On setting foot on the quay after having dressed myself, I heard twelve o'clock strike, and I perceived two old clerks, notary or lawyer's clerks, going off to their midday meal, like two old beasts of burden, unbridled for a few minutes while they eat their oats at the bottom of a nosebag.
Oh, liberty! liberty! our sole happiness, sole hope, sole dream! Of all the miserable creatures, of all classes of individuals, of all orders of workers, of all the men who daily fight the hard battle of life, these are the most to be pitied, on these does fortune bestow the fewest of her favours.
No one believes this,—no one knows it. They are powerless to complain; they cannot revolt; they remain gagged and bound in their misery, the shamefaced misery of quill-drivers.
They have gone through a course of study, they understand law, they have taken a degree, perhaps.
How dearly I like that dedication by Jules Vallès:
"To all those, who, nourished upon Greek and Latin, have died of starvation."
And what do they earn, these starvelings? Eight to fifteen hundred francs, (thirty-two to sixty pounds) a year!
Clerks in gloomy chambers, or clerks in office, you should read every morning over the door of your fatal prison, Dante's famous phrase:
"Abandon hope, all ye who enter here!"
They are but twenty when they first enter, and will remain till sixty or longer. During this long period not an event takes place! Their whole life slips away in the dark little bureau, ever the same, carpeted with green portfolios. They enter young, at the age of vigorous hopes; they leave in old age, when death is at hand. All the harvest of recollections that we make in a life-time, the unexpected events, our loves,—gentle or tragic memories, our adventures, all the chances of a free existence, are unknown to these convicts.