Abbe Mouret's Transgression: Chapter 4

Chapter 4

When Abbe Mouret had got beyond all hearing of La Teuse he stopped,
thankful to be alone at last. The church was built on a hillock, which
sloped down gently to the village. With its large gaping windows and
bright red tiles, it stretched out like a deserted sheep-cote. The
priest turned round and glanced at the parsonage, a greyish building
springing from the very side of the church; but as if fearful that he
might again be overtaken by the interminable chatter that had been
buzzing in his ears ever since morning, he turned up to the right again,
and only felt safe when he at last stood before the great doorway, where
he could not be seen from the parsonage. The front of the church, quite
bare and worn by the sunshine and rain of years, was crowned by a narrow
open stone belfry, in which a small bell showed its black silhouette,
whilst its rope disappeared through the tiles. Six broken steps, on one
side half buried in the earth, led up to the lofty arched door, now
cracked, smothered with dust and rust and cobwebs, and so frailly hung
upon its outwrenched hinges that it seemed as if the first slight puff
would secure free entrance to the winds of heaven. Abbe Mouret, who had
an affection for this dilapidated door, leaned against one of its leaves
as he stood upon the steps. Thence he could survey the whole country
round at a glance. And shading his eyes with his hands he scanned the
horizon.

In the month of May exuberant vegetation burst forth from that stony
soil. Gigantic lavenders, juniper bushes, patches of rank herbage
swarmed over the church threshold, and scattered clumps of dark greenery
even to the very tiles. It seemed as if the first throb of shooting sap
in the tough matted underwood might well topple the church over. At that
early hour, amid all the travail of nature's growth, there was a hum of
vivifying warmth, and the very rocks quivered as with a long and silent
effort. But the Abbe failed to comprehend the ardour of nature's painful
labour; he simply thought that the steps were tottering, and thereupon
leant against the other side of the door.

The countryside stretched away for a distance of six miles, bounded by a
wall of tawny hills speckled with black pine-woods. It was a fearful
landscape of arid wastes and rocky spurs rending the soil. The few
patches of arable ground were like scattered pools of blood, red fields
with rows of lean almond trees, grey-topped olive trees and long lines
of vines, streaking the soil with their brown stems. It was as if some
huge conflagration had swept by there, scattering the ashes of forests
over the hill-tops, consuming all the grass of the meadow lands, and
leaving its glare and furnace-like heat behind in the hollows. Only here
and there was the softer note of a pale green patch of growing corn. The
landscape generally was wild, lacking even a threadlet of water, dying
of thirst, and flying away in clouds of dust at the least breath of
wind. But at the farthest point where the crumbling hills on the horizon
had left a breach one espied some distant fresh moist greenery, a
stretch of the neighbouring valley fertilised by the Viorne, a river
flowing down from the gorges of the Seille.

The priest lowered his dazzled glance upon the village, whose few
scattered houses straggled away below the church--wretched hovels they
were of rubble and boards strewn along a narrow path without sign of
streets. There were about thirty of them altogether, some squatting
amidst muck-heaps, and black with woeful want; others roomier and more
cheerful-looking with their roofs of pinkish tiles. Strips of garden,
victoriously planted amidst stony soil, displayed plots of vegetables
enclosed by quickset hedges. At this hour Les Artaud was empty, not a
woman was at the windows, not a child was wallowing in the dust; parties
of fowls alone went to and fro, ferreting among the straw, seeking food
up to the very thresholds of the houses, whose open doors gaped in the
sunlight. A big black dog seated on his haunches at the entrance to the
village seemed to be mounting guard over it.

Languor slowly stole over Abbe Mouret. The rising sun steeped him in
such warmth that he leant back against the church door pervaded by a
feeling of happy restfulness. His thoughts were dwelling on that hamlet
of Les Artaud, which had sprung up there among the stones like one of
the knotty growths of the valley. All its inhabitants were related, all
bore the same name, so that from their very cradle they were
distinguished among themselves by nicknames. An Artaud, their ancestor,
had come hither and settled like a pariah in this waste. His family had
grown with all the wild vitality of the herbage that sucked life from
the rocky boulders. It had at last become a tribe, a rural community, in
which cousin-ships were lost in the mists of centuries. They
intermarried with shameless promiscuity. Not an instance could be cited
of any Artaud taking himself a wife from any neighbouring village; only
some of the girls occasionally went elsewhere. The others were born and
died fixed to that spot, leisurely increasing and multiplying on their
dunghills with the irreflectiveness of trees, and with no definite
notion of the world that lay beyond the tawny rocks, in whose midst they
vegetated. And yet there were already rich and poor among them; fowls
having at times disappeared, the fowl-houses were now closed at night
with stout padlocks; moreover one Artaud had killed another Artaud one
evening behind the mill. These folk, begirt by that belt of desolate
hills, were truly a people apart--a race sprung from the soil, a
miniature replica of mankind, three hundred souls all told, beginning
the centuries yet once again.

