"I have not seen him."

"Little Gervais? There are no villages here? Can you tell me?"

"If he is like what you say, my friend, he is a little stranger.
Such persons pass through these parts. We know nothing of them."

Jean Valjean seized two more coins of five francs each with violence,
and gave them to the priest.

"For your poor," he said.

Then he added, wildly:--

"Monsieur l'Abbe, have me arrested. I am a thief."

The priest put spurs to his horse and fled in haste, much alarmed.

Jean Valjean set out on a run, in the direction which he had
first taken.

In this way he traversed a tolerably long distance, gazing,
calling, shouting, but he met no one. Two or three times he ran
across the plain towards something which conveyed to him the effect
of a human being reclining or crouching down; it turned out to be
nothing but brushwood or rocks nearly on a level with the earth.
At length, at a spot where three paths intersected each other,
he stopped. The moon had risen. He sent his gaze into the distance
and shouted for the last time, "Little Gervais! Little Gervais!