The grandfather had from head to foot that shudder which ossified limbs can have. His eyes, whose cornea was yellow owing to their great age, were veiled by a sort of glassy stare; his entire face assumed in an instant the earthly angles of a skeleton's head; his arms fell pendent as if a spring had been broken in them, and his stupor was displayed by the outspreading of all the fingers of his two old trembling hands. His knees formed a salient angle, displaying through the opening of his dressing-gown his poor naked legs bristling with white hairs, and he murmured,—
"Marius!"
"He has just been brought here, sir," said Basque; "he went to the barricade, and—"
"He is dead," the old gentleman exclaimed in a terrible voice. "Oh, the brigand!"
Then a sort of sepulchral transfiguration drew up this centenarian as straight as a young man.
"You are the surgeon, sir," he said; "begin by telling me one thing. He is dead, is he not?"
The surgeon, who was frightfully anxious, maintained silence, and M. Gillenormand wrung his hands with a burst of terrifying laughter.
"He is dead, he is dead! He has let himself be killed at the barricade through hatred of me; it was against me that he did it! Ah, the blood-drinker, that is the way in which he returns to me! Woe of my life, he is dead!"
He went to a window, opened it quite wide, as if he were stifling, and standing there began speaking to the night in the street.
"Stabbed, sabred, massacred, exterminated, slashed, cut to pieces! Do you see that, the beggar! He knew very well that I expected him, and that I had his room ready, and that I had placed at my bed-head his portrait when he was a child! He knew very well that he need only return, and that for years I had been recalling him, and that I sat at night by my fire-side with my hands on my knees, not knowing what to do, and that I was crazy about him! You knew that very well; you had only to return and say, 'It is I,' and you would be the master of the house, and I would obey you, and you could do anything you liked with your old ass of a grandfather! You knew it very well, and said, 'No, he is a royalist, I will not go!' and you went to the barricades, and have let yourself be killed out of spite, in order to revenge yourself for what I said on the subject of Monsieur le Due de Berry! Is not that infamous! Go to bed and sleep quietly, for he is dead. This is my awaking."