He held out his hand to horsemen on the highways, approached the harvesters with genuflexions, or remained motionless before the barriers of courts; and his visage was so sad that they never refused him alms.
In his humility he told his story; thereupon all fled from him, crossing themselves. In the villages where he had already passed, as soon as he was recognized, they shut the doors, shouted threats at him, threw stones at him. The more charitable set a dish on their window-sill, then closed the shutter so as not to see him.
Repulsed everywhere, he avoided men; and nourished himself with roots, plants, wild fruits, and shell-fish which he sought along the shores.
Sometimes on turning a hill he would see below him a confusion of crowded roofs, with stone spires, bridges, towers, black streets crossing one another, whence a continual hum rose up to his ears.
The need of mingling with the existence of others would force him to descend to the town. But the brutish air of the faces, the din of occupations, the indifference of their talk, froze his heart. On feast-days, when the great bell of some cathedral filled the whole people with joy from break of day, he watched the inhabitants issuing from their houses, then the dances in the squares, the fountains running ale at the crossings, the damask hangings outside the lodgings of princes, and at evening, through the panes of the ground-floors, the long family tables, where grandparents held little children on their knees; sobs choked him and he turned back to the country.
He contemplated with transports of love the foals in the pastures, the birds in their nests, the insects on the flowers; at his approach all fled farther away, hid themselves in alarm, flew off as fast as they could.
He sought the solitudes again. But the wind brought what seemed groans of death-agony to his ear; the tears of the dew falling to earth recalled other drops of heavier weight to his mind. The sun showed like blood in the clouds every evening; and every night, in a dream, his parricide began anew.
He made himself a haircloth shirt with iron points. He climbed on his two knees up every hill that had a chapel on its summit. But pitiless thought obscured the splendours of the sanctuaries, and tortured him amid the macerations of his penance.
He did not revolt against God who had inflicted this deed upon him, and yet he was in despair to think that he could have wrought it.
His own person caused him such horror that he adventured himself in perils in the hope of delivering himself from it. He saved paralytics from fires, children from the bottom of gulfs. The abyss rejected him, the flames spared him.