I
When the shore-loafers of the small Provençal port of Garandou on the Bay of Pisca, between Marseilles and Toulon, caught sight of Abbé Vilbois’ boat coming back from fishing, they went down to the beach to help him draw it in.
The Abbé was alone in the boat, rowing like a seaman, with unusual energy, in spite of his fifty-eight years. His sleeves were turned up over his muscular arms, his cassock drawn up, gathered tightly between his knees and unbuttoned at the top, his shovel hat on the seat beside him and a pith helmet covered with white linen on his head, he looked like one of those solidly built, fantastic priests from the tropics, more suited for adventure than for saying Mass.
Occasionally he looked behind to make sure of his landing, then pulled again with great energy, rhythmically and steadily, just to show the poor Southern sailors how men from the North could row. The boat shot forward, touching the sand, over which it glided as if it were going to climb up the beach on its keel, then stopped dead, and the five men who were watching drew near; they were good-natured, cheerful, and on good terms with their priest.
“Well,” said one of them with a strong Provençal accent, “had a good catch, your Reverence?”
Abbé Vilbois shipped his oars, took off his helmet, put on his shovel hat, dropped his sleeves over his arms, buttoned up his cassock and, resuming his priestly attitude—the bearing of the officiating priest of the village—he replied proudly:
“Yes, indeed, very good, three catfish, two eels, and a few rockfish.”
Going up to the boat and leaning over the gunwale, the five fishermen examined the dead fish with an expert air—the fleshy catfish, the flat-headed eels—hideous sea serpents—and the violet rockfish with zigzag stripes and gold bands, the colour of orange peel.
One of the men said: “I will carry them to the house, your Reverence.”
“Thanks, my good man.”
Shaking hands, the priest started off, followed by the one fisherman, the others staying behind to look after the boat.
The priest, robust and dignified, strode along with big, slow steps. As he still felt warm from his vigorous rowing, he took off his hat whenever he reached the slight shade of the olive-trees, to expose his square-cut brow with its straight, white hair cut short—more the brow of an officer than of a priest—to the tepid night air now slightly freshened by a faint sea breeze. The village revealed itself up on the cliff in the middle of a wide valley that ran down like a plain towards the sea.
It was a night in July. The dazzling sun, nearing the crest of the distant hills, stretched out the priest’s long shadow on the white road, buried under a shroud of dust; his exaggerated shovel hat, reflected in a broad, dark patch in the neighbouring field, seemed to clamber up the tree-trunks on the way, and drop quickly to the ground again, creeping about among the olives.
From under Abbé Vilbois’ feet rose a cloud of that fine, floury dust that covers the roads of Provence in summer, curling around his cassock like a veil and colouring its hem with a faint wash of grey over the black. He strode along with the slow, measured gait of a mountaineer making an ascent. His unruffled eyes gazed upon the village of which he had been the curé for twenty years, the village he had picked out and obtained as a great favour, and where he hoped to die. The church—his church—crowned the wide circle of houses huddled together around it with its two uneven, square towers of brown stone whose profiles had stood out for centuries over the beautiful Southern valley, more like the donjons of a fortified castle than the steeples of a church.
The Abbé was pleased because he had caught three catfish, two eels, and a few rockfish. This would be a new, minor triumph over his parishioners, who respected him chiefly because he was the strongest man in the country, in spite of his age. These little harmless vanities were his greatest pleasure. With a pistol he could cut off a flower from its stalk, sometimes he fenced with his neighbour, the tobacconist, who had been a regimental fencing-master, and he rowed better than anyone on the coast.
In addition to which, Baron Vilbois, who at the age of thirty-two had become a priest after an unfortunate love affair, had been a man of the world, well known and a leader of fashion.
Descended from an old royalist family of Picardy, staunch Churchmen, whose sons had been in the Army, the Church, and the Law for several generations, his first intention was to enter holy orders on his mother’s advice, but his father’s objections prevailed, and he decided to go to Paris, study law, and then try for some important post at the Law Courts.
As he was finishing his course, his father died of pneumonia caught on a shooting expedition on the marshes, and his mother died shortly after of grief. Having thus suddenly inherited a large fortune, he gave up his plans of adopting any profession whatever and was content to live the life of a man of means. He was a handsome youth, whose intelligence was limited by the beliefs, traditions, and principles he had inherited from his family, together with the physical strength of a native of Picardy; everyone liked him, he was popular in the more serious circles of society and enjoyed life in the way that a wealthy, highly respected, conventional young man does.
Unfortunately, after a few meetings at a friend’s house, he fell in love with a young actress, a student from the Conservatoire who had made a brilliant first appearance at the Odéon.
