when the curé stretched forward his head above the heads of the children, a sixth tiny pup was born. All the brats, seized with joy at the sight of it, began to bawl out, clapping their hands: “Here’s another of them! Here’s another of them!”
To them it was a pleasure, a natural pleasure, into which nothing impure entered; they gazed at the birth of the puppies just as they would have looked at apples falling from trees. But the man with the black robe was quivering with indignation, and, losing his head, he lifted up his big blue umbrella and began to beat the youngsters. They retreated at full speed. Then, finding himself left alone with the animal, he proceeded to beat her also. As in her condition she was unable to run way she moaned while she struggled against his attack, and jumping on top of her, he crushed her under his feet, and with a few kicks with his heel finished her off. Then he left the body bleeding in the midst of the newborn animals, whining and helpless and instinctively making efforts to get at the mother’s teats.
He would take long walks, all alone, with a frown on his face. Now, one evening in May, as he was returning from a place some distance away, and going along by the cliff to get back to the village, a fierce shower of rain impeded his progress. He could see no house in sight, only the bare coast on every side riddled by the pelting downpour.
The rough sea dashed against him in masses of foam; and thick black clouds gathering at the horizon redoubled the rain. The wind whistled, blew great guns, battered down the growing crops, and the dripping Abbé; filling his ears with noises, and exciting his heart with its tumult.
He took off his hat, exposing his forehead to the storm, and by degrees approached the descent towards the lowland. But he had such a rattling in his throat that he could not advance farther, and, all of a sudden, he espied near a sheep pasture, a shepherd’s hut, a kind of movable box on wheels that the shepherds can drag in summer from pasture to pasture.
Above a wooden stool, a low door was open, affording a view of the straw inside.
The priest was on the point of entering to take shelter when he saw a loving couple embracing each other in the shadow. Thereupon, he abruptly closed the door and fastened it; then, getting the shafts, he bent his lean back and dragged the hut after him, like a horse. And thus he ran along in his drenched cassock toward the steep incline, the fatal incline, with the young couple he had caught together, who were banging their fists against the door of the hut, believing probably that the whole thing was only the practical joke of a passerby.
When he got to the top of the descent, he let go of the frail structure, which began to roll over the sloping side of the cliff. It then rolled down precipitately, carried along blindly, ever increasing in the speed of its course, leaping, stumbling like an animal, striking the ground with its shafts.
An old beggar, cuddled up in a gap near the cliff, saw it passing, with a rush above his head, and he heard dreadful cries coming from the interior of this wooden box.
Suddenly a wheel fell off from a collision with some stone; and then the hut, falling on one side, began to topple downward like a ball, like a house torn from its foundations, and tumbling down from the top of a mountain; and then, having reached the edge of the last depression it turned over, describing a curve in its fall, and was broken like an egg, at the bottom of the cliff.
The pair of lovers were picked up, bruised, battered, with all their limbs fractured, but still clasped in each other’s arms, but now through terror.
The curé refused to admit their corpses into the church or to pronounce a benediction over their coffins. And on the following Sunday in his sermon he spoke vehemently about the Seventh Commandment, threatening the lovers with an avenging and mysterious arm, and citing the terrible example of the two wretches killed in the midst of their sin.
As he was leaving the church, two gendarmes arrested him.
A coastguard who was in a sentry-box had seen him.
The priest was sentenced to a term of penal servitude.
And the peasant who told me the story added gravely:
“I knew him, Monsieur. He was a rough man, that’s a fact, but he did not like fooling.”
The Bed
On a stifling afternoon during last summer, the large auction rooms seemed asleep, and the auctioneers were knocking down the various lots in a listless manner. In a back room, on the first floor, two or three lots of all silk ecclesiastical vestments were lying in a corner.
They were copes for solemn occasions, and graceful chasubles on which embroidered flowers surrounded symbolic letters on a yellowish ground, which had originally been white. Some secondhand dealers were there, two or three men with dirty beards, and a fat woman with a big stomach, one of those women who deal in secondhand finery and manage illicit love affairs, women who are brokers in old and young human flesh, just as much as they are in new and old clothes.
Presently, a beautiful Louis XV chasuble, as pretty as the dress of a marquise, was put up for sale. It had retained all its colours, and was embroidered with lilies of the valley round the cross, and long blue irises, which came up to the foot of the sacred emblem, and with wreaths of roses in the corners. When I had bought it, I noticed that there was a faint scent about it, as if it were permeated with the remains of incense, or still pervaded by those delicate, sweet scents of bygone years,
