"There is nothing like it, not in the whole of France!"
Père Philibert said it with a wave of the hand. Brother Marc Antoine's pig, stretched at ease with her snout in the cool grass, grunted, as who should say Bien entendu!
We were three in the orchard below the Priory; or four, counting the pig— who is a sow, by the way, and by name Zephirine. Brother Marc Antoine looks after her; a gleeful old fellow of eighty, with a twinkling eye, a scandalously dirty soutane, and a fund of anecdote not always sedate. The Priory excuses him on the ground that his intellectuals are not strong—he has spent most of his life in Africa, and there taken a couple of sunstrokes. Zephirine follows him about like a dog. The pair are mighty hunters of truffles, in the season.
"—Not in the whole of France!" repeated Père Philibert with conviction, nodding from the dappled shade of the orchard-boughs towards the river, where it ran sparkling far below, by grey willows and a margin of mica-strewn sand; not 'apples of gold in a network of silver,' but a landscape all silver seen through a frame of green foliage starred with golden fruit.
The orchard-gate clicked behind us. Brother Marc Antoine, reclining beside the sow with his back against an apple-tree bole, slewed himself round for a look. Père Philibert and I, turning together, saw a man and a woman approaching, with hangdog looks, and a priest between them—the Curé of Ambialet—who seemed to be exhorting them by turns to keep up their courage.
"Pouf!" said the Curé, letting out a big sigh as he came to a standstill and mopped his brow. "Had ever poor man such trouble with his flock?— and the thermometer at twenty-eight, too! Advance, my children—you first, Maman Vacher; and Heaven grant the good father here may compose your differences!"
Here the Curé—himself a peasant—flung out both hands as if resigning the case. Père Philibert, finger on chin, eyed the two disputants with an air of grave abstraction, waiting for one or the other to begin. Brother Marc Antoine leaned back against the apple-tree, and took snuff. His eyes twinkled. Clearly he expected good sport, and I gathered that this was not the first of Ambialet's social difficulties to be brought up to the Priory for solution.
But for the moment both disputants hung back. The woman—an old crone, with a face like a carved nutcracker—dropped an obeisance and stood with her eyes fixed on the ground. The man shifted his weight from foot to foot while he glanced furtively from one to the other of us. I recognised him for Ambialet's only baker, a black-avised fellow on the youthful side of forty. Clearly, the grave dignity of Père Philibert abashed them. "Mais allez, donc! Allez!" cried the Curé, much as one starts a team of horses.
Père Philibert turned slowly on his heel, and, waving a hand once more toward the river, continued his discourse as though it had not been interrupted.
"One might say almost the whole world cannot show its like! To be sure, the historian Herodotus tells us that, when Babylon stood in danger of the Medes, Queen Nitocris applied herself to dig new channels for the Euphrates to make it run crookedly. And in one place she made it wind so that travellers down the river came thrice to the same village on three successive days."