Abbe Mouret's Transgression: Chapter 16

Chapter 16

This evocation of the deep joys of his youth had given Abbe Mouret a
touch of feverishness. He no longer felt the cold. He put down the tongs
and walked towards the bedstead as if about to go to bed, but turned
back and pressed his forehead to a window-pane, looking out into the
night with sightless eyes. Could he be ill? Why did he feel such languor
in all his limbs, why did his blood burn in every vein? On two
occasions, while at the seminary, he had experienced similar attacks--a
sort of physical discomfort which made him most unhappy; one day,
indeed, he had gone to bed in raving delirium. Then he bethought himself
of a young girl possessed by evil spirits, whom Brother Archangias
asserted he had cured with a simple sign of the cross, one day when she
fell down before him. This reminded him of the spiritual exorcisms which
one of his teachers had formerly recommended to him: prayer, a general
confession, frequent communion, the choosing of a wise confessor who
should have great authority on his mind. And then, without any
transition, with a suddenness which astonished himself, he saw in the
depths of his memory the round face of one of his old friends, a
peasant, who had been a choir boy at eight years old, and whose expenses
at the seminary were defrayed by a lady who watched over him. He was
always laughing, he rejoiced beforehand at the anticipated emoluments of
his career; twelve hundred francs of stipend, a vicarage at the end of a
garden, presents, invitations to dinners, little profits from weddings,
and baptismal and burial fees. That young fellow must indeed be happy in
his parish.

The feeling of melancholy regret evoked by this recollection surprised
Abbe Mouret extremely. Was he not happy, too? Until that day he had
regretted nothing, wished for nothing, envied nothing. Even as he
searched himself at that very moment he failed to find any cause for
bitterness. He believed himself the same as in the early days of his
deaconship, when the obligatory perusal of his breviary at certain
stated hours had filled his days with continuous prayer. No doubts had
tormented him; he had prostrated himself before the mysteries he could
not understand; he had sacrificed his reason, which he despised, with
the greatest ease. When he left the seminary, he had rejoiced at finding
himself a stranger among his fellowmen, no longer walking like them,
carrying his head differently, possessed of the gestures, words, and
opinions of a being apart. He had felt emasculated, nearer to the
angels, cleansed of sexuality. It had almost made him proud to belong no
longer to his species, to have been brought up for God and carefully
purged of all human grossness by a jealously watchful training. Again,
it had seemed to him as if for years he had been dwelling in holy oil,
prepared with all due rites, which had steeped his flesh in
beatification. His limbs, his brain, had lost material substance to gain
in soulfulness, impregnated with a subtle vapour which, at times,
intoxicated him and dizzied him as if the earth had suddenly failed
beneath his feet. He displayed the fears, the unwittingness, the open
candour of a cloistered maiden. He sometimes remarked with a smile that
he was prolonging his childhood, under the impression that he was still
quite little, retaining the same sensations, the same ideas, the same
opinions as in the past. At six years old, for instance, he had known as
much of God as he knew at twenty-five; in prayer the inflexions of his
voice were still the same, and he yet took a childish pleasure in
folding his hands quite correctly. The world too seemed to him the same
as he had seen in former days when his mother led him by the hand. He
had been born a priest, and a priest he had grown up. Whenever he
displayed before La Teuse some particularly gross ignorance of life, she
would stare him in the face, astounded, and remark with a strange smile
that 'he was Mademoiselle Desiree's brother all over.'

In all his existence he could only recall one shock of shame. It had
happened during his last six months at the seminary, between his
deaconship and priesthood. He had been ordered to read the work of Abbe
Craisson, the superior of the great seminary at Valence: '_De rebus
Veneris ad usum confessariorum_.' And he had risen from this book
terrified and choking with sobs. That learned casuistry, dealing so
fully with the abominations of mankind, descending to the most monstrous
examples of vice, violated, as it were, all his virginity of body and
mind. He felt himself for ever befouled. Yet every time he heard
confessions he inevitably recurred to that catechism of shame. And
though the obscurities of dogma, the duties of his ministry, and the
death of all free will within him left him calm and happy at being
nought but the child of God, he retained, in spite of himself, a carnal
taint of the horrors he must needs stir up; he was conscious of an
ineffaceable stain, deep down somewhere in his being, which might some
day grow larger and cover him with mud.

