Join Host Bree Carlile as she reads the one hundred seventy-third chapter of Les Miserables.

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Today well be continuing. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo chapter six.

The consequences of having met a warden where it was that Marius went will be disclosed a little further on. Marius was absent for three days.

Then he returned to Paris, went straight to the library of the law school, and asked for the files of the moniteurous. He read the Moniteur.

He read all the histories of the republic and the empire, the memorial de Saint Helene, all the memoirs, all the newspapers, the bulletins, the proclamations. He devoured everything. The first time that he came across his fathers name in the bulletins of the grand army, he had a fever.

For a week he went to see the generals under whom Georges Pontmercy had served. Among others, Count H.

Churchwarden Mabeuf, whom he went to see again, told him about the life at Vernon, the colonels retreat, his flowers, his solitude.

Marius came to a full knowledge of that rare, sweet and sublime man, that species of lion Lamb who had been his father in the meanwhile, occupied as he was with this study, which absorbed all its moments as well as his thoughts. He hardly saw the gillenormands at all. He made his appearance at meals, then they searched for him, and he was not to be found.

Father Gillenormand smiled. Bah, mbah. He is just of the age for the girls. Sometimes, the old man added the deuce. I thought it was only an affair of galleon tree.

It seems that it is an affair of passion. It was a passion. In fact. Marius was on the high road to adoring his father. At the same time, his ideas underwent an extraordinary change.

The phases of this change were numerous and successive. As this is the history of many minds of our day, we think it will prove useful to follow these phases step by step and indicate them all.

That history upon which he had just cast his eyes appalled him. The first effect was to dazzle him. Up to that time, the republic, the empire, had been to him only monstrous words.

The republic, a guillotine in the twilight, the empire, a sword in the night.

He had just taken a look at it, and where he had expected to find only a chaos of shadows, he had beheld with a sort of unprecedented surprise, mingled with fear and joy, stars sparkling Mirabeau, Vergenode, Saint just, Robespierre, Camille, Desmoulins, Danton, and the sonorais, Napoleon. He did not know where he stood. He recoiled, blinded by the brilliant lights.

Little by little, when his astonishment had passed off, he grew accustomed to this radiance. He contemplated these deeds without dizziness. He examined these personages without terror.

The revolution and the empire presented themselves luminously in perspective. Before his minds eye. He beheld each of these groups of events and of men, summed up in two tremendous facts.

The republic and the sovereignty of civil rights restored to the masses. The empire and the sovereignty of the french idea imposed on Europe.

He beheld the grand figure of the people emerge from the revolution, and the grand figure of France spring forth from the empire. He asserted in his conscience that all this had been good. What has dazzled state neglected in this, his first, far too synthetic estimation?

We do not think it necessary to point out here it is a state of a mind on the march that we are recording. Progress is not accomplished in one stage. That stated once for all in connection with what precedes as well as with what is to follow, we continue.

He then perceived that up to that moment he had comprehended his country no more than he had comprehended his father. He had not known either the one or the other, and a sort of voluntary night had obscured his eyes.

Now he saw, and on the one hand he admired, while on the other he adored. He was filled with regret and remorse. And he reflected in despair that all he had in his soul could now be said only to the tomb.

Oh, if his father had still been in existence, if he had still had him. If God in his compassion and his goodness had permitted his father to be still among the living, how he would have run.

How he would have precipitated himself. How he would have cried to his father. Father, here I am. It is I. I have the same heart as thou. I am thy son.

How he would have embraced that white head, bathed his hair in tears, gazed upon his scar, pressed his hands, adored his garment, kissed his feet. Oh, why had his father died so early? Before his time, before the justice, the love of his son had come to him.

Marius had a continual sob in his heart which said to him every moment, alas. At the same time he became more truly serious, more truly grave, more sure of his thought and his faith.

At each instant, gleams of the true came to complete his reason. An inward growth seemed to be in progress within him. He was conscious of a sort of natural enlargement.

Which gave him two things that were new to him, his father and his country. As everything opens when one has a key. So he explained to himself that which he had hated. He penetrated that which he had abhorred.

Henceforth he plainly perceived the providential, divine and human sense of the great things which he had been taught to detest.

And of the great men whom he had been instructed to curse when he reflected on his former opinions, which were but those of yesterday, and which nevertheless seemed to him already so very ancient, he grew indignant, yet he smiled. From the rehabilitation of his father he naturally passed to the rehabilitation of Napoleon.

Now all the prejudices of the restoration, all its interests, all its instincts, tended to disfigure Napoleon. It execrated him even more than it did Robespierre.

It had very cleverly turned to sufficiently good account the fatigue of the nation and the hatred of mothers. Bonaparte had become an almost fabulous monster.

Thus, in speaking of Bonaparte, one was free to sob or to puff up with laughter, provided that hatred lay at the bottom. Marius had never entertained about that man, as he was called. Any other ideas in his mind they had.

Combined with the tenacity which existed in his nature. There was in him a headstrong little man who hated Napoleon.

On reading history, on studying him, especially in the documents and materials for history, the veil which concealed Napoleon from the eyes of Marius was gradually rent.

He caught a glimpse of something immense, and he suspected that he had been deceived up to that moment on the score of Bonaparte, as about all the rest.

Each day he saw more distinctly, and he set about mounting slowly, step by step, almost regretfully in the beginning, then with intoxication, and as though attracted by an irresistible fascination. First the sombre steps, then the vaguely illuminated steps, at last the luminous and splendid steps of enthusiasm.

One night he was alone in his little chamber near the roof. His candle was burning. He was reading with his elbows resting on his table close to the open window.

