Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [42]
“Inexorable, yes,” said the bishop. “What do you think of Marat clapping his hands at the guillotine?”
“What do you think of Bossuet chanting the Te Deum over the dragonnades?” 4
The answer was severe, but it reached its aim with the keenness of a dagger. The bishop was staggered, no reply presented itself; but it shocked him to hear Bossuet spoken of in that manner. The best men have their fetishes, and sometimes they feel vaguely wounded at the little respect that logic shows them.
The conventionist began to gasp; the agonising asthma, which mingles with the latest breath, made his voice broken; nevertheless, his soul yet appeared perfectly lucid in his eyes. He continued:
“Let us have a few more words here and there—I would like it. Outside of the revolution which, taken as a whole, is an immense human affirmation, ‘93, alas! is a reply. You think it inexorable, but the whole monarchy, monsieur? Carrier is a bandit; but what name do you give to Montrevel? Fouquier-Tainville is a wretch; but what is your opinion of Lamoignon Bâville? Maillard is frightful, but Saulx Tavannes, if you please? Le père Duchene is ferocious, but what epithet will you furnish me for le père Letellier? Jourdan-Coupe-Tête is a monster, but less than the Marquis of Louvois. Monsieur, monsieur, I lament Marie Antoinette, arch-duchess and queen, but I lament also that poor Huguenot woman who, in 1685, under Louis le Grand, monsieur, while nursing her child, was stripped to the waist and tied to a post, while her child was held before her; her breast swelled with milk, and her heart with anguish; the little one, weak and famished, seeing the breast, cried with agony; and the executioner said to the woman, to the nursing mother, ‘Recant!’ giving her the choice between the death of her child and the death of her conscience. What say you to this Tantalus torture adapted to a mother? Monsieur, forget not this; the French revolution had its reasons. Its wrath will be pardoned by the future; its result is a better world. From its most terrible blows comes a caress for the human race. I must be brief. I must stop. I have too good a cause; and I am dying.”
And, ceasing to look at the bishop, the old man completed his idea in these few tranquil words:
“Yes, the brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over, this is recognised: that the human race has been harshly treated, but that it has advanced.”
The conventionist thought that he had borne down successively one after the other all the inner defenses of the bishop. There was one left, however, and from this, the last resource of Monseigneur Bienvenu’s resistance, came forth these words, in which nearly all the rudeness of the exordium reappeared.
“Progress must believe in God. The good cannot have an impious servi tor. An atheist is an evil leader of the human race.”
The old representative of the people did not answer. He was trembling. He looked up into the sky, and a tear gathered slowly in his eye. When the lid was full, the tear rolled down his livid cheek, and he said, almost stammering, low, and talking to himself, his eye lost in the depths:
“O thou! O ideal! thou alone dost exist!”
The bishop felt a kind of inexpressible emotion.
After brief silence, the old man raised his finger towards heaven, and said:
“The infinite exists. It is there. If the infinite had no selfhood, the self would be its limit; it would not be the infinite; in other words it would not be. But it is. Therefore it has a self. This selfhood of the infinite is God.”
The dying man pronounced these last words in a loud voice, and with a shudder of ecstasy, as if he saw some one. When he ceased, his eyes closed. The effort had exhausted him. It was evident that he had lived through in one minute the few hours that remained to him. What he had said had brought him near to him who is in death. The last moment was at hand.
The bishop perceived it, time was pressing. He had come as a priest; from extreme