1986 Les Miserables
Malfilatre, particularly the prodigies of Caesar’s death; and
at that word, Caesar, the conversation reverted to Brutus.
‘Caesar,’ said Combeferre, ‘fell justly. Cicero was severe
towards Caesar, and he was right. That severity is not di-
atribe. When Zoilus insults Homer, when Maevius insults
Virgil, when Vise insults Moliere, when Pope insults Shak-
speare, 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 Zoi-
lus 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 emanat-
ed 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 pro-
nounce the verses of Homer like a Greek of Laurium or of
Edapteon?’