Alfred; or, The Adventures of a French Gentleman — page 45: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

32 ALFRED; OR ADVENTURES He was accordingly about to have replied somewhat bitterly to hts companion; but an instant’s salutary reflection showed the folly and uselessness of irritating one who might perhaps aid him to make his escape hereafter, and at all events initiate him in the ways and habits of the bagne. But this circumstance brought the sense of his own wretchedness a thousand times more forcibly than ever to his mind; for it not only exemplified to him the villany, the hypocrisy, and the deceit of which his companions were capable; it also compelled him to acknowledge within himself the disagreeable and repugnant truth that he would be condemned to become a partner in their vices, and often the actual agent of their turpitude. To one, who has been brought up with the feelings of a gentleman, who has been educated in the schools of honour, of integrity, and virtue, and whose soul knows not how to descend to such petty instances of larceny or vulgar dissimulation as were hourly practised by the members of the chain, a situation like De Rosann’s must be the most insupportable. Cut off from all intercourse with the polite portion of society, linked to murderers, burglars, and robbers, guarded by ruthless soldiers whose uncompassionating dispositions expelled all sympathy or even lemty, and on the road to the sink of every vice, the receptacle of rumed characters—nature’s outlaws, as they might be called,—De Rosann would have yielded himself up entirely to despair, and have greedily seized the means of putting an end to a miserable existence 1f such means presented themselves, had not a distant hope—shining like a single star in a horizon where all else was dark—prompted him to cling to life, and to support to the utmost of his ability the horrors that might be in store for him. This philosophical resignation, which could even tutor his mind to see a blooming future succeed the five years of distress and of infamy to which he was now doomed by the laws of his country, was only the result of long reflection and self- communion. When the awful sentence was first pronounced upon him, his actions, his thoughts, and his words were those of a madman: days passed away—weeks flew over his head in his dreary cell at Bicétre—and at length the clamorous grief became tempered down into the moody resignation and the occasional. indifference to every thing, unless some tender recollection, some softening reminiscence awoke his better feelings, and wrung burning tears from his eyes, and bitter—Oh! good God! how bitter—sighs from his breast. ECOMICOOOKS»e©