By the end of the first year of his life under Mademoiselle Gamard’s roof the Abbé had fallen into his old habits, spending two evenings a week at Madame de Listomère’s, three with Mademoiselle Salomon, and the other two with Mademoiselle Merlin de la Blottière. These ladies moved in the aristocratic sphere of Tours society, to which Mademoiselle Gamard was not admitted. So the landlady was excessively indignant at the Abbé’s defection, which made her aware of her small importance: any kind of selection implying some contempt for the rejected object.
“Monsieur Birotteau did not find us good enough company,” the Abbé Troubert would say to Mademoiselle Gamard’s friends when she was obliged to give up her “evenings.” “He is a wit, a gourmet! He must have fashion, luxury, brilliant conversation, the tittle-tattle of the town.”
And such words always prompted Mademoiselle Gamard to praise the Canon’s excellent temper at the expense of Birotteau’s.
“He is not so clever when all is said,” she remarked. “But for Canon Chapeloud he would never have been received by Madame de Listomère. Oh, I lost a great deal when the Abbé Chapeloud died. What an amiable man! and so easy to live with! Indeed, in twelve years we never had the smallest difficulty or disagreement.”
Mademoiselle Gamard painted so unflattering a portrait of Monsieur Birotteau that her innocent boarder was regarded by this citizen circle, secretly hostile to the aristocratic class, as an essentially fractious man, very difficult to get on with. Then for a few weeks the old maid had the satisfaction of hearing herself pitied by her female friends, who, without believing a word of what they said, repeated again and again, “How can you, who are so gentle and so kind, have inspired him with such dislike?—” or, “Be comforted, dear Mademoiselle Gamard, everyone knows you too well—” and so forth.
Delighted, nevertheless, to escape spending an evening each week in the Close—the most deserted and gloomy spot in all Tours, and the most remote from the centre of life—they all blessed the Abbé.
Love or hatred must constantly increase between two persons who are always together; every moment fresh reasons are found for loving or hating better. Thus to Mademoiselle Gamard the Abbé Birotteau became unendurable. Eighteen months after taking him as a boarder, just when the good man believed he had found the peace of contentment in the silence of aversion, and prided himself on having come so comfortably to terms with the old woman, to use his expression, he was to her the object of covert persecution and calmly planned animosity.
The four capital facts of the closed door, the forgotten slippers, the lack of fire, the candlestick taken to his rooms, alone could betray the terrible enmity of which the last effects were not to fall on him till the moment when they would be irremediable. As he went to sleep, the good Abbé racked his brain, but vainly—and, indeed, he must soon have come to the bottom of it—to account for Mademoiselle Gamard’s singularly uncivil behavior. In point of fact, as he had originally acted very logically, obeying the natural law of his egoism, he could not possibly form a guess as to how he had offended his landlady. While great things are simple to understand, and easy to express, the mean things of life need much detail. The incidents which constitute the prologue, as it were, to this parochial drama, in which the passions will be seen not less violent than if they had been excited by important interests, necessitated this long introduction, and any exact historian would have found it difficult to abridge the trivial tale.
When he awoke next morning, the Abbé’s thoughts were so much set on the canonry, that he forgot the four circumstances which, the evening before, had appeared to him to be sinister prognostics of a future full of disaster. Birotteau was not the man to get up without a fire; he rang to announce to Marianne that he was awake, and wanted her; then, as he was wont, he lay lost in a somnolent, half-dreamy state, during which, as a rule, the woman made the fire, and dragged him gently from his last doze by a hum of inquiry and quiet bustle—a sort of music that he liked.
Half an hour went by, and Marianne had not appeared. The Abbé, already half a Canon, was about to ring again, when he stayed his hand on hearing a man’s step on the stairs. In fact, the Abbé Troubert, after discreetly tapping at the door, at Birotteau’s bidding came in. This call did not surprise him; the priests were in the habit of paying each other a visit once a month. The Canon was at once amazed that Marianne should not yet have lighted his quasi-colleague’s fire. He opened a window, called Marianne in a rough tone, and bid her come up at once; then, turning to his brother priest, he said, “If Mademoiselle should hear that you have no fire, she would give Marianne a good scolding.”
After this speech he inquired for Birotteau’s health, and asked him, in an insinuating voice, whether he had any recent news that could encourage his hope of being made a Canon. The Abbé explained to him what was being done, and guilelessly told him who the personages were that Madame de Listomère was canvassing, not knowing that Troubert had never forgiven that lady for not inviting him to her house—him—Canon Troubert, twice designate to be made Vicar-General of the diocese.
It would be impossible to meet with two figures offering so many points of contrast as those of these two
