This room and the salon were on the
ground-floor beneath the salon and bedroom of the Abbe Birotteau.
When the vicar had received his cup of coffee, duly sugared, from
Mademoiselle Gamard, he felt chilled to the bone at the grim silence
in which he was forced to proceed with the usually gay function of
breakfast. He dared not look at Troubert's dried-up features, nor at
the threatening visage of the old maid; and he therefore turned, to
keep himself in countenance, to the plethoric pug which was lying on a
cushion near the stove,--a position that victim of obesity seldom
quitted, 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.
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