The Three Cities Trilogy: Rome | Page 5

as with the sap of immortal youth. And that
which struck Pierre, that which made his heart leap within him, was
that he found Rome such as he had desired to find her, fresh and
youthful, with a volatile, almost incorporeal, gaiety of aspect, smiling
as at the hope of a new life in the pure dawn of a lovely day.
And standing motionless before the sublime vista, with his hands still
clenched and burning, Pierre in a few minutes again lived the last three
years of his life. Ah! what a terrible year had the first been, spent in his
little house at Neuilly, with doors and windows ever closed, burrowing
there like some wounded animal suffering unto death. He had come

back from Lourdes with his soul desolate, his heart bleeding, with
nought but ashes within him. Silence and darkness fell upon the ruins
of his love and his faith. Days and days went by, without a pulsation of
his veins, without the faintest gleam arising to brighten the gloom of
his abandonment. His life was a mechanical one; he awaited the
necessary courage to resume the tenor of existence in the name of
sovereign reason, which had imposed upon him the sacrifice of
everything. Why was he not stronger, more resistant, why did he not
quietly adapt his life to his new opinions? As he was unwilling to cast
off his cassock, through fidelity to the love of one and disgust of
backsliding, why did he not seek occupation in some science suited to a
priest, such as astronomy or archaeology? The truth was that something,
doubtless his mother's spirit, wept within him, an infinite, distracted
love which nothing had yet satisfied and which ever despaired of
attaining contentment. Therein lay the perpetual suffering of his
solitude: beneath the lofty dignity of reason regained, the wound still
lingered, raw and bleeding.
One autumn evening, however, under a dismal rainy sky, chance
brought him into relations with an old priest, Abbe Rose, who was
curate at the church of Ste. Marguerite, in the Faubourg St. Antoine. He
went to see Abbe Rose in the Rue de Charonne, where in the depths of
a damp ground floor he had transformed three rooms into an asylum for
abandoned children, whom he picked up in the neighbouring streets.
And from that moment Pierre's life changed, a fresh and all-powerful
source of interest had entered into it, and by degrees he became the old
priest's passionate helper. It was a long way from Neuilly to the Rue de
Charonne, and at first he only made the journey twice a week. But
afterwards he bestirred himself every day, leaving home in the morning
and not returning until night. As the three rooms no longer sufficed for
the asylum, he rented the first floor of the house, reserving for himself a
chamber in which ultimately he often slept. And all his modest income
was expended there, in the prompt succouring of poor children; and the
old priest, delighted, touched to tears by the young devoted help which
had come to him from heaven, would often embrace Pierre, weeping,
and call him a child of God.

It was then that Pierre knew want and wretchedness--wicked,
abominable wretchedness; then that he lived amidst it for two long
years. The acquaintance began with the poor little beings whom he
picked up on the pavements, or whom kind-hearted neighbours brought
to him now that the asylum was known in the district--little boys, little
girls, tiny mites stranded on the streets whilst their fathers and mothers
were toiling, drinking, or dying. The father had often disappeared, the
mother had gone wrong, drunkenness and debauchery had followed
slack times into the home; and then the brood was swept into the gutter,
and the younger ones half perished of cold and hunger on the footways,
whilst their elders betook themselves to courses of vice and crime. One
evening Pierre rescued from the wheels of a stone-dray two little
nippers, brothers, who could not even give him an address, tell him
whence they had come. On another evening he returned to the asylum
with a little girl in his arms, a fair-haired little angel, barely three years
old, whom he had found on a bench, and who sobbed, saying that her
mother had left her there. And by a logical chain of circumstances, after
dealing with the fleshless, pitiful fledglings ousted from their nests, he
came to deal with the parents, to enter their hovels, penetrating each
day further and further into a hellish sphere, and ultimately acquiring
knowledge of all its frightful horror, his heart meantime bleeding, rent
by terrified anguish and impotent charity.
Oh! the grievous City of Misery, the bottomless abyss of human
suffering and degradation--how frightful were his journeys through