The Shepherd’s Leap
High cliffs, perpendicular as a wall, skirt the seafront between Dieppe and Havre. In a depression in the cliffs, here and there, one sees a little narrow gulch with steep sides covered with short grass and gorse, which descends from the cultivated tableland toward a shingly beach, where it ends in a depression like the bed of a torrent. Nature made those valleys; the rainstorms created those depressions in which they terminate, wearing away what remained of the cliff, and channeling as far as the sea the bed of the stream.
Sometimes a village lies concealed in these gulches, into which the wind rushes straight from the open sea.
I spent a summer in one of these coast valleys with a peasant, whose house, facing the waves, enabled me to see from my window a huge triangular sweep of blue water framed by the green slopes of the valley, and lighted up in places by white sails passing in the distance in the sunlight.
The road leading towards the sea ran through the further end of the defile, abruptly passed between two chalk cliffs, became a sort of deep gulley before opening on a beautiful carpet of smooth pebbles, rounded and polished by the immemorial caress of the waves.
This steep gorge was called the “Shepherd’s Leap.”
Here is the drama which originated this name.
The story goes that this village was at one time ruled by an austere and violent young priest. He left the seminary filled with hatred toward those who lived according to natural laws, and did not follow the laws of his God. Inflexibly severe on himself, he displayed merciless intolerance toward others. One thing above all stirred him up with rage and disgust—love. If he had lived in cities in the midst of the civilized and the refined, who conceal the brutal dictates of nature behind delicate veils of sentiment and tenderness, if he had heard the confessions of perfumed sinners in some vast cathedral nave, in which their guilt was softened by the grace of their fall and the idealism surrounding material kisses, he would not perhaps have felt those fierce revolts, those inordinate outbursts of anger that took possession of him when he witnessed the vulgar misconduct of some rustic pair in a ditch or in a barn.
He likened them to brutes, these people who knew nothing of love and who simply paired like animals; and he hated them for the coarseness of their souls, for the foul way in which they appeased their instincts, for the repulsive merriment exhibited even by old men when they happened to talk about these unclean pleasures.
Perhaps, too, he was tortured, in spite of himself, by the pangs of appetites which he had refrained from satiating, and secretly troubled by the struggle of his body in its revolt against a spirit despotic and chaste. But everything that had reference to the flesh filled him with indignation, made him furious; and his violent sermons, full of threats and indignant allusions, caused the girls to titter and the young fellows to cast sly glances at them across the church; while the farmers in their blue blouses and their wives in their black mantles, said to each other on their way home from Mass before entering their houses, from the chimney of each of which ascended a thin blue film of smoke:
“He does not joke abont the matter, Mo’sieu’ the Curé!”
On one occasion, and for very slight cause, he flew into such a passion that he lost his reason. He went to see a sick woman. As soon as he reached the farmyard, he saw a crowd of children, those of the house as well and some of their friends, gathered around a dog’s kennel. They were staring curiously at something, standing there motionless, with concentrated, silent attention. The priest walked towards them. It was a dog and her litter of puppies. In front of the kennel five little puppies were swarming around their mother, who was affectionately licking them, and at the moment when the curé stretched forward his head above the heads of the children, a sixth tiny pup was born. All the brats, seized with joy at the sight of it, began to bawl out, clapping their hands: “Here’s another of them! Here’s another of them!”
To them it was a pleasure, a natural pleasure, into which nothing impure entered; they gazed at the birth of the puppies just as they would have looked at apples falling from trees. But the man with the black robe was quivering with indignation, and, losing his head, he lifted up his big blue umbrella and began to beat the youngsters. They retreated at full speed. Then, finding himself left alone with the animal, he proceeded to beat her also. As in her condition she was unable to run way she moaned while she struggled against his attack, and jumping on top of her, he crushed her under his feet, and with a few kicks with his heel finished her off. Then he left the body bleeding in the midst of the newborn animals, whining and helpless and instinctively making efforts to get at the mother’s teats.
He would take long walks, all alone, with a frown on his face. Now, one evening in May, as he was returning from a place some distance away, and going along by the cliff to get back to the village, a fierce shower of rain impeded his progress. He could see no house in sight, only the bare coast on every side riddled by the pelting downpour.
The rough sea dashed against him in masses of foam; and thick black clouds gathering at the horizon redoubled the rain. The wind whistled, blew great guns, battered down the growing crops, and the dripping Abbé; filling his ears with noises, and exciting his heart with its tumult.
He took off his hat, exposing his forehead to the storm, and by degrees approached the descent towards the lowland. But he had such a rattling in his throat that he could not advance farther, and, all of a sudden, he espied near a sheep pasture, a shepherd’s hut, a kind of movable box on wheels that the shepherds can drag in summer from pasture to pasture.
Above a wooden stool, a low door was open, affording a view of the straw inside.
The priest was on the point of entering to take shelter when he saw a loving couple embracing each other in the shadow. Thereupon, he abruptly closed the door and fastened it; then, getting the shafts, he bent his lean back and dragged the hut after him, like a horse. And thus he ran along in his drenched cassock toward the steep incline, the fatal incline, with the young couple he had caught together, who were banging their fists against the door of the hut, believing probably that the whole thing was only the practical joke of a passerby.
When he got to the top of the descent, he let go of the frail structure, which began to roll over the sloping side of the cliff. It then rolled down precipitately, carried along blindly, ever increasing in the speed of its course, leaping, stumbling like an animal, striking the ground with its shafts.
An old beggar, cuddled up in a gap near the cliff, saw it passing, with a rush above his head, and he heard dreadful cries coming from the interior of this wooden box.
Suddenly a wheel fell off from a collision with some stone; and then the hut, falling on one side, began to topple downward like a ball, like a house torn from its foundations, and tumbling down from the top of a mountain; and then, having reached the edge of the last depression it turned over, describing a curve in its fall, and was broken like an egg, at the bottom of the cliff.
The pair of lovers were picked up, bruised, battered, with all their limbs fractured, but still clasped in each other’s arms, but now through terror.
The curé refused to admit their corpses into the church or to pronounce a benediction over their coffins. And on the following Sunday in his sermon he spoke vehemently about the Seventh Commandment, threatening the lovers with an avenging and mysterious arm, and citing the terrible example of the two wretches killed in the midst of their sin.
As he was leaving the church, two gendarmes arrested him.
A coastguard who was in a sentry-box had seen him.
The priest was sentenced to a term of penal servitude.
And the peasant who told me the story added gravely:
“I knew him, Monsieur. He was a rough man, that’s a fact, but he did not like fooling.”