Page 599 - les-miserables

The future, which the Emperor had rallied, made its en-
try. On its brow it bore the star, Liberty. The glowing eyes
of all young generations were turned on it. Singular fact!
people were, at one and the same time, in love with the fu-
ture, Liberty, and the past, Napoleon. Defeat had rendered
the vanquished greater. Bonaparte fallen seemed more
lofty than Napoleon erect. Those who had triumphed were
alarmed. England had him guarded by Hudson Lowe, and
France had him watched by Montchenu. His folded arms
became a source of uneasiness to thrones. Alexander called
him ‘my sleeplessness.’ This terror was the result of the quan-
tity of revolution which was contained in him. That is what
explains and excuses Bonapartist liberalism. This phantom
caused the old world to tremble. The kings reigned, but ill at
their ease, with the rock of Saint Helena on the horizon.
While Napoleon was passing through the death struggle
at Longwood, the sixty thousand men who had fallen on
the field of Waterloo were quietly rotting, and something of
their peace was shed abroad over the world. The Congress
of Vienna made the treaties in 1815, and Europe called this
the Restoration.
This is what Waterloo was.
But what matters it to the Infinite? all that tempest, all
that cloud, that war, then that peace? All that darkness did
not trouble for a moment the light of that immense Eye
before which a grub skipping from one blade of grass to an-
other equals the eagle soaring from belfry to belfry on the
towers of Notre Dame.

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