The puny conscience soon turns reptile; the twilight thickets, the brambles, the thorns, the marsh waters under branches, make for it a fatal haunting place; amid all this it undergoes the mysterious infiltration of ill suggestions.  The optical illusions, the unexplained images, the scaring hour, the scaring spot, all throw man into that kind of affright, half-religious, half-brutal, which in ordinary times engenders superstition, and in epochs of violence, savagery.  Hallucinations hold the torch that lights the path to murder.  There is something like vertigo in the brigand.  Nature with her prodigies has a double effect; she dazzles great minds, and blinds the duller soul.  When man is ignorant, when the desert offers visions, the obscurity of the solitude is added to the obscurity of the intelligence; thence in man comes the opening of abysses.  Certain rocks, certain ravines, certain thickets, certain wild openings of the evening sky through the trees, drive man towards mad or monstrous exploits.  We might almost call some places criminal” (ii. 21).

With La Vendee for background, and some savage incidents of the bloody Vendean war for external machinery, Victor Hugo has realised his conception of ’93 in three types of character:  Lantenac, the royalist marquis; Cimourdain, the puritan turned Jacobin; and Gauvain, for whom one can as yet find no short name, he belonging to the millenarian times.  Lantenac, though naturally a less original creation than the other two, is still an extremely bold and striking figure, drawn with marked firmness of hand, and presenting a thoroughly distinct and coherent conception.  It is a triumph of the poetic or artistic part of the author’s nature over the merely political part, that he should have made even his type of the old feudal order which he execrates so bitterly, a heroic, if ever so little also a diabolic, personage.  There is everything that is cruel, merciless, unflinching, in Lantenac; there is nothing that is mean or insignificant.  A gunner at sea, by inattention to the lashing of his gun, causes an accident which breaks the ship to pieces, and then he saves the lives of the crew by hazarding his own life to secure the wandering monster.  Lantenac decorates him with the cross of Saint Lewis for his gallantry, and instantly afterwards has him shot for his carelessness.  He burns homesteads and villages, fusillades men and women, and makes the war a war without quarter or grace.  Yet he is no swashbuckler of the melodramatic stage.  There is a fine reserve, a brief gravity, in the delineation of him, his clear will, his quickness, his intrepidity, his relentlessness, which make of him the incarnation of aristocratic coldness, hatred, and pride.  You might guillotine Lantenac with exquisite satisfaction, and yet he does not make us ashamed of mankind.  Into his mouth, as he walks about his dungeon, impatiently waiting to be led out to execution, Victor Hugo has put the aristocratic view of the Revolution.  Some portions of it (ii. 224-226) would fit amazingly well into M. Renan’s notions about the moral and intellectual reform of France.