sort of prologue to
this bourgeois drama, in which we shall find passions as violent as
those excited by great interests, required this long introduction; and
it would have been difficult for any faithful historian to shorten the
account of these minute developments.

II

The next morning, on awaking, Birotteau thought so much of his
prospective canonry that he forgot the four circumstances in which he
had seen, the night before, such threatening prognostics of a future
full of misery. The vicar was not a man to get up without a fire. He
rang to let Marianne know that he was awake and that she must come to
him; then he remained, as his habit was, absorbed in somnolent musings.
The servant's custom was to make the fire and gently draw him from his
half sleep by the murmured sound of her movements,--a sort of music
which he loved. Twenty minutes passed and Marianne had not appeared.
The vicar, now half a canon, was about to ring again, when he let go the
bell-pull, hearing a man's step on the staircase. In a minute more the
Abbe Troubert, after discreetly knocking at the door, obeyed Birotteau's
invitation and entered the room. This visit, which the two abbe's
usually paid each other once a month, was no surprise to the vicar. The
canon at once exclaimed when he saw that Marianne had not made the fire
of his quasi-colleague. He opened the window and called to her harshly,
telling her to come at once to the abbe; then, turning round to his
ecclesiastical brother, he said, "If Mademoiselle knew that you had no
fire she would scold Marianne."

After this speech he inquired about Birotteau's health, and asked in a
gentle voice if he had had any recent news that gave him hopes of his
canonry. The vicar explained the steps he had taken, and told, naively,
the names of the persons with whom Madam de Listomere was using her
influence, quite unaware that Troubert had never forgiven that lady for
not admitting him--the Abbe Troubert, twice proposed by the bishop as
vicar-general!--to her house.

It would be impossible to find two figures which presented so many
contrasts to each other as those of the two abbes. Troubert, tall
and lean, was yellow and bilious, while the vicar was what we call,
familiarly, plump. Birotteau's face, round and ruddy, proclaimed a
kindly nature barren of ideas, while that of the Abbe Troubert, long and
ploughed by many wrinkles, took on at times an expression of sarcasm, or
else of contempt;