ardent a longing as that of Birotteau for
Chapeloud's apartment; and it was strengthened by all those feelings
of pride, egotism, envy, and vanity which pre-exist in the breasts of
worldly people.

This history is of all time; it suffices to widen slightly the
narrow circle in which these personages are about to act to find the
coefficient reasons of events which take place in the very highest
spheres of social life.

Mademoiselle Gamard spent her evenings by rotation in six or eight
different houses. Whether it was that she disliked being obliged to go
out to seek society, and considered that at her age she had a right
to expect some return; or that her pride was wounded at receiving no
company in her house; or that her self-love craved the compliments
she saw her various hostesses receive,--certain it is that her whole
ambition was to make her salon a centre towards which a given number of
persons should nightly make their way with pleasure. One morning as she
left Saint-Gatien, after Birotteau and his friend Mademoiselle Salomon
had spent a few evenings with her and with the faithful and patient
Troubert, she said to certain of her good friends whom she met at the
church door, and whose slave she had hitherto considered herself, that
those who wished to see her could certainly come once a week to her
house, where she had friends enough to make a card-table; she could not
leave the Abbe Birotteau; Mademoiselle Salomon had not missed a single
evening that week; she was devoted to friends; and--et cetera, et
cetera. Her speech was all the more humbly haughty and softly persuasive
because Mademoiselle Salomon de Villenoix belonged to the most
aristocratic society in Tours. For though Mademoiselle Salomon came to
Mademoiselle Gamard's house solely out of friendship for the vicar, the
old maid triumphed in receiving her, and saw that, thanks to Birotteau,
she was on the point of succeeding in her great desire to form a
circle as numerous and as agreeable as those of Madame de Listomere,
Mademoiselle Merlin de la Blottiere, and other devout ladies who were in
the habit of receiving the pious and ecclesiastical society of Tours.

But alas! the abbe Birotteau himself caused this cherished hope to
miscarry. Now if those persons who in the course of their lives have
attained to the enjoyment of a long desired happiness and have therefore
comprehended the joy of the vicar when he stepped into Chapeloud's
vacant place, they w