CHAPTER I
THE CHARYBDIS OF THE FAUBOURG SAINT ANTOINE AND THE SCYLLA OF
THE FAUBOURG DU TEMPLE
The two most memorable barricades
which the observer of social maladies can name do
not belong to the period in which the action of this
work is laid. These two barricades, both of them
symbols, under two different aspects, of a redoubtable
situation, sprang from the earth at the time of the
fatal insurrection of June, 1848, the greatest war
of the streets that history has ever beheld.
It sometimes happens that, even contrary
to principles, even contrary to liberty, equality,
and fraternity, even contrary to the universal vote,
even contrary to the government, by all for all, from
the depths of its anguish, of its discouragements
and its destitutions, of its fevers, of its distresses,
of its miasmas, of its ignorances, of its
darkness, that great and despairing body, the rabble,
protests against, and that the populace wages battle
against, the people.
Beggars attack the common right; the
ochlocracy rises against demos.
These are melancholy days; for there
is always a certain amount of night even in this madness,
there is suicide in this duel, and those words which
are intended to be insults beggars, canaille,
ochlocracy, populace exhibit, alas! rather
the fault of those who reign than the fault of those
who suffer; rather the fault of the privileged than
the fault of the disinherited.
For our own part, we never pronounce
those words without pain and without respect, for
when philosophy fathoms the facts to which they correspond,
it often finds many a grandeur beside these miseries.
Athens was an ochlocracy; the beggars were the making
of Holland; the populace saved Rome more than once;
and the rabble followed Jesus Christ.
There is no thinker who has not at
times contemplated the magnificences of the lower
classes.
It was of this rabble that Saint Jerome
was thinking, no doubt, and of all these poor people
and all these vagabonds and all these miserable people
whence sprang the apostles and the martyrs, when he
uttered this mysterious saying: “Fex urbis,
lex orbis,” the dregs of
the city, the law of the earth.
The exasperations of this crowd which
suffers and bleeds, its violences contrary to
all sense, directed against the principles which are
its life, its masterful deeds against the right, are
its popular coups d’etat and should be repressed.
The man of probity sacrifices himself, and out of
his very love for this crowd, he combats it. But
how excusable he feels it even while holding out against
it! How he venerates it even while resisting
it! This is one of those rare moments when, while
doing that which it is one’s duty to do, one
feels something which disconcerts one, and which would
dissuade one from proceeding further; one persists,
it is necessary, but conscience, though satisfied,
is sad, and the accomplishment of duty is complicated
with a pain at the heart.
June, 1848, let us hasten to say,
was an exceptional fact, and almost impossible of
classification, in the philosophy of history.
All the words which we have just uttered, must be
discarded, when it becomes a question of this extraordinary
revolt, in which one feels the holy anxiety of toil
claiming its rights. It was necessary to combat
it, and this was a duty, for it attacked the republic.
But what was June, 1848, at bottom? A revolt
of the people against itself.
Where the subject is not lost sight
of, there is no digression; may we, then, be permitted
to arrest the reader’s attention for a moment
on the two absolutely unique barricades of which we
have just spoken and which characterized this insurrection.
One blocked the entrance to the Faubourg
Saint Antoine; the other defended the approach to
the Faubourg du Temple; those before whom these two
fearful masterpieces of civil war reared themselves
beneath the brilliant blue sky of June, will never
forget them.
The Saint-Antoine barricade was tremendous;
it was three stories high, and seven hundred feet
wide. It barred the vast opening of the faubourg,
that is to say, three streets, from angle to angle;
ravined, jagged, cut up, divided, crenelated, with
an immense rent, buttressed with piles that were bastions
in themselves throwing out capes here and there, powerfully
backed up by two great promontories of houses of the
faubourg, it reared itself like a cyclopean dike
at the end of the formidable place which had seen
the 14th of July. Nineteen barricades were ranged,
one behind the other, in the depths of the streets
behind this principal barricade. At the very sight
of it, one felt the agonizing suffering in the immense
faubourg, which had reached that point of extremity
when a distress may become a catastrophe. Of what
was that barricade made? Of the ruins of three
six-story houses demolished expressly, said some.
Of the prodigy of all wraths, said others. It
wore the lamentable aspect of all constructions of
hatred, ruin. It might be asked: Who built
this? It might also be said: Who destroyed
this? It was the improvisation of the ebullition.
Hold! take this door! this grating! this penthouse!
this chimney-piece! this broken brazier! this cracked
pot! Give all! cast away all! Push this roll,
dig, dismantle, overturn, ruin everything! It
was the collaboration of the pavement, the block of
stone, the beam, the bar of iron, the rag, the scrap,
the broken pane, the unseated chair, the cabbage-stalk,
the tatter, the rag, and the malediction. It
was grand and it was petty. It was the abyss parodied
on the public place by hubbub. The mass beside
the atom; the strip of ruined wall and the broken
bowl, threatening fraternization of every
sort of rubbish. Sisyphus had thrown his rock
there and Job his potsherd. Terrible, in short.
It was the acropolis of the barefooted. Overturned
carts broke the uniformity of the slope; an immense
dray was spread out there crossways, its axle pointing
heavenward, and seemed a scar on that tumultuous façade;
an omnibus hoisted gayly, by main force, to the very
summit of the heap, as though the architects of this
bit of savagery had wished to add a touch of the street
urchin humor to their terror, presented its horseless,
unharnessed pole to no one knows what horses of the
air. This gigantic heap, the alluvium of the revolt,
figured to the mind an Ossa on Pelion of all revolutions;
’93 on ’89, the 9th of Thermidor on the
10th of August, the 18th of Brumaire on the 11th
of January, Vendémiaire on Prairial, 1848
on 1830. The situation deserved the trouble and
this barricade was worthy to figure on the very spot
whence the Bastille had disappeared. If the ocean
made dikes, it is thus that it would build. The
fury of the flood was stamped upon this shapeless
mass. What flood? The crowd. One thought
one beheld hubbub petrified. One thought one
heard humming above this barricade as though there
had been over their hive, enormous, dark bees of violent
progress. Was it a thicket? Was it a bacchanalia?
Was it a fortress? Vertigo seemed to have constructed
it with blows of its wings. There was something
of the cess-pool in that redoubt and something Olympian
in that confusion. One there beheld in a pell-mell
full of despair, the rafters of roofs, bits of garret
windows with their figured paper, window sashes with
their glass planted there in the ruins awaiting the
cannon, wrecks of chimneys, cupboards, tables, benches,
howling topsyturveydom, and those thousand poverty-stricken
things, the very refuse of the mendicant, which contain
at the same time fury and nothingness. One would
have said that it was the tatters of a people, rags
of wood, of iron, of bronze, of stone, and that the
Faubourg Saint Antoine had thrust it there at its
door, with a colossal flourish of the broom making
of its misery its barricade. Blocks resembling
headsman’s blocks, dislocated chains, pieces
of woodwork with brackets having the form of gibbets,
horizontal wheels projecting from the rubbish, amalgamated
with this edifice of anarchy the sombre figure of the
old tortures endured by the people. The barricade
Saint Antoine converted everything into a weapon;
everything that civil war could throw at the head
of society proceeded thence; it was not combat, it
was a paroxysm; the carbines which defended this redoubt,
among which there were some blunderbusses, sent bits
of earthenware bones, coat-buttons, even the casters
from night-stands, dangerous projectiles on account
of the brass. This barricade was furious; it
hurled to the clouds an inexpressible clamor; at certain
moments, when provoking the army, it was covered with
throngs and tempest; a tumultuous crowd of flaming
heads crowned it; a swarm filled it; it had a thorny
crest of guns, of sabres, of cudgels, of axes, of
pikes and of bayonets; a vast red flag flapped in
the wind; shouts of command, songs of attack, the roll
of drums, the sobs of women and bursts of gloomy laughter
from the starving were to be heard there. It
was huge and living, and, like the back of an electric
beast, there proceeded from it little flashes of lightning.
The spirit of revolution covered with its cloud this
summit where rumbled that voice of the people which
resembles the voice of God; a strange majesty was
emitted by this titanic basket of rubbish. It
was a heap of filth and it was Sinai.
As we have said previously, it attacked
in the name of the revolution what?
The revolution. It that barricade,
chance, hazard, disorder, terror, misunderstanding,
the unknown had facing it the Constituent
Assembly, the sovereignty of the people, universal
suffrage, the nation, the republic; and it was the
Carmagnole bidding defiance to the Marseillaise.
Immense but heroic defiance, for the
old faubourg is a hero.
The faubourg and its redoubt
lent each other assistance. The faubourg
shouldered the redoubt, the redoubt took its stand
under cover of the faubourg. The vast barricade
spread out like a cliff against which the strategy
of the African generals dashed itself. Its caverns,
its excrescences, its warts, its gibbosities, grimaced,
so to speak, and grinned beneath the smoke. The
mitraille vanished in shapelessness; the bombs
plunged into it; bullets only succeeded in making holes
in it; what was the use of cannonading chaos? and
the regiments, accustomed to the fiercest visions
of war, gazed with uneasy eyes on that species of
redoubt, a wild beast in its boar-like bristling and
a mountain by its enormous size.
