The Vicar of Tours

THE VICAR OF TOURS

By Honore De Balzac

Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley

DEDICATION

To David, Sculptor:

The permanence of the work on which I inscribe your name

--twice made illustrious in this century--is very problematical;

whereas you have graven mine in bronze which survives nations

--if only in their coins. The day may come when numismatists,

discovering amid the ashes of Paris existences perpetuated by

you, will wonder at the number of heads crowned in your

atelier and endeavour to find in them new dynasties.

To you, this divine privilege; to me, gratitude.

De Balzac.

THE VICAR OF TOURS

I

Early in the autumn of 1826 the Abbe Birotteau, the principal personage

of this history, was overtaken by a shower of rain as he returned

home from a friend’s house, where he had been passing the evening.

He therefore crossed, as quickly as his corpulence would allow, the

deserted little square called “The Cloister,” which lies directly behind

the chancel of the cathedral of Saint-Gatien at Tours.

The Abbe Birotteau, a short little man, apoplectic in constitution and

about sixty years old, had already gone through several attacks of gout.

Now, among the petty miseries of human life the one for which the worthy

priest felt the deepest aversion was the sudden sprinkling of his

shoes, adorned with silver buckles, and the wetting of their soles.

Notwithstanding the woollen socks in which at all seasons he enveloped

his feet with the extreme care that ecclesiastics take of themselves, he

was apt at such times to get them a little damp, and the next day

gout was sure to give him certain infallible proofs of constancy.

Nevertheless, as the pavement of the Cloister was likely to be dry, and

as the abbe had won three francs ten sous in his rubber with Madame de

Listomere, he bore the rain resignedly from the middle of the place de

l’Archeveche, where it began to come down in earnest. Besides, he was

fondling his chimera,--a desire already twelve years old, the desire of

a priest, a desire formed anew every evening and now, apparently, very

near accomplishment; in short, he had wrapped himself so completely

in the fur cape of a canon that he did not feel the inclemency of

the weather. During the evening several of the company who habitually

gathered at Madame de Listomere’s had almost guaranteed to him his

nomination to the office of canon (then vacant in the metropolitan

Chapter of Saint-Gatien), assuring him that no one deserved such

promotion as he, whose rights, long overlooked, were indisputable.

If he had lost the rubber, if he had heard that his rival, the Abbe

Poirel, was named canon, the worthy man would have thought the rain

extremely chilling; he might even have thought ill of life. But it

so chanced that he was in one of those rare moments when happy inward

sensations make a man oblivious of discomfort. In hastening his steps he

obeyed a more mechanical impulse, and truth (so essential in a history

of manners and morals) compels us to say that he was thinking of neither

rain nor gout.

In former days there was in the Cloister, on the side towards the

Grand’Rue, a cluster of houses forming a Close and belonging to the

cathedral, where several of the dignitaries of the Chapter lived. After

the confiscation of ecclesiastical property the town had turned the

passage through this close into a narrow street, called the Rue de

la Psalette, by which pedestrians passed from the Cloister to the

Grand’Rue. The name of this street, proves clearly enough that the

precentor and his pupils and those connected with the choir formerly

lived there. The other side, the left side, of the street is occupied by

a single house, the walls of which are overshadowed by the buttresses of

Saint-Gatien, which have their base in the narrow little garden of the

house, leaving it doubtful whether the cathedral was built before

or after this venerable dwelling. An archaeologist examining the

arabesques, the shape of the windows, the arch of the door, the whole

exterior of the house, now mellow with age, would see at once that

it had always been a part of the magnificent edifice with which it is

blended.

An antiquary (had there been one at Tours,--one of the least literary

towns in all France) would even discover, where the narrow street enters

the Cloister, several vestiges of an old arcade, which formerly made a

portico to these ecclesiastical dwellings, and was, no doubt, harmonious

in style with the general character of the architecture.

The house of which we speak, standing on the north side of the

cathedral, was always in the shadow thrown by that vast edifice, on

which time had cast its dingy mantle, marked its furrows, and shed

its chill humidity, its lichen, mosses, and rank herbs. The darkened

dwelling was wrapped in silence, broken only by the bells, by the

chanting of the offices heard through the windows of the church, by the

call of the jackdaws nesting in the belfries. The region is a desert

of stones, a solitude with a character of its own, an arid spot, which

could only be inhabited by beings who had either attained to absolute

nullity, or were gifted with some abnormal strength of soul. The house

in question had always been occupied by abbes, and it belonged to an old

maid named Mademoiselle Gamard. Though the property had been bought

from the national domain under the Reign of Terror by the father of

Mademoiselle Gamard, no one objected under the Restoration to the old

maid’s retaining it, because she took priests to board and was very

devout; it may be that religious persons gave her credit for the

intention of leaving the property to the Chapter.

The Abbe Birotteau was making his way to this house, where he had lived

for the last two years. His apartment had been (as was now the canonry)

an object of envy and his “hoc erat in votis” for a dozen years. To be

Mademoiselle Gamard’s boarder and to become a canon were the two great

desires of his life; in fact they do present accurately the ambition of

a priest, who, considering himself on the highroad to eternity, can wish

for nothing in this world but good lodging, good food, clean garments,

shoes with silver buckles, a sufficiency of things for the needs of the

animal, and a canonry to satisfy self-love, that inexpressible sentiment

which follows us, they say, into the presence of God,--for there are

grades among the saints. But the covetous desire for the apartment which

the Abbe Birotteau was now inhabiting (a very harmless desire in

the eyes of worldly people) had been to the abbe nothing less than a

passion, a passion full of obstacles, and, like more guilty passions,

full of hopes, pleasures, and remorse.

The interior arrangements of the house did not allow Mademoiselle Gamard

to take more than two lodgers. Now, for about twelve years before the

day when Birotteau went to live with her she had undertaken to keep in

health and contentment two priests; namely, Monsieur l’Abbe Troubert

and Monsieur l’Abbe Chapeloud. The Abbe Troubert still lived. The Abbe

Chapeloud was dead; and Birotteau had stepped into his place.

The late Abbe Chapeloud, in life a canon of Saint-Gatien, had been an

intimate friend of the Abbe Birotteau. Every time that the latter paid

a visit to the canon he had constantly admired the apartment, the

furniture and the library. Out of this admiration grew the desire to

possess these beautiful things. It had been impossible for the Abbe

Birotteau to stifle this desire; though it often made him suffer

terribly when he reflected that the death of his best friend could alone

satisfy his secret covetousness, which increased as time went on. The

Abbe Chapeloud and his friend Birotteau were not rich. Both were sons of

peasants; and their slender savings had been spent in the mere costs

of living during the disastrous years of the Revolution. When Napoleon

restored the Catholic worship the Abbe Chapeloud was appointed canon of

the cathedral and Birotteau was made vicar of it. Chapeloud then went to

board with Mademoiselle Gamard. When Birotteau first came to visit

his friend, he thought the arrangement of the rooms excellent, but he

noticed nothing more. The outset of this concupiscence of chattels was

very like that of a true passion, which often begins, in a young man,

with cold admiration for a woman whom he ends in loving forever.

The apartment, reached by a stone staircase, was on the side of the

house that faced south. The Abbe Troubert occupied the ground-floor, and

Mademoiselle Gamard the first floor of the main building, looking on the

street. When Chapeloud took possession of his rooms they were bare

of furniture, and the ceilings were blackened with smoke. The stone

mantelpieces, which were very badly cut, had never been painted. At

first, the only furniture the poor canon could put in was a bed, a

table, a few chairs, and the books he possessed. The apartment was like

a beautiful woman in rags. But two or three years later, an old lady

having left the Abbe Chapeloud two thousand francs, he spent that sum on

the purchase of an oak bookcase, the relic of a chateau pulled down by

the Bande Noire, the carving of which deserved the admiration of all

artists. The abbe made the purchase less because it was very cheap than

because the dimensions of the bookcase exactly fitted the space it was

to fill in his gallery. His savings enabled him to renovate the whole

gallery, which up to this time had been neglected and shabby. The floor

was carefully waxed, the ceiling whitened, the wood-work painted to

resemble the grain and knots of oak. A long table in ebony and two

cabinets by Boulle completed the decoration, and gave to this gallery a

certain air that was full of character. In the course of two years the

liberality of devout persons, and legacies, though small ones, from

pious penitents, filled the shelves of the bookcase, till then half

empty. Moreover, Chapeloud’s uncle, an old Oratorian, had left him his

collection in folio of the Fathers of the Church, and several other

important works that were precious to a priest.

Birotteau, more and more surprised by the successive improvements of

the gallery, once so bare, came by degrees to a condition of involuntary

envy. He wished he could possess that apartment, so thoroughly in

keeping with the gravity of ecclestiastical life. The passion increased

from day to day. Working, sometimes for days together, in this retreat,

the vicar could appreciate the silence and the peace that reigned there.

During the following year the Abbe Chapeloud turned a small room into

an oratory, which his pious friends took pleasure in beautifying. Still

later, another lady gave the canon a set of furniture for his bedroom,

the covering of which she had embroidered under the eyes of the worthy

man without his ever suspecting its destination. The bedroom then had

the same effect upon the vicar that the gallery had long had; it dazzled

him. Lastly, about three years before the Abbe Chapeloud’s death, he

completed the comfort of his apartment by decorating the salon. Though

the furniture was plainly covered in red Utrecht velvet, it fascinated

Birotteau. From the day when the canon’s friend first laid eyes on the

red damask curtains, the mahogany furniture, the Aubusson carpet which

adorned the vast room, then lately painted, his envy of Chapeloud’s

apartment became a monomania hidden within his breast. To live there, to

sleep in that bed with the silk curtains where the canon slept, to have

all Chapeloud’s comforts about him, would be, Birotteau felt, complete

happiness; he saw nothing beyond it. All the envy, all the ambition

which the things of this world give birth to in the hearts of other men

concentrated themselves for Birotteau in the deep and secret longing he

felt for an apartment like that which the Abbe Chapeloud had created for

himself. When his friend fell ill he went to him out of true affection;

but all the same, when he first heard of his illness, and when he sat

by his bed to keep him company, there arose in the depths of his

consciousness, in spite of himself, a crowd of thoughts the simple

formula of which was always, “If Chapeloud dies I can have this

apartment.” And yet--Birotteau having an excellent heart, contracted

ideas, and a limited mind--he did not go so far as to think of means by

which to make his friend bequeath to him the library and the furniture.

The Abbe Chapeloud, an amiable, indulgent egoist, fathomed his friend’s

desires--not a difficult thing to do--and forgave them; which may seem

less easy to a priest; but it must be remembered that the vicar, whose

friendship was faithful, did not fail to take a daily walk with his

friend along their usual path in the Mail de Tours, never once depriving

him of an instant of the time devoted for over twenty years to that

exercise. Birotteau, who regarded his secret wishes as crimes, would

have been capable, out of contrition, of the utmost devotion to his

friend. The latter paid his debt of gratitude for a friendship so

ingenuously sincere by saying, a few days before his death, as the

vicar sat by him reading the “Quotidienne” aloud: “This time you will

certainly get the apartment. I feel it is all over with me now.”

Accordingly, it was found that the Abbe Chapeloud had left his library

and all his furniture to his friend Birotteau. The possession of these

things, so keenly desired, and the prospect of being taken to board by

Mademoiselle Gamard, certainly did allay the grief which Birotteau felt

at the death of his friend the canon. He might not have been willing

to resuscitate him; but he mourned him. For several days he was like

Gargantus, who, when his wife died in giving birth to Pantagruel, did

not know whether to rejoice at the birth of a son or grieve at having

buried his good Babette, and therefore cheated himself by rejoicing at

the death of his wife, and deploring the advent of Pantagruel.

The Abbe Birotteau spent the first days of his mourning in verifying the

books in _his_ library, in making use of _his_ furniture, in examining

the whole of his inheritance, saying in a tone which, unfortunately,

was not noted at the time, “Poor Chapeloud!” His joy and his grief so

completely absorbed him that he felt no pain when he found that the

office of canon, in which the late Chapeloud had hoped his friend

Birotteau might succeed him, was given to another. Mademoiselle Gamard

having cheerfully agreed to take the vicar to board, the latter was

thenceforth a participator in all those felicities of material comfort

of which the deceased canon had been wont to boast.

Incalculable they were! According to the Abbe Chapeloud none of the

priests who inhabited the city of Tours, not even the archbishop, had

ever been the object of such minute and delicate attentions as those

bestowed by Mademoiselle Gamard on her two lodgers. The first words

the canon said to his friend when they met for their walk on the Mail

referred usually to the succulent dinner he had just eaten; and it was a

very rare thing if during the walks of each week he did not say at least

fourteen times, “That excellent spinster certainly has a vocation for

serving ecclesiastics.”

“Just think,” the canon would say to Birotteau, “that for twelve

consecutive years nothing has ever been amiss,--linen in perfect order,

bands, albs, surplices; I find everything in its place, always in

sufficient quantity, and smelling of orris-root. My furniture is rubbed

and kept so bright that I don’t know when I have seen any dust--did

you ever see a speck of it in my rooms? Then the firewood is so well

selected. The least little things are excellent. In fact, Mademoiselle

Gamard keeps an incessant watch over my wants. I can’t remember having

rung twice for anything--no matter what--in ten years. That’s what

I call living! I never have to look for a single thing, not even my

slippers. Always a good fire, always a good dinner. Once the bellows

annoyed me, the nozzle was choked up; but I only mentioned it once, and

the next day Mademoiselle gave me a very pretty pair, also those nice

tongs you see me mend the fire with.”

For all answer Birotteau would say, “Smelling of orris-root!” That

“smelling of orris-root” always affected him. The canon’s remarks

revealed ideal joys to the poor vicar, whose bands and albs were the

plague of his life, for he was totally devoid of method and often

forgot to order his dinner. Therefore, if he saw Mademoiselle Gamard

at Saint-Gatien while saying mass or taking round the plate, he never

failed to give her a kindly and benevolent look,--such a look as Saint

Teresa might have cast to heaven.

Though the comforts which all creatures desire, and for which he had so

often longed, thus fell to his share, the Abbe Birotteau, like the rest

of the world, found it difficult, even for a priest, to live without

something to hanker for. Consequently, for the last eighteen months

he had replaced his two satisfied passions by an ardent longing for a

canonry. The title of Canon had become to him very much what a peerage

is to a plebeian minister. The prospect of an appointment, hopes

of which had just been held out to him at Madame de Listomere’s, so

completely turned his head that he did not observe until he reached his

own door that he had left his umbrella behind him. Perhaps, even then,

if the rain were not falling in torrents he might not have missed it, so

absorbed was he in the pleasure of going over and over in his mind what

had been said to him on the subject of his promotion by the company at

Madame de Listomere’s,--an old lady with whom he spent every Wednesday

evening.

The vicar rang loudly, as if to let the servant know she was not to

keep him waiting. Then he stood close to the door to avoid, if he could,

getting showered; but the drip from the roof fell precisely on the toes

of his shoes, and the wind blew gusts of rain into his face that were

much like a shower-bath. Having calculated the time necessary for the

woman to leave the kitchen and pull the string of the outer door, he

rang again, this time in a manner that resulted in a very significant

peal of the bell.

“They can’t be out,” he said to himself, not hearing any movement on the

premises.

