁠—doubly illustrious in our age⁠—is most uncertain, while you inscribe mine on bronze, which outlives nations even when stamped only by the vulgar die of the coiner. Will not numismatists be puzzled by the many crowned heads in your studio, when they find among the ashes of Paris these lives, prolonged by you beyond the life of nations, in which they will fancy they discover dynasties? Yours is this divine prerogative⁠—mine be the gratitude. + 

The Vicar of Tours + 

In the early autumn of 1826 the Abbé Birotteau, the principal personage of this story, was caught in a shower on his way home from the house where he had spent the evening. He was just crossing, as fast as his burly weight permitted, a little deserted square known as the Close, lying behind the apse of Saint-Gatien at Tours. + 

The Abbé Birotteau, a short man of apoplectic build, and now sixty years of age, had already had several attacks of gout. Hence, of all the minor miseries of human life, that which the worthy man held in most horror was the sudden wetting of his shoes with their large silver buckles, and the immersion of their soles. In fact, notwithstanding the flannel lining in which he packed his feet in all weathers, with the care a priest always takes of himself, they often got a little damp; then, next day, the gout unfailingly gave him proof of its constancy. + 

However, as the cobbles in the Close are always dry, and as the Abbé had won three francs and ten sous at whist from Madame de Listomère, he submitted to the rain with resignation from the middle of the Place de l’Archevêché, where it had begun to fall heavily. Moreover, at this moment he was brooding over his chimera, a longing already twelve years old, a priest’s daydream! A dream which, recurring every evening, now seemed likely to find fulfilment; in short, he was too well wrapped in the fur sleeves of a canon’s robes to be sensitive to the severities of the weather. In the course of this evening the accustomed guests who met at Madame de Listomère’s had as good as promised him a nomination to the canon’s stall at present vacant in the Metropolitan Chapter of Saint-Gatien, by proving to him that no one better deserved it than he, whose claims were indisputable, though so long ignored. If he had lost at cards, if he had heard that the canonry was given to the Abbé Poirel, his rival, the good man would have found the rain very cold; he might have abused life. But he was in one of those rare moments when delightful sensations make us forget everything. Though he hastened his pace, it was in obedience to a mechanical impulse, and truth⁠—so indispensable in a tale of domestic life⁠—requires us to say that he was thinking neither of the shower nor of the gout. + 

There were formerly round this Close, on the side by the Grand’ Rue, a number of houses standing within a wall, and belonging to the Cathedral, inhabited by certain dignitaries of the Chapter. Since the sequestration of ecclesiastical property, the town has taken the alley dividing these houses as a public way, by the name of Rue de la Psalette, leading from the Close to the High Street. The name itself shows that here formerly dwelt the precentor with his schools and those who were within his jurisdiction. The left side of the street is formed of one large house, its garden walls being bridged by the flying buttresses of Saint-Gatien, which spring from the ground of its strip of garden, making it doubtful whether the Cathedral were built before or after that ancient dwelling. But, by examining the mouldings and the shape of the windows, the arch of the doorway, and the external architecture of the house, darkened by time, an archaeologist detects that it had always been part and parcel of the magnificent church to which it is wedded. An antiquarian⁠—if there were one at Tours, one of the least literary towns of France⁠—might even discern at the entrance to the passage from the Close some traces of the covered archway which of old served as an entry to these priestly dwellings, and which must have harmonized in character with the main edifice. + 

This house, being to the north of Saint-Gatien, lies always in the shadow of this vast Cathedral, on which time has cast its gloomy mantle, stamped wrinkles, and set its damp chill, its mosses, and straggling weeds. And it is perennially wrapped in the deepest silence, broken only by the tolling of the bells, the chanted service heard through the Cathedral walls, or the cawing of jackdaws nesting at the top of the belfries. The spot is a desert of masonry, a solitude full of individuality, in which none could dwell but beings absolutely mindless, or gifted with immense strength of soul. + 

The house in question had always been the home of Abbés, and belonged to an old maid named Mademoiselle Gamard. Although during the Terror the property had been bought from the nation by Mademoiselle Gamard’s father, as the worthy maiden had for twenty years past let the rooms to priests, no one, at the Restoration, could take it ill that a bigot should not surrender a piece of national property; religious persons may have supposed that she meant to bequeath it to the Chapter, and the worldly saw no change in its uses. + 

It was to this house, then, that the Abbé Birotteau was making his way; he had lived in it for two years. His rooms there had been till then, as the canonry was now, the object of his desires, and his hoc erat in votis for a dozen years before. To board with Mademoiselle Gamard and to be made a canon were the two great aims of his life; and perhaps they completely sum up the ambitions of a priest who, regarding himself as a pilgrim to eternity, can in this world wish for no more than a good room, a good table, clean clothes, shoes with silver buckles⁠—all-sufficient for his animal needs⁠—and a canonry to satisfy his pride, the indefinable feeling which will accompany us, no doubt, into the presence of God, since there are grades of rank among the saints. + 

But the Abbé Birotteau’s desire for the rooms he now occupied, so trivial a feeling in the eyes of the worldly wise, had been to him a perfect passion, a passion full of obstacles, and, like the most criminal passions, full of hopes, joys, and remorse. + 

The arrangements and space in her house did not allow Mademoiselle Gamard to take more than two resident boarders. Now, about twelve years before the day when Birotteau went to lodge with this maiden lady, she had undertaken to preserve in health and contentment Monsieur l’Abbé Troubert and Monsieur l’Abbé Chapeloud. The Abbé Troubert still lived, the Abbé Chapeloud was dead, and Birotteau had been his immediate successor. + 

The late Abbé Chapeloud, in his lifetime Canon of Saint-Gatien, had been the Abbé Birotteau’s intimate friend. Every time the priest had gone into the canon’s rooms he had unfailingly admired them, the furniture, and the books. This admiration one day gave birth to a desire to possess these fine things. The Abbé Birotteau had found it impossible to smother this desire, which often made him dreadfully unhappy when he reflected that only the death of his best friend could satisfy this hidden covetousness, which nevertheless constantly increased. + 

The Abbé Chapeloud and his friend Birotteau were not rich. Both sons of peasants, they had nothing but the poor emolument doled out to priests, and their small savings had been spent in tiding over the evil days of the Revolution. When Napoleon reestablished Catholic worship, the Abbé Chapeloud was made Canon of Saint-Gatien, and the Abbé Birotteau became vicaire, or mass-priest, of the Cathedral. It was then that Chapeloud went to board with Mademoiselle Gamard. When Birotteau first called on the Canon in his new residence, he thought the rooms delightfully arranged, but that was all. The beginnings of this concupiscence for furniture were like those of a real passion in a young man, which often at first is no more than cold admiration of the woman he subsequently loves forever. + 

These rooms, reached by a stone staircase, were on the side of the house looking south. The Abbé Troubert inhabited the ground floor, and Mademoiselle Gamard the first floor of the main front to the street. When Chapeloud went in, the rooms were bare and the ceilings blackened by smoke. The chimney fronts, clumsily carved in stone, had never been painted. All the furniture the poor canon could at first put in consisted of a bed, a table, some chairs, and his few books. The apartment was like a fine woman in rags. + 

But two or three years later, an old lady having left the Abbé Chapeloud two thousand francs, he laid out the money in the purchase of an oak bookcase, saved from the destruction of an old château pulled down by the Bande noire (a company who bought old buildings to demolish), and remarkable for carvings worthy of the admiration of artists. The Abbé made the purchase, fascinated less by its cheapness than by its exact correspondence in size with the dimensions of his corridor. His savings then allowed him completely to restore this corridor, until now abandoned to neglect. The floor was carefully waxed, the ceiling whitewashed, the woodwork painted and grained to imitate the tone and knots of oak. A marble chimney-shelf replaced the old one. The Canon had taste enough to hunt up and find some old armchairs of carved walnut wood. Then a long ebony table and two little Boulle cabinets gave this library a finish full of character. + 

Within two years, the liberality of various devout persons, and the bequests of pious penitents, though small, had filled the shelves of the bookcase hitherto vacant. Finally, an uncle of Chapeloud’s, an old Oratorian, left him his collection in folio of the Fathers of the Church, and several other large works of value to an ecclesiastic. + 

Birotteau, more and more surprised by the successive transformations in this formerly bare corridor, by degrees became involuntarily covetous. He longed to possess this study, so perfectly adapted to the gravity of priestly habits. This passion grew day by day. Spending whole days, as he often did, in working in this snuggery, he could appreciate the silence and peace of it, after having at first admired its comfortable arrangement. For the next few years the Abbé Chapeloud used this retreat as an oratory which his lady friends delighted to embellish. Later, again, a lady presented to the Canon a piece of furniture in worsted work for his bedroom, at which she had long been, stitching under the amiable priest’s eyes without his suspecting its purpose. Then Birotteau was as much dazzled by the bedroom as by the library. + 

Finally, three years before his death, the Abbé Chapeloud had completed the comfort of his rooms by decorating the drawing-room. Though simply furnished with red Utrecht velvet, this had been too much for Birotteau. From the day when the Canon’s friend first saw the red silk curtains, the mahogany furniture, the Aubusson carpet that graced this large room, freshly painted, Chapeloud’s apartment became to him the object of a secret monomania. To live there, to sleep in the great bed with silk curtains in which the Canon slept, and have all his comforts about him as Chapeloud had, seemed to Birotteau perfect happiness; he looked for nothing beyond. Every feeling which envy and ambition arouse in the souls of other men, was, in that of the Abbé Birotteau, centered in the deep and secret longing with which he wished for a home like that created for himself by the Abbé Chapeloud. When his friend fell ill, it was no doubt sincere affection that brought Birotteau to see him; but on first hearing of the Canon’s sickness, and while sitting with him, there rose from the depths of his soul a thousand thoughts, of which the simplest formula was always this, “If Chapeloud dies, I can have his rooms.” Still, as Birotteau had a good heart, strict principles, and a narrow intellect, he never went so far as to conceive of means for getting his friend to leave him his library and furniture. + 

The Abbé Chapeloud, an amiable and indulgent egoist, guessed his friend’s mania⁠—which it was not difficult to do, and forgave it⁠—which for a priest would seem less easy. Still, Birotteau, whose friendship remained unaltered, never ceased to walk day after day with the Canon up and down the same path in the Mall at Tours without curtailing by a single minute the time devoted to this exercise for the last twenty years. Birotteau thought of his involuntary wishes as sins, and would have been capable, in sheer contrition, of the utmost devotion for Chapeloud’s sake. + 

The Canon paid his debt to this sincere and artless brotherliness by saying, a few days before his death, to the priest, who was reading to him from the Quotidienne, “You will get the rooms this time. I feel that it is all over with me.” + 

In fact, by his will, the Abbé Chapeloud left his library and furniture to Birotteau. The possession of these much-longed-for things, and the prospect of being taken as a boarder by Mademoiselle Gamard, greatly softened Birotteau’s grief at the loss of his friend the Canon. He would not perhaps have called him to life again, but he wept for him. For several days he was like Gargantua, whose wife died in giving birth to Pantagruel, and who knew not whether to rejoice over his son’s birth or to lament at having buried his good Badebec, and made the mistake of rejoicing at his wife’s death and deploring the birth of Pantagruel. + 

The Abbé Birotteau spent the first days of his grief in verifying the volumes of his library, and enjoying the use of his furniture, examining them, and saying in a tone, which, unfortunately, could not be recorded, “Poor Chapeloud!” In short, his joy and his grief were so absorbing that he felt no distress at seeing the canonry bestowed on another, though the lamented Chapeloud had always hoped that Birotteau might be his successor. Mademoiselle Gamard received the Abbé with pleasure as a boarder, and he thus enjoyed thenceforth all the delights of material existence that the deceased Canon had so highly praised. + 

Incalculable advantages! For, to hear the late departed Canon Chapeloud, not one of the priests who dwelt in the town of Tours, not even the Archbishop himself, could be the object of care so delicate or so precise as that lavished by Mademoiselle Gamard on her two boarders. The first words spoken by the Canon to his friend as they walked in the Mall had almost always referred to the excellent dinner he had just eaten; and it was a rare thing if, in the course of the seven walks they took in the week, he did not happen to say at least fourteen times, “That good woman has certainly a vocation for taking charge of the priesthood.” + 

“Only think,” said the Canon to Birotteau, “for twelve successive years clean linen, albs, surplices, bands⁠—nothing has ever been missing. I always find everything in its place and in sufficient numbers, all smelling of orris-root. My furniture is constantly polished, and so well wiped that for a long time past I have not known what dust means. Did you ever see a speck in my rooms? Then the fire-logs are well chosen, the smallest things are all good; in short, it is as if Mademoiselle Gamard always had an eye on my room. I cannot recollect in ten years ever having had to ring twice for anything whatever. That I call living! never to have to look for a thing, not even for one’s slippers; always to find a good fire and a good table. Once my bellows put me out, the nozzle had got burned; I had not to complain twice. The very next day Mademoiselle had bought me a nice pair of bellows and the pair of tongs you see me use to put the fire together.” + 

Birotteau’s only reply was, “Smelling of orris-root!” That smelling of orris-root always struck him. The Canon’s words painted a really ideal state of happiness to the poor priest whose bands and albs nearly turned his brain; for he had no sense of order, and not unfrequently forgot to bespeak his dinner. And so, whenever he caught sight of Mademoiselle Gamard at Saint-Gatien, either while going round for the offertory or while reading mass, he never failed to give her a gentle and kindly glance such as Saint Theresa may have raised to heaven. + 

Though the comfort which every creature desires, and of which he had so often dreamed, had now fallen to his lot, as it is difficult for any man, even for a priest, to live without a hobby, for the last eighteen months the Abbé Birotteau had substituted for his two gratified passions a craving for a canonry. The title of canon had become to him what that of a peer must be to a plebeian minister. And the probability of a nomination, the hopes he had just been encouraged in at Madame de Listomère’s, had so effectually turned his brain that it was only on reaching home that he discovered that he had left his umbrella at her house. Perhaps, indeed, but for the rain that fell in torrents, he would not have remembered it then, so completely was he absorbed in repeating to himself all that had been said on the subject of his preferment by the members of the party at Madame de Listomère’s⁠—an old lady with whom he spent every Wednesday evening. + 

The Abbé rang sharply as a hint to the maid not to keep him waiting. Then he shrank into the corner by the door so as to be splashed as little as possible; but the water from the roof ran off precisely on the toes of his shoes, and the gusts of wind blew on to him squalls of rain not unlike a repeated shower bath. After calculating the time necessary for coming from the kitchen to pull the latchstring under the door, he rang again, a very significant peal. “They cannot have gone out,” thought he, hearing not a sound within. And for the third time he rang, again and again, a peal that sounded so sharply through the house, and was so loudly repeated by every echo in the Cathedral, that it was impossible not to be roused by this assertive jangle. And a few moments after it was not without satisfaction, mingled with annoyance, that he heard the maid’s wooden shoes clattering over the pebbly stone floor. Still, the gouty priest’s troubles were not over so soon as he thought. Instead of pulling the latch, Marianne was obliged to unlock the door with the huge key, and draw back the bolts. + 

