he had spoken, his eyes closed.
　　The effort had exhausted him. It was evident that he had just lived through in a moment the few hours which had been left to him.
　　That which he had said brought him nearer to him who is in death.
　　The supreme moment was approaching.
　　The Bishop understood this; time pressed; it was as a priest that he had come:
　　from extreme coldness he had passed by degrees to extreme emotion; he gazed at those closed eyes, he took that wrinkled, aged and ice-cold hand in his, and bent over the dying man.
　　"This hour is the hour of God.
　　Do you not think that it would be regrettable if we had met in vain?"
　　The conventionary opened his eyes again.
　　A gravity mingled with gloom was imprinted on his countenance.
　　"Bishop," said he, with a slowness which probably arose more from his dignity of soul than from the failing of his strength, "I have passed my life in meditation, study, and contemplation. I was sixty years of age when my country called me and commanded me to concern myself with its affairs.
　　I obeyed.
　　Abuses existed, I combated them; tyrannies existed, I destroyed them; rights and principles existed, I proclaimed and confessed them.
　　Our territory was invaded, I defended it; France was menaced, I offered my breast. I was not rich; I am poor.
　　I have been one of the masters of the state; the vaults of the treasury were encumbered with specie to such a degree that we were forced to shore up the walls, which were on the point of bursting beneath the weight of gold and silver; I dined in Dead Tree Street, at twenty-two sous. I have succored the oppressed, I have comforted the suffering. I tore the cloth from the altar, it is true; but it was to bind up the wounds of my country.
　　I have always upheld the march forward of the human race, forward towards the light, and I have sometimes resisted progress without pity.
　　I have, when the occasion offered, protected my own adversaries, men of your profession.
　　And there is at Peteghem, in Flanders, at the very spot where the Merovingian kings had their summer palace, a convent of Urbanists, the Abbey of Sainte Claire en Beaulieu, which I saved in 1793.
　　I have done my duty according to my powers, and all the good that I was able. After which, I was hunted down, pursued, persecuted, blackened, jeered at, scorned, cursed, proscribed.
　　For many years past, I with my white hair have been conscious that many people think they have the right to despise me; to the poor ignorant masses I present the visage of one damned.
　　And I accept this isolation of hatred, without hating any one myself.
　　Now I am eighty-six years old; I am on the point of death.
　　What is it that you have come to ask of me?"
　　"Your blessing," said the Bishop.
　　And he knelt down.
　　When the Bishop raised his head again, the face of the conventionary had become august.
　　He had just expired.⊙⊙網⊙
　　The Bishop returned home, deeply absorbed in thoughts which cannot be known to us.
　　He passed the whole night in prayer. On the following morning some bold and curious persons attempted to speak to him about member of the Convention G----; he contented himself with pointing heavenward.
　　From that moment he redoubled his tenderness and brotherly feeling towards all children and sufferers.
　　Any allusion to "that old wretch of a G----" caused him to fall into a singular preoccupation.
　　No one could say that the passage of that soul before his, and the reflection of that grand conscience upon his, did not count for something in his approach to perfection.
　　This "pastoral visit" naturally furnished an occasion for a murmur of comment in all the little local coteries.
　　"Was the bedside of such a dying man as that the proper place for a bishop?
　　There was evidently no conversion to be expected. All those revolutionists are backsliders.
　　Then why go there? What was there to be seen there?
　　He must have been very curious indeed to see a soul carried of