I didn’t read it in French, but don’t like the English translation (‘Abbe Mouret’s Transgression’ which misses half of the point) in my kindle.
This is an extraordinary book; I am surprised it is not better known or has been filmed, perhaps it has.
Abbe Mouret is one of the three Mouret children in no.321 above. He is a priest in a tiny rural hamlet not far from Plassans, inhabited by a few irreligious and interbred peasants. Taken ill, he is taken by his doctor uncle, another Rougon, to Paradou - a local and totally run down estate where he is cared for by the wild child Albine.
They explore the huge garden/forest, which teems voluptuously with vegetable and floral life, and fall in love.
Mouret cannot reconcile this with his vows as a priest. He returns/is dragged back to the village which the grim and authoritarian architecture of the church, the Virgin Mary versus Albine and his own Christianity contrast with Paradou and make him almost schizophrenic.
Albine tries to pull ‘her husband’ back to Paradou, and almost succeeds but his conscience gets the better of him. Albine dies, pregnant with his child and he ends up burying her, against the wishes of her uncle (a pretty committed atheist) in the village churchyard.
Extraordinary, and very different.
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