A quarter of a league away, from the
corner of the Rue du Temple which debouches on the
boulevard near the Chateaud’Eau, if one thrust
one’s head bodily beyond the point formed by
the front of the Dallemagne shop, one perceived in
the distance, beyond the canal, in the street which
mounts the slopes of Belleville at the culminating
point of the rise, a strange wall reaching to the
second story of the house fronts, a sort of hyphen
between the houses on the right and the houses on the
left, as though the street had folded back on itself
its loftiest wall in order to close itself abruptly.
This wall was built of paving-stones. It was
straight, correct, cold, perpendicular, levelled with
the square, laid out by rule and line. Cement
was lacking, of course, but, as in the case of certain
Roman walls, without interfering with its rigid architecture.
The entablature was mathematically parallel with the
base. From distance to distance, one could distinguish
on the gray surface, almost invisible loopholes which
resembled black threads. These loopholes were
separated from each other by equal spaces. The
street was deserted as far as the eye could reach.
All windows and doors were closed. In the background
rose this barrier, which made a blind thoroughfare
of the street, a motionless and tranquil wall; no
one was visible, nothing was audible; not a cry, not
a sound, not a breath. A sepulchre.
The dazzling sun of June inundated
this terrible thing with light.
It was the barricade of the Faubourg of the Temple.
As soon as one arrived on the spot,
and caught sight of it, it was impossible, even for
the boldest, not to become thoughtful before this
mysterious apparition. It was adjusted, jointed,
imbricated, rectilinear, symmetrical and funereal.
Science and gloom met there. One felt that the
chief of this barricade was a geometrician or a spectre.
One looked at it and spoke low.
From time to time, if some soldier,
an officer or representative of the people, chanced
to traverse the deserted highway, a faint, sharp whistle
was heard, and the passer-by fell dead or wounded,
or, if he escaped the bullet, sometimes a biscaien
was seen to ensconce itself in some closed shutter,
in the interstice between two blocks of stone, or in
the plaster of a wall. For the men in the barricade
had made themselves two small cannons out of two cast-iron
lengths of gas-pipe, plugged up at one end with tow
and fire-clay. There was no waste of useless powder.
Nearly every shot told. There were corpses here
and there, and pools of blood on the pavement.
I remember a white butterfly which went and came in
the street. Summer does not abdicate.
In the neighborhood, the spaces beneath
the portes cocheres were encumbered with wounded.
One felt oneself aimed at by some
person whom one did not see, and one understood that
guns were levelled at the whole length of the street.
Massed behind the sort of sloping
ridge which the vaulted canal forms at the entrance
to the Faubourg du Temple, the soldiers of the attacking
column, gravely and thoughtfully, watched this dismal
redoubt, this immobility, this passivity, whence sprang
death. Some crawled flat on their faces as far
as the crest of the curve of the bridge, taking care
that their shakos did not project beyond it.
The valiant Colonel Monteynard admired
this barricade with a shudder. “How
that is built!” he said to a Representative.
“Not one paving-stone projects beyond its neighbor.
It is made of porcelain.” At that
moment, a bullet broke the cross on his breast, and
he fell.
“The cowards!” people
said. “Let them show themselves. Let
us see them! They dare not! They are hiding!”
The barricade of the Faubourg du Temple,
defended by eighty men, attacked by ten thousand,
held out for three days. On the fourth, they
did as at Zaatcha, as at Constantine, they pierced
the houses, they came over the roofs, the barricade
was taken. Not one of the eighty cowards thought
of flight, all were killed there with the exception
of the leader, Barthelemy, of whom we shall speak
presently.
The Saint-Antoine barricade was the
tumult of thunders; the barricade of the Temple was
silence. The difference between these two redoubts
was the difference between the formidable and the sinister.
One seemed a maw; the other a mask.
Admitting that the gigantic and gloomy
insurrection of June was composed of a wrath and of
an enigma, one divined in the first barricade the
dragon, and behind the second the sphinx.
These two fortresses had been erected
by two men named, the one, Cournet, the other, Barthelemy.
Cournet made the Saint-Antoine barricade; Barthelemy
the barricade of the Temple. Each was the image
of the man who had built it.
Cournet was a man of lofty stature;
he had broad shoulders, a red face, a crushing fist,
a bold heart, a loyal soul, a sincere and terrible
eye. Intrepid, energetic, irascible, stormy;
the most cordial of men, the most formidable of combatants.
War, strife, conflict, were the very air he breathed
and put him in a good humor. He had been an officer
in the navy, and, from his gestures and his voice,
one divined that he sprang from the ocean, and that
he came from the tempest; he carried the hurricane
on into battle. With the exception of the genius,
there was in Cournet something of Danton, as, with
the exception of the divinity, there was in Danton
something of Hercules.
Barthelemy, thin, feeble, pale, taciturn,
was a sort of tragic street urchin, who, having had
his ears boxed by a policeman, lay in wait for him,
and killed him, and at seventeen was sent to the galleys.
He came out and made this barricade.
Later on, fatal circumstance, in London,
proscribed by all, Barthelemy slew Cournet. It
was a funereal duel. Some time afterwards, caught
in the gearing of one of those mysterious adventures
in which passion plays a part, a catastrophe in which
French justice sees extenuating circumstances, and
in which English justice sees only death, Barthelemy
was hanged. The sombre social construction is
so made that, thanks to material destitution, thanks
to moral obscurity, that unhappy being who possessed
an intelligence, certainly firm, possibly great, began
in France with the galleys, and ended in England with
the gallows. Barthelemy, on occasion, flew but
one flag, the black flag.
Chapter II
what is to be done in
the abyss if one does not
converse
Sixteen years count in the subterranean
education of insurrection, and June, 1848, knew a
great deal more about it than June, 1832. So the
barricade of the Rue de la Chanvrerie was only an outline,
and an embryo compared to the two colossal barricades
which we have just sketched; but it was formidable
for that epoch.
The insurgents under the eye of Enjolras,
for Marius no longer looked after anything, had made
good use of the night. The barricade had been
not only repaired, but augmented. They had raised
it two feet. Bars of iron planted in the pavement
resembled lances in rest. All sorts of rubbish
brought and added from all directions complicated the
external confusion. The redoubt had been cleverly
made over, into a wall on the inside and a thicket
on the outside.
The staircase of paving-stones which
permitted one to mount it like the wall of a citadel
had been reconstructed.
The barricade had been put in order,
the tap-room disencumbered, the kitchen appropriated
for the ambulance, the dressing of the wounded completed,
the powder scattered on the ground and on the tables
had been gathered up, bullets run, cartridges manufactured,
lint scraped, the fallen weapons re-distributed, the
interior of the redoubt cleaned, the rubbish swept
up, corpses removed.
They laid the dead in a heap in the
Mondetour lane, of which they were still the masters.
The pavement was red for a long time at that spot.
Among the dead there were four National Guardsmen of
the suburbs. Enjolras had their uniforms laid
aside.
Enjolras had advised two hours of
sleep. Advice from Enjolras was a command.
Still, only three or four took advantage of it.
Feuilly employed these two hours in
engraving this inscription on the wall which faced
the tavern:
Long live
the peoples!
These four words, hollowed out in
the rough stone with a nail, could be still read on
the wall in 1848.
The three women had profited by the
respite of the night to vanish definitely; which allowed
the insurgents to breathe more freely.
They had found means of taking refuge
in some neighboring house.
The greater part of the wounded were
able, and wished, to fight still. On a litter
of mattresses and trusses of straw in the kitchen,
which had been converted into an ambulance, there
were five men gravely wounded, two of whom were municipal
guardsmen. The municipal guardsmen were attended
to first.
In the tap-room there remained only
Mabeuf under his black cloth and Javert bound to his
post.
“This is the hall of the dead,” said Enjolras.
In the interior of this hall, barely
lighted by a candle at one end, the mortuary table
being behind the post like a horizontal bar, a sort
of vast, vague cross resulted from Javert erect and
Mabeuf lying prone.
The pole of the omnibus, although
snapped off by the fusillade, was still sufficiently
upright to admit of their fastening the flag to it.
Enjolras, who possessed that quality
of a leader, of always doing what he said, attached
to this staff the bullet-ridden and bloody coat of
the old man’s.
No repast had been possible.
There was neither bread nor meat. The fifty men
in the barricade had speedily exhausted the scanty
provisions of the wine-shop during the sixteen hours
which they had passed there. At a given moment,
every barricade inevitably becomes the raft of la
Méduse. They were obliged to resign themselves
to hunger. They had then reached the first hours
of that Spartan day of the 6th of June when, in the
barricade Saint-Merry, Jeanne, surrounded by the insurgents
who demanded bread, replied to all combatants crying:
“Something to eat!” with: “Why?
It is three o’clock; at four we shall be dead.”
As they could no longer eat, Enjolras
forbade them to drink. He interdicted wine, and
portioned out the brandy.
