Chapter 29 thirteen little Ruierwei

Jean Valjean left the town as if fleeing.He ran around in a hurry among the fields, not asking for roads and trails, and leaving whenever he encountered them, and he didn't feel that he was always going in circles.He ran around like that all morning, didn't eat, and didn't know he was hungry.He was overwhelmed by a host of new sensations.He felt that he was furious, but he didn't know who was angry.He could not tell whether he was touched or insulted.Sometimes he felt a strange softness in his heart, but he fought against it, fighting against it with the determination to fight to the end in his past twenty years.The situation made him tired.The unjust punishment which had suffered him in the past had made him determined to do evil, and he felt that that determination had been shaken, and he was disturbed.He asked himself: What will be the future replacement of that determination?Sometimes, he really thought that if he hadn't had these experiences, he could still get along with the police in prison, he might be happier, and there would be less turmoil in his heart.Although it was almost the end of the year, there were a few late-blooming flowers in the green hedges in twos and threes, and occasionally there were a few late-blooming flowers. He smelled the fragrance of flowers, which brought back many memories of his childhood.Those memories were almost unbearable to him, and he hadn't thought about it for so many years.

Therefore, on that day, many inexplicable feelings came to his heart at the same time. Jean Valjean was sitting behind a bush of thorns in an absolutely desolate plain of red soil, just as the sun was sinking and the smallest stone on the ground trailed its slender shadow.In the distance, only the Alps can be seen.Not even a bell tower in the distant village could be seen.Jean Valjean was about three leagues away from Digne.A few steps away from the thorns, a path crosses the plain. He was thinking wildly. If someone came over and saw his expression, he would definitely feel that his ragged clothes were particularly scary.At that moment, he suddenly heard a joyful sound.

He turned his head and saw a poor boy about ten years old walking along the path, singing in his mouth, with a violin on his waist and a field mouse cage on his back. One of the kids with a knee sticking out of the hole in the pant leg. As the boy sang, he stopped from time to time, and played a game of "catch" with some money in his hand, which was roughly all his property.Inside was a coin worth forty sous. The boy stopped by the bushes, without seeing Jean Valjean, and tossed up his handful of money, which, with such dexterity, he caught every time on the back of his hand. But this time his forty-sou coin was lost, and he rolled towards the thornbush and at Jean Valjean's feet.

Jean Valjean put his foot on it. But the boy's eyes followed the money, and he saw Jean Valjean stamping with his foot. Not panicking at all, he walked straight up to the man. It was an absolutely deserted place.There was never a soul on the plain or by the path as far as the eye could see.They could only hear the faint chirping of a flock of flying birds flying past.The child turned his back to the sun, which spun his hair into strands of gold, and lacquered Jean Valjean's fierce face purple with blood-red rays. "Sir," said the poor boy with a childish heart that was a combination of ignorance and innocence, "where is my money?"

"What is your name?" said Jean Valjean. "Little Rielville, sir." "Go away!" said Jean Valjean. "Sir," said the boy again, "please give me back my money." Jean Valjean bowed his head and did not answer. Then the child said: "My money, sir!" Jean Valjean's eyes remained fixed on the ground. "My money!" cried the boy. "My dime! My silver!" Jean Valjean seemed not to have heard at all.The boy grabbed him by the collar of his shirt and pushed him.At the same time, he pushed away the iron spiked shoe that was pressing on his baby.

"I want my money! I want my forty sous worth!" The child began to cry.Jean Valjean raised his head and remained seated.The look of his eyes was clouded.He looked at the boy with some wonder, and then, putting his hand where the stick lay, he cried out: "Who's there?" "It is I, monsieur," answered the boy, "little Rielvais. Me! Me! Give me back my forty sous! Take your foot off me, sir, please!" Although he was young, he got angry and almost looked like he was going to do it: "Ha! Are you going to take your foot off? Get your foot off! Do you hear me?"

"Ah! it's you again!" said Jean Valjean. Then he stood up suddenly, still stepping on the silver coin, and said: "Are you going or not!" The child was terrified, looked at him, then trembled from head to toe, froze for a while, and fled. He ran as hard as he could, not daring to turn his head back, and not daring to call out. But after running for a distance, he was out of breath and had to stop.Jean Valjean heard his cries in his confusion. After a while, the child disappeared. The sun went down too. Darkness gradually enveloped Jean Valjean's surroundings.He hadn't eaten all day and he was probably having a fever.

