Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: MALUS VICINUS MALUS VICINUS SAINT-JUERS is the name of a village in the canton of Sainte Hermine. Lying on the slope of a hill, it overlooks a fresh, grassy valley planted with poplars and watered by a brook which has no recorded name. A very modest Romanesque church laboriously hoists skyward a heavy stone belfry amid a clump of elm and nut trees. The ruins of an old castle degenerated from the dignity of a stronghold to the simple rank of a country residence testifies that here, possibly, some notable event may have taken place. But as the inhabitants have forgotten it, and have no care to search it out, they live in absolute indifference to a thing that is not their direct business. Their village appears to them like all other villages, their church, their houses, their fields, their beasts, like all other churches and houses and fields and beasts. They only vaguely take in the idea of other countries on the earth. The newspapers tell them of unknown lands and of strange doings; it all seems to belong to some other world. What does it matter to them, anyhow, since they have no intention of ever stirring,and since nothing will ever happen to them? For them the past is without interest, and the future does not mar the peace of their slumbers. The present means the crops, the flocks, and the weather. For the things of Heaven there is the cur6, for the things of earth there are the mayor, the notary, the customs officer, and the tax collector: a simplification of life. Markets and fairs purvey to the restless cravings of such as are curious about outside happenings, but no inhabitant of Saint-Juirs would entertain the absurd idea that any trace of an event worth relating was to be found in his own village. Love itself is without drama, owing to the lack of stiffness in rus...