The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Vicar of Tours, by Honore de Balzac

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Title: The Vicar of Tours

Author: Honore de Balzac

Translator: Katharine Prescott Wormeley

Release Date: June, 1998 [Etext #1345]
Posting Date: February 22, 2010

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE VICAR OF TOURS ***

Produced by John Bickers, and Dagny

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 cert