The day may come when numismatists,
discovering amid the ashes of Paris existences perpetuated by
you, will wonder at the number of heads crowned in your
atelier and endeavour to find in them new dynasties.
To you, this divine privilege; to me, gratitude.
De Balzac.
THE VICAR OF TOURS
I
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.
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