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 bitterness that the

sense of being kept outside the social pale puts into the heart of an
old maid; he therefore calculated his own treatment of Mademoiselle

Gamard very wisely. She was then about thirty-eight years old, and
still retained a few pretensions, which, in well-behaved persons of

her condition, change, rather later, into strong personal self-esteem.
The canon saw plainly that to live comfortably with his landlady he

must pay her invariably the same attentions and be more infallible
than the pope himself. To compass this result, he allowed no points of

contact between himself and her except those that politeness demanded,
and those which necessarily exist between two persons living under the

same roof. Thus, though he and the Abbe Troubert took their regular
three meals a day, he avoided the family breakfast by inducing

Mademoiselle Gamard to send his coffee to his own room. He also
avoided the annoyance of supper by taking tea in the houses of friends

with whom he spent his evenings. In this way he seldom saw his
landlady except at dinner; but he always came down to that meal a few

minutes in advance of the hour. During this visit of courtesy, as it
may be called, he talked to her, for the twelve years he had lived

under her roof, on nearly the same topics, receiving from her the same
answers. How she had slept, her breakfast, the trivial domestic

events, her looks, her health, the weather, the time the church
services had lasted, the incidents of the mass, the health of such or

such a priest,--these were the subjects of their daily conversation.
During dinner he invariably paid her certain indirect compliments; the

fish had an excellent flavor; the seasoning of a sauce was delicious;
Mademoiselle Gamard's capacities and virtues as mistress of a

household were great. He was sure of flattering the old maid's vanity
by praising the skill with which she made or prepared her preserves

and pickles and pates and other gastronomical inventions. To cap all,
the wily canon never left his landlady's yellow salon after dinner

without remarking that there was no house in Tours where he could get
such good coffee as that he had just imbibed.

Thanks to this thorough understanding of Mademoiselle Gamard's
character, and to the science of existence which he had put in

practice for the last twelve years, no matter of discussion on the
internal arrangements of the household had ever come up between them.

The Abbe Chapeloud had taken note of the spinster's angles,
asperities, and crabbedness, and had so arranged his avoidance of her

that he obtained without the least difficulty all the concessions that
were necessary to the happiness and tranquility of his life. The

result was that Mademoiselle Gamard frequently remarked to her friends
and acquaintances that the Abbe Chapeloud was a very amiable man,

extremely easy to live with, and a fine mind.
As to her other lodger, the Abbe Troubert, she said absolutely nothing

about him. Completely involved in the round of her life, like a
satellite in the orbit of a planet, Troubert was to her a sort of

intermediary creature between the individuals of the human species and
those of the canine species; he was classed in her heart next, but

directly before, the place intended for friends but now occupied by a
fat and wheezy pug which she tenderly loved. She ruled Troubert

completely, and the intermingling of their interests was so obvious
that many persons of her social sphere believed that the Abbe Troubert

had designs on the old maid's property, and was binding her to him
unawares with infinitepatience, and really directing her while he

seemed to be obeying without ever letting her percieve in him the
slightest wish on his part to govern her.

When the Abbe Chapeloud died, the old maid, who desired a lodger with
quiet ways, naturally thought of the vicar. Before the canon's will

was made known she had meditated offering his rooms to the Abbe
Troubert, who was not very comfortable on the ground-floor. But when

the Abbe Birotteau, on receiving his legacy, came to settle in writing
the terms of his board she saw he was so in love with the apartment,

for which he might now admit his long cherished desires, that she
dared not propose the exchange, and accordingly sacrificed her

sentiments of friendship to the demands of self-interest. But in order
to console her beloved canon, Mademoiselle took up the large white

Chateau-Renaud bricks that made the floors of his apartment and
replaced them by wooden floors laid in "point de Hongrie." She also

rebuilt a smoky chimney.
For twelve years the Abbe Birotteau had seen his friend Chapeloud in

that house without ever giving a thought to the motive of the canon's
extreme circumspection in his relations to Mademoiselle Gamard. When

he came himself to live with that saintly woman he was in the
condition of a lover on the point of being made happy. Even if he had

not been by nature purblind of intellect, his eyes were too dazzled by
his new happiness to allow him to judge of the landlady, or to reflect

on the limits which he ought to impose on their daily intercourse.
Mademoiselle Gamard, seen from afar and through the prism of those

material felicities which the vicar dreamed of enjoying in her house,
seemed to him a perfect being, a faultless Christian, essentially

charitable, the woman of the Gospel, the wise virgin, adorned by all
those humble and modestvirtues which shed celestialfragrance upon

life.
So, with the enthusiasm of one who attains an object long desired,

with the candor of a child, and the blundering foolishness of an old
man utterly without worldly experience, he fell into the life of

Mademoiselle Gamard precisely as a fly is caught in a spider's web.
The first day that he went to dine and sleep at the house he was

detained in the salon after dinner, partly to make his landlady's
acquaintance, but chiefly by that inexplicableembarrassment which

often assails timid people and makes them fear to seem impolite by
breaking off a conversation in order to take leave. Consequently he

remained there the whole evening. Then a friend of his, a certain
Mademoiselle Salomon de Villenoix, came to see him, and this gave

Mademoiselle Gamard the happiness of forming a card-table; so that
when the vicar went to bed he felt that he had passed a very agreeable

evening. Knowing Mademoiselle Gamard and the Abbe Troubert but
slightly, he saw only the superficial aspects of their characters; few

persons bare their defects at once, they generally take on a becoming
veneer.

The worthy abbe was thus led to suggest to himself the charming plan
of devoting all his evenings to Mademoiselle Gamard, instead of

spending them, as Chapeloud had done, elsewhere. The old maid had for
years been possessed by a desire which grew stronger day by day. This

desire, often formed by old persons and even by pretty women, had
become in Mademoiselle Gamard's soul as ardent a longing as that of

Birotteau for Chapeloud's apartment; and it was strengthened by all
those feelings of pride, egotism, envy, and vanity which pre-exist in

the breasts of worldly people.
This history is of all time; it suffices to widen slightly the narrow

circle in which these personages are about to act to find the
coefficient reasons of events which take place in the very highest

spheres of social life.
Mademoiselle Gamard spent her evenings by rotation in six or eight

different houses. Whether it was that she disliked being obliged to go
out to seek society, and considered that at her age she had a right to

expect some return; or that her pride was wounded at receiving no
company in her house; or that her self-love craved the compliments she

saw her various hostesses receive,--certain it is that her whole
ambition was to make her salon a centre towards which a given number

of persons should nightly make their way with pleasure. One morning as
she left Saint-Gatien, after Birotteau and his friend Mademoiselle

Salomon had spent a few evenings with her and with the faithful and
patient Troubert, she said to certain of her good friends whom she met

at the church door, and whose slave she had hitherto considered
herself, that those who wished to see her could certainly come once a

week to her house, where she had friends enough to make a card-table;
she could not leave the Abbe Birotteau; Mademoiselle Salomon had not

missed a single evening that week; she was devoted to friends; and--et
cetera, et cetera. Her speech was all the more humblyhaughty and