文档介绍：THE VICAR OF TOURS
THE VICAR OF TOURS
HONORE DE BALZAC
Translated By Katharine Prescott Wormeley
1
THE VICAR OF TOURS
DEDICATION
To David, Sculptor:
The permanence of the work on which I inscribe your name-- twice
made illustrious in this century--is very problematical; whereas you have
graven mine in bronze which survives nations --if only in their coins. The
day e when numismatists, discovering amid the ashes of Paris
existences perpetuated by you, will wonder at the number of heads
crowned in your atelier and endeavour to find in them new dynasties.
To you, this divine privilege; to me, gratitude.
De Balzac.
2
THE VICAR OF TOURS
THE VICAR OF TOURS
I
Early in the autumn of 1826 the Abbe Birotteau, the principal
personage of this history, was overtaken by a shower of rain as he returned
home from a friend's house, where he had been passing the evening. He
therefore crossed, as quickly as his corpulence would allow, the deserted
little square called "The Cloister," which lies directly behind the chancel
of the cathedral of Saint-Gatien at Tours.
The Abbe Birotteau, a short little man, apoplectic in constitution and
about sixty years old, had already gone through several attacks of gout.
Now, among the petty miseries of human life the one for which the worthy
priest felt the deepest aversion was the sudden sprinkling of his shoes,
adorned with silver buckles, and the wetting of their soles.
Notwithstanding the woollen socks in which at all seasons he enveloped
his feet with the extreme care that ecclesiastics take of themselves, he was
apt at such times to get them a little damp, and the next day gout was sure
to give him certain infallible proofs of constancy. Nevertheless, as the
pavement of the Cloister was likely to be dry, and as the abbe had won
three francs ten sous in his rubber with Madame de Listomere, he bore the
rain resignedly from the middle of the place de l'Archeveche, where it
began e down in earnest