o the river,
irrigating channels like those of La Marche and Berry indicated the flow
of water around the village by the green fringe of verdure about them;
Montegnac seemed tossed in their midst like a vessel at sea. When
a house, an estate, a village, a region, passes from the wretched
condition to a prosperous one, without becoming either rich or splendid,
life seems so easy, so natural to living beings, that the spectator may
not at once suspect the enormous labor, infinite in petty detail, grand
in persistency like the toil buried in a foundation wall, in short, the
forgotten labor on which the whole structure rests.

Consequently the scene that lay before him told nothing extraordinary
to the young Abbe Gabriel as his eye took in the charming landscape.
He knew nothing of the state of the region before the arrival of the
rector, Monsieur Bonnet. The young man now went on a few steps and again
saw, several hundred feet above the gardens of the upper village, the
church and the parsonage, which he had already seen from a distance
confusedly mingled with the imposing ruins clothed with creepers of the
old castle of Montegnac, one of the residences of the Navarreins family
in the twelfth century.

The parsonage, a house originally built no doubt for the bailiff or
game-keeper, was noticeable for a long raised terrace planted with
lindens from which a fine view extended over the country. The steps
leading to this terrace and the walls which supported it showed their
great age by the ravages of time. The flat moss which clings to stones
had laid its dragon-green carpet on each surface. The numerous families
of the pellitories, the chamomiles, the mesembryanthemums, pushed their
varied and abundant tufts through the loop-holes in the walls, cracked
and fissured in spite of their thickness. Botany had lavished there
its most elegant drapery of ferns of all kinds, snap-dragons with their
violet mouths and golden pistils, the blue anchusa, the brown lichens,
so that the old worn stones seemed mere accessories peeping out at
intervals from this fresh growth. Along the terrace a box hedge, cut
into geometric figures, enclosed a pleasure garden surrounding the
parsonage, above which the rock rose like a white wall surmounted by
slender trees that drooped and swayed above it like plumes.

The ruins of the castle looked down upon the house and church. The
house, built of pebbles and mortar, had but one story surmounted by an