Abbe Mouret's Transgression

The lad glanced towards the horizon. ‘He must be at his Olivettes field now,’ he answered, pointing towards the left. ‘But Voriau will show your reverence the way. He’s sure to know where his master is.’ And he clapped his hands and called: ‘Hie! Voriau! hie!’

The big black dog paused a moment, wagging his tail, and seeking to read the urchin’s eyes. Then, barking joyfully, he set off down the slope to the village. Abbe Mouret and Brother Archangias followed him, chatting. A hundred yards further Vincent surreptitiously bolted, and again glided up towards the church, keeping a watchful eye upon them, and ready to dart behind a bush if they should look round. With adder-like suppleness, he once more glided into the graveyard, that paradise full of lizards, nests, and flowers.

Meantime, while Voriau led the way before them along the dusty road, Brother Archangias was angrily saying to the priest: ‘Let be! Monsieur le Cure, they’re spawn of damnation, those toads are! They ought to have their backs broken, to make them pleasing to God. They grow up in irreligion, like their fathers. Fifteen years have I been here, and not one Christian have I been able to turn out. The minute they quit my hands, good-bye! They think of nothing but their land, their vines, their olive-trees. Not one ever sets foot in church. Brute beasts they are, struggling with their stony fields! Guide them with the stick, Monsieur le Cure, yes, the stick!’

Then, after drawing breath, he added with a terrific wave of his hands:

‘Those Artauds, look you, are like the brambles over-running these rocks. One stem has been enough to poison the whole district. They cling on, they multiply, they live in spite of everything. Nothing short of fire from heaven, as at Gomorrha, will clear it all away.’

‘We should never despair of sinners,’ said Abbe Mouret, all inward peacefulness, as he leisurely walked on.

‘But these are the devil’s own,’ broke in the Brother still more violently. ‘I’ve been a peasant, too. Up to eighteen I dug the earth; and later on, when I was at the Training College, I had to sweep, pare vegetables, do all the heavy work. It’s not their toilsome labour I find fault with. On the contrary, for God prefers the lowly. But the Artauds live like beasts! They are like their dogs, they never attend mass, and make a mock of the commandments of God and of the Church. They think of nothing but their plots of lands, so sweet they are on them!’

Voriau, his tail wagging, kept stopping and moving on again as soon as he saw that they still followed him.

‘There certainly are some grievous things going on,’ said Abbe Mouret. ‘My predecessor, Abbe Caffin – ’

‘A poor specimen,’ interrupted the Brother. ‘He came here to us from Normandy owing to some disreputable affair. Once here, his sole thought was good living; he let everything go to rack and ruin.’

‘Oh, no, Abbe Caffin certainly did what he could; but I must own that his efforts were all but barren in results. My own are mostly fruitless.’

Brother Archangias shrugged his shoulders. He walked on for a minute in silence, swaying his tall bony frame, which looked as if it had been roughly fashioned with a hatchet. The sun beat down upon his neck, shadowing his hard, sword-edged peasant’s face.

‘Listen to me, Monsieur le Cure,’ he said at last. ‘I am too much beneath you to lecture you; but still, I am almost double your age, I know this part, and therefore I feel justified in telling you that you will gain nothing by gentleness. The catechism, understand, is enough. God has no mercy on the wicked. He burns them. Stick to that.’

Then, as Abbe Mouret, whose head remained bowed, did not open his mouth, he went on: ‘Religion is leaving the country districts because it is made over indulgent. It was respected when it spoke out like an unforgiving mistress. I really don’t know what they can teach you now in the seminaries. The new priests weep like children with their parishioners. God no longer seems the same. I dare say, Monsieur le Cure, that you don’t even know your catechism by heart now?’

But the priest, wounded by the imperiousness with which the Brother so roughly sought to dominate him, looked up and dryly rejoined:

‘That will do, your zeal is very praiseworthy. But haven’t you something to tell me? You came to the parsonage this morning, did you not?’

