Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [43]
“This hour is the hour of God. Do you not think it would be a source of regret, if we should have met in vain?”
The conventionist re-opened his eyes. Seriousness mingled with shadow imprinted itself upon his face.
“Monsieur Bishop,” said he with a deliberation which perhaps came still more from the dignity of his soul than from the ebb of his strength, “I have passed my life in meditation, study, and contemplation. I was sixty years old when my country called me, and ordered me to take part in her affairs. I obeyed. There were abuses, I fought them; there were tyrannies, I destroyed them; there were rights and principles, I proclaimed and confessed them. The soil was invaded, I defended it; France was threatened, I offered her my breast. I was not rich; I am poor. I was one of the masters of the state, the vaults of the bank were piled with specie, so that we had to strengthen the walls or they would have fallen under the weight of gold and of silver; I dined in the Rue de l‘Arbre-Sec at twenty-two sous for the meal. I succoured the oppressed, I solaced the suffering. True, I tore the drapery from the altar; but it was to staunch the wounds of the country. I have always supported the forward march of the human race towards the light, and I have sometimes resisted a progress which was without pity. I have, on occasion, protected my own adversaries, your friends. There is at Peteghem in Flanders, at the very place where the Merovingian kings had their summer palace, a monastery of Urbanists, the Abbey of Sainte Claire in Beaulieu, which I saved in 1793, I have done my duty according to my strength, and the good that I could. After which I was hunted, hounded, pursued, persecuted, slandered, railed at, spit upon, cursed, proscribed. For many years now, with my white hairs, I have perceived that many people believed they had a right to despise me; to the poor, ignorant crowd I have the face of the damned, and I accept, hating no man myself, the isolation of hatred. Now I am eighty-six years old; I am about to die. What have you come to ask of me?”
“Your blessing,” said the bishop. And he fell upon his knees.
When the bishop raised his head, the face of the old man had become august. He had expired.
The bishop went home deeply absorbed in ineffable thoughts. He spent the whole night in prayer. The next day, some persons, emboldened by curiosity, tried to talk with him of the conventionist G—; he merely pointed to Heaven.
From that moment he redoubled his tenderness and brotherly love for the weak and the suffering.
Every allusion to “that old scoundrel G—,” threw him into a strange reverie. No one could say that the passage of that soul before his own, and the reflection of that grand conscience upon his own had not had its effect upon his approach to perfection.
BOOK TWO
THE FALL
1
THE EVENING AFTER A LONG DAY’S WALK
AN HOUR BEFORE SUNSET, on the evening of a day in the beginning of October, 1815, a man travelling afoot entered the little town of D—. The few persons who at this time were at their windows or their doors, regarded this traveller with apprehension. It would have been hard to find a passer-by more wretched in appearance. He was a man of middle height, burly and hardy, in the prime of life; he might have been forty-six or seven. A leather slouch cap half hid his face, bronzed by the sun and wind, and dripping with sweat. His hairy chest could be seen through the coarse yellow shirt which at the neck was fastened by a small silver anchor; he wore a cravat twisted like a rope; coarse blue trousers, worn and shabby, white on one knee, and with holes in the other; an old ragged grey smock, patched on one side with a piece of green cloth sewed with twine: upon his back was a well-filled knapsack, strongly buckled and quite new. In his hand he carried an enormous knotted stick: his stockingless feet were in hobnailed shoes; his hair was cropped