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CHAPTER IX.
Never was there a more dismal fall.
No expiation can be compared with this. The unprecedented drama was in
five acts, so fierce that Aeschylus himself would not have dared to
dream of them. "The Ambush!" "The Struggle!" "The Massacre!" "The
Victory!" "The Fall!" What a tangle and what an unwinding! A poet who
would have predicted it would have seemed a traitor. God alone could
permit Himself Sedan.
Everything in proportion, such is His law. Far worse than Brumaire, it
needed a more crushing retribution than Waterloo.
The first Napoleon, as we have said elsewhere,[40] had faced his
destiny; he had not been dishonored by his punishment, he fell while
steadfastly regarding God. He came back to Paris, appraising the deserts
of those men who overthrew him, proudly distinguishing amongst them,
esteeming Lafayette and despising Dupin. He had at the last moment
wished to see clearly into his destiny, he had not allowed his eyes to
be bandaged; he had accepted the catastrophe while making his conditions
with it. Here there is nothing of the kind. One might almost say that
the traitor is struck treacherously. In this case there is a bad man who
feels himself in the grasp of Destiny, and who does not know what it is
doing to him. He was at the summit of his power, the blind master of an
idiot world. He had wished for a plebiscitum, he had had one. He had
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