Page 1617 - les-miserables

of a street urchin. The brat had been accepted and sheltered
by the colossus. The bourgeois decked out in their Sunday
finery who passed the elephant of the Bastille, were fond of
saying as they scanned it disdainfully with their prominent
eyes: ‘What’s the good of that?’ It served to save from the
cold, the frost, the hail, and rain, to shelter from the winds
of winter, to preserve from slumber in the mud which pro-
duces fever, and from slumber in the snow which produces
death, a little being who had no father, no mother, no bread,
no clothes, no refuge. It served to receive the innocent whom
society repulsed. It served to diminish public crime. It was a
lair open to one against whom all doors were shut. It seemed
as though the miserable old mastodon, invaded by vermin
and oblivion, covered with warts, with mould, and ulcers,
tottering, worm-eaten, abandoned, condemned, a sort of
mendicant colossus, asking alms in vain with a benevo-
lent look in the midst of the cross-roads, had taken pity on
that other mendicant, the poor pygmy, who roamed with-
out shoes to his feet, without a roof over his head, blowing
on his fingers, clad in rags, fed on rejected scraps. That was
what the elephant of the Bastille was good for. This idea of
Napoleon, disdained by men, had been taken back by God.
That which had been merely illustrious, had become august.
In order to realize his thought, the Emperor should have
had porphyry, brass, iron, gold, marble; the old collection
of planks, beams and plaster sufficed for God. The Emper-
or had had the dream of a genius; in that Titanic elephant,
armed, prodigious, with trunk uplifted, bearing its tower
and scattering on all sides its merry and vivifying waters,

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