“Madame,” said Farrabesche, “for ten years I wore there (holding out his leg) a chain fastened to a great iron ring which bound me to another man. During my time I had to live thus with three different convicts. I slept on a wooden bench; I had to work extraordinarily hard to earn a little mattress called a _serpentin_. Each dormitory contains eight hundred men. Each bed, called a _tolard_, holds twenty-four men, chained in couples. Every night the chain of each couple is passed round another great chain which is called the _filet de ramas_. This chain holds all the couples by the feet, and runs along the bottom of the _tolard_. It took me over two years to get accustomed to that iron clanking, which called out incessantly, ‘Thou art a galley-slave!’ If I slept an instant some vile companion moved or quarrelled, reminding me of where I was. There is a terrible apprenticeship to make before a man can learn how to sleep. I myself could not sleep until I had come to the end of my strength and to utter exhaustion. When at last sleep came I had the nights in which to forget. Oh! to _forget_, madame, that was something! Once there, a man must learn to satisfy his needs, even in the smallest things, according to the ways laid down by pitiless regulations. Imagine, madame, the effect such a life produced on a lad like me, who had lived in the woods with the birds and the squirrels! If I had not already lived for six months within prison-walls, I should, in spite of Monsieur Bonnet’s grand words--for he, I can truly say, is the father of my soul--I should, ah! I must have flung myself into the sea at the mere sight of my companions. Out-doors I still could live; but in the building, whether to sleep or to eat,--to eat out of buckets, and each bucket filled for three couples,--it was life no longer, it was death; the atrocious faces and language of my companions were always insufferable to me. Happily, from five o’clock in summer, and from half-past seven o’clock in winter we went, in spite of heat or cold and wind or rain, on ‘fatigue,’ that is, hard-labor. Thus half this life was spent in the open air; and the air was sweet after the close dormitory packed with eight hundred convicts. And that air, too, is sea-air! We could enjoy the breezes, we could be friends with the sun, we could watch the clouds as they passed above us, we could hope and pray for fine weather! As for me, I took an interest in my work--” Farrabesche stopped; two heavy tears were rolling down his mistress’s face.