Page 1044 - les-miserables

CHAPTER II

ONE OF THE RED SPECTRES

OF THAT EPOCH

Any one who had chanced to pass through the little town
of Vernon at this epoch, and who had happened to walk
across that fine monumental bridge, which will soon be
succeeded, let us hope, by some hideous iron cable bridge,
might have observed, had he dropped his eyes over the par-
apet, a man about fifty years of age wearing a leather cap,
and trousers and a waistcoat of coarse gray cloth, to which
something yellow which had been a red ribbon, was sewn,
shod with wooden sabots, tanned by the sun, his face nearly
black and his hair nearly white, a large scar on his forehead
which ran down upon his cheek, bowed, bent, prematurely
aged, who walked nearly every day, hoe and sickle in hand,
in one of those compartments surrounded by walls which
abut on the bridge, and border the left bank of the Seine
like a chain of terraces, charming enclosures full of flow-
ers of which one could say, were they much larger: ‘these
are gardens,’ and were they a little smaller: ‘these are bou-
quets.’ All these enclosures abut upon the river at one end,

1044 Les Miserables