He fell in love with the violence and passion of a man destined to believe in absolute ideas. He fell in love, seeing her through the medium of the romantic part in which she had won great success the day she appeared in public for the first time.
She was pretty, naturally perverse, with the ways of a spoilt child that he called her angel-ways. She gained complete ascendancy over him, turning him into a raging maniac, a frenzied lunatic, one of those miserable beings whom the glance or the skirt of a woman consumes at the stake of a mortal passion. He made her his mistress, forced her to leave the stage, and loved her for four years with an ever-growing passion. Indeed, he would have married her in spite of his name and the family tradition of honour had he not suddenly discovered that she was deceiving him with the friend who had introduced them to each other.
The blow fell with all the more force because she was enceinte and he was awaiting the child’s birth to make up his mind to get married.
When he possessed all the proofs—letters accidentally found in a drawer—he accused her of infidelity, treachery, and double-dealing, with the brutality of a semi-savage.
But this child of the Paris streets, impudent and vicious, feeling as sure of her second lover as she did of Vilbois, as bold as those viragoes of the revolution who climb the barricades out of sheer bravado, defied and insulted him, pointing to her condition when she saw him raise his hand.
He stopped and turned pale, remembering that a child of his was there within that polluted flesh, in that defiled body, that unclean creature: his child!
He threw himself at her to destroy them both, to blot out the double shame. Frightened at the ruin of her future, stumbling about under the force of his blows and seeing his foot ready to kick the swollen womb with its human embryo, she cried with hands outstretched to save herself:
“Don’t kill me. It is not yours, it is his.”
He started back, stupefied and overcome, his anger momentarily fading, while his foot hovered in midair, and he stammered:
“What … what are you saying?”
Wild with fright at the signal of death she had caught in his eyes and at the man’s terrifying gesture, she repeated:
“It is not yours, it is his.”
Quite overwrought, he muttered between clenched teeth:
“The child?”
“Yes.”
“You are lying.”
And again he lifted his foot for a crushing blow, while his mistress, now on her knees, tried to move away, murmuring all the time:
“But I tell you it is his. If it was yours, would not I have had it long ago?”
This argument struck him as being truth itself. In one of those flashes of thought when all the arguments on a question are seen together in a blinding clearness, precise, unanswerable, conclusive, irresistible, he was convinced, he knew that he was not the father of the wretched waif-child she was carrying; and relieved, freed, suddenly almost at rest, he gave up the idea of killing the jade.
He said more gently:
“Get up, go away, never let me see you again.”
Quite subdued, she obeyed and went away.
He never saw her again.
He went away too. Down to the South, to the sun, and stayed in a village in the middle of a valley on the Mediterranean. He was attracted by an inn facing the sea, took a room there, in which he stayed for eighteen months, lost in grief and despair, and living in complete isolation. He lived there obsessed by the memory of the woman who had betrayed him, of her charm, her physical appearance, her unbelievable witchery, and filled with longing for her presence, her caressings.
He wandered through the valleys of Provence, seeking relief for his aching head with its burden of memory in the sun that filtered gently through the dull grey leaves of the olive-trees.
In this solitude of suffering the old piety, the steadied fervour of his early faith, revived in his heart. Religion, which had once seemed to him a refuge from the unknown, now appeared as a haven of escape from life’s treachery and cruelty. He had never lost the habit of prayer, to prayer he therefore clung in his great sorrow, going regularly to the darkened church at dusk, where a solitary speck of light shone down the chancel from the lamp, the holy guardian of the sanctuary and symbol of the Divine Presence.
To Him he confided his trouble, to his God, telling Him all about his sorrow. He craved for advice, pity, help, protection, consolation, putting more and more feeling into his prayers, which grew in fervour from day to day.
His wounded heart, ravaged by carnal love, was bare and throbbing, longing for tenderness, and little by little, through prayer and piety, by giving himself up to that secret communion of the devout with the Saviour who brings consolation and is a sure refuge to those in distress, the love of God entered in him and drove out the intruder.
He went back to his early plans and decided that what remained of the life he had intended to devote to the Lord in its youth and purity should now be given to the Church.
He became a priest. Through family influence he was appointed priest of the Provençal village into which luck had thrown him, and having given a large part of his fortune to benevolent institutions, only retaining sufficient to enable him to be of use, and a help to the poor until he died, he settled down to a quiet life full of good works and of care for his fellow creatures.
He was a narrow-minded priest, but kind to his people, a religious leader with a soldier’s temperament, a guide who forcibly led the sinner into the narrow way: the poor blind sinner lost in the forest of life where all our instincts, our desires, our tastes, are bypaths which lead us astray. But much of the man of old days remained. He still liked violent exercise, sport and fencing, and he detested all women with the unreasoning fear of a child before some hidden danger.