There are no villages here?
Can you tell me?"
"If he is like what you say, my friend, he is a little stranger. Such persons pass through these parts.
We know nothing of them."
Jean Valjean seized two more coins of five francs each with violence, and gave them to the priest.
"For your poor," he said.
Then he added, wildly:--
"Monsieur l'Abbe, have me arrested.
I am a thief."
The priest put spurs to his horse and fled in haste, much alarmed.
Jean Valjean set out on a run, in the direction which he had first taken.
In this way he traversed a tolerably long distance, gazing, calling, shouting, but he met no one.
Two or three times he ran across the plain towards something which conveyed to him the effect of a human being reclining or crouching down; it turned out to be nothing but brushwood or rocks nearly on a level with the earth. At length, at a spot where three paths intersected each other, he stopped.
The moon had risen.
He sent his gaze into the distance and shouted for the last time, "Little Gervais!
Little Gervais! Little Gervais!"
His shout died away in the mist, without even awakening an echo.
He murmured yet once more, "Little Gervais!" but in a feeble and almost inarticulate voice.
It was his last effort; his legs gave way abruptly under him, as though an invisible power had suddenly overwhelmed him with the weight of his evil conscience; he fell exhausted, on a large stone, his fists clenched in his hair and his face on his knees, and he cried, "I am a wretch!"
Then his heart burst, and he began to cry.