They had found in the cellar fifteen
full bottles hermetically sealed. Enjolras and
Combeferre examined them. Combeferre when he came
up again said: “It’s the old
stock of Father Hucheloup, who began business as a
grocer.” “It must be real wine,”
observed Bossuet. “It’s lucky that
Grantaire is asleep. If he were on foot, there
would be a good deal of difficulty in saving those
bottles.” Enjolras, in spite of all
murmurs, placed his veto on the fifteen bottles, and,
in order that no one might touch them, he had them
placed under the table on which Father Mabeuf was
lying.
About two o’clock in the morning,
they reckoned up their strength. There were still
thirty-seven of them.
The day began to dawn. The torch,
which had been replaced in its cavity in the pavement,
had just been extinguished. The interior of the
barricade, that species of tiny courtyard appropriated
from the street, was bathed in shadows, and resembled,
athwart the vague, twilight horror, the deck of a
disabled ship. The combatants, as they went and
came, moved about there like black forms. Above
that terrible nesting-place of gloom the stories of
the mute houses were lividly outlined; at the very
top, the chimneys stood palely out. The sky was
of that charming, undecided hue, which may be white
and may be blue. Birds flew about in it with
cries of joy. The lofty house which formed the
back of the barricade, being turned to the East, had
upon its roof a rosy reflection. The morning
breeze ruffled the gray hair on the head of the dead
man at the third-story window.
“I am delighted that the torch
has been extinguished,” said Courfeyrac to Feuilly.
“That torch flickering in the wind annoyed me.
It had the appearance of being afraid. The light
of torches resembles the wisdom of cowards; it gives
a bad light because it trembles.”
Dawn awakens minds as it does the
birds; all began to talk.
Joly, perceiving a cat prowling on
a gutter, extracted philosophy from it.
“What is the cat?” he
exclaimed. “It is a corrective. The
good God, having made the mouse, said: ‘Hullo!
I have committed a blunder.’ And so he
made the cat. The cat is the erratum of the mouse.
The mouse, plus the cat, is the proof of creation
revised and corrected.”
Combeferre, surrounded by students
and artisans, was speaking of the dead, of Jean Prouvaire,
of Bahorel, of Mabeuf, and even of Cabuc, and of Enjolras’
sad severity. He said:
“Harmodius and Aristogiton,
Brutus, Chereas, Stephanus, Cromwell, Charlotte Corday,
Sand, have all had their moment of agony when it was
too late. Our hearts quiver so, and human life
is such a mystery that, even in the case of a civic
murder, even in a murder for liberation, if there
be such a thing, the remorse for having struck a man
surpasses the joy of having served the human race.”
And, such are the windings of the
exchange of speech, that, a moment later, by a transition
brought about through Jean Prouvaire’s verses,
Combeferre was comparing the translators of the Georgics,
Raux with Cournand, Cournand with Delille, pointing
out the passages translated by Malfilatre, particularly
the prodigies of Caesar’s death; and at that
word, Caesar, the conversation reverted to Brutus.
“Caesar,” said Combeferre,
“fell justly. Cicero was severe towards
Caesar, and he was right. That severity is not
diatribe. When Zoilus insults Homer, when Maevius
insults Virgil, when Vise insults Moliere, when Pope
insults Shakspeare, when Frederic insults Voltaire,
it is an old law of envy and hatred which is being
carried out; genius attracts insult, great men are
always more or less barked at. But Zoilus and
Cicero are two different persons. Cicero is an
arbiter in thought, just as Brutus is an arbiter by
the sword. For my own part, I blame that last
justice, the blade; but, antiquity admitted it.
Caesar, the violator of the Rubicon, conferring, as
though they came from him, the dignities which emanated
from the people, not rising at the entrance of the
senate, committed the acts of a king and almost of
a tyrant, regia ac pêne tyrannica.
He was a great man; so much the worse, or so much the
better; the lesson is but the more exalted. His
twenty-three wounds touch me less than the spitting
in the face of Jesus Christ. Caesar is stabbed
by the senators; Christ is cuffed by lackeys.
One feels the God through the greater outrage.”
Bossuet, who towered above the interlocutors
from the summit of a heap of paving-stones, exclaimed,
rifle in hand:
“Oh Cydathenaeum, Oh Myrrhinus,
Oh Probalinthus, Oh graces of the AEantides!
Oh! Who will grant me to pronounce the verses
of Homer like a Greek of Laurium or of Edapteon?”
Chapter III
light and shadow
Enjolras had been to make a reconnaissance.
He had made his way out through Mondetour lane, gliding
along close to the houses.
The insurgents, we will remark, were
full of hope. The manner in which they had repulsed
the attack of the preceding night had caused them to
almost disdain in advance the attack at dawn.
They waited for it with a smile. They had no
more doubt as to their success than as to their cause.
Moreover, succor was, evidently, on the way to them.
They reckoned on it. With that facility of triumphant
prophecy which is one of the sources of strength in
the French combatant, they divided the day which was
at hand into three distinct phases. At six o’clock
in the morning a regiment “which had been labored
with,” would turn; at noon, the insurrection
of all Paris; at sunset, revolution.
They heard the alarm bell of Saint-Merry,
which had not been silent for an instant since the
night before; a proof that the other barricade, the
great one, Jeanne’s, still held out.
All these hopes were exchanged between
the different groups in a sort of gay and formidable
whisper which resembled the warlike hum of a hive of
bees.
Enjolras reappeared. He returned
from his sombre eagle flight into outer darkness.
He listened for a moment to all this joy with folded
arms, and one hand on his mouth. Then, fresh
and rosy in the growing whiteness of the dawn, he
said:
“The whole army of Paris is
to strike. A third of the army is bearing down
upon the barricades in which you now are. There
is the National Guard in addition. I have picked
out the shakos of the fifth of the line, and
the standard-bearers of the sixth legion. In one
hour you will be attacked. As for the populace,
it was seething yesterday, to-day it is not stirring.
There is nothing to expect; nothing to hope for.
Neither from a faubourg nor from a regiment.
You are abandoned.”
These words fell upon the buzzing
of the groups, and produced on them the effect caused
on a swarm of bees by the first drops of a storm.
A moment of indescribable silence ensued, in which
death might have been heard flitting by.
This moment was brief.
A voice from the obscurest depths of the groups shouted
to Enjolras:
“So be it. Let us raise
the barricade to a height of twenty feet, and let
us all remain in it. Citizens, let us offer the
protests of corpses. Let us show that, if the
people abandon the republicans, the republicans do
not abandon the people.”
These words freed the thought of all
from the painful cloud of individual anxieties.
It was hailed with an enthusiastic acclamation.
No one ever has known the name of
the man who spoke thus; he was some unknown blouse-wearer,
a stranger, a man forgotten, a passing hero, that
great anonymous, always mingled in human crises and
in social genèses who, at a given moment, utters
in a supreme fashion the decisive word, and who vanishes
into the shadows after having represented for a minute,
in a lightning flash, the people and God.
This inexorable resolution so thoroughly
impregnated the air of the 6th of June, 1832, that,
almost at the very same hour, on the barricade Saint-Merry,
the insurgents were raising that clamor which has become
a matter of history and which has been consigned to
the documents in the case: “What
matters it whether they come to our assistance or not?
Let us get ourselves killed here, to the very last
man.”
As the reader sees, the two barricades,
though materially isolated, were in communication
with each other.
Chapter IV
minus five, plus one
After the man who decreed the “protest
of corpses” had spoken, and had given this formula
of their common soul, there issued from all mouths
a strangely satisfied and terrible cry, funereal in
sense and triumphant in tone:
“Long live death! Let us all remain here!”
“Why all?” said Enjolras.
“All! All!”
Enjolras resumed:
“The position is good; the barricade
is fine. Thirty men are enough. Why sacrifice
forty?”
They replied:
“Because not one will go away.”
“Citizens,” cried Enjolras,
and there was an almost irritated vibration in his
voice, “this republic is not rich enough in men
to indulge in useless expenditure of them. Vain-glory
is waste. If the duty of some is to depart, that
duty should be fulfilled like any other.”
Enjolras, the man-principle, had over
his co-religionists that sort of omnipotent power
which emanates from the absolute. Still, great
as was this omnipotence, a murmur arose. A leader
to the very finger-tips, Enjolras, seeing that they
murmured, insisted. He resumed haughtily:
“Let those who are afraid of not numbering more
than thirty say so.”
The murmurs redoubled.
“Besides,” observed a
voice in one group, “it is easy enough to talk
about leaving. The barricade is hemmed in.”
“Not on the side of the Halles,”
said Enjolras. “The Rue Mondetour is free,
and through the Rue des Precheurs one can reach
the Marche des Innocents.”
“And there,” went on another
voice, “you would be captured. You would
fall in with some grand guard of the line or the suburbs;
they will spy a man passing in blouse and cap.
‘Whence come you?’ ’Don’t you
belong to the barricade?’ And they will look
at your hands. You smell of powder. Shot.”
Enjolras, without making any reply,
touched Combeferre’s shoulder, and the two entered
the tap-room.
