He stayed during the whole of that day and night, seated upon his mother’s grave.
It was there that the worthy Doctor Gilbert,—have we not already informed the reader that the future protector of Pitou was a physician?—it was there that the worthy doctor found him, when, feeling the full extent of the duty imposed upon him by the promise he had made, he had hastened to fulfil it, and this within forty-eight hours after the letter had been despatched.
Ange was very young when he had first seen the doctor, but it is well known that the impressions received in youth are so strong that they leave eternal reminiscences. Then the passage of the mysterious young man had left its trace in the house. He had there left the young child of whom we have spoken, and with him comparative ease and comfort; every time that Ange had heard his mother pronounce the name of Gilbert, it had been with a feeling that approached to adoration; then again, when he had reappeared at the house a grown man, and with the title of doctor, when he had added to the benefits he had showered upon it the promise of future protection, Pitou had comprehended, from the fervent gratitude of his mother, that he himself ought also to be grateful, and the poor youth, without precisely understanding what he was saying, had stammered out the words of eternal remembrance and profound gratitude which had before been uttered by his mother.
Therefore, as soon as he saw the doctor appear at the grated gate of the cemetery, and saw him advancing towards him amid the mossy graves and broken crosses, he recognized him, rose up and went to meet him, for he understood that to the person who had thus come on being called for by his mother he could not say no, as he had done to others; he therefore made no further resistance than that of turning back to give a last look at the grave, when Gilbert took him by the hand and gently drew him away from the gloomy enclosure. An elegant cabriolet was standing at the gate; he made the poor child get into it, and for the moment leaving the house of Pitou’s mother under the guardianship of public faith and the interest which misfortune always inspires, he drove his young protégé to the town and alighted with him at the best inn, which at that time was called The Dauphin. He was scarcely installed there when he sent for a tailor, who, having been forewarned, brought with him a quantity of ready-made clothes. He with due precaution selected for Pitou garments which were too long for him by two or three inches,—a superfluity which, from the rate at which our hero was growing, promised not to be of long duration. After this he walked with him towards that quarter of the town which we have designated, and which was called Pleux.
The nearer Pitou approached this quarter, the slower did his steps become, for it was evident that he was about to be conducted to the house of his aunt Angélique; and notwithstanding that he had but seldom seen his godmother,—for it was Aunt Angélique who had bestowed on Pitou his poetical Christian name,—he had retained a very formidable remembrance of his respectable relative.
And in fact there was nothing about Aunt Angélique that could be in any way attractive to a child accustomed to all the tender care of maternal solicitude. Aunt Angélique was at that time an old maid between fifty-five and fifty-eight years of age, stultified by the most minute practices of religious bigotry, and in whom an ill-understood piety had inverted every charitable, merciful, and humane feeling, to cultivate in their stead an unnatural thirst for malicious gossip, which was increased day by day from her constant intercourse with the bigoted old gossips of the town. She did not precisely live on charity; but besides the sale of the thread she spun upon her wheel, and the letting out of chairs in the church, which office had been granted to her by the chapter, she from time to time received from pious souls, who allowed themselves to be deceived by her pretensions to religion, small sums, which from their original copper she converted into silver, and then from silver into golden louis, which disappeared not only without any person seeing them disappear, but without any one ever suspecting their existence, and which were buried, one by one, in the cushion of the arm-chair upon which she sat at work; and when once in this hiding-place, they rejoined by degrees a certain number of their fellow-coins, which had been gathered one by one, and like them destined thenceforth to be sequestered from circulation until the unknown day of the death of the old maid should place them in the hands of her heir.