He was still standing, and he had not changed his position since the boy's escape.His breathing was long and fast, and his chest rose and fell.His eyes were fixed ten or twenty paces in front of him, as if absorbed in the study of the shape of a piece of broken blue china in the weeds. Suddenly, he shivered for a while, and only now did he feel the night cold. He pressed his peaked cap tightly on his forehead again, mechanically started to pull up his cloth shirt, buttoned it, took a step, bent down, and picked up his stick from the ground. Then suddenly he caught sight of the forty-sou piece, half-buried by his foot in the ground, which gleamed on the stones.

It seemed like he was being touched by electricity. "What is this?" He gritted his teeth and said.He took three steps back and stopped, unable to take his eyes off the point where his foot had just stepped on. The thing that shone in the dark seemed to be a big eye staring at him. After a few minutes, he rushed at the silver coin in a hurry, grabbed it, stood up, looked towards the distance of the plain, and cast his eyes to the horizon, standing trembling like a frightened beast looking for a place to hide . He couldn't see anything.It was dark and the plain was deserted.Violet fog was rising in the twilight twilight.He said "Yeah" and hurried towards the direction where the child was running away.After walking a hundred steps, he stopped and looked ahead, but could see nothing.

Then with all his strength he cried out: "Little Rielway! Little Rielway!" He shut up and listened.No one answered. The wilderness was desolate and dreary.The surrounding area is boundless, full of wasteland.There is nothing but the impenetrable shadow and the unbreakable silence. A cold north wind blew, making everything around him look melancholy.A few dwarf trees shook their dead branches with an inconceivable anger, as if they wanted to threaten and chase someone. He walked forward again, and then started to run again, stopping and running, and shouted his incomparably miserable and astonishing voice in the lonely wilderness:

