He was thinking, no doubt, that this man, whose name is Jean Valjean, had his misfortune only too vividly present in his mind; that the best thing was to divert him from it, and to make him believe, if only momentarily, that he was a person like any other, by treating him just in his ordinary way.
Is not this indeed, to understand charity well?
Is there not, dear Madame, something truly evangelical in this delicacy which abstains from sermon, from moralizing, from allusions? and is not the truest pity, when a man has a sore point, not to touch it at all?
It has seemed to me that this might have been my brother's private thought. In any case, what I can say is that, if he entertained all these ideas, he gave no sign of them; from beginning to end, even to me he was the same as he is every evening, and he supped with this Jean Valjean with the same air and in the same manner in which he would have supped with M. Gedeon le Provost, or with the curate of the parish.
"Towards the end, when he had reached the figs, there came a knock at the door.
It was Mother Gerbaud, with her little one in her arms. My brother kissed the child on the brow, and borrowed fifteen sous which I had about me to give to Mother Gerbaud.
The man was not paying much heed to anything then.
He was no longer talking, and he seemed very much fatigued.
After poor old Gerbaud had taken her departure, my brother said grace; then he turned to the man and said to him, `You must be in great need of your bed.'
Madame Magloire cleared the table very promptly.
I understood that we must retire, in order to allow this traveller to go to sleep, and we both went up stairs.
Nevertheless, I sent Madame Magloire down a moment later, to carry to the man's bed a goat skin from the Black Forest, which was in my room.
The nights are frigid, and that keeps one warm. It is a pity that this skin is old; all the hair is falling out. My brother bought it while he was in Germany, at Tottlingen, near the sources of the Danube, as well as the little ivory-handled knife which I use at table.
"Madame Magloire returned immediately.
We said our prayers in the drawing-room, where we hang up the linen, and then we each retired to our own chambers, without saying a word to each other."
BOOK SECOND--THE FALL
CHAPTER V
TRANQUILLITY