"Ah, my dear, the world would be too beautiful, if men did not spoil
it all! Albine is dead, and Serge is now rector of St. Eutrope, where
he lives with his sister Desiree, a worthy creature who has the good
fortune to be half an idiot. He is a holy man; I have never said the
contrary. One may be an assassin and serve God."

And he went on speaking of the hard things of life, of the blackness
and execrableness of humanity, without losing his gentle smile. He
loved life; and the continuous work of life was a continual joy to him
in spite of all the evil, all the misery, that it might contain. It
mattered not how dreadful life might appear, it must be great and
good, since it was lived with so tenacious a will, for the purpose no
doubt of this will itself, and of the great work which it
unconsciously accomplished. True, he was a scientist, a clear-sighted
man; he did not believe in any idyllic humanity living in a world of
perpetual peace; he saw, on the contrary, its woes and its vices; he
had laid them bare; he had examined them; he had catalogued them for
thirty years past, but his passion for life, his admiration for the
forces of life, sufficed to produce in him a perpetual gaiety, whence
seemed to flow naturally his love for others, a fraternal compassion,
a sympathy, which were felt under the roughness of the anatomist and
under the affected impersonality of his studies.

"Bah!" he ended, taking a last glance at the vast, melancholy plains.
"Le Paradou is no more. They have sacked it, defiled it, destroyed it;
but what does that matter! Vines will be planted, corn will spring up,
a whole growth of new crops; and people will still fall in love in
vintages and harvests yet to come. Life is eternal; it is a perpetual
renewal of birth and growth."