ey
prefer to seek the doubtful pleasures of society.

The cause of this desertion is plain enough. Although the vicar was
one of those to whom heaven is hereafter to belong in virtue of the
decree "Blessed are the poor in spirit," he could not, like some
fools, endure the annoyance that other fools caused him. Persons
without minds are like weeds that delight in good earth; they want to
be amused by others, all the more because they are dull within. The
incarnation of ennui to which they are victims, joined to the need
they feel of getting a divorce from themselves, produces that passion
for moving about, for being somewhere else than where they are, which
distinguishes their species,--and also that of all beings devoid of
sensitiveness, and those who have missed their destiny, or who suffer
by their own fault.

Without really fathoming the vacuity and emptiness of Mademoiselle
Gamard's mind, or stating to himself the pettiness of her ideas, the
poor abbe perceived, unfortunately too late, the defects which she
shared with all old maids, and those which were peculiar to herself.
The bad points of others show out so strongly against the good that
they usually strike our eyes before they wound us. This moral
phenomenon might, at a pinch, be made to excuse the tendency we all
have, more or less, to gossip. It is so natural, socially speaking, to
laugh at the failings of others that we ought to forgive the ridicule
our own absurdities excite, and be annoyed only by calumny. But in
this instance the eyes of the good vicar never reached the optical
range which enables men of the world to see and evade their
neighbours' rough points. Before he could be brought to perceive the
faults of his landlady he was forced to undergo the warning which
Nature gives to all her creatures--pain.

Old maids who have never yielded in their habits of life or in their
characters to other lives and other characters, as the fate of woman
exacts, have, as a general thing, a mania for making others give way
to them. In Mademoiselle Gamard this sentiment had degenerated into
despotism, but a despotism that could only exercise itself on little
things. For instance (among a hundred other examples), the basket of
counters placed on the card-table for the Abbe Birotteau was to stand
exactly where she placed it; and the abbe annoyed her terribly by
moving it, which he did nearly every evening. How is this
sensitiveness stupidly spent on nothings to be