Les Misérables, v. 4

On drawing nearer, this thing assumed a shape, and stood out behind the trees with the lividness of an apparition. The mass grew whiter, and the gradually dawning day threw a ghastly gleam over this mass, which was at once sepulchral and alive, – the heads of the shadows became the faces of corpses, and this is what it was. Seven vehicles were moving in file along the road, and the first six had a singular shape; they resembled brewers' drays, and consisted of long ladders laid upon two wheels, and forming a shaft at the front end. Each dray, or, to speak more correctly, each ladder, was drawn by a team of four horses, and strange clusters of men were dragged along upon these ladders. In the faint light these men could not be seen, so much as divined. Twenty-four on each ladder, twelve on either side, leaning against each other, had their faces turned to the passers-by, and their legs hanging down; and they had behind their back something which rang and was a chain, and something that glistened, which was a collar. Each man had his collar, but the chain was for all; so that these twenty-four men, if obliged to get down from the dray and walk, were seized by a species of inexorable unity, and were obliged to wind on the ground with the chain as backbone, very nearly like centipedes. At the front and back of each cart stood two men armed with guns, who stood with their feet on the end of the chain. The seventh vehicle, a vast fourgon with rack sides but no hood, had four wheels and six horses, and carried a resounding mass of coppers, boilers, chafing-dishes, and chains, among which were mingled a few bound men lying their full length, who seemed to be ill. This fourgon, which was quite open, was lined with broken-down hurdles, which seemed to have been used for old punishments.

These vehicles held the crown of the causeway; and on either side marched a double file of infamous-looking guards, wearing three-cornered hats, like the soldiers of the Directory, and dirty, torn, stained uniforms, half gray and blue, a coat of the Invalides and the trousers of the undertaker's men, red epaulettes and yellow belts, and were armed with short sabres, muskets, and sticks. These sbirri seemed compounded of the abjectness of the beggar and the authority of the hangman; and the one who appeared their leader held a postilion's whip in his hands. All these details grew more and more distinct in the advancing daylight; and at the head and rear of the train marched mounted gendarmes with drawn sabres. The train was so long that at the moment when the first vehicle reached the barrière the last had scarce turned out of the boulevard. A crowd, which came no one knew whence and formed in a second, as is so common in Paris, lined both sides of the road, and looked. In the side-lanes could be heard the shouts of people calling to each other, and the wooden shoes of the kitchen-gardeners running up to have a peep.

The men piled up on the drays allowed themselves to be jolted in silence, and were livid with the morning chill. They all wore canvas trousers, and their naked feet were thrust into wooden shoes; but the rest of their attire was left to the fancy of wretchedness. Their accoutrements were hideously disaccordant, for nothing is more mournful than the harlequin garb of rags. There were crushed hats, oilskin caps, frightful woollen night-caps, and side by side with the blouse, an out-at-elbow black coat Some wore women's bonnets, and others had baskets, as head-gear; hairy chests were visible, and through the rents of the clothes tattooing could be distinguished, – temples of love, burning hearts, and cupids, – but ringworm and other unhealthy red spots might also be noticed. Two or three had passed a straw rope through the side rail of the dray, which hung down like a stirrup and supported their feet; while one of them held in his hand and raised to his mouth something like a black stone, which he seemed to be gnawing, – it was bread he was eating. All the eyes were dry, and either dull or luminous with a wicked light. The escort cursed, but the chained men did not breathe a syllable; from time to time the sound of a blow dealt with a stick on shoulder-blades or heads could be heard. Some of these men yawned; the rags were terrible; their feet hung down, their shoulders oscillated, their heads struck against each other, their irons rattled, their eyeballs flashed ferociously, their fists clenched or opened inertly like the hands of death, and in the rear of the chain a band of children burst into a laugh.

