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Beatrix by Honoré de Balzac
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"Are you anxious or ill, Madame la baronne?" he asked.

"Thank you, no," she replied.

Monsieur Grimont, a man of fifty, of middle height, lost in his
cassock, from which issued two stout shoes with silver buckles,
exhibited above his hands a plump visage, and a generally white skin
though yellow in spots. His hands were dimpled. His abbatial face had
something of the Dutch burgomaster in the placidity of its complexion
and its flesh tones, and of the Breton peasant in the straight black
hair and the vivacity of the brown eyes, which preserved,
nevertheless, a priestly decorum. His gaiety, that of a man whose
conscience was calm and pure, admitted a joke. His manner had nothing
uneasy or dogged about it, like that of many poor rectors whose
existence or whose power is contested by their parishioners, and who
instead of being, as Napoleon sublimely said, the moral leaders of the
population and the natural justices of peace, are treated as enemies.
Observing Monsieur Grimont as he marched through Guerande, the most
irreligious of travellers would have recognized the sovereign of that
Catholic town; but this same sovereign lowered his spiritual
superiority before the feudal supremacy of the du Guenics. In their
salon he was as a chaplain in his seigneur's house. In church, when he
gave the benediction, his hand was always first stretched out toward
the chapel belonging to the Guenics, where their mailed hand and their
device were carved upon the key-stone of the arch.

"I thought that Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoel had already arrived," said
the rector, sitting down, and taking the hand of the baroness to kiss
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