It is all over with the old girl; I will make up to the Listomères, and do them a good turn if they do me one,” thought he. “
It is better to have them for friends than for enemies.”)
Madame de Listomère went home, hoping that the Archbishop would complete a pacification so happily begun. But Birotteau was to gain nothing even by his renunciation. Madame de Listomère heard next day that Mademoiselle Gamard was dead. The old maid’s will being opened, no one was surprised to learn that she had constituted the Abbé Troubert her universal legatee. Her property was estimated at a hundred thousand crowns. The Vicar-General sent two invitations to the service and burial to Madame de Listomère’s house—one for herself, and the other for her nephew.
“We must go,” said she.
“That is just what it means!” exclaimed Monsieur de Bourbonne. “It is a test by which Monseigneur Troubert meant to try you. Baron, you must go all the way to the grave,” he added to the navy lieutenant, who, for his sins, had not yet left Tours.
The service was held, and was marked by ecclesiastical magnificence. One person only shed tears. That was Birotteau, who, alone in a side chapel where he was not seen, believed himself guilty of this death, and prayed fervently for the soul of the departed, bitterly bewailing himself because he had not obtained her forgiveness for having wronged her.
The Abbé Troubert followed his friend’s body to the grave in which she was to be laid. Standing on its brink, he delivered an address, and, thanks to his eloquence, gave monumental dignity to his picture of the narrow life led by the testatrix. The bystanders noted these words in the peroration:
“This life, full of days devoted to God and to Religion—this life, adorned by so many beautiful actions performed in silence, so many modest and unrecognized virtues, was blighted by a sorrow which we would call unmerited if, here, on the verge of eternity, we could forget that all our afflictions are sent us by God. This holy woman’s many friends, knowing how noble was her guileless soul, foresaw that she could endure anything excepting only such detraction as would affect her whole existence. And so perhaps Providence has taken her to rest in God only to rescue her from our petty griefs. Happy are they who here on earth can live at peace with themselves, as Sophie now reposes in the realms of the blest, in her robe of innocence!”
“And when he had ended this grandiloquent discourse,” said Monsieur de Bourbonne, who reported all the details of the funeral to Madame de Listomère that evening when, the rubbers ended and the doors closed, they were left alone with the Baron, “imagine, if you can, that Louis XI in a priest’s gown giving the holy-water sprinkler a final flourish in this style”—and Monsieur de Bourbonne took up the tongs and imitated the Abbé Troubert’s movement so exactly that the Baron and his aunt could not help smiling. “In this alone,” added the old man, “did he betray himself. Till then his reserve had been perfect; but now, when he had packed away forever the old maid he so utterly despised and hated, almost as much perhaps as he had detested Chapeloud, he, no doubt, found it impossible to hinder his satisfaction from betraying itself in a gesture.”
Next morning Mademoiselle Salomon came to breakfast with Madame de Listomère, and as soon as she came in she said quite sadly:
“Our poor Abbé Birotteau has just been dealt a dreadful blow which reveals the most elaborately studied hatred. He is made Curé of Saint-Symphorien.”
Saint-Symphorien is a suburb of Tours lying beyond the bridge. This bridge, one of the finest works of French architecture, is nearly two thousand feet long, and the open squares at each end are exactly alike.
“Do you understand?” she added after a pause, amazed at the coolness with which Madame de Listomère heard this news, “The Abbé Birotteau will there be a hundred leagues from Tours, from his friends, from everything. Is it not exile, and all the more terrible because he will be torn from the town that his eyes will behold every day, while he can hardly ever come to it? He who, since his troubles, has hardly been able to walk, will be obliged to come a league to see us. At the present moment the poor man is in bed with a feverish attack. The priest’s residence at Saint-Symphorien is cold and damp, and the parish is too poor to restore it. The poor old man will be buried alive in a real tomb. What a villainous plot!”
It will now, perhaps, suffice in conclusion of this story to report briefly a few subsequent events, and to sketch a last picture.
Five months later the Vicar-General was a bishop; Madame de Listomère was dead, leaving fifteen hundred francs a year to the Abbé Birotteau. On the day when the Baroness’ will was read, Monseigneur Hyacinthe, Bishop of Troyes, was about to leave Tours and take up his residence in his diocese; but he postponed his departure. Furious at having been deceived by a woman to whom he had offered a hand, while she was secretly holding out hers to the man whom he chose to regard as an enemy, Troubert again threatened to mar the Baron’s career and hinder the Marquis de Listomère from receiving his peerage. In full council, at the Archbishop’s palace, he uttered one of those priestly speeches, big with revenge, though smooth with honeyed mildness.
The ambitious lieutenant came to see this ruthless prelate, who dictated hard terms no doubt, for the Baron’s conduct showed absolute subservience to the terrible Jesuit’s will.
The new Bishop, by a deed of gift, bestowed Mademoiselle Gamard’s house on the Cathedral Chapter; he gave Chapeloud’s bookcase and books to the little Seminary; he dedicated the two disputed pictures to the Lady Chapel; but he kept the portrait of
