He had been sleeping soundly when the stir of the crew roused him.  It was day; the tidal train had come down to the pier bringing the passengers from Paris.  Then he wandered about the vessel among all these busy, bustling folks inquiring for their cabins, questioning and answering each other at random, in the scare and fuss of a voyage already begun.  After greeting the Captain and shaking hands with his comrade the purser, he went into the saloon where some Englishmen were already asleep in the corners.  The large low room, with its white marble panels framed in gilt beading, was furnished with looking-glasses, which prolonged, in endless perspective, the long tables, flanked by pivot-seats covered with red velvet.  It was fit, indeed, to be the vast floating cosmopolitan dining-hall, where the rich natives of two continents might eat in common.  Its magnificent luxury was that of great hotels, and theatres, and public rooms; the imposing and commonplace luxury which appeals to the eye of the millionaire.

The doctor was on the point of turning into the second-class saloon, when he remembered that a large cargo of emigrants had come on board the night before, and he went down to the lower deck.  He was met by a sickening smell of dirty, poverty-stricken humanity, an atmosphere of naked flesh (far more revolting than the odour of fur or the skin of wild beasts).  There, in a sort of basement, low and dark, like a gallery in a mine, Pierre could discern some hundreds of men, women, and children, stretched on shelves fixed one above another, or lying on the floor in heaps.  He could not see their faces, but could dimly make out this squalid, ragged crowd of wretches, beaten in the struggle for life, worn out and crushed, setting forth, each with a starving wife and weakly children, for an unknown land where they hoped, perhaps, not to die of hunger.  And as he thought of their past labour—­wasted labour, and barren effort—­of the mortal struggle taken up afresh and in vain each day, of the energy expended by this tattered crew who were going to begin again, not knowing where, this life of hideous misery, he longed to cry out to them: 

“Tumble yourselves overboard, rather, with your women and your little ones.”  And his heart ached so with pity that he went away unable to endure the sight.

He found his father, his mother, Jean, and Mme. Rosemilly waiting for him in his cabin.

“So early!” he exclaimed.

“Yes,” said Mme. Roland in a trembling voice.  “We wanted to have a little time to see you.”

He looked at her.  She was dressed all in black as if she were in mourning, and he noticed that her hair, which only a month ago had been gray, was now almost white.  It was very difficult to find space for four persons to sit down in the little room, and he himself got on to his bed.  The door was left open, and they could see a great crowd hurrying by, as if it were a street on a holiday, for all the friends of the passengers and a host of inquisitive visitors had invaded the huge vessel.  They pervaded the passages, the saloons, every corner of the ship; and heads peered in at the doorway while a voice murmured outside:  “That is the doctor’s cabin.”