Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: VICTOR HUGO ON THE GREAT FRENCH PUZZLE.1 French ought to be the most ingenious -- people in the world. There is a great standing problem on which they have been sharpening their wits for fifty years, and which is likely to be their intellectual grindstone for fifty more. That problem, the national squaring of the circle, is, How to explain away the Battle of Waterloo. There it stands, a most substantial landmark in the century ; a piece de resistance, on which, it is evident, many an expositor, historical, philosophical, military, or merely patriotic, may cut and come again. It will evidently bear no end of explanation. Theories the most ingenious are brought to bear upon it; it is obscured for a moment, every now and then, in a haze of cloud or gossamer; but the 1 ' Les Miserables.' By Victor Hugo. Vol. iii. next moment there it is, " like Teneriffe or Atlas unremoved," ready for a fresh essay of subtlety. While other people see the matter in an ordinary light, a French writer, when he directs his mind across the Belgian frontier, enters a land of enchantment. The old men see visions and the young men dream dreams. What Britain was to Arthur, the Tauric Chersonese to Jason, or the domain of an enchanter to Orlando or Amadis, such is the marvellous region that lies beyond the Sambre to Napoleon. It is a kind of cosmopolitan Pandemonium—a land where evils gathered from all the mythologies are assembled to oppose the Emperor and his army of knights-errant. Fates and hostile powers from the poetic world of Greece—destinies from Arabia and stars from Chaldsea—pitfalls and delusions from the domain of chivalry, a pagan necessity and a modern French Providence, are all arrayed on the road to Brussels to harass and disconcert one conquering mortal. It is true there were also a ...