“How can you leave me to ring three times in such weather?” said he to Marianne. + 

“Why, sir, as you see, the house was locked up. Everybody has been in bed a long time; it has struck a quarter to ten. Mademoiselle must have thought you had not gone out.” + 

“But you yourself saw me go out. Besides, Mademoiselle knows very well that I go to Madame de Listomère’s every Wednesday.” + 

“Well, sir, I only did as Mademoiselle told me,” replied Marianne, locking the door again. + 

These words were a blow to the Abbé, which he felt all the more keenly for the intense bliss of his daydream. He said nothing, but followed Marianne to the kitchen, to fetch his bedroom candle, which he supposed would have been brought down there. But instead of going to the kitchen, Marianne lighted the Abbé up to his rooms, where he found the candlestick on a table outside the door of the red drawing-room, in a sort of anteroom, formed of the stair landing, which the Canon had shut in for the purpose by a large glass partition. Dumb with surprise, he hurried into his bedroom, found no fire on the hearth, and called Marianne, who had not yet had time to go downstairs. + 

“You have not lighted my fire?” said he. + 

“I beg your pardon, sir; it must have gone out again.” + 

Birotteau looked again at the hearth, and saw plainly that the ashes had been piled there since the morning. + 

“I want to dry my feet,” he went on; “make up the fire.” + 

Marianne obeyed with the haste of a woman who wants to go to sleep. While the Abbé himself hunted for his slippers, failing to see them in the middle of his bed-rug, as usual, he made certain observations as to the way Marianne was dressed, which proved to a demonstration that she had not just got out of bed, as she had asserted. And he then remembered that for about a fortnight past he had been weaned from all the little attentions that had made life so endurable for the last eighteen months. Now, as it is in the nature of narrow minds to argue from minute things, he at once gave himself up to deep reflections on these four incidents, imperceptible to anybody else, but to him nothing less than four catastrophes. The oversight as to his slippers, Marianne’s falsehood with regard to the fire, the unaccustomed removal of his candlestick to the table in the anteroom, and the long waiting so ingeniously inflicted on him on the threshold in the rain, were ominous of a complete wreck of his happiness. + 

When the fire was blazing on the dogs, when his night-lamp was lighted, and Marianne had left him without inquiring as usual, “Does Monsieur need anything further?” the Abbé sank gently into his departed friend’s roomy and handsome easy-chair; still, his action as he dropped into it was somewhat melancholy. The worthy man was oppressed by the presentiment of terrible disaster. His eyes fell in succession on the handsome timepiece, the chest of drawers, the chairs, curtains, and rugs, the four-post bed, the holy-water shell and the crucifix, on a Virgin by le Valentin, on a Christ by Lebrun⁠—in short, on all the details of the room; the expression of his face betrayed the pangs of the tenderest farewell that a lover ever looked at his first mistress, or an old man at his latest plantation. The Abbé had just detected⁠—a little late, it is true⁠—the symptoms of a covert persecution to which he had for about three months been subjected by Mademoiselle Gamard, whose ill-will would no doubt have been suspected sooner by a man of keener intelligence. + 

Have not all old maids a certain talent for emphasizing the acts and words suggested to them by hatred? They scratch as cats do. And not only do they hurt, but they take pleasure in hurting, and in making their victim see that they can hurt. While a man of the world would not have allowed himself to be clawed a second time, the worthy Birotteau had taken several scratches in the face before he had conceived of malignant purpose. + 

Immediately, with the inquisitorial shrewdness acquired by priests, accustomed as they are to direct consciences and to investigate trifles from the shades of the confessional, the Abbé Birotteau set to work to formulate the following proposition⁠—as though it were the basis of a religious controversy.⁠—Granting that Mademoiselle Gamard may have forgotten Madame de Listomère’s evening⁠—that Marianne had neglected to light my fire⁠—that they thought I was at home; as it is certain that I, myself, must have taken my candlestick downstairs this morning!!!⁠—it is impossible that Mademoiselle Gamard, seeing it in her sitting-room, could have supposed I had gone to bed. Ergo, Mademoiselle Gamard left me at the door in the rain on purpose; and by having the candlestick carried up to my rooms she meant me to know it.⁠—“What does it mean?” he said aloud, carried away by the gravity of the case, as he rose to take off his wet clothes, and put on his dressing-gown and his nightcap. Then he went from the bed to the fire gesticulating and jerking out such comments as these, in various tones of voice, all ended in a falsetto pitch as though to represent points of interrogation. + 

“What the deuce have I done? Why does she owe me a grudge?⁠—Marianne cannot have forgotten my fire; Mademoiselle must have told her not to light it! I should be childish not to see from the tone and manner she assumes towards me that I have been so unfortunate as to displease her. Nothing of the kind ever happened to Chapeloud!⁠—It will be impossible for me to live in the midst of the annoyances that⁠ ⁠… At my age too!” + 

He went to bed, hoping to clear up on the morrow the cause of the hatred which was destroying forever the happiness he had enjoyed for two years after wishing for it so long. Alas! the secret motives of Mademoiselle Gamard’s feeling against him were destined to remain forever unknown to him; not because they were difficult to guess, but because the poor man had not the simple candor which enables great minds and thorough scoundrels to recognize and judge themselves. Only a man of genius or a master of intrigue ever says to himself, “I was to blame.” Interest and talent are the only conscientious and lucid counselors. + 

Now, the Abbé Birotteau, whose kindliness went to the pitch of silliness, whose knowledge was a sort of veneer laid on by patient work, who had no experience whatever of the world and its ways, and who lived between the altar and the confessional, chiefly engaged in deciding trivial cases of conscience in his capacity of confessor to the schools of the town and to some noble souls who appreciated him⁠—the Abbé Birotteau was, in short, to be regarded as a big baby to whom the greater part of social customs were absolutely unknown. At the same time, the selfishness natural to all human beings, reinforced by the egoism peculiar to a priest, and by that of the narrow life of a provincial town, had insensibly grown strong in him without his suspecting it. If anyone had taken enough interest in searching the good man’s soul to show him that, in the infinitely small details of his existence and the trivial duties of his private life, he failed essentially in the self-sacrifice he professed, he would have punished and mortified himself in all sincerity. + 

But those whom we offend, even unwittingly, reck not of our innocence; they desire and achieve revenge. Thus Birotteau, weak as he was, was doomed to suffer under the hand of that great distributive Justice which always trusts the world to carry out its sentences, known to many simpletons as the misfortunes of life. + 

There was this difference between Canon Chapeloud and the Abbé: one was a witty and ingenious egotist, the other an honest and clumsy one. When Monsieur Chapeloud had come to board with Mademoiselle Gamard, he could perfectly well gauge his landlady’s character. The confessional had enlightened him as to the bitterness infused into an old maid’s heart by the misfortune of finding herself outside society; his behavior to Mademoiselle Gamard was shrewdly calculated. The lady being no more than eight-and-thirty, still had those little pretensions which, in such discreet persons, turn in later years into a high opinion of themselves. + 

The Canon understood that, to live comfortably with Mademoiselle Gamard, he must always show her the same respect and attention, and be more infallible than the Pope. To attain this end he established no points of contact between himself and her beyond what the strictest politeness required, and those necessarily subsisting between two persons living under the same roof. Thus, though he and the Abbé Troubert regularly took their three meals a day, he had never appeared at breakfast, but had accustomed Mademoiselle Gamard to send up to him, in his bed, a cup of coffee with milk. Then, he had avoided the boredom of supper by always taking tea at some house where he spent the evening. Thus he rarely saw his landlady at any time of the day excepting at dinner, but he always came into the room a few minutes before the hour. During this polite little visit, every day of the twelve years he had spent under her roof he had asked her the same questions and received the same answers. How Mademoiselle Gamard had slept during the night, the breakfast, little domestic events, the appearance of her face, the health of her person, the weather, the length of the Church services, the incidents of the morning’s Mass, the health of this or that priest, constituted the themes of this daily dialogue. + 

During dinner he always indulged her with indirect flattery, going on from the quality of the fish, the excellence of some seasoning, or the merits of a sauce, to those of Mademoiselle Gamard and her virtues as a housekeeper. He was sure of soothing all the old maid’s conceits when he praised the art with which her preserves were made, her gherkins pickled, and the excellence of her jam, her pies, and other gastronomical inventions. Finally, the wily Canon never quitted her yellow drawing-room without remarking that there was not another house in Tours where the coffee was so good as that he had just been drinking. + 

Thanks to this perfect comprehension of Mademoiselle Gamard’s character, and this science of life as practised by the Canon for those twelve years, no grounds had ever occurred for a discussion on any matter of domestic discipline. The Abbé Chapeloud had from the first discerned every angle, every rasping edge, every asperity in this old maid, and had so regulated the effect of the tangents where they inevitably met, as to secure from her every concession needed for peace and happiness in life. And Mademoiselle Gamard would always say that Canon Chapeloud was a most amiable man, very easy to live with, and full of wit. + 

As to the Abbé Troubert, the bigot never by any chance spoke of him. Troubert had so completely fallen into the routine of her life, like a satellite in the orbit of its planet, that he had become to her a sort of mongrel creature between those of the human and those of the canine species; he filled a place in her mind exactly below that occupied by her friends and that filled by a fat asthmatic pug-dog to which she was tenderly devoted; she managed him completely, and their interests became so inextricably knit that many persons of Mademoiselle Gamard’s circle supposed that the Abbé Troubert had an eye to the old maid’s fortune, and was attaching her to him by his constant patience, guiding her all the more effectually because he affected to obey her, never allowing her to see in him the faintest wish to rule her. + 

When the Canon died, the old maid, anxious to have a boarder of quiet habits, naturally thought of this priest. The Canon’s will had not yet been opened when Mademoiselle Gamard was already meditating giving the departed Canon’s upper rooms to her worthy Abbé Troubert, whom she thought but poorly lodged on the ground floor. But when the Abbé Birotteau came to discuss with her the written conditions of her terms, she found that he was so much in love with the lodgings for which he had long cherished a passion he might now avow, that she did not venture to propose an exchange, and affection gave way before the pressure of interest. To console her favorite Abbé, Mademoiselle substituted a parquet flooring in a neat pattern for the white Château-Renaud tiles in the ground-floor rooms, and rebuilt a chimney that smoked. + 

The Abbé Birotteau had seen his friend Chapeloud constantly for twelve years, without its ever having occurred to him to wonder why he was so excessively circumspect in his intercourse with the old maid. When he came to live under this saintly damsel’s roof he felt like a lover on the verge of happiness. Even if he had not been blinded by natural stupidity, his eyes were too much dazzled by contentment for him to be capable of gauging Mademoiselle Gamard or of considering the due measure of his daily relations with her. Mademoiselle Gamard, seen from afar, through the prism of the material enjoyment the Abbé dreamed of finding with her, appeared to him an admirable creature, a perfect Christian, an essentially charitable soul, the woman of the Gospel, the wise Virgin graced with the humble and modest virtues which shed celestial fragrance over life. And thus, with all the enthusiasm of a man who has reached a long-wished-for goal, with the simplicity of a child and the silly heedlessness of an old man devoid of worldly experience, he came into Mademoiselle Gamard’s life as a fly is caught in a spider’s web. + 

So the first day he was to dine and sleep in the old maid’s house he lingered in her drawing-room, as much in the wish to make acquaintance with her as in the inexplicable embarrassment that often troubles shy people and makes them fear lest they should be rude if they break off a conversation to leave the room. So there he remained all the evening. Another old maid, a friend of Birotteau’s, Mademoiselle Salomon de Villenoix, came in the evening. Then Mademoiselle Gamard had the joy of arranging a game of boston. The Abbé, as he went to bed, thought he had had a very pleasant evening. + 

As yet he knew Mademoiselle Gamard and the Abbé Troubert but very little, and saw only the surface. Few persons show their faults unveiled at first. Generally everybody tries to assume an attractive exterior. So Birotteau conceived the delightful purpose of devoting his evenings to Mademoiselle Gamard instead of spending them elsewhere. The lady had some few years since conceived a desire which revived more strongly every day. This desire, common to old men, and even to pretty women, had become in her a passion like that of Birotteau for his friend Chapeloud’s rooms, and was rooted in the old maid’s heart by the feelings of pride, egoism, envy, and vanity which are innate in the worldly-minded. This story repeats itself in every age. You have but slightly to enlarge the circle at the bottom of which these personages are about to move, to find the coefficient motive of events which happen in the highest ranks of society. + 

Mademoiselle Gamard spent her evenings at six or eight different houses by turns. Whether it was that she was annoyed at having to seek company, and thought that at her age she had a right to expect some return; whether her conceit was affronted by her having no circle of her own; or whether it was that her vanity craved the compliments and amusements she saw her friends enjoying⁠—all her ambition was to make her salon a centre of union towards which a certain number of persons would tend every evening with pleasure. When Birotteau and his friend Mademoiselle Salomon had spent a few evenings in her room with the faithful and patient Abbé Troubert, one night, as she came out of Saint-Gatien, Mademoiselle Gamard said to the kind friends of whom she had hitherto considered herself the slave, that those who cared to see her might very well come once a week to her house, where a sufficient party met already to make up a game of boston; that she could not leave her new boarder, the Abbé Birotteau, alone; that Mademoiselle Salomon had not yet missed a single evening of the week; that she belonged to her boarders; and that, etc., etc. + 

Her speech was all the more humbly haughty and volubly sweet because Mademoiselle Salomon de Villenoix belonged to the most aristocratic circle in Tours. Though Mademoiselle Salomon came solely for the Abbé’s sake, Mademoiselle Gamard triumphed in having her in her drawing-room. Thanks to the Abbé Birotteau, she found herself on the eve of succeeding in her great scheme of forming a circle which might become as numerous and as agreeable as were those of Madame de Listomère, of Mademoiselle Merlin de la Blottière, and other devout persons in a position to receive the pious society of Tours. But, alas! the Abbé Birotteau brought Mademoiselle Gamard’s hopes to an overthrow. + 

Now, if any persons, who have attained in life the enjoyment of a long-wished-for happiness, have entered into the gladness the Abbé must have felt in lying down to rest in Chapeloud’s bed, they must also form a slight notion of Mademoiselle Gamard’s chagrin at the ruin of her cherished scheme. After accepting his good fortune patiently enough for six months, Birotteau deserted his home, carrying with him Mademoiselle Salomon. + 

In spite of unheard-of efforts, the ambitious Gamard had secured no more than five or six recruits, whose fidelity was very problematical, and at least four unfailing visitors were needed for regular boston. She was consequently obliged to make honorable amends and return to her old friends, for old maids are too poor company to themselves not to crave the doubtful pleasures of society. + 

