Page 1097 - les-miserables

served B-u-o-naparte were brigands! They were all traitors
who betrayed, betrayed, betrayed their legitimate king! All
cowards who fled before the Prussians and the English at
Waterloo! That is what I do know! Whether Monsieur your
father comes in that category, I do not know! I am sorry for
it, so much the worse, your humble servant!’
In his turn, it was Marius who was the firebrand and
M. Gillenormand who was the bellows. Marius quivered
in every limb, he did not know what would happen next,
his brain was on fire. He was the priest who beholds all his
sacred wafers cast to the winds, the fakir who beholds a
passer-by spit upon his idol. It could not be that such things
had been uttered in his presence. What was he to do? His
father had just been trampled under foot and stamped upon
in his presence, but by whom? By his grandfather. How was
he to avenge the one without outraging the other? It was im-
possible for him to insult his grandfather and it was equally
impossible for him to leave his father unavenged. On the
one hand was a sacred grave, on the other hoary locks.
He stood there for several moments, staggering as
though intoxicated, with all this whirlwind dashing
through his head; then he raised his eyes, gazed fixedly at
his grandfather, and cried in a voice of thunder:—
‘Down with the Bourbons, and that great hog of a Louis
XVIII.!’
Louis XVIII. had been dead for four years; but it was all
the same to him.
The old man, who had been crimson, turned whiter than
his hair. He wheeled round towards a bust of M. le Duc de

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