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.