It is I!
I have the same heart as thou!
I am thy son!"
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 ancient, 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 judgments of the party of 1814, on Bonaparte.
Now, all the prejudices of the Restoration, all its interests, all its instincts tended to disfigure Napoleon. It execrated him even more than it did Robespierre.
It had very cleverly turned to sufficiently good account the fatigue of the nation, and the hatred of mothers.
Bonaparte had become an almost fabulous monster, and in order to paint him to the imagination of the people, which, as we lately pointed out, resembles the imagination of children, the party of 1814 made him appear under all sorts of terrifying masks in succession, from that which is terrible though it remains grandiose to that which is terrible and becomes grotesque, from Tiberius to the bugaboo.