d digestion.
Mademoiselle Gamard, who believed in this hygienic doctrine, had not
as yet refrained, in spite of their coolness, from talking at meals;
though, for the last few mornings, the vicar had been forced to strain
his mind to find beguiling topics on which to loosen her tongue. If
the narrow limits of this history permitted us to report even one of
the conversations which often brought a bitter and sarcastic smile to
the lips of the Abbe Troubert, it would offer a finished picture of
the Boeotian life of the provinces. The singular revelations of the
Abbe Birotteau and Mademoiselle Gamard relating to their personal
opinions on politics, religion, and literature would delight observing
minds. It would be highly entertaining to transcribe the reasons on
which they mutually doubted the death of Napoleon in 1820, or the
conjectures by which they mutually believed that the Dauphin was
living,--rescued from the Temple in the hollow of a huge log of wood.
Who could have helped laughing to hear them assert and prove, by
reasons evidently their own, that the King of France alone imposed the
taxes, that the Chambers were convoked to destroy the clergy, that
thirteen hundred thousand persons had perished on the scaffold during
the Revolution? They frequently discussed the press, without either of
them having the faintest idea of what that modern engine really was.
Monsieur Birotteau listened with acceptance to Mademoiselle Gamard
when she told him that a man who ate an egg every morning would die in
a year, and that facts proved it; that a roll of light bread eaten
without drinking for several days together would cure sciatica; that
all the workmen who assisted in pulling down the Abbey Saint-Martin
had died in six months; that a certain prefect, under orders from
Bonaparte, had done his best to damage the towers of Saint-Gatien,
--with a hundred other absurd tales.

But on this occasion poor Birotteau felt he was tongue-tied, and he
resigned himself to eat a meal without engaging in conversation. After
a while, however, the thought crossed his mind that silence was
dangerous for his digestion, and he boldly remarked, "This coffee is
excellent."

That act of courage was completely wasted. Then, after looking at the
scrap of sky visible above the garden between the two buttresses of
Saint-Gatien, the vicar again summoned nerve to say, "It will be finer
weather to-day than it was yesterday."

At that remark Mademoiselle