surmounted by a bald head, the entire figure running to length, which is, they say, the mark of an immoderate idealism. I remember his small, mocking green eyes, sunk behind the brush of his formidable eyebrows. The long, white side-whiskers, the carefully shaven lips that would stretch to his ears in a grin like Voltaire's, accompanied by a dry chuckle, have remained alive in my memory, as have also his wide, incoördinate gestures, his dry, harsh voice, and his biting, wrathful utterances.

I should find it impossible at this distance to trace the life history of Doctor Jean du Pouët, known over the entire Plain, from Sainte Hermine to Fontenay-le-Comte, under the familiar yet respectful title of "The Doctor." All I can say is that the Doctor, hailing originally from L'Aiguillon, a little port of the Vendée at the mouth of the Lay, had sailed every sea, landed on every island, visited every coast of every continent, and made his studies of all nations on earth from life, which enabled him to criticise his neighbours at every turn by comparing them, disastrously for them, with heaven knows what abominable savages, in which comparison the latter were always found far superior, with regard to the point under discussion, to the men of the Vendée, from the Plain, the Woodland, and the Marsh, all put together.

It was in the very heart of the Plain, in the village of Ecoulandres, that the "Doctor" had come to settle, brought there by an inheritance from a cousin, who had left him lord and master of an old middle-class dwelling with large tile-paved rooms in which hung panoplies of tomahawks, javelins, bucklers, boomerangs, in warlike wreaths around monstrous idols, whose barbaric names, impressively enumerated by the traveller, aroused a holy terror in the soul of the peaceable tillers of the soil.

A little wood of elms, a great curiosity in a region where not a tree is to be seen, surrounded the domain. It was a thin copse, the layer of soil making but a shallow covering to the underlying limestone. This did not prevent our stern censor from taking a certain pride in his "grove," without its like to the furthermost boundary of the horizon. I must even confess that the doctor, like any other true son of the Vendée, had a very well-developed sense of landed proprietorship. Money ran through his fingers, and no outstretched palm ever sought his help in vain. But the possessive pronoun rose readily to his lips when talk turned upon the land. "My dung," "my stones," "my nettles," he was wont to say. He adored his Plain—"Green in springtime, in summer gold," where fleecy crops rippled under the great blue canopy,—pierced along the horizon by steeples suggestive of distant shipping. Flights of plovers in January and ducks in September engaged the doctor's attention. He watched for them from a murderous shooting shelter, and invented incredible ruses to allure them nearer. The rest of his time was spent scouring the countryside in a jolting rural trap, hastening to the bedside of the sick, who sent for him on any and all occasions, but did not greatly value his visits, as he never required payment, or administered to his patients that accompanying dose of legitimate charlatanism which forms the chief factor in so many cures.

For the doctor was above all things outspoken. I am unaware whether some great disappointment had driven him to misanthropy, or whether he had merely given way to the natural bent of his character. Whatever may have been his soul's history, it is certain that he at every opportunity exercised his fine capacity for indignation against mankind in general, and with particular delight against the specimens of it who happened to be present. Never any coarse rudeness, however, and absolutely never any active ill will. He was not to be taken at his word, his pleasure consisting merely in satanic thoughts, the cruel expression of which sufficed for the satisfaction of his ferocity.

You should have heard him on the subject of love, of friendship, of gratitude. It was his joy to demonstrate that every form of courtesy concealed a lie, by which he was no more deceived than was the person favouring him with it. It was no pleasure trip, coming to thank him for having saved a sick man's life. The patient and his friends heard startling things concerning the self-interest at bottom of their thoughts.

"Are you so glad, then, not to get your inheritance?" he would say to a son who came to tell him of his old father's complete return to health.

And he would cite living parallels, drawn from the life of neighbouring villages, calling the characters by name, to demonstrate what a foundation of selfishness was covered by the veneer of affection people are so fond of exhibiting. The peasant would listen silently, wearing a foolish grin, pretending to be stupid in order to escape the necessity of answering, and admitting in the depth of his inmost heart that the doctor read him like an open book, and that one could have no secrets from that devil of a man.

His talk upon marriage, the family, religion, property, the judiciary, the administration itself, was directed by the blackest psychology. But his chief victim was the curé of Ecoulandres, an old friend who did not take abuse without virulent retaliation, which led to curious fencing bouts between the two.

The truth is that the two men had a great liking for each other. Both of them were remnants of the France of the eighteenth century, both suffering from the same stab of disillusion which the Revolution and the Empire had driven into their fondest dreams. The doctor found vent in wrath, the Abbé in resignation. Fundamentally alike in their wounded ideality, they sought each other out in the obstinate hope of agreeing, yet met only to offend, and to spend their strength in painful and useless strife, parting with bruised hearts and great oaths never to meet again, only to rush together on the following day.

The Abbé Jaud, like his inseparable enemy, was of more than ordinary height, and without the cassock clinging to his lean sides might at fifty paces have been taken for him. The doctor's excuse for frequenting the Abbé was that he could talk to him without stooping. When the two tall silhouettes were outlined against the horizon at the edge of the plain they might have been taken for one and the same man. They were, in truth, one man in two persons.

In their last years death naturally formed the inexhaustible topic of their conversation. The doctor had, he used to say, determined to die before the Abbé, in order to force him to perform an act of supreme hypocrisy by obliging him to bury with every formality the man who, having proclaimed himself an atheist all his days, had refused with his latest breath to put himself in order with the Church.

"One talks like that," said the Abbé. "When on the verge of the great step, one changes one's mind."

"Mine will not change."

"Then, my dear Doctor, I shall be under the painful necessity of letting you go unaccompanied to the grave."

"Not so. You will accompany me. You will mutter your Pater Nosters, let me assure you. You will sprinkle my coffin with holy water. You will sing psalms, clad in your finest stole. You will say a mass with all the fallals, and you will not leave me until you have provided me with a proper passport in due form."

"Cease blaspheming, or I must refuse to listen."

"A fine way to dispose of a difficulty! Do you know where I wish to be buried by your good agency, Abbé? In the unconsecrated part of the graveyard. Once upon a time the earth as well as the skies belonged to you. You laid claims to this planet as your property, and no one had the right to rot under ground save by your leave. Six feet of sod had to be wrested from you by main force to bury Molière! To-day, at last, we have taken back control over our earth. We have conquered the right to a peaceful return to nothingness. And now, to foster the illusion of getting even, and to shut yourselves to the very end in your secular spirit,