“There!” said Celine in her sing-song voice, “there he is, that’s the Philosopher!”
Madame Theodore had bent down to ascertain if he still lived. “Yes, he breathes; he’s sleeping I think. Oh! if he only had something to eat every day, he would be well enough. But what would you have? He has nobody left him, and when one gets to seventy the best is to throw oneself into the river. In the house-painting line it often happens that a man has to give up working on ladders and scaffoldings at fifty. He at first found some work to do on the ground level. Then he was lucky enough to get a job as night watchman. But that’s over, he’s been turned away from everywhere, and, for two months now, he’s been lying in this nook waiting to die. The landlord hasn’t dared to fling him into the street as yet, though not for want of any inclination that way. We others sometimes bring him a little wine and a crust, of course; but when one has nothing oneself, how can one give to others?”
Pierre, terrified, gazed at that frightful remnant of humanity, that remnant into which fifty years of toil, misery and social injustice had turned a man. And he ended by distinguishing Laveuve’s white, worn, sunken, deformed head. Here, on a human face, appeared all the ruin following upon hopeless labour. Laveuve’s unkempt beard straggled over his features, suggesting an old horse that is no longer cropped; his toothless jaws were quite askew, his eyes were vitreous, and his nose seemed to plunge into his mouth. But above all else one noticed his resemblance to some beast of burden, deformed by hard toil, lamed, worn to death, and now only good for the knackers.
“Ah! the poor fellow,” muttered the shuddering priest. “And he is left to die of hunger, all alone, without any succour? And not a hospital, not an asylum has given him shelter?”
“Well,” resumed Madame Theodore in her sad yet resigned voice, “the hospitals are built for the sick, and he isn’t sick, he’s simply finishing off, with his strength at an end. Besides he isn’t always easy to deal with. People came again only lately to put him in an asylum, but he won’t be shut up. And he speaks coarsely to those who question him, not to mention that he has the reputation of liking drink and talking badly about the gentle-folks. But, thank Heaven, he will now soon be delivered.”
Pierre had leant forward on seeing Laveuve’s eyes open, and he spoke to him tenderly, telling him that he had come from a friend with a little money to enable him to buy what he might most pressingly require. At first, on seeing Pierre’s cassock, the old man had growled some coarse words; but, despite his extreme feebleness, he still retained the pert chaffing spirit of the Parisian artisan: “Well, then, I’ll willingly drink a drop,” he said distinctly, “and have a bit of bread with it, if there’s the needful; for I’ve lost taste of both for a couple of days past.”
Celine offered her services, and Madame Theodore sent her to fetch a loaf and a quart of wine with Abbe Rose’s money. And in the interval she told Pierre how Laveuve was at one moment to have entered the Asylum of the Invalids of Labour, a charitable enterprise whose lady patronesses were presided over by Baroness Duvillard. However, the usual regulation inquiries had doubtless led to such an unfavourable report that matters had gone no further.
“Baroness Duvillard! but I know her, and will go to see her to-day!” exclaimed Pierre, whose heart was bleeding. “It is impossible for a man to be left in such circumstances any longer.”
Then, as Celine came back with the loaf and the wine, the three of them tried to make Laveuve more comfortable, raised him on his heap of rags, gave him to eat and to drink, and then left the remainder of the wine and the loaf—a large four-pound loaf—near him, recommending him to wait awhile before he finished the bread, as otherwise he might stifle.
“Monsieur l’Abbe ought to give me his address in case I should have any news to send him,” said Madame Theodore when she again found herself at her door.