“You are the one man in all the world that I love, and I will not have you persecuted on my account.  Since, after you, I neither know nor care for a soul, I am going off to live in the woods, like the men of primitive times.  I have inherited a field which brings me in fifty francs a year.  It is the only land I have ever stirred with these hands, and half its wretched rent has gone to pay the tithe of labour I owe the seignior.  I trust to die without ever doing duty as a beast of burden for others.  And yet, should they remove you from your office, or rob you of your income, if you have a field that needs ploughing, only send me word, and you will see that these arms have not grown altogether stiff in their idleness.”

It was in vain that the pastor opposed this resolve.  Patience departed, carrying with him as his only belonging the coat he had on his back, and an abridgment of the teachings of Epictetus.  For this book he had a great affection, and, thanks to much study of it, could read as many as three of its pages a day without unduly tiring himself.  The rustic anchorite went into the desert to live.  At first he built himself a hut of branches in a wood.  Then, as wolves attacked him, he took refuge in one of the lower halls of Gazeau Tower, which he furnished luxuriously with a bed of moss, and some stumps of trees; wild roots, wild fruit, and goat’s milk constituted a daily fare very little inferior to what he had had in the village.  This is no exaggeration.  You have to see the peasants in certain parts of Varenne to form an idea of the frugal diet on which a man can live and keep in good health.  In the midst of these men of stoical habits all round him, Patience was still exceptional.  Never had wine reddened his lips, and bread had seemed to him a superfluity.  Besides, the doctrine of Pythagoras was not wholly displeasing to him; and in the rare interviews which he henceforth had with his friend he would declare that, without exactly believing in metempsychosis, and without making it a rule to eat vegetables only, he felt a secret joy at being able to live thus, and at having no further occasion to see death dealt out every day to innocent animals.

Patience had formed this curious resolution at the age of forty.  He was sixty when I saw him for the first time, and he was then possessed of extraordinary physical vigour.  In truth, he was in the habit of roaming about the country every year.  However, in proportion as I tell you about my own life, I shall give you details of the hermit life of Patience.

At the time of which I am about to speak, the forest rangers, more from fear of his casting a spell over them than out of compassion, had finally ceased their persecutions, and given him full permission to live in Gazeau Tower, not, however, without warning him that it would probably fall about his head during the first gale of wind.  To this Patience had replied philosophically that if he was destined to be crushed to death, the first tree in the forest would do the work quite as well as the walls of Gazeau Tower.