Very different from the sombre-looking Franciscan, bent over the wheelbarrow, is the Pere Etienne.  He is as cheerful and sprightly as if he were now convinced that a convent is the pleasantest place on earth to live in, and that outside of it all is vanity and vexation.  He teaches the boys Latin, Greek, English, and the physical sciences.  Although he has never been out of France and Italy, he can speak English, and actually make himself understood.  He is a botanist, and he and I have already spent some hours together in his cell before a table strewn with floras and plants, both dry and fresh.  This time we are joined by a young monk who has been gathering flowers on the banks of the Tarn, and has placed them between the leaves of a great Latin Bible.

These meetings, and the library of the priory, with its valuable works by local historians, strengthened the spell by which Ambialet held me.  The monks whom one occasionally meets in Languedoc are generally men of better culture than the ordinary rural clergy, most of whom show plainly enough by their ideas and the vigorous expressions which they rarely hesitate to use in any company that they are sons of the soil.  As priests, situated as they are, this coarseness of manners and circumscribed range of ideas, so far from being a disadvantage, forms a bond of union between them and the people.  A man to be deeply pitied is he who, having a really superior and cultivated mind, is charged with the cure of souls in some forlorn parish where nobody has the time or the taste to read.  Such a priest must either bring his ideas down to those of the people around him, or be content to live in absolute intellectual isolation.  He may turn to the companionship of books, it is true, but his library is very small; and if, as is probable, his income is not more than £40 a year, he is too poor to add to it.  Such a revenue, when the bare needs of the body have been met, does not leave much for satisfying a literary appetite.

The priory of Notre Dame de l’Oder was founded in the twelfth or thirteenth century by the Benedictines, but a church already existed on the spot as early, it is supposed, as the eighth century.  The one now standing, and which became incorporated with the priory, probably dates from the eleventh.  If the interior is cold by the severity of the lines scarcely broken by ornament, the artistic sense is warmed by the beauty of the proportions and general disposition.  The apse, with its three little windows, has the perfect charm of grace and simplicity.  A structural peculiarity, to be especially noted as one of the tentative efforts of Romanesque art, is the use of half-arches for the vaulting of the two narrow aisles.  Unfortunately, the plastering mania, which has robbed the interior of so many French churches of their venerable air, has not spared this one.  A singularly broad flight of steps, partly cut in the rock and covered with tiles, leads up to the portal; but as the building has been closed to the public since the application of the law dispersing religious communities, these steps look as if they belonged to the Castle of Indolence, so overgrown with grass are they and abandoned to the wandering wild-flowers.  Great mulleins have been allowed to spring up from the gaps between the lichen-spotted tiles.