lowly raised, the whole scene was one of ardent fructification,
through which he moved with the calm step born of ignorance. No
discomfort came to him from the great travail of love that permeated
that splendid morning.

'Steady! Voriau, you mustn't eat people!' some one gaily shouted in a
powerful voice by way of silencing the dog's loud barks.

Abbe Mouret looked up.

'Oh! it's you. Fortune?' he said, approaching the edge of the field in
which the young peasant was at work. 'I was just on my way to speak to
you.'

Fortune was of the same age as the priest: a bigly built, bold-looking
young fellow, with skin already hardened. He was clearing a small plot
of stony heath.

'What about, Monsieur le Cure?' he asked.

'About Rosalie and you,' replied the priest.

Fortune began to laugh. Perhaps he thought it droll that a priest should
interest himself in such a matter.

'Well,' he muttered, 'I'm not to blame in it nor she either. So much the
worse if old Bambousse refuses to let me have her. You saw yourself how
his dog was trying to bite me just now; he sets him on me.'

Then, as Abbe Mouret was about to continue, old Artaud, called Brichet,
whom he had not previously perceived, emerged from the shadow of a bush
behind which he and his wife were eating. He was a little man, withered
by age, with a cringing face.

'Your reverence must have been told a pack of lies,' he exclaimed.
'The youngster is quite ready to marry Rosalie. What's happened isn't
anybody's fault. It has happened to others who got on all right just the
same. The matter doesn't rest with us. You ought to speak to Bambousse.
He's the one who looks down on us because he's got money.'

'Yes, we are very poor,' whined his wife, a tall lachrymose woman, who
also rose to her feet. 'We've only this scrap of ground where the very
devil seems to have been hailing stones. Not a bite of bread from it,
even. Without you, your reverence, life would be impossible.'

Brichet's wife was the one solitary devotee of the village. Whenever she
had been to communion, she would hang about the parsonage, well knowing
that La Teuse always kept a couple of loaves for her from her last
baking. At times she was even able to carry off a rabbit or a fowl given
her by Desiree.

'There's no end to the scandals,' continued the priest. 'The marriage
must take place without delay.'

'Oh! at once! as soon as the others are agreeable,' said the old woman,
alarmed about her p