Again he rang, producing a sound that echoed sharply through the house

and was taken up and repeated by all the echoes of the cathedral,

so that no one could avoid waking up at the remonstrating racket.

Accordingly, in a few moments, he heard, not without some pleasure in

his wrath, the wooden shoes of the servant-woman clacking along the

paved path which led to the outer door. But even then the discomforts of

the gouty old gentleman were not so quickly over as he hoped. Instead

of pulling the string, Marianne was obliged to turn the lock of the door

with its heavy key, and pull back all the bolts.

“Why did you let me ring three times in such weather?” said the vicar.

“But, monsieur, don’t you see the door was locked? We have all been

in bed ever so long; it struck a quarter to eleven some time ago.

Mademoiselle must have thought you were in.”

“You saw me go out, yourself. Besides, Mademoiselle knows very well I

always go to Madame de Listomere’s on Wednesday evening.”

“I only did as Mademoiselle told me, monsieur.”

These words struck the vicar a blow, which he felt the more because his

late revery had made him completely happy. He said nothing and followed

Marianne towards the kitchen to get his candlestick, which he supposed

had been left there as usual. But instead of entering the kitchen

Marianne went on to his own apartments, and there the vicar beheld his

candlestick on a table close to the door of the red salon, in a sort of

antechamber formed by the landing of the staircase, which the late canon

had inclosed with a glass partition. Mute with amazement, he entered his

bedroom hastily, found no fire, and called to Marianne, who had not had

time to get downstairs.

“You have not lighted the fire!” he said.

“Beg pardon, Monsieur l’abbe, I did,” she said; “it must have gone out.”

Birotteau looked again at the hearth, and felt convinced that the fire

had been out since morning.

“I must dry my feet,” he said. “Make the fire.”

Marianne obeyed with the haste of a person who wants to get back to her

night’s rest. While looking about him for his slippers, which were not

in the middle of his bedside carpet as usual, the abbe took mental notes

of the state of Marianne’s dress, which convinced him that she had not

got out of bed to open the door as she said she had. He then recollected

that for the last two weeks he had been deprived of various little

attentions which for eighteen months had made life sweet to him. Now,

as the nature of narrow minds induces them to study trifles, Birotteau

plunged suddenly into deep meditation on these four circumstances,

imperceptible in their meaning to others, but to him indicative of four

catastrophes. The total loss of his happiness was evidently foreshadowed

in the neglect to place his slippers, in Marianne’s falsehood about

the fire, in the unusual removal of his candlestick to the table of the

antechamber, and in the evident intention to keep him waiting in the

rain.

When the fire was burning on the hearth, and the lamp was lighted, and

Marianne had departed without saying, as usual, “Does Monsieur want

anything more?” the Abbe Birotteau let himself fall gently into the

wide and handsome easy-chair of his late friend; but there was something

mournful in the movement with which he dropped upon it. The good

soul was crushed by a presentiment of coming calamity. His eyes roved

successively to the handsome tall clock, the bureau, curtains, chairs,

carpets, to the stately bed, the basin of holy-water, the crucifix, to

a Virgin by Valentin, a Christ by Lebrun,--in short, to all the

accessories of this cherished room, while his face expressed the anguish

of the tenderest farewell that a lover ever took of his first mistress,

or an old man of his lately planted trees. The vicar had just perceived,

somewhat late it is true, the signs of a dumb persecution instituted

against him for the last three months by Mademoiselle Gamard, whose

evil intentions would doubtless have been fathomed much sooner by a more

intelligent man. Old maids have a special talent for accentuating the

words and actions which their dislikes suggest to them. They scratch

like cats. They not only wound but they take pleasure in wounding, and

in making their victim see that he is wounded. A man of the world would

never have allowed himself to be scratched twice; the good abbe, on the

contrary, had taken several blows from those sharp claws before he could

be brought to believe in any evil intention.

But when he did perceive it, he set to work, with the inquisitorial

sagacity which priests acquire by directing consciences and burrowing

into the nothings of the confessional, to establish, as though it were

a matter of religious controversy, the following proposition: “Admitting

that Mademoiselle Gamard did not remember it was Madame de Listomere’s

evening, and that Marianne did think I was home, and did really forget

to make my fire, it is impossible, inasmuch as I myself took down my

candlestick this morning, that Mademoiselle Gamard, seeing it in her

salon, could have supposed I had gone to bed. Ergo, Mademoiselle Gamard

intended that I should stand out in the rain, and, by carrying my

candlestick upstairs, she meant to make me understand it. What does it

all mean?” he said aloud, roused by the gravity of these circumstances,

and rising as he spoke to take off his damp clothes, get into his

dressing-gown, and do up his head for the night. Then he returned from

the bed to the fireplace, gesticulating, and launching forth in various

tones the following sentences, all of which ended in a high falsetto

key, like notes of interjection:

“What the deuce have I done to her? Why is she angry with me? Marianne

did _not_ forget my fire! Mademoiselle told her not to light it! I must

be a child if I can’t see, from the tone and manner she has been taking

to me, that I’ve done something to displease her. Nothing like it ever

happened to Chapeloud! I can’t live in the midst of such torments as--At

my age--”

He went to bed hoping that the morrow might enlighten him on the causes

of the dislike which threatened to destroy forever the happiness he had

now enjoyed two years after wishing for it so long. Alas! the secret

reasons for the inimical feelings Mademoiselle Gamard bore to the

luckless abbe were fated to remain eternally unknown to him,--not that

they were difficult to fathom, but simply because he lacked the good

faith and candor by which great souls and scoundrels look within and

judge themselves. A man of genius or a trickster says to himself, “I

did wrong.” Self-interest and native talent are the only infallible

and lucid guides. Now the Abbe Birotteau, whose goodness amounted to

stupidity, whose knowledge was only, as it were, plastered on him by

dint of study, who had no experience whatever of the world and its ways,

who lived between the mass and the confessional, chiefly occupied

in dealing the most trivial matters of conscience in his capacity

of confessor to all the schools in town and to a few noble souls who

rightly appreciated him,--the Abbe Birotteau must be regarded as a

great child, to whom most of the practices of social life were

utterly unknown. And yet, the natural selfishness of all human beings,

reinforced by the selfishness peculiar to the priesthood and that of

the narrow life of the provinces had insensibly, and unknown to himself,

developed within him. If any one had felt enough interest in the good

man to probe his spirit and prove to him that in the numerous petty

details of his life and in the minute duties of his daily existence he

was essentially lacking in the self-sacrifice he professed, he would

have punished and mortified himself in good faith. But those whom we

offend by such unconscious selfishness pay little heed to our real

innocence; what they want is vengeance, and they take it. Thus it

happened that Birotteau, weak brother that he was, was made to undergo

the decrees of that great distributive Justice which goes about

compelling the world to execute its judgments,--called by ninnies “the

misfortunes of life.”

There was this difference between the late Chapeloud and the vicar,--one

was a shrewd and clever egoist, the other a simple-minded and clumsy

one. When the canon went to board with Mademoiselle Gamard he knew

exactly how to judge of his landlady’s character. The confessional had

taught him to understand the bitterness that the sense of being kept

outside the social pale puts into the heart of an old maid; he therefore

calculated his own treatment of Mademoiselle Gamard very wisely. She was

then about thirty-eight years old, and still retained a few pretensions,

which, in well-behaved persons of her condition, change, rather later,

into strong personal self-esteem. The canon saw plainly that to live

comfortably with his landlady he must pay her invariably the same

attentions and be more infallible than the pope himself. To compass this

result, he allowed no points of contact between himself and her except

those that politeness demanded, and those which necessarily exist

between two persons living under the same roof. Thus, though he and

the Abbe Troubert took their regular three meals a day, he avoided the

family breakfast by inducing Mademoiselle Gamard to send his coffee to

his own room. He also avoided the annoyance of supper by taking tea in

the houses of friends with whom he spent his evenings. In this way he

seldom saw his landlady except at dinner; but he always came down to

that meal a few minutes in advance of the hour. During this visit of

courtesy, as it may be called, he talked to her, for the twelve years he

had lived under her roof, on nearly the same topics, receiving from her

the same answers. How she had slept, her breakfast, the trivial domestic

events, her looks, her health, the weather, the time the church services

had lasted, the incidents of the mass, the health of such or such a

priest,--these were the subjects of their daily conversation. During

dinner he invariably paid her certain indirect compliments; the fish

had an excellent flavor; the seasoning of a sauce was delicious;

Mademoiselle Gamard’s capacities and virtues as mistress of a household

were great. He was sure of flattering the old maid’s vanity by praising

the skill with which she made or prepared her preserves and pickles and

pates and other gastronomical inventions. To cap all, the wily canon

never left his landlady’s yellow salon after dinner without remarking

that there was no house in Tours where he could get such good coffee as

that he had just imbibed.

Thanks to this thorough understanding of Mademoiselle Gamard’s

character, and to the science of existence which he had put in practice

for the last twelve years, no matter of discussion on the internal

arrangements of the household had ever come up between them. The Abbe

Chapeloud had taken note of the spinster’s angles, asperities, and

crabbedness, and had so arranged his avoidance of her that he obtained

without the least difficulty all the concessions that were necessary

to the happiness and tranquility of his life. The result was that

Mademoiselle Gamard frequently remarked to her friends and acquaintances

that the Abbe Chapeloud was a very amiable man, extremely easy to live

with, and a fine mind.

As to her other lodger, the Abbe Troubert, she said absolutely nothing

about him. Completely involved in the round of her life, like a

satellite in the orbit of a planet, Troubert was to her a sort of

intermediary creature between the individuals of the human species

and those of the canine species; he was classed in her heart next, but

directly before, the place intended for friends but now occupied by

a fat and wheezy pug which she tenderly loved. She ruled Troubert

completely, and the intermingling of their interests was so obvious that

many persons of her social sphere believed that the Abbe Troubert had

designs on the old maid’s property, and was binding her to him unawares

with infinite patience, and really directing her while he seemed to be

obeying without ever letting her perceive in him the slightest wish on

his part to govern her.

When the Abbe Chapeloud died, the old maid, who desired a lodger with

quiet ways, naturally thought of the vicar. Before the canon’s will was

made known she had meditated offering his rooms to the Abbe Troubert,

who was not very comfortable on the ground-floor. But when the Abbe

Birotteau, on receiving his legacy, came to settle in writing the terms

of his board she saw he was so in love with the apartment, for which he

might now admit his long cherished desires, that she dared not propose

the exchange, and accordingly sacrificed her sentiments of friendship to

the demands of self-interest. But in order to console her beloved canon,

Mademoiselle took up the large white Chateau-Renaud bricks that made

the floors of his apartment and replaced them by wooden floors laid in

“point de Hongrie.” She also rebuilt a smoky chimney.

For twelve years the Abbe Birotteau had seen his friend Chapeloud in

that house without ever giving a thought to the motive of the canon’s

extreme circumspection in his relations to Mademoiselle Gamard. When he

came himself to live with that saintly woman he was in the condition

of a lover on the point of being made happy. Even if he had not been

by nature purblind of intellect, his eyes were too dazzled by his new

happiness to allow him to judge of the landlady, or to reflect on the

limits which he ought to impose on their daily intercourse. Mademoiselle

Gamard, seen from afar and through the prism of those material

felicities which the vicar dreamed of enjoying in her house, seemed to

him a perfect being, a faultless Christian, essentially charitable, the

woman of the Gospel, the wise virgin, adorned by all those humble and

modest virtues which shed celestial fragrance upon life.

So, with the enthusiasm of one who attains an object long desired, with

the candor of a child, and the blundering foolishness of an old

man utterly without worldly experience, he fell into the life of

Mademoiselle Gamard precisely as a fly is caught in a spider’s web. The

first day that he went to dine and sleep at the house he was detained in

the salon after dinner, partly to make his landlady’s acquaintance, but

chiefly by that inexplicable embarrassment which often assails

timid people and makes them fear to seem impolite by breaking off a

conversation in order to take leave. Consequently he remained there the

whole evening. Then a friend of his, a certain Mademoiselle Salomon

de Villenoix, came to see him, and this gave Mademoiselle Gamard the

happiness of forming a card-table; so that when the vicar went to bed he

felt that he had passed a very agreeable evening. Knowing Mademoiselle

Gamard and the Abbe Troubert but slightly, he saw only the superficial

aspects of their characters; few persons bare their defects at once,

they generally take on a becoming veneer.

The worthy abbe was thus led to suggest to himself the charming plan of

devoting all his evenings to Mademoiselle Gamard, instead of spending

them, as Chapeloud had done, elsewhere. The old maid had for years been

possessed by a desire which grew stronger day by day. This desire,

often formed by old persons and even by pretty women, had become in

Mademoiselle Gamard’s soul as ardent a longing as that of Birotteau for

Chapeloud’s apartment; and it was strengthened by all those feelings

of pride, egotism, envy, and vanity which pre-exist in the breasts of

worldly people.

This history is of all time; it suffices to widen slightly the

narrow circle in which these personages are about to act to find the

coefficient reasons of events which take place in the very highest

spheres of social life.

Mademoiselle Gamard spent her evenings by rotation in six or eight

different houses. Whether it was that she disliked being obliged to go

out to seek society, and considered that at her age she had a right

to expect some return; or that her pride was wounded at receiving no

company in her house; or that her self-love craved the compliments

she saw her various hostesses receive,--certain it is that her whole

ambition was to make her salon a centre towards which a given number of

persons should nightly make their way with pleasure. One morning as she

left Saint-Gatien, after Birotteau and his friend Mademoiselle Salomon

had spent a few evenings with her and with the faithful and patient

Troubert, she said to certain of her good friends whom she met at the

church door, and whose slave she had hitherto considered herself, that

those who wished to see her could certainly come once a week to her

house, where she had friends enough to make a card-table; she could not

leave the Abbe Birotteau; Mademoiselle Salomon had not missed a single

evening that week; she was devoted to friends; and--et cetera, et

cetera. Her speech was all the more humbly haughty and softly persuasive

because Mademoiselle Salomon de Villenoix belonged to the most

aristocratic society in Tours. For though Mademoiselle Salomon came to

Mademoiselle Gamard’s house solely out of friendship for the vicar, the

old maid triumphed in receiving her, and saw that, thanks to Birotteau,

she was on the point of succeeding in her great desire to form a

circle as numerous and as agreeable as those of Madame de Listomere,

Mademoiselle Merlin de la Blottiere, and other devout ladies who were in

the habit of receiving the pious and ecclesiastical society of Tours.

But alas! the abbe Birotteau himself caused this cherished hope to

miscarry. Now if those persons who in the course of their lives have

attained to the enjoyment of a long desired happiness and have therefore

comprehended the joy of the vicar when he stepped into Chapeloud’s

vacant place, they will also have gained some faint idea of Mademoiselle

Gamard’s distress at the overthrow of her favorite plan.

After accepting his happiness in the old maid’s salon for six months

with tolerable patience, Birotteau deserted the house of an evening,

carrying with him Mademoiselle Salomon. In spite of her utmost efforts

the ambitious Gamard had recruited barely six visitors, whose faithful

attendance was more than problematical; and boston could not be played

night after night unless at least four persons were present. The

defection of her two principal guests obliged her therefore to make

suitable apologies and return to her evening visiting among former

friends; for old maids find their own company so distasteful that they

prefer to seek the doubtful pleasures of society.