They emerged thence a moment later.
Enjolras held in his outstretched hands the four uniforms
which he had laid aside. Combeferre followed,
carrying the shoulder-belts and the shakos.
“With this uniform,” said
Enjolras, “you can mingle with the ranks and
escape; here is enough for four.” And he
flung on the ground, deprived of its pavement, the
four uniforms.
No wavering took place in his stoical
audience. Combeferre took the word.
“Come,” said he, “you
must have a little pity. Do you know what the
question is here? It is a question of women.
See here. Are there women or are there not?
Are there children or are there not? Are there
mothers, yes or no, who rock cradles with their foot
and who have a lot of little ones around them?
Let that man of you who has never beheld a nurse’s
breast raise his hand. Ah! you want to get yourselves
killed, so do I I, who am speaking to you;
but I do not want to feel the phantoms of women wreathing
their arms around me. Die, if you will, but don’t
make others die. Suicides like that which is on
the brink of accomplishment here are sublime; but
suicide is narrow, and does not admit of extension;
and as soon as it touches your neighbors, suicide
is murder. Think of the little blond heads; think
of the white locks. Listen, Enjolras has just
told me that he saw at the corner of the Rue du
Cygne a lighted casement, a candle in a poor window,
on the fifth floor, and on the pane the quivering
shadow of the head of an old woman, who had the air
of having spent the night in watching. Perhaps
she is the mother of some one of you. Well, let
that man go, and make haste, to say to his mother:
‘Here I am, mother!’ Let him feel at ease,
the task here will be performed all the same.
When one supports one’s relatives by one’s
toil, one has not the right to sacrifice one’s
self. That is deserting one’s family.
And those who have daughters! what are you thinking
of? You get yourselves killed, you are dead, that
is well. And tomorrow? Young girls without
bread that is a terrible thing. Man
begs, woman sells. Ah! those charming and gracious
beings, so gracious and so sweet, who have bonnets
of flowers, who fill the house with purity, who sing
and prattle, who are like a living perfume, who prove
the existence of angels in heaven by the purity of
virgins on earth, that Jeanne, that Lise, that Mimi,
those adorable and honest creatures who are your blessings
and your pride, ah! good God, they will suffer hunger!
What do you want me to say to you? There is a
market for human flesh; and it is not with your shadowy
hands, shuddering around them, that you will prevent
them from entering it! Think of the street, think
of the pavement covered with passers-by, think of
the shops past which women go and come with necks
all bare, and through the mire. These women,
too, were pure once. Think of your sisters, those
of you who have them. Misery, prostitution, the
police, Saint-Lazare that is what those
beautiful, delicate girls, those fragile marvels of
modesty, gentleness and loveliness, fresher than lilacs
in the month of May, will come to. Ah! you have
got yourselves killed! You are no longer on hand!
That is well; you have wished to release the people
from Royalty, and you deliver over your daughters
to the police. Friends, have a care, have mercy.
Women, unhappy women, we are not in the habit of bestowing
much thought on them. We trust to the women not
having received a man’s education, we prevent
their reading, we prevent their thinking, we prevent
their occupying themselves with politics; will you
prevent them from going to the dead-house this evening,
and recognizing your bodies? Let us see, those
who have families must be tractable, and shake hands
with us and take themselves off, and leave us here
alone to attend to this affair. I know well that
courage is required to leave, that it is hard; but
the harder it is, the more meritorious. You say:
’I have a gun, I am at the barricade; so much
the worse, I shall remain there.’ So much
the worse is easily said. My friends, there is
a morrow; you will not be here to-morrow, but your
families will; and what sufferings! See, here
is a pretty, healthy child, with cheeks like an apple,
who babbles, prattles, chatters, who laughs, who smells
sweet beneath your kiss, and do you know
what becomes of him when he is abandoned? I have
seen one, a very small creature, no taller than that.
His father was dead. Poor people had taken him
in out of charity, but they had bread only for themselves.
The child was always hungry. It was winter.
He did not cry. You could see him approach the
stove, in which there was never any fire, and whose
pipe, you know, was of mastic and yellow clay.
His breathing was hoarse, his face livid, his limbs
flaccid, his belly prominent. He said nothing.
If you spoke to him, he did not answer. He is
dead. He was taken to the Necker Hospital, where
I saw him. I was house-surgeon in that hospital.
Now, if there are any fathers among you, fathers whose
happiness it is to stroll on Sundays holding their
child’s tiny hand in their robust hand, let
each one of those fathers imagine that this child
is his own. That poor brat, I remember, and I
seem to see him now, when he lay nude on the dissecting
table, how his ribs stood out on his skin like the
graves beneath the grass in a cemetery. A sort
of mud was found in his stomach. There were ashes
in his teeth. Come, let us examine ourselves
conscientiously and take counsel with our heart.
Statistics show that the mortality among abandoned
children is fifty-five per cent. I repeat, it
is a question of women, it concerns mothers, it concerns
young girls, it concerns little children. Who
is talking to you of yourselves? We know well
what you are; we know well that you are all brave,
parbleu! we know well that you all have in your
souls the joy and the glory of giving your life for
the great cause; we know well that you feel yourselves
elected to die usefully and magnificently, and that
each one of you clings to his share in the triumph.
Very well. But you are not alone in this world.
There are other beings of whom you must think.
You must not be egoists.”
All dropped their heads with a gloomy air.
Strange contradictions of the human
heart at its most sublime moments. Combeferre,
who spoke thus, was not an orphan. He recalled
the mothers of other men, and forgot his own.
He was about to get himself killed. He was “an
egoist.”
Marius, fasting, fevered, having emerged
in succession from all hope, and having been stranded
in grief, the most sombre of shipwrecks, and saturated
with violent emotions and conscious that the end was
near, had plunged deeper and deeper into that visionary
stupor which always precedes the fatal hour voluntarily
accepted.
A physiologist might have studied
in him the growing symptoms of that febrile absorption
known to, and classified by, science, and which is
to suffering what voluptuousness is to pleasure.
Despair, also, has its ecstasy. Marius had reached
this point. He looked on at everything as from
without; as we have said, things which passed before
him seemed far away; he made out the whole, but did
not perceive the details. He beheld men going
and coming as through a flame. He heard voices
speaking as at the bottom of an abyss.
But this moved him. There was
in this scene a point which pierced and roused even
him. He had but one idea now, to die; and he did
not wish to be turned aside from it, but he reflected,
in his gloomy somnambulism, that while destroying
himself, he was not prohibited from saving some one
else.
He raised his voice.
“Enjolras and Combeferre are
right,” said he; “no unnecessary sacrifice.
I join them, and you must make haste. Combeferre
has said convincing things to you. There are
some among you who have families, mothers, sisters,
wives, children. Let such leave the ranks.”
No one stirred.
“Married men and the supporters
of families, step out of the ranks!” repeated
Marius.
His authority was great. Enjolras
was certainly the head of the barricade, but Marius
was its savior.
“I order it,” cried Enjolras.
“I entreat you,” said Marius.
Then, touched by Combeferre’s
words, shaken by Enjolras’ order, touched by
Marius’ entreaty, these heroic men began to denounce
each other. “It is true,” said
one young man to a full grown man, “you are the
father of a family. Go.” “It
is your duty rather,” retorted the man, “you
have two sisters whom you maintain.” And
an unprecedented controversy broke forth. Each
struggled to determine which should not allow himself
to be placed at the door of the tomb.
“Make haste,” said Courfeyrac,
“in another quarter of an hour it will be too
late.”
“Citizens,” pursued Enjolras,
“this is the Republic, and universal suffrage
reigns. Do you yourselves designate those who
are to go.”
They obeyed. After the expiration
of a few minutes, five were unanimously selected and
stepped out of the ranks.
“There are five of them!” exclaimed Marius.
There were only four uniforms.
“Well,” began the five, “one must
stay behind.”
And then a struggle arose as to who
should remain, and who should find reasons for the
others not remaining. The generous quarrel began
afresh.
“You have a wife who loves you.” “You
have your aged mother.” ” You
have neither father nor mother, and what is to become
of your three little brothers?” “You
are the father of five children.” “You
have a right to live, you are only seventeen, it is
too early for you to die.”
These great revolutionary barricades
were assembling points for heroism. The improbable
was simple there. These men did not astonish each
other.
“Be quick,” repeated Courfeyrac.
Men shouted to Marius from the groups:
“Do you designate who is to remain.”
“Yes,” said the five, “choose.
We will obey you.”
Marius did not believe that he was
capable of another emotion. Still, at this idea,
that of choosing a man for death, his blood rushed
back to his heart. He would have turned pale,
had it been possible for him to become any paler.
He advanced towards the five, who
smiled upon him, and each, with his eyes full of that
grand flame which one beholds in the depths of history
hovering over Thermopylae, cried to him:
“Me! me! me!”
And Marius stupidly counted them;
there were still five of them! Then his glance
dropped to the four uniforms.
At that moment, a fifth uniform fell,
as if from heaven, upon the other four.
The fifth man was saved.
Marius raised his eyes and recognized M. Fauchelevent.