The causes of this defection are easily imagined. Though the Abbé was one of those to whom Paradise shall one day be opened in virtue of the words, “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” he, like many fools, could not endure the weariness inflicted on him by other fools. Unintelligent persons are like weeds that thrive in good ground; they love to be amused in proportion to the degree in which they weary themselves. Being the incarnation of the dullness they suffer from, the craving they perpetually feel to be divorced from themselves produces the mania for excitement, the need to be where they are not, which characterizes them as it does other creatures who lack feeling, or whose lot is a failure, or who suffer by their own fault. Without understanding too clearly the vacuity and nullity of Mademoiselle Gamard, or discerning the smallness of her mind, poor Birotteau discovered, too late for happiness, the faults she had in common with all old maids, as well as those personal to herself. + 

What is evil, in other people, contrasts so strongly with what is good, that it generally strikes the eye before inflicting a wound. This moral phenomenon might at need justify the tendency that leads us all more or less to evil speaking. Socially speaking, it is so natural to satirize the faults of others, that we ought to forgive the severe gossip to which our own absurdities give rise, and wonder at nothing but calumny. + 

But the good Abbé’s eyes were never at the precise focus which enables the worldly wise to see and at once evade their neighbor’s sharp tongues; to discover his landlady’s faults, he was obliged to endure the warning given by nature to all its creatures, that of suffering. + 

Old maids, having never bent their temper or their lives to other lives and other tempers, as woman’s destiny requires, have for the most part a mania for making everything about them bend to them. In Mademoiselle Gamard this feeling had degenerated into despotism, but this despotism could only be exerted in small things. For instance⁠—out of a thousand cases⁠—the basket of counters and fish placed on the boston table for the Abbé Birotteau must be left on the spot where she had put it, and the Abbé irritated her extremely by moving it, as he did almost every evening. What was the cause of this touchiness foolishly provoked by mere trifles, and what was its object? No one could say; Mademoiselle Gamard herself did not know. + 

Though very lamblike by nature, the new boarder did not like to feel the crook too often, any more than a sheep, especially a crook set with nails. Without understanding Canon Troubert’s amazing patience, Birotteau was anxious to escape the bliss which Mademoiselle Gamard was bent on seasoning to her own taste, for she thought she could compound happiness as she could preserves; but the luckless priest set to work very clumsily, as a result of his perfectly artless nature. So the separation was not effected without some clawing and pricking, to which the Abbé Birotteau tried to seem insensible. + 

By the end of the first year of his life under Mademoiselle Gamard’s roof the Abbé had fallen into his old habits, spending two evenings a week at Madame de Listomère’s, three with Mademoiselle Salomon, and the other two with Mademoiselle Merlin de la Blottière. These ladies moved in the aristocratic sphere of Tours society, to which Mademoiselle Gamard was not admitted. So the landlady was excessively indignant at the Abbé’s defection, which made her aware of her small importance: any kind of selection implying some contempt for the rejected object. + 

“Monsieur Birotteau did not find us good enough company,” the Abbé Troubert would say to Mademoiselle Gamard’s friends when she was obliged to give up her “evenings.” “He is a wit, a gourmet! He must have fashion, luxury, brilliant conversation, the tittle-tattle of the town.” + 

And such words always prompted Mademoiselle Gamard to praise the Canon’s excellent temper at the expense of Birotteau’s. + 

“He is not so clever when all is said,” she remarked. “But for Canon Chapeloud he would never have been received by Madame de Listomère. Oh, I lost a great deal when the Abbé Chapeloud died. What an amiable man! and so easy to live with! Indeed, in twelve years we never had the smallest difficulty or disagreement.” + 

Mademoiselle Gamard painted so unflattering a portrait of Monsieur Birotteau that her innocent boarder was regarded by this citizen circle, secretly hostile to the aristocratic class, as an essentially fractious man, very difficult to get on with. Then for a few weeks the old maid had the satisfaction of hearing herself pitied by her female friends, who, without believing a word of what they said, repeated again and again, “How can you, who are so gentle and so kind, have inspired him with such dislike?⁠—” or, “Be comforted, dear Mademoiselle Gamard, everyone knows you too well⁠—” and so forth. + 

Delighted, nevertheless, to escape spending an evening each week in the Close⁠—the most deserted and gloomy spot in all Tours, and the most remote from the centre of life⁠—they all blessed the Abbé. + 

Love or hatred must constantly increase between two persons who are always together; every moment fresh reasons are found for loving or hating better. Thus to Mademoiselle Gamard the Abbé Birotteau became unendurable. Eighteen months after taking him as a boarder, just when the good man believed he had found the peace of contentment in the silence of aversion, and prided himself on having come so comfortably to terms with the old woman, to use his expression, he was to her the object of covert persecution and calmly planned animosity. + 

The four capital facts of the closed door, the forgotten slippers, the lack of fire, the candlestick taken to his rooms, alone could betray the terrible enmity of which the last effects were not to fall on him till the moment when they would be irremediable. As he went to sleep, the good Abbé racked his brain, but vainly⁠—and, indeed, he must soon have come to the bottom of it⁠—to account for Mademoiselle Gamard’s singularly uncivil behavior. In point of fact, as he had originally acted very logically, obeying the natural law of his egoism, he could not possibly form a guess as to how he had offended his landlady. While great things are simple to understand, and easy to express, the mean things of life need much detail. The incidents which constitute the prologue, as it were, to this parochial drama, in which the passions will be seen not less violent than if they had been excited by important interests, necessitated this long introduction, and any exact historian would have found it difficult to abridge the trivial tale. + 

When he awoke next morning, the Abbé’s thoughts were so much set on the canonry, that he forgot the four circumstances which, the evening before, had appeared to him to be sinister prognostics of a future full of disaster. Birotteau was not the man to get up without a fire; he rang to announce to Marianne that he was awake, and wanted her; then, as he was wont, he lay lost in a somnolent, half-dreamy state, during which, as a rule, the woman made the fire, and dragged him gently from his last doze by a hum of inquiry and quiet bustle⁠—a sort of music that he liked. + 

Half an hour went by, and Marianne had not appeared. The Abbé, already half a Canon, was about to ring again, when he stayed his hand on hearing a man’s step on the stairs. In fact, the Abbé Troubert, after discreetly tapping at the door, at Birotteau’s bidding came in. This call did not surprise him; the priests were in the habit of paying each other a visit once a month. The Canon was at once amazed that Marianne should not yet have lighted his quasi-colleague’s fire. He opened a window, called Marianne in a rough tone, and bid her come up at once; then, turning to his brother priest, he said, “If Mademoiselle should hear that you have no fire, she would give Marianne a good scolding.” + 

After this speech he inquired for Birotteau’s health, and asked him, in an insinuating voice, whether he had any recent news that could encourage his hope of being made a Canon. The Abbé explained to him what was being done, and guilelessly told him who the personages were that Madame de Listomère was canvassing, not knowing that Troubert had never forgiven that lady for not inviting him to her house⁠—him⁠—Canon Troubert, twice designate to be made Vicar-General of the diocese. + 

It would be impossible to meet with two figures offering so many points of contrast as those of these two priests. Troubert, tall and lean, had a bilious yellow hue, while Birotteau was what is familiarly called crummy. His face, round and florid, spoke of good-nature devoid of ideas; while Troubert’s, long and furrowed by deep wrinkles, wore at times an expression of irony and scorn; still, attentive examination was needed to discover these feelings. The Canon was habitually and absolutely placid, his eyelids almost always lowered over a pair of orange-hazel eyes, whose glance was at will very clear and piercing. Red hair completed this countenance, which was constantly clouded under the shroud cast over his features by serious meditations. Several persons had at first supposed him to be absorbed in high and rooted ambition; but those who thought they knew him best had ended by demolishing this opinion, representing him as stultified by Mademoiselle Gamard’s tyranny, or worn by long fasting. He rarely spoke, and never laughed. When he happened to be pleasurably moved, a faint smile appeared and lost itself in the furrows on his cheeks. + 

Birotteau, on the other hand, was all expansiveness, all openness; he liked tidbits, and could be amused by a trifle with the artlessness of a man free from gall and malice. The Abbé Troubert at first sight inspired an involuntary feeling of dread, while the Vicar made everyone who looked at him smile kindly. When the tall Canon stalked solemnly along the cloisters and aisles of Saint-Gatien, his brow bent, his eye stern, he commanded respect; his bowed figure harmonized with the yellow vaulting of the cathedral; there was something monumental in the folds of his gown, and worthy of the sculptor’s art. But the good little Abbé moved without dignity, trotted and pattered, looking as if he rolled along. + 

And yet the two men had one point of resemblance. While Troubert’s ambitious looks, by making the world afraid of him, had perhaps contributed to condemn him to the modest dignity of a mere Canon, Birotteau’s character and appearance seemed to stamp him forever as no more than a vicaire of the Cathedral. The Abbé Troubert meanwhile, at the age of fifty, by the moderation of his conduct, by the apparently total absence of any ambition in his aims, and by his saintly life, had dispelled the fears his superiors had conceived of his supposed cleverness and his alarming exterior. Indeed, for a year past, his health had been seriously impaired, so that his early promotion to the dignity of Vicar-General to the Archbishop seemed probable. His rivals even hoped for his appointment, to enable them the more effectually to prepare for their own, during the short span of life that might yet be granted him by a malady that had become chronic. Birotteau’s triple chin, far from suggesting the same hopes, displayed to the candidates who were struggling for the canonry all the symptoms of vigorous health, and his gout seemed to them the proverbial assurance of a long life. + 

The Abbé Chapeloud, a man of great good sense, whose amiability had secured him the friendship of persons in good society and of the various heads of the diocese, had always opposed the elevation of the Abbé Troubert, secretly and with much address; he had even hindered his admission to any of the salons where the best set in Tours were wont to meet, though during his lifetime Troubert always treated him with great respect, and on all occasions showed him the utmost deference. This persistent submissiveness had not availed to change the deceased Canon’s opinion; during his last walk with Birotteau, he had said to him once more: + 

“Do not trust that dry pole Troubert! He is Sixtus V reduced to the scale of a bishopric.” + 

This was Mademoiselle Gamard’s friend and messmate, who, the very day after that on which she had, so to speak, declared war with poor Birotteau, had come to call on him with every mark of friendliness. + 

“You must excuse Marianne,” said Troubert as she came in. “I fancy she did my room first. My place is very damp, and I coughed a great deal during the night.⁠—You are very healthily situated here,” he added, looking up at the mouldings. + 

“Oh, I am lodged like a Canon!” replied Birotteau with a emile. + 

“And I like a curate,” replied the humble priest. + 

“Yes, but before long you will be lodged in the Archbishop’s Palace,” said the good Abbé, who only wanted that everybody should be happy. + 

“Oh! or in the graveyard. God’s will be done!” and Troubert looked up to heaven with a resigned air. “I came,” he went on, “to beg you to lend me the General Clergy List. No one but you has the book at Tours.” + 

“Take it out of the bookcase,” replied Birotteau, reminded by the Canon’s last words of all the joys of his life. + 

The tall priest went into the library, and remained there all the time the Abbé was dressing. Presently the breakfast-bell rang, and Birotteau, reflecting that but for Troubert’s visit he would have had no fire to get up by, said to himself, “He is a good man!” + 

The two priests went down together, each armed with an enormous folio, which they laid on one of the consoles in the dining-room. + 

“What in the world is that?” asked Mademoiselle Gamard in sharp tones, addressing Birotteau. “You are not going to lumber up my dining-room with old books, I hope!” + 

“They are some books I wanted,” said the Abbé Troubert. “Monsieur is kind enough to lend them to me.” + 

“I might have guessed that,” said she with a scornful smile. “Monsieur Birotteau does not often study such big books.” + 

“And how are you, mademoiselle?” asked the Abbé in a piping voice. + 

“Why, not at all well,” she replied curtly. “You were the cause of my being roused from my first sleep, and I felt the effects all night.” And as she seated herself. Mademoiselle Gamard added, “Gentlemen, the milk will get cold.” + 

Astounded at being so sourly received by his hostess when he expected her to apologize, but frightened, as timid people are, by the prospect of a discussion, especially when they themselves are the subject of it, the poor Abbé took his place in silence. Then, recognizing in Mademoiselle Gamard’s face the obvious symptoms of a bad temper, he sat warring with his common sense, which advised him not to submit to her want of manners, while his nature prompted him to avoid a quarrel. Birotteau, a prey to this internal struggle, began by seriously studying the broad-green stripes painted on the oilcloth cover, which, from immemorial habit, Mademoiselle Gamard always left on the table during breakfast, heedless of the frayed edges and scars innumerable that covered this cloth. The two boarders were seated opposite each other, in cane armchairs at each end of the table, a royal square; the place between them being occupied by the landlady, who towered above the table from a chair mounted on runners, padded with cushions, and backing on the dining-room stove. This room and the common sitting-room were on the ground floor, under the Abbé Birotteau’s bedroom and drawing-room. When the Abbé had received from Mademoiselle Gamard his cup of sweetened coffee, he felt chilled by the utter silence in which he was doomed to perform the usually cheerful function of breakfast. He dared not look either at Troubert’s expressionless face, nor at the old maid’s threatening countenance; so, to do something, he turned to the pug-dog, overburdened with fat, lying near the stove on a cushion whence it never stirred, finding always on the left a little plate of dainties, and on the right a saucer of clean water. + 

“Well, my pet,” said he, “so you want your coffee!” + 

This personage, one of the most important members of the household, but not a troublesome one, since he never barked now, and left the conversation to his mistress, looked up at Birotteau with little eyes buried in the folds of fat that wrinkled his face. Then he cunningly shut them again. + 

To give the measure of the priest’s discomfiture, it must be explained that, being gifted with a voice and volubility as resonant and meaningless as the sound of an india-rubber ball, he asserted, without being able to give the faculty any reason for his opinion, that speech favored digestion. Mademoiselle Gamard, who shared this theory of hygiene, had never hitherto failed to converse during meals, notwithstanding their misunderstanding; but now for some few days the Abbé had racked his wits in vain to ask her insidious questions which might loosen her tongue. If the narrow limits to which this story is restricted would allow of a report in full of one of these conversations which always provoked the Abbé Troubert’s bitter and sardonic smiles, it would give a perfect picture of the Boeotian existence of provincials. Some clever men might perhaps be even pleased to know the extraordinary amplitude given by the Abbé Birotteau and Mademoiselle Gamard to their personal opinions on politics, religion, and literature. There would certainly be some very funny things to tell: such as their reasons, in 1820, for doubting the death of Napoleon, or the conjectures which led them to believe in the survival of Louis XVII, smuggled away in a hollow log of wood. Who would not have laughed to hear them asserting, with arguments peculiarly their own, that the King of France alone spent the money collected in taxes; that the Chambers met to destroy the Clergy; that more than thirteen hundred thousand persons had perished on the scaffold during the Revolution? Then they discussed the press, knowing nothing of how many newspapers were issued, having not the smallest idea of what this modern power is. Finally, Monsieur Birotteau listened respectfully to Mademoiselle Gamard when she asserted that a man fed on an egg every morning would infallibly die at the end of a year, and that it had been known; that a soft roll eaten without drinking for a few days would cure sciatica; that all the workmen who had been employed in the destruction of the Abbey of Saint-Martin had died within six months; that a certain préfet had done his utmost in Bonaparte’s time to ruin the towers of Saint-Gatien, and a thousand other absurd stories. + 

