He had seen better days, despite his present misery and infirmities.
At the age of fifteen both his legs had been crushed by a carriage on the Varville
highway. From that time forth he begged, dragging himself along the roads and through
the farmyards, supported by crutches which forced his shoulders up to his ears. His head
looked as if it were squeezed in between two mountains.
A foundling, picked up out of a ditch by the priest of Les Billettes on the eve of All
Saints' Day and baptized, for that reason, Nicholas Toussaint, reared by charity, utterly
without education, crippled in consequence of having drunk several glasses of brandy
given him by the baker (such a funny story!) and a vagabond all his life afterward--the
only thing he knew how to do was to hold out his hand for alms.
At one time the Baroness d'Avary allowed him to sleep in a kind of recess spread with
straw, close to the poultry yard in the farm adjoining the chateau, and if he was in great
need he was sure of getting a glass of cider and a crust of bread in the kitchen. Moreover,
the old lady often threw him a few pennies from her window. But she was dead now.
In the villages people gave him scarcely anything--he was too well known. Everybody
had grown tired of seeing him, day after day for forty years, dragging his deformed and
tattered person from door to door on his wooden crutches. But he could not make up his
mind to go elsewhere, because he knew no place on earth but this particular corner of the
country, these three or four villages where he had spent the whole of his miserable
existence. He had limited his begging operations and would not for worlds have passed
his accustomed bounds.
He did not even know whether the world extended for any distance beyond the trees
which had always bounded his vision. He did not ask himself the question. And when the
peasants, tired of constantly meeting him in their fields or along their lanes, exclaimed:
"Why don't you go to other villages instead of always limping about here?" he did not
answer, but slunk away, possessed with a vague dread of the unknown--the dread of a
poor wretch who fears confusedly a thousand things--new faces, taunts, insults, the
suspicious glances of people who do not know him and the policemen walking in couples
on the roads. These last he always instinctively avoided, taking refuge in the bushes or
behind heaps of stones when he saw them coming.
When he perceived them in the distance, 'With uniforms gleaming in the sun, he was
suddenly possessed with unwonted agility--the agility of a wild animal seeking its lair.
He threw aside his crutches, fell to the ground like a limp rag, made himself as small as
possible and crouched like a bare under cover, his tattered vestments blending in hue with
the earth on which he cowered.