The cause of this desertion is plain enough. Although the vicar was one

of those to whom heaven is hereafter to belong in virtue of the decree

“Blessed are the poor in spirit,” he could not, like some fools, endure

the annoyance that other fools caused him. Persons without minds are

like weeds that delight in good earth; they want to be amused by others,

all the more because they are dull within. The incarnation of ennui

to which they are victims, joined to the need they feel of getting a

divorce from themselves, produces that passion for moving about, for

being somewhere else than where they are, which distinguishes their

species,--and also that of all beings devoid of sensitiveness, and those

who have missed their destiny, or who suffer by their own fault.

Without really fathoming the vacuity and emptiness of Mademoiselle

Gamard’s mind, or stating to himself the pettiness of her ideas, the

poor abbe perceived, unfortunately too late, the defects which she

shared with all old maids, and those which were peculiar to herself.

The bad points of others show out so strongly against the good that

they usually strike our eyes before they wound us. This moral phenomenon

might, at a pinch, be made to excuse the tendency we all have, more or

less, to gossip. It is so natural, socially speaking, to laugh at

the failings of others that we ought to forgive the ridicule our own

absurdities excite, and be annoyed only by calumny. But in this instance

the eyes of the good vicar never reached the optical range which enables

men of the world to see and evade their neighbours’ rough points. Before

he could be brought to perceive the faults of his landlady he was forced

to undergo the warning which Nature gives to all her creatures--pain.

Old maids who have never yielded in their habits of life or in their

characters to other lives and other characters, as the fate of woman

exacts, have, as a general thing, a mania for making others give way

to them. In Mademoiselle Gamard this sentiment had degenerated into

despotism, but a despotism that could only exercise itself on little

things. For instance (among a hundred other examples), the basket of

counters placed on the card-table for the Abbe Birotteau was to stand

exactly where she placed it; and the abbe annoyed her terribly by

moving it, which he did nearly every evening. How is this sensitiveness

stupidly spent on nothings to be accounted for? what is the object of

it? No one could have told in this case; Mademoiselle Gamard herself

knew no reason for it. The vicar, though a sheep by nature, did not

like, any more than other sheep, to feel the crook too often, especially

when it bristled with spikes. Not seeking to explain to himself the

patience of the Abbe Troubert, Birotteau simply withdrew from the

happiness which Mademoiselle Gamard believed that she seasoned to his

liking,--for she regarded happiness as a thing to be made, like her

preserves. But the luckless abbe made the break in a clumsy way, the

natural way of his own naive character, and it was not carried out

without much nagging and sharp-shooting, which the Abbe Birotteau

endeavored to bear as if he did not feel them.

By the end of the first year of his sojourn under Mademoiselle Gamard’s

roof the vicar had resumed his former habits; spending two evenings a

week with Madame de Listomere, three with Mademoiselle Salomon, and

the other two with Mademoiselle Merlin de la Blottiere. These ladies

belonged to the aristocratic circles of Tourainean society, to which

Mademoiselle Gamard was not admitted. Therefore the abbe’s abandonment

was the more insulting, because it made her feel her want of social

value; all choice implies contempt for the thing rejected.

“Monsieur Birotteau does not find us agreeable enough,” said the Abbe

Troubert to Mademoiselle Gamard’s friends when she was forced to tell

them that her “evenings” must be given up. “He is a man of the world,

and a good liver! He wants fashion, luxury, witty conversation, and the

scandals of the town.”

These words of course obliged Mademoiselle Gamard to defend herself at

Birotteau’s expense.

“He is not much a man of the world,” she said. “If it had not been

for the Abbe Chapeloud he would never have been received at Madame de

Listomere’s. Oh, what didn’t I lose in losing the Abbe Chapeloud! Such

an amiable man, and so easy to live with! In twelve whole years I never

had the slightest difficulty or disagreement with him.”

Presented thus, the innocent abbe was considered by this bourgeois

society, which secretly hated the aristocratic society, as a man

essentially exacting and hard to get along with. For a week Mademoiselle

Gamard enjoyed the pleasure of being pitied by friends who, without

really thinking one word of what they said, kept repeating to her: “How

_could_ he have turned against you?--so kind and gentle as you are!”

or, “Console yourself, dear Mademoiselle Gamard, you are so well known

that--” et cetera.

Nevertheless, these friends, enchanted to escape one evening a week in

the Cloister, the darkest, dreariest, and most out of the way corner in

Tours, blessed the poor vicar in their hearts.

Between persons who are perpetually in each other’s company dislike or

love increases daily; every moment brings reasons to love or hate each

other more and more. The Abbe Birotteau soon became intolerable to

Mademoiselle Gamard. Eighteen months after she had taken him to board,

and at the moment when the worthy man was mistaking the silence of

hatred for the peacefulness of content, and applauding himself for

having, as he said, “managed matters so well with the old maid,” he

was really the object of an underhand persecution and a vengeance

deliberately planned. The four marked circumstances of the locked

door, the forgotten slippers, the lack of fire, and the removal of

the candlestick, were the first signs that revealed to him a terrible

enmity, the final consequences of which were destined not to strike him

until the time came when they were irreparable.

As he went to bed the worthy vicar worked his brains--quite uselessly,

for he was soon at the end of them--to explain to himself the

extraordinarily discourteous conduct of Mademoiselle Gamard. The fact

was that, having all along acted logically in obeying the natural laws

of his own egotism, it was impossible that he should now perceive his

own faults towards his landlady.

Though the great things of life are simple to understand and easy to

express, the littlenesses require a vast number of details to explain

them. The foregoing events, which may be called a sort of prologue to

this bourgeois drama, in which we shall find passions as violent as

those excited by great interests, required this long introduction; and

it would have been difficult for any faithful historian to shorten the

account of these minute developments.

II

The next morning, on awaking, Birotteau thought so much of his

prospective canonry that he forgot the four circumstances in which he

had seen, the night before, such threatening prognostics of a future

full of misery. The vicar was not a man to get up without a fire. He

rang to let Marianne know that he was awake and that she must come to

him; then he remained, as his habit was, absorbed in somnolent musings.

The servant’s custom was to make the fire and gently draw him from his

half sleep by the murmured sound of her movements,--a sort of music

which he loved. Twenty minutes passed and Marianne had not appeared.

The vicar, now half a canon, was about to ring again, when he let go the

bell-pull, hearing a man’s step on the staircase. In a minute more the

Abbe Troubert, after discreetly knocking at the door, obeyed Birotteau’s

invitation and entered the room. This visit, which the two abbe’s

usually paid each other once a month, was no surprise to the vicar. The

canon at once exclaimed when he saw that Marianne had not made the fire

of his quasi-colleague. He opened the window and called to her harshly,

telling her to come at once to the abbe; then, turning round to his

ecclesiastical brother, he said, “If Mademoiselle knew that you had no

fire she would scold Marianne.”

After this speech he inquired about Birotteau’s health, and asked in a

gentle voice if he had had any recent news that gave him hopes of his

canonry. The vicar explained the steps he had taken, and told, naively,

the names of the persons with whom Madam de Listomere was using her

influence, quite unaware that Troubert had never forgiven that lady for

not admitting him--the Abbe Troubert, twice proposed by the bishop as

vicar-general!--to her house.

It would be impossible to find two figures which presented so many

contrasts to each other as those of the two abbes. Troubert, tall

and lean, was yellow and bilious, while the vicar was what we call,

familiarly, plump. Birotteau’s face, round and ruddy, proclaimed a

kindly nature barren of ideas, while that of the Abbe Troubert, long and

ploughed by many wrinkles, took on at times an expression of sarcasm, or

else of contempt; but it was necessary to watch him very closely before

those sentiments could be detected. The canon’s habitual condition

was perfect calmness, and his eyelids were usually lowered over his

orange-colored eyes, which could, however, give clear and piercing

glances when he liked. Reddish hair added to the gloomy effect of this

countenance, which was always obscured by the veil which deep meditation

drew across its features. Many persons at first sight thought him

absorbed in high and earnest ambitions; but those who claimed to know

him better denied that impression, insisting that he was only stupidly

dull under Mademoiselle Gamard’s despotism, or else worn out by too much

fasting. He seldom spoke, and never laughed. When it did so happen that

he felt agreeably moved, a feeble smile would flicker on his lips and

lose itself in the wrinkles of his face.

Birotteau, on the other hand, was all expansion, all frankness; he loved

good things and was amused by trifles with the simplicity of a man who

knew no spite or malice. The Abbe Troubert roused, at first sight, an

involuntary feeling of fear, while the vicar’s presence brought a kindly

smile to the lips of all who looked at him. When the tall canon marched

with solemn step through the naves and cloisters of Saint-Gatien, his

head bowed, his eye stern, respect followed him; that bent face was in

harmony with the yellowing arches of the cathedral; the folds of his

cassock fell in monumental lines that were worthy of statuary. The good

vicar, on the contrary, perambulated about with no gravity at all. He

trotted and ambled and seemed at times to roll himself along. But with

all this there was one point of resemblance between the two men. For,

precisely as Troubert’s ambitious air, which made him feared, had

contributed probably to keep him down to the insignificant position of

a mere canon, so the character and ways of Birotteau marked him out as

perpetually the vicar of the cathedral and nothing higher.

Yet the Abbe Troubert, now fifty years of age, had entirely removed,

partly by the circumspection of his conduct and the apparent lack of all

ambitions, and partly by his saintly life, the fears which his suspected

ability and his powerful presence had roused in the minds of his

superiors. His health having seriously failed him during the last

year, it seemed probable that he would soon be raised to the office of

vicar-general of the archbishopric. His competitors themselves desired

the appointment, so that their own plans might have time to mature

during the few remaining days which a malady, now become chronic, might

allow him. Far from offering the same hopes to rivals, Birotteau’s

triple chin showed to all who wanted his coveted canonry an evidence of

the soundest health; even his gout seemed to them, in accordance with

the proverb, an assurance of longevity.

The Abbe Chapeloud, a man of great good sense, whose amiability had made

the leaders of the diocese and the members of the best society in Tours

seek his company, had steadily opposed, though secretly and with much

judgment, the elevation of the Abbe Troubert. He had even adroitly

managed to prevent his access to the salons of the best society.

Nevertheless, during Chapeloud’s lifetime Troubert treated him

invariably with great respect, and showed him on all occasions the

utmost deference. This constant submission did not, however, change the

opinion of the late canon, who said to Birotteau during the last walk

they took together: “Distrust that lean stick of a Troubert,--Sixtus the

Fifth reduced to the limits of a bishopric!”

Such was the friend, the abiding guest of Mademoiselle Gamard, who

now came, the morning after the old maid had, as it were, declared war

against the poor vicar, to pay his brother a visit and show him marks of

friendship.

“You must excuse Marianne,” said the canon, as the woman entered. “I

suppose she went first to my rooms. They are very damp, and I coughed

all night. You are most healthily situated here,” he added, looking up

at the cornice.

“Yes; I am lodged like a canon,” replied Birotteau.

“And I like a vicar,” said the other, humbly.

“But you will soon be settled in the archbishop’s palace,” said the

kindly vicar, who wanted everybody to be happy.

“Yes, or in the cemetery, but God’s will be done!” and Troubert raised

his eyes to heaven resignedly. “I came,” he said, “to ask you to lend me

the ‘Register of Bishops.’ You are the only man in Tours I know who has

a copy.”

“Take it out of my library,” replied Birotteau, reminded by the canon’s

words of the greatest happiness of his life.

The canon passed into the library and stayed there while the vicar

dressed. Presently the breakfast bell rang, and the gouty vicar

reflected that if it had not been for Troubert’s visit he would have had

no fire to dress by. “He’s a kind man,” thought he.

The two priests went downstairs together, each armed with a huge folio

which they laid on one of the side tables in the dining-room.

“What’s all that?” asked Mademoiselle Gamard, in a sharp voice,

addressing Birotteau. “I hope you are not going to litter up my

dining-room with your old books!”

“They are books I wanted,” replied the Abbe Troubert. “Monsieur

Birotteau has been kind enough to lend them to me.”

“I might have guessed it,” she said, with a contemptuous smile.

“Monsieur Birotteau doesn’t often read books of that size.”

“How are you, mademoiselle?” said the vicar, in a mellifluous voice.

“Not very well,” she replied, shortly. “You woke me up last night out

of my first sleep, and I was wakeful for the rest of the night.” Then,

sitting down, she added, “Gentlemen, the milk is getting cold.”

Stupefied at being so ill-naturedly received by his landlady, from whom

he half expected an apology, and yet alarmed, like all timid people at

the prospect of a discussion, especially if it relates to themselves,

the poor vicar took his seat in silence. Then, observing in Mademoiselle

Gamard’s face the visible signs of ill-humour, he was goaded into a

struggle between his reason, which told him that he ought not to submit

to such discourtesy from a landlady, and his natural character, which

prompted him to avoid a quarrel.

Torn by this inward misery, Birotteau fell to examining attentively the

broad green lines painted on the oilcloth which, from custom immemorial,

Mademoiselle Gamard left on the table at breakfast-time, without regard

to the ragged edges or the various scars displayed on its surface. The

priests sat opposite to each other in cane-seated arm-chairs on either

side of the square table, the head of which was taken by the landlady,

who seemed to dominate the whole from a high chair raised on casters,

filled with cushions, and standing very near to the dining-room stove.

This room and the salon were on the ground-floor beneath the salon and

bedroom of the Abbe Birotteau.

When the vicar had received his cup of coffee, duly sugared, from

Mademoiselle Gamard, he felt chilled to the bone at the grim silence

in which he was forced to proceed with the usually gay function of

breakfast. He dared not look at Troubert’s dried-up features, nor at

the threatening visage of the old maid; and he therefore turned, to

keep himself in countenance, to the plethoric pug which was lying on

a cushion near the stove,--a position that victim of obesity seldom

quitted, having a little plate of dainties always at his left side, and

a bowl of fresh water at his right.

“Well, my pretty,” said the vicar, “are you waiting for your coffee?”

The personage thus addressed, one of the most important in the

household, though the least troublesome inasmuch as he had ceased to

bark and left the talking to his mistress, turned his little eyes,

sunk in rolls of fat, upon Birotteau. Then he closed them peevishly.

To explain the misery of the poor vicar it should be said that being

endowed by nature with an empty and sonorous loquacity, like the

resounding of a football, he was in the habit of asserting, without any

medical reason to back him, that speech favored digestion. Mademoiselle

Gamard, who believed in this hygienic doctrine, had not as yet

refrained, in spite of their coolness, from talking at meals; though,

for the last few mornings, the vicar had been forced to strain his mind

to find beguiling topics on which to loosen her tongue. If the

narrow limits of this history permitted us to report even one of the

conversations which often brought a bitter and sarcastic smile to the

lips of the Abbe Troubert, it would offer a finished picture of the

Boeotian life of the provinces. The singular revelations of the Abbe

Birotteau and Mademoiselle Gamard relating to their personal opinions

on politics, religion, and literature would delight observing minds.

