neighbourhoods, and, lastly, a somewhat vague socialist enactment for
the storing in common warehouses of all the provisions brought to the
markets, and the ensuring of a minimum daily supply to each household in
Paris. As he sat there, with his head bent over his table, and his mind
absorbed in thoughts of all these weighty matters, his gloomy figure
cast a great black shadow on the soft peacefulness of the garret.
Sometimes a chaffinch which he had picked up one snowy day in the market
would mistake the lamplight for the day, and break the silence, which
only the scratching of Florent's pen on his paper disturbed, by a cry.

Florent was fated to revert to politics. He had suffered too much
through them not to make them the dearest occupation of his life. Under
other conditions he might have become a good provincial schoolmaster,
happy in the peaceful life of some little town. But he had been treated
as though he were a wolf, and felt as though he had been marked out
by exile for some great combative task. His nervous discomfort was the
outcome of his long reveries at Cayenne, the brooding bitterness he had
felt at his unmerited sufferings, and the vows he had secretly sworn to
avenge humanity and justice--the former scourged with a whip, and the
latter trodden under foot. Those colossal markets and their teeming
odoriferous masses of food had hastened the crisis. To Florent they
appeared symbolical of some glutted, digesting beast, of Paris,
wallowing in its fat and silently upholding the Empire. He seemed to be
encircled by swelling forms and sleek, fat faces, which ever and
ever protested against his own martyrlike scragginess and sallow,
discontented visage. To him the markets were like the stomach of the
shopkeeping classes, the stomach of all the folks of average rectitude
puffing itself out, rejoicing, glistening in the sunshine, and declaring
that everything was for the best, since peaceable people had never
before grown so beautifully fat. As these thoughts passed through his