Les Misérables - Volume I - Fantine

Classic from the year 2009 in the subject French Studies - Literature language: English abstract: BOOK F SECOND. THE FALL***CHAPTER I. THE EVENING OF A DAY OF WALKING***Early in the month of October 1815 about an hour before sunset a man who was travelling on foot entered the little town of D---- The few inhabitants who were at their windows or on their thresholds at the moment stared at this traveller with a sort of uneasiness. It was difficult to encounter a wayfarer of more wretched appearance. He was a man of medium stature thickset and robust in the prime of life. He might have been forty-six or forty-eight years old. A cap with a drooping leather visor partly concealed 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 string; trousers of blue drilling worn and threadbare white on one knee and torn on 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 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 sweat the heat the journey on foot the dust added I know not what sordid quality to this dilapidated whole. 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 below the city had se