It would be highly entertaining to transcribe the reasons on which they

mutually doubted the death of Napoleon in 1820, or the conjectures by

which they mutually believed that the Dauphin was living,--rescued from

the Temple in the hollow of a huge log of wood. Who could have helped

laughing to hear them assert and prove, by reasons evidently their own,

that the King of France alone imposed the taxes, that the Chambers were

convoked to destroy the clergy, that thirteen hundred thousand persons

had perished on the scaffold during the Revolution? They frequently

discussed the press, without either of them having the faintest idea

of what that modern engine really was. Monsieur Birotteau listened with

acceptance to Mademoiselle Gamard when she told him that a man who ate

an egg every morning would die in a year, and that facts proved it; that

a roll of light bread eaten without drinking for several days together

would cure sciatica; that all the workmen who assisted in pulling down

the Abbey Saint-Martin had died in six months; that a certain prefect,

under orders from Bonaparte, had done his best to damage the towers of

Saint-Gatien,--with a hundred other absurd tales.

But on this occasion poor Birotteau felt he was tongue-tied, and he

resigned himself to eat a meal without engaging in conversation. After a

while, however, the thought crossed his mind that silence was dangerous

for his digestion, and he boldly remarked, “This coffee is excellent.”

That act of courage was completely wasted. Then, after looking at the

scrap of sky visible above the garden between the two buttresses of

Saint-Gatien, the vicar again summoned nerve to say, “It will be finer

weather to-day than it was yesterday.”

At that remark Mademoiselle Gamard cast her most gracious look on the

Abbe Troubert, and immediately turned her eyes with terrible severity on

Birotteau, who fortunately by that time was looking on his plate.

No creature of the feminine gender was ever more capable of presenting

to the mind the elegaic nature of an old maid than Mademoiselle Sophie

Gamard. In order to describe a being whose character gives a momentous

interest to the petty events of the present drama and to the anterior

lives of the actors in it, it may be useful to give a summary of the

ideas which find expression in the being of an Old Maid,--remembering

always that the habits of life form the soul, and the soul forms the

physical presence.

Though all things in society as well as in the universe are said to have

a purpose, there do exist here below certain beings whose purpose and

utility seem inexplicable. Moral philosophy and political economy both

condemn the individual who consumes without producing; who fills a place

on the earth but does not shed upon it either good or evil,--for evil is

sometimes good the meaning of which is not at once made manifest. It

is seldom that old maids of their own motion enter the ranks of these

unproductive beings. Now, if the consciousness of work done gives to the

workers a sense of satisfaction which helps them to support life, the

certainty of being a useless burden must, one would think, produce a

contrary effect, and fill the minds of such fruitless beings with the

same contempt for themselves which they inspire in others. This harsh

social reprobation is one of the causes which contribute to fill the

souls of old maids with the distress that appears in their faces.

Prejudice, in which there is truth, does cast, throughout the world but

especially in France, a great stigma on the woman with whom no man has

been willing to share the blessings or endure the ills of life. Now,

there comes to all unmarried women a period when the world, be it right

or wrong, condemns them on the fact of this contempt, this rejection.

If they are ugly, the goodness of their characters ought to have

compensated for their natural imperfections; if, on the contrary, they

are handsome, that fact argues that their misfortune has some serious

cause. It is impossible to say which of the two classes is most

deserving of rejection. If, on the other hand, their celibacy is

deliberate, if it proceeds from a desire for independence, neither men

nor mothers will forgive their disloyalty to womanly devotion, evidenced

in their refusal to feed those passions which render their sex so

affecting. To renounce the pangs of womanhood is to abjure its poetry

and cease to merit the consolations to which mothers have inalienable

rights.

Moreover, the generous sentiments, the exquisite qualities of a woman

will not develop unless by constant exercise. By remaining unmarried,

a creature of the female sex becomes void of meaning; selfish and

cold, she creates repulsion. This implacable judgment of the world is

unfortunately too just to leave old maids in ignorance of its causes.

Such ideas shoot up in their hearts as naturally as the effects of their

saddened lives appear upon their features. Consequently they wither,

because the constant expression of happiness which blooms on the faces

of other women and gives so soft a grace to their movements has never

existed for them. They grow sharp and peevish because all human beings

who miss their vocation are unhappy; they suffer, and suffering gives

birth to the bitterness of ill-will. In fact, before an old maid blames

herself for her isolation she blames others, and there is but one step

between reproach and the desire for revenge.

But more than this, the ill grace and want of charm noticeable in these

women are the necessary result of their lives. Never having felt a

desire to please, elegance and the refinements of good taste are foreign

to them. They see only themselves in themselves. This instinct brings

them, unconsciously, to choose the things that are most convenient to

themselves, at the sacrifice of those which might be more agreeable to

others. Without rendering account to their own minds of the difference

between themselves and other women, they end by feeling that difference

and suffering under it. Jealousy is an indelible sentiment in the female

breast. An old maid’s soul is jealous and yet void; for she knows

but one side--the miserable side--of the only passion men will allow

(because it flatters them) to women. Thus thwarted in all their hopes,

forced to deny themselves the natural development of their natures, old

maids endure an inward torment to which they never grow accustomed. It

is hard at any age, above all for a woman, to see a feeling of repulsion

on the faces of others, when her true destiny is to move all hearts

about her to emotions of grace and love. One result of this inward

trouble is that an old maid’s glance is always oblique, less from

modesty than from fear and shame. Such beings never forgive society for

their false position because they never forgive themselves for it.

Now it is impossible for a woman who is perpetually at war with herself

and living in contradiction to her true life, to leave others in peace

or refrain from envying their happiness. The whole range of these sad

truths could be read in the dulled gray eyes of Mademoiselle Gamard; the

dark circles that surrounded those eyes told of the inward conflicts of

her solitary life. All the wrinkles on her face were in straight lines.

The structure of her forehead and cheeks was rigid and prominent. She

allowed, with apparent indifference, certain scattered hairs, once

brown, to grow upon her chin. Her thin lips scarcely covered teeth that

were too long, though still quite white. Her complexion was dark, and

her hair, originally black, had turned gray from frightful headaches,--a

misfortune which obliged her to wear a false front. Not knowing how to

put it on so as to conceal the junction between the real and the false,

there were often little gaps between the border of her cap and the black

string with which this semi-wig (always badly curled) was fastened to

her head. Her gown, silk in summer, merino in winter, and always brown

in color, was invariably rather tight for her angular figure and thin

arms. Her collar, limp and bent, exposed too much the red skin of a

neck which was ribbed like an oak-leaf in winter seen in the light. Her

origin explains to some extent the defects of her conformation. She

was the daughter of a wood-merchant, a peasant, who had risen from the

ranks. She might have been plump at eighteen, but no trace remained of

the fair complexion and pretty color of which she was wont to boast.

The tones of her flesh had taken the pallid tints so often seen in

“devotes.” Her aquiline nose was the feature that chiefly proclaimed

the despotism of her nature, and the flat shape of her forehead the

narrowness of her mind. Her movements had an odd abruptness which

precluded all grace; the mere motion with which she twitched her

handkerchief from her bag and blew her nose with a loud noise would have

shown her character and habits to a keen observer. Being rather tall,

she held herself very erect, and justified the remark of a naturalist

who once explained the peculiar gait of old maids by declaring that

their joints were consolidating. When she walked her movements were not

equally distributed over her whole person, as they are in other women,

producing those graceful undulations which are so attractive. She moved,

so to speak, in a single block, seeming to advance at each step like the

statue of the Commendatore. When she felt in good humour she was apt,

like other old maids, to tell of the chances she had had to marry,

and of her fortunate discovery in time of the want of means of her

lovers,--proving, unconsciously, that her worldly judgment was better

than her heart.

This typical figure of the genus Old Maid was well framed by the

grotesque designs, representing Turkish landscapes, on a varnished

paper which decorated the walls of the dining-room. Mademoiselle

Gamard usually sat in this room, which boasted of two pier tables and

a barometer. Before the chair of each abbe was a little cushion covered

with worsted work, the colors of which were faded. The salon in which

she received company was worthy of its mistress. It will be visible to

the eye at once when we state that it went by the name of the “yellow

salon.” The curtains were yellow, the furniture and walls yellow; on the

mantelpiece, surmounted by a mirror in a gilt frame, the candlesticks

and a clock all of crystal struck the eye with sharp brilliancy. As

to the private apartment of Mademoiselle Gamard, no one had ever been

permitted to look into it. Conjecture alone suggested that it was full

of odds and ends, worn-out furniture, and bits of stuff and pieces dear

to the hearts of all old maids.

Such was the woman destined to exert a vast influence on the last years

of the Abbe Birotteau.

For want of exercising in nature’s own way the activity bestowed upon

women, and yet impelled to spend it in some way or other, Mademoiselle

Gamard had acquired the habit of using it in petty intrigues, provincial

cabals, and those self-seeking schemes which occupy, sooner or later,

the lives of all old maids. Birotteau, unhappily, had developed in

Sophie Gamard the only sentiments which it was possible for that poor

creature to feel,--those of hatred; a passion hitherto latent under the

calmness and monotony of provincial life, but which was now to become

the more intense because it was spent on petty things and in the

midst of a narrow sphere. Birotteau was one of those beings who are

predestined to suffer because, being unable to see things, they cannot

avoid them; to them the worst happens.

“Yes, it will be a fine day,” replied the canon, after a pause,

apparently issuing from a revery and wishing to conform to the rules of

politeness.

Birotteau, frightened at the length of time which had elapsed between

the question and the answer,--for he had, for the first time in

his life, taken his coffee without uttering a word,--now left the

dining-room where his heart was squeezed as if in a vise. Feeling that

the coffee lay heavy on his stomach, he went to walk in a sad mood among

the narrow, box-edged garden paths which outlined a star in the little

garden. As he turned after making the first round, he saw Mademoiselle

Gamard and the Abbe Troubert standing stock-still and silent on the

threshold of the door,--he with his arms folded and motionless like a

statue on a tomb; she leaning against the blind door. Both seemed to be

gazing at him and counting his steps. Nothing is so embarrassing to

a creature naturally timid as to feel itself the object of a close

examination, and if that is made by the eyes of hatred, the sort of

suffering it causes is changed into intolerable martyrdom.

Presently Birotteau fancied he was preventing Mademoiselle Gamard and

the abbe from walking in the narrow path. That idea, inspired equally by

fear and kindness, became so strong that he left the garden and went to

the church, thinking no longer of his canonry, so absorbed was he by the

disheartening tyranny of the old maid. Luckily for him he happened to

find much to do at Saint-Gatien,--several funerals, a marriage, and two

baptisms. Thus employed he forgot his griefs. When his stomach told him

that dinner was ready he drew out his watch and saw, not without alarm,

that it was some minutes after four. Being well aware of Mademoiselle

Gamard’s punctuality, he hurried back to the house.

He saw at once on passing the kitchen door that the first course had

been removed. When he reached the dining-room the old maid said, with a

tone of voice in which were mingled sour rebuke and joy at being able to

blame him:--

“It is half-past four, Monsieur Birotteau. You know we are not to wait

for you.”

The vicar looked at the clock in the dining-room, and saw at once, by

the way the gauze which protected it from dust had been moved, that his

landlady had opened the face of the dial and set the hands in advance of

the clock of the cathedral. He could make no remark. Had he uttered

his suspicion it would only have caused and apparently justified one of

those fierce and eloquent expositions to which Mademoiselle Gamard, like

other women of her class, knew very well how to give vent in particular

cases. The thousand and one annoyances which a servant will sometimes

make her master bear, or a woman her husband, were instinctively divined

by Mademoiselle Gamard and used upon Birotteau. The way in which she

delighted in plotting against the poor vicar’s domestic comfort bore all

the marks of what we must call a profoundly malignant genius. Yet she so

managed that she was never, so far as eye could see, in the wrong.

III

Eight days after the date on which this history began, the new

arrangements of the household and the relations which grew up between

the Abbe Birotteau and Mademoiselle Gamard revealed to the former the

existence of a plot which had been hatching for the last six months.

As long as the old maid exercised her vengeance in an underhand way, and

the vicar was able to shut his eyes to it and refuse to believe in her

malevolent intentions, the moral effect upon him was slight. But since

the affair of the candlestick and the altered clock, Birotteau would

doubt no longer that he was under an eye of hatred turned fully upon

him. From that moment he fell into despair, seeing everywhere the

skinny, clawlike fingers of Mademoiselle Gamard ready to hook into his

heart. The old maid, happy in a sentiment as fruitful of emotions as

that of vengeance, enjoyed circling and swooping above the vicar as a

bird of prey hovers and swoops above a field-mouse before pouncing down

upon it and devouring it. She had long since laid a plan which the poor

dumbfounded priest was quite incapable of imagining, and which she now

proceeded to unfold with that genius for little things often shown by

solitary persons, whose souls, incapable of feeling the grandeur of true

piety, fling themselves into the details of outward devotion.

The petty nature of his troubles prevented Birotteau, always effusive

and liking to be pitied and consoled, from enjoying the soothing

pleasure of taking his friends into his confidence,--a last but cruel

aggravation of his misery. The little amount of tact which he derived

from his timidity made him fear to seem ridiculous in concerning himself

with such pettiness. And yet those petty things made up the sum of his

existence,--that cherished existence, full of busyness about nothings,

and of nothingness in its business; a colorless barren life in which

strong feelings were misfortunes, and the absence of emotion happiness.

The poor priest’s paradise was changed, in a moment, into hell. His

sufferings became intolerable. The terror he felt at the prospect of

a discussion with Mademoiselle Gamard increased day by day; the secret

distress which blighted his life began to injure his health. One

morning, as he put on his mottled blue stockings, he noticed a marked

diminution in the circumference of his calves. Horrified by so cruel and

undeniable a symptom, he resolved to make an effort and appeal to

the Abbe Troubert, requesting him to intervene, officially, between

Mademoiselle Gamard and himself.

When he found himself in presence of the imposing canon, who, in order

to receive his visitor in a bare and cheerless room, had hastily quitted

a study full of papers, where he worked incessantly, and where no

one was ever admitted, the vicar felt half ashamed at speaking of

Mademoiselle Gamard’s provocations to a man who appeared to be so

gravely occupied. But after going through the agony of the mental

deliberations which all humble, undecided, and feeble persons endure

about things of even no importance, he decided, not without much

swelling and beating of the heart, to explain his position to the Abbe

Troubert.

The canon listened in a cold, grave manner, trying, but in vain, to

repress an occasional smile which to more intelligent eyes than those of

the vicar might have betrayed the emotions of a secret satisfaction. A

flame seemed to dart from his eyelids when Birotteau pictured with the

eloquence of genuine feeling the constant bitterness he was made to

swallow; but Troubert laid his hand above those lids with a gesture very

common to thinkers, maintaining the dignified demeanor which was usual

with him. When the vicar had ceased to speak he would indeed have been

puzzled had he sought on Troubert’s face, marbled with yellow blotches

even more yellow than his usually bilious skin, for any trace of the

feelings he must have excited in that mysterious priest.

After a moment’s silence the canon made one of those answers which

required long study before their meaning could be thoroughly perceived,

though later they proved to reflecting persons the astonishing depths

of his spirit and the power of his mind. He simply crushed Birotteau by

telling him that “these things amazed him all the more because he should

never have suspected their existence were it not for his brother’s

confession. He attributed such stupidity on his part to the gravity of

his occupations, his labors, the absorption in which his mind was held

by certain elevated thoughts which prevented his taking due notice

of the petty details of life.” He made the vicar observe, but without

appearing to censure the conduct of a man whose age and connections

deserved all respect, that “in former days, recluses thought little

about their food and lodging in the solitude of their retreats, where

they were lost in holy contemplations,” and that “in our days, priests

could make a retreat for themselves in the solitude of their own

hearts.” Then, reverting to Birotteau’s affairs, he added that “such

disagreements were a novelty to him. For twelve years nothing of the

kind had occurred between Mademoiselle Gamard and the venerable Abbe

Chapeloud. As for himself, he might, no doubt, be an arbitrator between

the vicar and their landlady, because his friendship for that person

had never gone beyond the limits imposed by the Church on her faithful

servants; but if so, justice demanded that he should hear both sides.

