have, more or less, to gossip. It is so natural, socially speaking, to
laugh at the failings of others that we ought to forgive the ridicule
our own absurdities excite, and be annoyed only by calumny. But in
this instance the eyes of the good vicar never reached the optical
range which enables men of the world to see and evade their
neighbours' rough points. Before he could be brought to perceive the
faults of his landlady he was forced to undergo the warning which
Nature gives to all her creatures--pain.

Old maids who have never yielded in their habits of life or in their
characters to other lives and other characters, as the fate of woman
exacts, have, as a general thing, a mania for making others give way
to them. In Mademoiselle Gamard this sentiment had degenerated into
despotism, but a despotism that could only exercise itself on little
things. For instance (among a hundred other examples), the basket of
counters placed on the card-table for the Abbe Birotteau was to stand
exactly where she placed it; and the abbe annoyed her terribly by
moving it, which he did nearly every evening. How is this
sensitiveness stupidly spent on nothings to be accounted for? what is
the object of it? No one could have told in this case; Mademoiselle
Gamard herself knew no reason for it. The vicar, though a sheep by
nature, did not like, any more than other sheep, to feel the crook too
often, especially when it bristled with spikes. Not seeking to explain
to himself the patience of the Abbe Troubert, Birotteau simply
withdrew from the happiness which Mademoiselle Gamard believed that
she seasoned to his liking,--for she regarded happiness as a thing to
be made, like her preserves. But the luckless abbe made the break in a
clumsy way, the natural way of his own naive character, and it was not
carried out without much nagging and sharp-shooting, which the Abbe
Birotteau endeavored to bear as if he did not feel them.