But at the present juncture Birotteau felt his tongue dead within him; so he resigned himself to eating without trying to converse. He soon thought that such silence was perilous to his digestion, and boldly said, “This is excellent coffee!” But the courageous act fell flat. + 

After looking at the narrow strip of sky above the garden, between the two black buttresses of Saint-Gatien, the Abbé again was brave enough to remark, “It will be finer today than it was yesterday.” + 

At this Mademoiselle Gamard did no more than cast one of her most ingratiating glances at Monsieur Troubert, and then turn her eyes full of terrible severity on Birotteau, who was happily looking down. + 

No being of the female sex was better able to assume the elegiac attitude of an old maid than Mademoiselle Sophie Gamard; but to do justice in describing a person whose character will give the greatest interest to the trivial events of this drama, and to the antecedent lives of the figures playing a part in it, it will be well here to epitomize the ideas of which the old maid is the outcome. The habits of life form the soul, and the soul forms the countenance. If in society, as in the universe, everything must have a purpose, there yet are on this earth some existences of which the use and purpose are undiscoverable; morality and political economy alike reject the individual that consumes without producing, that fills a place on earth without diffusing either good or evil⁠—for evil, no doubt, is a form of good of which the results are not immediately manifest. Very rarely does an old maid fail to place herself by her own act in this class of unproductive creatures. Now if the consciousness of work done gives productive beings a sense of satisfaction which helps them to endure life, the knowledge that they are a burden on others, or even merely useless, must produce the contrary effect, and give to the inert a contempt for themselves as great as that they provoke in others. This stern social reprobation is one of the causes which, unknown to themselves, contribute to implant in their soul the grievance which is stamped on their faces. + 

A prejudice, not perhaps without a basis of truth, everywhere gives rise⁠—and in France more than elsewhere⁠—to marked disfavor being felt towards a woman with whom no man has chosen to share his fortunes, or to endure the woes of life. And an age comes to unmarried women when the world, rightly or wrongly, condemns them on the strength of the disdain to which they are victims. If ugly, the amiability of their nature ought to have redeemed the imperfections of their persons; if pretty, their loneliness must have its cause in serious reasons. It is hard to decide which of the two classes is most to be contemned. If their single life is deliberately chosen, if it is a determination to be independent, neither men nor mothers can forgive them for having shirked the sacrifice of woman by refusing to know the passions that make their sex pathetic. To reject its sufferings is to forego its poetry, to cease to deserve the sweet consolations to which a mother has always uncontested rights. Then the generous feelings, the exquisite qualities of woman, can only be developed by constant exercise. When she remains unmarried, a creature of the female sex is a self-contradiction: egoistical and cold, she fills us with horror. + 

This pitiless verdict is unfortunately too just for old maids to misinterpret its motives. These ideas germinate in their heart as naturally as the effects of their desolate life are imprinted on their features. Thus they wither, because the constant expansion, or the happiness that blooms in a woman’s face and lends softness to her movements, has never existed in them. Then they grow harsh and discontented, because a creature that fails of its purpose is unhappy, it suffers, and suffering brings forth viciousness. In fact, before an unmarried woman spites herself for her loneliness, she accuses the whole world, and from accusation there is but one step to the desire for revenge. + 

Again, the ill-grace that disfigures their persons is an inevitable outcome of their life. Never having felt the necessity to please, elegance and good taste are unknown to them. This feeling gradually leads them to choose everything to suit their own convenience at the cost of what might be agreeable to others. Without quite understanding their dissimilarity to other women, at last they observe it and suffer from it. Jealousy is an indelible passion in the female heart. Old maids are jealous for nothing, and know only the woes of the single passion which men can forgive in women because it flatters them. Thus tormented on every side, and compelled to reject the development of their nature, old maids are always conscious of a moral uneasiness to which they never become accustomed. Is it not hard at any age, especially for a woman, to read a feeling of repugnance on every face, when it ought to have been her fate to inspire none but sensations of kindliness in the hearts of those about her? Hence an old maid’s glance is always askance, not so much from modesty as from fear and shame. + 

Now, it is impossible that a person perpetually at war with herself, or at loggerheads with life, should leave others in peace, and never envy their happiness. This world of gloomy ideas lay complete in Mademoiselle Gamard’s dull gray eyes; and the broad, dark circle in which they were set spoke of the long struggles of her solitary life. All the wrinkles on her face were straight lines. The form of her brow, head, and cheeks was characterized by rigidity and hardness. Without heeding them, she left the hairs, once brown, of two or three moles on her chin to grow as they would. Her thin lips scarcely covered her long but sufficiently white teeth. She was dark, and her hair had once been black, but terrible headaches had turned it white. This disaster led her to wear a front; but not knowing how to put it on so as to conceal the junction, there often was a small gap between her cap-border and the black ribbon that fastened this half-wig, very carelessly curled. Her gown, of thin silk in summer, of merinos in winter, and always of Carmelite brown, fitted her ungraceful figure and thin arms rather too closely. Her collar, always limp, betrayed a throat whose reddish skin was as finely lined as an oak leaf looked at in the light. + 

Her parentage accounted for the faults of her figure. She was the daughter of a dealer in fire-logs, a peasant who had risen in the world. At eighteen she might have been fresh and plump, but not a trace was now left either of the white skin or the fine color she boasted of having then had. The hues of her complexion had acquired the dull pallor common enough in very devout persons. An aquiline nose was of all her features that which most strongly expressed the despotism of her ideas, just as the flatness of her forehead revealed her narrowness of mind. Her movements had an odd abruptness bereft of all grace; and only to see her pull her handkerchief out of her bag and loudly blow her nose would have told you what her character and habits were. Fairly tall, she held herself very upright, justifying the remark of a naturalist, who explains the stiffness of old maids physiologically by declaring that all their joints anchylose. She walked so that the motion did not distribute itself equally over her whole person, or produce the graceful undulations that are so attractive in a woman; she moved all of a piece, so to speak, seeming to lift herself at every step, like the statue of the Commendatore. In her moments of good-humor she would give it out, as all old maids do, that she could have been married, but that, happily, she had found out her lover’s faithlessness in time, and she thus, without knowing it, passed judgment on her heart in favor of her sense of self-interest. + 

This typical figure of an old maid was suitably set against a background of the grotesque pattern, representing Turkish landscapes, of a satin wallpaper with which the dining-room was hung. Mademoiselle Gamard habitually occupied this room, ornamented by two consoles and a barometer. In the place occupied by each priest was a little footstool in worsted work of faded hues. + 

The public sitting-room, where she received company, was worthy of her. The room will be at once familiar when it is known that it went by the name of the yellow drawing-room; the hangings were yellow, the furniture and wallpaper yellow; on the chimney-shelf, in front of a mirror with a gilt frame, candlesticks and a clock in cut glass reflected a hard glitter to the eye. As to Mademoiselle Gamard’s private sanctum, no one had ever been allowed to enter it. It could only be conjectured that it was full of the odds and ends, the shabby furniture, the rags and tatters, so to speak, which all old maids collect and cling to so fondly. + 

This was the woman who was destined to exert the greatest influence over the Abbé Birotteau’s latter days. Having failed to exercise the energies bestowed on woman in the way intended by nature, and urged by the need of expending them, this old maid had thrown them into the sordid intrigue, the petty tittle-tattle of provincial life, and the selfish scheming which at last exclusively absorbs all old maids. + 

Birotteau, for his woe, had developed in Sophie Gamard the only feelings this unhappy creature could possibly know, those of hatred; these, till now latent, as a result of the calm monotony of a country-town life, whose horizon was to her more especially narrow, were presently to become all the more intense for being wreaked on small things, and in a narrow sphere of activity. Birotteau was one of those men who are predestined to suffer everything, because, as they never foresee anything, they can avoid nothing; everything falls on them. + 

“Yes, it will be fine,” the Canon replied after a pause, seeming to come out of his meditations and to wish to fulfil the laws of good manners. + 

Birotteau, frightened at the time that had elapsed between the remark and the reply, since he, for the first time in his life, had swallowed his coffee without speaking, left the dining-room, where his heart was held as in a vise. Feeling his cup of coffee lie heavy on his stomach, he went to walk, sadly enough, up and down the narrow box-edged paths which marked out a star in the garden. But as he turned after his first round, he saw the Abbé Troubert and Mademoiselle Gamard standing at the glass door of the drawing-room; he with his arms crossed, as motionless as the statue on a tomb, she leaning against the shutter-door. Both, as they watched him, seemed to be counting the number of his steps. + 

To a timid person there is nothing so distressing as being the object of inquisitive inspection; when it is made by the eyes of hatred, the sort of suffering it inflicts becomes an intolerable martyrdom. Presently the Abbé fancied that he was hindering Mademoiselle Gamard and the Canon from taking their walk. This notion, inspired alike by fear and by good-nature, acquired such proportions, that he abandoned the place. He went away, already thinking no more of his canonry, so greatly was he worried by the woman’s maddening tyranny. + 

By chance, and happily for him, he was kept very busy at Saint-Gatien, where there were several funerals, a marriage, and two baptisms. This enabled him to forget his troubles. When his appetite warned him of the dinner hour, he took out his watch in some alarm, seeing that it was some minutes past four. He knew Mademoiselle Gamard’s punctuality, so he hurried home. + 

He saw the first course brought down again as he passed the kitchen. Then on going into the dining-room, the old maid said to him in a tone of voice which betrayed alike the harshness of a reproof and the glee of finding her boarder in fault, “It is half-past four, Monsieur Birotteau; you knew we should not wait for you.” + 

The priest looked at the dining-room clock, and the arrangement of the gauze wrapper, intended to protect it from dust, showed him that his landlady had wound it in the course of the morning, and had allowed herself the pleasure of setting it faster than the clock of Saint-Gatien’s. There was nothing to be said. The least word of the suspicion he had conceived would have sprung the most terrible and plausible of those explosions of eloquence which Mademoiselle Gamard, like all women of her class, could give vent to in such cases. + 

The thousand-and-one vexations that a maidservant can inflict on her master, or a wife on her husband, in the daily course of private life, were imagined by Mademoiselle Gamard, who heaped them on her border. The way in which she plotted her conspiracies against the poor Abbé’s domestic comfort bore the stamp of deeply malignant genius. She contrived never to be in the wrong. + 

By the end of a week after the opening of this tale, his life in the house, and his position towards Mademoiselle Gamard, revealed to him a plot, hatching for six months past. So long as the old maid had been covert in her revenge, and the priest could voluntarily keep up his self-deceit, refusing to believe in her malevolent purpose, the moral effects had made no great progress in him. But since the incidents of the displacement of the candlestick and the clock put too fast, Birotteau could no longer doubt that he was living under the rule of an aversion that kept an ever-watchful eye on him. From this he rapidly sank into despair, forever seeing Mademoiselle Gamard’s lean and talon-like fingers ready to claw his heart. + 

The old maid, happy in living on a sentiment so teeming with excitement as revenge is, delighted in hovering and wheeling above the Abbé as a bird of prey hovers and circles over a field mouse before seizing it. She had long plotted a scheme which the bewildered priest could not possibly guess, and which she soon began to unfold, showing the genius that can be displayed in small things by isolated beings whose soul, incapable of apprehending the grandeur of true piety, has lost itself in the trivialities of devotion. The last and most frightful aggravation of his torments was that the nature of them prohibited Birotteau, an effusive man who loved to be pitied and comforted, from enjoying the little solace of relating them to his friends. The small amount of tact he owed to his shyness made him dread appearing ridiculous by troubling himself about such silly trifles. At the same time, these silly trifles made up his whole life, the life he loved, full of busy vacuity and vacuous business, a dull, gray life, in which too strong a feeling was a misfortune, and the absence of all excitement is happiness. Thus the poor Abbé’s paradise had suddenly become a hell. In short, his torments were intolerable. + 

The terror with which he contemplated an explanation with Mademoiselle Gamard grew daily, and the secret misfortunes which blighted every hour of his old age injured his health. One morning, as he put on his speckled blue stockings, he observed that the circumference of his calf had shrunk by eight lines. Appalled at such a terribly unmistakable symptom, he determined to make an effort to persuade the Abbé Troubert to intervene officially between himself and Mademoiselle Gamard. + 

When he found himself in the presence of the imposing Canon, who came out of a study crammed with papers, where he was always at work, admitting nobody, to receive him in a bare room, the Abbé was almost ashamed to speak of Mademoiselle Gamard’s petty aggravations to a man who seemed so seriously occupied. But after having suffered all the misery of mental deliberation which humble, weak, or irresolute persons go through, even with regard to trifles, he made up his mind to explain the position to the Canon, not without feeling his heart swollen by extraordinary throbs. Troubert listened with a cold, grave air, trying, but in vain, to control some smiles, which, to intelligent eyes, might have betrayed the satisfaction of a secret desire. A flash sparkled in his eye when Birotteau described to him, with the eloquence lent by true emotion, the bitterness that was incessantly poured out for him; but Troubert at once covered his eyes with his hands, a gesture common to great thinkers, and preserved his habitually dignified attitude. + 

When the Abbé ceased speaking he would have been puzzled indeed if he had tried to read any sign of the feelings he imagined he should incite in this mysterious priest, on his face, mottled now with yellow patches⁠—yellower than even his usual bilious complexion. After a moment’s silence, the Canon made one of those replies of which every word must have been carefully studied to give them their full bearing, but which subsquently showed to capable persons the amazing depth of his mind and the power of his intellect. + 

He finally crushed Birotteau by saying that all these things surprised him the more, because, but for his brother’s explanation, he would never have discerned them. He ascribed this dullness of perception to his important occupations, to his work, and to the supremacy of certain lofty thoughts, which did not allow of his heeding the trivialities of life. He pointed out, but without assuming the airs of wishing to censure the conduct of a man whose years and learning commanded his respect, that “the hermits of old rarely thought about their food, or their dwelling in the deserts, where they gave themselves up to holy contemplation,” and that “in our days the priest could, in mind, make a desert for himself in every place.” Then, returning to Birotteau, he remarked that “such squabbles were a quite new thing to him. During twelve years nothing of the kind had ever arisen between Mademoiselle Gamard and the venerated Abbé Chapeloud. As for himself, he could, no doubt, act as moderator between the priest and their landlady, since his friendship for her did not overstep the limits imposed by the laws of the Church on its faithful ministers; but then justice would require that he should also hear Mademoiselle Gamard. At the same time, he discerned no change in her; he had always seen her thus; he had willingly yielded to some of her vagaries, knowing that the excellent woman was kindness and sweetness itself; these little caprices of temper were to be ascribed to the sufferings caused by a pulmonary trouble, of which she never spoke, resigning herself to it as a true Christian.” He ended by saying that “when he should have lived a few years longer with Mademoiselle, he would appreciate her better, and recognize the beauties of her admirable character.” + 

