#the chain gang

‘Father! What are those men in those carts?’

Jean Valjean replied: ‘Convicts.’

‘Whither are they going?’

‘To the galleys.’

‘Father, are they still men?’

‘Sometimes,’ answered the unhappy man.

Les Misérables | Vol.IV - Book.III - Ch.VIII Watercolor illustration by Gino Stabace and Carlo Chiostri (Italian Edition, 1930)

“ Nevertheless, horrors, when grouped together, always end by evolving a result; all additions of wretched men give a sum total, each chain exhaled a common soul, and each dray-load had its own physiognomy. By the side of the one where they were singing, there was one where they were howling; a third where they were begging; one could be seen in which they were gnashing their teeth; another load menaced the spectators, another blasphemed God; the last was as silent as the tomb. Dante would have thought that he beheld his seven circles of hell on the march. The march of the damned to their tortures, performed in sinister wise, not on the formidable and flaming chariot of the Apocalypse, but, what was more mournful than that, on the gibbet cart. ”

— Les Misérables, The Chain Gang( Illustrated by Carlo Chiostri, 1930 )