at him, at the valley in the morning light, the quickset
hedges that marked the ways, the little river flowing under its
willows, in such contrast with the infinite of the plains. Grad-
ually 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
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
square below; planted with the great elm-trees which date
from the time of the Protestant Sully, and full of channels
washed by the rains.
The church itself, one of the poorest in Prance, where
churches are sometimes very poor, was not unlike those huge
barns which boast a roof above the door, supported by brick
pillars or tree trunks. Like the parsonage house, it was built
of rubble, the square tower being roofed with round tiles ; but
Nature had covered the bare walls with the richest tracery
mouldings, and made them fairer still with color and light
and shade, carving her lines and disposing her masses, show-
90 THE COUNTRY PARSON
ing all the craftsman's cunning of a Michael Angelo in her
work. The ivy clambered over both sides, its sinewy stems
clung to the walls till they were covered, beneath the green
leaves, with as many veins as any anatomical diagram. Under
this mantle, wrought by Time to hide the wounds which
Time had made, damasked by autumn flowers that grew in
the crevices, nestled the singing-birds. The rose window in
the west front was bordered with blue harebells, like the first
page of some richly painted missal. There were fewer flowers
on the north side, which communicated with the parsonage,
though even there there were patches of crimson moss
on the gray stone, but the south wall and the apse were cov-
ered with many-colored blossoms; there were a few saplings
rooted in the cracks, notably an almond-tree, the symbol of
Hope. Two giant firs grew up close to the wall of the apse,
and served as lightning-conductors. A low ruinous wall re-
paired and maintained at elbow height with fallen fragments
of its own masonry ran round the churchyard. In the midst
of the space stood an iron cross mounted on a stone pedestal,
strewn with sprigs of box blessed at Easter, a reminder of a
touching Christian rite, now fallen into disuse except in
country places. Only in little villages and hamlets does the
priest go at Eastertide to bear to his dead the tidings of the
Eesurrection "You shall live again in happiness." Here
and there above the grass-covered graves rose a rotten wooden
cross.
The inside was in every way in keeping with the picturesque
neglect outside of the poor Church, where all the ornament
had been given by Time, grown charitable for once. Within,
your eyes turned at once to the roof. It was -lined with chest-
nut wood and sustained at equal distances by strong king-
posts set on crossbeams; age had imparted to it the richest
tones which old woods can take in Europe. The four walls
were lime-washed and bare of ornament. Poverty had made
unconscious iconoclasts of these worshipers.
Four pointed windows in the side walls let in the light
through their leaded panes; the floor was of brick; the seats,
91
wooden benches. The tomb-shaped altar bore for ornament
a great crucifix, beneath which stood a tabernacle in walnut
wood (its mouldings brightly polished and clean), eight can-
dlesticks (the candles thriftily made of painted wood), and
a couple of china vases full of artificial flowers, things that
a broker's man would have declined to look at, but which
must serve for God. The lamp in the shrine was simply a
floating-light, like a night-light, set in an old silver-plated
holy-water stoup, hung from the ceiling by silken cords
brought from the wreck of some chateau. The baptismal
fonts were of wood like the pulpit, and a sort of cage where
the churchwardens sat the patricians of the place. The
shrine in the Lady Chapel offered to the admiration of the
public two colored lithographs framed in a narrow gilded
frame. The altar had been painted white, and adorned with
artificial flowers planted in gilded wooden flower-pots set on a
white altar-cloth edged with shabby }^ellowish lace.
But at the end of the church a long window covered with
a red cotton curtain produced a magical effect. The lime-
washed walls caught a faint rose tint from that glowing crim-
son; it was as if some thought divine shone from the altar
to fill the poor place with warmth and light. On one wall of
the passage which led into the sacristy the patron saint of
the village had been carved in wood and painted a St. John
the Baptist and his sheep, an execrable daub. Yet in spite
of the bareness and poverty of the church, there was about the
whole a subdued harmony which appeals to those whose
spirits have been finely touched, a harmony of visible and
invisible emphasized by the coloring. The rich dark brown
tints of the wood made an admirable relief to the pure white
of the walls, and both blended with the triumphant crimson
of the chancel window, an austere trinity of color which re-
called the great doctrine of the Catholic Church.
