Page 77 - les-miserables

rible; but Saulx-Tavannes, if you please? Duchene senior
is ferocious; but what epithet will you allow me for the el-
der Letellier? Jourdan-Coupe-Tete is a monster; but not so
great a one as M. the Marquis de Louvois. Sir, sir, I am sor-
ry for Marie Antoinette, archduchess and queen; but I am
also sorry for that poor Huguenot woman, who, in 1685,
under Louis the Great, sir, while with a nursing infant, was
bound, naked to the waist, to a stake, and the child kept at
a distance; her breast swelled with milk and her heart with
anguish; the little one, hungry and pale, beheld that breast
and cried and agonized; the executioner said to the wom-
an, a mother and a nurse, ‘Abjure!’ giving her her choice
between the death of her infant and the death of her con-
science. What say you to that torture of Tantalus as applied
to a mother? Bear this well in mind sir: the French Revolu-
tion had its reasons for existence; its wrath will be absolved
by the future; its result is the world made better. From its
most terrible blows there comes forth a caress for the hu-
man race. I abridge, I stop, I have too much the advantage;
moreover, I am dying.’
And ceasing to gaze at the Bishop, the conventionary
concluded his thoughts in these tranquil words:—
‘Yes, the brutalities of progress are called revolutions.
When they are over, this fact is recognized,—that the human
race has been treated harshly, but that it has progressed.’
The conventionary doubted not that he had successively
conquered all the inmost intrenchments of the Bishop. One
remained, however, and from this intrenchment, the last
resource of Monseigneur Bienvenu’s resistance, came forth

77