Over the priest the sombre shadows of seminary life still hovered. For
years he had never seen the sun. He perceived it not even now, his eyes
closed and gazing inwards on his soul, and with no feeling for
perishable nature, fated to damnation, save contempt. For a long time in
his hours of devout thought he had dreamt of some hermit's desert, of
some mountain hole, where no living thing--neither being, plant, nor
water--should distract him from the contemplation of God. It was an
impulse springing from the purest love, from a loathing of all physical
sensation. There, dying to self, and with his back turned to the light
of day, he would have waited till he should cease to be, till nothing
should remain of him but the sovereign whiteness of the soul. To him
heaven seemed all white, with a luminous whiteness as if lilies there
snowed down upon one, as if every form of purity, innocence, and
chastity there blazed. But his confessor reproved him whenever he
related his longings for solitude, his cravings for an existence of
Godlike purity; and recalled him to the struggles of the Church, the
necessary duties of the priesthood. Later on, after his ordination, the
young priest had come to Les Artaud at his own request, there hoping to
realise his dream of human annihilation. In that desolate spot, on that
barren soil, he might shut his ears to all worldly sounds, and live the
dreamy life of a saint. For some months past, in truth, his existence
had been wholly undisturbed, rarely had any thrill of the village-life
disturbed him; and even the sun's heat scarcely brought him any glow of
feeling as he walked the paths, his whole being wrapped in heaven,
heedless of the unceasing travail of life amidst which he moved.

The big black dog watching over Les Artaud had determined to come up to
Abbe Mouret, and now sat upon its haunches at the priest's feet; but the
unconscious man remained absorbed amidst the sweetness of the morning.
On the previous evening he had begun the exercises of the Rosary, and to
the intercession of the Virgin with her Divine Son he attributed the
great joy which filled his soul. How despicable appeared all the good
things of the earth! How thankfully he recognised his poverty! When he
entered into holy orders, after losing on the same day both his father
and his mother through a tragedy the fearful details of which were even
now unknown to him,* he had relinquished all his share of their property
to an elder brother. His only remaining link with the world was his
sister; he had undertaken the care of her, stirred by a kind of
religious affection for her feeble intelligence. The dear innocent was
so childish, such a very little girl, that she recalled to him the poor
in spirit to whom the Gospel promises the kingdom of heaven. Of late,
however, she had somewhat disturbed him; she was growing too lusty, too
full of health and life. But his discomfort was yet of the slightest.
His days were spent in that inner life he had created for himself, for
which he had relinquished all else. He closed the portals of his senses,
and sought to free himself from all bodily needs, so that he might be
but a soul enrapt in contemplation. To him nature offered only snares
and abominations; he gloried in maltreating her, in despising her, in
releasing himself from his human slime. And as the just man must be a
fool according to the world, he considered himself an exile on this
earth; his thoughts were solely fixed upon the favours of Heaven,
incapable as he was of understanding how an eternity of bliss could be
weighed against a few hours of perishable enjoyment. His reason duped
him and his senses lied; and if he advanced in virtue it was
particularly by humility and obedience. His wish was to be the last of
all, one subject to all, in order that the divine dew might fall upon
his heart as upon arid sand; he considered himself overwhelmed with
reproach and with confusion, unworthy of ever being saved from sin. He
no longer belonged to himself--blind, deaf, dead to the world as he was.
He was God's thing. And from the depth of the abjectness to which he
sought to plunge, Hosannahs suddenly bore him aloft, above the happy and
the mighty into the splendour of never-ending bliss.

* This forms the subject of M. Zola's novel, _The Conquest of
Plassans_. ED.

Thus, at Les Artaud, Abbe Mouret had once more experienced, each time he
read the 'Imitation,' the raptures of the cloistered life which he had
longed for at one time so ardently. As yet he had not had to fight any
battle. From the moment that he knelt down, he became perfect,
absolutely oblivious of the flesh, unresisting, undisturbed, as if
overpowered by the Divine grace. Such ecstasy at God's approach is well
known to some young priests: it is a blissful moment when all is hushed,
and the only desire is but a boundless craving for purity. From no human
creature had he sought his consolations. He who believes a certain thing
to be all in all cannot be troubled: and he did believe that God was all
in all, and that humility, obedience, and chastity were everything. He
could remember having heard temptation spoken of as an abominable
torture that tries the holiest. But he would only smile: God had never
left him. He bore his faith about him thus like a breast-plate
protecting him from the slightest breath of evil. He could recall how he
had hidden himself and wept for very love; he knew not whom he loved,
but he wept for love, for love of some one afar off. The recollection
never failed to move him. Later on he had decided on becoming a priest
in order to satisfy that craving for a superhuman affection which was
his sole torment. He could not see where greater love could be. In that
state of life he satisfied his being, his inherited predisposition, his
youthful dreams, his first virile desires. If temptation must come, he
awaited it with the calmness of the seminarist ignorant of the world. He
felt that his manhood had been killed in him: it gladdened him to feel
himself a creature set apart, unsexed, turned from the usual paths of
life, and, as became a lamb of the Lord, marked with the tonsure.

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