The Abbé Birotteau came away bewildered. Under the absolute necessity of taking counsel with himself alone, he gauged Mademoiselle Gamard by himself. The poor man thought that by absenting himself for a few days this woman’s hatred would burn itself out for lack of fuel. So he determined to go, as he had done before now, to spend some time at a country place where Madame de Listomère always went at the end of the autumn, a season when, in Touraine, the sky is usually clear and mild. Poor man! He was thus carrying out the secret wishes of his terrible enemy, whose schemes could not be thwarted by anything short of monk-like endurance; while he, guessing nothing, and not knowing his own business even, was doomed to fall like a lamb under the first blow from the butcher. + 

Lying on the slope between the town of Tours and the heights of Saint-Georges, facing the south, and sheltered by cliffs, Madame de Listomère’s estate combined all the charms of the country with the pleasures of the town. It was not more than a ten-minutes’ drive from the Bridge of Tours to the gate of this house, known as l’Alouette (the Lark)⁠—an immense convenience in a place where no one will disturb himself for any earthly thing, not even in quest of pleasure. + 

The Abbé Birotteau had been about ten days at l’Alouette, when one morning, at the breakfast hour, the lodge-keeper came to tell him that Monsieur Caron wished to speak with him. Monsieur Caron was a lawyer employed by Mademoiselle Gamard. Birotteau, not remembering this, and conscious of no litigious difficulty to be settled with anybody in the world, left the table, not without some anxiety, to meet the lawyer; he found him sitting modestly on the parapet of a terrace. + 

“Your intention of remaining no longer as a resident under Mademoiselle Gamard’s roof being now quite evident⁠—” the man of business began. + 

“Dear me, monsieur,” cried Birotteau, interrupting him, “I never thought of leaving her.” + 

“And yet, monsieur,” the lawyer went on, “you must certainly have expressed yourself to that effect to Mademoiselle, since she has sent me to inquire whether you intend remaining long in the country. The event of a prolonged absence not having been provided for in your agreement, might give rise to some discussion. Now, as Mademoiselle Gamard understands it, your board⁠—” + 

“Monsieur,” said Birotteau in surprise, and again interrupting the lawyer, “I did not think it could be necessary to take steps, almost legal in their nature, to⁠—” + 

“Mademoiselle Gamard, wishing to preclude any difficulty,” said Monsieur Caron, “has sent me to come to an understanding with you.” + 

“Very well, if you will be so obliging as to call again tomorrow, I, on my part, will have taken advice.” + 

“So be it,” said Caron with a bow. + 

The scrivener withdrew. The hapless priest, appalled by the pertinacity of Mademoiselle Gamard’s persecution, went back to Madame de Listomère’s dining-room looking quite upset. At his mere appearance everyone asked him, “Why, Monsieur Birotteau, what is the matter?” + 

The Abbé, greatly distressed, sat down without answering, so overwhelmed was he by the vague vision of his misfortune. But after breakfast, when several of his friends had gathered round a good fire in the drawing-room, Birotteau artlessly told them the tale of his catastrophe. The hearers, who were just beginning to be bored by their stay in the country, were deeply interested in an intrigue so completely in keeping with provincial life. Everybody took the Abbé’s part against the old maid. + 

“Why!” cried Madame de Listomère, “do you not plainly see that the Abbé Troubert wants your rooms?” + 

In this place the historian would have a right to sketch this lady’s portrait; but it occurs to him that even those persons to whom Sterne’s cognomology is unknown could surely not utter the three words Madame de Listomère without seeing her⁠—noble and dignified, tempering the austerity of piety by the antique elegance of monarchical and classic manners and polite distinction; kind, but a little formal; speaking slightly through her nose; allowing herself to read la Nouvelle Héloïse, and to go to the play; still wearing her own hair. + 

“The Abbé Birotteau must certainly not yield to that nagging old woman!” cried Monsieur de Listomère, a lieutenant in the navy, spending a holiday with his aunt. “If the Abbé has any courage, and will follow my advice, he will soon have recovered his peace of mind.” + 

In short, everybody began to analyze Mademoiselle Gamard’s proceedings with the acumen peculiar to provincials, who, it certainly cannot be denied, possess the talent of laying bare the most secret human actions. + 

“You have not hit the mark,” said an old landowner who knew the country. “There is something very serious under this which I have not yet mastered. The Abbé Troubert is far too deep to be so easily seen through. Our good friend Birotteau is only at the beginning of his troubles. In the first place, would he be happy and left in peace even if he gave up his rooms to Troubert? I doubt it.⁠—If Caron came to tell you,” he went on, turning to the puzzled Abbé, “that you had intended to leave Mademoiselle Gamard, with the object of getting you out of her house.⁠ ⁠… Well, you will have to go, willy nilly. That kind of man never risks a chance; they only play when they hold the trumps.” + 

This old gentleman, a certain Monsieur de Bourbonne, epitomized provincial ideas as completely as Voltaire epitomized the spirit of his time. This withered little old man professed in matters of dress all the indifference of a proprietor whose estate has a quotable value in the department. His countenance, tanned by the sun of Touraine, was shrewd rather than clever. He was accustomed to weigh his words, to consider his actions, and he concealed his deep caution under a delusive bluntness. The very least observation was enough to discover that, like a Norman peasant, he would get the advantage in every stroke of business. He was great in oenology⁠—the favorite science of the Tourangeaux. He had managed to extend the circle of one of his estates by taking in the alluvial land of the Loire without getting into a lawsuit with the State. This achievement had established his reputation as a clever man. If, charmed by Monsieur de Bourbonne’s conversation, you had asked his biography of one of his fellow-provincials, “Oh! he is a cunning old fox,” would have been the proverbial reply of all who envied him, and they were many. In Touraine, as in most provinces, jealousy lies at the base of the tongue. + 

Monsieur de Bourbonne’s remark caused a brief silence, during which the members of this little committee seemed lost in thought. + 

At this juncture Mademoiselle Salomon de Villenoix was announced. She had Just come from Tours, prompted by her wish to be of service to Birotteau, and the news she brought completely changed the aspect of affairs. At the moment when she came in, everyone but the landowner was advising Birotteau to hold his own against Troubert and Gamard, under the auspices of the aristocratic party, who would support him. + 

“The Vicar-General,” said Mademoiselle Salomon, “who has all the promotions in his hands, has just been taken ill, and the Archbishop has commissioned Canon Troubert to act in his place. The nomination to the canonry now depends entirely on him. Now yesterday, at Mademoiselle de la Blottière’s, the Abbé Poirel was speaking of the annoyances Monsieur Birotteau occasioned to Mademoiselle Gamard, in such a way as to seem to justify the neglect which will certainly fall on our good Abbé. ‘The Abbé Birotteau is a man who badly needed the Abbé Chapeloud,’ said he, ‘and since that virtuous Canon’s death it has been proved that⁠—’ Then came a series of suppositions and calumnies.⁠—You understand?” + 

“Troubert will be made Vicar-General,” said Monsieur de Bourbonne solemnly. + 

“Come now,” cried Madame de Listomère, looking at Birotteau, “which would you prefer⁠—to be made Canon, or to remain with Mademoiselle Gamard?” + 

“To be made Canon,” was the general outcry. + 

“Well, then,” Madame de Listomère went on, “the Abbé Troubert and Mademoiselle Gamard must be allowed to have their way. Have they not conveyed to you indirectly by Caron’s visit that, provided you consent to leave your rooms, you shall be made Canon? One good turn for another.” + 

Everyone exclaimed at Madame de Listomère’s acumen and sagacity; but her nephew, the Baron de Listomère, said in a comical tone to Monsieur de Bourbonne: + 

“I should have liked to see the battle between the Gamard and the Birotteau.” + 

But, for the Abbé’s worse luck, the forces were not equal, with the worldly-wise on one side, and the old maid upheld by the Abbé Troubert on the other. The time was at hand when the struggle would become more decisive, and assume a greater scope and immense proportions. + 

By the advice of Madame de Listomère and most of her adherents, who were beginning to take a passionate interest in this intrigue flung into the vacuity of their country life, a footman was despatched for Monsieur Caron. The lawyer returned with amazing promptitude, a fact that alarmed no one but Monsieur de Bourbonne. + 

“Let us adjourn any decision till we have fuller information,” was the advice of this Fabius in a dressing-gown, whose deep reflections revealed to him some abstruse plan of battle on the Tours chessboard. + 

He tried to enlighten Birotteau as to the perils of his position. But the “old fox’s” shrewdness did not subserve the frenzy of the moment; he was scarcely listened to. + 

The meeting between the lawyer and Birotteau was brief. The Abbé came in looking quite scared, and saying, “He requires me to sign a paper declaring my decession.” + 

“What barbarous word is that?” said the navy lieutenant. + 

“And what does it mean?” cried Madame de Listomère. + 

“It simply means that the Abbé is to declare his readiness to leave Mademoiselle Gamard’s house,” replied Monsieur de Bourbonne, taking a pinch of snuff. + 

“Is that all?⁠—Sign it!” said Madame de Listomère to Birotteau. “If you have really made up your mind to quit her house, there can be no harm done by declaring your will.”⁠—The Will of Birotteau! + 

“That is true,” said Monsieur de Bourbonne, shutting his snuffbox with a dry snap, of which it is impossible to render the full meaning, for it was a language by itself. “But writing is always dangerous,” he added, placing the snuffbox on the chimney-shelf with a look that terrified the Abbé. + 

Birotteau was so bewildered by the upheaval of all his ideas, by the swiftness of events which had come on him and found him defenceless, and by the lightness with which his friends treated the most cherished circumstances of his lonely life, that he remained motionless, as if lost in the moon, not thinking of anything, but listening and trying to catch the sense of the hasty words everybody else was so ready with. He took up Monsieur Caron’s document, and read it as though the lawyer’s deed were in fact the object of his attention; but it was merely mechanical, and he signed the paper by which he declared himself ready and willing to give up his residence with Mademoiselle Gamard as well as his board, as provided by the agreement between them. When Birotteau had signed the deed, Caron took it, and asked him where his client was to bestow the goods and chattels belonging to him. Birotteau mentioned Madame de Listomère’s house, and the lady by a nod consented to receive the Abbé for some days, never doubting but that he would ere long be made a Canon. The old landowner wished to see this sort of act of renunciation, and Monsieur Caron handed it to him. + 

“Why,” said he to the Abbé, after having read it, “is there any written agreement between you and Mademoiselle Gamard? Where is it? What are the conditions?” + 

“The paper is in my rooms,” said Birotteau. + 

“Do you know its contents?” the old gentleman asked the lawyer. + 

“No, monsieur,” said Monsieur Caron, holding out his hand for the ominous document. + 

“Ah, ha!” said Monsieur de Bourbonne to himself, “you, master lawyer, are no doubt informed of what that agreement contains, but you are not paid to tell us.” And he returned the deed of “decession” to the lawyer. + 

“Where am I to put all my furniture?” cried Birotteau, “and my books, my beautiful library, my nice pictures, my red drawing-room⁠—all my things, in short!” + 

And the poor man’s despair at finding himself thus uprooted was so guileless, it so perfectly showed the purity of his life, and his ignorance of the world, that Madame de Listomère and Mademoiselle Salomon said, to comfort him, and in the tone that mothers use when they promise a child a plaything: + 

“There, there, do not worry yourself about such silly trifles. We shall easily find you a home less cold and gloomy than Mademoiselle Gamard’s house. If no lodging is to be found to suit you⁠—well, one of us will take you as a boarder. Come, play a hit at backgammon. You can call on the Abbé Troubert tomorrow to ask his support, and you will see how well he will receive you.” + 

Weak-minded persons are reassured as easily as they are frightened. So poor Birotteau, dazzled by the prospect of living with Madame de Listomère, forgot the ruin, now irremediably complete, of the happiness he had so long sighed for, and so thoroughly reveled in. Still, at night, before falling asleep, with the anguish of a man to whom a removal, and the formation of new habits, were as the end of the world, he tortured his mind to imagine where he could find as convenient a home for his library as that corridor. As he pictured his books astray, his furniture dispersed, and his home broken up, he wondered a thousand times why his first year at Mademoiselle Gamard’s had been so delightful, and the second so wretched. And again and again this disaster was a bottomless pit in which his mind was lost. + 

The canonry no longer seemed to him a sufficient compensation for so many misfortunes; he compared his life to a stocking in which one dropped stitch leads to a ladder all the way down the web. Mademoiselle Salomon was left to him. But, losing all his old illusions, the poor priest no longer dared believe in a new friend. + 

In the città dolente of old maids there are several, especially in France, whose life is a sacrifice nobly renewed day by day to noble feeling. Some remain proudly faithful to a heart which death untimely snatched from them; martyrs to love, they learn the secret of womanliness of soul. Others succumb to a family pride which, to our shame, is daily waxing less; they have devoted themselves to make the fortune of a brother, or to the care of orphan nephews; such women are mothers though remaining maids. These old maids rise to the highest heroism of their sex, by consecrating every womanly feeling to the worship of misfortune. They idealize the concept of woman, by renouncing all the rewards of her natural destiny, and accepting only its penalties. They live enshrined in the beauty of their self-sacrifice, and men reverently bow their heads before their faded forms. Mademoiselle de Sombreuil is neither wife nor maid; she was, and always will be, an embodied poem. + 

Mademoiselle Salomon was one of these heroic creatures. Her sacrifice was religiously sublime, inasmuch as it would remain inglorious after having been a daily anguish. Young and handsome, she was loved; her lover lost his reason. For five years she had devoted herself with the courage of love to the mechanical joys of the unhappy man; she was so fully wedded to his madness that she did not think him mad. + 

She was a woman of simple manners, frank in speech, with a pale face not devoid of character, though the features were regular. She never spoke of the experiences of her life. Only, now and then, the sudden shudder with which she heard the narrative of some dreadful or melancholy incident betrayed in her the fine qualities evolved by great sorrows. She had come to live at Tours after the death of her companion in life. There she could not be appreciated at her true value; she was regarded as a “good creature.” She was very charitable, and attached herself by preference to the weak and helpless. For this reason she had, of course, the deepest interest in the unhappy priest. + 

Mademoiselle Salomon de Villenoix, driving into town early next morning, took Birotteau with her, set him down on the Cathedral quay, and left him making his way towards the Close, where he was in great haste to arrive, to save the canonry, at any rate, from the shipwreck, and to superintend the removal of his furniture. He rang, not without violent palpitations, at the door of the house, whither for fourteen years he had been in the habit of coming, in which he had dwelt, and whence he was now to be forever exiled after dreaming that he might die there in peace like his friend Chapeloud. + 

Marianne was surprised to see him. He told her he had come to speak to Monsieur Troubert, and turned towards the ground-floor rooms in which the Canon lodged; but Marianne called out to him: + 

“The Abbé Troubert is not there, Monsieur le Vicaire; he is in your old rooms.” + 

