Page 2000 - les-miserables

CHAPTER V

THE HORIZON WHICH

ONE BEHOLDS FROM THE

SUMMIT OF A BARRICADE

The situation of all in that fatal hour and that pitiless
place, had as result and culminating point Enjolras’ su-
preme melancholy.
Enjolras bore within him the plenitude of the revolution;
he was incomplete, however, so far as the absolute can be so;
he had too much of Saint-Just about him, and not enough
of Anacharsis Cloots; still, his mind, in the society of the
Friends of the A B C, had ended by undergoing a certain
polarization from Combeferre’s ideas; for some time past,
he had been gradually emerging from the narrow form of
dogma, and had allowed himself to incline to the broad-
ening influence of progress, and he had come to accept, as
a definitive and magnificent evolution, the transformation
of the great French Republic, into the immense human re-
public. As far as the immediate means were concerned, a
violent situation being given, he wished to be violent; on

2000 Les Miserables