968 Les Miserables
to spring up. Who knows? He might have ended by return-
ing very gradually to hatred.
The convent stopped him on that downward path.
This was the second place of captivity which he had seen.
In his youth, in what had been for him the beginning of his
life, and later on, quite recently again, he had beheld an-
other,— a frightful place, a terrible place, whose severities
had always appeared to him the iniquity of justice, and the
crime of the law. Now, after the galleys, he saw the cloister;
and when he meditated how he had formed a part of the
galleys, and that he now, so to speak, was a spectator of the
cloister, he confronted the two in his own mind with anxi-
et y.
Sometimes he crossed his arms and leaned on his hoe,
and slowly descended the endless spirals of revery.
He recalled his former companions: how wretched they
were; they rose at dawn, and toiled until night; hardly were
they permitted to sleep; they lay on camp beds, where noth-
ing was tolerated but mattresses two inches thick, in rooms
which were heated only in the very harshest months of the
year; they were clothed in frightful red blouses; they were
allowed, as a great favor, linen trousers in the hottest weath-
er, and a woollen carter’s blouse on their backs when it was
very cold; they drank no wine, and ate no meat, except when
they went on ‘fatigue duty.’ They lived nameless, designated
only by numbers, and converted, after a manner, into ci-
phers themselves, with downcast eyes, with lowered voices,
with shorn heads, beneath the cudgel and in disgrace.
Then his mind reverted to the beings whom he had un-