Though the great things of life are simple to understand and easy to
express, the littlenesses require a vast number of details to explain
them. The foregoing events, which may be called a sort of prologue to
this bourgeois drama, in which we shall find passions as violent as
those excited by great interests, required this long introduction; and
it would have been difficult for any faithful historian to shorten the
account of these minute developments.


II

The next morning, on awaking, Birotteau thought so much of his
prospective canonry that he forgot the four circumstances in which he
had seen, the night before, such threatening prognostics of a future
full of misery. The vicar was not a man to get up without a fire. He
rang to let Marianne know that he was awake and that she must come to
him; then he remained, as his habit was, absorbed in somnolent
musings. The servant's custom was to make the fire and gently draw him
from his half sleep by the murmured sound of her movements,--a sort of
music which he loved. Twenty minutes passed and Marianne had not
appeared. The vicar, now half a canon, was about to ring again, when
he let go the bell-pull, hearing a man's step on the staircase. In a
minute more the Abbe Troubert, after discreetly knocking at the door,
obeyed Birotteau's invitation and entered the room. This visit, which
the two abbe's usually paid each other once a month, was no surprise
to the vicar. The canon at once exclaimed when he saw that Marianne
had not made the fire of his quasi-colleague. He opened the window and
called to her harshly, telling her to come at once to the abbe; then,
turning round to his ecclesiastical brother, he said, "If Mademoiselle
knew that you had no fire she would scold Marianne."