Page 553 - les-miserables

to gaze steadily at war; he never added up the heart-rend-
ing details, cipher by cipher; ciphers mattered little to him,
provided that they furnished the total, victory; he was not
alarmed if the beginnings did go astray, since he thought
himself the master and the possessor at the end; he knew
how to wait, supposing himself to be out of the question,
and he treated destiny as his equal: he seemed to say to fate,
Thou wilt not dare.
Composed half of light and half of shadow, Napoleon
thought himself protected in good and tolerated in evil.
He had, or thought that he had, a connivance, one might
almost say a complicity, of events in his favor, which was
equivalent to the invulnerability of antiquity.
Nevertheless, when one has Beresina, Leipzig, and
Fontainebleau behind one, it seems as though one might
distrust Waterloo. A mysterious frown becomes perceptible
in the depths of the heavens.
At the moment when Wellington retreated, Napoleon
shuddered. He suddenly beheld the table-land of Mont-Saint-
Jean cleared, and the van of the English army disappear. It
was rallying, but hiding itself. The Emperor half rose in his
stirrups. The lightning of victory flashed from his eyes.
Wellington, driven into a corner at the forest of Soignes
and destroyed—that was the definitive conquest of England
by France; it was Crecy, Poitiers, Malplaquet, and Ramillies
avenged. The man of Marengo was wiping out Agincourt.
So the Emperor, meditating on this terrible turn of for-
tune, swept his glass for the last time over all the points of the
field of battle. His guard, standing behind him with ground-

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