The Vicar of Tours

by Honore de Balzac
Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley

DEDICATION
To David, Sculptor:

The permanence of the work on which I inscribe your name--
twice made illustrious in this century--is very problematical;

whereas you have graven mine in bronze which survives nations
--if only in their coins. The day may come when numismatists,

discovering amid the ashes of Paris existences perpetuated by
you, will wonder at the number of heads crowned in your

atelier and endeavour to find in them new dynasties.
To you, this divineprivilege; to me, gratitude.

De Balzac.
THE VICAR OF TOURS

I
Early in the autumn of 1826 the Abbe Birotteau, the principal

personage of this history, was overtaken by a shower of rain as he
returned home from a friend's house, where he had been passing the

evening. He therefore crossed, as quickly as his corpulence would
allow, the deserted little square called "The Cloister," which lies

directly behind the chancel of the cathedral of Saint-Gatien at Tours.
The Abbe Birotteau, a short little man, apoplectic in constitution and

about sixty years old, had already gone through several attacks of
gout. Now, among the petty miseries of human life the one for which

the worthypriest felt the deepest aversion was the sudden sprinkling
of his shoes, adorned with silver buckles, and the wetting of their

soles. Notwithstanding the woollen socks in which at all seasons he
enveloped his feet with the extreme care that ecclesiastics take of

themselves, he was apt at such times to get them a little damp, and
the next day gout was sure to give him certain infallible proofs of

constancy. Nevertheless, as the pavement of the Cloister was likely to
be dry, and as the abbe had won three francs ten sous in his rubber

with Madame de Listomere, he bore the rain resignedly from the middle
of the place de l'Archeveche, where it began to come down in earnest.

Besides, he was fondling his chimera,--a desire already twelve years
old, the desire of a priest, a desire formed anew every evening and

now, apparently, very near accomplishment; in short, he had wrapped
himself so completely in the fur cape of a canon that he did not feel

the inclemency of the weather. During the evening several of the
company who habitually gathered at Madame de Listomere's had almost

guaranteed to him his nomination to the office of canon (then vacant
in the metropolitan Chapter of Saint-Gatien), assuring him that no one

deserved such promotion as he, whose rights, long overlooked, were
indisputable.

If he had lost the rubber, if he had heard that his rival, the Abbe
Poirel, was named canon, the worthy man would have thought the rain

extremely chilling; he might even have thought ill of life. But it so
chanced that he was in one of those rare moments when happy inward

sensations make a man oblivious of discomfort. In hastening his steps
he obeyed a more mechanicalimpulse, and truth (so essential in a

history of manners and morals) compels us to say that he was thinking
of neither rain nor gout.

In former days there was in the Cloister, on the side towards the
Grand'Rue, a cluster of houses forming a Close and belonging to the

cathedral, where several of the dignitaries of the Chapter lived.
After the confiscation of ecclesiastical property the town had turned

the passage through this close into a narrow street, called the Rue de
la Psalette, by which pedestrians passed from the Cloister to the

Grand'Rue. The name of this street, proves clearly enough that the
precentor and his pupils and those connected with the choir formerly

lived there. The other side, the left side, of the street is occupied
by a single house, the walls of which are overshadowed by the

buttresses of Saint-Gatien, which have their base in the narrow little
garden of the house, leaving it doubtful whether the cathedral was

built before or after this venerabledwelling. An archaeologist
examining the arabesques, the shape of the windows, the arch of the

door, the whole exterior of the house, now mellow with age, would see
at once that it had always been a part of the magnificentedifice with

which it is blended.
An antiquary (had there been one at Tours,--one of the least literary

towns in all France) would even discover, where the narrow street
enters the Cloister, several vestiges of an old arcade, which formerly

made a portico to these ecclesiasticaldwellings, and was, no doubt,
harmonious in style with the general character of the architecture.

The house of which we speak, standing on the north side of the
cathedral, was always in the shadow thrown by that vast edifice, on

which time had cast its dingy mantle, marked its furrows, and shed its
chill humidity, its lichen, mosses, and rank herbs. The darkened

dwelling was wrapped in silence, broken only by the bells, by the
chanting of the offices heard through the windows of the church, by

the call of the jackdaws nesting in the belfries. The region is a
desert of stones, a solitude with a character of its own, an arid

spot, which could only be inhabited by beings who had either attained
to absolute nullity, or were gifted with some abnormal strength of

soul. The house in question had always been occupied by abbes, and it
belonged to an old maid named Mademoiselle Gamard. Though the property

had been bought from the national domain under the Reign of Terror by
the father of Mademoiselle Gamard, no one objected under the

Restoration to the old maid's retaining it, because she took priests
to board and was very devout; it may be that religious persons gave

her credit for the intention of leaving the property to the Chapter.
The Abbe Birotteau was making his way to this house, where he had

lived for the last two years. His apartment had been (as was now the
canonry) an object of envy and his "hoc erat in votis" for a dozen

years. To be Mademoiselle Gamard's boarder and to become a canon were
the two great desires of his life; in fact they do present accurately

the ambition of a priest, who, considering himself on the highroad to
eternity, can wish for nothing in this world but good lodging, good

food, clean garments, shoes with silver buckles, a sufficiency of
things for the needs of the animal, and a canonry to satisfy self-

love, that inexpressible sentiment which follows us, they say, into
the presence of God,--for there are grades among the saints. But the

covetous desire for the apartment which the Abbe Birotteau was now
inhabiting (a very harmless desire in the eyes of worldly people) had

been to the abbe nothing less than a passion, a passion full of
obstacles, and, like more guiltypassions, full of hopes, pleasures,

and remorse.
The interiorarrangements of the house did not allow Mademoiselle

Gamard to take more than two lodgers. Now, for about twelve years
before the day when Birotteau went to live with her she had undertaken

to keep in health and contentment two priests; namely, Monsieur l'Abbe
Troubert and Monsieur l'Abbe Chapeloud. The Abbe Troubert still lived.

The Abbe Chapeloud was dead; and Birotteau had stepped into his place.
The late Abbe Chapeloud, in life a canon of Saint-Gatien, had been an

intimate friend of the Abbe Birotteau. Every time that the latter paid
a visit to the canon he had constantly admired the apartment, the

furniture and the library. Out of this admiration grew the desire to
possess these beautiful things. It had been impossible for the Abbe

Birotteau to stifle this desire; though it often made him suffer
terribly when he reflected that the death of his best friend could

alone satisfy his secret covetousness, which increased as time went
on. The Abbe Chapeloud and his friend Birotteau were not rich. Both

were sons of peasants; and their slender savings had been spent in the
mere costs of living during the disastrous years of the Revolution.

When Napoleon restored the Catholic worship the Abbe Chapeloud was
appointed canon of the cathedral and Birotteau was made vicar of it.

Chapeloud then went to board with Mademoiselle Gamard. When Birotteau
first came to visit his friend, he thought the arrangement of the

rooms excellent, but he noticed nothing more. The outset of this
concupiscence of chattels was very like that of a true passion, which

often begins, in a young man, with cold admiration for a woman whom he
ends in loving forever.

The apartment, reached by a stone staircase, was on the side of the
house that faced south. The Abbe Troubert occupied the ground-floor,

and Mademoiselle Gamard the first floor of the main building, looking
on the street. When Chapeloud took possession of his rooms they were

bare of furniture, and the ceilings were blackened with smoke. The
stone mantelpieces, which were very badly cut, had never been painted.