pon the
plank bed of the convict, he withdrew into his own consciousness and
meditated.

He constituted himself the tribunal.

He began by putting himself on trial.

He recognized the fact that he was not an innocent man unjustly
punished. He admitted that he had committed an extreme and blameworthy
act; that that loaf of bread would probably not have been refused to
him had he asked for it; that, in any case, it would have been better to
wait until he could get it through compassion or through work; that
it is not an unanswerable argument to say, "Can one wait when one is
hungry?" That, in the first place, it is very rare for any one to die of
hunger, literally; and next, that, fortunately or unfortunately, man
is so constituted that he can suffer long and much, both morally and
physically, without dying; that it is therefore necessary to have
patience; that that would even have been better for those poor little
children; that it had been an act of madness for him, a miserable,
unfortunate wretch, to take society at large violently by the collar,
and to imagine that one can escape from misery through theft; that that
is in any case a poor door through which to escape from misery through
which infamy enters; in short, that he was in the wrong.

Then he asked himself--

Whether he had been the only one in fault in his fatal history. Whether
it was not a serious thing, that he, a laborer, out of work, that he, an
industrious man, should have lacked bread. And whether, the fault once
committed and confessed, the chastisement had not been ferocious and
disproportioned. Whether there had not been more abuse on the part of
the law, in respect to the penalty, than there had been on the part
of the culprit in respect to his fault. Whether there had not been an
excess of weights in one balance of the scale, in the one which contains
expiation. Whether the over-weight of the penalty was not equivalent
to the annihilation of the crime, and did not result in reversing the
situation, of replacing the fault of the delinquent by the fault of the
repression, of converting the guilty man into the victim, and the debtor
into the creditor, and of ranging the law definitely on the side of the
man who had violated it.

Whether this penalty, complicated by successive aggravations for
attempts at escape, had not ended in becoming a sort of outrage
perpetrated by the stronger upon the feebler, a crime of society against
the individual,