CHAPTER XIII

LITTLE GERVAIS


Jean Valjean left the town as though he were fleeing from it.
He set out at a very hasty pace through the fields, taking whatever
roads and paths presented themselves to him, without perceiving
that he was incessantly retracing his steps. He wandered thus the
whole morning, without having eaten anything and without feeling hungry.
He was the prey of a throng of novel sensations. He was conscious
of a sort of rage; he did not know against whom it was directed.
He could not have told whether he was touched or humiliated.
There came over him at moments a strange emotion which he resisted
and to which he opposed the hardness acquired during the last twenty
years of his life. This state of mind fatigued him. He perceived
with dismay that the sort of frightful calm which the injustice
of his misfortune had conferred upon him was giving way within him.
He asked himself what would replace this. At times he would have
actually preferred to be in prison with the gendarmes, and that things
should not have happened in this way; it would have agitated him less.
Although the season was tolerably far advanced, there were still
a few late flowers in the hedge-rows here and there, whose odor
as he passed through them in his march recalled to him memories
of his childhood. These memories were almost intolerable to him,
it was so long since they had recurred to him.

Unutterable thoughts assembled within him in this manner all day long.