"Truly, what you say confounds me."
"You will have a great deal more of the same! To return to my protector: some time since, after a service which he pretended I had rendered him, he procured me a slap-up situation. I have no need to tell you what—it would be too long; in a word, he sent me to Marseilles, to embark for my place. I left Paris contented as a beggar! Good! But soon that changed. A supposition: let us say that I left on a fine sunny day. Well! the next day is cloudy; the day after very cloudy, and every succeeding day more and more so, until, at length, it became as black as the devil. Do you comprehend?"
"Not exactly."
"Well, let us see. Did you ever keep a pup?"
"What a singular question!"
"Have you had a dog that loved you well, and that was lost?"
"No."
"Then I will tell you at once, that when at a distance from M. Rudolph, I was restless, uneasy, alarmed, like a dog that had lost his master. It was brutish, but the dogs also are brutes, and this does not prevent them from being attached to their masters, and remembering quite as much the good mouthfuls as the kickings they are accustomed to receive; and M. Rudolph had given me better than good mouthfuls, for, do you see, for me M. Rudolph is all in all. From a wicked, brutal, savage, and riotous rascal, he made me a kind of honest man, by saying only two words to me; but those words were like magic."
"And those words, what are they? What did he say to you?"
"He told me that I had still a 'heart' and 'honor,' although I had been to the hulks—not for having robbed, it is true. Oh! that, never, but for what is worse, perhaps—for having killed. Yes," said the Slasher, in a sad tone, "yes, killed in a moment of anger, because from my childhood, brought up like a brute, without father or mother, abandoned in the streets of Paris, I knew neither God nor the devil, nor good nor evil, nor strong nor weak. Sometimes the blood rushed to my eyes, I saw red, and if I had a knife in my hand, I stabbed—I stabbed! I was like a wolf; I could not frequent any other places than those where I met beggars and ruffians; I did not put crape on my hat for that. I was obliged to live in the mire; I did not even know I was there. But, when M. Rudolph told me that since in spite of the contempt of the world and misery, instead of stealing, as others did, I had preferred to work as much as I could, and at what I could, that showed I had a heart and honor. Thunder! those two words had the same effect upon me as if some one had caught me by the hair, and raised me a thousand feet in the air above the beggars with whom I lived, and showed me in what mire I wallowed. Then, of course, I said, 'Thank you, I have enough.' Then my heart beat with something besides anger, and I swore to myself always to preserve this honor of which M. Rudolph had spoken. You see, M. Germain, by telling me with kindness that I was not as bad as I thought, M. Rudolph encouraged me, and, thanks to him, I have become better than I was."