ht
any battle. From the moment that he knelt down, he became perfect,
absolutely oblivious of the flesh, unresisting, undisturbed, as if
overpowered by the Divine grace. Such ecstasy at God's approach is well
known to some young priests: it is a blissful moment when all is hushed,
and the only desire is but a boundless craving for purity. From no human
creature had he sought his consolations. He who believes a certain thing
to be all in all cannot be troubled: and he did believe that God was all
in all, and that humility, obedience, and chastity were everything.
He could remember having heard temptation spoken of as an abominable
torture that tries the holiest. But he would only smile: God had
never left him. He bore his faith about him thus like a breast-plate
protecting him from the slightest breath of evil. He could recall how
he had hidden himself and wept for very love; he knew not whom he loved,
but he wept for love, for love of some one afar off. The recollection
never failed to move him. Later on he had decided on becoming a priest
in order to satisfy that craving for a superhuman affection which was
his sole torment. He could not see where greater love could be. In that
state of life he satisfied his being, his inherited predisposition, his
youthful dreams, his first virile desires. If temptation must come, he
awaited it with the calmness of the seminarist ignorant of the world. He
felt that his manhood had been killed in him: it gladdened him to feel
himself a creature set apart, unsexed, turned from the usual paths of
life, and, as became a lamb of the Lord, marked with the tonsure.

V

While the priest pondered the sun was heating the big church-door.
Gilded flies buzzed round a large flower that was blooming between two
of the church-door steps. Abbe Mouret, feeling slightly dazed, was
at last about to move away, when the big black dog sprang, barking
violently, towards the iron gate of the little graveyard on the left of
the church. At the same time a harsh voice called out: 'Ah! you young
rascal! So you stop away from school, and I find you in the graveyard!
Oh, don't say no: I have been watching you this quarter of an hour.'

As the priest stepped forward he saw Vincent, whom a Brother of
the Christian Schools was clutching tightly by the ear. The lad was
suspended, as it were, over a ravine skirting the graveyard, at the
bottom of which flowed the Mascle, a mountain torrent whose crystal
waters