Page 452 - les-miserables

sent when he had been judged.
There was a chair behind him; he dropped into it, ter-
rified at the thought that he might be seen; when he was
seated, he took advantage of a pile of cardboard boxes,
which stood on the judge’s desk, to conceal his face from
the whole room; he could now see without being seen; he
had fully regained consciousness of the reality of things;
gradually he recovered; he attained that phase of compo-
sure where it is possible to listen.
M. Bamatabois was one of the jurors.
He looked for Javert, but did not see him; the seat of the
witnesses was hidden from him by the clerk’s table, and
then, as we have just said, the hall was sparely lighted.
At the moment of this entrance, the defendant’s lawyer
had just finished his plea.
The attention of all was excited to the highest pitch; the
affair had lasted for three hours: for three hours that crowd
had been watching a strange man, a miserable specimen of
humanity, either profoundly stupid or profoundly subtle,
gradually bending beneath the weight of a terrible likeness.
This man, as the reader already knows, was a vagabond who
had been found in a field carrying a branch laden with ripe
apples, broken in the orchard of a neighbor, called the Pier-
ron orchard. Who was this man? an examination had been
made; witnesses had been heard, and they were unanimous;
light had abounded throughout the entire debate; the ac-
cusation said: ‘We have in our grasp not only a marauder, a
stealer of fruit; we have here, in our hands, a bandit, an old
offender who has broken his ban, an ex-convict, a miscreant

452 Les Miserables