When Florent was brought before an investigating magistrate, without anyone to defend him, and without any evidence being adduced, he was accused of belonging to a secret society; and when he swore that this was untrue, the magistrate produced the scrap of paper from amongst the documents before him:  “Taken with blood-stained hands.  Very dangerous.”  That was quite sufficient.  He was condemned to transportation.  Six weeks afterwards, one January night, a gaoler awoke him and locked him up in a courtyard with more than four hundred other prisoners.  An hour later this first detachment started for the pontoons and exile, handcuffed and 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.

Old Mother Chantemesse had by this time made up her mind to buy a dozen bunches of turnips.  She put them in her apron, which she held closely pressed to her person, thus making herself look yet more corpulent than she was; and for some time longer she lingered there, still gossiping in a drawling voice.  When at last she went away, Madame Francois again sat down by the side of Florent.