Only a loaf can be
found, and it is slid under the spongy hair.
While they hold the sergeant's hand and question him, he only
slavers new heaps of bubbles, and we see his great black-bearded
head across this rosy cloud. Laid out like that, he might be a
deep-breathing marine monster, and the transparent red foam gathers
and creeps up to his great hazy eyes, no longer spectacled.
Then his throat rattles. It is a childish rattle, and he dies moving
his head to right and to left as though he were trying very gently
to say "No."
Looking on the enormous inert mass, I reflect that he was a good
man. He had an innocent and impressionable heart. How I reproach
myself that I sometimes abused him for the ingenuous narrowness of
his views, and for a certain clerical impertinence that he always
had! And how glad I am in this distressing scene--yes, happy enough
to tremble with joy--that I restrained myself from an angry protest
when I found him stealthily reading a letter I was writing, a
protest that would unjustly have wounded him! I remember the time
when he exasperated me so much by his dissertation on France and the
Virgin Mary. It seemed impossible to me that he could utter those
thoughts sincerely. Why should he not have been sincere? Has he not
been really killed today? I remember, too, certain deeds of
devotion, the kindly patience of the great man, exiled in war as in
life--and the rest does not matter. His ideas themselves are only
trivial details compared with his heart--which is there on the
ground in ruins in this corner of Hell.
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