Les Misérables
with the pallid hue of an apparition; the mass grew white; the day,
which was slowly dawning, cast a wan light on this swarming heap which
was at once both sepulchral and living, the heads of the figures turned
into the faces of corpses, and this is what it proved to be:—
Seven wagons were driving in a file along the road. The first six were
singularly constructed. They resembled coopers’ drays; they consisted
of long ladders placed on two wheels and forming barrows at their rear
extremities. Each dray, or rather let us say, each ladder, was attached
to four horses harnessed tandem. On these ladders strange clusters of
men were being drawn. In the faint light, these men were to be divined
rather than seen. Twenty-four on each vehicle, twelve on a side, back
to back, facing the passers-by, their legs dangling in the air,—this
was the manner in which these men were travelling, and behind their
backs they had something which clanked, and which was a chain, and on
their necks something which shone, and which was an iron collar. Each
man had his collar, but the chain was for all; so that if these four
and twenty men had occasion to alight from the dray and walk, they were
seized with a sort of inexorable unity, and were obliged to wind over
the ground with the chain for a backbone, somewhat after the fashion of
millepeds. In the back and front of each vehicle, two men armed with
muskets stood erect, each holding one end of the chain under his foot.
The iron necklets were square. The seventh vehicle, a huge rack-sided
baggage wagon, without a hood, had four wheels and six horses, and
carried a sonorous pile of iron boilers, cast-iron pots, braziers, and
chains, among which were mingled several men who were pinioned and
stretched at full length, and who seemed to be ill. This wagon, all
lattice-work, was garnished with dilapidated hurdles which appeared to
have served for former punishments. These vehicles kept to the middle
of the road. On each side marched a double hedge of guards of infamous
aspect, wearing three-cornered hats, like the soldiers under the
Directory, shabby, covered with spots and holes, muffled in uniforms of
veterans and the trousers of undertakers’ men, half gray, half blue,
which were almost hanging in rags, with red epaulets, yellow shoulder
belts, short sabres, muskets, and cudgels; they were a species of
soldier-blackguards. These myrmidons seemed composed of the abjectness
of the beggar and the authority of the executioner. The one who
appeared to be their chief held a postilion’s whip in his hand. All
these details, blurred by the dimness of dawn, became more and more
clearly outlined as the light increased. At the head and in the rear of
the convoy rode mounted gendarmes, serious and with sword in fist.
This procession was so long that when the first vehicle reached the
barrier, the last was barely debauching from the boulevard. A throng,
sprung, it is impossible to say whence, and formed in a twinkling, as
is frequently the case in Paris, pressed forward from both sides of the
road and looked on. In the neighboring lanes the shouts of people
calling to each other and the wooden shoes of market-gardeners
hastening up to gaze were audible.
The men massed upon the drays allowed themselves to be jolted along in
silence. They were livid with the chill of morning. They all wore linen
trousers, and their bare feet were thrust into wooden shoes. The rest
of their costume was a fantasy of wretchedness. Their accoutrements
were horribly incongruous; nothing is more funereal than the harlequin
in rags. Battered felt hats, tarpaulin caps, hideous woollen nightcaps,
and, side by side with a short blouse, a black coat broken at the
elbow; many wore women’s headgear, others had baskets on their heads;
hairy breasts were visible, and through the rent in their garments
tattooed designs could be descried; temples of Love, flaming hearts,
Cupids; eruptions and unhealthy red blotches could also be seen. Two or
three had a straw rope attached to the cross-bar of the dray, and
suspended under them like a stirrup, which supported their feet. One of
them held in his hand and raised to his mouth something which had the
appearance of a black stone and which he seemed to be gnawing; it was
bread which he was eating. There were no eyes there which were not
either dry, dulled, or flaming with an evil light. The escort troop
cursed, the men in chains did not utter a syllable; from time to time
the sound of a blow became audible as the cudgels descended on
shoulder-blades or skulls; some of these men were yawning; their rags
were terrible; their feet hung down, their shoulders oscillated, their
heads clashed together, their fetters clanked, their eyes glared
ferociously, their fists clenched or fell open inertly like the hands
of corpses; in the rear of the convoy ran a band of children screaming
with laughter.
This file of vehicles, whatever its nature was, was mournful. It was
evident that to-morrow, that an hour hence, a pouring rain might
descend, that it might be followed by another and another, and that
their dilapidated garments would be drenched, that once soaked, these
men would not get dry again, that once chilled, they would not again
get warm, that their linen trousers would be glued to their bones by
the downpour, that the water would fill their shoes, that no lashes
from the whips would be able to prevent their jaws from chattering,
that the chain would continue to bind them by the neck, that their legs
would continue to dangle, and it was impossible not to shudder at the
sight of these human beings thus bound and passive beneath the cold
clouds of autumn, and delivered over to the rain, to the blast, to all
the furies of the air, like trees and stones.
Blows from the cudgel were not omitted even in the case of the sick
men, who lay there knotted with ropes and motionless on the seventh
wagon, and who appeared to have been tossed there like sacks filled
with misery.
