the gaping cracks in the doors came low
faint sounds which spoke of all the swarming life within. Nausea came
upon him. Yet he had often faced it all without feeling any other need
than that of refreshing himself in prayer.

His brow perspiring, he proceeded to open the other window, as if to
seek cooler air. Below him, to his left, lay the graveyard with the
Solitaire erect like a bar, unstirred by the faintest breeze. From the
empty field arose an odour like that of a newly mown meadow. The
grey wall of the church, that wall full of lizards and planted with
wall-flowers, gleamed coldly in the moonlight, and the panes of one of
the windows glistened like plates of steel. The sleeping church could
now have no other life within it than the extra-human life of the
Divinity embodied in the Host enclosed in the tabernacle. He thought of
the bracket lamp's yellow glow peeping out of the gloom, and was tempted
to go down once more to try to ease his ailing head amid those deep
shadows. But a strange feeling of terror held him back; he suddenly
fancied, while his eyes were fixed upon the moonlit panes, that he saw
the church illumined by a furnace-like glare, the blaze of a festival
of hell, in which whirled the Month of May, the plants, the animals,
and the girls of Les Artaud, who wildly encircled trees with their
bare arms. Then, as he leaned over, he saw beneath him Desiree's
poultry-yard, black and steaming. He could not clearly distinguish the
rabbit-hutches, the fowls' roosting-places, or the ducks' house. The
place was all one big mass heaped up in stench, still exhaling in its
sleep a pestiferous odour. From under the stable-door came the acrid
smell of the nanny-goat; while the little pig, stretched upon his back,
snorted near an empty porringer. And suddenly with his brazen throat
Alexander, the big yellow cock, raised a crow, which awoke in the
distance impassioned calls from all the cocks of the village.

Then all at once Abbe Mouret remembered: The fever had struck him in
Desiree's farmyard, while he was looking at the hens still warm from
laying, the rabbit-does plucking the down from under them. And now the
feeling that some one was breathing on his neck became so distinct that
he turned at last to see who was behind him. And then he recalled Albine
bounding out of the Paradou, and the door slamming upon the vision of an
enchanted garden; he recalled the girl racing alongside the interminable
wall, following t