"I went once to Guerande to draw for the conscription; and I went to Savenay to the messieurs who measure for the army. If I had been half an inch taller they'd have made me a soldier. I should have died of my first march, and my poor father would to-day be begging his bread."
I had thought out many dramas; Pauline was accustomed to great emotions beside a man so suffering as myself; well, never had either of us listened to words so moving as these. We walked on in silence, measuring, each of us, the silent depths of that obscure life, admiring the nobility of a devotion which was ignorant of itself. The strength of that feebleness amazed us; the man's unconscious generosity belittled us. I saw that poor being of instinct chained to that rock like a galley-slave to his ball; watching through twenty years for shell-fish to earn a living, and sustained in his patience by a single sentiment. How many hours wasted on a lonely shore! How many hopes defeated by a change of weather! He was hanging there to a granite rock, his arm extended like that of an Indian fakir, while his father, sitting in their hovel, awaited, in silence and darkness, a meal of the coarsest bread and shell-fish, if the sea permitted.
"Do you ever drink wine?" I asked.
"Three or four times a year," he replied.
"Well, you shall drink it to-day,—you and your father; and we will send you some white bread."
"You are very kind, monsieur."
"We will give you your dinner if you will show us the way along the shore to Batz, where we wish to see the tower which overlooks the bay between Batz and Croisic."
"With pleasure," he said. "Go straight before you, along the path you are now on, and I will follow you when I have put away my tackle."
We nodded consent, and he ran off joyfully toward the town. This meeting maintained us in our previous mental condition; but it lessened our gay lightheartedness.
"Poor man!" said Pauline, with that accent which removes from the compassion of a woman all that is mortifying in human pity, "ought we not to feel ashamed of our happiness in presence of such misery?"