ill also have gained some faint idea of Mademoiselle
Gamard's distress at the overthrow of her favorite plan.

After accepting his happiness in the old maid's salon for six months
with tolerable patience, Birotteau deserted the house of an evening,
carrying with him Mademoiselle Salomon. In spite of her utmost efforts
the ambitious Gamard had recruited barely six visitors, whose faithful
attendance was more than problematical; and boston could not be played
night after night unless at least four persons were present. The
defection of her two principal guests obliged her therefore to make
suitable apologies and return to her evening visiting among former
friends; for old maids find their own company so distasteful that they
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 forc