His brow perspiring, he proceeded to open the other window, as if to seek cooler air.  Below him, to his left, lay the graveyard with the Solitaire erect like a bar, unstirred by the faintest breeze.  From the empty field arose an odour like that of a newly mown meadow.  The grey wall of the church, that wall full of lizards and planted with wall-flowers, gleamed coldly in the moonlight, and the panes of one of the windows glistened like plates of steel.  The sleeping church could now have no other life within it than the extra-human life of the Divinity embodied in the Host enclosed in the tabernacle.  He thought of the bracket lamp’s yellow glow peeping out of the gloom, and was tempted to go down once more to try to ease his ailing head amid those deep shadows.  But a strange feeling of terror held him back; he suddenly fancied, while his eyes were fixed upon the moonlit panes, that he saw the church illumined by a furnace-like glare, the blaze of a festival of hell, in which whirled the Month of May, the plants, the animals, and the girls of Les Artaud, who wildly encircled trees with their bare arms.  Then, as he leaned over, he saw beneath him Desiree’s poultry-yard, black and steaming.  He could not clearly distinguish the rabbit-hutches, the fowls’ roosting-places, or the ducks’ house.  The place was all one big mass heaped up in stench, still exhaling in its sleep a pestiferous odour.  From under the stable-door came the acrid smell of the nanny-goat; while the little pig, stretched upon his back, snorted near an empty porringer.  And suddenly with his brazen throat Alexander, the big yellow cock, raised a crow, which awoke in the distance impassioned calls from all the cocks of the village.

Then all at once Abbe Mouret remembered:  The fever had struck him in Desiree’s farmyard, while he was looking at the hens still warm from laying, the rabbit-does plucking the down from under them.  And now the feeling that some one was breathing on his neck became so distinct that he turned at last to see who was behind him.  And then he recalled Albine bounding out of the Paradou, and the door slamming upon the vision of an enchanted garden; he recalled the girl racing alongside the interminable wall, following the gig at a run, and throwing birch leaves to the breeze as kisses; he recalled her, again, in the twilight, laughing at the oaths of Brother Archangias, her skirts skimming over the path like a cloudlet of dust bowled along by the evening breeze.  She was sixteen; how strange she looked, with her rather elongated face! she savoured of the open air, of the grass, of mother earth.  And so accurate was his recollection of her that he could once more see a scratch upon one of her supple wrists, a rosy scar on her white skin.  Why did she laugh like that when she looked at him with her blue eyes?  He was engulfed in her laugh as in a sonorous wave which resounded and pressed close to him on every side; he inhaled it, he felt it vibrate within him.  Yes, all his evil came from that laugh of hers which he had quaffed.