The Vicar of Tours | Page 8

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