This file of vehicles, whatever their nature might be, was lugubrious. It was plain that within an hour a shower might fall, that it might be followed by another, and then another, that the ragged clothing would be drenched; and that once wet through, these men would not dry again, and once chilled, would never grow warm any more; that their canvas trousers would be glued to their bones by the rain, that water would fill their wooden shoes, that lashes could not prevent the chattering of teeth, that the chain would continue to hold them by the neck, and their feet would continue to hang; and it was impossible not to shudder on seeing these human creatures thus bound and passive beneath the cold autumnal clouds, and surrendered to the rain, the breezes, and all the furies of the atmosphere, like trees and stones. The blows were not even spared the sick who lay bound with ropes and motionless in the seventh vehicle, and who seemed to have been thrown down there like sacks filled with wretchedness.

All at once the sun appeared, the immense beam of the east flashed forth; and it seemed as if it set fire to all these ferocious heads. Tongues became untied, and a storm of furies, oaths, and songs exploded. The wide horizontal light cut the whole file in two, illumining the heads and bodies, and leaving the feet and wheels in obscurity. Thoughts appeared on faces, and it was a fearful thing to see demons with their masks thrown away, and ferocious souls laid bare. Some of the merrier ones had in their mouths quills, through which they blew vermin on the crowd, selecting women. The dawn caused their lamentable faces to stand out in the darkness of the shadows. Not one of these beings but was misshapen through wretchedness; and it was so monstrous that it seemed to change the light of the sun into the gleam of a lightning flash. The first cart-load had struck up, and were droning out at the top of their voices, with a haggard joviality, a pot-pourri of Desaugiers, at that time famous under the title of La Vestale. The trees shook mournfully, while in the side-walks bourgeois faces were listening with an idiotic beatitude to these comic songs chanted by spectres. All destinies could be found in this gang, like a chaos; there were there the facial angles of all animals, old men, youths, naked skulls, gray beards, cynical monstrosities, sulky resignation, savage grins, wild attitudes, youth, girlish heads with corkscrew curls on the temples, infantine, and for that reason horrible, faces, and then countenances of skeletons which only lacked death. On the first dray could be seen a negro, who had been a slave probably, and was enabled to compare the chains. The frightful leveller, shame, had passed over all these foreheads. At this stage of abasement the last transformations were undergone by all in the lowest depths; and ignorance, changed into dulness, was the equal of intellect changed into despair. No choice was possible among these men, who appeared to be the pick of the mud; and it was clear that the arranger of this unclean procession had not attempted to classify them. These beings had been bound and coupled pell-mell, probably in alphabetical disorder, and loaded haphazard on the vehicles. Still, horrors, when grouped, always end by disengaging a resultant. Every addition of wretched men produces a total; a common soul issued from each chain, and each dray-load had its physiognomy. By the side of the man who sang was one who yelled; a third begged; another could be seen gnashing his teeth; another threatened the passers-by; another blasphemed God, and the last was silent as the tomb. Dante would have fancied that he saw the seven circles of the Inferno in motion. It was the march of the damned to the torture, performed in a sinister way, not upon the formidable flashing car of the Apocalypse, but, more gloomy still, in the hangman's cart.

One of the keepers, who had a hook at the end of his stick, from time to time attempted to stir up this heap of human ordure. An old woman in the crowd pointed them to a little boy of five years of age, and said to him, "You scamp, that will teach you!" As the songs and blasphemy grew louder, the man who seemed the captain of the escort cracked his whip; and at this signal a blind, indiscriminate bastinado fell with the sound of hail upon the seven cart-loads. Many yelled and foamed at the lips, which redoubled the joy of the gamins who had come up like a cloud of flies settling upon wounds. Jean Valjean's eye had become frightful; it was no longer an eyeball, but that profound glass bulb which takes the place of the eye in some unfortunate men, which seems unconscious of reality, and in which the reflection of horrors and catastrophes flashes. He was not looking at a spectacle, but going through a vision; he had to rise, fly, escape, but could not move his foot. At times things which you see seize you and root you in the ground. He remained petrified and stupid, asking himself through a confused and inexpressible agony what was the meaning of this sepulchral persecution, and whence came this Pandemonium that pursued him. All at once he raised his hand to his forehead, – the usual gesture of those to whom memory suddenly returns; he remembered that this was substantially the road, that this détour was usual to avoid any meeting with royalty, – which was always possible on the Fontainebleau road, – and that five-and-thirty years before he had passed through that barrière. Cosette was not the less horrified, though in a different way; she did not understand, her breath failed her, and what she saw did not appear to her possible. At length she exclaimed, —

"Father! what is there in those vehicles?"

