Mademoiselle Gamard intended that I should stand out in the rain, and,
by carrying my candlestick upstairs, she meant to make me understand
it. What does it all mean?" he said aloud, roused by the gravity of
these circumstances, and rising as he spoke to take off his damp
clothes, get into his dressing-gown, and do up his head for the night.
Then he returned from the bed to the fireplace, gesticulating, and
launching forth in various tones the following sentences, all of which
ended in a high falsetto key, like notes of interjection:

"What the deuce have I done to her? Why is she angry with me? Marianne
did _not_ forget my fire! Mademoiselle told her not to light it! I must
be a child if I can't see, from the tone and manner she has been
taking to me, that I've done something to displease her. Nothing like
it ever happened to Chapeloud! I can't live in the midst of such
torments as--At my age--"

He went to bed hoping that the morrow might enlighten him on the
causes of the dislike which threatened to destroy forever the
happiness he had now enjoyed two years after wishing for it so long.
Alas! the secret reasons for the inimical feelings Mademoiselle Gamard
bore to the luckless abbe were fated to remain eternally unknown to
him,--not that they were difficult to fathom, but simply because he
lacked the good faith and candor by which great souls and scoundrels
look within and judge themselves. A man of genius or a trickster says
to himself, "I did wrong." Self-interest and native talent are the
only infallible and lucid guides. Now the Abbe Birotteau, whose
goodness amounted to stupidity, whose knowledge was only, as it were,
plastered on him by dint of study, who had no experience whatever of
the world and its ways, who lived between the mass and the
confessional, chiefly occupied in dealing the most trivial matters of