Jean Valjean had just entered the barricade.
He had arrived by way of Mondetour
lane, whither by dint of inquiries made, or by instinct,
or chance. Thanks to his dress of a National
Guardsman, he had made his way without difficulty.
The sentinel stationed by the insurgents
in the Rue Mondetour had no occasion to give the alarm
for a single National Guardsman, and he had allowed
the latter to entangle himself in the street, saying
to himself: “Probably it is a reinforcement,
in any case it is a prisoner.” The moment
was too grave to admit of the sentinel abandoning his
duty and his post of observation.
At the moment when Jean Valjean entered
the redoubt, no one had noticed him, all eyes being
fixed on the five chosen men and the four uniforms.
Jean Valjean also had seen and heard, and he had silently
removed his coat and flung it on the pile with the
rest.
The emotion aroused was indescribable.
“Who is this man?” demanded Bossuet.
“He is a man who saves others,” replied
Combeferre.
Marius added in a grave voice:
“I know him.”
This guarantee satisfied every one.
Enjolras turned to Jean Valjean.
“Welcome, citizen.”
And he added:
“You know that we are about to die.”
Jean Valjean, without replying, helped
the insurgent whom he was saving to don his uniform.
Chapter V
the horizon which one beholds
from the summit of A barricade
The situation of all in that fatal
hour and that pitiless place, had as result and culminating
point Enjolras’ supreme melancholy.
Enjolras bore within him the plenitude
of the revolution; he was incomplete, however, so
far as the absolute can be so; he had too much of
Saint-Just about him, and not enough of Anacharsis
Cloots; still, his mind, in the society of the Friends
of the A B C, had ended by undergoing a certain polarization
from Combeferre’s ideas; for some time past,
he had been gradually emerging from the narrow form
of dogma, and had allowed himself to incline to the
broadening influence of progress, and he had come
to accept, as a definitive and magnificent evolution,
the transformation of the great French Republic, into
the immense human republic. As far as the immediate
means were concerned, a violent situation being given,
he wished to be violent; on that point, he never varied;
and he remained of that epic and redoubtable school
which is summed up in the words: “Eighty-three.”
Enjolras was standing erect on the staircase of paving-stones,
one elbow resting on the stock of his gun. He
was engaged in thought; he quivered, as at the passage
of prophetic breaths; places where death is have these
effects of tripods. A sort of stifled fire darted
from his eyes, which were filled with an inward look.
All at once he threw back his head, his blond locks
fell back like those of an angel on the sombre quadriga
made of stars, they were like the mane of a startled
lion in the flaming of an halo, and Enjolras cried:
“Citizens, do you picture the
future to yourselves? The streets of cities inundated
with light, green branches on the thresholds, nations
sisters, men just, old men blessing children, the past
loving the present, thinkers entirely at liberty,
believers on terms of full equality, for religion
heaven, God the direct priest, human conscience become
an altar, no more hatreds, the fraternity of the workshop
and the school, for sole penalty and recompense fame,
work for all, right for all, peace over all, no more
bloodshed, no more wars, happy mothers! To conquer
matter is the first step; to realize the ideal is the
second. Reflect on what progress has already
accomplished. Formerly, the first human races
beheld with terror the hydra pass before their eyes,
breathing on the waters, the dragon which vomited flame,
the griffin who was the monster of the air, and who
flew with the wings of an eagle and the talons of
a tiger; fearful beasts which were above man.
Man, nevertheless, spread his snares, consecrated
by intelligence, and finally conquered these monsters.
We have vanquished the hydra, and it is called the
locomotive; we are on the point of vanquishing the
griffin, we already grasp it, and it is called the
balloon. On the day when this Promethean task
shall be accomplished, and when man shall have definitely
harnessed to his will the triple Chimaera of antiquity,
the hydra, the dragon and the griffin, he will be
the master of water, fire, and of air, and he will
be for the rest of animated creation that which the
ancient gods formerly were to him. Courage, and
onward! Citizens, whither are we going?
To science made government, to the force of things
become the sole public force, to the natural law, having
in itself its sanction and its penalty and promulgating
itself by evidence, to a dawn of truth corresponding
to a dawn of day. We are advancing to the union
of peoples; we are advancing to the unity of man.
No more fictions; no more parasites. The real
governed by the true, that is the goal. Civilization
will hold its assizes at the summit of Europe, and,
later on, at the centre of continents, in a grand parliament
of the intelligence. Something similar has already
been seen. The amphictyons had two sittings
a year, one at Delphos the seat of the gods, the other
at Thermopylae, the place of heroes. Europe will
have her amphictyons; the globe will have its
amphictyons. France bears this sublime future
in her breast. This is the gestation of the nineteenth
century. That which Greece sketched out is worthy
of being finished by France. Listen to me, you,
Feuilly, valiant artisan, man of the people. I
revere you. Yes, you clearly behold the future,
yes, you are right. You had neither father nor
mother, Feuilly; you adopted humanity for your mother
and right for your father. You are about to die,
that is to say to triumph, here. Citizens, whatever
happens to-day, through our defeat as well as through
our victory, it is a revolution that we are about to
create. As conflagrations light up a whole city,
so revolutions illuminate the whole human race.
And what is the revolution that we shall cause?
I have just told you, the Revolution of the True.
From a political point of view, there is but a single
principle; the sovereignty of man over himself.
This sovereignty of myself over myself is called Liberty.
Where two or three of these sovereignties are combined,
the state begins. But in that association there
is no abdication. Each sovereignty concedes a
certain quantity of itself, for the purpose of forming
the common right. This quantity is the same for
all of us. This identity of concession which
each makes to all, is called Equality. Common
right is nothing else than the protection of all beaming
on the right of each. This protection of all
over each is called Fraternity. The point of
intersection of all these assembled sovereignties is
called society. This intersection being a junction,
this point is a knot. Hence what is called the
social bond. Some say social contract; which is
the same thing, the word contract being etymologically
formed with the idea of a bond. Let us come to
an understanding about equality; for, if liberty is
the summit, equality is the base. Equality, citizens,
is not wholly a surface vegetation, a society of great
blades of grass and tiny oaks; a proximity of jealousies
which render each other null and void; legally speaking,
it is all aptitudes possessed of the same opportunity;
politically, it is all votes possessed of the same
weight; religiously, it is all consciences possessed
of the same right. Equality has an organ:
gratuitous and obligatory instruction. The right
to the alphabet, that is where the beginning must
be made. The primary school imposed on all, the
secondary school offered to all, that is the law.
From an identical school, an identical society will
spring. Yes, instruction! light! light! everything
comes from light, and to it everything returns.
Citizens, the nineteenth century is great, but the
twentieth century will be happy. Then, there
will be nothing more like the history of old, we shall
no longer, as to-day, have to fear a conquest, an invasion,
a usurpation, a rivalry of nations, arms in hand, an
interruption of civilization depending on a marriage
of kings, on a birth in hereditary tyrannies,
a partition of peoples by a congress, a dismemberment
because of the failure of a dynasty, a combat of two
religions meeting face to face, like two bucks in
the dark, on the bridge of the infinite; we shall
no longer have to fear famine, farming out, prostitution
arising from distress, misery from the failure of
work and the scaffold and the sword, and battles and
the ruffianism of chance in the forest of events.
One might almost say: There will be no more events.
We shall be happy. The human race will accomplish
its law, as the terrestrial globe accomplishes its
law; harmony will be re-established between the soul
and the star; the soul will gravitate around the truth,
as the planet around the light. Friends, the
present hour in which I am addressing you, is a gloomy
hour; but these are terrible purchases of the future.
A revolution is a toll. Oh! the human race will
be delivered, raised up, consoled! We affirm
it on this barrier. Whence should proceed that
cry of love, if not from the heights of sacrifice?
Oh my brothers, this is the point of junction, of
those who think and of those who suffer; this barricade
is not made of paving-stones, nor of joists, nor of
bits of iron; it is made of two heaps, a heap of ideas,
and a heap of woes. Here misery meets the ideal.
The day embraces the night, and says to it: ’I
am about to die, and thou shalt be born again with
me.’ From the embrace of all desolations
faith leaps forth. Sufferings bring hither their
agony and ideas their immortality. This agony
and this immortality are about to join and constitute
our death. Brothers, he who dies here dies in
the radiance of the future, and we are entering a tomb
all flooded with the dawn.”
Enjolras paused rather than became
silent; his lips continued to move silently, as though
he were talking to himself, which caused them all
to gaze attentively at him, in the endeavor to hear
more. There was no applause; but they whispered
together for a long time. Speech being a breath,
the rustling of intelligences resembles the rustling
of leaves.
Chapter VI
Marius haggard, javert laconic
Let us narrate what was passing in Marius’ thoughts.
Let the reader recall the state of
his soul. We have just recalled it, everything
was a vision to him now. His judgment was disturbed.
Marius, let us insist on this point, was under the
shadow of the great, dark wings which are spread over
those in the death agony. He felt that he had
entered the tomb, it seemed to him that he was already
on the other side of the wall, and he no longer beheld
the faces of the living except with the eyes of one
dead.
