ent and replaced them by wooden floors laid in
"point de Hongrie." She also rebuilt a smoky chimney.

For twelve years the Abbe Birotteau had seen his friend Chapeloud in
that house without ever giving a thought to the motive of the canon's
extreme circumspection in his relations to Mademoiselle Gamard. When he
came himself to live with that saintly woman he was in the condition
of a lover on the point of being made happy. Even if he had not been
by nature purblind of intellect, his eyes were too dazzled by his new
happiness to allow him to judge of the landlady, or to reflect on the
limits which he ought to impose on their daily intercourse. Mademoiselle
Gamard, seen from afar and through the prism of those material
felicities which the vicar dreamed of enjoying in her house, seemed to
him a perfect being, a faultless Christian, essentially charitable, the
woman of the Gospel, the wise virgin, adorned by all those humble and
modest virtues which shed celestial fragrance upon life.

So, with the enthusiasm of one who attains an object long desired, with
the candor of a child, and the blundering foolishness of an old
man utterly without worldly experience, he fell into the life of
Mademoiselle Gamard precisely as a fly is caught in a spider's web. The
first day that he went to dine and sleep at the house he was detained in
the salon after dinner, partly to make his landlady's acquaintance, but
chiefly by that inexplicable embarrassment which often assails
timid people and makes them fear to seem impolite by breaking off a
conversation in order to take leave. Consequently he remained there the
whole evening. Then a friend of his, a certain Mademoiselle Salomon
de Villenoix, came to see him, and this gave Mademoiselle Gamard the
happiness of forming a card-table; so that when the vicar went to bed he
felt that he had passed a very agreeable evening. Knowing Mademoiselle
Gamard and the Abbe Troubert but slightly, he saw only the superficial
aspects of their characters; few persons bare their defects at once,
they generally take on a becoming veneer.

The worthy abbe was thus led to suggest to himself the charming plan of
devoting all his evenings to Mademoiselle Gamard, instead of spending
them, as Chapeloud had done, elsewhere. The old maid had for years been
possessed by a desire which grew stronger day by day. This desire,
often formed by old persons and even by pretty women, had become in
Mademoiselle Gamard's soul as