At Bombarda’s — Les Misérables

The Russian mountains having been exhausted, the eight become stranded in Bombarda's public house in the Champs-Élysées, a branch of the famous house near Delorme Alley. Sunday crowd: they must take a large ugly room with an alcove and a bed at the end. Two windows look through elms to the quay and the river. August sunlight touches the panes. One table is a triumphant mountain of bouquets mixed with hats. At the other the four couples sit in a merry confusion of platters, beer jugs, and wine flasks, very little order on the table, some disorder beneath it. Molière is cited for the abominable clatter of feet. This is the state the shepherd idyll, begun at five in the morning, has reached at half-past four. The sun is setting. Appetites are satisfied.

Outside, the Champs-Élysées are light and dust, the two things of which glory is composed. The horses of Marly prance in a cloud of gold. Body-guards descend the Avenue de Neuilly. The white flag, faintly rosy, floats over the Tuileries. The Place de la Concorde, Louis XV once more, is choked with promenaders, some still wearing the silver fleur-de-lys. Little girls throw the Bourbon air to the winds: give us back our father from Ghent. Wooden horses, rings, printers in paper caps. It is undisputed peace and profound royalist security. Chief of Police Anglès has just reported to the King that there is nothing to be feared from these people. They are as heedless and as indolent as cats. The populace is restless in the provinces, not in Paris. Two of them would be needed to make one grenadier. The stature of the capital has diminished. In short, it is an amiable rabble.

Hugo jots a note on the margin. Prefects do not deem it possible that a cat can transform itself into a lion; that does happen, and in that lies the miracle wrought by the populace of Paris. The old republics esteemed the cat as liberty. The Restoration sees the city in too rose-coloured a light. No one sleeps more soundly than the Parisian, no one is more frankly lazy; let him not be trusted. Give him a pike, the 10th of August; a gun, Austerlitz. If it is country, he enlists; if liberty, he tears up the pavements. As long as he has for refrain only the Carmagnole, he overthrows Louis XVI. Make him sing the Marseillaise, and he will free the world. This note jotted down, Hugo returns to the four couples. The dinner, as we have said, was drawing to its close.