Page 1062 - les-miserables

cover all that it is their mission to destroy and to bury, and
how promptly they create frightful gulfs!
Such was the physiognomy of the salons of those distant
and candid times when M. Martainville had more wit than
Voltaire.
These salons had a literature and politics of their own.
They believed in Fievee. M. Agier laid down the law in
them. They commentated M. Colnet, the old bookseller
and publicist of the Quay Malaquais. Napoleon was to them
thoroughly the Corsican Ogre. Later on the introduction
into history of M. le Marquis de Bonaparte, Lieutenant-
General of the King’s armies, was a concession to the spirit
of the age.
These salons did not long preserve their purity. Begin-
ning with 1818, doctrinarians began to spring up in them,
a disturbing shade. Their way was to be Royalists and to ex-
cuse themselves for being so. Where the ultras were very
proud, the doctrinarians were rather ashamed. They had
wit; they had silence; their political dogma was suitably
impregnated with arrogance; they should have succeeded.
They indulged, and usefully too, in excesses in the matter
of white neckties and tightly buttoned coats. The mistake or
the misfortune of the doctrinarian party was to create aged
youth. They assumed the poses of wise men. They dreamed
of engrafting a temperate power on the absolute and ex-
cessive principle. They opposed, and sometimes with rare
intelligence, conservative liberalism to the liberalism which
demolishes. They were heard to say: ‘Thanks for Royalism!
It has rendered more than one service. It has brought back

1062 Les Miserables