Then he let his head fall on the pillow and sang no more.
“There is good in this Christian,” said the vicar, “much good, and a while ago he really edified me with his beautiful sentences. But I am not without a certain apprehension, as everything depends on the end, and nobody knows what’s hidden at the bottom of the basket God in His kindness wills that one single moment brings us salvation, but this moment must be the last one, so that everything depends on a single minute, in comparison with which the whole life does not count. That’s what makes me tremble for the patient, over whom angels and devils are furiously quarrelling. But one must never despair of divine mercy.”
CHAPTER XXI
Death of M. Jérôme Coignard
Two days passed in cruel alternations. After that my good master became extremely weak.
“There is no more hope,” M. Coquebert told me. “Look how his head lies on the pillow, how thin his nose is.”
As a fact, my good master’s nose, formerly big and red, was nothing now but a bent blade, livid like lead.
“Tournebroche, my son,” he said to me in a voice still full and strong but of a sound quite strange to me, “I feel that I have but a short time to live. Go and fetch that good priest, that he may listen to my confession.”
The vicar was in his vineyard. There I went.