His anger increased as he thought how he had been entrapped, like a mere child. Was he destined, then, to be ever hurled to the ground, with sin crouching victoriously on his breast? This time he had actually denied his God. It was all one fatal descent. His transgression had destroyed his faith, and then dogma had tottered. One single doubt of the flesh, pleading abomination, sufficed to sweep heaven away. The divine ordinances irritated one; the divine mysteries made one smile. Then came other temptations and allurements; gold, power, unrestrained liberty, an irresistible longing for enjoyment, culminating in luxuriousness, sprawling on a bed of wealth and pride. And then God was robbed. His vessels were broken to adorn woman's impurity. Ah! well, then, he was damned. Nothing could make any difference to him now. Sin might speak aloud. It was useless to struggle further. The monsters who had hovered about his neck were battening on his vitals now. He yielded to them with hideous satisfaction. He shook his fists at the church. No; he believed no longer in the divinity of Christ; he believed no longer in the Holy Trinity; he believed in naught but himself, and his muscles and the appetites of his body. He wanted to live. He felt the necessity of being a man. Oh! to speed along through the open air, to be lusty and strong, to owe obedience to no jealous master, to fell one's enemies with stones, to carry off the fair maidens that passed upon one's shoulders. He would break out from that living tomb where cruel hands had thrust him. He would awaken his manhood, which had only been slumbering. And might he die of shame if he should find that it were really dead! And might the Divinity be accursed if, by the touch of His finger, He had made him different from the rest of mankind.
The priest stood erect, his mind all dazed and scared. He fancied that, at this fresh outburst of blasphemy, the church was falling down upon him. The sunlight, which had poured over the high altar, had gradually spread and mounted the walls like ruddy fire. Flames soared and licked the rafters, then died away in a sanguineous, ember-like glow. And all at once the church became quite black. It was as though the fires of the setting sun had burst the roof asunder, pierced the walls, thrown open wide breaches on every side to some exterior foe. The gloomy framework seemed to shake beneath some violent assault. Night was coming on quickly.
Then, in the far distance, the priest heard a gentle murmur rising from the valley of Les Artaud. The time had been when he had not understood the impassioned language of those burning lands, where writhed but knotted vine-stocks, withered almond-trees, and decrepit olives sprawling with crippled limbs. Protected by his ignorance, he had passed undisturbed through all that world of passion. But, to-day, his ear detected the slightest sigh of the leaves that lay panting in the heat. Afar off, on the edge of the horizon, the hills, still hot with the sinking luminary's farewell, seemed to set themselves in motion with the tramp of an army on the march. Nearer at hand, the scattered rocks, the stones along the road, all the pebbles in the valley, throbbed and rolled as if possessed by a craving for motion. Then the tracts of ruddy soil, the few fields that had been reduced to cultivation, seemed to heave and growl like rivers that had burst their banks, bearing along in a blood-like flood the engenderings of seeds, the births of roots, the embraces of plants. Soon everything was in motion. The vine-branches appeared to crawl along like huge insects; the parched corn and the dry grass formed into dense, lance-waving battalions; the trees stretched out their boughs like wrestlers making ready for a contest; the fallen leaves skipped forward; the very dust on the road rolled on. It was a moving multitude reinforced by fresh recruits at every step; a legion, the sound of whose coming went on in front of it; an outburst of passionate life, sweeping everything along in a mighty whirlwind of fruitfulness. And all at once the assault began. From the limits of the horizon, the whole countryside, the hills and stones and fields and trees, rushed upon the church. At the first shock, the building quivered and cracked. The walls were pierced and the tiles on the roof were thrown down. But the great Christ, although shaken, did not fall.
A short respite followed. Outside, the voices sounded more angrily, and the priest could now distinguish human ones amongst them. The Artauds, those bastards who sprang up out of the rocky soil with the persistence of brambles, were now in their turn blowing a blast that reeked of teeming life. They had planted everywhere forests of humanity that swallowed up all around them. They came up to the church, they shattered the door with a push, and threatened to block up the very nave with the invading scions of their race. Behind them came the beasts; the oxen that tried to batter down the walls with their horns, the flocks of asses, goats, and sheep, that dashed against the ruined church like living waves, while swarms of wood-lice and crickets attacked the foundations and reduced them to dust with their sawlike teeth. Yet again, on the other side, there was Desiree's poultry-yard, where the dunghill reeked with suffocating fumes. Here the big cock, Alexander, sounded the assault, and the hens loosened the stones with their beaks, and the rabbits burrowed under the very altars; whilst the pig, too fat to stir, grunted and waited till all the sacred ornaments should be reduced to warm ashes in which he might wallow at his ease.
A great roar ascended, and a second assault was delivered. The villagers, the animals, all that overflowing sea of life assailed the church with such impetuosity that the rafters bent and curved. This time a part of the walls tottered and fell down, the ceiling shook, the woodwork of the windows was carried away, and the grey mist of the evening streamed in through the frightful gaping breaches. The great Christ now only clung to His cross by the nail that pierced His left hand.
A mighty shout hailed the downfall of the block of wall. Yet the church still stood there firmly, in spite of the injuries it had received. It offered a stern, silent, unflinching resistance, clutching desperately to the tiniest stones of its foundations. It seemed as though, to keep itself from falling, it required only the support of its slenderest pillar, which, by some miracle of equilibration, held up the gaping roof. Then Abbe Mouret beheld the rude plants of the plateau, the dreadful-looking growths that had become hard as iron amidst the arid rocks, that were knotted like snakes and bossy with muscles, set themselves to work. The rust-hued lichens gnawed away at the rough plasterwork like fiery leprosy. Then the thyme-plants thrust their roots between the bricks like so many iron wedges. The lavenders insinuated hooked fingers into the loosened stonework, and by slow persistent efforts tore the blocks asunder. The junipers, the rosemaries, the prickly holly bushes, climbed higher and battered the walls with irresistible blows; and even the grass, the grass whose dry blades slipped beneath the great door, stiffened itself into steel-like spears and made its way down the nave, where it forced up the flagstones with powerful levers. It was a victorious revolt, it was revolutionary nature constructing barricades out of the overturned altars, and wrecking the church which had for centuries cast too deep a shadow over it. The other combatants had fallen back, and let the plants, the thyme and the lavender and the lichens, complete the overthrow of the building with their ceaseless little blows, their constant gnawing, which proved more destructive than the heavier onslaught of the stronger assailants.
Then, suddenly, the end came. The rowan-tree, whose topmost branches had already forced their way through the broken windows under the vaulted roof, rushed in violently with its formidable stream of greenery. It planted itself in the centre of the nave and grew there monstrously. Its trunk expanded till its girth became so colossal that it seemed as though it would burst the church asunder like a girdle spanning it too closely. Its branches shot out in knotted arms, each one of which broke down a piece of the wall or thrust off a strip of the roof, and they went on multiplying without cessation, each branch ramifying, till a fresh tree sprang out of each single knot, with such impetuosity of growth that the ruins of the church, pierced through and through like a sieve, flew into fragments, scattering a fine dust to the four quarters of the heavens.