Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [61]
Then turning to the gendarmes, he said:
“Messieurs, you can retire.” The gendarmes withdrew.
Jean Valjean felt like a man who is just about to faint.
The bishop approached him, and said, in a low voice:
“Forget not, never forget that you have promised me to use this silver to become an honest man.”
Jean Valjean, who had no recollection of this promise, stood confounded. The bishop had laid much stress upon these words as he uttered them. He continued, solemnly:
“Jean Valjean, my brother: you belong no longer to evil, but to good. It is your soul that I am buying for you. I am withdrawing it from dark thoughts and from the spirit of perdition, and I am giving it to God!”
11 (13)
PETIT GERVAIS
JEAN VALJEAN went out of the city as if he were escaping. He made all haste to get into the open country, taking the first lanes and bypaths that offered, without noticing that he was every moment retracing his steps. He wandered thus all the morning. He had eaten nothing, but he felt no hunger. He was the prey of a multitude of new sensations. He felt somewhat angry, he knew not against whom. He could not have told whether he were touched or humiliated. There came over him, at times, a strange relenting which he struggled with, and to which he opposed the hardening of his past twenty years. This condition wearied him. He saw, with disquietude, shaken within him that species of frightful calm which the injustice of his fate had given him. He asked himself what should replace it. At times he would really have liked better to be in prison with the gendarmes, and that things had not happened thus; that would have given him less agitation. Although the season was well advanced, there were yet here and there a few late flowers in the hedges, the odour of which, as it met him in his walk, recalled the memories of his childhood. These memories were almost unbearable, it was so long since they had occurred to him.
Inexpressible thoughts thus gathered in his mind the whole day.
As the sun was sinking towards the horizon, lengthening the shadow on the ground of the smallest pebble, Jean Valjean was seated behind a thicket in a large reddish plain, absolutely deserted. There was no horizon but the Alps. Not even the steeple of a village church. Jean Valjean might have been seven miles from D—. A by-path which crossed the plain passed a few steps from the thicket.
In the midst of this meditation, which would have heightened not a little the frightful effect of his rags to any one who might have met him, he heard a joyous sound.
He turned his head, and saw coming along the path a little Savoyard,r a dozen years old, singing, with his hurdygurdy at his side, and his cherrywood box on his back.
One of those pleasant and gay youngsters who go from place to place, with their knees sticking through their trousers.
Always singing, the boy stopped from time to time, and played at tossing up some pieces of money that he had in his hand, probably his whole fortune. Among them there was one forty-sous coin.
The boy stopped by the side of the thicket without seeing Jean Valjean, and tossed up his handful of sous; until this time he had skilfully caught the whole of them upon the back of his hand.
This time the forty-sous coin got away from him, and rolled towards the thicket, near Jean Valjean.
Jean Valjean put his foot upon it.
The boy, however, had followed the coin with his eye, and had seen where it went.
He was not frightened, and walked straight to the man.
It was an entirely solitary place. Far as the eye could reach there was no one on the plain or in the path. Nothing could be heard, but the faint cries of a flock of birds of passage, that were flying across the sky at an immense height. The child turned his back to the sun, which made his hair like threads of gold, and flushed the savage face of Jean Valjean with a lurid glow.
“Monsieur,” said the little Savoyard, with that childish confidence which is made up of ignorance and innocence, “my coin?”
“What is your name?” said Jean Valjean.
“Petit Gervais, monsieur.