The Abbé Gobert and the Abbé Rousseau, both natives of Saint-Juirs, had been ordained upon leaving the seminary of Luçon, in about 1760. The book contains nothing concerning their families. One may suppose them both to have been of good middle-class origin. Each manifestly had "a certain place in the sun." They were warm friends up to the time of their ordination, which brought about inevitable separation. Abbé Gobert was installed as vicar at Vieux Pouzauges whose _curé_ was to sit in the Constituency among the partisans of the new order; Abbé Rousseau was sent to Mortagne-sur-Sèvres, in the heart of what was destined to be the territory of the Chouans. Concerning their life up to the beginning of the Revolution we know nothing, except that they remained on friendly terms. They often visited each other. The walk from Pouzauges to Mortagne following the ridge of the hills of the Woodland is one of the most picturesque in our lovely western France, so rich in beautiful landscapes. Very pleasant are its valleys, watered by crystalline brooks flowing musically over pebbly beds; they are everywhere intersected by hedges behind which in serried ranks rise shady thickets, inviolate sanctuary of rural peace. There might the peasant be born and die with never the least knowledge of the outer world. Thirty years ago specimens of the kind were still to be found. If, however, you follow one of the road-cuts under the heavy, overarching boughs and laboriously climb the steep rise amid granite rocks and thick tufts of gorse mingling with brambles, which drape themselves from one to another tree stump centuries old, you emerge suddenly and as if miraculously into the very sky, whence all the earth is visible. Northward as far as the Loire, where rise the towers of Saint Peter's in Nantes, westward as far as the sea, stretches an immense garden of verdure bathed in that translucent bluish light which unites earth and sky and gives the sense of our planet launched in infinite space. But to this day man and beast contemplate this marvellous spectacle with the same indifferent eye. In those days, the preaching of the Gospel to peasants still stupefied from serfdom, by a clergy whose leaders prided themselves upon their unbelief, in nowise resembled the stultifying mummeries of to-day. When Abbé Gobert and Abbé Rousseau, arm in arm, stopped at some farmhouse for noonday rest after a frugal meal, their free speech would doubtless startle many a modern seminarist. Their views of the future were perhaps not very different. The ardent liberalism of the good _curé_ of Pouzauges could not have been unknown to his vicar, and how could the latter, open as he was to the new ideas, have refrained from unbosoming himself to his friend?