Excerpt from Les Miserables, (the Wretched): A Novel

On a beautiful morning in May, last year, (1861), a traveller, he who tells this story was journeying from Nivelles towards La Hulpe. He travelled a-foot. He was following, between the rows of trees, a broad road, undulxting over hills, which, one after another, upheave it and let it fall again, like enormous waves. He had passed Lillois vand Bois-Seigneur Issac. He saw to the west the slated steeple of Braine-l'Alleud, which has the form of an inverted vase. He had just passed a wood upon a hill, and at the corner of a cross-road, beside a sort of worm eaten sign-post, bearing the inscription - Old Toll-Gate, Na. 4 - a tavern with this sign: The Four Winds. Eschaleau, Private Cafe.

Half a mile from this tavern, he reached the bottom of a little valley, where a stream flowed beneath an arch in the embankment of the road. The cluster of trees, thin-sown but very green, which fills the vale on one side of the road, on the other spreads out into meadows, and sweeps away in graceful disorder towards Braine-l'Alleud.

At this point there was at the right, and immediately on the road, an inn, with a four-wheeled cart before the door, a great bundle of hoppoles, a plough, a pile of dry brush near a quick-set hedge, some lime which was smoking in a square hole in the ground, and a ladder lying along an old shed with mangers of straw. A young girls was pulling weeds in a field, where a large green poster, probably of a travelling show at some annua fair, fluttered in the wind. At the corner of the inn, beside a pond, in which a flotilla of ducks was navigating, a difficult foot-path lost itself in the shrubbery. The Traveller took this path.

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