Melville settled the chicken-and-egg question regarding the influence of Robert Bresson as follows: "I'm sorry, but it's Bresson who's always been Melvillian. Le Journal d'un curé de compagne is Le Silence de la mer!?.(Nor did) Bresson deny?that he had been influenced by me. All this has been forgotten since." Georges Bernanos's novel concerns a young priest who, in his simplicity and purity, suffers the scorn of his parishioners. Bresson adaptd the novel to the screen using Bernanos's original dialogue and diary entries; what he cut from the novel seems only to add to this fidelity. (Critic Albert Beguin notes, "The film's true merit is in having rejected everything in the novel that could be already thought of as 'cinematic' in the popular sense of the word.") The austere narrative is punctuated by a low-toned, voice-over reading. Episode by episode, like stations of the cross, the priest progresses through pain to grace.