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