If surprise was the first feeling called forth by the sight of
this miserable house of God, pity and admiration followed
quickly upon it. Did it not express the poverty of those who
worshiped there? Was it not in keeping with the quaint
92 THE COUNTRY PARSON
simplicity of the parsonage ? And it was clean and carefully
kept. You breathed, as it were, an atmosphere of the simple
virtues of the fields ; nothing within spoke of neglect. Primi-
tive and homely though it was, it was clothed in prayer; a
soul pervaded it which you felt, though you could not explain
how.
The Abbe Gabriel slipped in softly, so as not to interrupt
the meditations of two groups on the front benches before
the high-altar, which was railed off from the nave by a balus-
trade of the inevitable chestnut wood, roughly made enough,
and covered with a white cloth for the Communicn. Just
above the space hung the lamp. Some score of peasant folk
on' either side were so deeply absorbed in passionate prayer,
that they paid no heed to the stranger as he walked up the
church in the narrow gangway between the rows of benches.
As the Abbe Gabriel stood beneath the lamp, he could see
into the two chancels which completed the cross of the ground-
plan ; one of them led to the sacristy, the other to the church-
yard. It was in this latter, near the graves, that a whole
family clad in black were kneeling on the brick floor, for
there were no benches in this part of the church. The Abbe
bent before the altar on the step of the balustrade and knelt
to pray, giving a side glance at this sight, which was soon
explained. The Gospel was read ; the cure took off his chasu-
ble and came down from the altar towards the railing; and
the Abbe, who had foreseen this, slipped away and stood
close to the wall before M. Bonnet could see him. The clock
struck ten.
"My brethren," said the cure in a faltering voice, "even
at this moment, a child of this parish is paying his forfeit
to man's justice by submitting to its supreme penalty. We
offer the holy sacrifice of the mass for the repose of his soul.
Let us all pray together to God to beseech Him not to forsake
that child in his last moments, to entreat that repentance
here on earth may find in Heaven the mercy which has been
refused to it here below. The ruin of this unhappy child,
on whom we had counted most surely to set a good example,
THE COUNTRY PARSON 93
can only be attributed to a lapse from religious princi-
ples
The cure was interrupted by the sound of sobbing from
the group of mourners in the transept ; and by the paroxysm
of grief the young priest knew that this was the Tascheron
family, though he had never seen them before. The two
foremost among them were old people of seventy years at
least. Their faces, swarthy as a Florentine bronze, were cov-
ered with deep impassive lines. Both of them, in their old
patched garments, stood like statues close against the wall;
evidently this was the condemned man's grandfather and
grandmother. Their red glassy eyes seemed to shed tears of
blood; the old arms trembled so violently that the sticks on
which they leant made a faint sound of scratching on the
bricks. Behind them the father and mother, their faces hid-
den in their handkerchiefs, burst into tears. About the four
heads of the family knelt two married daughters with their
husbands, then three sons, stupefied with grief. Five kneel-
ing little ones, the oldest not more than seven years of age,
understood nothing probably of all that went on, but looked
and listened with the apparently torpid curiosity, which in
the peasant is often a process of observation carried (so far
as the outward and visible is concerned) to the highest possi-
ble pitch. Last of all came the poor girl Denise, who had
been imprisoned by justice, the martyr to sisterly love; she
was listening with an expression which seemed to betoken
incredulity and straying thoughts. To her it seemed impos-
sible that her brother should die. Her face was a wonderful
picture of another face, that of one among the three Maries
who could not believe that Christ was dead, though she had
shared the agony of His Passion. Pale and dry-eyed, as is
the wont of those who have watched for many nights, her
freshness had been withered more by sorrow than by work in
the fields ; but .she still kept the beauty of a country girl, the
full plump figure, the shapely red arms, a perfectly round face,
and clear eyes, glittering at that moment with the light of
despair in them. Her throat, firm-fleshed and white below
94 THE COUNTRY PARSON
the line of sunburned brown, indicated the rich tissue and
fairness of the skin beneath the stuff. The two married
daughters were weeping; their husbands, patient tillers of the
soil, were grave and sad. None of the three sons in their
sorrow raised their eyes from the ground.
