had bowed his head before the altar of the tabernacle for some
time, only gave thirty sous to the postillions, and traveled
slowly accordingly. The postillion tribe drive with all due
respect a bishop who does but pay twice the amount demanded
of ordinary mortals, but, at the same time, they are careful
not to damage the episcopal equipage, for fear of getting them-
selves into trouble. The abbe, traveling alone for the first
time in his life, spolce mildly at each relay

" Just drive on a little faster, can't you? "

" You can't get the whip to work without a little palm
oil," an old postillion replied, and the young abbe, much
mystified, fell back in a corner of the carriage. He amused
himself by watching the landscape through which they were
traveling, and walked up a hill now and again on the winding
road from Bordeaux to Lyons.

Five leagues beyond Limoges the country changes. You
have left behind the charming low hills about the Vienne
(82)



THE CURE OF MONTEGNAC. 83

and the fair meadow slopes of Limousin, which sometimes
(and this particularly about Saint-Leonard) put you in mind
of Switzerland. You find yourself in a wilder and sterner
district. Wide moors, vast steppes without grass or herds of
horses, stretch away to the mountains of the Correze on the
horizon. The far-off hills do not tower above the plain, a
grandly, rent wall of rock like the Alps in the south ; you look
in vain for the desolate peaks and glowing gorges of the Apen-
nine, or for the majesty of the Pyrenees the curving wave-
like swell of the hills of the Correze bears witness to their
origin, to the peaceful slow subsidence of the waters which
once overwhelmed this country.

These undulations, characteristic of this, and, indeed, of
most of the hill districts of France, have perhaps, contributed
quite as much as the climate to gain for the land its title of
"the kindly," which Europe has confirmed. But it is a
dreary transition country which separates Limousin from the
provinces of Marche and Auvergne. In the mind of the poet
and thinker who crosses it, it calls up visions of the Infinite
(a terrible thought for certain souls) ; a woman looking out
on its monotonous sameness is driven to muse ; and to those
who must dwell with the wilderness, nature shows herself stub-
born, peevish, and barren ; 'tis a churlish soil that covers
these wide gray plains.

Only the neighborhood of a great capital can work such a
miracle as transformed Brie during the last two centuries.
Here there is no large settlement which sometimes puts life
into the waste lands which the agricultural economist regards
as blanks in creation, spots where civilization groans aghast,
and the touri'st finds no inns and a total absence of that pic-
turesqueness in which he delights.

But to lofty spirits the moors, the shadows needed in the
vast picture of nature, are not repellent. In our own day,
Fenimore Cooper, owner of so melancholy a talent, has set
forth the mysterious charm of great solitudes magnificently in



84 THE COUNTRY PARSON.

"The Prairie." But the wastes shunned by every form of
plant life, the barren soil covered with loose stones and water-
borne pebbles, the "bad lands" of the earth, are so many
challenges to civilization. France must face her difficulties
and find a solution for them, as the British are doing ; their
patient heroism is turning the most barren heather-land in
Scotland into productive farms. Left to their primitive deso-
lation, these fallows produce a crop of discouragement, of
idleness, of poor physique from insufficient food, and crime,
whenever want grows too clamorous. In these few words, you
have the past history of Montegnac.

What is there to be done when a waste on so vast a scale is
neglected by the administration, deserted by the nobles, exe-
crated by workers? Its inhabitants declare war against a
social system which refuses to do its duty, and so it was in
former times with the folk of Montegnac. They lived, like
Highlanders, by murder and rapine. At sight of that country,
a thoughtful observer could readily imagine how that only
twenty years ago the people of the village were at war with
society at large.

The wide plateau, cut away on one side by the Vienne, on
another by the lovely valleys of Marche, bounded by the Au-
vergne to the east, and shut in by the mountains of the Cor-
reze on the south, is very much like (agriculture apart) the
uplands of Beauce, which separate the basin of the Loire
from the basin of the Seine, or the plateaux of Touraine or of
Berri, or many others of these facets, as it were, on the sur-
face of France, so numerous that they demand the careful
attention of the greatest administrators.