He certainly saw no change in Mademoiselle Gamard, who seemed to him the

same as ever; he had always submitted to a few of her caprices, knowing

that the excellent woman was kindness and gentleness itself; the

slight fluctuations of her temper should be attributed, he thought, to

sufferings caused by a pulmonary affection, of which she said little,

resigning herself to bear them in a truly Christian spirit.” He ended by

assuring the vicar that “if he stayed a few years longer in Mademoiselle

Gamard’s house he would learn to understand her better and acknowledge

the real value of her excellent nature.”

Birotteau left the room confounded. In the direful necessity of

consulting no one, he now judged Mademoiselle Gamard as he would

himself, and the poor man fancied that if he left her house for a few

days he might extinguish, for want of fuel, the dislike the old maid

felt for him. He accordingly resolved to spend, as he formerly did,

a week or so at a country-house where Madame de Listomere passed her

autumns, a season when the sky is usually pure and tender in Touraine.

Poor man! in so doing he did the thing that was most desired by his

terrible enemy, whose plans could only have been brought to nought by

the resistant patience of a monk. But the vicar, unable to divine them,

not understanding even his own affairs, was doomed to fall, like a lamb,

at the butcher’s first blow.

Madame de Listomere’s country-place, situated on the embankment which

lies between Tours and the heights of Saint-Georges, with a southern

exposure and surrounded by rocks, combined the charms of the country

with the pleasures of the town. It took but ten minutes from the bridge

of Tours to reach the house, which was called the “Alouette,”--a great

advantage in a region where no one will put himself out for anything

whatsoever, not even to seek a pleasure.

The Abbe Birotteau had been about ten days at the Alouette, when, one

morning while he was breakfasting, the porter came to say that Monsieur

Caron desired to speak with him. Monsieur Caron was Mademoiselle

Gamard’s laywer, and had charge of her affairs. Birotteau, not

remembering this, and unable to think of any matter of litigation

between himself and others, left the table to see the lawyer in a stage

of great agitation. He found him modestly seated on the balustrade of a

terrace.

“Your intention of ceasing to reside in Mademoiselle Gamard’s house

being made evident--” began the man of business.

“Eh! monsieur,” cried the Abbe Birotteau, interrupting him, “I have not

the slightest intention of leaving it.”

“Nevertheless, monsieur,” replied the lawyer, “you must have had some

agreement in the matter with Mademoiselle, for she has sent me to

ask how long you intend to remain in the country. The event of a long

absence was not foreseen in the agreement, and may lead to a contest.

Now, Mademoiselle Gamard understanding that your board--”

“Monsieur,” said Birotteau, amazed, and again interrupting the lawyer,

“I did not suppose it necessary to employ, as it were, legal means to--”

“Mademoiselle Gamard, who is anxious to avoid all dispute,” said

Monsieur Caron, “has sent me to come to an understanding with you.”

“Well, if you will have the goodness to return to-morrow,” said the

abbe, “I shall then have taken advice in the matter.”

The quill-driver withdrew. The poor vicar, frightened at the persistence

with which Mademoiselle Gamard pursued him, returned to the dining-room

with his face so convulsed that everybody cried out when they saw him:

“What _is_ the matter, Monsieur Birotteau?”

The abbe, in despair, sat down without a word, so crushed was he by the

vague presence of approaching disaster. But after breakfast, when his

friends gathered round him before a comfortable fire, Birotteau naively

related the history of his troubles. His hearers, who were beginning to

weary of the monotony of a country-house, were keenly interested in a

plot so thoroughly in keeping with the life of the provinces. They all

took sides with the abbe against the old maid.

“Don’t you see, my dear friend,” said Madame de Listomere, “that the

Abbe Troubert wants your apartment?”

Here the historian ought to sketch this lady; but it occurs to him that

even those who are ignorant of Sterne’s system of “cognomology,” cannot

pronounce the three words “Madame de Listomere” without picturing her

to themselves as noble and dignified, softening the sternness of rigid

devotion by the gracious elegance and the courteous manners of the old

monarchical regime; kind, but a little stiff; slightly nasal in voice;

allowing herself the perusal of “La Nouvelle Heloise”; and still wearing

her own hair.

“The Abbe Birotteau must not yield to that old vixen,” cried Monsieur de

Listomere, a lieutenant in the navy who was spending a furlough with

his aunt. “If the vicar has pluck and will follow my suggestions he will

soon recover his tranquillity.”

All present began to analyze the conduct of Mademoiselle Gamard with the

keen perceptions which characterize provincials, to whom no one can deny

the talent of knowing how to lay bare the most secret motives of human

actions.

“You don’t see the whole thing yet,” said an old landowner who knew the

region well. “There is something serious behind all this which I can’t

yet make out. The Abbe Troubert is too deep to be fathomed at once. Our

dear Birotteau is at the beginning of his troubles. Besides, would he

be left in peace and comfort even if he did give up his lodging to

Troubert? I doubt it. If Caron came here to tell you that you intended

to leave Mademoiselle Gamard,” he added, turning to the bewildered

priest, “no doubt Mademoiselle Gamard’s intention is to turn you out.

Therefore you will have to go, whether you like it or not. Her sort of

people play a sure game, they risk nothing.”

This old gentleman, Monsieur de Bourbonne, could sum up and estimate

provincial ideas as correctly as Voltaire summarized the spirit of

his times. He was thin and tall, and chose to exhibit in the matter of

clothes the quiet indifference of a landowner whose territorial value is

quoted in the department. His face, tanned by the Touraine sun, was less

intellectual than shrewd. Accustomed to weigh his words and measure

his actions, he concealed a profound vigilance behind a misleading

appearance of simplicity. A very slight observation of him sufficed to

show that, like a Norman peasant, he invariably held the upper hand

in business matters. He was an authority on wine-making, the leading

science of Touraine. He had managed to extend the meadow lands of his

domain by taking in a part of the alluvial soil of the Loire without

getting into difficulties with the State. This clever proceeding gave

him the reputation of a man of talent. If Monsieur de Bourbonne’s

conversation pleased you and you were to ask who he was of a Tourainean,

“Ho! a sly old fox!” would be the answer of those who were envious

of him--and they were many. In Touraine, as in many of the provinces,

jealousy is the root of language.

Monsieur de Bourbonne’s remark occasioned a momentary silence, during

which the persons who composed the little party seemed to be reflecting.

Meanwhile Mademoiselle Salomon de Villenoix was announced. She came from

Tours in the hope of being useful to the poor abbe, and the news she

brought completely changed the aspect of the affair. As she entered,

every one except Monsieur de Bourbonne was urging Birotteau to hold his

own against Troubert and Gamard, under the auspices of the aristocratic

society of the place, which would certainly stand by him.

“The vicar-general, to whom the appointments to office are entrusted, is

very ill,” said Mademoiselle Salomon, “and the archbishop has delegated

his powers to the Abbe Troubert provisionally. The canonry will, of

course, depend wholly upon him. Now last evening, at Mademoiselle de la

Blottiere’s the Abbe Poirel talked about the annoyances which the Abbe

Birotteau had inflicted on Mademoiselle Gamard, as though he were trying

to cast all the blame on our good abbe. ‘The Abbe Birotteau,’ he said,

‘is a man to whom the Abbe Chapeloud was absolutely necessary, and

since the death of that venerable man, he has shown’--and then came

suggestions, calumnies! you understand?”

“Troubert will be made vicar-general,” said Monsieur de Bourbonne,

sententiously.

“Come!” cried Madame de Listomere, turning to Birotteau, “which do

you prefer, to be made a canon, or continue to live with Mademoiselle

Gamard?”

“To be a canon!” cried the whole company.

“Well, then,” resumed Madame de Listomere, “you must let the Abbe

Troubert and Mademoiselle Gamard have things their own way. By sending

Caron here they mean to let you know indirectly that if you consent

to leave the house you shall be made canon,--one good turn deserves

another.”

Every one present applauded Madame de Listomere’s sagacity, except her

nephew the Baron de Listomere, who remarked in a comic tone to Monsieur

de Bourbonne, “I would like to have seen a fight between the Gamard and

the Birotteau.”

But, unhappily for the vicar, forces were not equal between these

persons of the best society and the old maid supported by the Abbe

Troubert. The time soon came when the struggle developed openly, went

on increasing, and finally assumed immense proportions. By the advice

of Madame de Listomere and most of her friends, who were now eagerly

enlisted in a matter which threw such excitement into their vapid

provincial lives, a servant was sent to bring back Monsieur Caron.

The lawyer returned with surprising celerity, which alarmed no one but

Monsieur de Bourbonne.

“Let us postpone all decision until we are better informed,” was the

advice of that Fabius in a dressing-gown, whose prudent reflections

revealed to him the meaning of these moves on the Tourainean

chess-board. He tried to enlighten Birotteau on the dangers of his

position; but the wisdom of the old “sly-boots” did not serve the

passions of the moment, and he obtained but little attention.

The conference between the lawyer and Birotteau was short. The vicar

came back quite terrified.

“He wants me to sign a paper stating my relinquishment of domicile.”

“That’s formidable language!” said the naval lieutenant.

“What does it mean?” asked Madame de Listomere.

“Merely that the abbe must declare in writing his intention of leaving

Mademoiselle Gamard’s house,” said Monsieur de Bourbonne, taking a pinch

of snuff.

“Is that all?” said Madame de Listomere. “Then sign it at once,” she

added, turning to Birotteau. “If you positively decide to leave her

house, there can be no harm in declaring that such is your will.”

Birotteau’s will!

“That is true,” said Monsieur de Bourbonne, closing his snuff-box with a

gesture the significance of which it is impossible to render, for it

was a language in itself. “But writing is always dangerous,” he added,

putting his snuff-box on the mantelpiece with an air and manner that

alarmed the vicar.

Birotteau was so bewildered by the upsetting of all his ideas, by the

rapidity of events which found him defenceless, by the ease with which

his friends were settling the most cherished matters of his solitary

life, that he remained silent and motionless as if moonstruck, thinking

of nothing, though listening and striving to understand the meaning of

the rapid sentences the assembled company addressed to him. He took the

paper Monsieur Caron had given him and read it, as if he were giving

his mind to the lawyer’s document, but the act was merely mechanical.

He signed the paper, by which he declared that he left Mademoiselle

Gamard’s house of his own wish and will, and that he had been fed and

lodged while there according to the terms originally agreed upon. When

the vicar had signed the document, Monsieur Caron took it and asked

where his client was to send the things left by the abbe in her house

and belonging to him. Birotteau replied that they could be sent to

Madame de Listomere’s,--that lady making him a sign that she would

receive him, never doubting that he would soon be a canon. Monsieur de

Bourbonne asked to see the paper, the deed of relinquishment, which the

abbe had just signed. Monsieur Caron gave it to him.

“How is this?” he said to the vicar after reading it. “It appears that

written documents already exist between you and Mademoiselle Gamard.

Where are they? and what do they stipulate?”

“The deed is in my library,” replied Birotteau.

“Do you know the tenor of it?” said Monsieur de Bourbonne to the lawyer.

“No, monsieur,” said Caron, stretching out his hand to regain the fatal

document.

“Ha!” thought the old man; “you know, my good friend, what that deed

contains, but you are not paid to tell us,” and he returned the paper to

the lawyer.

“Where can I put my things?” cried Birotteau; “my books, my beautiful

book-shelves, and pictures, my red furniture, and all my treasures?”

The helpless despair of the poor man thus torn up as it were by the

roots was so artless, it showed so plainly the purity of his ways

and his ignorance of the things of life, that Madame de Listomere and

Mademoiselle de Salomon talked to him and consoled him in the tone which

mothers take when they promise a plaything to their children.

“Don’t fret about such trifles,” they said. “We will find you some place

less cold and dismal than Mademoiselle Gamard’s gloomy house. If we

can’t find anything you like, one or other of us will take you to live

with us. Come, let’s play a game of backgammon. To-morrow you can go and

see the Abbe Troubert and ask him to push your claims to the canonry,

and you’ll see how cordially he will receive you.”

Feeble folk are as easily reassured as they are frightened. So the poor

abbe, dazzled at the prospect of living with Madame de Listomere, forgot

the destruction, now completed, of the happiness he had so long desired,

and so delightfully enjoyed. But at night before going to sleep, the

distress of a man to whom the fuss of moving and the breaking up of all

his habits was like the end of the world, came upon him, and he racked

his brains to imagine how he could ever find such a good place for his

book-case as the gallery in the old maid’s house. Fancying he saw his

books scattered about, his furniture defaced, his regular life turned

topsy-turvy, he asked himself for the thousandth time why the first year

spent in Mademoiselle Gamard’s house had been so sweet, the second

so cruel. His troubles were a pit in which his reason floundered. The

canonry seemed to him small compensation for so much misery, and

he compared his life to a stocking in which a single dropped stitch

resulted in destroying the whole fabric. Mademoiselle Salomon remained

to him. But, alas, in losing his old illusions the poor priest dared not

trust in any later friendship.

In the “citta dolente” of spinsterhood we often meet, especially in

France, with women whose lives are a sacrifice nobly and daily offered

to noble sentiments. Some remain proudly faithful to a heart which death

tore from them; martyrs of love, they learn the secrets of womanhood

only though their souls. Others obey some family pride (which in our

days, and to our shame, decreases steadily); these devote themselves to

the welfare of a brother, or to orphan nephews; they are mothers while

remaining virgins. Such old maids attain to the highest heroism of their

sex by consecrating all feminine feelings to the help of sorrow.

They idealize womanhood by renouncing the rewards of woman’s destiny,

accepting its pains. They live surrounded by the splendour of their

devotion, and men respectfully bow the head before their faded features.

Mademoiselle de Sombreuil was neither wife nor maid; she was and ever

will be a living poem. Mademoiselle Salomon de Villenoix belonged to

the race of these heroic beings. Her devotion was religiously sublime,

inasmuch as it won her no glory after being, for years, a daily agony.

Beautiful and young, she loved and was beloved; her lover lost his

reason. For five years she gave herself, with love’s devotion, to the

mere mechanical well-being of that unhappy man, whose madness she so

penetrated that she never believed him mad. She was simple in manner,

frank in speech, and her pallid face was not lacking in strength and

character, though its features were regular. She never spoke of the

events of her life. But at times a sudden quiver passed over her as she

listened to the story of some sad or dreadful incident, thus betraying

the emotions that great sufferings had developed within her. She had

come to live at Tours after losing the companion of her life; but she

was not appreciated there at her true value and was thought to be

merely an amiable woman. She did much good, and attached herself,

by preference, to feeble beings. For that reason the poor vicar had

naturally inspired her with a deep interest.

