‘Good morning, Monsieur le Curé,’ a passing peasant said to him.
Sounds of digging alongside the cultivated strips of ground again roused him from his abstraction. He turned his head and perceived big knotty-limbed old men greeting him from among the vines. The Artauds were eagerly satisfying their passion for the soil, in the sun’s full blaze. Sweating brows appeared from behind the bushes, heaving chests were slowly raised, the whole scene was one of ardent fructification, through which he moved with the calm step born of ignorance. No discomfort came to him from the great travail of love that permeated that splendid morning.
‘Steady! Voriau, you mustn’t eat people!’ some one gaily shouted in a powerful voice by way of silencing the dog’s loud barks.
Abbé Mouret looked up.
‘Oh! it’s you. Fortune?’ he said, approaching the edge of the field in which the young peasant was at work. ‘I was just on my way to speak to you.’
Fortune was of the same age as the priest: a bigly built, bold-looking young fellow, with skin already hardened. He was clearing a small plot of stony heath.
‘What about, Monsieur le Curé?’ he asked.
‘About Rosalie and you,’ replied the priest.
Fortune began to laugh. Perhaps he thought it droll that a priest should interest himself in such a matter.
‘Well,’ he muttered, ‘I’m not to blame in it nor she either. So much the worse if old Bambousse refuses to let me have her. You saw yourself how his dog was trying to bite me just now; he sets him on me.’