Thereupon Brother Archangias plumply answered: ‘I had to tell you just what I have told you. The Artauds live like pigs. Only yesterday I learned that Rosalie, old Bambousse’s eldest daughter, is in the family way. It happens with all of them before they get married. And they simply laugh at reproaches, as you know.’

‘Yes,’ murmured Abbe Mouret, ‘it is a great scandal. I am just on my way to see old Bambousse to speak to him about it; it is desirable that they should be married as soon as possible. The child’s father, it seems, is Fortune, the Brichets’ eldest son. Unfortunately the Brichets are poor.’

‘That Rosalie, now,’ continued the Brother, ‘is just eighteen. Not four years since I still had her under me at school, and she was already a gadabout. I have now got her sister Catherine, a chit of eleven, who seems likely to become even worse than her elder. One comes across her in every corner with that little scamp, Vincent. It’s no good, you may pull their ears till they bleed, the woman always crops up in them. They carry perdition about with them and are only fit to be thrown on a muck-heap. What a splendid riddance if all girls were strangled at their birth!’

His loathing, his hatred of woman made him swear like a carter. Abbe Mouret, who had been listening to him with unmoved countenance, smiled at last at his rabid utterances. He called Voriau, who had strayed into a field close by.

‘There, look there!’ cried Brother Archangias, pointing to a group of children playing at the bottom of a ravine, ‘there are my young devils, who play the truant under pretence of going to help their parents among the vines! You may be certain that jade of a Catherine is among them… There, didn’t I tell you! Till to-night, Monsieur le Cure. Oh, just you wait, you rascals!’

Off he went at a run, his dirty neckband flying over his shoulder, and his big greasy cassock tearing up the thistles. Abbe Mouret watched him swoop down into the midst of the children, who scattered like frightened sparrows. But he succeeded in seizing Catherine and one boy by the ears and led them back towards the village, clutching them tightly with his big hairy fingers, and overwhelming them with abuse.

The priest walked on again. Brother Archangias sometimes aroused strange scruples in his mind. With his vulgarity and coarseness the Brother seemed to him the true man of God, free from earthly ties, submissive in all to Heaven’s will, humble, blunt, ready to shower abuse upon sin. He, the priest, would then feel despair at his inability to rid himself more completely of his body; he regretted that he was not ugly, unclean, covered with vermin like some of the saints. Whenever the Brother had wounded him by some words of excessive coarseness, or by some over-hasty churlishness, he would blame himself for his refinement, his innate shrinking, as if these were really faults. Ought he not to be dead to all the weaknesses of this world? And this time also he smiled sadly as he thought how near he had been to losing his temper at the Brother’s roughly put lesson. It was pride, it seemed to him, seeking to work his perdition by making him despise the lowly. However, in spite of himself, he felt relieved at being alone again, at being able to walk on gently, reading his breviary, free at last from the grating voice that had disturbed his dream of heavenly love.

VI

The road wound on between fallen rocks, among which the peasants had succeeded here and there in reclaiming six or seven yards of chalky soil, planted with old olive trees. Under the priest’s feet the dust in the deep ruts crackled lightly like snow. At times, as he felt a warmer puff upon his face, he would raise his eyes from his book, as if to seek whence came this soft caress; but his gaze was vacant, straying without perception over the glowing horizon, over the twisted outlines of that passion-breathing landscape as it stretched out in the sun before him, dry, barren, despairing of the fertilisation for which it longed. And he would lower his hat over his forehead to protect himself against the warm breeze and tranquilly resume his reading, his cassock raising behind him a cloudlet of dust which rolled along the surface of the road.

‘Good morning, Monsieur le Cure,’ a passing peasant said to him.

Sounds of digging alongside the cultivated strips of ground again roused him from his abstraction. He turned his head and perceived big knotty-limbed old men greeting him from among the vines. The Artauds were eagerly satisfying their passion for the soil, in the sun’s full blaze. Sweating brows appeared from behind the bushes, heaving chests were slowly raised, the whole scene was one of ardent fructification, through which he moved with the calm step born of ignorance. No discomfort came to him from the great travail of love that permeated that splendid morning.