It is an unheard-of thing that while people complain that
the masses are discontented with their condition, and con-
stantly aspiring towards social elevation, a government cannot
find a remedy for this in a country like France, where statistics
show that there are millions of acres of land lying idle, and
in some cases (as in Berri) covered with leaf mold seven or



THE CUR& OF MONT&GNAC. 85

eight feet thick ! A good deal of this land which should
support whole villages, and yield a magnificent return to culti-
vation, is the property of pig-headed communes which refuse
to sell to speculators because, forsooth, they wish to preserve
the right of grazing some hundred cows upon it. Impotence
is writ large over all these lands without a purpose. Yet every
bit of land will grow some special thing, and neither arms
nor will to work are lacking, but administrative ability and
conscience.

Hitherto the upland districts of France have been sacrificed
to the valleys. The government has given its fostering protec-
tion to districts well able to take care of themselves. But
most of these unlucky wastes have no water supply, the first
requisite for cultivation. The mists which might fertilize the
gray dead soil by depositing their oxides are swept across
them by the wind. There are no trees to arrest the clouds and
suck up their nourishing moisture. A few plantations here
and there would be a godsend in such places. The poor folk
who live in these wilds, at a practically impossible distance
from the nearest large town, are without a market for their
produce if they have any. Scattered about on the edges of
a forest left to nature, they pick up their firewood and eke out
a precarious existence by poaching ; in the winter starvation
stares them in the face. They have not capital enough to
grow wheat, for so poor are they that ploughs and cattle are
beyond their means ; and they live on chestnuts. If you have
wandered through some Natural History Museum and felt the
indescribable depression which comes on after a prolonged
study of the unvarying brown hues of the European specimens,
you will perhaps understand how the perpetual contemplation
of the gray plains must affect the moral conditions of the
people who live face to face with such disheartening ster-
ility. There is no shadow, nor contrast, nor coolness ; no
sight to stir associations which gladden the mind. One could
hail a stunted crab-tree there as a friend.



86 THE COUNTRY PARSON.

The high-road forked at length, and a cross-road branched
off towards the village a few leagues distant. Montegnac
lying (as its name indicates) at the foot of a ridge of hill is
the chief village of a canton on the borders of Haute-
Vienne. The hillside above belongs to the township which
encircles hill country and plain ; indeed, the commune is a
miniature Scotland, and has its highlands and its lowlands.
Only a league away, at the back of the hill which shelters the
township, rises the first peak of the chain of the Correze, and
all the country between is filled by the great forest of Mon-
tegnac, crowning the slope above the village, covering the little
valleys and bleak undulating land (left bare in patches here
and there), climbing the peak itself, stretching away to the
north in a long narrow strip which ends abruptly in a point
on a steep bank above the Aubusson road. That bit of steep
bank rises above a deep hollow through which the high-road
runs from Lyons to Bordeaux. Many a time coaches and
foot-passengers have been stopped in the darkest part of the
dangerous ravine ; and the robberies nearly always went with-
out punishment. The situation favored the highwaymen, who
escaped by paths well known to them into their forest fast-
nesses. In such a country the investigations of justice find
little trace. People accordingly shunned that route.

Without traffic neither commerce nor industry can exist ;
the exchange of intellectual and material wealth becomes
impossible. The visible wonders of civilization are in all cases
the result of the application of ideas as old as man. A thought
in the mind of man that is from age to age the starting-point
and the goal of all our civilization. The history of Montegnac
is a proof of this axiom of social science. When the administra-
tion found itself in a position to consider the pressing prac-
tical needs of the country, the strip of forest was felled,
gendarmes were posted to accompany the diligence through
the two stages ; but, to the shame of the gendarmerie be it
said, it was not the sword but a voice, not Corporal Chervin



THE CURE OF MONTEGNAC. 87

but Parson Bonnet, who won the battle of civilization by
reforming the lives of the people. The cure, seized with pity
and compassion for those poor souls, tried to regenerate them,
and persevered till he gained his end.