Mademoiselle de Villenoix, who returned to Tours the next morning, took

Birotteau with her and set him down on the quay of the cathedral leaving

him to make his own way to the Cloister, where he was bent on going,

to save at least the canonry and to superintend the removal of his

furniture. He rang, not without violent palpitations of the heart, at

the door of the house whither, for fourteen years, he had come daily,

and where he had lived blissfully, and from which he was now exiled

forever, after dreaming that he should die there in peace like his

friend Chapeloud. Marianne was surprised at the vicar’s visit. He told

her that he had come to see the Abbe Troubert, and turned towards the

ground-floor apartment where the canon lived; but Marianne called to

him:--

“Not there, monsieur le vicaire; the Abbe Troubert is in your old

apartment.”

These words gave the vicar a frightful shock. He was forced to

comprehend both Troubert’s character and the depths of the revenge so

slowly brought about when he found the canon settled in Chapeloud’s

library, seated in Chapeloud’s handsome armchair, sleeping, no doubt, in

Chapeloud’s bed, and disinheriting at last the friend of Chapeloud, the

man who, for so many years, had confined him to Mademoiselle Gamard’s

house, by preventing his advancement in the church, and closing the

best salons in Tours against him. By what magic wand had the present

transformation taken place? Surely these things belonged to Birotteau?

And yet, observing the sardonic air with which Troubert glanced at that

bookcase, the poor abbe knew that the future vicar-general felt certain

of possessing the spoils of those he had so bitterly hated,--Chapeloud

as an enemy, and Birotteau, in and through whom Chapeloud still thwarted

him. Ideas rose in the heart of the poor man at the sight, and plunged

him into a sort of vision. He stood motionless, as though fascinated by

Troubert’s eyes which fixed themselves upon him.

“I do not suppose, monsieur,” said Birotteau at last, “that you intend

to deprive me of the things that belong to me. Mademoiselle may have

been impatient to give you better lodgings, but she ought to have

been sufficiently just to give me time to pack my books and remove my

furniture.”

“Monsieur,” said the Abbe Troubert, coldly, not permitting any sign of

emotion to appear on his face, “Mademoiselle Gamard told me yesterday

of your departure, the cause of which is still unknown to me. If she

installed me here at once, it was from necessity. The Abbe Poirel has

taken my apartment. I do not know if the furniture and things that are

in these rooms belong to you or to Mademoiselle; but if they are

yours, you know her scrupulous honesty; the sanctity of her life is the

guarantee of her rectitude. As for me, you are well aware of my simple

modes of living. I have slept for fifteen years in a bare room without

complaining of the dampness,--which, eventually will have caused my

death. Nevertheless, if you wish to return to this apartment I will cede

it to you willingly.”

After hearing these terrible words, Birotteau forgot the canonry and ran

downstairs as quickly as a young man to find Mademoiselle Gamard. He

met her at the foot of the staircase, on the broad, tiled landing which

united the two wings of the house.

“Mademoiselle,” he said, bowing to her without paying any attention

to the bitter and derisive smile that was on her lips, nor to the

extraordinary flame in her eyes which made them lucent as a tiger’s, “I

cannot understand how it is that you have not waited until I removed my

furniture before--”

“What!” she said, interrupting him, “is it possible that your things

have not been left at Madame de Listomere’s?”

“But my furniture?”

“Haven’t you read your deed?” said the old maid, in a tone which would

have to be rendered in music before the shades of meaning that hatred is

able to put into the accent of every word could be fully shown.

Mademoiselle Gamard seemed to rise in stature, her eyes shone, her face

expanded, her whole person quivered with pleasure. The Abbe Troubert

opened a window to get a better light on the folio volume he was

reading. Birotteau stood as if a thunderbolt had stricken him.

Mademoiselle Gamard made his ears hum when she enunciated in a voice as

clear as a cornet the following sentence:--

“Was it not agreed that if you left my house your furniture should

belong to me, to indemnify me for the difference in the price of board

paid by you and that paid by the late venerable Abbe Chapeloud? Now, as

the Abbe Poirel has just been appointed canon--”

Hearing the last words Birotteau made a feeble bow as if to take leave

of the old maid, and left the house precipitately. He was afraid if he

stayed longer that he should break down utterly, and give too great a

triumph to his implacable enemies. Walking like a drunken man he at last

reached Madame de Listomere’s house, where he found in one of the lower

rooms his linen, his clothing, and all his papers packed in a trunk.

When he eyes fell on these few remnants of his possessions the unhappy

priest sat down and hid his face in his hands to conceal his tears

from the sight of others. The Abbe Poirel was canon! He, Birotteau, had

neither home, nor means, nor furniture!

Fortunately Mademoiselle Salomon happened to drive past the house, and

the porter, who saw and comprehended the despair of the poor abbe, made

a sign to the coachman. After exchanging a few words with Mademoiselle

Salomon the porter persuaded the vicar to let himself be placed, half

dead as he was, in the carriage of his faithful friend, to whom he

was unable to speak connectedly. Mademoiselle Salomon, alarmed at the

momentary derangement of a head that was always feeble, took him back at

once to the Alouette, believing that this beginning of mental alienation

was an effect produced by the sudden news of Abbe Poirel’s nomination.

She knew nothing, of course, of the fatal agreement made by the abbe

with Mademoiselle Gamard, for the excellent reason that he did not

know of it himself; and because it is in the nature of things that the

comical is often mingled with the pathetic, the singular replies of the

poor abbe made her smile.

“Chapeloud was right,” he said; “he is a monster!”

“Who?” she asked.

“Chapeloud. He has taken all.”

“You mean Poirel?”

“No, Troubert.”

At last they reached the Alouette, where the priest’s friends gave him

such tender care that towards evening he grew calmer and was able to

give them an account of what had happened during the morning.

The phlegmatic old fox asked to see the deed which, on thinking the

matter over, seemed to him to contain the solution of the enigma.

Birotteau drew the fatal stamped paper from his pocket and gave it

to Monsieur de Bourbonne, who read it rapidly and soon came upon the

following clause:--

“Whereas a difference exists of eight hundred francs yearly between the

price of board paid by the late Abbe Chapeloud and that at which the

said Sophie Gamard agrees to take into her house, on the above-named

stipulated condition, the said Francois Birotteau; and whereas it is

understood that the undersigned Francois Birotteau is not able for

some years to pay the full price charged to the other boarders of

Mademoiselle Gamard, more especially the Abbe Troubert; the said

Birotteau does hereby engage, in consideration of certain sums of money

advanced by the undersigned Sophie Gamard, to leave her, as indemnity,

all the household property of which he may die possessed, or to transfer

the same to her should he, for any reason whatever or at any time,

voluntarily give up the apartment now leased to him, and thus derive

no further profit from the above-named engagements made by Mademoiselle

Gamard for his benefit--”

“Confound her! what an agreement!” cried the old gentleman. “The said

Sophie Gamard is armed with claws.”

Poor Birotteau never imagined in his childish brain that anything could

ever separate him from that house where he expected to live and die with

Mademoiselle Gamard. He had no remembrance whatever of that clause, the

terms of which he had not discussed, for they had seemed quite just to

him at a time when, in his great anxiety to enter the old maid’s house,

he would readily have signed any and all legal documents she had offered

him. His simplicity was so guileless and Mademoiselle Gamard’s conduct

so atrocious, the fate of the poor old man seemed so deplorable, and his

natural helplessness made him so touching, that in the first glow of

her indignation Madame de Listomere exclaimed: “I made you put your

signature to that document which has ruined you; I am bound to give you

back the happiness of which I have deprived you.”

“But,” remarked Monsieur de Bourbonne, “that deed constitutes a fraud;

there may be ground for a lawsuit.”

“Then Birotteau shall go to the law. If he loses at Tours he may win at

Orleans; if he loses at Orleans, he’ll win in Paris,” cried the Baron de

Listomere.

“But if he does go to law,” continued Monsieur de Bourbonne, coldly, “I

should advise him to resign his vicariat.”

“We will consult lawyers,” said Madame de Listomere, “and go to law if

law is best. But this affair is so disgraceful for Mademoiselle Gamard,

and is likely to be so injurious to the Abbe Troubert, that I think we

can compromise.”

After mature deliberation all present promised their assistance to the

Abbe Birotteau in the struggle which was now inevitable between the poor

priest and his antagonists and all their adherents. A true presentiment,

an infallible provincial instinct, led them to couple the names of

Gamard and Troubert. But none of the persons assembled on this occasion

in Madame de Listomere’s salon, except the old fox, had any real idea of

the nature and importance of such a struggle. Monsieur de Bourbonne took

the poor abbe aside into a corner of the room.

“Of the fourteen persons now present,” he said, in a low voice, “not

one will stand by you a fortnight hence. If the time comes when you need

some one to support you you may find that I am the only person in Tours

bold enough to take up your defence; for I know the provinces and men

and things, and, better still, I know self-interests. But these friends

of yours, though full of the best intentions, are leading you astray

into a bad path, from which you won’t be able to extricate yourself.

Take my advice; if you want to live in peace, resign the vicariat of

Saint-Gatien and leave Tours. Don’t say where you are going, but find

some distant parish where Troubert cannot get hold of you.”

“Leave Tours!” exclaimed the vicar, with indescribable terror.

To him it was a kind of death; the tearing up of all the roots by which

he held to life. Celibates substitute habits for feelings; and when to

that moral system, which makes them pass through life instead of really

living it, is added a feeble character, external things assume an

extraordinary power over them. Birotteau was like certain vegetables;

transplant them, and you stop their ripening. Just as a tree needs daily

the same sustenance, and must always send its roots into the same soil,

so Birotteau needed to trot about Saint-Gatien, and amble along the Mail

where he took his daily walk, and saunter through the streets, and visit

the three salons where, night after night, he played his whist or his

backgammon.

“Ah! I did not think of it!” replied Monsieur de Bourbonne, gazing at

the priest with a sort of pity.

All Tours was soon aware that Madame la Baronne de Listomere, widow of

a lieutenant-general, had invited the Abbe Birotteau, vicar of

Saint-Gatien, to stay at her house. That act, which many persons

questioned, presented the matter sharply and divided the town into

parties, especially after Mademoiselle Salomon spoke openly of a fraud

and a lawsuit. With the subtle vanity which is common to old maids, and

the fanatic self-love which characterizes them, Mademoiselle Gamard was

deeply wounded by the course taken by Madame de Listomere. The baroness

was a woman of high rank, elegant in her habits and ways, whose good

taste, courteous manners, and true piety could not be gainsaid.

By receiving Birotteau as her guest she gave a formal denial to all

Mademoiselle Gamard’s assertions, and indirectly censured her conduct by

maintaining the vicar’s cause against his former landlady.

It is necessary for the full understanding of this history to explain

how the natural discernment and spirit of analysis which old women bring

to bear on the actions of others gave power to Mademoiselle Gamard, and

what were the resources on her side. Accompanied by the taciturn Abbe

Troubert she made a round of evening visits to five or six houses, at

each of which she met a circle of a dozen or more persons, united by

kindred tastes and the same general situation in life. Among them were

one or two men who were influenced by the gossip and prejudices of their

servants; five or six old maids who spent their time in sifting the

words and scrutinizing the actions of their neighbours and others in the

class below them; besides these, there were several old women who

busied themselves in retailing scandal, keeping an exact account of

each person’s fortune, striving to control or influence the actions of

others, prognosticating marriages, and blaming the conduct of friends

as sharply as that of enemies. These persons, spread about the town like

the capillary fibres of a plant, sucked in, with the thirst of a leaf

for the dew, the news and the secrets of each household, and transmitted

them mechanically to the Abbe Troubert, as the leaves convey to the

branch the moisture they absorb.

Accordingly, during every evening of the week, these good devotees,

excited by that need of emotion which exists in all of us, rendered

an exact account of the current condition of the town with a sagacity

worthy of the Council of Ten, and were, in fact, a species of police,

armed with the unerring gift of spying bestowed by passions. When they

had divined the secret meaning of some event their vanity led them to

appropriate to themselves the wisdom of their sanhedrim, and set the

tone to the gossip of their respective spheres. This idle but ever busy

fraternity, invisible, yet seeing all things, dumb, but perpetually

talking, possessed an influence which its nonentity seemed to render

harmless, though it was in fact terrible in its effects when it

concerned itself with serious interests. For a long time nothing had

entered the sphere of these existences so serious and so momentous to

each one of them as the struggle of Birotteau, supported by Madame de

Listomere, against Mademoiselle Gamard and the Abbe Troubert. The three

salons of Madame de Listomere and the Demoiselles Merlin de la Blottiere

and de Villenoix being considered as enemies by all the salons which

Mademoiselle Gamard frequented, there was at the bottom of the quarrel

a class sentiment with all its jealousies. It was the old Roman

struggle of people and senate in a molehill, a tempest in a teacup, as

Montesquieu remarked when speaking of the Republic of San Marino, whose

public offices are filled by the day only,--despotic power being easily

seized by any citizen.

But this tempest, petty as it seems, did develop in the souls of these

persons as many passions as would have been called forth by the highest

social interests. It is a mistake to think that none but souls concerned

in mighty projects, which stir their lives and set them foaming, find

time too fleeting. The hours of the Abbe Troubert fled by as eagerly,

laden with thoughts as anxious, harassed by despairs and hopes as deep

as the cruellest hours of the gambler, the lover, or the statesman. God

alone is in the secret of the energy we expend upon our occult triumphs

over man, over things, over ourselves. Though we know not always

whither we are going we know well what the journey costs us. If it be

permissible for the historian to turn aside for a moment from the drama

he is narrating and ask his readers to cast a glance upon the lives of

these old maids and abbes, and seek the cause of the evil which

vitiates them at their source, we may find it demonstrated that man

must experience certain passions before he can develop within him those

virtues which give grandeur to life by widening his sphere and checking

the selfishness which is inherent in every created being.

Madame de Listomere returned to town without being aware that for the

previous week her friends had felt obliged to refute a rumour (at which

she would have laughed had she known if it) that her affection for her

nephew had an almost criminal motive. She took Birotteau to her lawyer,

who did not regard the case as an easy one. The vicar’s friends,

inspired by the belief that justice was certain in so good a cause,

or inclined to procrastinate in a matter which did not concern them

personally, had put off bringing the suit until they returned to

Tours. Consequently the friends of Mademoiselle Gamard had taken the

initiative, and told the affair wherever they could to the injury of

Birotteau. The lawyer, whose practice was exclusively among the most

devout church people, amazed Madame de Listomere by advising her not

to embark on such a suit; he ended the consultation by saying that “he

himself would not be able to undertake it, for, according to the terms

of the deed, Mademoiselle Gamard had the law on her side, and in equity,

that is to say outside of strict legal justice, the Abbe Birotteau would

undoubtedly seem to the judges as well as to all respectable laymen

to have derogated from the peaceable, conciliatory, and mild character

hitherto attributed to him; that Mademoiselle Gamard, known to be a

kindly woman and easy to live with, had put Birotteau under obligations

to her by lending him the money he needed to pay the legacy duties on

Chapeloud’s bequest without taking from him a receipt; that Birotteau

was not of an age or character to sign a deed without knowing what

it contained or understanding the importance of it; that in leaving

Mademoiselle Gamard’s house at the end of two years, when his friend

Chapeloud had lived there twelve and Troubert fifteen, he must have had

some purpose known to himself only; and that the lawsuit, if undertaken,

would strike the public as an act of ingratitude;” and so forth. Letting

Birotteau go before them to the staircase, the lawyer detained Madame de

Listomere a moment to entreat her, if she valued her own peace of mind,

not to involve herself in the matter.

