They make bread every six months, baking it over a fire of dried dung. In winter they break the loaves with a hatchet and soak the bread for twenty-four hours before it can be eaten. My brothers, be merciful. Consider the sufferings of those around you.’

Having been born in Provence he had had no difficulty in familiarizing himself with the dialects of the Midi, whether of Languedoc or the lower Alps or Upper Dauphiné. This pleased the people and had greatly helped to bring him close to them. He was at home in the peasant’s hut and in the mountains. He could expound great matters in the simplest terms, and speaking all tongues could find his way to all hearts.

For the rest, he was the same to all men, the fashionable world and the ordinary people. He judged nothing in haste, or without taking account of the circumstances. He said, ‘Let me see how the fault arose.’ Being, as he said with a smile, himself a former sinner, he lacked all sactimoniousness, and without self-righteous flourishes preached in forthright terms a doctrine which may be summed up as follows:

‘The flesh is at once man’s burden and his temptation. He bears it and yields to it. He must keep watch over it and restrain it, and obey it only in the last resort. Such obedience may be a fault, but it is a venial fault. It is a fall, but a fall on to the knees which may end in prayer. To be a saint is to be an exception; to be a true man is the rule. Err, fail, sin if you must, but be upright. To sin as little as possible is the law for men; to sin not at all is a dream for angels. All earthly things are subject to sin; it is like the force of gravity.’

Any ill-considered outburst of popular indignation would cause him to smile. ‘It appears,’ he would say, ‘that this is a crime which everyone commits. See how outraged hypocrisy hurries to cover itself!’

He was indulgent to women and to the poor, oppressed by the weight of society. ‘The faults of women, children and servants,’ he said, ‘and of the weak, the poor and the ignorant, are the faults of husbands, fathers and masters, and of the strong, the rich and the learned.’ He also said: ‘Teach the ignorant as much as you can. Society is to blame for not giving free education; it is responsible for the darkness it creates. The soul in darkness sins, but the real sinner is he who caused the darkness.’

As we can see, he had his own way of looking at things. I think he derived it from the Gospel.

He listened one day to a drawing-room discussion of a crime which was then under interrogation and was shortly to be tried. For love of a woman and the child she had borne him a wretched man, at the end of his resources, had coined false currency. Counterfeiting at that time was punishable by death. The woman had been arrested when attempting to pass the first coin the man had forged. She was detained, but there was no evidence except against her, and she alone could destroy her lover by testifying against him. She denied everything and persisted in her denial. The Public Prosecutor then advised a plan. By the cunning use of fragments of letters he persuaded the unhappy woman that her lover had been unfaithful to her, and in a fit of jealousy she divulged everything.