As I see it, the best evidence that such an accusation lacks accuracy, is to be found in a simple comparison of both novels. La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret is, in its central episode, the allegorical charting of the initiation of the first man and the first woman into Love. The Abbé Mouret (Serge), after suffering from an attack of brain fever, mainly derived from his mystical exaltation in worship of the Madonna, in the solitude of a scorched vale in Provence (first part of the book) is taken to convalesce at the Paradou, an ancient 18th Century Park to which dereliction has given in wilderness a new virginity, and which is an allegorical representation of Paradise. There, after losing himself in his fever consciousness to the extent of forgetting his priesthood and the very existence of the village, and his consciousness of the universe to the point of being scared by the sun and by the trees of Paradou as if they were strange monsters, he spends some months wandering, in the depths of the unkempt wood, with Albine, who is the genius loci, the Eve of that place of legend.

Albine and Serge, half-naked as in Paradise, driven by some instinct, seek unceasingly a mysterious tree, from whose foliage flows the aphrodisiac influence of procreative matter; under this symbol of the tree of science do they possess each other, after days of anguish spent in trying to discover, in their paradisiacal innocence, the physical means of realizing love. Then, in a mutual and sudden shame, observing their nakedness, they cover themselves with leaves, as they are expelled from there, cast away by Father Arcangias, who is the theocratic personification of the ancient Archangel.

In the last part of the book, the Abbé Mouret recovers self-awareness, subtracts himself from the dissolving influence of worshipping the Madonna, obtains by an effort of prayer and privilege of grace the extinction of his manhood, and becomes an ascete with nothing human left in him, a shadow fallen at the foot of the cross; and it is without turning a hair that he finally sprinkles the Holy water and leads the prayers over the coffin of Albine, who died in the Paradou, stifled under a pile of heavily fragrant flowers.