But that evening the poor vicar, suffering the torments of a man under

sentence of death who awaits in the condemned cell at Bicetre the result

of his appeal for mercy, could not refrain from telling his assembled

friends the result of his visit to the lawyer.

“I don’t know a single pettifogger in Tours,” said Monsieur de

Bourbonne, “except that Radical lawyer, who would be willing to take

the case,--unless for the purpose of losing it; I don’t advise you to

undertake it.”

“Then it is infamous!” cried the navel lieutenant. “I myself will take

the abbe to the Radical--”

“Go at night,” said Monsieur de Bourbonne, interrupting him.

“Why?”

“I have just learned that the Abbe Troubert is appointed vicar-general

in place of the other man, who died yesterday.”

“I don’t care a fig for the Abbe Troubert.”

Unfortunately the Baron de Listomere (a man thirty-six years of age) did

not see the sign Monsieur de Bourbonne made him to be cautious in what

he said, motioning as he did so to a friend of Troubert, a councillor of

the Prefecture, who was present. The lieutenant therefore continued:--

“If the Abbe Troubert is a scoundrel--”

“Oh,” said Monsieur de Bourbonne, cutting him short, “why bring Monsieur

Troubert into a matter which doesn’t concern him?”

“Not concern him?” cried the baron; “isn’t he enjoying the use of the

Abbe Birotteau’s household property? I remember that when I called on

the Abbe Chapeloud I noticed two valuable pictures. Say that they are

worth ten thousand francs; do you suppose that Monsieur Birotteau

meant to give ten thousand francs for living two years with that Gamard

woman,--not to speak of the library and furniture, which are worth as

much more?”

The Abbe Birotteau opened his eyes at hearing he had once possessed so

enormous a fortune.

The baron, getting warmer than ever, went on to say: “By Jove! there’s

that Monsieur Salmon, formerly an expert at the Museum in Paris; he is

down here on a visit to his mother-in-law. I’ll go and see him this very

evening with the Abbe Birotteau and ask him to look at those pictures

and estimate their value. From there I’ll take the abbe to the lawyer.”

Two days after this conversation the suit was begun. This employment of

the Liberal laywer did harm to the vicar’s cause. Those who were opposed

to the government, and all who were known to dislike the priests, or

religion (two things quite distinct which many persons confound), got

hold of the affair and the whole town talked of it. The Museum expert

estimated the Virgin of Valentin and the Christ of Lebrun, two paintings

of great beauty, at eleven thousand francs. As to the bookshelves

and the gothic furniture, the taste for such things was increasing

so rapidly in Paris that their immediate value was at least twelve

thousand. In short, the appraisal of the whole property by the expert

reached the sum of over thirty-six thousand francs. Now it was very

evident that Birotteau never intended to give Mademoiselle Gamard such

an enormous sum of money for the small amount he might owe her under the

terms of the deed; therefore he had, legally speaking, equitable grounds

on which to demand an amendment of the agreement; if this were denied,

Mademoiselle Gamard was plainly guilty of intentional fraud. The Radical

lawyer accordingly began the affair by serving a writ on Mademoiselle

Gamard. Though very harsh in language, this document, strengthened by

citations of precedents and supported by certain clauses in the Code,

was a masterpiece of legal argument, and so evidently just in its

condemnation of the old maid that thirty or forty copies were made and

maliciously distributed through the town.

IV

A few days after this commencement of hostilities between Birotteau and

the old maid, the Baron de Listomere, who expected to be included as

captain of a corvette in a coming promotion lately announced by the

minister of the Navy, received a letter from one of his friends warning

him that there was some intention of putting him on the retired list.

Greatly astonished by this information he started for Paris immediately,

and went at once to the minister, who seemed to be amazed himself, and

even laughed at the baron’s fears. The next day, however, in spite of

the minister’s assurance, Monsieur de Listomere made inquiries in the

different offices. By an indiscretion (often practised by heads of

departments in favor of their friends) one of the secretaries showed

him a document confirming the fatal news, which was only waiting the

signature of the director, who was ill, to be submitted to the minister.

The Baron de Listomere went immediately to an uncle of his, a deputy,

who could see the minister of the Navy at the chamber without loss of

time, and begged him to find out the real intentions of his Excellency

in a matter which threatened the loss of his whole future. He waited in

his uncle’s carriage with the utmost anxiety for the end of the session.

His uncle came out before the Chamber rose, and said to him at once as

they drove away: “Why the devil have you meddled in a priest’s quarrel?

The minister began by telling me you had put yourself at the head of the

Radicals in Tours; that your political opinions were objectionable; you

were not following in the lines of the government,--with other remarks

as much involved as if he were addressing the Chamber. On that I said

to him, ‘Nonsense; let us come to the point.’ The end was that his

Excellency told me frankly you were in bad odor with the diocese. In

short, I made a few inquiries among my colleagues, and I find that

you have been talking slightingly of a certain Abbe Troubert, the

vicar-general, but a very important personage in the province, where he

represents the Jesuits. I have made myself responsible to the minister

for your future conduct. My good nephew, if you want to make your way be

careful not to excite ecclesiastical enmities. Go at once to Tours and

try to make your peace with that devil of a vicar-general; remember that

such priests are men with whom we absolutely _must_ live in harmony.

Good heavens! when we are all striving and working to re-establish

religion it is actually stupid, in a lieutenant who wants to be made a

captain, to affront the priests. If you don’t make up matters with that

Abbe Troubert you needn’t count on me; I shall abandon you. The minister

of ecclesiastical affairs told me just now that Troubert was certain to

be made bishop before long; if he takes a dislike to our family he could

hinder me from being included in the next batch of peers. Don’t you

understand?”

These words explained to the naval officer the nature of Troubert’s

secret occupations, about which Birotteau often remarked in his silly

way: “I can’t think what he does with himself,--sitting up all night.”

The canon’s position in the midst of his female senate, converted so

adroitly into provincial detectives, and his personal capacity,

had induced the Congregation of Jesus to select him out of all the

ecclesiastics in the town, as the secret proconsul of Touraine.

Archbishop, general, prefect, all men, great and small, were under his

occult dominion. The Baron de Listomere decided at once on his course.

“I shall take care,” he said to his uncle, “not to get another round

shot below my water-line.”

Three days after this diplomatic conference between the uncle and

nephew, the latter, returning hurriedly in a post-chaise, informed his

aunt, the very night of his arrival, of the dangers the family were

running if they persisted in supporting that “fool of a Birotteau.” The

baron had detained Monsieur de Bourbonne as the old gentleman was taking

his hat and cane after the usual rubber of whist. The clear-sightedness

of that sly old fox seemed indispensable for an understanding of the

reefs among which the Listomere family suddenly found themselves; and

perhaps the action of taking his hat and cane was only a ruse to have it

whispered in his ear: “Stay after the others; we want to talk to you.”

The baron’s sudden return, his apparent satisfaction, which was quite

out of keeping with a harassed look that occasionally crossed his face,

informed Monsieur de Bourbonne vaguely that the lieutenant had met with

some check in his crusade against Gamard and Troubert. He showed

no surprise when the baron revealed the secret power of the Jesuit

vicar-general.

“I knew that,” he said.

“Then why,” cried the baroness, “did you not warn us?”

“Madame,” he said, sharply, “forget that I was aware of the invisible

influence of that priest, and I will forget that you knew it equally

well. If we do not keep this secret now we shall be thought his

accomplices, and shall be more feared and hated than we are. Do as I do;

pretend to be duped; but look carefully where you set your feet. I did

warn you sufficiently, but you would not understand me, and I did not

choose to compromise myself.”

“What must we do now?” said the baron.

The abandonment of Birotteau was not even made a question; it was a

first condition tacitly accepted by the three deliberators.

“To beat a retreat with the honors of war has always been the triumph of

the ablest generals,” replied Monsieur de Bourbonne. “Bow to Troubert,

and if his hatred is less strong than his vanity you will make him your

ally; but if you bow too low he will walk over you rough-shod; make

believe that you intend to leave the service, and you’ll escape him,

Monsieur le baron. Send away Birotteau, madame, and you will set things

right with Mademoiselle Gamard. Ask the Abbe Troubert, when you meet him

at the archbishop’s, if he can play whist. He will say yes. Then invite

him to your salon, where he wants to be received; he’ll be sure to come.

You are a woman, and you can certainly win a priest to your interests.

When the baron is promoted, his uncle peer of France, and Troubert

a bishop, you can make Birotteau a canon if you choose. Meantime

yield,--but yield gracefully, all the while with a slight menace. Your

family can give Troubert quite as much support as he can give you.

You’ll understand each other perfectly on that score. As for you,

sailor, carry your deep-sea line about you.”

“Poor Birotteau?” said the baroness.

“Oh, get rid of him at once,” replied the old man, as he rose to take

leave. “If some clever Radical lays hold of that empty head of his, he

may cause you much trouble. After all, the court would certainly give a

verdict in his favour, and Troubert must fear that. He may forgive

you for beginning the struggle, but if they were defeated he would be

implacable. I have said my say.”

He snapped his snuff-box, put on his overshoes, and departed.

The next day after breakfast the baroness took the vicar aside and said

to him, not without visible embarrassment:--

“My dear Monsieur Birotteau, you will think what I am about to ask of

you very unjust and very inconsistent; but it is necessary, both for you

and for us, that your lawsuit with Mademoiselle Gamard be withdrawn by

resigning your claims, and also that you should leave my house.”

As he heard these words the poor abbe turned pale.

“I am,” she continued, “the innocent cause of your misfortunes, and,

moreover, if it had not been for my nephew you would never have begun

this lawsuit, which has now turned to your injury and to ours. But

listen to me.”

She told him succinctly the immense ramifications of the affair, and

explained the serious nature of its consequences. Her own meditations

during the night had told her something of the probable antecedents of

Troubert’s life; she was able, without misleading Birotteau, to show

him the net so ably woven round him by revenge, and to make him see the

power and great capacity of his enemy, whose hatred to Chapeloud, under

whom he had been forced to crouch for a dozen years, now found vent in

seizing Chapeloud’s property and in persecuting Chapeloud in the person

of his friend. The harmless Birotteau clasped his hands as if to pray,

and wept with distress at the sight of human horrors that his own

pure soul was incapable of suspecting. As frightened as though he had

suddenly found himself at the edge of a precipice, he listened, with

fixed, moist eyes in which there was no expression, to the revelations

of his friend, who ended by saying: “I know the wrong I do in abandoning

your cause; but, my dear abbe, family duties must be considered before

those of friendship. Yield, as I do, to this storm, and I will prove to

you my gratitude. I am not talking of your worldly interests, for those

I take charge of. You shall be made free of all such anxieties for the

rest of your life. By means of Monsieur de Bourbonne, who will know

how to save appearances, I shall arrange matters so that you shall lack

nothing. My friend, grant me the right to abandon you. I shall ever be

your friend, though forced to conform to the axioms of the world. You

must decide.”

The poor, bewildered abbe cried aloud: “Chapeloud was right when he said

that if Troubert could drag him by the feet out of his grave he would do

it! He sleeps in Chapeloud’s bed!”

“There is no use in lamenting,” said Madame de Listomere, “and we have

little time now left to us. How will you decide?”

Birotteau was too good and kind not to obey in a great crisis the

unreflecting impulse of the moment. Besides, his life was already in the

agony of what to him was death. He said, with a despairing look at his

protectress which cut her to the heart, “I trust myself to you--I am but

the stubble of the streets.”

He used the Tourainean word “bourrier” which has no other meaning than

a “bit of straw.” But there are pretty little straws, yellow, polished,

and shining, the delight of children, whereas the bourrier is straw

discolored, muddy, sodden in the puddles, whirled by the tempest,

crushed under feet of men.

“But, madame, I cannot let the Abbe Troubert keep Chapeloud’s portrait.

It was painted for me, it belongs to me; obtain that for me, and I will

give up all the rest.”

“Well,” said Madame de Listomere. “I will go myself to Mademoiselle

Gamard.” The words were said in a tone which plainly showed the immense

effort the Baronne de Listomere was making in lowering herself to

flatter the pride of the old maid. “I will see what can be done,”

she said; “I hardly dare hope anything. Go and consult Monsieur de

Bourbonne; ask him to put your renunciation into proper form, and bring

me the paper. I will see the archbishop, and with his help we may be

able to stop the matter here.”

Birotteau left the house dismayed. Troubert assumed in his eyes the

dimensions of an Egyptian pyramid. The hands of that man were in Paris,

his elbows in the Cloister of Saint-Gatien.

“He!” said the victim to himself, “_He_ to prevent the Baron de

Listomere from becoming peer of France!--and, perhaps, ‘by the help of

the archbishop we may be able to stop the matter here’!”

In presence of such great interests Birotteau felt he was a mere worm;

he judged himself harshly.

The news of Birotteau’s removal from Madame de Listomere’s house seemed

all the more amazing because the reason of it was wholly impenetrable.

Madame de Listomere said that her nephew was intending to marry and

leave the navy, and she wanted the vicar’s apartment to enlarge her own.

Birotteau’s relinquishment was still unknown. The advice of Monsieur de

Bourbonne was followed. Whenever the two facts reached the ears of the

vicar-general his self-love was certain to be gratified by the assurance

they gave that even if the Listomere family did not capitulate they

would at least remain neutral and tacitly recognize the occult power of

the Congregation,--to recognize it was, in fact, to submit to it. But the

lawsuit was still sub-judice; his opponents yielded and threatened at

the same time.

The Listomeres had thus taken precisely the same attitude as the

vicar-general himself; they held themselves aloof, and yet were able

to direct others. But just at this crisis an event occurred which

complicated the plans laid by Monsieur de Bourbonne and the Listomeres

to quiet the Gamard and Troubert party, and made them more difficult to

carry out.

Mademoiselle Gamard took cold one evening in coming out of the

cathedral; the next day she was confined to her bed, and soon after

became dangerously ill. The whole town rang with pity and false

commiseration: “Mademoiselle Gamard’s sensitive nature has not been

able to bear the scandal of this lawsuit. In spite of the justice of

her cause she was likely to die of grief. Birotteau has killed his

benefactress.” Such were the speeches poured through the capillary tubes

of the great female conclave, and taken up and repeated by the whole

town of Tours.

Madame de Listomere went the day after Mademoiselle Gamard took cold

to pay the promised visit, and she had the mortification of that act

without obtaining any benefit from it, for the old maid was too ill to

see her. She then asked politely to speak to the vicar-general.

Gratified, no doubt, to receive in Chapeloud’s library, at the corner of

the fireplace above which hung the two contested pictures, the woman

who had hitherto ignored him, Troubert kept the baroness waiting a moment

before he consented to admit her. No courtier and no diplomatist ever

put into a discussion of their personal interests or into the management

of some great national negotiation more shrewdness, dissimulation, and

ability than the baroness and the priest displayed when they met face to

face for the struggle.

Like the seconds or sponsors who in the Middle Age armed the champion,

and strengthened his valor by useful counsel until he entered the lists,

so the sly old fox had said to the baroness at the last moment: “Don’t

forget your cue. You are a mediator, and not an interested party.

Troubert also is a mediator. Weigh your words; study the inflection of

the man’s voice. If he strokes his chin you have got him.”