"Little Rielway! Little Rielway!" If the child heard it, he would be scared and hide himself well.But the child, no doubt, was gone. He met a priest on horseback.He came up to him and said to him: "Monsieur Priest, do you see a child go by?" "No," said the priest. "One named Little Rielway?" "I didn't see anyone." He took two five-franc pieces out of his purse and handed them to the priest. "It's for your poor, Monsieur Priest. Monsieur Priest, he's a boy of ten or so, and he's got a field mouse cage, I think, and a harpie. He's going in that direction. He's A poor boy down a chimney, you know?" "I really didn't see it." "Little Realway? Isn't he from this village? Can you tell me?" "If he speaks as you say, my friend, he is a boy from elsewhere. They pass here, and no one knows them." Jean Valjean handed over to the priest two more five-franc pieces. "To your poor," he said. Then he said confusedly: "Monsieur Priest, go and get me caught. I am a thief." The priest kicked his legs, urged the horse forward, and fled as if out of his wits. Jean Valjean ran again in the direction he had first intended. He walked a lot in that way, looking, calling, and calling, but never met a soul again.When he was in the field, he saw something that seemed to be lying or squatting, and he ran over. Two or three times like this, all he saw were some weeds or stones exposed on the ground, and finally he walked away. At a fork in the road, stop.The moon is out.Looking into the distance, he called out for the last time: "Little Jervais! Little Jervais! Little Jervais!" His voice died away in the twilight without even an echo.He was still chanting: "Little Ruierwei!" But the voice was so weak that it was almost impossible to make a sound.It was his last effort, and his knees suddenly buckled, as if the burden of his conscience had become an invisible force that suddenly overwhelmed him. Exhausted, he fell on a large stone, holding the stone in his hands. hair, face hid between his knees, he cried: "I'm a rascal!" His heart was broken and he cried, the first time he cried. When Jean Valjean came out from the bishop's house, we could see that he had completely shaken off his former thoughts.But he couldn't distinguish his own mood for a while.He still strongly resisted the old man's benevolent words and deeds. "You have promised me to be honest. I have bought your soul, I have delivered it from its filth to a merciful God." The words kept coming back to his mind.He used his arrogance to confront that supreme benevolence, and arrogance is really the fortress of sin in our hearts.It seemed to him that the absolution of the priest was the greatest blow and the most savage attack to win him back; He should give up the kind of hatred that others have planted in his heart for many years, and he is also complacent.That time was his moment of victory and defeat, that kind of struggle, the kind of fierce struggle that related to the overall outcome, had been waged between his own ferocity and that man's benevolence. With a feeling of ignorance, he walked forward like a drunk.Did he, as he went on in such a daze, have a clear sense of the consequences of this unexpected encounter at Digne?At certain moments in life, there is often a mysterious whisper that alarms or disturbs our minds. Has he heard this kind of whisper?Was there a voice in his ear that he was going through the worst moment of his life?He has no room for neutrality, and henceforth he will be the worst, if not the best, and now he must surpass the bishop (so to speak), or sink to the level of a convict, if he chooses If he does good, he should be an angel; if he is willing to do evil, he must be a devil. Here we should again raise the questions we have raised elsewhere. Did all this have any influence on his thinking?We have said, of course, that a hard life can educate and inspire, but it is doubtful whether, on the level of Jean Valjean, he could have analyzed all that we have pointed out here, if he had done so to those Thoughts can feel something, but it is only a half-knowledge, he must not see clearly, and those thoughts can only make him fall into a kind of trouble, embarrass him, almost feel pain.After he emerged from that monstrous and dark thing called a prison, the bishop had wounded his soul, as a too strong light would have wounded his eyes just emerging from darkness.The life to come, the life before him of eternal purity and splendor and utter possibility made him shudder and bewilderment.He really didn't know what to do.Like an owl that sees the sunrise, so the criminal is dazzled and nearly blinded by virtue. One thing was certain, and he believed it himself, that he was not the man he had been, that his heart had changed, that he was no longer capable of doing things that the bishop had neither spoken to nor touched. . In such a state of mind, he met little Rielway and robbed him of forty sous.why?He must not be able to explain whether this is the last effect of the evil thoughts he brought from the prison, as the result of the dying spirit, the remnant of impulse, the result of what is called "inertia" in mechanics?Yes.Maybe not quite.Let us simply say that it was not he who robbed things, not him, but the beast. Instinctively, he unconsciously stepped on the money.When he came to his senses and saw the beastly behavior, Jean Valjean was distressed, drew back, and cried out in horror. Stealing the child's money is no longer something he can do. The extraordinary phenomenon that time only happened under the circumstances of his thoughts at the time. At any rate, this last bad act had a decisive effect on him.This evil act suddenly penetrated and clarified his confused thoughts, placed the dark barriers on one side and the light on the other, and affected his mind according to the level of his thinking at the time, just as certain chemical reactants do to him. As is the case with a cloudy mixture, which precipitates one element and clarifies the other. At first, before self-examination and thinking, he was flustered, just like a fleeing person, chasing desperately, trying to find the child and return the money to him; later, when he realized that it was too late to catch up, he Disappointed, he stopped.It was only when he cried out "I am a scoundrel" that he saw what he was, and at that moment he left himself as if he were only a ghost, and saw the hideous figure of flesh and bones. The convict Jean Valjean stood before him, stick in hand, blouse round his waist, sack full of stolen things on his back, his face resolute and melancholy, his mind full of vile plots. We have already pointed out that the excessive suffering made him a dreamer, it was like a vision, and he really saw Jean Valjean's fierce face appearing before him.He almost asked himself who that man was, and felt a strong dislike for him. In fantasies, people sometimes appear to be terribly quiet, and then become violently excited. People who are deluded by fantasies often ignore reality. Jean Valjean's situation at that time was just like that.He couldn't see the things around him, but he seemed to see the characters in his heart appearing in front of him. We may say that he was looking at himself, looking at each other, and at the same time through that vision, saw a point of light in some unfathomable depth, which at first he thought was a torch, until he looked at the point more carefully. Only when he saw the light that appeared on his conscience did he see that the torch-like light had a human form, and that it was the bishop. His conscience studied over and over the two persons who stood before him in that way, the Bishop and Jean Valjean.It takes the first to tame the second.By the strange effect of that delusion, the longer his fancy lasted, the larger and more radiant the figure of the Bishop grew before his eyes, while Jean Valjean grew smaller and more indistinct.At some point he was just a shadow.Suddenly, he disappeared completely.Only the bishop remained. He let the splendor fill the whole soul of the poor man. Jean Valjean wept for a long time, weeping hot tears, choked with pain, more feeblely than a woman, more disturbed than a child. While he was crying, light gradually appeared in his mind, a strange light, an extremely lovely and at the same time extremely terrifying light.His past life, his first transgressions, his long atonement, his outward vulgarity, his inward obstinacy, his plans for vengeance after his release, such as at the bishop's house, his last deeds, The crime of robbing the boy of forty sous, which had been committed after the bishop's pardon, was still more shameless and uglier; Appeared, the brightness of the light he had never seen in his life.He looked back on his life, ugly, and his heart, vile.But there is a light of peace upon that life and heart.It was as if he had seen the devil in the light of heaven. How long had he been crying like that?What did he do after crying?Where has he gone?No one ever knew.But one thing seems to be certain, that on that night, a coach bound for Grenoble, which arrived at Digne at about three o'clock in the morning, passed the Rue Bishop's College, and the driver saw a man kneeling on the grounds of Bienvenu. On the roadside outside the bishop's gate, it seems to be praying in the dark.