Birotteau is an other-worldly, gentle, introspective type; Troubert, who is ten years younger than his fellow boarder, is very much of the world: he is a careerist devoured by ambition.

Birotteau prides himself on his furniture and fine library, inherited from his friend and predecessor as parish priest of Saint-Gatien de Tours.

Without reading all its clauses, or at least without remembering them, he signs a document handed to him by Mlle Gamard, forfeiting his entitlement to his lodgings and making over their contents to her in the event of his vacating his premises for any considerable period.

On returning home he finds Troubert installed in his apartments, in full possession of his furniture and his library, whilst he himself has been moved into inferior rooms.

Birotteau abandons any prospect of a lawsuit to regain his property, as his friends in the provincial aristocracy of Tours gradually withdraw their backing.

(1) The English title The Celibates is more appropriate than The Bachelors in that there are three people in Le Curé de Tours – Birotteau, Troubert and Mlle Gamard – to whom that description applies.

(2) The theme of celibacy was important to Balzac, who gave the name Les Célibataires (the original title of Le Curé de Tours) to a sub-section of La Comédie humaine.

(4) In the novella Le Curé de Tours the dual themes of celibacy and chastity are interwoven with the processes of the law.

In the full-length novels Eugénie Grandet, Ursule Mirouët and Le Cousin Pons these themes of celibacy and chastity are interwoven with the making of wills.

In the reign of Charles X this politico-religious body is said by Balzac to have wielded a Juggernaut-like destructive influence, holding sway over “the Archbishop, the General, the Prefect, and great and small alike”.

(2) As in Pierrette, the personal drama of the three celibates in Le Curé de Tours is increasingly interwoven with the politics of their small city.

This presentation of setting is important as Balzac's purpose in La Comédie humaine was to describe “men, women and things”[4] and to show the interplay of competing forms of self-interest[5] in his account of the social and political history of contemporary France.

Written in the earlier days of La Comédie humaine, Le Curé de Tours foreshadows, and helps to shape, the great novels that tower at the very end.