He was, as we have said, an ignorant man, but he was not a fool.
The light of nature was ignited in him. Unhappiness, which also
possesses a clearness of vision of its own, augmented the small
amount of daylight which existed in this mind. Beneath the cudgel,
beneath the chain, in the cell, in hardship, beneath the burning sun
of the galleys, upon the plank bed of the convict, he withdrew into
his own consciousness and meditated.

He constituted himself the tribunal.

He began by putting himself on trial.

He recognized the fact that he was not an innocent man unjustly punished.
He admitted that he had committed an extreme and blameworthy act;
that that loaf of bread would probably not have been refused to him
had he asked for it; that, in any case, it would have been better
to wait until he could get it through compassion or through work;
that it is not an unanswerable argument to say, "Can one wait when one
is hungry?" That, in the first place, it is very rare for any one to die
of hunger, literally; and next, that, fortunately or unfortunately,
man is so constituted that he can suffer long and much, both morally
and physically, without dying; that it is therefore necessary to
have patience; that that would even have been better for those poor
little children; that it had been an act of madness for him, a miserable,
unfortunate wretch, to take society at large violently by the collar,
and to imagine that one can escape from misery through theft;
that that is in any case a poor door through which to escape from
misery through which infamy enters; in short, that he was in the wrong.

Then he asked himself--