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.