e 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 potpourri 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