Page 1108 - les-miserables

of fighting, he did not refuse a hand-to-hand combat with
the obstacle, and to attack it by main force and explosively;
but it suited him better to bring the human race into accord
with its destiny gradually, by means of education, the incul-
cation of axioms, the promulgation of positive laws; and,
between two lights, his preference was rather for illumina-
tion than for conflagration. A conflagration can create an
aurora, no doubt, but why not await the dawn? A volcano
illuminates, but daybreak furnishes a still better illumina-
tion. Possibly, Combeferre preferred the whiteness of the
beautiful to the blaze of the sublime. A light troubled by
smoke, progress purchased at the expense of violence, only
half satisfied this tender and serious spirit. The headlong
precipitation of a people into the truth, a ‘93, terrified him;
nevertheless, stagnation was still more repulsive to him, in
it he detected putrefaction and death; on the whole, he pre-
ferred scum to miasma, and he preferred the torrent to the
cesspool, and the falls of Niagara to the lake of Montfau-
con. In short, he desired neither halt nor haste. While his
tumultuous friends, captivated by the absolute, adored and
invoked splendid revolutionary adventures, Combeferre
was inclined to let progress, good progress, take its own
course; he may have been cold, but he was pure; methodical,
but irreproachable; phlegmatic, but imperturbable. Combe-
ferre would have knelt and clasped his hands to enable the
future to arrive in all its candor, and that nothing might
disturb the immense and virtuous evolution of the races.
The good must be innocent, he repeated incessantly. And
in fact, if the grandeur of the Revolution consists in keep-

1108 Les Miserables