The Vicar of Tours | Page 3

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Etext prepared by John Bickers, [email protected].
Proofed by Dagny ([email protected]).

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 divine privilege; 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
worthy priest 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 mechanical impulse, 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