Page 598 - les-miserables

all the shadows and all the light of the earth changed place,
because, on the afternoon of a certain summer’s day, a shep-
herd said to a Prussian in the forest, ‘Go this way, and not
that!’
This 1815 was a sort of lugubrious April. Ancient un-
healthy and poisonous realities were covered with new
appearances. A lie wedded 1789; the right divine was masked
under a charter; fictions became constitutional; prejudices,
superstitions and mental reservations, with Article 14 in the
heart, were varnished over with liberalism. It was the ser-
pent’s change of skin.
Man had been rendered both greater and smaller by Na-
poleon. Under this reign of splendid matter, the ideal had
received the strange name of ideology! It is a grave impru-
dence in a great man to turn the future into derision. The
populace, however, that food for cannon which is so fond
of the cannoneer, sought him with its glance. Where is he?
What is he doing? ‘Napoleon is dead,’ said a passer-by to
a veteran of Marengo and Waterloo. ‘He dead!’ cried the
soldier; ‘you don’t know him.’ Imagination distrusted this
man, even when overthrown. The depths of Europe were
full of darkness after Waterloo. Something enormous re-
mained long empty through Napoleon’s disappearance.
The kings placed themselves in this void. Ancient Eu-
rope profited by it to undertake reforms. There was a Holy
Alliance; Belle-Alliance, Beautiful Alliance, the fatal field of
Waterloo had said in advance.
In presence and in face of that antique Europe recon-
structed, the features of a new France were sketched out.

598 Les Miserables