Page 192 - les-miserables

fied wild animal which is seeking refuge.
He saw nothing. Night was falling, the plain was cold
and vague, great banks of violet haze were rising in the
gleam of the twilight.
He said, ‘Ah!’ and set out rapidly in the direction in
which the child had disappeared. After about thirty paces
he paused, looked about him and saw nothing.
Then he shouted with all his might:—
‘Little Gervais! Little Gervais!’
He paused and waited.
There was no reply.
The landscape was gloomy and deserted. He was en-
compassed by space. There was nothing around him but an
obscurity in which his gaze was lost, and a silence which
engulfed his voice.
An icy north wind was blowing, and imparted to things
around him a sort of lugubrious life. The bushes shook their
thin little arms with incredible fury. One would have said
that they were threatening and pursuing some one.
He set out on his march again, then he began to run; and
from time to time he halted and shouted into that solitude,
with a voice which was the most formidable and the most
disconsolate that it was possible to hear, ‘Little Gervais! Lit-
tle Gervais!’
Assuredly, if the child had heard him, he would have
been alarmed and would have taken good care not to show
himself. But the child was no doubt already far away.
He encountered a priest on horseback. He stepped up to
him and said:—

192 Les Miserables