Be careful what you wish for!, February 3, 2015This review is from: The Vicar of Tours (Kindle Edition)The wonderfully told story of chubby, innocent Abbe Birotteau, the eponymous vicar. He yearns for promotion to canon, but also to live in the luxurious boarding house, run for clergymen by embittered old spinster Mlle Gamard. Hearing of the delightful conditions enjoyed there by his colleague, "it often made him suffer terribly when he reflected that the death of his best friend could alone satisfy his secret covetousness.....His envy of Chapeloud's apartment became a monomania."But Birotteau does get his wish and succeeds to lodgings with said spinster, with all her "angles, asperities and crabbedness" - and with one other clergyman in the next apartment, the conniving Troubert . But his life is not to be the joy he imagined...I love Balzac's writing: his succinct descriptions of the characters. Troubert, whose "priestly speeches are big with vengeance and soft with honied mildness" and poor, weak Birotteau "one of those to whom heaven is hereafter to belong in virtue of the decree 'Blessed are the poor in spirit' " .Most enjoyable read.
The title character, Abbe Birotteau, is now sixty years of age. Not a man of means he has been living for the past two years in rooms in the home of Mademoiselle Gamard. The rooms had previously been tenanted by Abbe Chapeloud and the books and furnishings had been greatly coveted by Abbe Birotteau who didn't wish for much more than a good room, a good table, clean clothes and "shoes with silver buckles." Birotteau and Chapeloud were both sons of peasants. Chapeloud was enabled to purchase his fine furnishings because of a legacy of two thousand francs and he left them to his friend in his will. Who else has designs on the fine items? Perhaps the landlady? Or maybe the Abbe Troubert? To what lengths will they go to obtain them?
What do You think about The Vicar Of Tours (2004)?
The level of control, pace, psychological penetration, actuality of the characters and situations, between this novella and all of Balzac's previous writings is enough to make me think this is his first mature masterpiece. Predecessors are Gobseck and Colonel Chabert, in terms of legal/economical intrigue as sociological mirror.Troubert is up there with the other great Balzacian 'universal spiders' Vautrin, Gobseck and Chatelet; and it's a testament to his greatness at characterization that each personality is incredibly different from the next despite the similar roles they play in their respective milieux.
—Jeremy