How did M. Fauchelevent come there?
Why was he there? What had he come there to do?
Marius did not address all these questions to himself.
Besides, since our despair has this peculiarity, that
it envelops others as well as ourselves, it seemed
logical to him that all the world should come thither
to die.
Only, he thought of Cosette with a pang at his heart.
However, M. Fauchelevent did not speak
to him, did not look at him, and had not even the
air of hearing him, when Marius raised his voice to
say: “I know him.”
As far as Marius was concerned, this
attitude of M. Fauchelevent was comforting, and, if
such a word can be used for such impressions, we should
say that it pleased him. He had always felt the
absolute impossibility of addressing that enigmatical
man, who was, in his eyes, both equivocal and imposing.
Moreover, it had been a long time since he had seen
him; and this still further augmented the impossibility
for Marius’ timid and reserved nature.
The five chosen men left the barricade
by way of Mondetour lane; they bore a perfect resemblance
to members of the National Guard. One of them
wept as he took his leave. Before setting out,
they embraced those who remained.
When the five men sent back to life
had taken their departure, Enjolras thought of the
man who had been condemned to death.
He entered the tap-room. Javert,
still bound to the post, was engaged in meditation.
“Do you want anything?” Enjolras asked
him.
Javert replied: “When are you going to
kill me?”
“Wait. We need all our cartridges just
at present.”
“Then give me a drink,” said Javert.
Enjolras himself offered him a glass
of water, and, as Javert was pinioned, he helped him
to drink.
“Is that all?” inquired Enjolras.
“I am uncomfortable against
this post,” replied Javert. “You are
not tender to have left me to pass the night here.
Bind me as you please, but you surely might lay me
out on a table like that other man.”
And with a motion of the head, he indicated the body
of M. Mabeuf.
There was, as the reader will remember,
a long, broad table at the end of the room, on which
they had been running bullets and making cartridges.
All the cartridges having been made, and all the powder
used, this table was free.
At Enjolras’ command, four insurgents unbound
Javert from the post.
While they were loosing him, a fifth held a bayonet
against his breast.
Leaving his arms tied behind his back,
they placed about his feet a slender but stout whip-cord,
as is done to men on the point of mounting the scaffold,
which allowed him to take steps about fifteen inches
in length, and made him walk to the table at the end
of the room, where they laid him down, closely bound
about the middle of the body.
By way of further security, and by
means of a rope fastened to his neck, they added to
the system of ligatures which rendered every attempt
at escape impossible, that sort of bond which is called
in prisons a martingale, which, starting at the neck,
forks on the stomach, and meets the hands, after passing
between the legs.
While they were binding Javert, a
man standing on the threshold was surveying him with
singular attention. The shadow cast by this man
made Javert turn his head. He raised his eyes,
and recognized Jean Valjean. He did not even
start, but dropped his lids proudly and confined himself
to the remark: “It is perfectly simple.”
Chapter VII
the situation becomes aggravated
The daylight was increasing rapidly.
Not a window was opened, not a door stood ajar; it
was the dawn but not the awaking. The end of the
Rue de la Chanvrerie, opposite the barricade, had
been evacuated by the troops, as we have stated it
seemed to be free, and presented itself to passers-by
with a sinister tranquillity. The Rue Saint-Denis
was as dumb as the avenue of Sphinxes at Thebes.
Not a living being in the cross-roads, which gleamed
white in the light of the sun. Nothing is so
mournful as this light in deserted streets. Nothing
was to be seen, but there was something to be heard.
A mysterious movement was going on at a certain distance.
It was evident that the critical moment was approaching.
As on the previous evening, the sentinels had come
in; but this time all had come.
The barricade was stronger than on
the occasion of the first attack. Since the departure
of the five, they had increased its height still further.
On the advice of the sentinel who
had examined the region of the Halles, Enjolras, for
fear of a surprise in the rear, came to a serious
decision. He had the small gut of the Mondetour
lane, which had been left open up to that time, barricaded.
For this purpose, they tore up the pavement for the
length of several houses more. In this manner,
the barricade, walled on three streets, in front on
the Rue de la Chanvrerie, to the left on the Rues
du Cygne and de la Petite
Truanderie, to the right on the Rue Mondetour,
was really almost impregnable; it is true that they
were fatally hemmed in there. It had three fronts,
but no exit. “A fortress but a rat
hole too,” said Courfeyrac with a laugh.
Enjolras had about thirty paving-stones
“torn up in excess,” said Bossuet, piled
up near the door of the wine-shop.
The silence was now so profound in
the quarter whence the attack must needs come, that
Enjolras had each man resume his post of battle.
An allowance of brandy was doled out to each.
Nothing is more curious than a barricade
preparing for an assault. Each man selects his
place as though at the theatre. They jostle, and
elbow and crowd each other. There are some who
make stalls of paving-stones. Here is a corner
of the wall which is in the way, it is removed; here
is a redan which may afford protection, they take shelter
behind it. Left-handed men are precious; they
take the places that are inconvenient to the rest.
Many arrange to fight in a sitting posture. They
wish to be at ease to kill, and to die comfortably.
In the sad war of June, 1848, an insurgent who was
a formidable marksman, and who was firing from the
top of a terrace upon a roof, had a reclining-chair
brought there for his use; a charge of grape-shot
found him out there.
As soon as the leader has given the
order to clear the decks for action, all disorderly
movements cease; there is no more pulling from one
another; there are no more coteries; no more asides,
there is no more holding aloof; everything in their
spirits converges in, and changes into, a waiting
for the assailants. A barricade before the arrival
of danger is chaos; in danger, it is discipline itself.
Peril produces order.
As soon as Enjolras had seized his
double-barrelled rifle, and had placed himself in
a sort of embrasure which he had reserved for himself,
all the rest held their peace. A series of faint,
sharp noises resounded confusedly along the wall of
paving-stones. It was the men cocking their guns.
Moreover, their attitudes were prouder,
more confident than ever; the excess of sacrifice
strengthens; they no longer cherished any hope, but
they had despair, despair, the last weapon,
which sometimes gives victory; Virgil has said so.
Supreme resources spring from extreme resolutions.
To embark in death is sometimes the means of escaping
a shipwreck; and the lid of the coffin becomes a plank
of safety.
As on the preceding evening, the attention
of all was directed, we might almost say leaned upon,
the end of the street, now lighted up and visible.
They had not long to wait. A
stir began distinctly in the Saint-Leu quarter, but
it did not resemble the movement of the first attack.
A clashing of chains, the uneasy jolting of a mass,
the click of brass skipping along the pavement, a
sort of solemn uproar, announced that some sinister
construction of iron was approaching. There arose
a tremor in the bosoms of these peaceful old streets,
pierced and built for the fertile circulation of interests
and ideas, and which are not made for the horrible
rumble of the wheels of war.
The fixity of eye in all the combatants
upon the extremity of the street became ferocious.
A cannon made its appearance.
Artillery-men were pushing the piece;
it was in firing trim; the fore-carriage had been
detached; two upheld the gun-carriage, four were at
the wheels; others followed with the caisson.
They could see the smoke of the burning lint-stock.
“Fire!” shouted Enjolras.
The whole barricade fired, the report
was terrible; an avalanche of smoke covered and effaced
both cannon and men; after a few seconds, the cloud
dispersed, and the cannon and men re-appeared; the
gun-crew had just finished rolling it slowly, correctly,
without haste, into position facing the barricade.
Not one of them had been struck. Then the captain
of the piece, bearing down upon the breech in order
to raise the muzzle, began to point the cannon with
the gravity of an astronomer levelling a telescope.
“Bravo for the cannoneers!” cried Bossuet.
And the whole barricade clapped their hands.
A moment later, squarely planted in
the very middle of the street, astride of the gutter,
the piece was ready for action. A formidable pair
of jaws yawned on the barricade.
“Come, merrily now!” ejaculated
Courfeyrac. “That’s the brutal part
of it. After the fillip on the nose, the blow
from the fist. The army is reaching out its big
paw to us. The barricade is going to be severely
shaken up. The fusillade tries, the cannon takes.”
“It is a piece of eight, new
model, brass,” added Combeferre. “Those
pieces are liable to burst as soon as the proportion
of ten parts of tin to one hundred of brass is exceeded.
The excess of tin renders them too tender. Then
it comes to pass that they have caves and chambers
when looked at from the vent hole. In order to
obviate this danger, and to render it possible to
force the charge, it may become necessary to return
to the process of the fourteenth century, hooping,
and to encircle the piece on the outside with a series
of unwelded steel bands, from the breech to the trunnions.
In the meantime, they remedy this defect as best they
may; they manage to discover where the holes are located
in the vent of a cannon, by means of a searcher.
But there is a better method, with Gribeauval’s
movable star.”
“In the sixteenth century,”
remarked Bossuet, “they used to rifle cannon.”
