He acted wisely.  He was full of distrust of himself, and kept himself in prudent reserve in face of the enemy.  For he knew full well that the enemy was there, in these sweet woman’s eyes and those smiles which wished him welcome.

Then the pagan intoxications of the Catholic rites were no more surrounding him to over-excite him and betray the trouble of his heart and the straying of his thoughts, and if he felt affected before the smiles of these marriageable girls, he armed himself with force sufficient to thrust back carefully to his inmost being his boldness and his desires.

It was no more the ardent passionate man who disclosed himself sometimes in rapid moments of forgetfulness, it was the priest austere and calm, the functionary salaried by the State to teach the religion of the State.

IV.

EXPECTATION.

“And the days and the hours glided on, and withdrawn within itself, affected by sorrows and joys unknown, the soul stretched its mysterious wing over a new life soon to dawn.”

  LAMENNAIS (Une voix de prison).

One of his greatest pleasures was to plunge into the woods which surround the village.  He sought silence and solitude there, and when he heard the steps of a keeper or of some pedestrian, or even the happy voices of young couples calling one another, he concealed himself behind the masses of foliage, and hid himself with a kind of shame like a criminal.  He wished to be alone, completely alone, so as to dream at his ease.  Then he stretched himself in the sun on the warm grass, opened his breviary, the discreet confidant of all wandering thoughts, the screen for the priest’s looks and thoughts, and listened to the insects’ hum.

He followed the goings and comings of an ant or the capricious flight of a bumble-bee; then with his eyes lost in space, immersed in the profundity of nature, he dreamed....

One could have seen by his smile that he was wandering in spirit in the laughing and limit-less garden of hope, pausing here and there on rosy illusions and fair chimeras like a butterfly on flowers.

They were delicious hours which he passed thus, full of forgetfulness and indolence.  He enjoyed the present moment, the present, poor, humble and obscure, but which held neither disquietude nor care.

Sometimes regrets for a past of which no one was aware came and knocked at the door of his dreams, but he drove them for away, saying like Werther: 

“The past is past.”

The hand of time revolved without his giving heed, and often night surprised him in his fantastic reveries.  The good country-folk bad been sorely puzzled by these solitary walks in the depths of the woods.

They talked at first of some scandalous intrigue, and the Cure had no difficulty in discovering that he was followed and watched by rigid parishioners, anxious about his morality and his virtue.  More than once through the foliage he believed he saw vigilant sentinels who watched him carefully.