THE SERMON OF THE MERRY VICAR OF MEUDON by Honoré de Balzac

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This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook. In this compact, pointed tale, Honoré de Balzac turns his novelist’s eye toward a single pulpit in the Parisian suburbs and extracts from it a little world of manners, hypocrisy, and human warmth. The Merry Vicar of Meudon is less a doctrinal homily than a study of performance: a popular priest whose sermons draw the curious and the credulous, the sincere and the scheming, and whose tongue—half wit, half consolation—both reveals and conceals the town’s true rhythms. Balzac stages the parish as a microcosm, where parishioners’ private vanities, secret regrets, and civic ambitions meet the ritualized language of faith; the vicar’s merry, earthy eloquence becomes a mirror in which Meudon sees itself.

Balzac’s prose in this story is at once brisk and indulgent: he admires the small combustions of social life while dissecting their motives with forensic irony. The narrative delights in contrasts—sermon and satire, piety and performance, charity and calculation—and the writer’s compassion keeps him from reducing his characters to mere caricatures. The vicar is not simply a comic figure; he is a study in adaptation, a man who negotiates the demands of conscience, community, and survival. Through him Balzac explores how public words can heal, flatter, manipulate, and disguise, and how a congregation’s need for reassurance can be both benign and self-serving.

As a short piece, The Merry Vicar of Meudon rewards close reading: it showcases Balzac’s talent for turning a narrow scene into a panoramic moral observation, and it bristles with the author’s characteristic mixture of social realism and sly moralizing. Readers who relish sharp character sketches and social satire will find it rich, though those expecting sweeping plots may long for more development. Ultimately the story’s charm lies in its humane skepticism—Balzac neither idealizes faith nor condemns the consolations it supplies; instead he watches, with a novelist’s curiosity, as a small community makes itself by the words it chooses to hear.