guarded by a double file of gendarmes with loaded muskets. They crossed
the Austerlitz bridge, followed the line of the boulevards, and so
reached the terminus of the Western Railway line. It was a joyous
carnival night. The windows of the restaurants on the boulevards
glittered with lights. At the top of the Rue Vivienne, just at the spot
where he ever saw the young woman lying dead--that unknown young woman
whose image he always bore with him--he now beheld a large carriage in
which a party of masked women, with bare shoulders and laughing voices,
were venting their impatience at being detained, and expressing their
horror of that endless procession of convicts. The whole of the way from
Paris to Havre the prisoners never received a mouthful of bread or a
drink of water. The officials had forgotten to give them their rations
before starting, and it was not till thirty-six hours afterwards, when
they had been stowed away in the hold of the frigate _Canada_, that they
at last broke their fast.

No, Florent had never again been free from hunger. He recalled all the
past to mind, but could not recollect a single hour of satiety. He had
become dry and withered; his stomach seemed to have shrunk; his skin
clung to his bones. And now that he was back in Paris once more, he
found it fat and sleek and flourishing, teeming with food in the midst
of the darkness. He had returned to it on a couch of vegetables; he
lingered in its midst encompassed by unknown masses of food which still
and ever increased and disquieted him. Had that happy carnival night
continued throughout those seven years, then? Once again he saw the
glittering windows on the boulevards, the laughing women, the luxurious,
greedy city which he had quitted on that far-away January night; and it
seemed to him that everything had expanded and increased in harmony
with those huge markets, whose gigantic breathing, still heavy from the
indigestion of the previous day, he now began to hear.