Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [137]
And so Fantine was buried in the common grave of the cemetery, which is for everybody and for all, and in which the poor are lost. Happily, God knows where to find the soul. Fantine was laid away in the darkness with bodies which had no name; she suffered the promiscuity of dust. She was thrown into the public pit. Her tomb was like her bed.
COSETTE
BOOK ONE WATERLOO
1
WHAT YOU MEET IN COMING FROM NIVELLES
Hugo describes himself revisiting the Battlefield of Waterloo, in Belgium, in 1861. There the English had defeated Napoleon for the last time, forcing him to surrender. Hugo recalls the details of the battle. He admires the bravery and gallantry of both sides. Napoleon was a great general facing Wellington, a mediocre one, but Providence wanted Napoleon’s tyranny to end so that democracy could progress throughout Europe. Many minor circumstances and unexpected setbacks led to the Emperor’s defeat.
Hugo recalls the daring cavalry charge in which Marius’s father, Baron and Colonel Pontmercy, fell into a concealed sunken road with his horse, to be buried beneath other horses and men. Their bodies arched over him, preventing him from being crushed. The robber Thenardier inadvertently revived him and thus saved his life while stripping his body of all valuables.
2 (19)
THE FIELD OF BATTLE AT NIGHT
WE RETURN, for it is a requirement of this book, to the fatal field of battle.
On the 18th of June, 1815, the moon was full. Its light favoured the ferocious pursuit of Blücher, disclosed the traces of the fugitives, delivered this helpless mass to the bloodthirsty Prussian cavalry, and aided in the massacre. Night sometimes lends such tragic assistance to catastrophe.
When the last gun had been fired the plain of Mont Saint Jean remained deserted.
The moon was an evil genius on this plain.
Towards midnight a man was prowling or rather crawling along the sunken road of Ohain. He was, to all appearance, one of those whom we have just described, neither English nor French, peasant nor soldier, less a man than a ghoul, attracted by the scent of the corpses, counting theft for victory, coming to rifle Waterloo. He was dressed in a workman’s smock which was in part an overcoat, was restless and daring, looking behind and before as he went. Who was this man? Night, probably, knew more of his doings than day! He had no knapsack, but evidently wide pockets under his overcoat. From time to time he stopped, examined the plain around him as if to see if he were observed, stooped down suddenly, stirred on the ground something silent and motionless, then rose up and skulked away. His gliding movement, his attitudes, his rapid and mysterious gestures, made him seem like those twilight spectres which haunt ruins and which the old Norman legends call the Goers.
Certain nocturnal water-birds make such motions in marshes.
An eye which had carefully penetrated all this haze, might have noticed at some distance, standing as it were concealed behind the ruin which is on the Nivelle road at the corner of the route from Mont Saint Jean to Braine l‘Alleud, a sort of little canteen owner’s waggon, covered with tarred osiers, harnessed to a famished jade browsing nettles through her bit, and in the waggon a sort of woman seated on some trunks and packages. Perhaps there was some connection between this waggon and the prowler.
The night was serene. Not a cloud was in the zenith. What mattered it that the earth was red, the moon retained her whiteness. Such is the indifference of heaven. In the meadows, branches of trees broken by grapeshot, but not fallen, and held by the bark, swung gently in the night wind. A breath, almost a respiration, moved the brushwood. There was a quivering in the grass which seemed like the departure of souls.
The tread of the patrols and sentries of the English camp could be heard dimly in the distance.
Hougomont and La Haie