There were collections of plants and boxes filled with shells, and also many stuffed birds, all the varieties found in Camargue. For more than thirty years, fishermen and hunters had presented Monsieur le curé with curious objects and animals. Here was an otter from the Rhône, there a beaver, with his trowel-shaped tail and hooked teeth. It is a question of serious importance whether the beavers do not injure the dikes of the Rhône. The important point, you see, is that the water from the swamps should empty into the river or the sea through the canals, which run in all directions. Therefore, the dikes must hold firm and not let the Rhône overflow the swamps. And the beavers, they say, destroy the dikes. They gnaw into them when the great freshets come, to avoid the drift, and take refuge inside; and when the water comes in after them, they make a vertical hole through which to escape, and there is your dike, undermined, eaten into by the water! That is a bad state of affairs. Livette raised her eyes. A reptile, with his mouth open, was hanging from the ceiling; he was very fat, and well he might be! he was a little crocodile, the last one killed in Camargue, a very long while ago! In every nook left free by the natural curiosities some pious image was to be seen. Here the two Maries in their boat. There the Holy Women wrapping the Christ in his shroud. In another place, Magdalen at La Baume, kneeling in front of the death's-head. But Livette saw no image of Saint Sara. Livette sat down and waited. Monsieur le curé did not come. The fact was, that Monsieur le curé, who had already written two monographs, one entitled _La Cure de Boismaux_, and the other _La Villa de la Mar_, was at that moment at work upon a third: _Concordance of the Legends of the Blessed Maries_, with this sub-title: _Concerning the strange and regrettable confusion that seems to exist between Saint Sara and Marie the Egyptian._ _La Cure de Boismaux_ also had a sub-title: _Monograph concerning the domains of the Château d'Avignon in Camargue._ Monsieur le curé recalled the fact that the domains of the Château d'Avignon formerly constituted a separate commune. That commune naturally had a curé, and in those days the proprietor of the Château d'Avignon was General Miollis, brother of the Bishop of Digne mentioned by Monsieur Victor Hugo in _Les Misérables_ under the name of Myriel. In a special chapter, Monsieur le curé sought, to no purpose, to find a reason, telluric or otherwise, for the fact that the estates of the Château d'Avignon are particularly subject to invasion by locusts, which sometimes have to be fought in Camargue, as in Africa, by regiments.