III.



Whosoever witnesses this kind of anguish witnesses the
extreme of human misfortune.

Dark zones are these. Baleful night bursts and spreads
o'er them. Evil accumulated dissolves in misfortune upon
them, they are swept with blasts of despair by the tempest
of fatalities, there a downpour of trials and sorrows streams
upon dishevelled heads in the darkness; squalls, hail, a
hurricane of distress, swirl and whirl back and forth
athwart them; it rains, rains without cease: it rains
horror, it rains vice, it rains crime, it rains the blackness of
night; yet we must explore this obscurity, and in the
sombre storm the mind essays a difficult flight, the flight of
a wet bird, as it were.

There is always a vague, spectral dread in these low
regions where hell penetrates; they are so little in the
human order and so disproportionate that they create
phantoms. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that a legend
should be connected with this sinister bouquet offered by
Bicêtre to La Salpêtrière or by La Force to Saint Lazare;
it is related at night in the cells and wards after the
keepers have gone their rounds.