Page 2400 - les-miserables

He spread it out on his bed.
The Bishop’s candlesticks were in their place on the
chimney-piece. He took from a drawer two wax candles
and put them in the candlesticks. Then, although it was still
broad daylight,—it was summer,— he lighted them. In the
same way candles are to be seen lighted in broad daylight in
chambers where there is a corpse.
Every step that he took in going from one piece of fur-
niture to another exhausted him, and he was obliged to
sit down. It was not ordinary fatigue which expends the
strength only to renew it; it was the remnant of all move-
ment possible to him, it was life drained which flows away
drop by drop in overwhelming efforts and which will never
be renewed.
The chair into which he allowed himself to fall was placed
in front of that mirror, so fatal for him, so providential for
Marius, in which he had read Cosette’s reversed writing on
the blotting book. He caught sight of himself in this mirror,
and did not recognize himself. He was eighty years old; be-
fore Marius’ marriage, he would have hardly been taken for
fifty; that year had counted for thirty. What he bore on his
brow was no longer the wrinkles of age, it was the mysteri-
ous mark of death. The hollowing of that pitiless nail could
be felt there. His cheeks were pendulous; the skin of his face
had the color which would lead one to think that it already
had earth upon it; the corners of his mouth drooped as in
the mask which the ancients sculptured on tombs. He gazed
into space with an air of reproach; one would have said that
he was one of those grand tragic beings who have cause to

2400 Les Miserables