These words were a fearful shock to Birotteau, who at last understood Troubert’s character, and the unfathomable depth of revenge so slowly worked out, when he saw him quite at home in Chapeloud’s library, seated in Chapeloud’s fine Gothic chair⁠—sleeping, no doubt, in Chapeloud’s bed, using Chapeloud’s furniture, contravening Chapeloud’s will, in short, disinheriting Chapeloud’s friend;⁠—that very Chapeloud who had for so long penned him in at Mademoiselle Gamard’s, hindered his advancement, and kept him out of the drawing-rooms of Tours. By what magic wand had this transformation been effected? Were these things no longer Birotteau’s? + 

Indeed, as he noted the sardonic expression with which Troubert looked round on this library, Birotteau inferred that the future Vicar-General was secure of possessing forever the plunder of the two men he had so bitterly hated⁠—Chapeloud as an enemy, and Birotteau because in him he still saw Chapeloud. At the sight a thousand ideas surged up in the worthy man’s heart and wrapped him in a sort of trance. He stood motionless, and, as it were, fascinated by Troubert’s eye, which was fixed on him. + 

“I cannot suppose, monsieur,” said Birotteau at last, “that you would wish to deprive me of the things that are mine. Though Mademoiselle Gamard may have been impatient to move you, she must surely be just enough to allow me time to identify my books and remove my furniture.” + 

“Monsieur,” said the Canon coldly, and betraying no sort of feeling in his face, “Mademoiselle Gamard told me yesterday that you were leaving; of the cause of it I know nothing. If she moved me up here, it was because she was obliged to do so. Monsieur l’Abbé Poirel has taken my rooms. Whether the furniture in these rooms belongs to mademoiselle, I know not. If it is yours, you know her perfect honesty; the saintliness of her life is a guarantee for it. + 

“As to myself, you know how plainly I live. For fifteen years I slept in a bare room, never heeding the damp, which is killing me by inches. At the same time, if you wish to return to these rooms, I am ready to give them up to you.” + 

As he listened to this terrible speech, Birotteau forgot the matter of the canonry; he went downstairs as briskly as a young man to find Mademoiselle Gamard, and met her at the bottom of the stairs in the large paved passage which joined the two parts of the house. + 

“Mademoiselle,” said he, bowing, and not heeding the sour, sardonic smile that curled her lips, or the extraordinary fire that gave her eyes a glare like a tiger’s, “I cannot understand why you did not wait till I had removed my furniture before⁠—” + 

“What?” she exclaimed, interrupting him, “have not all your things been taken to Madame de Listomère’s?” + 

“But my furniture?” + 

“Did you never read your agreement?” cried she, in tones which ought to be expressed in musical notation to show how many shades hatred could infuse into the accentuation of every word. + 

And Mademoiselle Gamard seemed to swell, her eyes flashed once more, and her face beamed; her whole person thrilled with satisfaction. + 

The Abbé Troubert opened a window to see better to read a folio volume. + 

Birotteau stood as if thunderstricken. + 

Mademoiselle Gamard trumpeted at him, in a voice as shrill as a clarion, the following words:⁠— + 

“Was it not agreed that, in the event of your leaving my house, your furniture was to become mine to indemnify me for the difference between what you paid me for your board, and what I received from the late respectable Abbé Chapeloud? Now, as Monsieur l’Abbé Poirel has been made Canon⁠—” + 

At these last words Birotteau bowed slightly as if to take leave; then he rushed out of the house. He was afraid lest, if he stayed any longer, he should faint, and so give his relentless foes a too great triumph. Walking like a drunken man, he got back to Madame de Listomère’s town house, where, in a lower room, he found his linen, clothes, and papers all packed into a trunk. At the sight of those relics of his property, the unhappy priest sat down and hid his face in his hands to hide his tears from the sight of men. The Abbé Poirel was Canon! He, Birotteau, found himself homeless, bereft of fortune and furniture. + 

Happily, Mademoiselle Salomon happened to drive past. The doorkeeper, understanding the poor man’s despair, signaled to the coachman. After a few words of explanation between the lady and the porter, the Abbé allowed himself to be led to his faithful friend, though he could only answer her in incoherent words. Mademoiselle Salomon, alarmed by the temporary derangement of a brain already so feeble, carried him at once to l’Alouette, ascribing these symptoms of mental disturbance to the effect naturally produced on him by the Abbé Poirel’s promotion. She knew nothing of the hapless priest’s agreement with Mademoiselle Gamard, for the excellent reason that he himself did not know its full bearing. And as it is in the nature of things that comedy is often mixed up with the most pathetic incidents, Birotteau’s bewildered answers almost made Mademoiselle Salomon laugh. “Chapeloid was right,” said he; “he is a monster.” + 

“Who?” said she. + 

“Chapeloud. He has robbed me of everything.” + 

“Then you mean Poirel?” + 

“No, Troubert.” + 

At length they reached l’Alouette, where the priest’s friends lavished on him such effusive kindness, that by the evening he grew calmer, and they could extract from him an account of all that had occurred that morning. + 

Monsieur de Bourbonne, always phlegmatic, naturally asked to see the agreement which ever since the day before had seemed to him to contain the key to the riddle. Birotteau brought the fatal document out of his pocket, and held it out to the landowner, who read it hastily, presently coming to a sentence in these terms:⁠— + 

“Whereas there is a difference of eight hundred francs a year between the price paid by the late Monsieur Chapeloud and the sum for which the aforenamed Sophie Gamard agrees to lodge and board, on the terms hereinbefore stated, the said François Birotteau; whereas the said François Birotteau fully acknowledges that it is out of his power for some years to come to pay the full price paid by Mademoiselle Gamard’s boarders, and more especially by the Abbé Troubert; and, finally whereas the said Sophie Gamard has advanced certain sums of money, the said Birotteau hereby pledges himself to bequeath to her, as an indemnity, the furniture of which he may be possessed at the time of his decease; or in the event of his voluntary departing, for whatever cause or reason, and quitting the premises at present let to him, and no longer availing himself of the benefits contracted for in the agreement made by Mademoiselle Gamard hereinbefore⁠—” + 

“Heaven above us! What impudence!” exclaimed Monsieur de Bourbonne. “And what claws the said Sophie Gamard has!” + 

Poor Birotteau, never conceiving in his childish brain of any cause which could ever separate him from Mademoiselle Gamard, had counted on dying under her roof. He had not the least recollection of this clause, of which the terms had not even been discussed at the time when, in his eagerness to lodge with the old maid, he would have signed all the documents she might have chosen to lay before him. His innocence was so creditable, and Mademoiselle Gamard’s conduct so atrocious; there was something so deplorable in the fate of this hapless sexagenarian, and his weakness made him so pitiable, that in a first impulse of indignation Madame de Listomère exclaimed, “I am the cause of your having signed the act that has ruined you; I ought to make up to you for the comfort you have lost.” + 

“But,” said Monsieur de Bourbonne, “such proceedings constitute a fraud; there are grounds for an action⁠—” + 

“Good, Birotteau shall bring an action. If he loses it at Tours, he will win it at Orléans; if he loses it at Orléans, he will win it at Paris!” cried the Baron de Listomère. + 

“If he means to bring an action, I should advise him first to resign his benefice in the Cathedral,” said Monsieur de Bourbonne calmly. + 

“We will take legal advice,” replied Madame de Listomère; “and we will bring an action if we ought. But this business is so disgraceful for Mademoiselle Gamard, and may prove so damaging to the Abbé Troubert, that we can surely effect a compromise.” + 

After mature deliberation, everybody promised to assist the Abbé Birotteau in the struggle that must ensue between him and the allies of his enemies. A confident presentiment, an indescribable provincial instinct prompted everyone to combine the names of Troubert and Gamard. But not a soul of those then assembled at Madame de Listomère’s excepting the “old fox,” had any accurate notion of the importance of such a conflict. + 

Monsieur de Bourbonne took the poor priest into a corner. + 

“Of all the fourteen persons present,” said he in a low voice, “not one will be still on your side within a fortnight. If you then want to call in help, you will perhaps find no one but myself bold enough to undertake your defence, because I know the country, men, and things, and, better still, their interests. All your friends here, though full of good intentions, are starting on the wrong road, which you can never get out of. Listen to my advice. If you want to live in peace, give up your office in Saint-Gatien and leave Tours. Tell no one where you go, but seek a cure of souls far from hence, where Troubert can never come across you.” + 

“Leave Tours!” cried the Abbé, with unspeakable dismay. + 

It was to him a form of death. Was it not tearing up all the roots by which he held to the world? Celibates make habits take the place of feelings. And when to this system of ideas, by which they go through life rather than live, they add a weak nature, external things have an astonishing dominion over them. Birotteau had really become a sort of vegetable; to transplant it was to endanger its guileless functions. Just as a tree, in order to live, must always find the same juices at hand, and always send its filaments into the same soil, so Birotteau must always patter round Saint-Gatien, always trot up and down the spot on the Mall where he was wont to walk, always go through the same familiar streets, and constantly frequent the three drawing-rooms where evening after evening he played whist or backgammon. + 

“To be sure⁠—I was not thinking,” replied Monsieur de Bourbonne, looking compassionately at the priest. + 

Before long all Tours knew that Madame la Baronne de Listomère, widow of a Lieutenant-General, had given a home to the Abbé Birotteau, Vicaire of Saint-Gatien. This fact, on which several persons threw doubts, cut short all questions, and gave definiteness to party divisions, especially when Mademoiselle Salomon was the first to dare speak of fraud and an action at law. + 

Mademoiselle Gamard, with the subtle vanity and the fanatical sense of personal importance that are characteristic of old maids, considered herself greatly aggrieved by the line of conduct taken by Madame de Listomère. The Baroness was a woman of high rank, elegant in her habits, whose good taste, polished manners, and genuine piety were beyond dispute. By sheltering Birotteau she formally gave the lie to all Mademoiselle Gamard’s asseverations, indirectly censured her conduct, and seemed to sanction the Abbé’s complaints of his former landlady. + 

For the better comprehension of this story, it is necessary here to explain how much power Mademoiselle Gamard derived from the discernment and analytical spirit with which old women can account to themselves for the actions of others, and to set forth the resources of her faction. Escorted by the always taciturn Abbé Troubert, she spent her evenings in four or five houses where a dozen persons were wont to meet, allied by common tastes and analogous circumstances. There were two or three old men, wedded to the whims and tittle-tattle of their cooks; five or six old maids, who spent their days in sifting the words and scrutinizing the proceedings of their neighbors and those a little below them in the social scale; and finally, several old women wholly occupied in distilling scandal, in keeping an exact register of everybody’s fortune, and a check on everybody’s actions. They foretold marriages, and blamed their friends’ conduct quite as harshly as their enemies’. These persons, filling in the town a position analogous to the capillary vessels of a plant, imbibed news with the thirst of a leaf for the dew, picked up the secrets of every household, discharged them and transmitted them mechanically to Monsieur Troubert, as leaves communicate to the plant the moisture they have absorbed. Thus, every evening of the week, these worthy bigots, prompted by the craving for excitement which exists in everyone, struck an accurate balance of the position of the town with a sagacity worthy of the Council of Ten, and made an armed police out of the unerring espionage to which our passions give rise. Then, as soon as they had found the secret motive of any event, their conceit led them to appropriate, severally, the wisdom of their Sanhedrim, and to give importance to their gossip in their respective circles. + 

This idle and busybody assembly, invisible though omniscient, speechless but forever talking, had at that time an influence which was apparently harmless in view of its contemptibility, but which nevertheless could be terrible when it was animated by a strong motive. Now it was a very long time since any event had occurred within range of their lives to compare in general importance to each and all with the contest between Birotteau, supported by Madame de Listomère, and the Abbé Troubert with Mademoiselle Gamard. In fact, the three drawing-rooms of Madame de Listomère, Mademoiselle Merlin de la Blottière, and Mademoiselle de Villenoix, being regarded as a hostile camp by those where Mademoiselle Gamard visited, there lay behind this quarrel a strong party spirit with all its vanities. It was the struggle of the Roman Senate and people in a molehill, or a tempest in a glass of water, as Montesquieu said in speaking of the Republic of San Marino, where public officials held their places but a day, so easy it was to seize despotic power. + 

But this storm in a teacup evolved as many passions in the actors as would have sufficed to direct the largest social interests. Is it not a mistake to suppose that time flies swiftly only to those whose hearts are a prey to such vast projects as trouble life and make it boil? The Abbé Troubert’s hours were spent as busily, flew loaded with thoughts as anxious, and marked by despair and hopes as deep, as could the racking hours of the man of ambition, the gamester, or the lover. God alone knows the secret of the energy we put forth to win the occult triumphs we achieve over men, or things, or ourselves. Though we do not always know whither we are going, we know full well the fatigues of the voyage. Still, if the historian may be allowed to digress from the drama he is narrating, to assume for a moment the functions of the critic⁠—if he may invite you to glance at the lives of these old maids and of these two priests, to investigate the causes of the misfortune which vitiated their inmost core⁠—you will perhaps find it proved to a demonstration that man must necessarily experience certain passions if he is to evolve those qualities which give nobleness to life, which expand its limits and silence the selfishness natural to all beings. + 

Madame de Listomère returned to town, not knowing that for five or six days past several of her friends had been obliged to dispute a rumor concerning herself, and accepted by some, though she would have laughed at it had she heard of it, which attributed her affection for her nephew to almost criminal causes. + 

She took the Abbé to see her lawyer, who did not think an action an easy matter. The Abbé’s friends, confident in the feeling that comes of the justice of a good case, or else dilatory about proceedings which did not concern them personally, had postponed the preliminary inquiry till the day when they should return to Tours. Thus Mademoiselle Gamard’s allies had been able to make the first move, and had told the story in a way unfavorable to the Abbé Birotteau. Hence the man of law, whose clients consisted exclusively of the pious folks of the town, very much astonished Madame de Listomère by urging her on no account to be mixed up in such proceedings; and he closed the interview by saying that “he, at any rate, would not undertake the case, because, by the terms of the agreement, Mademoiselle Gamard was right in the eye of the law; that in equity, that is to say, out of the jurisdiction of the Court, Monsieur Birotteau would appear in the eyes of the Bench and of all honest folks to have fallen away from the meek, peace-loving, and conciliatory character he had hitherto enjoyed; that Mademoiselle Gamard, regarded as a gentle person and easy to live with, had accommodated Birotteau by lending the money needed to pay the succession duties arising from Chapeloud’s bequest, without demanding any receipt; that Birotteau was not of an age, nor of a nature, to sign a document without knowing what it contained and recognizing its importance; and that as he had ceased to live at Mademoiselle Gamard’s after only two years’ residence, whereas his friend Chapeloud had been with her for twelve years and Troubert for fifteen, it could only be in accordance with some plan best known to himself. That, consequently, the action would be generally considered as an act of ingratitude,” etc. + 

After seeing Birotteau to the head of the stairs, the lawyer detained Madame de Listomère a moment as he showed her out, and besought her, as she loved her peace of mind, to have nothing to do with the affair. + 

In the evening, however, the hapless Abbé, as miserable as a criminal in the condemned cell at Bicêtre while awaiting the result of his petition to the court of appeal, could not keep himself from telling his friends of the result of his visit to the lawyer, at the hour before the card-parties were made up, when the little circle were assembling round Madame de Listomère’s fire. + 

