tted, having a little plate of dainties always at his left side, and
a bowl of fresh water at his right.

"Well, my pretty," said the vicar, "are you waiting for your coffee?"

The personage thus addressed, one of the most important in the
household, though the least troublesome inasmuch as he had ceased to
bark and left the talking to his mistress, turned his little eyes,
sunk in rolls of fat, upon Birotteau. Then he closed them peevishly.
To explain the misery of the poor vicar it should be said that being
endowed by nature with an empty and sonorous loquacity, like the
resounding of a football, he was in the habit of asserting, without any
medical reason to back him, that speech favored digestion. Mademoiselle
Gamard, who believed in this hygienic doctrine, had not as yet
refrained, in spite of their coolness, from talking at meals; though,
for the last few mornings, the vicar had been forced to strain his mind
to find beguiling topics on which to loosen her tongue. If the
narrow limits of this history permitted us to report even one of the
conversations which often brought a bitter and sarcastic smile to the
lips of the Abbe Troubert, it would offer a finished picture of the
Boeotian life of the provinces. The singular revelations of the Abbe
Birotteau and Mademoiselle Gamard relating to their personal opinions
on politics, religion, and literature would delight observing minds.
It would be highly entertaining to transcribe the reasons on which they
mutually doubted the death of Napoleon in 1820, or the conjectures by
which they mutually believed that the Dauphin was living,--rescued from
the Temple in the hollow of a huge log of wood. Who could have helped
laughing to hear them assert and prove, by reasons evidently their own,
that the King of France alone imposed the taxes, that the Chambers were
convoked to destroy the clergy, that thirteen hundred thousand persons
had perished on the scaffold during the Revolution? They frequently
discussed the press, without either of them having the faintest idea
of what that modern engine really was. Monsieur Birotteau listened with
acceptance to Mademoiselle Gamard when she told him that a man who ate
an egg every morning would die in a year, and that facts proved it; that
a roll of light bread eaten without drinking for several days together
would cure sciatica; that all the workmen who assisted in pulling down
the Abbey Saint-Martin had died in six months; that a certain p