All sorts of reveries reached him from space and mingled with his thoughts. What a spectacle is the night. One hears dull sounds without knowing whence they proceed.

He was perusing the bulletins of the grand army, those heroic stropheas penned on the field of battle. There, at intervals, he beheld his fathers name, always the name of the emperor. The whole of that great empire presented itself to him.

He felt a flood swelling and rising within him. It seemed to him at moments that his father passed close to him like a breath and whispered in his ear. He gradually got into a singular state.

He thought that he heard drums, cannon, trumpets, the measured tread of battalions, the dull and distant gallop of the calvary. From time to time, his eyes were raised heavenward and gazed upon the colossal constellations as they gleamed in the measureless depths of space.

Then they fell upon his book once more, and there they beheld other colossal things. Moving confusedly, his heart contracted within him.

He was in a transport, trembling, panting all at once, without himself knowing what was in him and what impulse he was obeying.

He sprang to his feet, stretched both arms out of the window, gazed intently into the gloom, the silence, the infinite darkness, the eternal immensity, and exclaimed, long live the emperor. From that moment forth, all was over.

The ogre of Corsica, the usurper, the tyrant, the monster who was the lover of his own sisters, the actor who took lessons of Talma, the poisoner of Jaffa, the tiger, buonaparte.

All this vanished and gave place in his mind to a vague and brilliant radiance in which shone at an inaccessible height the pale marble phantom of Caesar. The emperor had been for his father only the well beloved captain whom one admires, for whom one sacrifices oneself. He was something more, Temerius.

He was the predestined constructor of the french group, succeeding the roman group in the domination of the universe.

He was a prodigious architect of a destruction, the continuer of Charlemagne, of Louis XI, of Henry IV, of Richelieu, of Louis XIV, and of the committee of public safety.

Having his spots, no doubt his faults, his crimes, even being a man, that is to say, but August in his faults, brilliant in his spots, powerful in his crime. He was the predestined man who had forced all nations to say the great nation. He was better than that.

He was the very incarnation of France, conquering Europe by the sword which he grasped, and the world by the light which he shedded. Marius saw in Bonaparte the dazzling specter which will always rise upon the frontier and which will guard the future despot.

But dictator, a despot resulting from a republic. And summing up, a revolution. Napoleon became for him the man people, as Jesus Christ is the man God.

It will be perceived that, like all new converts to a religion, his conversion intoxicated him. He hurled himself headlong into adhesion, and he went too far.

His nature was so constructed, once on the downward slope, it was almost impossible for him to put on the drag. Fanaticism for the sword took possession of him and complicated in his mind his enthusiasm for the idea.

He did not perceive that along with genius and Pell mell, he was admitting force. That is to say, he was installing in two compartments of his idolatry. On the one hand, that which is divine, on the other hand, that which is brutal.

In many respects, he had set about deceiving himself. Otherwise he admitted everything. There's a way of encountering error while on one's way to the truth.

He had a violent sort of good faith which took everything in the lump in the new path which he had entered on. In judging the mistakes of the old regime, as in measuring the glory of Napoleon, he neglected the attenuating circumstances.

At all events, a tremendous step had been taken. Where he had formerly beheld the fall of the monarchy, he now saw the advent of France. His orientation had changed.

What had been his east became the west. He had turned squarely round. All these revolutions were accomplished within him without his family obtaining an inkling of the case.

When during this mysterious labor he had entirely shed his old bourbon and ultra skin, when he had cast off the aristocrat, the Jacobite and the royalist, when he had become thoroughly a revolutionist, profoundly democratic and republican, he went to an engraver on the quai des Orfez and ordered a hundred cards bearing this Liberon Marius Pontmercy.

This was only the strictly logical consequence of the change which had taken place in him, a change in which everything gravitated round his father only as he did not know anyone and could not sew his cards with any porter, he put them in his pocket by another natural consequence.

In proportion as he drew nearer to his father, to the latter's memory, and to the things for which the colonel had fought five and 20 years before he receded from his grandfather. We have long ago said that Monsieur Gillenormands temper did not please him.

There already existed between them all the dissonances of the grave young man and the frivolous old man. The gaiety of Geront shocks and exasperates the melancholy of Werther.

So long as the same political opinions and the same ideas had been common to them both. Marius had met Monsieur Gillenormand there as on a bridge.

When the bridge fell, an abyss was formed, and then, over and above all, Marius experienced unutterable impulses to revolt.

When he reflected that it was Monsieur de Lenormand who had, from stupid motives, torn him ruthlessly from the colonel, thus depriving the father of the child and the child of the father. By dint of pity for his father, Marius had nearly arrived at a version for his grandfather.

Nothing of this sort, however, was betrayed on the exterior, as weve already said. Only he grew colder and colder, laconic at meals and rare in the house.

When his aunt scolded him for it, he was very gentle and alleged his studies, his lectures, the examinations, etcetera. As a pretext, his grandfather never departed from his infallible diagnosis. In love, I know all about it. From time to time Marius absented himself.

Where is it that he goes off like this? Said his aunt.

On one of these trips, which were always very brief, he went to Montfermeil in order to obey the injunction which his father had left him, and he sought the old sergeant to Waterloo. The innkeeper, thenardier. Thenardier, had failed. The inn was closed and no one knew what had become of him.

Marius was away from the house for four days. On this quest he is getting decidedly wild, said his grandfather.

They thought they had noticed that he wore something on his breast, under his shirt, which was attached to his neck by a black ribbon. Thank you for joining bite at a time books today while we wrote a bite of one of your favorite classics.

Again, my name is Brie Carlisle and I hope you come back tomorrow for the next bite of le miserable.