Some sketchers are fond of caricaturing the contrast often observable

between “what is said” and “what is thought” by the speaker. To catch

the full meaning of the duel of words which now took place between the

priest and the lady, it is necessary to unveil the thoughts that each

hid from the other under spoken sentences of apparent insignificance.

Madame de Listomere began by expressing the regret she had felt at

Birotteau’s lawsuit; and then went on to speak of her desire to settle

the matter to the satisfaction of both parties.

“The harm is done, madame,” said the priest, in a grave voice. “The

pious and excellent Mademoiselle Gamard is dying.” (“I don’t care a fig

for the old thing,” thought he, “but I mean to put her death on your

shoulders and harass your conscience if you are such a fool as to listen

to it.”)

“On hearing of her illness,” replied the baroness, “I entreated Monsieur

Birotteau to relinquish his claims; I have brought the document,

intending to give it to that excellent woman.” (“I see what you mean,

you wily scoundrel,” thought she, “but we are safe now from your

calumnies. If you take this document you’ll cut your own fingers by

admitting you are an accomplice.”)

There was silence for a moment.

“Mademoiselle Gamard’s temporal affairs do not concern me,” said the

priest at last, lowering the large lids over his eagle eyes to veil his

emotions. (“Ho! ho!” thought he, “you can’t compromise me. Thank God,

those damned lawyers won’t dare to plead any cause that could smirch me.

What do these Listomeres expect to get by crouching in this way?”)

“Monsieur,” replied the baroness, “Monsieur Birotteau’s affairs are

no more mine than those of Mademoiselle Gamard are yours; but,

unfortunately, religion is injured by such a quarrel, and I come to you

as a mediator--just as I myself am seeking to make peace.” (“We are not

deceiving each other, Monsieur Troubert,” thought she. “Don’t you feel

the sarcasm of that answer?”)

“Injury to religion, madame!” exclaimed the vicar-general. “Religion

is too lofty for the actions of men to injure.” (“My religion is I,”

thought he.) “God makes no mistake in His judgments, madame; I recognize

no tribunal but His.”

“Then, monsieur,” she replied, “let us endeavor to bring the judgments

of men into harmony with the judgments of God.” (“Yes, indeed, your

religion is you.”)

The Abbe Troubert suddenly changed his tone.

“Your nephew has been to Paris, I believe.” (“You found out about me

there,” thought he; “you know now that I can crush you, you who dared to

slight me, and you have come to capitulate.”)

“Yes, monsieur; thank you for the interest you take in him. He returns

to-night; the minister, who is very considerate of us, sent for him; he

does not want Monsieur de Listomere to leave the service.” (“Jesuit, you

can’t crush us,” thought she. “I understand your civility.”)

A moment’s silence.

“I did not think my nephew’s conduct in this affair quite the thing,”

she added; “but naval men must be excused; they know nothing of law.”

(“Come, we had better make peace,” thought she; “we sha’n’t gain

anything by battling in this way.”)

A slight smile wandered over the priests face and was lost in its

wrinkles.

“He has done us the service of getting a proper estimate on the value of

those paintings,” he said, looking up at the pictures. “They will be

a noble ornament to the chapel of the Virgin.” (“You shot a sarcasm at

me,” thought he, “and there’s another in return; we are quits, madame.”)

“If you intend to give them to Saint-Gatien, allow me to offer frames

that will be more suitable and worthy of the place, and of the works

themselves.” (“I wish I could force you to betray that you have taken

Birotteau’s things for your own,” thought she.)

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

“Here is the deed of relinquishment,” said Madame de Listomere; “it ends

all discussion, and makes them over to Mademoiselle Gamard.” She laid

the document on the table. (“See the confidence I place in you,” thought

she.) “It is worthy of you, monsieur,” she added, “worthy of your noble

character, to reconcile two Christians,--though at present I am not

especially concerned for Monsieur Birotteau--”

“He is living in your house,” said Troubert, interrupting her.

“No, monsieur, he is no longer there.” (“That peerage and my nephew’s

promotion force me to do base things,” thought she.)

The priest remained impassible, but his calm exterior was an indication

of violent emotion. Monsieur Bourbonne alone had fathomed the secret of

that apparent tranquillity. The priest had triumphed!

“Why did you take upon yourself to bring that relinquishment,” he

asked, with a feeling analogous to that which impels a woman to fish for

compliments.

“I could not avoid a feeling of compassion. Birotteau, whose feeble

nature must be well known to you, entreated me to see Madaemoiselle

Gamard and to obtain as the price of his renunciation--”

The priest frowned.

“of rights upheld by distinguished lawyers, the portrait of--”

Troubert looked fixedly at Madame de Listomere.

“the portrait of Chapeloud,” she said, continuing: “I leave you to judge

of his claim.” (“You will be certain to lose your case if we go to law,

and you know it,” thought she.)

The tone of her voice as she said the words “distinguished lawyers”

showed the priest that she knew very well both the strength and weakness

of the enemy. She made her talent so plain to this connoisseur emeritus

in the course of a conversation which lasted a long time in the tone

here given, that Troubert finally went down to Mademoiselle Gamard to

obtain her answer to Birotteau’s request for the portrait.

He soon returned.

“Madame,” he said, “I bring you the words of a dying woman. ‘The Abbe

Chapeloud was so true a friend to me,’ she said, ‘that I cannot consent

to part with his picture.’ As for me,” added Troubert, “if it were mine

I would not yield it. My feelings to my late friend were so faithful

that I should feel my right to his portrait was above that of others.”

“Well, there’s no need to quarrel over a bad picture.” (“I care as

little about it as you do,” thought she.) “Keep it, and I will have a

copy made of it. I take some credit to myself for having averted this

deplorable lawsuit; and I have gained, personally, the pleasure of your

acquaintance. I hear you have a great talent for whist. You will forgive

a woman for curiosity,” she said, smiling. “If you will come and play at

my house sometimes you cannot doubt your welcome.”

Troubert stroked his chin. (“Caught! Bourbonne was right!” thought she;

“he has his quantum of vanity!”)

It was true. The vicar-general was feeling the delightful sensation

which Mirabeau was unable to subdue when in the days of his power he

found gates opening to his carriage which were barred to him in earlier

days.

“Madame,” he replied, “my avocations prevent my going much into society;

but for you, what will not a man do?” (“The old maid is going to die;

I’ll get a footing at the Listomere’s, and serve them if they serve me,”

thought he. “It is better to have them for friends than enemies.”)

Madame de Listomere went home, hoping that the archbishop would complete

the work of peace so auspiciously begun. But Birotteau was fated to gain

nothing by his relinquishment. Mademoiselle Gamard died the next day.

No one felt surprised when her will was opened to find that she had

left everything to the Abbe Troubert. Her fortune was appraised at three

hundred thousand francs. The vicar-general sent to Madame de Listomere

two notes of invitation for the services and for the funeral procession

of his friend; one for herself and one for her nephew.

“We must go,” she said.

“It can’t be helped,” said Monsieur de Bourbonne. “It is a test to

which Troubert puts you. Baron, you must go to the cemetery,” he added,

turning to the lieutenant, who, unluckily for him, had not left Tours.

The services took place, and were performed with unusual ecclesiastical

magnificence. Only one person wept, and that was Birotteau, who,

kneeling in a side chapel and seen by none, believed himself guilty of

the death and prayed sincerely for the soul of the deceased, bitterly

deploring that he was not able to obtain her forgiveness before she

died.

The Abbe Troubert followed the body of his friend to the grave; at

the verge of which he delivered a discourse in which, thanks to his

eloquence, the narrow life the old maid had lived was enlarged to

monumental proportions. Those present took particular note of the

following words in the peroration:--

“This life of days devoted to God and to His religion, a life adorned

with noble actions silently performed, and with modest and hidden

virtues, was crushed by a sorrow which we might call undeserved if we

could forget, here at the verge of this grave, that our afflictions are

sent by God. The numerous friends of this saintly woman, knowing the

innocence and nobility of her soul, foresaw that she would issue safely

from her trials in spite of the accusations which blasted her life. It

may be that Providence has called her to the bosom of God to withdraw

her from those trials. Happy they who can rest here below in the peace

of their own hearts as Sophie now is resting in her robe of innocence

among the blest.”

“When he had ended his pompous discourse,” said Monsieur de Bourbonne,

after relating the incidents of the internment to Madame de Listomere

when whist was over, the doors shut, and they were alone with the baron,

“this Louis XI. in a cassock--imagine him if you can!--gave a last

flourish to the sprinkler and aspersed the coffin with holy water.”

Monsieur de Bourbonne picked up the tongs and imitated the priest’s

gesture so satirically that the baron and his aunt could not help

laughing. “Not until then,” continued the old gentleman, “did he

contradict himself. Up to that time his behavior had been perfect; but

it was no doubt impossible for him to put the old maid, whom he despised

so heartily and hated almost as much as he hated Chapeloud, out of sight

forever without allowing his joy to appear in that last gesture.”

The next day Mademoiselle Salomon came to breakfast with Madame de

Listomere, chiefly to say, with deep emotion: “Our poor Abbe Birotteau

has just received a frightful blow, which shows the most determined

hatred. He is appointed curate of Saint-Symphorien.”

Saint-Symphorien is a suburb of Tours lying beyond the bridge. That

bridge, one of the finest monuments of French architecture, is nineteen

hundred feet long, and the two open squares which surround each end are

precisely alike.

“Don’t you see the misery of it?” she said, after a pause, amazed at the

coldness with which Madame de Listomere received the news. “It is just

as if the abbe were a hundred miles from Tours, from his friends, from

everything! It is a frightful exile, and all the more cruel because he

is kept within sight of the town where he can hardly ever come. Since

his troubles he walks very feebly, yet he will have to walk three miles

to see his old friends. He has taken to his bed, just now, with fever.

The parsonage at Saint-Symphorien is very cold and damp, and the parish

is too poor to repair it. The poor old man will be buried in a living

tomb. Oh, it is an infamous plot!”

To end this history it will suffice to relate a few events in a simple

way, and to give one last picture of its chief personages.

Five months later the vicar-general was made Bishop of Troyes; and

Madame de Listomere was dead, leaving an annuity of fifteen hundred

francs to the Abbe Birotteau. The day on which the dispositions in her

will were made known Monseigneur Hyacinthe, Bishop of Troyes, was on

the point of leaving Tours to reside in his diocese, but he delayed his

departure on receiving the news. Furious at being foiled by a woman to

whom he had lately given his countenance while she had been secretly

holding the hand of a man whom he regarded as his enemy, Troubert again

threatened the baron’s future career, and put in jeopardy the peerage

of his uncle. He made in the salon of the archbishop, and before an

assembled party, one of those priestly speeches which are big with

vengeance and soft with honied mildness. The Baron de Listomere went the

next day to see this implacable enemy, who must have imposed sundry hard

conditions on him, for the baron’s subsequent conduct showed the most

entire submission to the will of the terrible Jesuit.

The new bishop made over Mademoiselle Gamard’s house by deed of gift to

the Chapter of the cathedral; he gave Chapeloud’s books and bookcases

to the seminary; he presented the two disputed pictures to the Chapel of

the Virgin; but he kept Chapeloud’s portrait. No one knew how to

explain this almost total renunciation of Mademoiselle Gamard’s bequest.

Monsieur de Bourbonne supposed that the bishop had secretly kept moneys

that were invested, so as to support his rank with dignity in Paris,

where of course he would take his seat on the Bishops’ bench in the

Upper Chamber. It was not until the night before Monseigneur Troubert’s

departure from Tours that the sly old fox unearthed the hidden reason

of this strange action, the deathblow given by the most persistent

vengeance to the feeblest of victims. Madame de Listomere’s legacy to

Birotteau was contested by the Baron de Listomere under a pretence of

undue influence!

A few days after the case was brought the baron was promoted to the rank

of captain. As a measure of ecclesiastical discipline, the curate of

Saint-Symphorien was suspended. His superiors judged him guilty. The

murderer of Sophie Gamard was also a swindler. If Monseigneur Troubert

had kept Mademoiselle Gamard’s property he would have found it difficult

to make the ecclestiastical authorities censure Birotteau.

At the moment when Monseigneur Hyacinthe, Bishop of Troyes, drove along

the quay Saint-Symphorien in a post-chaise on his way to Paris poor

Birotteau had been placed in an armchair in the sun on a terrace above

the road. The unhappy priest, smitten by the archbishop, was pale and

haggard. Grief, stamped on every feature, distorted the face that was

once so mildly gay. Illness had dimmed his eyes, formerly brightened by

the pleasures of good living and devoid of serious ideas, with a veil

which simulated thought. It was but the skeleton of the old Birotteau

who had rolled only one year earlier so vacuous but so content along the

Cloister. The bishop cast one look of pity and contempt upon his victim;

then he consented to forget him, and went his way.

There is no doubt that Troubert would have been in other times a

Hildebrand or an Alexander the Sixth. In these days the Church is no

longer a political power, and does not absorb the whole strength of

her solitaries. Celibacy, however, presents the inherent vice of

concentrating the faculties of man upon a single passion, egotism, which

renders celibates either useless or mischievous. We live at a period

when the defect of governments is to make Man for Society rather than

Society for Man. There is a perpetual struggle going on between the

Individual and the Social system which insists on using him, while he is

endeavoring to use it to his own profit; whereas, in former days, man,

really more free, was also more loyal to the public weal. The round in

which men struggle in these days has been insensibly widened; the soul

which can grasp it as a whole will ever be a magnificent exception;

for, as a general thing, in morals as in physics, impulsion loses

in intensity what it gains in extension. Society can not be based on

exceptions. Man in the first instance was purely and simply, father;

his heart beat warmly, concentrated in the one ray of Family. Later,

he lived for a clan, or a small community; hence the great historical

devotions of Greece and Rome. After that he was a man of caste or of

a religion, to maintain the greatness of which he often proved himself

sublime; but by that time the field of his interests became enlarged by

many intellectual regions. In our day, his life is attached to that of

a vast country; sooner or later his family will be, it is predicted, the

entire universe.

Will this moral cosmopolitanism, the hope of Christian Rome, prove to be

only a sublime error? It is so natural to believe in the realization of

a noble vision, in the Brotherhood of Man. But, alas! the human machine

does not have such divine proportions. Souls that are vast enough to

grasp a range of feelings bestowed on great men only will never belong

to either fathers of families or simple citizens. Some physiologists

have thought that as the brain enlarges the heart narrows; but they are

mistaken. The apparent egotism of men who bear a science, a nation, a

code of laws in their bosom is the noblest of passions; it is, as one

may say, the maternity of the masses; to give birth to new peoples, to

produce new ideas they must unite within their mighty brains the breasts

of woman and the force of God. The history of such men as Innocent the

Third and Peter the Great, and all great leaders of their age and nation

will show, if need be, in the highest spheres the same vast thought of

which Troubert was made the representative in the quiet depths of the

Cloister of Saint-Gatien.

ADDENDUM

The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.

Birotteau, Abbe Francois

The Lily of the Valley

Cesar Birotteau

Bourbonne, De

Madame Firmiani

Listomere, Baronne de

Cesar Birotteau

The Muse of the Department

Troubert, Abbe Hyacinthe

The Member for Arcis

Villenoix, Pauline Salomon de

Louis Lambert

A Seaside Tragedy