Viciously anticlerical in tone, it follows on from the horrific events at the end of La Conquête de Plassans, focussing this time on a remote Provençal backwater village.

The novel then takes a complete new direction in terms of both tone and style, as Serge — suffering from amnesia and total long-term memory loss, with no idea who or where he is beyond his first name — is doted upon by Albine, the whimsical, innocent and entirely uneducated girl who has been left to grow up practically alone and wild in the vast, sprawling, overgrown grounds of Le Paradou.

The two of them live a life of idyllic bliss with many biblical parallels and over, the course of a number of months, they fall deeply in love with one another; however, at the moment they consummate their relationship, they are discovered by Serge's monstrous former monsignor and his memory is instantly returned to him.

The novel was adapted as the 1970 French film The Demise of Father Mouret, directed by Georges Franju, starring Gillian Hills and Francis Huster.

The novel inspired a now lost painting by John Collier (1850—1934), exhibited in 1895 at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, under the title The death of Albine.