The town speaks of G, a former member of the Convention, with a sort of horror: a quasi-regicide, an atheist, a vulture in a valley three-quarters of an hour from D, where the path has vanished under grass. He had not voted for the king's death, so he was not included in the exile decrees. The Bishop looks toward a clump of trees and says there is a soul yonder which is lonely. He owes him a visit. After a moment the idea seems strange and almost repulsive. He shares the town's estrangement without quite knowing it. Should the scab of the sheep cause the shepherd to recoil? No. But what a sheep. He sets out in that direction and turns back. Then a shepherd lad comes for a doctor. The old wretch is dying of paralysis. Some add, thank God. The Bishop takes his staff, puts on the cloak that hides the threadbare cassock, and goes as the sun is setting. He strides a ditch, leaps a hedge, and finds a low clean hut with a vine nailed outside. A white-haired man in an old peasant wheelchair smiles at the sun. A boy offers a jar of milk. This is the first time anyone has entered since G came. He will recover, he says, then corrects himself: he will die in three hours, by starlight, while the child sleeps. The two slumbers may be good neighbours.
The Bishop is not touched as he should be. He misses being called Monseigneur and is almost tempted to retort citizen. For the first time he feels in a mood to be severe. He sits on a stone and congratulates G for not voting the king's death. G will not take the congratulation. He voted for the death of the tyrant, which is ignorance. Conscience, he says, is innate science. As for Louis XVI he said no: he had no right to kill a man, but he voted the end of the tyrant, of prostitution, slavery, and night for the child. They demolished the old regime in deeds, not entirely in ideas. The mill is gone; the wind is still there. The Bishop distrusts demolition mixed with wrath. G answers that the Revolution is the most important step of the human race since Christ. The Bishop murmurs ninety-three. G expected that word. A cloud formed for fifteen hundred years. The Bishop is putting the thunderbolt on trial.
The Bishop names Louis XVII. G will mourn the innocent child with him, but not the royal child above Cartouche's brother, hung in the Place de Greve for the crime of kinship. Innocence needs no highness. He will weep for the children of kings if the Bishop will weep for the children of the people, and if the balance must incline, toward those who have suffered longer. Then he asks who this gilded prelate is: twenty-five thousand francs, moor-hens on Friday, a palace in the name of a barefoot Christ. The Bishop hangs his head. I am a worm. A worm of the earth in a carriage, G growls, then begs pardon for using riches as a weapon in a guest's house. The Bishop asks how the carriage proves ninety-three was not inexorable, and names Marat at the guillotine. G names Bossuet's Te Deum over the dragonnades. The Bishop quivers and has no reply. G, panting, sets Carrier beside Montrevel, Fouquier beside Lamoignon-Baville, and a Huguenot mother in 1685 bound while her infant cried. The brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over, the human race has been treated harshly, but it has progressed.
One inner trench remains. Progress should believe in God, the Bishop says. An atheist is a bad leader. G looks at the sky. A tear gathers. O thou, O ideal, thou alone existest. Then, louder: the infinite is; that I of the infinite is God. The effort exhausts him. The Bishop takes the ice-cold hand. This hour is the hour of God; would it not be regrettable if they had met in vain? G recites a life: called at sixty, poor at a treasury stuffed with specie, twenty-two sous in Dead Tree Street, a convent saved in 1793, hunted and damned in the eyes of the masses, eighty-six, without hating anyone. What has the Bishop come to ask? Your blessing. He kneels. When he raises his head, G has just expired. He passes the night in prayer. By morning he only points heavenward. He redoubles tenderness toward children and sufferers. The coteries murmur that no conversion was to be expected at such a bedside. A dowager asks when His Greatness will receive the red cap. Oh, oh, that is a coarse colour, he replies. It is lucky that those who despise it in a cap revere it in a hat.