After another hour's journey across the plains where flints
succeed to dust, and dust to flints, and flocks of partridges
abode in peace, rising at the approach of the carriage with a
heavy whirring sound of their wings, the Abbe Gabriel, like most
other travelers who pass that way, hailed the sight of the roofs
of the township with a certain pleasure. As you enter Montg-
nac you are confronted by one of the queer posthouses, not
to be found out of France. The signboard, nailed up with
four nails above a sbrry empty stable, is a rough oaken plank
on which a pretentious postillion has carved an inscription,
darkening the letters with ink : " Poast hosses," it runs. The
door is nearly always wide open. The threshold is a plank set up
edgewise in the earth to keep the rain-water out of the stable,
the floor being below the level of the road outside. Within,
the traveler sees, to his sorrow, the harness, worn, mildewed,
mended with string, ready to give way at the first tug. The
horses are probably not to be seen ; they are at work on the
land, or out at grass, anywhere and everywhere but in the
stable. If by any chance they are within they are feeding.
If the horses are ready, the postillion has gone to see his aunt
or his cousin, or gone to sleep, or he is getting in his hay.
Nobody knows where he is ; you must wait while somebody goes
to find him. He does not stir until he has a mind ; and when
he comes, it takes him an eternity to find his waistcoat or his
whip, or to rub down his cattle. The buxom dame in the door-
way fidgets about even more restlessly than the traveler, and
forestalls any outburst on his part by bestirring herself a good
deal more quickly than the horses. She personates the post-
mistress whose husband is out in the fields.

It was in such a stable as this that the bishop's favorite left
his traveling carriage. The walls looked like maps; the



88 THE COUNTRY PARSON.

thatched roof, as gay with flowers as a garden bed, bent under
the weight of its growing house-leeks. He asked the woman
of the place to have everything in readiness for his departure
in an hour's time, and inquired of her his way to the parson-
age. The good woman pointed out a narrow alley between
two houses. That was the way to the church, she said, and
he would find the parsonage hard by.

While the abbe climbed the steep path paved with cobble-
stones between the hedgerows on either side, the postmistress
fell to questioning the postboy. Every postboy along the
road from Limoges had passed on to his brother whip the
surmises of the first postillion concerning the bishop's inten-
tions. So while Limoges was turning out of bed and talking
of the execution of old Pingret's murderer, the country-folk
all along the road were spreading the news of the pardon
procured by the bishop for the innocent prisoner, and prattling
of supposed miscarriages of justice, insomuch that when Jean-
Francois came to the scaffold at a later day, he was likely to be
regarded as a martyr.

The Abb6 Gabriel went some few paces along the footpath,
red with autumn leaves, dark with blackberries and sloes;
then he turned and stood, acting on the instinct which
prompts us to make a survey of any strange place, an instinct
which we share with the horse and dog. The reason of the
choice of the site of Montegnac was apparent ; several streams
broke out of the hillside, and a small river flowed along by
the departmental road which leads from the township to the
prefecture. Like the rest of the villages in this plateau,
Montegnac is built of blocks of clay, dried in the sun ; if a
fire broke out in a cottage, it is possible that it might find it
earth and leave it brick. The roofs are of thatch ; altogether,
it was a poor-looking place that the bishop's messenger saw.
Below Montegnac lay fields of rye, potatoes, and turnips,
land won from the plain. In the meadows on the lowest
slope of the hillside, watered by artificial channels, were



THE CURE OF MONTEGNAC. 8d

some of the celebrated breed of Limousin horses ; a legacy
(so it is said) of the Arab invaders o*f France, who crossed
the Pyrenees to meet death from the battle-axes of Charles
Martel's Franks, between Poitiers and Tours. Up above on
the heights the soil looked parched. Now and again the
reddish scorched surface, burnt bare by the sun, indicated the
arid soil which the chestnuts love. The water, thriftily dis-
tributed along the irrigation channels, was only sufficient to
keep the meadows fresh and green ; on these hillsides grows
the fine short grass, the delicate sweet pasture that builds you
up a breed of horses delicate and impatient of control, fiery,
but not possessed of much staying-power ; unexcelled in their
native district, but apt to change their character when they
change their country.

