In truth, le bon Dieu has cut you out
after the pattern of your dead father. Every morning, in my prayers,
I put in my complaint thereanent. My poor boy died from going too
fast. He could never sit still when it was a question of gathering a
few sous from the [128] fields; and those fields took and consumed
him.'"
The boy fancies that the blind eyes are turned towards a particular
spot in the landscape, as if they saw:--
"'I often turn my eyes in that direction (the old man explains) from
habit. One might suppose that a peasant had the scent of the earth
on which he has laboured. I have given so much of the sweat of my
brow--there--towards Rocaillet! Angelique, my dead wife, was of
Rocaillet; and when she married me, brought a few morsels of land in
her apron. What a state they're in now!--those poor morsels of land
we used to weed and rake and hoe, my boy and I! What superb crops of
vetches we mowed then, for feeding, in due time, our lambs, our
calves! All is gone to ruin since my blindness, and especially since
Angelique left me for the churchyard, never to come back.' He paused
to my great relief. For every one of those phrases he modulated
under the fig-trees more sadly than the Lamentations of Jeremiah on
Jeudi Saint overset me--was like death.
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