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How he would have embraced that white head, bathed his
hair in tears, gazed upon his scar, pressed his hands, adored
his garment, kissed his feet! Oh! Why had his father died
so early, before his time, before the justice, the love of his
son had come to him? Marius had a continual sob in his
heart, which said to him every moment: ‘Alas!’ At the same
time, he became more truly serious, more truly grave, more
sure of his thought and his faith. At each instant, gleams of
the true came to complete his reason. An inward growth
seemed to be in progress within him. He was conscious of a
sort of natural enlargement, which gave him two things that
were new to him—his father and his country.
As everything opens when one has a key, so he explained
to himself that which he had hated, he penetrated that
which he had abhorred; henceforth he plainly perceived the
providential, divine and human sense of the great things
which he had been taught to detest, and of the great men
whom he had been instructed to curse. When he reflected
on his former opinions, which were but those of yesterday,
and which, nevertheless, seemed to him already so very an-
cient, he grew indignant, yet he smiled.
From the rehabilitation of his father, he naturally passed
to the rehabilitation of Napoleon.
But the latter, we will confess, was not effected without
labor.
From his infancy, he had been imbued with the judg-
ments of the party of 1814, on Bonaparte. Now, all the
prejudices of the Restoration, all its interests, all its in-
stincts tended to disfigure Napoleon. It execrated him even