Page 1539 - les-miserables

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 abase-
ment, 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 per-
son 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 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 sing-
ing, 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 tor-
tures, 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 cud-
gel, made a pretence from time to time, of stirring up this

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