The Brother fell back before the raised staff, a flood of abuse rising to his lips; but he began to stammer and went on disjointedly: ‘I will set the gendarmes after you, scoundrel! You spat on the church; I saw you. You give the plague to the poor people who merely pass your door. At Saint-Eutrope you made a girl die by forcing her to chew a consecrated wafer which you had stolen. At Beage you went and dug up the bodies of little dead children and carried them away on your back. You are an old sorcerer! Everybody knows it, you scoundrel! You are the disgrace of the district. Whoever strangles you will gain heaven for the deed.’ The old man listened with a sneer, twirling the while his staff between his fingers. And between the Brother’s successive insults he ejaculated in an undertone: ‘Go on, go on; relieve yourself, you viper. I’ll break your back for you by-and-by.’ Abbé Mouret tried to interfere, but Brother Archangias pushed him away, exclaiming: ‘You are led by him yourself! Didn’t he make you trample upon the cross? Deny it, if you dare!’ Then again, turning to Jeanbernat, he yelled: ‘Ah! Satan, you must have chuckled and no mistake when you held a priest in your grasp! May Heaven curse those who abetted you in that sacrilege! What was it you did, at night, while he slept? You came and moistened his tonsure with your saliva, eh? so that his hair might grow more quickly. And then you breathed upon his chin and his cheeks that his beard might grow a hand’s breadth in a single night. And you rubbed all your philters into his body, and breathed into his mouth the lasciviousness of a dog. You turned him into a brute-beast, Satan.’ ‘He’s idiotic,’ said Jeanbernat, resting his stick on his shoulder. ‘He quite bores me.’ The Brother, however, growing bolder, thrust his fists under the old man’s nose. ‘And that drab of yours!’ he cried, ‘you can’t deny that you set her on to damn the priest.’ Then he suddenly sprang backwards, with a shriek, for the old man, swinging his stick with all his strength, had just broken it over his back. Retreating yet a little further, Archangias picked from a heap of stones beside the road a piece of flint twice the size of a man’s fist, and threw it at Jeanbernat. It would surely have split the other’s forehead open if he had not bent down. He, however, now likewise crossed over to a heap of stones, sheltered himself behind it, and provided himself with missiles; and from one heap to the other a terrible combat began, with a perfect hail of flints. The moon now shone very brightly, and their dark shadows fell distinctly on the ground.