To-morrow you can
go and see the Abbe Troubert and ask him to push your claims to the
canonry, and you'll see how cordially he will receive you."
Feeble folk are as easily reassured as they are frightened. So the
poor abbe, dazzled at the prospect of living with Madame de Listomere,
forgot the destruction, now completed, of the happiness he had so long
desired, and so delightfully enjoyed. But at night before going to
sleep, the distress of a man to whom the fuss of moving and the
breaking up of all his habits was like the end of the world, came upon
him, and he racked his brains to imagine how he could ever find such a
good place for his book-case as the gallery in the old maid's house.
Fancying he saw his books scattered about, his furniture defaced, his
regular life turned topsy-turvy, he asked himself for the thousandth
time why the first year spent in Mademoiselle Gamard's house had been
so sweet, the second so cruel. His troubles were a pit in which his
reason floundered. The canonry seemed to him small compensation for so
much misery, and he compared his life to a stocking in which a single
dropped stitch resulted in destroying the whole fabric. Mademoiselle
Salomon remained to him. But, alas, in losing his old illusions the
poor priest dared not trust in any later friendship.
In the "citta dolente" of spinsterhood we often meet, especially in
France, with women whose lives are a sacrifice nobly and daily offered
to noble sentiments.
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