On the day after his arrival Gobert came face to face with Abbé Rousseau in the church square. He went straight to him, with hands outstretched. The other, not having had time to put himself on guard, was unable to withstand a friendly impulse. The eyes of each scrutinizingly questioned the other, but every dangerous word was avoided. The Abbé, moreover, cut short the interview with the excuse of being expected at the bedside of a sick man. They had parted with the understanding that they should soon see each other again, but two days later, Gobert, going up to the Abbé who was passing, received a curt bow from him, unaccompanied by a word of even perfunctory courtesy. It meant the end of friendly intercourse. The meeting between the "annointed of the Lord" and the "unfrocked priest" had created a scandal in the community of the faithful, and Master Pierre Gaborit, President of the vestry board, had called his _curé_ roundly to account. Could a chaplain of the King's armies afford to be seen consorting with a tool of Satan, a renegade living amid the filth of apostasy, a man who, the report ran, had danced the Carmagnole at the foot of the scaffold?
The disconcerted Abbé listened, shaking his head.
"He was a good fellow, and a godly one, when I knew him formerly, at the seminary. He is perhaps not as guilty as they say--I hoped to bring him back into the fold----"
"One does not bring back the Devil," replied Gaborit, violently. "You do not wish to be a stumbling block, do you, _Monsieur le Curé_?"
"No--no----" replied the Abbé, who already saw himself denounced, excommunicated, damned.
From that day onward relations between the priest and his ancient comrade limited themselves to a mutual raising of the hat, for the Abbé never found the courage to ignore "the renegade," as Gaborit would have wished him to. That is why the latter conceived the plan of forestalling any eventual relapse into weakness by fostering between the man of God and the man of the Devil every possible cause for enmity.
Abbé Rousseau owned the house next to Gobert's, and Gaborit had rented it for his newly married son. A party wall, a common well, contiguous fields and rights of way through them, were more than sufficient to give rise to daily friction. After some resistance, Abbé Rousseau, under the pretext that he could have "no dealings with Satan's emissary," let himself be convinced that he must refuse all customary "rights" to the "enemy." Gobert's remonstrances obtained no attention, and thereupon followed lawsuits. A bucket of lime was thrown into his well. The trees in his orchard were hacked with a bill hook. His hens disappeared. Investigation by a bailiff ensued, and the arrival of the police, who had first been to take instructions at the rectory. For a trifling bribe, the servant of the "accused" permitted the "revolutionary" cow to stray into the clerical hay field. This time Abbé Rousseau could do no less than to denounce the crime from the pulpit. A somewhat distorted version of the entire Revolution was rehearsed.