The Classics Club Spin date seems to come around so quickly, but I just managed to get this one finished on time.
The Sinful Priest which also goes under the name Abbe Mouret’s Transgression is the third book in Emile Zola’s Rougon Macquart series, quite a lot of which I’ve enjoyed in the past, but sadly I can’t say the same for this one.
It begins with a young priest called Serge who has a very dilapidated church in a country area. He really has no congregation at all but is helped by young Vincent, his server. Serge’s younger sister Desiree lives with him, but she is lacking mentally, is very childlike and lives for her animals – chickens, rabbits and a cow. Serge does have a housekeeper, an old woman La Teuse from the village.
Serge is very devout and is particularly attached to the Virgin Mary, in fact the local Christian Brother/Jesuit? named Brother Archangias has warned Serge about what he sees as an unhealthy obsession which he says is “veritable robbery of devotion due to God.” Archangias seems to think that all females lead to sin.
There follows a long section of the book which is about Serge’s – what I think nowadays is called Marianism. I thought it would never come to an end and I found the endless parade of adjectives and purple prose to be tedious in the extreme.
Then Serge goes to visit an estate called Paradou and while there he becomes ill. Nursed back to health by the landowner’s daughter the inevitable happens. This section is so obviously the Adam and Eve story, with Brother Archangias getting involved. Things do not end well, but there is a lot more purple prose.
It’s hard to believe that the same author who wrote Germinal wrote this one, but as I’ve been reading the Rougon Maquart series over the years I would have got around to this one eventually, so I don’t feel that it was wasted time.