The Emperor Puts a Question to the Guide Lacoste — Les Misérables

So, on the morning of Waterloo, Napoleon was content. He was right. The plan of battle conceived by him was, as we have seen, really admirable. Then the day began, and the changes came. Hougomont resisted. La Haie-Sainte held with a terrible tenacity. Bauduin was killed. Foy was disabled. Soye's brigade shattered on a wall nobody had counted. Guilleminot had neither petard nor powder-sacks. Batteries mired. Fifteen unescorted pieces were overwhelmed in a hollow way by Uxbridge. Bombs falling into the English lines only made volcanoes of mud. Piré's demonstration on Braine-l'Alleud was useless. Ney massed, instead of echeloning, the four divisions of the first corps. Men were delivered to grape-shot twenty-seven ranks deep. Marcognet was caught in the grain and put to the sword by Ponsonby. Two flags were taken. A black Prussian hussar was stopped between Wavre and Plancenoit. Prisoners said alarming things. Grouchy was late. Fifteen hundred men died in the orchard of Hougomont in less than an hour. Eighteen hundred were overthrown about La Haie-Sainte in a still shorter time. All these stormy incidents passed like the clouds of battle before Napoleon, and had hardly troubled his gaze. They had not overshadowed that face of imperial certainty. He was accustomed to gaze steadily at war. He never added up the heart-rending details cipher by cipher. Ciphers mattered little, provided they furnished the total, victory. He was not alarmed if the beginnings went astray. He thought himself the master and the possessor at the end. He knew how to wait, supposing himself to be out of the question, and he treated destiny as his equal. He seemed to say to fate: Thou wilt not dare.

Composed half of light and half of shadow, Napoleon thought himself protected in good and tolerated in evil. He had, or thought that he had, a connivance of events, almost a complicity, equivalent to the invulnerability of antiquity. Nevertheless, when one has Beresina, Leipzig, and Fontainebleau behind one, it seems as though one might distrust Waterloo. A mysterious frown becomes perceptible in the depths of the heavens. At the moment when Wellington retreated, Napoleon shuddered. He suddenly beheld the table-land of Mont-Saint-Jean cleared, and the van of the English army disappear. It was rallying, but hiding itself. The Emperor half rose in his stirrups. The lightning of victory flashed from his eyes. Wellington, driven into a corner at the forest of Soignes and destroyed: that was the definitive conquest of England by France. Crecy, Poitiers, Malplaquet, and Ramillies avenged. The man of Marengo was wiping out Agincourt.

So the Emperor, meditating on this terrible turn of fortune, swept his glass for the last time over all the points of the field. His guard, standing behind him with grounded arms, watched him from below with a sort of religion. He pondered. He examined the slopes, noted the declivities, scrutinized the clumps of trees, the square of rye, the path. He seemed to be counting each bush. He gazed with some intentness at the English barricades of the two highways, and near the Nivelles barricade he observed the old chapel of Saint Nicholas, painted white, at the angle of the crossroad. He bent down and spoke in a low voice to the guide Lacoste. The guide made a negative sign with his head, which was probably perfidious. The Emperor straightened himself up and fell to thinking. Wellington had drawn back. All that remained to do was to complete this retreat by crushing him. Napoleon turning round abruptly despatched an express at full speed to Paris to announce that the battle was won. Napoleon was one of those geniuses from whom thunder darts. He had just found his clap of thunder. He gave orders to Milhaud's cuirassiers to carry the table-land of Mont-Saint-Jean.