Jean Valjean answered, —

"Convicts."

"Where are they going?"

"To the galleys."

At this moment the bastinado, multiplied by a hundred hands, became tremendous; strokes of the flat of the sabre were mingled with it, and it resembled a tornado of whips and sticks. The galley-slaves bowed their heads; a hideous obedience was produced by the punishment, and all were silent, with the looks of chained wolves. Cosette, trembling in all her limbs, continued, —

"Father, are they still men?"

"Sometimes," the miserable man replied.

It was, in fact, the Chain, which, leaving Bicêtre before daybreak, was taking the Mans road, to avoid Fontainebleau, where the king then was. This détour made the fearful journey last three or four days longer; but it surely may be prolonged to save a royal personage the sight of a punishment! Jean Valjean went home crushed; for such encounters are blows, and the recollections they leave behind resemble a concussion. While walking along the Rue de Babylone, Jean Valjean did not notice that Cosette asked him other questions about what they had just seen; perhaps he was himself too absorbed in his despondency to notice her remarks and answer them. At night, however, when Cosette left him to go to bed, he heard her say in a low voice, and as if speaking to herself: "I feel that if I were to meet one of those men in the street, I should die only from being so close to him."

Luckily, the next day after this tragic interlude, there were festivals in Paris on account of some official solemnity which I have forgotten, a review at the Champ de Mars, a quintain on the Seine, theatres in the Champs Élysées, fireworks at the Étoile, and illuminations everywhere. Jean Valjean, breaking through his habits, took Cosette to these rejoicings in order to make her forget the scene of the previous day, and efface, beneath the laughing tumult of all Paris, the abominable thing which had passed before her. The review, which seasoned the fête, rendered uniforms very natural; hence Jean Valjean put on his National Guard coat, with the vague inner feeling of a man who is seeking a refuge. However, the object of this jaunt seemed to be attained; Cosette, who made it a law to please her father, and to whom any festival was a novelty, accepted the distraction with the easy and light good-will of adolescents, and did not make too disdainful a pout at the porringer of joy which is called a public holiday. Hence Jean Valjean might believe that he had succeeded, and that no trace of the hideous vision remained. A few days after, one morning when the sun was shining, and both were on the garden steps, – another infraction of the rules which Jean Valjean seemed to have imposed on himself, and that habit of remaining in her chamber which sadness had caused Cosette to assume, – the girl, wearing a combing jacket, was standing in that morning négligé which adorably envelops maidens, and looks like a cloud over a star; and with her head in the light, her cheeks pink from a good night's rest, and gazed at softly by the old man, she was plucking the petals of a daisy. She did not know the delicious legend of, "I love you, a little, passionately," etc., – for who could have taught it to her? She handled the flower instinctively and innocently, without suspecting that plucking a daisy to pieces is questioning a heart. If there were a fourth Grace called Melancholy, she had the air of that Grace when smiling. Jean Valjean was fascinated by the contemplation of these little fingers on this flower, forgetting everything in the radiance which surrounded the child. A red-breast was twittering in a bush hard by; and while clouds crossed the sky so gayly that you might have said that they had just been set at liberty, Cosette continued to pluck her flower attentively. She seemed to be thinking of something, but that something must be charming. All at once she turned her head on her shoulder, with the delicate slowness of a swan, and said to Jean Valjean, "Tell me, father, what the galleys are."