Some young mulberry trees indicated an intention of grow-
ing silk. Like most villages, Montegnac could only boast a
single street, to wit, the road that ran through it ; but there
was an Upper and Lower Montegnac on either side of it,
each cut in two by a little pathway running at right angles to
the road. The hillside below a row of houses on the ridge
was gay with terraced gardens which rose from a level of
several feet above the road, necessitating flights of steps,
sometimes of earth, sometimes paved with cobble-stones. A
few old women, here and there, who sat spinning or looking
after the children, put some human interest into the picture,
and kept up a conversation between Upper and Lower Mon-
tegnac by talking to each other across the road, usually quiet
enough. In this way news traveled pretty quickly from one
end of the township to the other. The gardens were full of
fruit trees, cabbages, onions, and potherbs ; beehives stood
in rows along the terraces.

A second parallel row of cottages lay below the road, their
gardens sloping down towards the little river which flowed
through fields of thick-growing hemp, the fruit trees which
love damp places marking its course. A few cottages, the



90 THE COUNTRY PARSON.

posthouse among them, nestled in a hollow, a situation well
adapted for the weavers who lived in them, and almost every
house was overshadowed by the walnut trees, which flourish
best in heavy soil. At the further end of Montegnac, and on
the same side of the road, stood a house larger and more
carefully kept than the rest ; it was the largest of a group
equally neat in appearance, a little hamlet, in fact, separated
from the township by its gardens, and known then, as to-day,
by the name of " Tascherons.' ' The commune was not much
in itself, but some thirty outlying farms belonged to it. In
the valley several " water-lanes " like those in Berri and
Marche marked out the course of the little streams with green
fringes. The whole commune looked like a green ship in the
midst of a wide sea.

Whenever a house, a farm, a village, or a district passes
from a deplorable state to a more satisfactory condition of
things, though as yet scarcely to be called strikingly pros-
perous, the life there seems so much a matter of course, so
natural, that at first sight a spectator can never guess how much
toil went to the founding of that not extraordinary prosperity ;
what an amount of effort, vast in proportion to the strength
that undertook it ; what heroic persistence lies there buried
and out of sight, effort and persistence without which the
visible changes could not have taken place. So the young
abb6 saw nothing unusual in the pleasant view before his eyes ;
he little knew what that country had been before M. Bonnet
came to it.

He turned and went a few paces further up the path, and
soon came in sight of the church and parsonage, about six
hundred feet above the gardens of Upper Montegnac. Both
buildings, when first seen in the distance, were hard to dis-
tinguish among the ivy-covered stately ruins of the old Castle
of Montegnac, a stronghold of the Navarreins in the twelfth
century. The parsonage house had every appearance of being
built in the first instance for a steward or a head gamekeeper.



THE CURE OF MONT&GNAC. 91

It stood at the end of a broad terrace planted with lime trees,
and overlooked the whole countryside. The ravages of time
bore witness to the antiquity of the flight of steps and the
walls which supported the terrace, the stones had been forced
out of place by the constant imperceptible thrusting of plant
life in the crevices, until tall grasses and wild flowers had
taken root among them. Every step was covered with a
dark-green carpet of fine close moss. The masonry, solid
though it was, was full of rifts and cracks, where wild plants
of the pellitory and camomile tribe were growing ; the maiden-
hair fern sprang from the loopholes in thick masses of shaded
green. The whole face of the wall, in fact, was hung with
the finest and fairest tapestry, damasked with bracken fronds,
purple snap-dragons with their golden stamens, blue borage,
and brown fern and moss, till the stone itself was only seen
by glimpses here and there through its moist, cool covering.

Up above, upon the terrace, the clipped box borders formed
geometrical patterns in a pleasure garden framed by the par-
sonage house, and behind the parsonage rose the crags, a pale
background of rock, on which a few drooping, feathery trees
struggled to live. The ruins of the castle towered above the
house and the church.

The parsonage itself, built of flints and mortar, boasted a
single story and garrets above, apparently empty, to judge by
the dilapidated windows on either gable under the high-pitched
roof. A couple of rooms on the ground floor, separated by a
passage with a wooden staircase at the farther end of it, two
more rooms on the second floor, and a little lean-to kitchen
built against the side of the house in the yard, where a stable
and coach-house stood perfectly empty, useless, abandoned
this was all. The kitchen garden lay between the house and
the church ; a ruinous covered passage led from the parsonage
to the sacristy.