Only Denise and her mother showed any sign of rebellion
in the harrowing picture of resignation and despairing
anguish. The sympathy and sincere and pious commiseration
felt by the rest of the villagers for a family so much respected
had lent the same expression to all faces, an expression which
became a look of positive horror when they gathered from the
cure's words that even in that moment the knife would fall.
All of them had known the young man from the day of his
birth, and doubtless all of them believed him to be incapable
of committing the crime laid to his charge. The sobbing
which broke in upon the simple and brief address grew so
vehement that the cure's voice suddenly ceased, and he invited
those present to fervent prayer.
There was nothing in this scene to surprise a priest, but
Gabriel de Rastignac was too young not to feel deeply moved
by it. He had not as }-et put priestly virtues in practice; he
knew that a different destiny lay before him; that it would
never be his duty to go forth into the social breaches where
the heart bleeds at the sight of suffering on every side; his
lot would be cast among the upper ranks of the clergy which
keep alive the spirit of sacrifice, represent the highest intelli-
gence of the Church, and, when occasion calls for it, display
these same virtues of the village cure on the largest scale,
like the great Bishops of Marseilles and Meaux, the Arch-
bishops of Aries and Cambrai. The poor peasants were pray-
ing and weeping for one who (as they believed) was even
then going to his death in a great public square, before a
crowd of people assembled from all parts to see him die, the
agony of death made intolerable for him by- the weight of
shame; there was something very touching in this feeble
counterpoise of sympathy and prayer from a few, opposed
to the cruel curiosity of the rabble and the curses, not un-
THE COUNTRY PARSON 95
deserved. The poor church heightened the pathos of the
contrast.
The Abbe Gabriel was tempted to go over to the Tascherons
and cry, "Your son, your brother has been reprieved!" but
he shrank from interrupting the mass; he knew, moreover,
that it was only a reprieve, the execution was sure to take
place sooner or later. But he could not follow the service;
in spite of himself, he began to watch the pastor of whom
the miracle of conversion was expected.
Out of the indications in the parsonage house, Gabriel
de Eastignac had drawn a picture of M. Bonnet in his own
mind: he would be short and stout, he thought, with a red
powerful face, a rough working-man, almost like one of the
peasants themselves, and tanned by the sun. The reality
was very far from this; the Abbe Gabriel found himself in
the presence of an equal. M. Bonnet was short, slender, and
weakly-looking; yet it was none of these characteristics, but
an impassioned face, such a face as we imagine for an
apostle, which struck you at a first glance. In shape it was
almost triangular; starting from the temples on either side
of a broad forehead, furrowed with wrinkles, the meagre
outlines of the hollow cheeks met at a point in the chin. In
that face, overcast by an ivory tint like the wax of an altar
candle, blazed two blue eyes, full of the light of faith and
the fires of a living hope. A long slender, straight nose
divided it into two equal parts. The wide mouth spoke even
when the full, resolute lips were closed, and the voice which
issued thence was one of those which go to the heart. The
chestnut hair, thin, smooth, and fine, denoted a poor physique,
poorly nourished. The whole strength of the man lay in his
will. Such were his personal characteristics. In any other
such short hands might have indicated a bent towards ma-
terial pleasures ; perhaps he too, like Socrates, had found evil
in his nature to subdue. His thinness was ungainly, his
shoulders protruded too much, and he seemed to be knock-
kneed ; his bust was so over developed in comparison with his
limbs, that it gave him something of the appearance of a
96 THE COUNTRY PARSON
hunchback without the actual deformity; altogether, to an
ordinary observer, his appearance was not prepossessing.
