and decent wants from the
shameful and fatal ones; where, in short, they tell us what we can and
ought to think about when we have borne the burden and heat of the day
for the profit of others, and are sitting in the evening at the door of
our huts, gazing on the red stars as they come out on the horizon."

Thus would Patience reason; and, believe me, in translating his words
into our conventional language, I am robbing them of all their grace,
all their fire, and all their vigour. But who could repeat the exact
words of Patience? His was a language used by none but himself; it was a
mixture of the limited, though forcible, vocabulary of the peasants and
of the boldest metaphors of the poets, whose poetic turns he would often
make bolder still. To this mixed idiom his sympathetic mind gave order
and logic. An incredible wealth of thought made up for the brevity of
the phrases that clothed it. You should have seen how desperately his
will and convictions strove to overcome the impotence of his language;
any other than he would have failed to come out of the struggle with
honour. And I assure you that any one capable of something more serious
than laughing at his solecisms and audacities of phrase, would have
found in this man material for the most important studies on the
development of the human mind, and an incentive to the most tender
admiration for primitive moral beauty.

When, subsequently, I came to understand Patience thoroughly, I found a
bond of sympathy with him in my own exceptional destiny. Like him, I
had been without education; like him, I had sought outside myself for
an explanation of my being--just as one seeks the answer to a riddle.
Thanks to the accidents of my birth and fortune, I had arrived at
complete development, while Patience, to the hour of his death, remained
groping in the darkness of an ignorance from which he neither would nor
could emerge. To me, however, this was only an additional reason for
recognising the superiority of that powerful nature which held its
course more boldly by the feeble light of instinct, than I myself by all
the brilliant lights of knowledge; and which, moreover, had not had a
single evil inclination to subdue, while I had had all that a man may
have.

At the time, however, at which I must take up my story, Patience was
still, in my eyes, merely a grotesque character, an object of amusement
for Edmee, and of kindly compassion for the Abbe Aubert. When they spoke