The young abbd's eyes wandered over the place. He
noted the four windows with their leaded panes, the brown



92 THE COUNTRY PARSON.

moss-grown walls, the rough wooden door, so full of splits
and cracks that it looked like a bundle of matches, and the
adorable quaintness of it all by no means took his fancy. The
grace of the plant life which covered the roofs, the wild
climbing flowers that sprang from the rotting wooden sills
and cracks in the wall, the trails and tendrils of the vines,
covered with tiny clusters of grapes, which found their way
in through the windows, as if they were fain to carry merri-
ment and laughter into the house all this he beheld, and
thanked his stars that his way led to a bishopric, and not to a
country parsonage.

The house, open all day long, seemed to belong to every
one. The Abbe Gabriel walked into the dining-room, which
opened into the kitchen. The furniture which met his eyes
was poor an old oak table with four twisted legs, an easy-
chair covered with tapestry, a few wooden chairs, and an old
chest, which did duty as a sideboard. There was no one in
the kitchen except the cat, the sign of a woman in the house.
The other room was the parlor ; glancing round it, the young
priest noticed that the easy-chairs were made of unpolished
wood, and covered with tapestry. The paneling of the walls,
like the rafters, was of chestnut-wood, and black as ebony.
There was a timepiece in a green case painted with flowers, a
table covered with a worn green cloth, one or two chairs, and
on the mantle-shelf an Infant Jesus in wax under a glass shade
set between two candlesticks. The hearth, surrounded by a
rough wooden moulding, was hidden by a paper screen repre-
senting the Good Shepherd with a sheep on his shoulder. In
this way, doubtless, one of the family of the mayor, or of the
justice of the peace, endeavored to express his acknowledg-
ments of the care bestowed on his training.

The state of the house was something piteous. The walls,
which had once been lime-washed, were discolored here and
there, and rubbed and darkened up to the height of a man's
head. The wooden staircase, with its heavy balustrades,



THE CUR& OF MOMT&GNAC, 93

neatly kept though it was, looked as though it must totter if
any one set foot on it. At the end of the passage, just oppo-
site the front door, another door stood open, giving the Abbe
Gabriel an opportunity of surveying the kitchen garden, shut
in by the wall of the old rampart, built of the white crumb-
ling stone of the district. Fruit trees in full beating had been
trained espalier-fashion along this side of the garden, but the
long trellises were falling to pieces, and the vine-leaves were
covered with blight.

The abbe went back through the house, and walked along
the paths in the front garden. Down below the magnificent
wide view of the valley was spread out before his eyes, a sort
of oasis on the edge of the great plain, which, in the light
morning mists, looked something like a waveless sea. Behind,
and rather to one side, the great forest stretched away to the
horizon, the bronzed mass making a contrast with the plains,
and on the other hand the church and the castle perched on
the crag stood sharply out against the blue sky. As the
Abbe Gabriel paced the tiny paths among the box-edged
diamonds, circles, and stars, crunching the gravel beneath his
boots, he looked from point to point at the scene ; over the
village, where already a few groups of gazers had formed to
stare at him, at the valley in the morning light, the quick-set
hedges that marked the ways, the little river flowing under its
willows, in such contrast with the infinite of the plains.
Gradually his impressions changed the current of his thoughts.
He admired the quietness, he felt the influences of the pure
air, of the peace inspired by a glimpse of a life of biblical
simplicity ; and with these came a dim sense of the beauty of
that life. He went back again to look at its details with a
more serious curiosity.

A little girl, left in charge of the house no doubt, but busy
pilfering in the garden, came back at the sound of a man's
shoes creaking on the flagged pavement of the ground-floor
rooms. In her confusion at being caught with fruit in her



94 THE COUNTRY PARSON.

hand and between her teeth, she made no answer whatever to
the questions put to her by this abbe young, handsome,
daintily arrayed. The child had never believed it possible
that such an abbe could exist radiant in fine lawn, neat as a
new pin, and dressed in fine black cloth without a speck or a
crease.

" M. Bonnet ? " she echoed at last. " M. Bonnet is saying
mass, and Mile. Ursule is gone to the church."

The covered passage from the house to the sacristy had
escaped the Abbe Gabriel's notice ; so he went down the path
again to enter the church by the principal door. The church
porch was a sort of pent-house facing the village, set at the
top of a flight of worn and disjointed steps, overlooking a