His first visit had been made to the cure of Vivey, where he hoped to meet with some intellectual resources, and a tone of conversation more in harmony with his tastes.  In this expectation, also, he had been disappointed.  The Abbe Pernot was an amiable quinquagenarian, and a ’bon vivant’, whose mind inclined more naturally toward the duties of daily life than toward meditation or contemplative studies.  The ideal did not worry him in the least; and when he had said his mass, read his breviary, confessed the devout sinners and visited the sick, he gave the rest of his time to profane but respectable amusements.  He was of robust temperament, with a tendency to corpulency, which he fought against by taking considerable exercise; his face was round and good-natured, his calm gray eyes reflected the tranquillity and uprightness of his soul, and his genial nature was shown in his full smiling mouth, his thick, wavy, gray hair, and his quick and cordial gestures.

When Julien was ushered into the presbytery, he found the cure installed in a small room, which he used for working in, and which was littered up with articles bearing a very distant connection to his pious calling:  nets for catching larks, hoops and other nets for fishing, stuffed birds, and a collection of coleopterx.  At the other end of the room stood a dusty bookcase, containing about a hundred volumes, which seemed to have been seldom consulted.  The Abbe, sitting on a low chair in the chimney-corner, his cassock raised to his knees, was busy melting glue in an old earthen pot.

“Aha, good-day!  Monsieur de Buxieres,” said he in his rich, jovial voice, “you have caught me in an occupation not very canonical; but what of it?  As Saint James says:  ‘The bow can not be always bent.’  I am preparing some lime-twigs, which I shall place in the Bois des Ronces as soon as the snow is melted.  I am not only a fisher of souls, but I endeavor also to catch birds in my net, not so much for the purpose of varying my diet, as of enriching my collection!”

“You have a great deal of spare time on your hands, then?” inquired Julien, with some surprise.

“Well, yes—­yes—­quite a good deal.  The parish is not very extensive, as you have doubtless noticed; my parishioners are in the best possible health, thank God! and they live to be very old.  I have barely two or three marriages in a year, and as many burials, so that, you see, one must fill up one’s time somehow to escape the sin of idleness.  Every man must have a hobby.  Mine is ornithology; and yours, Monsieur de Buxieres?”

Julien was tempted to reply:  “Mine, for the moment, is ennui.”  He was just in the mood to unburden himself to the cure as to the mental thirst that was drying up his faculties, but a certain instinct warned him that the Abbe was not a man to comprehend the subtle complexities of his psychological condition, so he contented himself with replying, briefly: 

“I read a great deal.  I have, over there in the chateau, a pretty fair collection of historical and religious works, and they are at your service, Monsieur le Cure!”