Suddenly, the sun made its appearance; the immense light of the Orient
burst forth, and one would have said that it had set fire to all those
ferocious heads. Their tongues were unloosed; a conflagration of grins,
oaths, and songs exploded. The broad horizontal sheet of light severed
the file in two parts, illuminating heads and bodies, leaving feet and
wheels in the obscurity. Thoughts made their appearance on these faces;
it was a terrible moment; visible demons with their masks removed,
fierce souls laid bare. Though lighted up, this wild throng remained in
gloom. Some, who were gay, had in their mouths quills through which
they blew vermin over the crowd, picking out the women; the dawn
accentuated these lamentable profiles with the blackness of its
shadows; there was not one of these creatures who was not deformed by
reason of wretchedness; and the whole was so monstrous that one would
have said that the sun’s brilliancy had been changed into the glare of
the lightning. The wagon-load which headed the line had struck up a
song, and were shouting at the top of their voices with a haggard
joviality, a pot-pourri by Desaugiers, then famous, called _The
Vestal_; the trees shivered mournfully; in the cross-lanes,
countenances of bourgeois listened in an idiotic delight to these
coarse strains droned by spectres.
All sorts of distress met in this procession as in chaos; here were to
be found the facial angles of every sort of beast, old men, youths,
bald heads, gray beards, cynical monstrosities, sour resignation,
savage grins, senseless attitudes, snouts surmounted by caps, heads
like those of young girls with corkscrew curls on the temples,
infantile visages, and by reason of that, horrible thin skeleton faces,
to which death alone was lacking. On the first cart was a negro, who
had been a slave, in all probability, and who could make a comparison
of his chains. The frightful leveller from below, shame, had passed
over these brows; at that degree of abasement, the last transformations
were suffered by all in their extremest depths, and ignorance,
converted into dulness, was the equal of intelligence converted into
despair. There was no choice possible between these men who appeared to
the eye as the flower of the mud. It was evident that the person who
had had the ordering of that unclean procession had not classified
them. These beings had been fettered and coupled pell-mell, in
alphabetical disorder, probably, and loaded hap-hazard on those carts.
Nevertheless, horrors, when grouped together, always end by evolving a
result; all additions of wretched men give a sum total, each chain
exhaled a common soul, and each dray-load had its own physiognomy. By
the side of the one where they were singing, there was one where they
were howling; a third where they were begging; one could be seen in
which they were gnashing their teeth; another load menaced the
spectators, another blasphemed God; the last was as silent as the tomb.
Dante would have thought that he beheld his seven circles of hell on
the march. The march of the damned to their tortures, performed in
sinister wise, not on the formidable and flaming chariot of the
Apocalypse, but, what was more mournful than that, on the gibbet cart.
One of the guards, who had a hook on the end of his cudgel, made a
pretence from time to time, of stirring up this mass of human filth. An
old woman in the crowd pointed them out to her little boy five years
old, and said to him: “Rascal, let that be a warning to you!”
As the songs and blasphemies increased, the man who appeared to be the
captain of the escort cracked his whip, and at that signal a fearful
dull and blind flogging, which produced the sound of hail, fell upon
the seven dray-loads; many roared and foamed at the mouth; which
redoubled the delight of the street urchins who had hastened up, a
swarm of flies on these wounds.
Jean Valjean’s eyes had assumed a frightful expression. They were no
longer eyes; they were those deep and glassy objects which replace the
glance in the case of certain wretched men, which seem unconscious of
reality, and in which flames the reflection of terrors and of
catastrophes. He was not looking at a spectacle, he was seeing a
vision. He tried to rise, to flee, to make his escape; he could not
move his feet. Sometimes, the things that you see seize upon you and
hold you fast. He remained nailed to the spot, petrified, stupid,
asking himself, athwart confused and inexpressible anguish, what this
sepulchral persecution signified, and whence had come that pandemonium
which was pursuing him. All at once, he raised his hand to his brow, a
gesture habitual to those whose memory suddenly returns; he remembered
that this was, in fact, the usual itinerary, that it was customary to
make this detour in order to avoid all possibility of encountering
royalty on the road to Fontainebleau, and that, five and thirty years
before, he had himself passed through that barrier.
Cosette was no less terrified, but in a different way. She did not
understand; what she beheld did not seem to her to be possible; at
length she cried:—
“Father! What are those men in those carts?”
Jean Valjean replied: “Convicts.”
“Whither are they going?”
“To the galleys.”
At that moment, the cudgelling, multiplied by a hundred hands, became
zealous, blows with the flat of the sword were mingled with it, it was
a perfect storm of whips and clubs; the convicts bent before it, a
hideous obedience was evoked by the torture, and all held their peace,
darting glances like chained wolves.
Cosette trembled in every limb; she resumed:—
“Father, are they still men?”
“Sometimes,” answered the unhappy man.
It was the chain-gang, in fact, which had set out before daybreak from