The incomprehensible had just made its entrance into Fauchelevent's hut.
Fauchelevent groped about amid conjectures, and could see nothing clearly but this: "M. Madeleine saved my life."
This certainty alone was sufficient and decided his course.
He said to himself:
"It is my turn now." He added in his conscience:
"M. Madeleine did not stop to deliberate when it was a question of thrusting himself under the cart for the purpose of dragging me out."
He made up his mind to save M. Madeleine.
Nevertheless, he put many questions to himself and made himself divers replies:
"After what he did for me, would I save him if he were a thief?
Just the same.
If he were an assassin, would I save him?
Just the same.
Since he is a saint, shall I save him? Just the same."
But what a problem it was to manage to have him remain in the convent! Fauchelevent did not recoil in the face of this almost chimerical undertaking; this poor peasant of Picardy without any other ladder than his self-devotion, his good will, and a little of that old rustic cunning, on this occasion enlisted in the service of a generous enterprise, undertook to scale the difficulties of the cloister, and the steep escarpments of the rule of Saint-Benoit. Father Fauchelevent was an old man who had been an egoist all his life, and who, towards the end of his days, halt, infirm, with no interest left to him in the world, found it sweet to be grateful, and perceiving a generous action to be performed, flung himself upon it like a man, who at the moment when he is dying, should find close to his hand a glass of good wine which he had never tasted, and should swallow it with avidity. We may add, that the air which he had breathed for many years in this convent had destroyed all personality in him, and had ended by rendering a good action of some kind absolutely necessary to him.
So he took his resolve:
to devote himself to M. Madeleine.
We have just called him a poor peasant of Picardy.
That description is just, but incomplete.
At the point of this story which we have now reached, a little of Father Fauchelevent's physiology becomes useful.
He was a peasant, but he had been a notary, which added trickery to his cunning, and penetration to his ingenuousness. Having, through various causes, failed in his business, he had descended to the calling of a carter and a laborer.
But, in spite of oaths and lashings, which horses seem to require, something of the notary had lingered in him.
He had some natural wit; he talked good grammar; he conversed, which is a rare thing in a village; and the other peasants said of him:
"He talks almost like a gentleman with a hat."
Fauchelevent belonged, in fact, to that species, which the impertinent and flippant vocabulary of the last century qualified as demi-bourgeois, demi-lout, and which the metaphors showered by the chateau upon the thatched cottage ticketed in the pigeon-hole of the plebeian:
rather rustic, rather citified; pepper and salt. Fauchelevent, though sorely tried and harshly used by fate, worn out, a sort of poor, threadbare old soul, was, nevertheless, an impulsive man, and extremely spontaneous in his actions; a precious quality which prevents one from ever being wicked. His defects and his vices, for he had some, were all superficial; in short, his physiognomy was of the kind which succeeds with an observer.