All at once the sun appeared, the immense beam of the east flashed forth; and it seemed as if it set fire to all these ferocious heads. Tongues became untied, and a storm of furies, oaths, and songs exploded. The wide horizontal light cut the whole file in two, illumining the heads and bodies, and leaving the feet and wheels in obscurity. Thoughts appeared on faces, and it was a fearful thing to see demons with their masks thrown away, and ferocious souls laid bare. Some of the merrier ones had in their mouths quills, through which they blew vermin on the crowd, selecting women. The dawn caused their lamentable faces to stand out in the darkness of the shadows. Not one of these beings but was misshapen through wretchedness; and it was so monstrous that it seemed to change the light of the sun into the gleam of a lightning flash. The first cart-load had struck up, and were droning out at the top of their voices, with a haggard joviality, a pot-pourri of Desaugiers, at that time famous under the title of _La Vestale_. The trees shook mournfully, while in the side-walks bourgeois faces were listening with an idiotic beatitude to these comic songs chanted by spectres. All destinies could be found in this gang, like a chaos; there were there the facial angles of all animals, old men, youths, naked skulls, gray beards, cynical monstrosities, sulky resignation, savage grins, wild attitudes, youth, girlish heads with corkscrew curls on the temples, infantine, and for that reason horrible, faces, and then countenances of skeletons which only lacked death. On the first dray could be seen a negro, who had been a slave probably, and was enabled to compare the chains. The frightful leveller, shame, had passed over all these foreheads. At this stage of abasement the last transformations were undergone by all in the lowest depths; and ignorance, changed into dulness, was the equal of intellect changed into despair. No choice was possible among these men, who appeared to be the pick of the mud; and it was clear that the arranger of this unclean procession had not attempted to classify them. These beings had been bound and coupled pell-mell, probably in alphabetical disorder, and loaded haphazard on the vehicles. Still, horrors, when grouped, always end by disengaging a resultant. Every addition of wretched men produces a total; a common soul issued from each chain, and each dray-load had its physiognomy. By the side of the man who sang was one who yelled; a third begged; another could be seen gnashing his teeth; another threatened the passers-by; another blasphemed God, and the last was silent as the tomb. Dante would have fancied that he saw the seven circles of the Inferno in motion. It was the march of the damned to the torture, performed in a sinister way, not upon the formidable flashing car of the Apocalypse, but, more gloomy still, in the hangman's cart.