In the villages people gave him scarcely anything—­he was too well known.  Everybody had grown tired of seeing him, day after day for forty years, dragging his deformed and tattered person from door to door on his wooden crutches.  But he could not make up his mind to go elsewhere, because he knew no place on earth but this particular corner of the country, these three or four villages where he had spent the whole of his miserable existence.  He had limited his begging operations and would not for worlds have passed his accustomed bounds.

He did not even know whether the world extended for any distance beyond the trees which had always bounded his vision.  He did not ask himself the question.  And when the peasants, tired of constantly meeting him in their fields or along their lanes, exclaimed:  “Why don’t you go to other villages instead of always limping about here?” he did not answer, but slunk away, possessed with a vague dread of the unknown—­the dread of a poor wretch who fears confusedly a thousand things—­new faces, taunts, insults, the suspicious glances of people who do not know him and the policemen walking in couples on the roads.  These last he always instinctively avoided, taking refuge in the bushes or behind heaps of stones when he saw them coming.

When he perceived them in the distance, ’With uniforms gleaming in the sun, he was suddenly possessed with unwonted agility—­the agility of a wild animal seeking its lair.  He threw aside his crutches, fell to the ground like a limp rag, made himself as small as possible and crouched like a bare under cover, his tattered vestments blending in hue with the earth on which he cowered.

He had never had any trouble with the police, but the instinct to avoid them was in his blood.  He seemed to have inherited it from the parents he had never known.

He had no refuge, no roof for his head, no shelter of any kind.  In summer he slept out of doors and in winter he showed remarkable skill in slipping unperceived into barns and stables.  He always decamped before his presence could be discovered.  He knew all the holes through which one could creep into farm buildings, and the handling of his crutches having made his arms surprisingly muscular he often hauled himself up through sheer strength of wrist into hay-lofts, where he sometimes remained for four or five days at a time, provided he had collected a sufficient store of food beforehand.

He lived like the beasts of the field.  He was in the midst of men, yet knew no one, loved no one, exciting in the breasts of the peasants only a sort of careless contempt and smoldering hostility.  They nicknamed him “Bell,” because he hung between his two crutches like a church bell between its supports.

For two days he had eaten nothing.  No one gave him anything now.  Every one’s patience was exhausted.  Women shouted to him from their doorsteps when they saw him coming: 

“Be off with you, you good-for-nothing vagabond!  Why, I gave you a piece of bread only three days ago!”