M. Gillenormand wrung his hands with an outburst of terrible laughter.
“He is dead!
He is dead! He is dead!
He has got himself killed on the barricades!
Out of hatred to me!
He did that to spite me!
Ah! You blood-drinker!
This is the way he returns to me!
Misery of my life, he is dead!”
He went to the window, threw it wide open as though he were stifling, and, erect before the darkness, he began to talk into the street, to the night:
“Pierced, sabred, exterminated, slashed, hacked in pieces!
Just look at that, the villain!
He knew well that I was waiting for him, and that I had had his room arranged, and that I had placed at the head of my bed his portrait taken when he was a little child!
He knew well that he had only to come back, and that I had been recalling him for years, and that I remained by my fireside, with my hands on my knees, not knowing what to do, and that I was mad over it!
You knew well, that you had but to return and to say:
‘It is I,’ and you would have been the master of the house, and that I should have obeyed you, and that you could have done whatever you pleased with your old numskull of a grandfather! you knew that well, and you said:
“No, he is a Royalist, I will not go!
And you went to the barricades, and you got yourself killed out of malice! To revenge yourself for what I said to you about Monsieur le Duc de Berry.
It is infamous!
Go to bed then and sleep tranquilly! he is dead, and this is my awakening.”
The doctor, who was beginning to be uneasy in both quarters, quitted Marius for a moment, went to M. Gillenormand, and took his arm.
The grandfather turned round, gazed at him with eyes which seemed exaggerated in size and bloodshot, and said to him calmly:
“I thank you, sir.
I am composed, I am a man, I witnessed the death of Louis XVI., I know how to bear events.
One thing is terrible and that is to think that it is your newspapers which do all the mischief.
You will have scribblers, chatterers, lawyers, orators, tribunes, discussions, progress, enlightenment, the rights of man, the liberty of the press, and this is the way that your children will be brought home to you.
Ah! Marius! It is abominable!
Killed!
Dead before me!
A barricade!
Ah, the scamp!
Doctor, you live in this quarter, I believe?
Oh! I know you well.
I see your cabriolet pass my window.
I am going to tell you.
You are wrong to think that I am angry.
One does not fly into a rage against a dead man. That would be stupid.
This is a child whom I have reared.
I was already old while he was very young.
He played in the Tuileries garden with his little shovel and his little chair, and in order that the inspectors might not grumble, I stopped up the holes that he made in the earth with his shovel, with my cane.
One day he exclaimed: Down with Louis XVIII.! and off he went.
It was no fault of mine.
He was all rosy and blond.
His mother is dead.
Have you ever noticed that all little children are blond?
Why is it so?
He is the son of one of those brigands of the Loire, but children are innocent of their fathers’ crimes.
I remember when he was no higher than that.
He could not manage to pronounce his Ds.
He had a way of talking that was so sweet and indistinct that you would have thought it was a bird chirping.