The closer you came to him, the
more compelling was he--a devilish attraction, notably selfish, yet
capable of benevolence. Two years before this time I saw him lift
a load from the back of a peasant woman and carry it home for her,
putting into her hand a gold piece on leaving. At another time, an
old man had died of a foul disease in a miserable upper room of a
warehouse. Doltaire was passing at the moment when the body should
be carried to burial. The stricken widow of the dead man stood
below, waiting, but no one would fetch the body down. Doltaire
stopped and questioned her kindly, and in another minute he was
driving the carter and another upstairs at the point of his sword.
Together they brought the body down, and Doltaire followed it to
the burying-ground; keeping the gravedigger at his task when he
would have run away, and saying the responses to the priest in the
short service read above the grave.
I said to him then, "You rail at the world and scoff at men and
many decencies, and yet you do these things!"
To this he replied--he was in my own lodgings at the time--"The
brain may call all men liars and fools, but the senses feel the
shock of misery which we do not ourselves inflict.
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