Page 2083 - les-miserables

jority of them, when talking freely, did justice to this king
who stood midway between monarchy and revolution; no
one hated him. But they attacked the younger branch of
the divine right in Louis Philippe as they had attacked its
elder branch in Charles X.; and that which they wished to
overturn in overturning royalty in France, was, as we have
explained, the usurpation of man over man, and of privi-
lege over right in the entire universe. Paris without a king
has as result the world without despots. This is the manner
in which they reasoned. Their aim was distant no doubt,
vague perhaps, and it retreated in the face of their efforts;
but it was great.
Thus it is. And we sacrifice ourselves for these visions,
which are almost always illusions for the sacrificed, but il-
lusions with which, after all, the whole of human certainty
is mingled. We throw ourselves into these tragic affairs and
become intoxicated with that which we are about to do.
Who knows? We may succeed. We are few in number, we
have a whole army arrayed against us; but we are defend-
ing right, the natural law, the sovereignty of each one over
himself from which no abdication is possible, justice and
truth, and in case of need, we die like the three hundred
Spartans. We do not think of Don Quixote but of Leonidas.
And we march straight before us, and once pledged, we do
not draw back, and we rush onwards with head held low,
cherishing as our hope an unprecedented victory, revolu-
tion completed, progress set free again, the aggrandizement
of the human race, universal deliverance; and in the event
of the worst, Thermopylae.

2083