Only those who know the miracles of thought and faith and
art can recognize and reverence the light that burns in a
martyr's eyes, the pallor of steadfastness, the voice of love,
all traits of the Cure Bonnet. Here was a man worthy of
that early Church which no longer exists save in the pages
of the Martyrology and in pictures of the sixteenth century;
he bore unmistakably the seal of human greatness which most
nearly approaches the Divine; conviction had set its mark on
him, and a convictio-n brings a salient indefinable beauty into
faces made of the commonest human clay; the devout wor-
shiper at any shrine reflects something of its golden glow,
even as the glory of a noble love shines like a sort of light
from a woman's face. Conviction is human will come to its
full strength ; and being at once the cause and the effect, con-
viction impresses the most indifferent, it is a kind of mute
eloquence which gains a hold upon the masses.
As the cure came down from the altar, his eyes fell on the
Abbe Gabriel, whom he recognized; but when the Bishop's
secretary appeared in the sacristy, he found no one there but
Ursule. Her master had already given his orders. Ursule,
a woman of canonical age, asked the Abbe de Rastignac to
follow her along the passage through the garden.
"Monsieur le Cure told me to ask you whether you had
breakfasted, sir," she said. "You must have started out from
Limoges .very early this morning to be here by ten o'clock,
so I will set about getting breakfast ready. Monsieur 1'Abbe
will not find the Bishop's table here, but we will do our best.
M. Bonnet will not be long ; he has gone to comfort those poor
souls the Tascherons. Something very terrible is happening
to-day to one of their sons."
"But where do the poor people live?" the Abbe Gabriel
put in at length. "I must take M. Bonnet back to Limoges
with me at once by the Bishop's orders. The unhappy man is
not to be executed to-day; his lordship has obtained a re-
prieve -"
THE COUNTRY PARSON 97
"Ah !" cried TJrsule, her tongue itching to spread the news.
"There will be plenty of time to take that comfort to the
poor things whilst I am getting breakfast ready. The
Tascherons live at the other end of the village. You follow
the path under the terrace, that will take you to the house."
As soon as the Abbe Gabriel was fairly out of sight, TJrsule
went down to take the tidings to the village herself, and to
obtain the things needed for breakfast.
The cure had learned, for the first time, at the church
of a desperate resolve on the part of the Tascherons, made
since the appeal had been rejected. They would leave the
district; they had already sold all they had, and that very
morning the money was to be paid down. Formalities and
unforeseen delays had retarded the sale ; they had been forced
to stay in the countryside after Jean-Frangois was condemned,
and every day had been for them a cup of bitterness to drink.
The news of the plan, carried out so secretly, had only trans-
pired on the eve of the day fixed for the execution. The
Tascherons had meant to leave the place before the fatal day ;
but the purchaser of their property was a stranger to the
canton, a Correzein to whom their motives were indifferent,
and he on his own part had found some difficulty in getting
the money together. So the family had endured the utmost
of their misery. So strong was the feeling of their disgrace
in these simple folk who had never tampered witk conscience,
that grandfather and grandmother, daughters and sons-in-
law, father and mother, and all who bore the name of Tas-
cheron, or were connected with them, were leaving the place.
Every one in the commune was sorry that they should go,
and the mayor had gone to the cure, entreating him to use
his influence with the poor mourners.
