Before him stretched the vast plain, more direful still beneath the pallid light of the oblique moonbeams.  The olive and almond trees showed like grey spots amid the chaos of rocks spreading to the sombre row of hills on the horizon.  There were big splotches of gloom, bumpy ridges, blood-hued earthy pools in which red stars seemed to contemplate one another, patches of chalky light, suggestive of women’s garments cast off and disclosing shadowy forms which slumbered in the hollow folds of ground.  At night that glowing landscape weltered there strangely, passionately, slumbering with uncovered bosom, and outspread twisted limbs, whilst heaving mighty sighs, and exhaling the strong aroma of a sweating sleeper.  It was as if some mighty Cybele had fallen there beneath the moon, intoxicated with the embraces of the sun.  Far away, Abbe Mouret’s eyes followed the path to Les Olivettes, a narrow pale ribbon stretching along like a wavy stay-lace.  He could hear Brother Archangias whipping the truant schoolgirls, and spitting in the faces of their elder sisters.  He could see Rosalie slyly laughing in her hands while old Bambousse hurled clods of earth after her and smote her on her hips.  Then, too, he thought, he had still been well, his neck barely heated by the lovely morning sunshine.  He had felt but a quivering behind him, that confused hum of life, which he had faintly heard since morning when the sun, in the midst of his mass, had entered the church by the shattered windows.  Never, then, had the country disturbed him, as it did at this hour of night, with its giant bosom, its yielding shadows, its gleams of ambery skin, its lavish goddess-like nudity, scarce hidden by the silvery gauze of moonlight.

The young priest lowered his eyes, and gazed upon the village of Les Artaud.  It had sunk into the heavy slumber of weariness, the soundness of peasants’ sleep.  Not a light:  the battered hovels showed like dusky mounds intersected by the white stripes of cross lanes which the moonbeams swept.  Even the dogs were surely snoring on the thresholds of the closed doors.  Had the Artauds poisoned the air of the parsonage with some abominable plague?  Behind him gathered and swept the gust whose approach filled him with so much anguish.  Now he could detect a sound like the tramping of a flock, a whiff of dusty air, which reached him laden with the emanations of beasts.  Again came back his thoughts of a handful of men beginning the centuries over again, springing up between those naked rocks like thistles sown by the winds.  In his childhood nothing had amazed and frightened him more than those myriads of insects which gushed forth when he raised certain damp stones.  The Artauds disturbed him even in their slumber; he could recognise their breath in the air he inhaled.  He would have liked to have had the rocks alone below his window.  The hamlet was not dead enough; the thatched roofs bulged like bosoms; through 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.