“I know no lawyer in Tours, excepting the solicitor for the Liberal party, who would undertake the case, unless he meant to lose it,” exclaimed Monsieur de Bourbonne, “and I do not advise you to embark on it.” + 

“Well, it is a rascally shame!” said the navy lieutenant. “I myself will take the Abbé to see that lawyer!” + 

“Then go after dark,” said Monsieur de Bourbonne, interrupting him. + 

“Why?” + 

“I have just heard that the Abbé Troubert is appointed Vicar-General in the place of him who died the day before yesterday.” + 

“Much I care for the Abbé Troubert!” + 

Unluckily, the Baron de Listomère, a man of six-and-thirty, did not see the sign made to him by Monsieur de Bourbonne warning him to weigh his words, and pointing significantly at a town councillor who was known to be a friend of Troubert’s. So the officer went on: + 

“If Monsieur Troubert is a rogue⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Dear me,” said Monsieur de Bourbonne, “why bring the Abbé Troubert’s name into a matter with which he has no concern whatever?” + 

“Nay,” said the lieutenant, “is he not in the enjoyment of the Abbé Birotteau’s furniture? I remember having called on Monsieur Chapeloud and seeing two valuable pictures. Suppose they are worth ten thousand francs? Can you believe that Monsieur Birotteau ever intended to give, in return for two years’ board with this Gamard woman, ten thousand francs, when the library and furniture are worth almost as much more?” + 

The Abbé opened his eyes very wide on hearing that he had ever owned such an enormous fortune. And the Baron went on vehemently to the end. + 

“By Jove! Monsieur Salmon, an expert from the Paris gallery, happens to be here on a visit to his mother-in-law. I will go to him this very evening with Monsieur l’Abbé, and beg him to value the pictures. From thence I will take him to that lawyer.” + 

Two days after this conversation the action had taken shape. The solicitor to the Liberal party, now Birotteau’s attorney, cast some obloquy on the Abbé’s case. The Opposition to the Government, and some persons known to love neither priests nor religion⁠—two things which many people fail to distinguish⁠—took up the matter, and the whole town was talking of it. The expert from Paris had valued the Virgin by le Valentin, and the Christ by Lebrun, at eleven thousand francs; they were both choice examples. As to the bookcase and the Gothic furniture, the fashionable taste, daily growing in Paris, for that style of work gave them an immediate value of twelve thousand francs. In short, the expert, on examination, estimated the contents of the rooms at ten thousand crowns. + 

Now, it was obvious that as Birotteau had never intended to give Mademoiselle Gamard this immense sum in payment of the little money he might owe her in virtue of the stipulated indemnity, there were grounds, legally speaking, for a new contract, otherwise the old maid would be guilty of unintentional fraud. So the lawyer on Birotteau’s behalf began by serving a writ on Mademoiselle Gamard, formulating the Abbé’s case. This statement, though exceedingly severe, and supported by quotations from leading judgments, and confirmed by certain articles of the Code, was at the same time a masterpiece of legal logic, and so evidently condemned the old maid, that thirty or forty copies were maliciously circulated in the town by the opposite party. + 

A few days after this commencement of hostilities between the old maid and Birotteau, the Baron de Listomère, who, as commander of a corvette, hoped to be included in the next list of promotions, which had been expected for some time at the Navy Board, received a letter, in which a friend informed him that there was, on the contrary, some idea in the office of placing him on the Retired List. Greatly amazed by this news, he at once set out for Paris, and appeared at the Minister’s next reception. This official himself seemed no less surprised, and even laughed at the fears expressed by the Baron de Listomère. + 

Next day, in spite of the Minister’s words, the Baron inquired at the office. With an indiscretion, such as is not unfrequently committed by heads of departments for their friends, a secretary showed him a minute confirming the fatal news, ready drawn up, but which had not yet been submitted to the Minister, in consequence of the illness of a head-clerk. The Baron at once went to call on an uncle, who, being a député, could without delay meet the Minister at the Chamber, and begged him to sound His Excellency as to his views, since to him this meant the sacrifice of his whole career. He awaited the closing of the sitting in his uncle’s carriage in the greatest anxiety. + 

Long before the end his uncle came out, and as they drove home to his house he asked the Baron:⁠— + 

“What the devil led you to make war against the priesthood? The Minister told me at once that you had put yourself at the head of the Liberal party at Tours. Your opinions are detestable, you do not follow the line laid down by the Government, and whatnot! His phrases were as confused as if he were still addressing the Chamber. So then I said to him, ‘Come, let us understand each other.’ And His Excellency ended by confessing that you were in a scrape with the Lord High Almoner. In short, by making some inquiries among my colleagues, I learned that you had spoken with much levity of a certain Abbé Troubert, who, though but a Vicar-General, is the most important personage of the province, where he represents the ecclesiastical power. I answered for you to the Minister in person.⁠—My noble nephew, if you want to get on in the world, make no enemies in the Church. + 

“Now, go back to Tours, and make your peace with this devil of a Vicar-General. Remember that Vicars-General are men with whom you must always live in peace. Deuce take it! When we are all trying to reestablish the Church, to cast discredit on the priests is a blunder in a ship’s lieutenant who wants his promotion. If you do not make it up with this Abbé Troubert, you need not look to me; I shall cast you off. The Minister for Church Affairs spoke to me of the man just now as certain to be a Bishop. If Troubert took an aversion for our family, he might hinder my name from appearing in the next batch of peers.⁠—Do you understand?” + 

This speech explained to the navy lieutenant what Troubert’s secret occupations were, when Birotteau so stupidly remarked, “I cannot think what good he gains by sitting up all night!” + 

The Canon’s position, in the midst of the feminine senate which so craftily kept a surveillance over the province, as well as his personal capabilities, had led to his being chosen by the Church authorities from among all the priests in the town to be the unacknowledged proconsul of Touraine. Archbishop, General, Préfet⁠—high and low were under his occult dominion. + 

The Baron de Listomère had soon made up his mind. + 

“I have no notion,” said he to his uncle, “of receiving another ecclesiastical broadside below the waterline.” + 

Three days after this diplomatic interview between the uncle and nephew, the sailor, who had suddenly returned to Tours by the mail-coach, explained to his aunt, the very evening of his arrival, all the danger that would be incurred by the Listomère family if they persisted in defending that idiot Birotteau. The Baron had caught Monsieur de Bourbonne at the moment when the old gentleman was taking up his stick and hat to leave after his rubber. The “old fox’s” intelligence was indispensable to throw a light on the reefs among which the Listomères had been entangled; he rose so early to seek his hat and stick, only to be stopped by a word in his ear: + 

“Wait, we want to talk.” + 

The young Baron’s prompt return, and his air of satisfaction, though contrasting with the gravity his face assumed now and then, had vaguely hinted to Monsieur de Bourbonne of some checks the lieutenant might have received in his cruise against Gamard and Troubert. He manifested no surprise on hearing the Baron proclaim the secret power possessed by the Vicar-General. + 

“I knew that,” said he. + 

“Well, then,” exclaimed the Baroness, “why did you not warn us?” + 

“Madame,” he hastily replied, “if you will forget that I guessed this priest’s occult influence, I will forget that you know it as well as I. If we should fail to keep the secret, we might be taken for his accomplices; we should be feared and hated. Do as I do. Pretend to be a dupe; but look carefully where you set your feet. I said quite enough; you did not understand me. I could not compromise myself.” + 

“What must we do now?” said the Baron. + 

The desertion of Birotteau was not a matter of question; it was the primary condition, and so understood by this council of three. + 

“To effect a retreat with all the honors of war has always been the greatest achievement of the most skilful generals,” said Monsieur de Bourbonne. “Yield to Troubert; if his hatred is less than his vanity, you will gain an ally; but if you yield too much, he will trample on your body, for, as Boileau says, ‘Destruction is by choice the spirit of the Church.’ Make as though you were quitting the service, and you will escape him, Monsieur le Baron. Dismiss Birotteau, madame, and you will gain Gamard her lawsuit. When you meet the Abbé Troubert at the Archbishop’s, ask him if he plays whist; he will answer Yes. Invite him to play a rubber in this drawing-room, where he longs to be admitted; he will certainly come. You are a woman; try to enlist this priest in your interest. When the Baron is a ship’s Captain, his uncle a Peer of France, and Troubert a Bishop, you can make Birotteau a Canon at your leisure. Till then yield; but yield gracefully, and with a threat. Your family can give Troubert quite as much assistance as he can give you; you will meet halfway to admiration. And take soundings constantly as you go, sailor!” + 

“Poor Birotteau!” said the Baronne. + 

“Oh! begin at once,” said the old man as he took leave. “If some clever Liberal should get hold of that vacuous brain, he would get you into trouble. After all, the law would pronounce in his favor, and Troubert must be afraid of the verdict. As yet he may forgive you for having begun the action, but after a defeat he would be implacable.⁠—I have spoken.” + 

He snapped his snuffbox lid, went to put on his thick shoes, and departed. + 

The next morning, after breakfast, the Baroness remained alone with Birotteau, and said to him, not without visible embarrassment: + 

“My dear Monsieur Birotteau, I am going to make a request that you will think very unjust and inconsistent; but both for your sake and for ours you must, in the first place, put an end to your action against Mademoiselle Gamard by renouncing your claims, and also quit my house.” + 

As he heard these words the poor priest turned pale. + 

“I am the innocent cause of your misfortunes,” she went on; “and I know that but for my nephew you would never have begun the proceedings which now are working woe for you and for us. Listen to me.” + 

And she briefly set forth the immense scope of this affair, explaining the seriousness of its consequences. Her meditations during the night had enabled her to form an idea of what the Abbé Troubert’s former life had been. Thus she could unerringly point out to Birotteau the web in which he had been involved by this skilfully-plotted vengeance, could show him the superior cleverness and power of the enemy, revealing his hatred and explaining its causes; she pictured him as crouching for twelve years to Chapeloud, and now devouring and persecuting Chapeloud in the person of his friend. + 

The guileless Birotteau clasped his hands as if to pray, and wept with grief at this vision of human wickedness which his innocent soul had never conceived of. Terrified, as though he were standing on the verge of an abyss, he listened to his benefactress with moist and staring eyes, but without expressing a single idea. She said in conclusion: + 

“I know how vile it is to desert you; but, my dear Abbé, family duties must supersede those of friendship. Bend before this storm, as I must, and I will prove my gratitude. I say nothing of your personal concerns; I undertake them; you shall be released from money difficulties for the rest of your life. By the intervention of Monsieur de Bourbonne, who will know how to save appearances, I will see that you lack nothing. My friend, give me the right to throw you over. I shall remain your friend while conforming to the requirements of the world.⁠—Decide.” + 

The hapless Abbé, quite bewildered, exclaimed: + 

“Ah! then Chapeloud was right when he said that if Troubert could drag him out of his grave by the heels, he would do it!⁠—He sleeps in Chapeloud’s bed!” + 

“It is no time for lamentations,” said Madame de Listomère. “We have no time to spare. Come⁠—” + 

Birotteau was too kindhearted not to submit in any great crisis to the impulsive self-sacrifice of the first moment. But, in any case, his life already was but one long martyrdom. He answered with a heartbroken look at his protectress, which wrung her soul: + 

“I am in your hands. I am no more than a straw in the street!” + 

The local word he used, bourrier, is peculiar to Touraine, and its only liberal rendering is a straw. But there are pretty little straws, yellow, shiny, and smart, the delight of children; while a bourrier is a dirty, colorless, miry straw, left in the gutter, driven by the wind, crushed by the foot of every passerby. + 

“But, madame,” he went on, “I should not wish to leave the portrait of Chapeloud for the Abbé Troubert. It was done for me, and belongs to me; get that back for me, and I will give up everything else.” + 

“Well,” said Madame de Listomère, “I will go to Mademoiselle Gamard.” She spoke in a tone which showed what an extraordinary effort the Baronne de Listomère was making in stooping to flatter the old maid’s conceit. “And I will try to settle everything,” she went on. “I hardly dare hope it.⁠—Go and see Monsieur de Bourbonne. Get him to draw up your act of renunciation in due form, and bring it to me signed and witnessed. With the help of the Archbishop, I may perhaps get the thing settled.” + 

Birotteau went away overpowered. Troubert had assumed in his eyes the proportions of an Egyptian pyramid. The man’s hands were in Paris, and his elbows in the Close of Saint-Gatien. + 

“He,” said he to himself, “to hinder Monsieur le Marquis de Listomère being made a peer of France!⁠—And then, ‘With the help of the Archbishop, perhaps get the thing settled!’ ” + 

In comparison with such high interests, Birotteau felt himself a grasshopper; he was honest to himself. + 

The news of Birotteau’s removal was all the more astounding because the reason was undiscoverable. Madame de Listomère gave out that as her nephew wished to marry and retire from the service, she needed the Abbé’s room, to add to her own. No one as yet had heard that Birotteau had withdrawn the action. Monsieur de Bourbonne’s instructions were thus judiciously carried out. + 

These two pieces of news, when they should reach the ears of the Vicar-General, must certainly flatter his vanity, by showing him that, though the Listomère family would not capitulate, it would at least remain neutral, tacitly recognizing the secret power of the Church Council; and was not recognition submission? Still, the action remained sub judice. Was not this to yield and to threaten? + 

Thus the Listomères had assumed an attitude precisely similar to that of the Abbé Troubert in this contest; they stood aside, and could direct their forces. + 

But a serious event now occurred, and added to their difficulties, hindering the success of the means by which Monsieur de Bourbonne and the Listomères hoped to mollify the Gamard and Troubert faction. On the previous day Mademoiselle Gamard had taken a chill on coming out of the Cathedral, had gone to bed, and was reported to be seriously ill. The whole town rang with lamentations, excited by spurious commiseration. “Mademoiselle Gamard’s highly-strung sensibilities had succumbed to the scandal of this lawsuit. Though she was undoubtedly in the right, she was dying of grief. Birotteau had killed his benefactress.” This was the sum and substance of the phrases fired off through the capillary ducts of the great feminine synod, and readily repeated by the town of Tours. + 

Madame de Listomère suffered the humiliation of calling on the old woman without gaining anything by her visit. She very politely requested to be allowed to speak to the Vicar-General. Flattered, perhaps, at receiving a woman who had slighted him, in Chapeloud’s library, by the fireplace over which the two famous pictures in dispute were hanging, Troubert kept the Baroness waiting a minute, then he consented to see her. + 

No courtier, no diplomat, ever threw into the discussion of private interests or national negotiations greater skill, dissimulation, and depth of purpose than the Baroness and the Abbé displayed when they found themselves face to face. + 

Old Bourbonne, like the sponsor, in the Middle Ages, who armed the champion, and fortified his courage by good counsel as he entered the lists, had instructed the Baroness: + 

“Do not forget your part; you are a peacemaker, and not an interested party. Troubert likewise is a mediator. Weigh your words. Study the tones of the Vicar-General’s voice.⁠—If he strokes his chin, you have won him.” + 

