The shocks of youthful minds among themselves have this admirable property, that one can never foresee the spark, nor divine the lightning flash. What will dart out presently? No one knows. The burst of laughter starts from a tender feeling. At the moment of jest, the serious makes its entry.
Impulses depend on the first chance word. The spirit of each is sovereign, jest suffices to open the field to the unexpected. These are conversations with abrupt turns, in which the perspective changes suddenly. Chance is the stage-manager of such conversations.
A severe thought, starting oddly from a clash of words, suddenly traversed the conflict of quips in which Grantaire, Bahorel, Prouvaire, Bossuet, Combeferre, and Courfeyrac were confusedly fencing. How does a phrase crop up in a dialogue?
Whence comes it that it suddenly impresses itself on the attention of those who hear it? We have just said, that no one knows anything about it. In the midst of the uproar, Bossuet all at once terminated some apostrophe to Combeferre, with this date:— 'June 18th, 1815, Waterloo.
' At this name of Waterloo, Marius, who was leaning his elbows on a table, beside a glass of water, removed his wrist from beneath his chin, and began to gaze fixedly at the audience. 'Pardieu!
' exclaimed Courfeyrac ('Parbleu' was falling into disuse at this period), 'that number 18 is strange and strikes me. It is Bonaparte’s fatal number.
Place Louis in front and Brumaire behind, you have the whole destiny of the man, with this significant peculiarity, that the end treads close on the heels of the commencement.
' Enjolras, who had remained mute up to that point, broke the silence and addressed this remark to Combeferre:— 'You mean to say, the crime and the expiation. ' This word crime overpassed the measure of what