but himself, and his muscles and the appetites of his body.  He wanted to live.  He felt the necessity of being a man.  Oh! to speed along through the open air, to be lusty and strong, to owe obedience to no jealous master, to fell one’s enemies with stones, to carry off the fair maidens that passed upon one’s shoulders.  He would break out from that living tomb where cruel hands had thrust him.  He would awaken his manhood, which had only been slumbering.  And might he die of shame if he should find that it were really dead!  And might the Divinity be accursed if, by the touch of His finger, He had made him different from the rest of mankind.

The priest stood erect, his mind all dazed and scared.  He fancied that, at this fresh outburst of blasphemy, the church was falling down upon him.  The sunlight, which had poured over the high altar, had gradually spread and mounted the walls like ruddy fire.  Flames soared and licked the rafters, then died away in a sanguineous, ember-like glow.  And all at once the church became quite black.  It was as though the fires of the setting sun had burst the roof asunder, pierced the walls, thrown open wide breaches on every side to some exterior foe.  The gloomy framework seemed to shake beneath some violent assault.  Night was coming on quickly.

Then, in the far distance, the priest heard a gentle murmur rising from the valley of Les Artaud.  The time had been when he had not understood the impassioned language of those burning lands, where writhed but knotted vine-stocks, withered almond-trees, and decrepit olives sprawling with crippled limbs.  Protected by his ignorance, he had passed undisturbed through all that world of passion.  But, to-day, his ear detected the slightest sigh of the leaves that lay panting in the heat.  Afar off, on the edge of the horizon, the hills, still hot with the sinking luminary’s farewell, seemed to set themselves in motion with the tramp of an army on the march.  Nearer at hand, the scattered rocks, the stones along the road, all the pebbles in the valley, throbbed and rolled as if possessed by a craving for motion.  Then the tracts of ruddy soil, the few fields that had been reduced to cultivation, seemed to heave and growl like rivers that had burst their banks, bearing along in a blood-like flood the engenderings of seeds, the births of roots, the embraces of plants.  Soon everything was in motion.  The vine-branches appeared to crawl along like huge insects; the parched corn and the dry grass formed into dense, lance-waving battalions; the trees stretched out their boughs like wrestlers making ready for a contest; the fallen leaves skipped forward; the very dust on the road rolled on.  It was a moving multitude reinforced by fresh recruits at every step; a legion, the sound of whose coming went on in front of it; an outburst of passionate life, sweeping everything along in a mighty whirlwind of fruitfulness.  And all at once the assault began.  From the limits of the horizon, the whole countryside, the hills and stones and fields and trees, rushed upon the church.  At the first shock, the building quivered and cracked.  The walls were pierced and the tiles on the roof were thrown down.  But the great Christ, although shaken, did not fall.