The Shepherd’s Leap
High cliffs, perpendicular as a wall, skirt the seafront between Dieppe and Havre. In a depression in the cliffs, here and there, one sees a little narrow gulch with steep sides covered with short grass and gorse, which descends from the cultivated tableland toward a shingly beach, where it ends in a depression like the bed of a torrent. Nature made those valleys; the rainstorms created those depressions in which they terminate, wearing away what remained of the cliff, and channeling as far as the sea the bed of the stream.
Sometimes a village lies concealed in these gulches, into which the wind rushes straight from the open sea.
I spent a summer in one of these coast valleys with a peasant, whose house, facing the waves, enabled me to see from my window a huge triangular sweep of blue water framed by the green slopes of the valley, and lighted up in places by white sails passing in the distance in the sunlight.
The road leading towards the sea ran through the further end of the defile, abruptly passed between two chalk cliffs, became a sort of deep gulley before opening on a beautiful carpet of smooth pebbles, rounded and polished by the immemorial caress of the waves.
This steep gorge was called the “Shepherd’s Leap.”
Here is the drama which originated this name.
The story goes that this village was at one time ruled by an austere and violent young priest. He left the seminary filled with hatred toward those who lived according to natural laws, and did not follow the laws of his God. Inflexibly severe on himself, he displayed merciless intolerance toward others. One thing above all stirred him up with rage and disgust—love. If he had lived in cities in the midst of the civilized and the refined, who conceal the brutal dictates of nature behind delicate veils of sentiment and tenderness, if he had heard the confessions of perfumed sinners in some vast cathedral nave, in which their guilt was softened by the grace of their fall and the idealism surrounding material kisses, he would not perhaps have felt those fierce revolts, those inordinate outbursts of anger that took possession of him when he witnessed the vulgar misconduct of some rustic pair in a ditch or in a barn.
He likened them to brutes, these people who knew nothing of love and who simply paired like animals; and he hated them for the coarseness of their souls, for the foul way in which they appeased their instincts, for the repulsive merriment exhibited even by old men when they happened to talk about these unclean pleasures.
Perhaps, too, he was tortured, in spite of himself, by the pangs of appetites which he had refrained from satiating, and secretly troubled by the struggle of his body in its revolt against a spirit despotic and chaste. But everything that had reference to the flesh filled him with indignation, made him furious; and his violent sermons, full of threats and indignant allusions, caused the girls to titter and the young fellows to cast sly glances at them across the church; while the farmers in their blue blouses and their wives in their black mantles, said to each other on their way home from Mass before entering their houses, from the chimney of each of which ascended a thin blue film of smoke:
“He does not joke abont the matter, Mo’sieu’ the Curé!”
On one occasion, and for very slight cause, he flew into such a passion that he lost his reason. He went to see a sick woman. As soon as he reached the farmyard, he saw a crowd of children, those of the house as well and some of their friends, gathered around a dog’s kennel. They were staring curiously at something, standing there motionless, with concentrated, silent attention. The priest walked towards them. It was a dog and her litter of puppies. In front of the kennel five little puppies were swarming around their mother, who was affectionately licking them, and at the moment
