In the first place, where is Mount Faunus? The authors do not point it out. The natives know nothing about it. It would be necessary to devote themselves to excavations, and with that view they forwarded a petition to the prefect, to which they got no response.
Perhaps Mount Faunus had disappeared, and was not a hill but a barrow?
Several of them contain skeletons that have the position of the fœtus in the mother's womb. This meant that for them the tomb was, as it were, a second gestation, preparing them for another life. Therefore the barrow symbolises the female organ, just as the raised stone is the male organ.
In fact, where menhirs are found, an obscene creed has persisted. Witness what took place at Guerande, at Chichebouche, at Croissic, at Livarot. In former times the towers, the pyramids, the wax tapers, the boundaries of roads, and even the trees had a phallic meaning. Bouvard and Pécuchet collected whipple-trees of carriages, legs of armchairs, bolts of cellars, apothecaries' pestles. When people came to see them they would ask, "What do you think that is like?" and then they would confide the secret. And, if anyone uttered an exclamation, they would shrug their shoulders in pity.
One evening as they were dreaming about the dogmas of the Druids, the abbé cautiously stole in.
Immediately they showed the museum, beginning with the church window; but they longed to reach the new compartment—that of the phallus. The ecclesiastic stopped them, considering the exhibition indecent. He came to demand back his baptismal font.
Bouvard and Pécuchet begged for another fortnight, the time necessary for taking a moulding of it.
"The sooner the better," said the abbé.
Then he chatted on general topics.
Pécuchet, who had left the room a minute, on coming back slipped a napoleon into his hand.