Napoleon

My book on Charlemagne was an interesting read, but nothing too intruiging. So I've resumed Les Miserables. The current plan is to finish it by the end of the year, but it's a large book, and I'm a slow reader. Anyway, here's more juicy goodness:

"Napoleon was accustomed to looking intently at war; he never added up figure by figure the tedious sum of details; the figures mattered little to him, provided they gave this total: Victory. Though beginnings might go wrong he was not alarmed, he who believed himself master and possessor of the end; he knew how to wait, believing in himself beyond question, and he treated destiny as an equal. He seemed to say to Fate: You wouldn't dare."

And a few pages later:

"Might it have been possible for Napoleon to win this battle? We answer no. Why? Because of Wellington? Because of Blucher? No. Because of God.

"For Bonaparte to be conquerer at Waterloo was no longer within the law of the nineteenth century. Another series of acts was under way in which Napoleon had no place. The ill-will of events had long been coming.

"It was time for this titan to fall.

"The excessive weight of this man in human destiny disturbed the equilibrium. This individual alone counted for more than the whole of mankind. This plethora of all human vitality concentrated within a single head, the world rising to the brain of one man, would be fatal to civilization if it endured. The moment had come for incorruptible supreme equity to look into it."

-Victor Hugo's Les Miserables