Page 2209 - les-miserables

bleeding, white with a waxen whiteness, with closed eyes
and gaping mouth, and pallid lips, stripped to the waist,
slashed all over with crimson wounds, motionless and bril-
liantly lighted up.
The grandfather trembled from head to foot as power-
fully as ossified limbs can tremble, his eyes, whose corneae
were yellow on account of his great age, were veiled in a sort
of vitreous glitter, his whole face assumed in an instant the
earthy angles of a skull, his arms fell pendent, as though a
spring had broken, and his amazement was betrayed by the
outspreading of the fingers of his two aged hands, which
quivered all over, his knees formed an angle in front, al-
lowing, through the opening in his dressing-gown, a view
of his poor bare legs, all bristling with white hairs, and he
murmured:
‘Marius!’
‘Sir,’ said Basque, ‘Monsieur has just been brought back.
He went to the barricade, and …’
‘He is dead!’ cried the old man in a terrible voice. ‘Ah!
The rascal!’
Then a sort of sepulchral transformation straightened up
this centenarian as erect as a young man.
‘Sir,’ said he, ‘you are the doctor. Begin by telling me one
thing. He is dead, is he not?’
The doctor, who was at the highest pitch of anxiety, re-
mained silent.
M. Gillenormand wrung his hands with an outburst of
terrible laughter.
‘He is dead! He is dead! He is dead! He has got himself

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