As the law now stands, the father is no longer responsible
for his son's crime, and the father's guilt does not attach
to his children, a condition of things in keeping with other
emancipations which have weakened the paternal power, and
contributed to the triumph of that individualism which ia
eating the heart of society in our days. The thinker who
98 THE COUNTRY PARSON
looks to the future sees the extinction of the spirit of the
family ; those who drew up the new code have set in its place
equality and independent opinion. The family will always
be the basis of society ; and now the family, as it used to be,
exists no longer, it has come of necessity to be a temporary
arrangement, continually broken up and reunited only to be
separated again; the links between the future and the past
are destroyed, the family of an older time has ceased to exist
in France. Those who proceeded to the demolition of the old
social edifice were logical when they decided that each mem-
ber of the family should inherit equally, lessening the author-
ity of the father, making of each child the head of a new
household, suppressing great responsibilities, but is the social
system thus re-edified as solid a structure, with its laws of
yesterday unproved by long experience, as the old monarchy
was in spite of its abuses ? With the solidarity of the family,
society has lost that elemental force which Montesquieu dis-
covered and called "honor." Society has isolated its members
the better to govern them, and has divided in order to weaken.
The social system reigns over so many units, an aggregation
of so many ciphers, piled up like grains of wheat in a heap.
Can the general welfare take the place of the welfare of the
family? Time holds the answer to this great enigma. And
yet the old order still exists, it is so deeply rooted that you
find it most alive among the people. It is still an active force
in remote districts where "prejudice," as it is called, likewise
exists ; in old-world nooks where all the members of a family
suffer for the crime of one, and the children for the sins of
their fathers.
It was this belief which made their own countryside intol-
erable to the Tascherons. Their profoundly religious natures
had brought them to the church that morning, for how was it
possible to stay away when the mass was said for their son,
and prayer offered that God might bring him to a repentance
which should reopen eternal life to him ? and, moreover, must
they not take leave of the village altar? But, for all that,
their plans were made; and when the cure, who followed
THE COUNTRY PARSON 99
them, entered the principal house, he found the bundles made
up, ready for the journey. The purchaser was waiting with
the money. The notary had just made out the receipt. Out
in the yard, in front of the house, stood a country cart ready
to take the old people and the money and Jean-Frangois'
mother. The rest of the family meant to set out on foot that
night.
The young Abbe entered the room on the ground floor
where the whole family were assembled, just as the cure of
Montegnac had exhausted all his eloquence. The two old
people seemed to have ceased to feel from excess of grief ; they
were crouching on their bundles in a corner of the room,
gazing round them at the old house, which had been a family
possession from father to son, at the familiar furniture, at
the man who had bought it all, and then at each other, as
who should say, "Who would have thought that we should
ever have come to this?" For a long time past the old
people had resigned their authority to their son, the pris-
oner's father; and now, like old kings after their abdication,
they played the passive part of subjects and children.
Tascheron stood upright listening to the cure, to whom he
gave answers in a deep voice by monosyllables. He was a
man of forty-eight or thereabouts, with a fine face, such as
served Titian for his apostles. It was a trustworthy face,
gravely honest and thoughtful; a severe profile, a nose at
right angles with the brows, blue eyes, a noble forehead, regu-
lar features, dark crisped stubborn hair, growing in the sym-
metrical fashion which adds a charm to a visage bronzed by
a life of work in the open air this was the present head of
the house. It was easy to see that the cure's arguments were
shattered against that resolute will.
Denise was leaning against the bread hutch, watching the
notary, who used it as a writing-table; they had given him
the grandmother's armchair. The man who had bought the
place sat beside the scrivener. The two married sisters were
laying the cloth for the last meal which the old folk would
offer or partake of in the old house and in their own country
100 THE COUNTRY PARSON
before they set out to live beneath alien skies. The men of
the family half stood, half sat, propped against the large
bedstead with the green serge curtains, while Tascheron's
wife, their mother, was whisking an omelette by the fire.
The grandchildren crowded about the doorway, and the pur-
chaser's family were outside.
Out of the window you could see the garden, carefully cul-
tivated, stocked with fruit-trees; the two old people had
planted them every one. Everything about them, like the
old smoke-begrimed room with its black rafters, seemed to
share in the pent-up sorrow, which could be read in so many
different expressions on the different faces. The meal was
being prepared for the notary, the purchaser, the children,
and the men ; neither the father, nor mother, nor Denise, nor
her sisters, cared to satisfy their hunger, their hearts were