To Scoff, to Reign — Les Misérables

There is no limit to Paris. No city has had that domination which sometimes derides those whom it subjugates. It makes more than the law: it makes the fashion, then the routine. It may be stupid if it sees fit. Then the universe is stupid in company with it. Then Paris awakes, rubs its eyes, says how stupid it is, and bursts out laughing in the face of the human race. The same mouth can blow the trump of the Judgement Day today and the reed-flute tomorrow. Its laugh is the mouth of a volcano. Its jests are sparks. The child who scoffs in the street is already practising that mouth.

While this enormous genius transfigures the world by its light, it sketches Bouginier's nose in charcoal on the wall of a temple and writes a thief's name on the Pyramids. Paris is always showing its teeth. When it is not scolding it is laughing. The smoke of its roofs forms the ideas of the universe. A heap of mud and stone, if you will, but above all a moral being. It is immense because it is daring.

To dare is the price of progress. It is not enough that one man should foresee a revolution, that another should preach it, that a third should premeditate it. Someone must dare it. The cry of audacity is a first light. Nations need the example of a person who holds his ground and astounds catastrophe by how little fear it occasions him. The same lightning proceeds from the torch of Prometheus to Cambronne's short pipe.