174 6 Les Miserables
disappeared.
The old man remained for several minutes motionless and
as though struck by lightning, without the power to speak or
breathe, as though a clenched fist grasped his throat. At last
he tore himself from his arm-chair, ran, so far as a man can
run at ninety-one, to the door, opened it, and cried:—
‘Help! Help!’
His daughter made her appearance, then the domestics.
He began again, with a pitiful rattle: ‘Run after him! Bring
him back! What have I done to him? He is mad! He is go-
ing away! Ah! my God! Ah! my God! This time he will not
come back!’
He went to the window which looked out on the street,
threw it open with his aged and palsied hands, leaned out
more than half-way, while Basque and Nicolette held him
behind, and shouted:—
‘Marius! Marius! Marius! Marius!’
But Marius could no longer hear him, for at that moment
he was turning the corner of the Rue Saint-Louis.
The octogenarian raised his hands to his temples two
or three times with an expression of anguish, recoiled tot-
tering, and fell back into an arm-chair, pulseless, voiceless,
tearless, with quivering head and lips which moved with a
stupid air, with nothing in his eyes and nothing any longer
in his heart except a gloomy and profound something which
resembled night.