had departed without saying, as usual, "Does Monsieur want
anything more?" the Abbe Birotteau let himself fall gently into the
wide and handsome easy-chair of his late friend; but there was something
mournful in the movement with which he dropped upon it. The good
soul was crushed by a presentiment of coming calamity. His eyes roved
successively to the handsome tall clock, the bureau, curtains, chairs,
carpets, to the stately bed, the basin of holy-water, the crucifix, to
a Virgin by Valentin, a Christ by Lebrun,--in short, to all the
accessories of this cherished room, while his face expressed the anguish
of the tenderest farewell that a lover ever took of his first mistress,
or an old man of his lately planted trees. The vicar had just perceived,
somewhat late it is true, the signs of a dumb persecution instituted
against him for the last three months by Mademoiselle Gamard, whose
evil intentions would doubtless have been fathomed much sooner by a more
intelligent man. Old maids have a special talent for accentuating the
words and actions which their dislikes suggest to them. They scratch
like cats. They not only wound but they take pleasure in wounding, and
in making their victim see that he is wounded. A man of the world would
never have allowed himself to be scratched twice; the good abbe, on the
contrary, had taken several blows from those sharp claws before he could
be brought to believe in any evil intention.

But when he did perceive it, he set to work, with the inquisitorial
sagacity which priests acquire by directing consciences and burrowing
into the nothings of the confessional, to establish, as though it were
a matter of religious controversy, the following proposition: "Admitting
that Mademoiselle Gamard did not remember it was Madame de Listomere's
evening, and that Marianne did think I was home, and did really forget
to make my fire, it is impossible, inasmuch as I myself took down my
candlestick this morning, that Mademoiselle Gamard, seeing it in her
salon, could have supposed I had gone to bed. Ergo, Mademoiselle Gamard
intended that I should stand out in the rain, and, by carrying my
candlestick upstairs, she meant to make me understand it. What does it
all mean?" he said aloud, roused by the gravity of these circumstances,
and rising as he spoke to take off his damp clothes, get into his
dressing-gown, and do up his head for the night. Then he returned from
the bed to the fireplace, gesticulating,