And yet, as I say, M. le Curé thinks they are in a bad way, and he knows something about them. M. le Curé, too, is not a dealer in scandal; there is something delightfully quaint in the way in which he deprecates an un-Christian construction of his words. There is more than one curé in the valley whose charms I celebrate; but the worthy priest of whom I speak is the pearl of the local priesthood. He has been accused, I believe, of pretentions to what is called _illuminisme_; but even in his most illuminated moments it can never occur to him that he has been chronicled in an American magazine, and therefore it is not indiscreet to say that he is the curé, not of Gy, but of the village nearest to Gy. I write this sentence half for the pleasure of putting down that briefest of village names and seeing how it looks in print. But it may be elongated at will, and yet be only improved. If you wish to be very specific, you may call it Gy-les-Nonnains--Gy of the Little Nuns. I went with my hostess, another morning, to call upon M. le Curé, who himself opened his garden door to us (there was a crooked little black cross perched upon it), and, lifting his rusty _calotte_, stood there a moment in the sunshine, smiling a greeting more benignant than words.
A rural _presbytère_ is not a very sumptuous dwelling, and M. le Curé's little drawing room reminded me of a Yankee parlor (_minus_ the subscription books from Hartford, on the centre-table) in some out-of-the-way corner of New England. But he took us into his very diminutive garden, and showed us an ornament that would not have flourished in the shade of a Yankee parlor--a rude stone image of the Virgin, which he had become possessed of I know not how, and for which he was building a sort of niche in the wall. The work was going on slowly, for he must take the labor as he could get it; but he appealed to his visitors, with a smile of indulgent irony, for an assurance that his little structure would not make too bad a figure. One of them told him that she would send him some white flowers to set out round his statue; whereupon he clasped his hands together over his snuff-box and expressed cheerful views of the world we live in. A couple of days afterward he came to breakfast, and, of course, he arrived early, in his new cassock and band. I found him in the billiard-room, walking up and down alone, and reading his breviary. The combination of the locality, the personage, and the occupation made me smile; and I smiled again when, after breakfast, I found him walking up and down the garden, puffing a cigarette. Of course he had an excellent appetite; but there is something rather cruel in those alternations of diet to which the French parish priest is subjected. At home he lives like a peasant--a fact which, in itself, is not particularly cruel, inasmuch as he is usually a peasant born. But his fellow peasants don't breakfast at the château and gaze adown the savory vistas opened by cutlets à la Soubise. They have not the acute pain of being turned back into the stale atmosphere of bread and beans. Of course it is by no means every day or every week even that M. le Curé breakfasts at the château; but there must nevertheless be a certain uncomfortable crookedness in his position. He lives like a laborer, and yet he is treated like a gentleman. The latter character must seem to him sometimes a rather heavy irony on the other. But to the ideal curé, of course, all characters are equal; he thinks neither too ill of his bad breakfasts, nor too well of his good ones. I won't say that the excellent man I speak of is the ideal curé, but I suspect he is an approach to it; he has a grain of epicureanism to an ounce of stoicism. In the garden path, beside the moat, while he puffed his cigarette, he told me how he had held up his head to the Prussians; for, hard as it seemed to believe it, that pastoral valley had been occupied by ravaging Teutons. According to this recital, he had spoken his mind civilly, but most distinctly, to the group of officers who had made themselves at home in his dwelling--had informed them that it grieved him profoundly that he was obliged to meet them standing there in his cassock, and not out in the fields with a musket in his hands and a dozen congenial spirits at his side. The scene must have been picturesque. The first of the officers got up from table and asked for the privilege of shaking his hand. "M. le Curé," he said, "j'estime hautement votre caractère."