“Yes,” replied Combeferre,
“that augments the projectile force, but diminishes
the accuracy of the firing. In firing at short
range, the trajectory is not as rigid as could be
desired, the parabola is exaggerated, the line of
the projectile is no longer sufficiently rectilinear
to allow of its striking intervening objects, which
is, nevertheless, a necessity of battle, the importance
of which increases with the proximity of the enemy
and the precipitation of the discharge. This
defect of the tension of the curve of the projectile
in the rifled cannon of the sixteenth century arose
from the smallness of the charge; small charges for
that sort of engine are imposed by the ballistic necessities,
such, for instance, as the preservation of the gun-carriage.
In short, that despot, the cannon, cannot do all that
it desires; force is a great weakness. A cannon-ball
only travels six hundred leagues an hour; light travels
seventy thousand leagues a second. Such is the
superiority of Jesus Christ over Napoleon.”
“Reload your guns,” said Enjolras.
How was the casing of the barricade
going to behave under the cannon-balls? Would
they effect a breach? That was the question.
While the insurgents were reloading their guns, the
artillery-men were loading the cannon.
The anxiety in the redoubt was profound.
The shot sped the report burst forth.
“Present!” shouted a joyous voice.
And Gavroche flung himself into the
barricade just as the ball dashed against it.
He came from the direction of the
Rue du Cygne, and he had nimbly climbed
over the auxiliary barricade which fronted on the labyrinth
of the Rue de la Petite Truanderie.
Gavroche produced a greater sensation
in the barricade than the cannon-ball.
The ball buried itself in the mass
of rubbish. At the most there was an omnibus
wheel broken, and the old Anceau cart was demolished.
On seeing this, the barricade burst into a laugh.
“Go on!” shouted Bossuet to the artillerists.
Chapter VIII
the artillery-men compel people
to take them seriously
They flocked round Gavroche.
But he had no time to tell anything. Marius drew
him aside with a shudder.
“What are you doing here?”
“Hullo!” said the child, “what are
you doing here yourself?”
And he stared at Marius intently with
his epic effrontery. His eyes grew larger with
the proud light within them.
It was with an accent of severity that Marius continued:
“Who told you to come back? Did you deliver
my letter at the address?”
Gavroche was not without some compunctions
in the matter of that letter. In his haste to
return to the barricade, he had got rid of it rather
than delivered it. He was forced to acknowledge
to himself that he had confided it rather lightly
to that stranger whose face he had not been able to
make out. It is true that the man was bareheaded,
but that was not sufficient. In short, he had
been administering to himself little inward remonstrances
and he feared Marius’ reproaches. In order
to extricate himself from the predicament, he took
the simplest course; he lied abominably.
“Citizen, I delivered the letter
to the porter. The lady was asleep. She
will have the letter when she wakes up.”
Marius had had two objects in sending
that letter: to bid farewell to Cosette and to
save Gavroche. He was obliged to content himself
with the half of his desire.
The despatch of his letter and the
presence of M. Fauchelevent in the barricade, was
a coincidence which occurred to him. He pointed
out M. Fauchelevent to Gavroche.
“Do you know that man?”
“No,” said Gavroche.
Gavroche had, in fact, as we have
just mentioned, seen Jean Valjean only at night.
The troubled and unhealthy conjectures
which had outlined themselves in Marius’ mind
were dissipated. Did he know M. Fauchelevent’s
opinions? Perhaps M. Fauchelevent was a republican.
Hence his very natural presence in this combat.
In the meanwhile, Gavroche was shouting,
at the other end of the barricade: “My
gun!”
Courfeyrac had it returned to him.
Gavroche warned “his comrades”
as he called them, that the barricade was blocked.
He had had great difficulty in reaching it. A
battalion of the line whose arms were piled in the
Rue de la Petite Truanderie was
on the watch on the side of the Rue du Cygne;
on the opposite side, the municipal guard occupied
the Rue des Precheurs. The bulk of the army
was facing them in front.
This information given, Gavroche added:
“I authorize you to hit ’em a tremendous
whack.”
Meanwhile, Enjolras was straining
his ears and watching at his embrasure.
The assailants, dissatisfied, no doubt,
with their shot, had not repeated it.
A company of infantry of the line
had come up and occupied the end of the street behind
the piece of ordnance. The soldiers were tearing
up the pavement and constructing with the stones a
small, low wall, a sort of side-work not more than
eighteen inches high, and facing the barricade.
In the angle at the left of this épaulement, there
was visible the head of the column of a battalion
from the suburbs massed in the Rue Saint-Denis.
Enjolras, on the watch, thought he
distinguished the peculiar sound which is produced
when the shells of grape-shot are drawn from the caissons,
and he saw the commander of the piece change the elevation
and incline the mouth of the cannon slightly to the
left. Then the cannoneers began to load the piece.
The chief seized the lint-stock himself and lowered
it to the vent.
“Down with your heads, hug the
wall!” shouted Enjolras, “and all on your
knees along the barricade!”
The insurgents who were straggling
in front of the wine-shop, and who had quitted their
posts of combat on Gavroche’s arrival, rushed
pell-mell towards the barricade; but before Enjolras’
order could be executed, the discharge took place
with the terrifying rattle of a round of grape-shot.
This is what it was, in fact.
The charge had been aimed at the cut
in the redoubt, and had there rebounded from the wall;
and this terrible rebound had produced two dead and
three wounded.
If this were continued, the barricade
was no longer tenable. The grape-shot made its
way in.
A murmur of consternation arose.
“Let us prevent the second discharge,”
said Enjolras.
And, lowering his rifle, he took aim
at the captain of the gun, who, at that moment, was
bearing down on the breach of his gun and rectifying
and definitely fixing its pointing.
The captain of the piece was a handsome
sergeant of artillery, very young, blond, with a very
gentle face, and the intelligent air peculiar to that
predestined and redoubtable weapon which, by dint of
perfecting itself in horror, must end in killing war.
Combeferre, who was standing beside
Enjolras, scrutinized this young man.
“What a pity!” said Combeferre.
“What hideous things these butcheries are!
Come, when there are no more kings, there will be no
more war. Enjolras, you are taking aim at that
sergeant, you are not looking at him. Fancy,
he is a charming young man; he is intrepid; it is evident
that he is thoughtful; those young artillery-men are
very well educated; he has a father, a mother, a family;
he is probably in love; he is not more than five and
twenty at the most; he might be your brother.”
“He is,” said Enjolras.
“Yes,” replied Combeferre, “he is
mine too. Well, let us not kill him.”
“Let me alone. It must be done.”
And a tear trickled slowly down Enjolras’ marble
cheek.
At the same moment, he pressed the
trigger of his rifle. The flame leaped forth.
The artillery-man turned round twice, his arms extended
in front of him, his head uplifted, as though for
breath, then he fell with his side on the gun, and
lay there motionless. They could see his back,
from the centre of which there flowed directly a stream
of blood. The ball had traversed his breast from
side to side. He was dead.
He had to be carried away and replaced
by another. Several minutes were thus gained,
in fact.
Chapter IX
employment of the old talents
of A poacher and that
infallible marksmanship which influenced
the condemnation of 1796-
Opinions were exchanged in the barricade.
The firing from the gun was about to begin again.
Against that grape-shot, they could not hold out a
quarter of an hour longer. It was absolutely necessary
to deaden the blows.
Enjolras issued this command:
“We must place a mattress there.”
“We have none,” said Combeferre, “the
wounded are lying on them.”
Jean Valjean, who was seated apart
on a stone post, at the corner of the tavern, with
his gun between his knees, had, up to that moment,
taken no part in anything that was going on.
He did not appear to hear the combatants saying around
him: “Here is a gun that is doing nothing.”
At the order issued by Enjolras, he rose.
It will be remembered that, on the
arrival of the rabble in the Rue de la Chanvrerie,
an old woman, foreseeing the bullets, had placed her
mattress in front of her window. This window,
an attic window, was on the roof of a six-story house
situated a little beyond the barricade. The mattress,
placed cross-wise, supported at the bottom on two poles
for drying linen, was upheld at the top by two ropes,
which, at that distance, looked like two threads,
and which were attached to two nails planted in the
window frames. These ropes were distinctly visible,
like hairs, against the sky.
“Can some one lend me a double-barrelled rifle?”
said Jean Valjean.
Enjolras, who had just re-loaded his, handed it to
him.
Jean Valjean took aim at the attic window and fired.
One of the mattress ropes was cut.
The mattress now hung by one thread only.
Jean Valjean fired the second charge.
The second rope lashed the panes of the attic window.
The mattress slipped between the two poles and fell
into the street.
The barricade applauded.
All voices cried:
“Here is a mattress!”
“Yes,” said Combeferre, “but who
will go and fetch it?”
The mattress had, in fact, fallen
outside the barricade, between besiegers and besieged.
Now, the death of the sergeant of artillery having
exasperated the troop, the soldiers had, for several
minutes, been lying flat on their stomachs behind
the line of paving-stones which they had erected,
and, in order to supply the forced silence of the
piece, which was quiet while its service was in course
of reorganization, they had opened fire on the barricade.
The insurgents did not reply to this musketry, in
order to spare their ammunition The fusillade broke
against the barricade; but the street, which it filled,
was terrible.
