The preceding remarks might be applied in substance to the _Village Cure_, which is one of the most incoherent of the novelist's productions. "I have no time to finish the book; just the part that concerns the Cure will be wanting," he explained to a correspondent. A good deal else was lacking when it was published, the whole resembling a patchwork of odds and ends of the crudest and least harmonious design. Its central figure is Veronique, the wife of a Limoges banker named Grasselin, and greatly her senior, to whom she has been married by her parents before she has had the time to know anything of love and its behests. Led by her goodness of heart to patronize a youth in her husband's employ, she falls in love with him, as he with her, and, through weakness, becomes his mistress. A murder, of which the young Tascheron is accused, and, as the issue proves, quite justly, interrupts this culpable idyll; and the assassin is condemned and executed, without revealing the secret of his liaison, and without Madame Grasselin's interfering to save him, otherwise than vaguely, through the Cure of the district. None the less, she is aware that the act has been committed indirectly through the young man's love for her. Smitten with remorse, after the execution, she quits Limoges, and, removing into the country, endeavours there by a life of charity and devotion to religion to redeem her lapse from her wifely duty. Then, finally, she dies in presence of the Archbishop, of Bianchon the great doctor, and of the Procureur-General and other witnesses, whom she has sent for to listen to her confession of moral complicity, the death scene being narrated with much theatrical emphasis. On to this melodramatic subject, wilfully rendered obscure, and really incomprehensible, the novelist did his best to tack various illustrations of Catholic repentance. He intended the book to be the glorification of Catholicism, the refutation of Protestantism, the embodiment of virtues private and social in people who bowed themselves to his ideal of faith; the story he used simply as a thread to connect these things together. Consequently, the action is intermittent, being checked by irrelevant episodes, and by long tirades on agriculture, sociology, and on other theories set forth by the writer with much zeal but also with much acrimony. Catholicism is asserted to be the only Church which has shown humanity its way of safety; Tascheron's sister, who returns from America, is made to relate that in a certain place where Catholic influence prevailed, the Protestants were very soon chased away. To this religion of such charming mansuetude whenever it has the upper hand, a Protestant engineer named Gerard is converted by puerile arguments which in any other domain than the theological would seem to be the divagations of a lunatic; and the Cure Bonnet proclaims the necessity of passive obedience by the masses to the Church's rule in matters civil as well as ecclesiastic.