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The minister of ecclesiastical affairs told me just now that Troubert was certain to be made bishop before long; if he takes a dislike to our family he could hinder me from being included in the next batch of peers. Don't you understand?"
Gratified, no doubt, to receive in Chapeloud's library, at the corner of the fireplace above which hung the two contested pictures, the woman who had hitherto ignored him, Troubert kept the baroness waiting a moment before he consented to admit her.
"I hope you are not going to litter up my dining-room with your old books!" "They are books I wanted," replied the Abbe Troubert. "Monsieur Birotteau has been kind enough to lend them to me." "I might have guessed it," she said, with a contemptuous smile. "Monsieur Birotteau doesn't often read books of that size." "How are you, mademoiselle?" said the vicar, in a mellifluous voice.
He told her that he had come to see the Abbe Troubert, and turned towards the ground-floor apartment where the canon lived; but Marianne called to him: "Not there, monsieur le vicaire; the Abbe Troubert is in your old apartment." These words gave the vicar a frightful shock.
'The Abbe Chapeloud was so true a friend to me, she said, 'that I cannot consent to part with his picture. As for me," added Troubert, "if it were mine I would not yield it. My feelings to my late friend were so faithful that I should feel my right to his portrait was above that of others." "Well, there's no need to quarrel over a bad picture."
To compass this result, he allowed no points of contact between himself and her except those that politeness demanded, and those which necessarily exist between two persons living under the same roof. Thus, though he and the Abbe Troubert took their regular three meals a day, he avoided the family breakfast by inducing Mademoiselle Gamard to send his coffee to his own room.
After mature deliberation all present promised their assistance to the Abbe Birotteau in the struggle which was now inevitable between the poor priest and his antagonists and all their adherents. A true presentiment, an infallible provincial instinct, led them to couple the names of Gamard and Troubert.
On that I said to him, 'Nonsense; let us come to the point. The end was that his Excellency told me frankly you were in bad odor with the diocese. In short, I made a few inquiries among my colleagues, and I find that you have been talking slightingly of a certan Abbe Troubert, the vicar-general, but a very important personage in the province, where he represents the Jesuits.
The lawyer, whose practice was exclusively among the most devout church people, amazed Madame de Listomere by advising her not to embark on such a suit; he ended the consultation by saying that "he himself would not be able to undertake it, for, according to the terms of the deed, Mademoiselle Gamard had the law on her side, and in equity, that is to say outside of strict legal justice, the Abbe Birotteau would undoubtedly seem to the judges as well as to all respectable laymen to have derogated from the peaceable, conciliatory, and mild character hitherto attributed to him; that Mademoiselle Gamard, known to be a kindly woman and easy to live with, had put Birotteau under obligations to her by lending him the money he needed to pay the legacy duties on Chapeloud's bequest without taking from him a receipt; that Birotteau was not of an age or character to sign a deed without knowing what it contained or understanding the importance of it; that in leaving Mademoiselle Gamard's house at the end of two years, when his friend Chapeloud had lived there twelve and Troubert fifteen, he must have had some purpose known to himself only; and that the lawsuit, if undertaken, would strike the public as an act of ingratitude;" and so forth.
Furious at being foiled by a woman to whom he had lately given his countenance while she had been secretly holding the hand of a man whom he regarded as his enemy, Troubert again threatened the baron's future career, and put in jeopardy the peerage of his uncle.
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