and launching forth in various
tones the following sentences, all of which ended in a high falsetto
key, like notes of interjection:

"What the deuce have I done to her? Why is she angry with me? Marianne
did _not_ forget my fire! Mademoiselle told her not to light it! I must
be a child if I can't see, from the tone and manner she has been taking
to me, that I've done something to displease her. Nothing like it ever
happened to Chapeloud! I can't live in the midst of such torments as--At
my age--"

He went to bed hoping that the morrow might enlighten him on the causes
of the dislike which threatened to destroy forever the happiness he had
now enjoyed two years after wishing for it so long. Alas! the secret
reasons for the inimical feelings Mademoiselle Gamard bore to the
luckless abbe were fated to remain eternally unknown to him,--not that
they were difficult to fathom, but simply because he lacked the good
faith and candor by which great souls and scoundrels look within and
judge themselves. A man of genius or a trickster says to himself, "I
did wrong." Self-interest and native talent are the only infallible
and lucid guides. Now the Abbe Birotteau, whose goodness amounted to
stupidity, whose knowledge was only, as it were, plastered on him by
dint of study, who had no experience whatever of the world and its ways,
who lived between the mass and the confessional, chiefly occupied
in dealing the most trivial matters of conscience in his capacity
of confessor to all the schools in town and to a few noble souls who
rightly appreciated him,--the Abbe Birotteau must be regarded as a
great child, to whom most of the practices of social life were
utterly unknown. And yet, the natural selfishness of all human beings,
reinforced by the selfishness peculiar to the priesthood and that of
the narrow life of the provinces had insensibly, and unknown to himself,
developed within him. If any one had felt enough interest in the good
man to probe his spirit and prove to him that in the numerous petty
details of his life and in the minute duties of his daily existence he
was essentially lacking in the self-sacrifice he professed, he would
have punished and mortified himself in good faith. But those whom we
offend by such unconscious selfishness pay little heed to our real
innocence; what they want is vengeance, and they take it. Thus it
happened that Birotteau, weak brother that he was, was made to undergo
the decrees of that great