h a man of the world," she said. "If it had not been
for the Abbe Chapeloud he would never have been received at Madame de
Listomere's. Oh, what didn't I lose in losing the Abbe Chapeloud! Such
an amiable man, and so easy to live with! In twelve whole years I never
had the slightest difficulty or disagreement with him."

Presented thus, the innocent abbe was considered by this bourgeois
society, which secretly hated the aristocratic society, as a man
essentially exacting and hard to get along with. For a week Mademoiselle
Gamard enjoyed the pleasure of being pitied by friends who, without
really thinking one word of what they said, kept repeating to her: "How
_could_ he have turned against you?--so kind and gentle as you are!"
or, "Console yourself, dear Mademoiselle Gamard, you are so well known
that--" et cetera.

Nevertheless, these friends, enchanted to escape one evening a week in
the Cloister, the darkest, dreariest, and most out of the way corner in
Tours, blessed the poor vicar in their hearts.

Between persons who are perpetually in each other's company dislike or
love increases daily; every moment brings reasons to love or hate each
other more and more. The Abbe Birotteau soon became intolerable to
Mademoiselle Gamard. Eighteen months after she had taken him to board,
and at the moment when the worthy man was mistaking the silence of
hatred for the peacefulness of content, and applauding himself for
having, as he said, "managed matters so well with the old maid," he
was really the object of an underhand persecution and a vengeance
deliberately planned. The four marked circumstances of the locked
door, the forgotten slippers, the lack of fire, and the removal of
the candlestick, were the first signs that revealed to him a terrible
enmity, the final consequences of which were destined not to strike him
until the time came when they were irreparable.

As he went to bed the worthy vicar worked his brains--quite uselessly,
for he was soon at the end of them--to explain to himself the
extraordinarily discourteous conduct of Mademoiselle Gamard. The fact
was that, having all along acted logically in obeying the natural laws
of his own egotism, it was impossible that he should now perceive his
own faults towards his landlady.

Though the great things of life are simple to understand and easy to
express, the littlenesses require a vast number of details to explain
them. The foregoing events, which may be called a