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.