The countryside stretched away for a distance of six miles, bounded by a wall of tawny hills speckled with black pine-woods.  It was a fearful landscape of arid wastes and rocky spurs rending the soil.  The few patches of arable ground were like scattered pools of blood, red fields with rows of lean almond trees, grey-topped olive trees and long lines of vines, streaking the soil with their brown stems.  It was as if some huge conflagration had swept by there, scattering the ashes of forests over the hill-tops, consuming all the grass of the meadow lands, and leaving its glare and furnace-like heat behind in the hollows.  Only here and there was the softer note of a pale green patch of growing corn.  The landscape generally was wild, lacking even a threadlet of water, dying of thirst, and flying away in clouds of dust at the least breath of wind.  But at the farthest point where the crumbling hills on the horizon had left a breach one espied some distant fresh moist greenery, a stretch of the neighbouring valley fertilised by the Viorne, a river flowing down from the gorges of the Seille.

The priest lowered his dazzled glance upon the village, whose few scattered houses straggled away below the church—­wretched hovels they were of rubble and boards strewn along a narrow path without sign of streets.  There were about thirty of them altogether, some squatting amidst muck-heaps, and black with woeful want; others roomier and more cheerful-looking with their roofs of pinkish tiles.  Strips of garden, victoriously planted amidst stony soil, displayed plots of vegetables enclosed by quickset hedges.  At this hour Les Artaud was empty, not a woman was at the windows, not a child was wallowing in the dust; parties of fowls alone went to and fro, ferreting among the straw, seeking food up to the very thresholds of the houses, whose open doors gaped in the sunlight.  A big black dog seated on his haunches at the entrance to the village seemed to be mounting guard over it.

Languor slowly stole over Abbe Mouret.  The rising sun steeped him in such warmth that he leant back against the church door pervaded by a feeling of happy restfulness.  His thoughts were dwelling on that hamlet of Les Artaud, which had sprung up there among the stones like one of the knotty growths of the valley.  All its inhabitants were related, all bore the same name, so that from their very cradle they were distinguished among themselves by nicknames.  An Artaud, their ancestor, had come hither and settled like a pariah in this waste.  His family had grown with all the wild vitality of the herbage that sucked life from the rocky boulders.  It had at last become a tribe, a rural community, in which cousin-ships were lost in the mists of centuries.  They intermarried with shameless promiscuity.  Not an instance could be cited of any Artaud taking himself a wife from any neighbouring village; only some of the girls occasionally went elsewhere.  The others were born and died