"Why did you not kill the man?"
Bossuet asked Jean Valjean.
Jean Valjean made no reply.
BOOK FIRST.--THE WAR BETWEEN FOUR WALLS
CHAPTER XII
DISORDER A PARTISAN OF ORDER
Bossuet muttered in Combeferre''s ear:
"He did not answer my question."
"He is a man who does good by gun-shots," said Combeferre.
Those who have preserved some memory of this already distant epoch know that the National Guard from the suburbs was valiant against insurrections.
It was particularly zealous and intrepid in the days of June, 1832.
A certain good dram-shop keeper of Pantin des Vertus or la Cunette, whose "establishment" had been closed by the riots, became leonine at the sight of his deserted dance-hall, and got himself killed to preserve the order represented by a tea-garden. In that bourgeois and heroic time, in the presence of ideas which had their knights, interests had their paladins. The prosiness of the originators detracted nothing from the bravery of the movement.*本*作*品*由*思*兔*在*線*閱*讀*網*友*整*理*上*傳*
The diminution of a pile of crowns made bankers sing the Marseillaise.
They shed their blood lyrically for the counting-house; and they defended the shop, that immense diminutive of the fatherland, with Lacedaemonian enthusiasm.
At bottom, we will observe, there was nothing in all this that was not extremely serious.