Les Misérables: Essential Edition

n the early part of October, 1815, about an hour before sunset, a man who was traveling on foot entered the little town of D——. The few individuals who at this moment were at their windows or on their thresholds, regarded this traveler with a sort of unrest. It would have been difficult to encounter a wayfarer of more wretched appearance. He was a man of medium stature, thick-set and robust, in the prime of life. He might have been forty-six or forty-eight years old. A cap with a drooping visor concealed partly his face, burned and tanned by sun and wind, and dripping with perspiration. His shirt of coarse yellow linen, fastened at the neck by a small silver anchor, permitted a view of his hairy breast; he had a cravat twisted into a rope, blue jean breeches, worn and shabby, white on one knee and with a hole in the other, an old gray, tattered blouse, patched on one of the elbows with a bit of green cloth sewed on with twine; a tightly packed soldier's knapsack, well buckled and perfectly new, on his back; an enormous, knotty stick in his hand; iron-shod shoes on his stockingless feet; a shaved head and a long beard. The heat, the walk, the dust, the fatigues of the way, had added an indescribable element of baseness to this tattered appearance. His hair was closely cut, yet bristling, for it had begun to grow a little, and did not seem to have been cut for some time. No one knew him. He was evidently only a chance passer-by. Whence came he? From the south; from the seashore, perhaps, for he made his entrance into D—— by the same street which, seven months previously, had witnessed the passage of the Emperor Napoleon on his way from Cannes to Paris. This man must have been walking all day. He seemed very much fatigued. Some women of the ancient market town which is situated lower down had seen him pause beneath the trees of the boulevard Gassendi, and drink at the fountain which stands at the end of the promenade. He must have been very thirsty, for the children who followed him saw him stop again for a drink, two hundred paces further on, at the fountain in the market-place. On arriving at the corner of the Rue Poichevert, he turned to the left, and directed his steps toward the town-hall. He entered, then came out a quarter of an hour later. A gendarme was seated near the door, on the stone bench which General Drouot had mounted on the 4th of March to read to the thronged and terrified inhabitants of D—— the proclamation of the Gulf Juan. The man pulled off his cap and humbly saluted the gendarme. The gendarme, without replying to his salute, stared attentively at him, followed him with his eyes for some moments, then entered the town-hall.