Library / Literature & Fiction
The Vicar of Tours
- Pages
- about 91
- Category
- Literature & Fiction
- Language
- English
- Reading time
- 1.7 h at 250 wpm
From the opening
Early in the autumn of 1826 the Abbe Birotteau, the principal personage
of this history, was overtaken by a shower of rain as he returned
home from a friend’s house, where he had been passing the evening.
He therefore crossed, as quickly as his corpulence would allow, the
deserted little square called “The Cloister,” which lies directly behind
the chancel of the cathedral of Saint-Gatien at Tours.
The Abbe Birotteau, a short little man, apoplectic in constitution and
about sixty years old, had already gone through several attacks of gout.
Now, among the petty miseries of human life the one for which the worthy
priest felt the deepest aversion was the sudden sprinkling of his
shoes, adorned with silver buckles, and the wetting of their soles.
Notwithstanding the woollen socks in which at all seasons he enveloped
his feet with the extreme care that ecclesiastics take of themselves, he
was apt at such times to get them a little damp, and the next day
gout was sure to give him certain infallible proofs of constancy.
Nevertheless, as the pavement of the Cloister was likely to be dry, and
as the abbe had won three francs ten sous in his rubber with Madame de
Listomere, he bore the rain resignedly from the middle of the place de
l’Archeveche, where it began to come down in earnest. Besides, he was
fondling his chimera,--a desire already twelve years old, the desire of
a priest, a desire formed anew every evening and now, apparently, very
near accomplishment; in short, he had wrapped himself so completely
in the fur cape of a canon that he did not feel the inclemency of
the weather. During the evening several of the company who habitually
gathered at Madame de Listomere’s had almost guaranteed to him his
nomination to the office of canon (then vacant in the metropolitan
Chapter of Saint-Gatien), assuring him that no one deserved such
promotion as he, whose rights, long overlooked, were indisputable.
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