Très bien ! La comédie humaine ! ( )

Be careful what you wish for!, February 3, 2015

This 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. ( )