“There, there, do not worry yourself about such silly trifles. We shall easily find you a home less cold and gloomy than Mademoiselle Gamard’s house. If no lodging is to be found to suit you—well, one of us will take you as a boarder. Come, play a hit at backgammon. You can call on the Abbé Troubert tomorrow to ask his support, and you will see how well he will receive you.”
Weak-minded persons are reassured as easily as they are frightened. So poor Birotteau, dazzled by the prospect of living with Madame de Listomère, forgot the ruin, now irremediably complete, of the happiness he had so long sighed for, and so thoroughly reveled in. Still, at night, before falling asleep, with the anguish of a man to whom a removal, and the formation of new habits, were as the end of the world, he tortured his mind to imagine where he could find as convenient a home for his library as that corridor. As he pictured his books astray, his furniture dispersed, and his home broken up, he wondered a thousand times why his first year at Mademoiselle Gamard’s had been so delightful, and the second so wretched. And again and again this disaster was a bottomless pit in which his mind was lost.
The canonry no longer seemed to him a sufficient compensation for so many misfortunes; he compared his life to a stocking in which one dropped stitch leads to a ladder all the way down the web. Mademoiselle Salomon was left to him. But, losing all his old illusions, the poor priest no longer dared believe in a new friend.
In the città dolente of old maids there are several, especially in France, whose life is a sacrifice nobly renewed day by day to noble feeling. Some remain proudly faithful to a heart which death untimely snatched from them; martyrs to love, they learn the secret of womanliness of soul. Others succumb to a family pride which, to our shame, is daily waxing less; they have devoted themselves to make the fortune of a brother, or to the care of orphan nephews; such women are mothers though remaining maids. These old maids rise to the highest heroism of their sex, by consecrating every womanly feeling to the worship of misfortune. They idealize the concept of woman, by renouncing all the rewards of her natural destiny, and accepting only its penalties. They live enshrined in the beauty of their self-sacrifice, and men reverently bow their heads before their faded forms. Mademoiselle de Sombreuil is neither wife nor maid; she was, and always will be, an embodied poem.
Mademoiselle Salomon was one of these heroic creatures. Her sacrifice was religiously sublime, inasmuch as it would remain inglorious after having been a daily anguish. Young and handsome, she was loved; her lover lost his reason. For five years she had devoted herself with the courage of love to the mechanical joys of the unhappy man; she was so fully wedded to his madness that she did not think him mad.
She was a woman of simple manners, frank in speech, with a pale face not devoid of character, though the features were regular. She never spoke of the experiences of her life. Only, now and then, the sudden shudder with which she heard the narrative of some dreadful or melancholy incident betrayed in her the fine qualities evolved by great sorrows. She had come to live at Tours after the death of her companion in life. There she could not be appreciated at her true value; she was regarded as a “good creature.” She was very charitable, and attached herself by preference to the weak and helpless. For this reason she had, of course, the deepest interest in the unhappy priest.
Mademoiselle Salomon de Villenoix, driving into town early next morning, took Birotteau with her, set him down on the Cathedral quay, and left him making his way towards the Close, where he was in great haste to arrive, to save the canonry, at any rate, from the shipwreck, and to superintend the removal of his furniture. He rang, not without violent palpitations, at the door of the house, whither for fourteen years he had been in the habit of coming, in which he had dwelt, and whence he was now to be forever exiled after dreaming that he might die there in peace like his friend Chapeloud.
Marianne was surprised to see him. He told her he had come to speak to Monsieur Troubert, and turned towards the ground-floor rooms in which the Canon lodged; but Marianne called out to him:
“The Abbé Troubert is not there, Monsieur le Vicaire; he is in your old rooms.”
These words were a fearful shock to Birotteau, who at last understood Troubert’s character, and the unfathomable depth of revenge so slowly worked out, when he saw him quite at home in Chapeloud’s library, seated in Chapeloud’s fine Gothic chair—sleeping, no doubt, in Chapeloud’s bed, using Chapeloud’s furniture, contravening Chapeloud’s will, in short, disinheriting Chapeloud’s friend;—that very Chapeloud who had for so long penned him in at Mademoiselle Gamard’s, hindered his advancement, and kept him out of the drawing-rooms of Tours. By what magic wand had this transformation been effected? Were these things no longer Birotteau’s?
Indeed, as he noted the sardonic expression with which Troubert looked round on this library, Birotteau inferred that the future Vicar-General was secure of possessing forever the plunder of the two men he had so bitterly hated—Chapeloud as an enemy, and Birotteau because in him he still saw Chapeloud. At the sight a thousand ideas surged up in the worthy man’s heart and wrapped him in a sort of trance. He stood motionless, and, as it were, fascinated by Troubert’s eye, which was fixed on him.
“I cannot suppose, monsieur,” said Birotteau at last, “that you would wish to deprive me of the things that are mine. Though Mademoiselle Gamard may have been