The moon was rising behind the Garrigue hills. Abbe Mouret, still more
and more feverish, opened the window and leaned out upon his elbows,
that he might feel upon his face the coolness of the night. He could no
longer remember at what time exactly this illness had come upon him. He
recollected, however, that in the morning, while saying mass, he had
been quite calm and restful. It must have been later, perhaps during his
long walk in the sun, or while he shivered under the trees of the
Paradou, or while stifling in Desiree's poultry-yard. And then he lived
through the day again.

Before him stretched the vast plain, more direful still beneath the
pallid light of the oblique moonbeams. The olive and almond trees showed
like grey spots amid the chaos of rocks spreading to the sombre row of
hills on the horizon. There were big splotches of gloom, bumpy ridges,
blood-hued earthy pools in which red stars seemed to contemplate one
another, patches of chalky light, suggestive of women's garments cast
off and disclosing shadowy forms which slumbered in the hollow folds of
ground. At night that glowing landscape weltered there strangely,
passionately, slumbering with uncovered bosom, and outspread twisted
limbs, whilst heaving mighty sighs, and exhaling the strong aroma of a
sweating sleeper. It was as if some mighty Cybele had fallen there
beneath the moon, intoxicated with the embraces of the sun. Far away,
Abbe Mouret's eyes followed the path to Les Olivettes, a narrow pale
ribbon stretching along like a wavy stay-lace. He could hear Brother
Archangias whipping the truant schoolgirls, and spitting in the faces of
their elder sisters. He could see Rosalie slyly laughing in her hands
while old Bambousse hurled clods of earth after her and smote her on her
hips. Then, too, he thought, he had still been well, his neck barely
heated by the lovely morning sunshine. He had felt but a quivering
behind him, that confused hum of life, which he had faintly heard since
morning when the sun, in the midst of his mass, had entered the church
by the shattered windows. Never, then, had the country disturbed him, as
it did at this hour of night, with its giant bosom, its yielding
shadows, its gleams of ambery skin, its lavish goddess-like nudity,
scarce hidden by the silvery gauze of moonlight.

The young priest lowered his eyes, and gazed upon the village of Les
Artaud. It had sunk into the heavy slumber of weariness, the soundness
of peasants' sleep. Not a light: the battered hovels showed like dusky
mounds intersected by the white stripes of cross lanes which the
moonbeams swept. Even the dogs were surely snoring on the thresholds of
the closed doors. Had the Artauds poisoned the air of the parsonage with
some abominable plague? Behind him gathered and swept the gust whose
approach filled him with so much anguish. Now he could detect a sound
like the tramping of a flock, a whiff of dusty air, which reached him
laden with the emanations of beasts. Again came back his thoughts of a
handful of men beginning the centuries over again, springing up between
those naked rocks like thistles sown by the winds. In his childhood
nothing had amazed and frightened him more than those myriads of insects
which gushed forth when he raised certain damp stones. The Artauds
disturbed him even in their slumber; he could recognise their breath in
the air he inhaled. He would have liked to have had the rocks alone
below his window. The hamlet was not dead enough; the thatched roofs
bulged like bosoms; through the gaping cracks in the doors came low
faint sounds which spoke of all the swarming life within. Nausea came
upon him. Yet he had often faced it all without feeling any other need
than that of refreshing himself in prayer.

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.

Standing in the middle of the room, with both windows open, he remained
shivering, seized with a fright which made him hide his face in his
hands. So this was the ending of the whole day; this evocation of a fair
girl, with a somewhat long face and eyes of blue. And the whole day came
in through the open windows. In the distance--the glow of those red
lands, the ardent passion of the big rocks, of the olive-trees springing
up amid the stones, of the vines twisting their arms by the roadside.
Nearer--the steam of human sweat borne in upon the air from Les Artaud,
the musty odour of the cemetery, the fragrance of incense from the
church, tainted by the scent of greasy-haired wenches. And there was
also the steaming muck-heap, the fumes of the poultry-yard, the
oppressing ferment of animal germs. And all these vapours poured in at
once, in one asphyxiating gust, so offensive, so violent, as to choke
him. He tried to close his senses, to subdue and annihilate them. But
Albine reappeared before him like a tall flower that had sprung and
grown beautiful in that soil. She was the natural blossom of that
corruption, delicate in the sunshine, her white shoulders expanding in
youthfulness, her whole being so fraught with the gladness of life, that
she leaped from her stem and darted upon his mouth, scenting him with
her long ripple of laughter.

A cry burst from the priest. He had felt a burning touch upon his lips.
A stream as of fire coursed through his veins. And then, in search of
refuge, he threw himself on his knees before the statuette of the
Immaculate Conception, exclaiming, with folded hands:

'Holy Virgin of Virgins, pray for me!'

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