All sorts of ideas warred within me; I passed
through periods of revolt when I shook my fist at Heaven, and then I
lapsed into humility, entreating God to take me in my turn. And it was at
last a conviction that there must be justice, a conviction that there
must be love, which calmed me by restoring me my faith. You knew my
daughter, so tall and strong, so beautiful, so brimful of life. Would it
not be the most monstrous injustice if for her, who did not know life,
there should be nothing beyond the tomb? She will live again, I am
absolutely convinced of it, for I still hear her at times, she tells me
that we shall meet, that we shall see one another again. Oh! the dear
beings whom one has lost, my dear daughter, my dear wife, to see them
once more, to live with them elsewhere, that is the one hope, the one
consolation for all the sorrows of this world! I have given myself to
God, since God alone can restore them to me!"
He was shaking with a slight tremor, like the weak old man he had become;
and Pierre was at last able to understand and explain the conversion of
this /savant/, this man of intellect who, growing old, had reverted to
belief under the influence of sentiment. First of all, and this he had
previously suspected, he discovered a kind of atavism of faith in this
Pyrenean, this son of peasant mountaineers, who had been brought up in
belief of the legend, and whom the legend had again mastered even when
fifty years, of positive study had rolled over it.
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