e, when Frederic insults Voltaire, it is an
old law of envy and hatred which is being carried out; genius attracts
insult, great men are always more or less barked at. But Zoilus and
Cicero are two different persons. Cicero is an arbiter in thought, just
as Brutus is an arbiter by the sword. For my own part, I blame that last
justice, the blade; but, antiquity admitted it. Caesar, the violator
of the Rubicon, conferring, as though they came from him, the dignities
which emanated from the people, not rising at the entrance of the
senate, committed the acts of a king and almost of a tyrant, regia ac
pene tyrannica. He was a great man; so much the worse, or so much the
better; the lesson is but the more exalted. His twenty-three wounds
touch me less than the spitting in the face of Jesus Christ. Caesar is
stabbed by the senators; Christ is cuffed by lackeys. One feels the God
through the greater outrage."

Bossuet, who towered above the interlocutors from the summit of a heap
of paving-stones, exclaimed, rifle in hand:--

"Oh Cydathenaeum, Oh Myrrhinus, Oh Probalinthus, Oh graces of the
AEantides! Oh! Who will grant me to pronounce the verses of Homer like a
Greek of Laurium or of Edapteon?"

CHAPTER III--LIGHT AND SHADOW

Enjolras had been to make a reconnaissance. He had made his way out
through Mondetour lane, gliding along close to the houses.

The insurgents, we will remark, were full of hope. The manner in which
they had repulsed the attack of the preceding night had caused them to
almost disdain in advance the attack at dawn. They waited for it with
a smile. They had no more doubt as to their success than as to their
cause. Moreover, succor was, evidently, on the way to them. They
reckoned on it. With that facility of triumphant prophecy which is one
of the sources of strength in the French combatant, they divided the
day which was at hand into three distinct phases. At six o'clock in the
morning a regiment "which had been labored with," would turn; at noon,
the insurrection of all Paris; at sunset, revolution.

They heard the alarm bell of Saint-Merry, which had not been silent for
an instant since the night before; a proof that the other barricade, the
great one, Jeanne's, still held out.

All these hopes were exchanged between the different groups in a sort of
gay and formidable whisper which resembled the warlike hum of a hive of
bees.

Enjolras reappeared. He returned from his sombre eagle flight