‘As for you, you’re a parson,’ he muttered; ’you did well; a parson’s a very happy man.  The calling absorbs you, eh?  And so you’ve taken to the good path.  Well! you would never have been satisfied otherwise.  Your relatives, starting like you, have done a deal of evil, and still they are unsatisfied.  It’s all logically perfect, my lad.  A priest completes the family.  Besides, it was inevitable.  Our blood was bound to run to that.  So much the better for you; you have had the most luck.’  Correcting himself, however, with a strange smile, he added:  ’No, it’s your sister Desiree who has had the best luck of all.’

He whistled, whipped up his horse, and changed the conversation.  The gig, after climbing a somewhat steep slope, was threading its way through desolate ravines; at last it reached a tableland, where the hollow road skirted an interminable and lofty wall.  Les Artaud had disappeared; they found themselves in the heart of a desert.

‘We are getting near, are we not?’ asked the priest.

‘This is the Paradou,’ replied the doctor, pointing to the wall.  ’Haven’t you been this way before, then?  We are not three miles from Les Artaud.  A splendid property it must have been, this Paradou.  The park wall this side alone is quite a mile and a half long.  But for over a hundred years it’s all been running wild.’

‘There are some fine trees,’ observed the Abbe, as he looked up in astonishment at the luxuriant mass of foliage which jutted over.

’Yes, that part is very fertile.  In fact, the park is a regular forest amidst the bare rocks which surround it.  The Mascle, too, rises there; I have heard four or five springs mentioned, I fancy.’

In short sentences, interspersed with irrelevant digressions, he then related the story of the Paradou, according to the current legend of the countryside.  In the time of Louis XV., a great lord had erected a magnificent palace there, with vast gardens, fountains, trickling streams, and statues—­a miniature Versailles hidden away among the stones, under the full blaze of the southern sun.  But he had there spent but one season with a lady of bewitching beauty, who doubtless died there, as none had ever seen her leave.  Next year the mansion was destroyed by fire, the park doors were nailed up, the very loopholes of the walls were filled with mould; and thus, since that remote time, not a glance had penetrated that vast enclosure which covered the whole of one of the plateaux of the Garrigue hills.

‘There can be no lack of nettles there,’ laughingly said Abbe Mouret.  ‘Don’t you find that the whole wall reeks of damp, uncle?’

A pause followed, and he asked: 

‘And whom does the Paradou belong to now?’

‘Why, nobody knows,’ the doctor answered.  ’The owner did come here once, some twenty years ago.  But he was so scared by the sight of this adders’ nest that he has never turned up since.  The real master is the caretaker, that old oddity, Jeanbernat, who has managed to find quarters in a lodge where the stones still hang together.  There it is, see—­that grey building yonder, with its windows all smothered in ivy.’