, and little good comes
of it. He is persecuted, actually to the death, by his rural dean, a
sort of duplicate of the hero of _L'Abbe Tigrane_; but the circumstances
are not purely ecclesiastical. He has, in his new parish, taken for
goat-girl a certain Marie Galtier, daughter of his beadle, but,
unluckily, also step-daughter of a most abominable step-mother. Marie,
as innocently as possible, "gets into trouble," and dies of it,
accusations being brought against her guiltless and guileless master in
consequence. There are many good passages; the opening is (as nearly
always with M. Fabre) excellent; but both the parts and the whole are,
once more, too long--the mere "flitting" from one parish to another
seems never to be coming to an end. Still, the book should be read; and
it has one very curious class of personages, the "hermits" of the
Cevennes--probably the latest (the date is 1846) of their kind in
literature. The general characteristics of that kind do not seem to have
been exactly saintly;[532] and the best of them, Adon Laborie, after
being "good" throughout, and always intending to be so, brings about the
catastrophe by calmly suppressing, in the notion that he will save the
Abbe trouble, three successive citations from the Diocesan Council,
thereby getting him "interdicted." The shock, when the judgment in
contumacy is announced by the brutal dean, proves fatal.

[Sidenote: _Lucifer._]

In Lucifer M. Fabre is still nearer, though with no repetition, to the
_Tigrane_ motive. The book justifies its title by being the most
ambitious of all the novels, and justifies the ambition itself by
showing a great deal of power--most perhaps again, of all; though
whether that power is used to the satisfaction of the reader must
depend, even more than is usual, on individual tastes. Bernard Jourfier,
at the beginning of the book and of the Second Empire, is a young
_vicaire_, known to be of great talents and, in especial, of unusual
preaching faculty, but of a violent temper, ill at ease about his own
vocation, and suspected--at least by Ultramontanes--of very doubtful
orthodoxy and not at all doubtful Gallicanism. He is, moreover, the
grandson of a _conventionnel_ who voted for the King's death, and the
son of a deputy of extreme Liberal views. So the Jesuits, after trying
to catch him for themselves, make a dead set at him, and secure his
appointment to out-of-the-way country parishes only, and even in these
his constant