17. “If it were not too late, after all!” he murmured. “If I could once more, like the others, eat my toasted bread honestly, sleep out my sleep without nightmare? The police spy would be very clever to recognize me now. My beard, that I shaved off down there, has grown out now thick and strong. One can borrow somewhere in this big ant-heap, and work is not lacking. Whoever does not go to pieces soon in the hell of the galleys comes out agile and robust; and I have learned how to climb the rope-ladders with loads on my back. Building is going on all around here, and the masons need helpers. Three francs a day,—I have never earned so much. That they should forget me, that is all I ask.”
18. He followed his courageous resolution, he was faithful to it, and three months afterward he was another man. The master for whom he labored cited him as his best workman. After a long day passed on the scaffolding, in the full sun, in the dust, constantly bending and straightening his back to take the stones from the hands of the man below him and to pass them to the man above him, he went to get his soup, at the cheap eating house, tired out, his legs numb, his hands burning, and his eyelashes stuck together by the plaster, but content with himself, and carrying his well-earned money in the knot of his handkerchief. He went out without fear, for his white mask made him unrecognizable, and, then, he had observed that the suspicious glance of the policeman seldom falls on the real worker. He was silent and sober. He slept the sound sleep of honest fatigue. He was free.
19. At last—supreme recompense!—he had a friend.
20. It was a mason’s helper like himself, named Savinien, a little peasant from Limoges, red-cheeked, who had come to Paris with his stick over his shoulder and his bundle on the end of it, who fled from the liquor-dealers and went to mass on Sundays. Jean François loved him for his piety, for his candor, for his honesty, for all that he himself had lost, and so long ago. It was a passion profound, reserved, disclosing itself in the care and forethought of a father. Savinien, himself easily moved and self-loving, let things take their course, satisfied only in that he had found a comrade who shared his horror of the wine-shop. The two friends lived together in a furnished room, fairly clean, but their resources were very limited; they had to take into their room a third companion, an old man from Auvergne, sombre and rapacious, who found a way of economizing out of his meagre wages enough to buy some land in his own province.
21. Jean François and Savinien scarcely left each other. On days of rest they took long walks in the environs of Paris and dined in the open air in one of those little country inns where there are plenty of mushrooms in the sauces and innocent enigmas on the bottoms of the plates. There Jean François made his friend tell him all those things of which those born in the cities are ignorant. He learned the names of the trees, the flowers, the plants; the seasons for the different harvests; he listened avidly to the thousand details of a farmer’s labors: the autumn’s sowing, the winter’s work, the splendid fêtes of harvest-home and vintage, and the flails beating the ground, and the noise of the mills by the borders of the streams, and the tired horses led to the trough, and the morning hunting in the mists, and, above all, the long evenings around the fire of vine-branches, shortened by tales of wonder. He discovered in himself a spring of imagination hitherto unsuspected, finding a singular delight in the mere recital of these things, so gentle, calm, and monotonous.
22. One anxiety troubled him, however, that Savinien should not come to know his past. Sometimes there escaped him a shady word of thieves’ slang, an ignoble gesture, vestiges of his horrible former existence; and then he felt the pain of a man whose old wounds reopen, more especially as he thought he saw then in Savinien the awakening of an unhealthy curiosity. When the young man, already tempted by the pleasures which Paris offers even to the poorest, questioned him about the mysteries of the great city, Jean François feigned ignorance and turned the conversation; but he had now conceived a vague inquietude for the future of his friend.
23. This was not without foundation, and Savinien could not long remain the naïve rustic he had been on his arrival in Paris. If the gross and noisy pleasures of the wine-shop always were repugnant to him, he was profoundly troubled by other desires full of danger for the inexperience of his twenty years. When the spring came, he began to seek solitude, and at first he wandered before the gayly lighted entrances to the dancing-halls, through which he saw the girls going in couples, without bonnets—and with their arms around each other’s waists, whispering low. Then, one evening, when the lilacs shed their perfume, and the appeal of the quadrilles was more entrancing, he crossed the threshold, and after that Jean François saw him change little by little in manners and in visage. Savinien became more frivolous, more extravagant; often he borrowed from his friend his miserable savings, which he forgot to repay. Jean François, feeling himself abandoned, was both indulgent and jealous; he suffered and kept silent. He did not think he had the right to reproach; but his penetrating friendship had cruel and insurmountable presentiments.
24. One evening when he was climbing the stairs of his lodging, absorbed in his preoccupations, he heard in the room he was about to enter a dialogue of irritated voices, and he recognized one as that of the old man from Auvergne, who lodged with him and Savinien. An old habit of suspicion made him pause on the landing, and he listened to learn the cause of the trouble.
25. “Yes,” said the man from Auvergne angrily, “I am sure that some one has broken open my trunk and stolen the three louis which I had hidden in a little box; and the man who has done this thing can only be one of the two companions who sleep here, unless it is Maria, the servant. This concerns you as much as me, since you are the master of the house, and I will drag you before the judge if you do not let me at once open up the valises of the two masons. My poor hoard! It was in its place only yesterday; and I will tell you what it was, so that, if we find it, no one can accuse me of lying. Oh, I know them, my three beautiful gold pieces, and I can see them as plainly as I see you. One was a little more worn than the others, of a slightly greenish gold, and that had the portrait of the great Emperor; another had that of a fat old fellow with a queue and epaulets; and the third had a Philippe with side-whiskers. I had marked it with my teeth. No one can trick me, not me. Do you know that I needed only two others like those to pay for my vineyard? Come on, let us look through the things of these comrades, or I will call the police. Make haste!”