Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [63]
“Monsieur cure, have you seen a child go by?”
“No,” said the priest.
“Petit Gervais was his name?”
“I have seen nobody.”
He took two five-franc coins from his bag, and gave them to the priest.
“Monsieur cure, this is for your poor. Monsieur cure, he is a little fellow, about ten years old, with a cherrywood box, I think, and a hurdygurdy. He went this way. One of these Savoyards, you know?”
“I have not seen him.”
“Petit Gervais? is his village near here? can you tell me?”
“If it be as you say, my friend, the little fellow is a foreigner. They roam about this country. Nobody knows them.”
Jean Valjean hastily took out two more five-franc coins, and gave them to the priest.
“For your poor,” said he.
Then he added wildly:
“Monsieur abbé, have me arrested. I am a robber.”
The priest put spurs to his horse, and fled in great fear.
Jean Valjean began to run again in the direction which he had first taken.
He went on in this wise for a considerable distance, looking around, calling and shouting, but met nobody else. Two or three times he left the path to look at what seemed to be somebody lying down or crouching; it was only low bushes or rocks. Finally, at a place where three paths met, he stopped. The moon had risen. He strained his eyes in the distance, and called out once more “Petit Gervais! Petit Gervais! Petit Gervais!” His cries died away into the mist, without even awakening an echo. Again he murmured: “Petit Gervais!” but with a feeble, and almost inarticulate voice. That was his last effort; his knees suddenly bent under him, as if an invisible power overwhelmed him at a blow, with the weight of his bad conscience; he fell exhausted upon a great stone, his hands clenched in his hair, and his face on his knees, and exclaimed: “What a wretch I am!”
Then his heart swelled, and he burst into tears. It was the first time he had wept for nineteen years.
When Jean Valjean left the bishop’s house, as we have seen, his mood was one that he had never known before. He could understand nothing of what was going on within him. He set himself stubbornly in opposition to the angelic deeds and the gentle words of the old man, “you have promised me to become an honest man. I am purchasing your soul, I withdraw it from the spirit of perversity and I give it to God Almighty.” This came back to him incessantly. To this celestial tenderness, he opposed pride, which is the fortress of evil in man. He felt dimly that the pardon of this priest was the hardest assault, and the most formidable attack which he had yet sustained; that his hardness of heart would be complete, if it resisted this kindness; that if he yielded, he must renounce that hatred with which the acts of other men had for so many years filled his soul, and in which he found satisfaction; that, this time, he must conquer or be conquered, and that the struggle, a gigantic and decisive struggle, had begun between his own wickedness, and the goodness of this man.
Confronted with all these revelations, he staggered like a drunken man. While thus walking on with haggard look, had he a distinct perception of what the result of his adventure at D—might mean? Did he hear those mysterious murmurs which warn or entreat the spirit at certain moments of life? Did a voice whisper in his ear that he had just passed through the decisive hour of his destiny, that there was no longer a middle course for him, that if, thereafter, he should not be the best of men, he would be the worst, that he must now, so to speak, mount higher than the bishop, or fall lower than the galley slave; that, if he would become good, he must become an angel; that, if he would remain wicked, he must become a monster?
One thing was certain, nor did he himself doubt it, that he was no longer the same man, that all was changed in him, that it was no longer in his power to prevent the bishop from having talked to him and having moved him.
In this frame of mind, he had met Petit Gervais, and stolen his forty sous. Why? He could not have explained it, surely; was it the final effect, the final effort