Les Miserables

the waist and tied to a post, while her child was held
before her; her breast swelled with milk and her heart with anguish;
the little one, weak and famished, seeing the breast, cried with
agony; and the executioner said to the woman, to the nursing mother,
'Recant!' giving her the choice between the death of her child and the
death of her conscience. What say you to this Tantalus torture adapted
to a mother? Monsieur, forget not this; the French revolution had
its reasons. Its wrath will be pardoned by the future; its result is a
better world. From its most terrible blows comes a caress for the
human race. I must be brief. I must stop. I have too good a cause; and
I am dying."
And, ceasing to look at the bishop, the old man completed his idea
in these few tranquil words:
{FANTINE|BOOK_1ST|X ^paragraph 90}
"Yes, the brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When
they are over, this is recognised: that the human race has been
harshly treated, but that it has advanced."
The conventionist thought that he had borne down successively one
after the other all the interior intrenchments of the bishop. There
was one left, however, and from this, the last resource of Monseigneur
Bienvenu's resistance, came forth these words, in which nearly all the
rudeness of the exordium reappeared.
"Progress ought to believe in God. The good cannot have an impious
servitor. An atheist is an evil leader of the human race."
The old representative of the people did not answer. He was
trembling. He looked up into the sky, and a tear gathered slowly in
his eye. When the lid was full, the tear rolled down his livid
cheek, and he said, almost stammering, low, and talking to himself,
his eye lost in the depths:
"O thou! O ideal! thou alone dost exist!"
{FANTINE|BOOK_1ST|X ^paragraph 95}
The bishop felt a kind of inexpressible emotion.
After brief silence, the old man raised his finger towards heaven,
and said:
"The infinite exists. It is there. If the infinite had no me,
the me would be its limit; it would not be the infinite; in other
words, it would not be. But it is. Then it has a me. This me of
the infinite is God."
The dying man pronounced these last words in a loud voice, and
with a shudder of ecstasy, as if he saw some one. When he ceased,
his eyes closed. The effort had exhausted him. It was evident that
he had lived through in one minute the few hours that remained to him.
What he had said had brought him near to him who is in death. The last
moment was at hand.
The bishop perceived it, time was pressing. He had come as a priest;
from extreme coldness he had passed by degrees to extreme emotion;
he looked upon those closed eyes, he took that old, wrinkled and icy
hand, and drew closer to the dying man.
{FANTINE|BOOK_1ST|X ^paragraph