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