Page 1634 - les-miserables

tunda an enormous black, hideous, bare wall by which it
was backed up.
This was the outer wall of La Force.
This wall, beside that rotunda, was Milton viewed
through Berquin.
Lofty as it was, this wall was overtopped by a still black-
er roof, which could be seen beyond. This was the roof of
the New Building. There one could descry four dormer-
windows, guarded with bars; they were the windows of the
Fine-Air.
A chimney pierced the roof; this was the chimney which
traversed the dormitories.
The Bel-Air, that top story of the New Building, was a
sort of large hall, with a Mansard roof, guarded with tri-
ple gratings and double doors of sheet iron, which were
studded with enormous bolts. When one entered from the
north end, one had on one’s left the four dormer-windows,
on one’s right, facing the windows, at regular intervals, four
square, tolerably vast cages, separated by narrow passages,
built of masonry to about the height of the elbow, and the
rest, up to the roof, of iron bars.
Thenardier had been in solitary confinement in one of
these cages since the night of the 3d of February. No one
was ever able to discover how, and by what connivance, he
succeeded in procuring, and secreting a bottle of wine, in-
vented, so it is said, by Desrues, with which a narcotic is
mixed, and which the band of the Endormeurs, or Sleep-
compellers, rendered famous.
There are, in many prisons, treacherous employees, half-

1634 Les Miserables