Page 1613 - les-miserables

clean, despised, repulsive, and superb, ugly in the eyes of
the bourgeois, melancholy in the eyes of the thinker. There
was something about it of the dirt which is on the point of
being swept out, and something of the majesty which is on
the point of being decapitated. As we have said, at night, its
aspect changed. Night is the real element of everything that
is dark. As soon as twilight descended, the old elephant be-
came transfigured; he assumed a tranquil and redoubtable
appearance in the formidable serenity of the shadows. Be-
ing of the past, he belonged to night; and obscurity was in
keeping with his grandeur.
This rough, squat, heavy, hard, austere, almost misshap-
en, but assuredly majestic monument, stamped with a sort
of magnificent and savage gravity, has disappeared, and left
to reign in peace, a sort of gigantic stove, ornamented with
its pipe, which has replaced the sombre fortress with its nine
towers, very much as the bourgeoisie replaces the feudal
classes. It is quite natural that a stove should be the symbol
of an epoch in which a pot contains power. This epoch will
pass away, people have already begun to understand that, if
there can be force in a boiler, there can be no force except in
the brain; in other words, that which leads and drags on the
world, is not locomotives, but ideas. Harness locomotives
to ideas,— that is well done; but do not mistake the horse
for the rider.
At all events, to return to the Place de la Bastille, the ar-
chitect of this elephant succeeded in making a grand thing
out of plaster; the architect of the stove has succeeded in
making a pretty thing out of bronze.

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