‘Steady! Voriau, you mustn’t eat people!’ some one gaily shouted in a powerful voice by way of silencing the dog’s loud barks.

Abbe Mouret looked up.

‘Oh! it’s you. Fortune?’ he said, approaching the edge of the field in which the young peasant was at work. ‘I was just on my way to speak to you.’

Fortune was of the same age as the priest: a bigly built, bold-looking young fellow, with skin already hardened. He was clearing a small plot of stony heath.

‘What about, Monsieur le Cure?’ he asked.

‘About Rosalie and you,’ replied the priest.

Fortune began to laugh. Perhaps he thought it droll that a priest should interest himself in such a matter.

‘Well,’ he muttered, ‘I’m not to blame in it nor she either. So much the worse if old Bambousse refuses to let me have her. You saw yourself how his dog was trying to bite me just now; he sets him on me.’

Then, as Abbe Mouret was about to continue, old Artaud, called Brichet, whom he had not previously perceived, emerged from the shadow of a bush behind which he and his wife were eating. He was a little man, withered by age, with a cringing face.

‘Your reverence must have been told a pack of lies,’ he exclaimed. ‘The youngster is quite ready to marry Rosalie. What’s happened isn’t anybody’s fault. It has happened to others who got on all right just the same. The matter doesn’t rest with us. You ought to speak to Bambousse. He’s the one who looks down on us because he’s got money.’

‘Yes, we are very poor,’ whined his wife, a tall lachrymose woman, who also rose to her feet. ‘We’ve only this scrap of ground where the very devil seems to have been hailing stones. Not a bite of bread from it, even. Without you, your reverence, life would be impossible.’

Brichet’s wife was the one solitary devotee of the village. Whenever she had been to communion, she would hang about the parsonage, well knowing that La Teuse always kept a couple of loaves for her from her last baking. At times she was even able to carry off a rabbit or a fowl given her by Desiree.

‘There’s no end to the scandals,’ continued the priest. ‘The marriage must take place without delay.’

‘Oh! at once! as soon as the others are agreeable,’ said the old woman, alarmed about her periodical presents. ‘What do you say, Brichet? we are not such bad Christians as to go against his reverence?’

Fortune sniggered.

‘Oh, I’m quite ready,’ he said, ‘and so is Rosalie. I saw her yesterday at the back of the mill. We haven’t quarrelled. We stopped there to have a bit of a laugh.’

But Abbe Mouret interrupted him: ‘Very well, I am now going to speak to Bambousse. He is over there, at Les Olivettes, I believe.’

The priest was going off when the mother asked him what had become of her younger son Vincent, who had left in the early morning to serve mass. There was a lad now who badly needed his reverence’s admonitions. And she walked by the priest’s side for another hundred yards, bemoaning her poverty, the failure of the potato crop, the frost which had nipped the olive trees, the hot weather which threatened to scorch up the scanty corn. Then, as she left him, she solemnly declared that her son Fortune always said his prayers, both morning and evening.

Voriau now ran on in front, and suddenly, at a turn in the road, he bolted across the fields. The priest then struck into a small path leading up a low hill. He was now at Les Olivettes, the most fertile spot in the neighbourhood, where the mayor of the commune, Artaud, otherwise Bambousse, owned several fields of corn, olive plantations, and vines. The dog was now romping round the skirts of a tall brunette, who burst into a loud laugh as she caught sight of the priest.

‘Is your father here, Rosalie?’ the latter asked.

‘Yes, just across there,’ she said, pointing with her hand and still smiling.

Leaving the part of the field she had been weeding, she walked on before him with the vigorous springiness of a hard-working woman, her head unshielded from the sun, her neck all sunburnt, her hair black and coarse like a horse’s mane. Her green-stained hands exhaled the odour of the weeds she had been pulling up.

‘Father,’ she called out, ‘here’s Monsieur le Cure asking for you.’