Some caricaturists have amused themselves by representing the contrast that so frequently exists between what we say and what we think. In this place, to represent fully the interesting points of the duel of words that took place between the priest and the fine lady, it is necessary to disclose the thoughts they each kept concealed under apparently trivial speech. + 

Madame de Listomère began by expressing the regret she felt about this lawsuit of Birotteau’s, and she went on to speak of her desire of seeing the affair settled to the satisfaction of both parties. + 

“The mischief is done, madame,” said the Abbé. “The admirable Mademoiselle Gamard is dying.” (“I care no more for that stupid creature than for Prester John,” thought he, “but I should like to lay her death at your door, and burden your conscience, if you are silly enough to care.”) + 

“On hearing of her illness,” said the Baroness, “I desired the Abbé to sign a withdrawal, which I have brought to that saintly person.” (“I see through you,” thought she, “you old rascal; but we are no longer at the mercy of your vagaries. As for you, if you accept the deed, you will have put your foot in it; it will be a confession of complicity.”) + 

There was a brief silence. + 

“Mademoiselle Gamard’s temporal affairs are no concern of mine,” said the priest at length, closing the deep lids over his eagle eyes to conceal his excitement. (“Ah, ha, you will not catch me tripping! But God he praised, those cursed lawyers will not fight out a case that might bespatter me! But what on earth can the Listomères want, that they are so humble?”) + 

“Monsieur,” replied the Baronne, “the concerns of Monsieur l’Abbé Birotteau interest me no more than those of Mademoiselle Gamard do you. But, unluckily, religion might suffer from their quarrels, and in you I see but a mediator, while I myself come forward as a peacemaker⁠ ⁠…” (“We can neither of us throw dust in the other’s eyes. Monsieur Troubert,” thought she. “Do you appreciate the epigram in that reply?”) + 

“Religion! madame,” said the Vicar-General. “Religion stands too high for man to touch it.” (“Religion means me,” thought he.) “God will judge us unerringly, madame,” he added, “and I recognize no other tribunal.” + 

“Well, then, monsieur,” replied she, “let us try to make man’s judgments agree with God’s.” (“Yes, Religion means you.”) + 

The Abbé Troubert changed his tone. + 

“Has not Monsieur your nephew just been to Paris?” (“You heard of me there, I fancy,” thought he; “I can crush you⁠—you who scorned me! You have come to surrender.”) + 

“Yes, monsieur, thank you for taking so much interest in him. He is returning to Paris tonight, ordered there by the Minister, who is kindness itself to us, and does not wish him to retire from the service.” (“No, Jesuit, you will not crush us,” thought she; “we understand your little game.”) A pause. “I have not approved of his conduct in this affair,” she went on, “but a sailor may be forgiven for not understanding the law.” (“Come, let us be allies,” thought she; “we shall gain nothing by squabbling.”) + 

A faint smile dawned, and was lost, in the furrows of the Abbé’s face. + 

“He has done us some service by informing us of the value of those two pictures,” said he, looking at them; “they will be a worthy ornament to the Lady Chapel.” (“You fired an epigram at me, madame” thought he; “there are two for you, and we are quits.”) + 

“If you present them to Saint-Gatien, I would beg you to allow me to offer to the Church two frames worthy of the place and of the gift.” (“I should like to make you confess that you coveted Birotteau’s property,” thought she.) + 

“They do not belong to me,” said the priest, well on his guard. + 

“Well, here is the deed that puts an end to all dispute,” said Madame de Listomère, “and restores them to Mademoiselle Gamard.” She laid the document on the table. (“You see, monsieur, how much I trust you,” thought she.) “It is worthy of you, monsieur, worthy of your fine character, to reconcile two Christians, though I have ceased to take much interest in Monsieur Birotteau.” + 

“But he is your pensioner,” said he, interrupting her. + 

“No, monsieur, he is no longer under my roof.” (“My brother-in-law’s peerage and my nephew’s promotion are leading me into very mean actions,” thought she.) + 

The Abbé remained unmoved, but his calm aspect was a symptom of violent agitation. Only Monsieur de Bourbonne had divined the secret of that superficial calm. The priest was triumphant. + 

“Why, then, did you take charge of his act of renunciation?” he asked, moved by a feeling similar to that which makes a woman fish for compliments. + 

“I could not help feeling some pity for him. Birotteau, whose feeble character must be well known to you, entreated me to see Mademoiselle Gamard in order to obtain from her, as the price of the surrender of,” the Abbé frowned⁠—“of his rights, as recognized by many distinguished lawyers, the portrait⁠—” the priest looked hard at Madame de Listomère⁠—“of Chapeloud,” she said. “I leave it to you to judge of his claim to it⁠ ⁠…” (“You would lose if you fought the case,” thought she.) + 

The tone in which the Baroness uttered the words “distinguished lawyers,” showed the priest that she knew the enemy’s strength and weakness. Madame de Listomère displayed so much skill to this experienced connoisseur, that at the end of this conversation, which was carried on for some time in the same key, he went down to see Mademoiselle Gamard to bring her answer as to the proposed bargain. + 

Troubert soon returned. + 

“Madame,” said he, “I can but repeat the poor dying woman’s words. ‘Monsieur l’Abbé Chapeloud showed me too much kindness,’ said she, ‘for me to part from his portrait.’⁠—As for myself, if it were mine, I would not give it up to anyone. I was too faithfully attached to my poor dead friend not to feel that I have a right to claim his likeness against anybody in the world.” + 

“Well, monsieur, do not let us fall out over a bad picture.” (“I care for it more than you do” thought she.) “Keep it; we will have it copied. I am proud to have brought this sad and deplorable lawsuit to an end, and I have personally gained the pleasure of making your acquaintance.⁠—I have heard that you are a fine whist player. You will forgive a woman for being curious,” she added with a smile. “If you will come and play occasionally at my house, you cannot doubt that you will be heartily welcomed.” + 

The Abbé Troubert stroked his chin. (“He is caught; Bourbonne was right,” thought she, “he has his share of vanity.”) + 

In fact, the Vicar-General was at this moment enjoying the delicious sensation which Mirabeau found irresistible when, in the day of his power, he saw the gates of some mansion which had formerly been closed against him, opened to admit his carriage. + 

“Madame,” replied he, “my occupations are too important to allow of my going into society; but for you what would not a man do?” (“It is all over with the old girl; I will make up to the Listomères, and do them a good turn if they do me one,” thought he. “It is better to have them for friends than for enemies.”) + 

Madame de Listomère went home, hoping that the Archbishop would complete a pacification so happily begun. But Birotteau was to gain nothing even by his renunciation. Madame de Listomère heard next day that Mademoiselle Gamard was dead. The old maid’s will being opened, no one was surprised to learn that she had constituted the Abbé Troubert her universal legatee. Her property was estimated at a hundred thousand crowns. The Vicar-General sent two invitations to the service and burial to Madame de Listomère’s house⁠—one for herself, and the other for her nephew. + 

“We must go,” said she. + 

“That is just what it means!” exclaimed Monsieur de Bourbonne. “It is a test by which Monseigneur Troubert meant to try you. Baron, you must go all the way to the grave,” he added to the navy lieutenant, who, for his sins, had not yet left Tours. + 

The service was held, and was marked by ecclesiastical magnificence. One person only shed tears. That was Birotteau, who, alone in a side chapel where he was not seen, believed himself guilty of this death, and prayed fervently for the soul of the departed, bitterly bewailing himself because he had not obtained her forgiveness for having wronged her. + 

The Abbé Troubert followed his friend’s body to the grave in which she was to be laid. Standing on its brink, he delivered an address, and, thanks to his eloquence, gave monumental dignity to his picture of the narrow life led by the testatrix. The bystanders noted these words in the peroration: + 

“This life, full of days devoted to God and to Religion⁠—this life, adorned by so many beautiful actions performed in silence, so many modest and unrecognized virtues, was blighted by a sorrow which we would call unmerited if, here, on the verge of eternity, we could forget that all our afflictions are sent us by God. This holy woman’s many friends, knowing how noble was her guileless soul, foresaw that she could endure anything excepting only such detraction as would affect her whole existence. And so perhaps Providence has taken her to rest in God only to rescue her from our petty griefs. Happy are they who here on earth can live at peace with themselves, as Sophie now reposes in the realms of the blest, in her robe of innocence!” + 

“And when he had ended this grandiloquent discourse,” said Monsieur de Bourbonne, who reported all the details of the funeral to Madame de Listomère that evening when, the rubbers ended and the doors closed, they were left alone with the Baron, “imagine, if you can, that Louis XI in a priest’s gown giving the holy-water sprinkler a final flourish in this style”⁠—and Monsieur de Bourbonne took up the tongs and imitated the Abbé Troubert’s movement so exactly that the Baron and his aunt could not help smiling. “In this alone,” added the old man, “did he betray himself. Till then his reserve had been perfect; but now, when he had packed away forever the old maid he so utterly despised and hated, almost as much perhaps as he had detested Chapeloud, he, no doubt, found it impossible to hinder his satisfaction from betraying itself in a gesture.” + 

Next morning Mademoiselle Salomon came to breakfast with Madame de Listomère, and as soon as she came in she said quite sadly: + 

“Our poor Abbé Birotteau has just been dealt a dreadful blow which reveals the most elaborately studied hatred. He is made Curé of Saint-Symphorien.” + 

Saint-Symphorien is a suburb of Tours lying beyond the bridge. This bridge, one of the finest works of French architecture, is nearly two thousand feet long, and the open squares at each end are exactly alike. + 

“Do you understand?” she added after a pause, amazed at the coolness with which Madame de Listomère heard this news, “The Abbé Birotteau will there be a hundred leagues from Tours, from his friends, from everything. Is it not exile, and all the more terrible because he will be torn from the town that his eyes will behold every day, while he can hardly ever come to it? He who, since his troubles, has hardly been able to walk, will be obliged to come a league to see us. At the present moment the poor man is in bed with a feverish attack. The priest’s residence at Saint-Symphorien is cold and damp, and the parish is too poor to restore it. The poor old man will be buried alive in a real tomb. What a villainous plot!” + 

It will now, perhaps, suffice in conclusion of this story to report briefly a few subsequent events, and to sketch a last picture. + 

Five months later the Vicar-General was a bishop; Madame de Listomère was dead, leaving fifteen hundred francs a year to the Abbé Birotteau. On the day when the Baroness’ will was read, Monseigneur Hyacinthe, Bishop of Troyes, was about to leave Tours and take up his residence in his diocese; but he postponed his departure. Furious at having been deceived by a woman to whom he had offered a hand, while she was secretly holding out hers to the man whom he chose to regard as an enemy, Troubert again threatened to mar the Baron’s career and hinder the Marquis de Listomère from receiving his peerage. In full council, at the Archbishop’s palace, he uttered one of those priestly speeches, big with revenge, though smooth with honeyed mildness. + 

The ambitious lieutenant came to see this ruthless prelate, who dictated hard terms no doubt, for the Baron’s conduct showed absolute subservience to the terrible Jesuit’s will. + 

The new Bishop, by a deed of gift, bestowed Mademoiselle Gamard’s house on the Cathedral Chapter; he gave Chapeloud’s bookcase and books to the little Seminary; he dedicated the two disputed pictures to the Lady Chapel; but he kept the portrait of Chapeloud. No one could understand this almost complete surrender of all Mademoiselle Gamard’s property. Monsieur de Bourbonne imagined that he secretly kept all the actual money to enable him to maintain his rank in Paris, if he should be called to sit on the Bench of Bishops in the Upper Chamber. + 

At last, on the very day before Monseigneur Troubert left Tours, the “old fox” detected the last plot which the gifts had covered, a coup de grâce dealt by the most relentless vengeance to the most helpless of victims. The Baron de Listomère disputed Madame de Listomère’s bequest to Birotteau on the ground of undue influence! Within a few days of the first steps being taken in this action, the Baron was appointed to a ship with the rank of captain; the Curé of Saint-Symphorien was, by an act of discipline, placed under an interdict. His ecclesiastical superiors condemned him by anticipation; so the assassin of the late Sophie Gamard was a rogue as well! Now, if Monseigneur Troubert had kept the old maid’s property, he could hardly have secured Birotteau’s disgrace. + 

At the moment when Monseigneur Hyacinthe, Bishop of Troyes, was passing in a post-chaise, along the quay of Saint-Symphorien, on his way to Paris, poor Birotteau had just been brought out in an armchair to sit in the sun on a terrace. The unhappy priest, stricken by his archbishop, was pale and haggard. Grief, stamped on every feature, had completely altered the face, which of old had been so blandly cheerful. Ill health had cast a dimness that simulated thought over his eyes, which had been bright once with the pleasures of good living, and devoid of any weight of ideas. This was but the skeleton of that Birotteau who, only a year ago, vacuous but happy, had waddled across the Close, The Bishop shot a glance of contempt and pity at his victim; then he vouchsafed to forget him, and passed on. + 

In other times Troubert would certainly have been a Hildebrand or an Alexander VI. Nowadays the Church is no longer a political force, and does not absorb all the powers of isolated men. Hence celibacy has this crying evil, that by concentrating the powers of a man on one single passion, namely, egoism, it makes the unwedded soul mischievous or useless. + 

We live in a time when the fault of most governments is that they make man for society rather than society for man. A perpetual struggle is going on between the individual and the system that tries to turn him to account, while he tries to turn it to account for his own advantage; formerly, man having really more liberty, showed greater generosity for the public weal. The circle in which men move has insensibly widened; the soul that can apprehend it synthetically will never be anything but a grand exception, since, constantly, in moral as in physical force, what is gained in extent is lost in intensity. Society cannot be based on exceptions. + 

Originally, man was simply and solely a father; his heart beat warmly, concentrated within the radius of the family. Later on he lived for the Clan or for a small Republic; hence the grand historical heroism of Greece and Rome. Next, he became the member of a caste, or of a religion, and often was truly sublime in his devotion to its greatness; but then the field of his interests was increased by the addition of every intellectual realm. In these days his life is bound up with that of a vast fatherland; ere long his family will be the whole human race. + 

Will not this moral cosmopolitanism, the thing the Roman Church hopes for, be a sublime mistake? It is so natural to believe in that noble chimera⁠—the brotherhood of men. But, alas! the human machine has not such godlike proportions. The souls that are vast enough to wed a sentiment that is the prerogative of a great man will never be those of plain citizens, of fathers of families. + 

Certain physiologists opine that if the brain expands, the heart must necessarily shrink. That is a mistake. Is not what looks like egoism in the men who bear in their breast a science, a nation, or its laws, the noblest of passions? Is it not, in a way, a motherhood of the people? To bring forth new races or new ideas, must they not combine in their powerful brain the breast of the mother with the force of God? The history of an Innocent III, of a Peter the Great, of all who have guided an epoch or a nation, would at need prove to be, in the highest order of minds, the immense idea represented by Troubert in the depths of the Close of Saint-Gatien. + 