"
Justin's one remaining hope is to go home to those native mountains,
if it may be, with the dead body of his boy, dead "the very morning
on which he should have received the tonsure from the hands of Mgr.
l'Archeveque," and buried now temporarily at the cemetery of
Montparnasse:--
Theodore calls me. I saw him distinctly to-night. He gave me a
sign. After all said, life is heavy, sans le fillot, and but [133]
for you it were well to be released from it....'
"I have seen Justin Lebasset die, dear Arribas, and was touched,
edified, to the bottom of my soul. God grant, when my hour comes, I
may find that calm, that force, in the last struggle with life. Not
a complaint! not a sigh! Once only he gave Norine a sorrowful,
heartrending look; then, from lips already cold, breathed that one
word, 'Theodore!' Marcus Aurelius used to say: 'A man should leave
the world as a ripe olive falls from the tree that bore it, and with
a kiss for the earth that nourished it.' Well! the peasant of
Rocaillet had the beautiful, noble, simple death of the fruit of the
earth, going to the common receptacle of all mortal beings, with no
sense that he was torn away. Pardon, I pray, my quotation from
Marcus Aurelius, who persecuted the Christians.
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