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.’