Page 1081 - les-miserables

his enthusiasm for the idea. He did not perceive that, along
with genius, and pell-mell, he was admitting force, that is to
say, that he was installing in two compartments of his idola-
try, on the one hand that which is divine, on the other that
which is brutal. In many respects, he had set about deceiv-
ing himself otherwise. He admitted everything. There is a
way of encountering error while on one’s way to the truth.
He had a violent sort of good faith which took everything in
the lump. In the new path which he had entered on, in judg-
ing the mistakes of the old regime, as in measuring the glory
of Napoleon, he neglected the attenuating circumstances.
At all events, a tremendous step had been taken. Where
he had formerly beheld the fall of the monarchy, he now saw
the advent of France. His orientation had changed. What
had been his East became the West. He had turned squarely
round.
All these revolutions were accomplished within him,
without his family obtaining an inkling of the case.
When, during this mysterious labor, he had entirely shed
his old Bourbon and ultra skin, when he had cast off the
aristocrat, the Jacobite and the Royalist, when he had be-
come thoroughly a revolutionist, profoundly democratic
and republican, he went to an engraver on the Quai des Or-
fevres and ordered a hundred cards bearing this name: Le
Baron Marius Pontmercy.
This was only the strictly logical consequence of the
change which had taken place in him, a change in which
everything gravitated round his father.
Only, as he did not know any one and could not sow his

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