Napoleon in a Good Humor — Les Misérables

The Emperor, though ill and discommoded on horseback, has never been in a better humour than on that day. His impenetrability has been smiling since morning. The man who had been gloomy at Austerlitz is gay at Waterloo. The greatest favourites of destiny make mistakes. Our joys are composed of shadow. The supreme smile is God's alone. Riding at one o'clock the night before, in storm and rain, with Bertrand, among the communes near Rossomme, he sees the long line of English camp-fires from Frischemont to Braine-l'Alleud. Fate, to whom he has assigned a day, seems exact to the appointment. He stops his horse. He gazes at the lightning and listens to the thunder. This fatalist casts into the darkness a mysterious saying: We are in accord. Napoleon was mistaken. They were no longer in accord. He takes not a moment for sleep. Near Hougomont at half-past two he hears a column and thinks Wellington is already decamping. He will take prisoners the six thousand English who have just arrived at Ostend. That little Englishman needs a lesson. The rain redoubles. The thunder rolls while he is speaking. At half-past three the illusion falls. Officers report that nothing is stirring. Not a bivouac-fire has been extinguished. The English army is asleep. At four a peasant is brought in who has guided English cavalry toward Ohain. At five two Belgian deserters say the English army is ready for battle. So much the better, Napoleon exclaims. He prefers to overthrow them rather than to drive them back.

In the morning he dismounts in the mud on the slope that angles with the Plancenoit road. A kitchen table and a peasant's chair are brought from the farm of Rossomme. He sits with a truss of straw for a carpet and spreads out the chart of the battle-field. A pretty checker-board, he says to Soult. The provision wagons, embedded in the soft roads, have not arrived. The soldiers have had no sleep. They are wet and fasting. This does not prevent him from telling Ney they have ninety chances out of a hundred. At eight his breakfast is brought. He invites many generals. Wellington, they say, was at a ball two nights before, at the Duchess of Richmond's. Soult, a rough man of war with the face of an archbishop, says the ball takes place today. Ney says Wellington will not be so simple as to wait. That was his way, however. After breakfast Napoleon meditates a quarter of an hour, then dictates the order of battle to two generals seated on the straw, pen in hand, paper on their knees. At nine the army deploys in five columns, music at their head, a sea of casques and bayonets. The Emperor is touched and twice exclaims Magnificent. Between nine and half-past ten the whole army has ranged itself in six lines, the figure of six V's. He taps Haxo on the shoulder before the twenty-four twelve-pounders destined for Mont-Saint-Jean. There are four and twenty handsome maids, General. He smiles at the sappers appointed to barricade the village once it is carried. All this serenity is crossed by one word of haughty pity. Seeing the Scotch Grays massing, he says, It is a pity.

Then he mounts, advances beyond Rossomme, and chooses a contracted elevation of turf as his second station. The third station, at seven in the evening, will be a knoll between La Belle-Alliance and La Haie-Sainte, where balls rebound from the pavement up to Napoleon himself, and where he will tell the guide Lacoste, a hostile and terrified peasant tied to a hussar's saddle, that it is shameful to get killed with a ball in the back. The person writing these lines has found, in that friable soil, the neck of a bomb rusted through forty-six years. Everyone is aware that the undulations of those plains are no longer what they were on the 18th of June. By taking from this mournful field the wherewithal to make a monument to it, its real relief has been taken away. It has been disfigured for the sake of glorifying it. Wellington, when he beheld Waterloo two years later, exclaimed that they had altered his field of battle. Where the lion's pyramid rises today, there was a hillock almost an escarpment on the Genappe side. Thousands of cartloads of earth have made the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean an easy slope. On the day of battle, especially toward La Haie-Sainte, it was abrupt. The rains had increased the acclivity. Men not only slipped back but stuck fast in the mire. Along the crest ran a trench no distant observer could divine. Braine-l'Alleud and Ohain are connected by a road that often buries itself in the hills like a furrow. In 1815 that road cut the crest of Mont-Saint-Jean as a hollow way. Its two slopes have been taken for the monumental hillock. It was a trench, sometimes a dozen feet deep. On the day of battle this hollow road, whose existence was in no way indicated, a rut concealed in the soil, was invisible. That is to say, terrible.