Jean Valjean stepped out of the cut,
entered the street, traversed the storm of bullets,
walked up to the mattress, hoisted it upon his back,
and returned to the barricade.
He placed the mattress in the cut
with his own hands. He fixed it there against
the wall in such a manner that the artillery-men should
not see it.
That done, they awaited the next discharge of grape-shot.
It was not long in coming.
The cannon vomited forth its package
of buck-shot with a roar. But there was no rebound.
The effect which they had foreseen had been attained.
The barricade was saved.
“Citizen,” said Enjolras to Jean Valjean,
“the Republic thanks you.”
Bossuet admired and laughed. He exclaimed:
“It is immoral that a mattress
should have so much power. Triumph of that which
yields over that which strikes with lightning.
But never mind, glory to the mattress which annuls
a cannon!”
Chapter X
dawn
At that moment, Cosette awoke.
Her chamber was narrow, neat, unobtrusive,
with a long sash-window, facing the East on the back
court-yard of the house.
Cosette knew nothing of what was going
on in Paris. She had not been there on the preceding
evening, and she had already retired to her chamber
when Toussaint had said:
“It appears that there is a row.”
Cosette had slept only a few hours,
but soundly. She had had sweet dreams, which
possibly arose from the fact that her little bed was
very white. Some one, who was Marius, had appeared
to her in the light. She awoke with the sun in
her eyes, which, at first, produced on her the effect
of being a continuation of her dream. Her first
thought on emerging from this dream was a smiling
one. Cosette felt herself thoroughly reassured.
Like Jean Valjean, she had, a few hours previously,
passed through that reaction of the soul which absolutely
will not hear of unhappiness. She began to cherish
hope, with all her might, without knowing why.
Then she felt a pang at her heart. It was three
days since she had seen Marius. But she said to
herself that he must have received her letter, that
he knew where she was, and that he was so clever that
he would find means of reaching her. And
that certainly to-day, and perhaps that very morning. It
was broad daylight, but the rays of light were very
horizontal; she thought that it was very early, but
that she must rise, nevertheless, in order to receive
Marius.
She felt that she could not live without
Marius, and that, consequently, that was sufficient
and that Marius would come. No objection was valid.
All this was certain. It was monstrous enough
already to have suffered for three days. Marius
absent three days, this was horrible on the part of
the good God. Now, this cruel teasing from on
high had been gone through with. Marius was about
to arrive, and he would bring good news. Youth
is made thus; it quickly dries its eyes; it finds sorrow
useless and does not accept it. Youth is the
smile of the future in the presence of an unknown
quantity, which is itself. It is natural to it
to be happy. It seems as though its respiration
were made of hope.
Moreover, Cosette could not remember
what Marius had said to her on the subject of this
absence which was to last only one day, and what explanation
of it he had given her. Every one has noticed
with what nimbleness a coin which one has dropped
on the ground rolls away and hides, and with what
art it renders itself undiscoverable. There are
thoughts which play us the same trick; they nestle
away in a corner of our brain; that is the end of
them; they are lost; it is impossible to lay the memory
on them. Cosette was somewhat vexed at the useless
little effort made by her memory. She told herself,
that it was very naughty and very wicked of her, to
have forgotten the words uttered by Marius.
She sprang out of bed and accomplished
the two ablutions of soul and body, her prayers and
her toilet.
One may, in a case of exigency, introduce
the reader into a nuptial chamber, not into a virginal
chamber. Verse would hardly venture it, prose
must not.
It is the interior of a flower that
is not yet unfolded, it is whiteness in the dark,
it is the private cell of a closed lily, which must
not be gazed upon by man so long as the sun has not
gazed upon it. Woman in the bud is sacred.
That innocent bud which opens, that adorable half-nudity
which is afraid of itself, that white foot which takes
refuge in a slipper, that throat which veils itself
before a mirror as though a mirror were an eye, that
chemise which makes haste to rise up and conceal the
shoulder for a creaking bit of furniture or a passing
vehicle, those cords tied, those clasps fastened, those
laces drawn, those tremors, those shivers of cold
and modesty, that exquisite affright in every movement,
that almost winged uneasiness where there is no cause
for alarm, the successive phases of dressing, as charming
as the clouds of dawn, it is not fitting
that all this should be narrated, and it is too much
to have even called attention to it.
The eye of man must be more religious
in the presence of the rising of a young girl than
in the presence of the rising of a star. The possibility
of hurting should inspire an augmentation of respect.
The down on the peach, the bloom on the plum, the
radiated crystal of the snow, the wing of the butterfly
powdered with feathers, are coarse compared to that
chastity which does not even know that it is chaste.
The young girl is only the flash of a dream, and is
not yet a statue. Her bed-chamber is hidden in
the sombre part of the ideal. The indiscreet touch
of a glance brutalizes this vague penumbra. Here,
contemplation is profanation.
We shall, therefore, show nothing
of that sweet little flutter of Cosette’s rising.
An oriental tale relates how the rose
was made white by God, but that Adam looked upon her
when she was unfolding, and she was ashamed and turned
crimson. We are of the number who fall speechless
in the presence of young girls and flowers, since
we think them worthy of veneration.
Cosette dressed herself very hastily,
combed and dressed her hair, which was a very simple
matter in those days, when women did not swell out
their curls and bands with cushions and puffs, and
did not put crinoline in their locks. Then she
opened the window and cast her eyes around her in
every direction, hoping to descry some bit of the street,
an angle of the house, an edge of pavement, so that
she might be able to watch for Marius there.
But no view of the outside was to be had. The
back court was surrounded by tolerably high walls,
and the outlook was only on several gardens.
Cosette pronounced these gardens hideous: for
the first time in her life, she found flowers ugly.
The smallest scrap of the gutter of the street would
have met her wishes better. She decided to gaze
at the sky, as though she thought that Marius might
come from that quarter.
All at once, she burst into tears.
Not that this was fickleness of soul; but hopes cut
in twain by dejection that was her case.
She had a confused consciousness of something horrible.
Thoughts were rife in the air, in fact. She told
herself that she was not sure of anything, that to
withdraw herself from sight was to be lost; and the
idea that Marius could return to her from heaven appeared
to her no longer charming but mournful.
Then, as is the nature of these clouds,
calm returned to her, and hope and a sort of unconscious
smile, which yet indicated trust in God.
Every one in the house was still asleep.
A country-like silence reigned. Not a shutter
had been opened. The porter’s lodge was
closed. Toussaint had not risen, and Cosette,
naturally, thought that her father was asleep.
She must have suffered much, and she must have still
been suffering greatly, for she said to herself, that
her father had been unkind; but she counted on Marius.
The eclipse of such a light was decidedly impossible.
Now and then, she heard sharp shocks in the distance,
and she said: “It is odd that people should
be opening and shutting their carriage gates so early.”
They were the reports of the cannon battering the
barricade.
A few feet below Cosette’s window,
in the ancient and perfectly black cornice of the
wall, there was a martin’s nest; the curve of
this nest formed a little projection beyond the cornice,
so that from above it was possible to look into this
little paradise. The mother was there, spreading
her wings like a fan over her brood; the father fluttered
about, flew away, then came back, bearing in his beak
food and kisses. The dawning day gilded this
happy thing, the great law, “Multiply,”
lay there smiling and august, and that sweet mystery
unfolded in the glory of the morning. Cosette,
with her hair in the sunlight, her soul absorbed in
chimeras, illuminated by love within and by the dawn
without, bent over mechanically, and almost without
daring to avow to herself that she was thinking at
the same time of Marius, began to gaze at these birds,
at this family, at that male and female, that mother
and her little ones, with the profound trouble which
a nest produces on a virgin.
Chapter XI
the shot which misses nothing
and kills no one
The assailants’ fire continued.
Musketry and grape-shot alternated, but without committing
great ravages, to tell the truth. The top alone
of the Corinthe façade suffered; the window on the
first floor, and the attic window in the roof, riddled
with buck-shot and biscaiens, were slowly losing their
shape. The combatants who had been posted there
had been obliged to withdraw. However, this is
according to the tactics of barricades; to fire for
a long while, in order to exhaust the insurgents’
ammunition, if they commit the mistake of replying.
When it is perceived, from the slackening of their
fire, that they have no more powder and ball, the
assault is made. Enjolras had not fallen into
this trap; the barricade did not reply.
At every discharge by platoons, Gavroche
puffed out his cheek with his tongue, a sign of supreme
disdain.
“Good for you,” said he,
“rip up the cloth. We want some lint.”
Courfeyrac called the grape-shot to
order for the little effect which it produced, and
said to the cannon:
“You are growing diffuse, my good fellow.”
One gets puzzled in battle, as at
a ball. It is probable that this silence on the
part of the redoubt began to render the besiegers uneasy,
and to make them fear some unexpected incident, and
that they felt the necessity of getting a clear view
behind that heap of paving-stones, and of knowing
what was going on behind that impassable wall which
received blows without retorting. The insurgents
suddenly perceived a helmet glittering in the sun
on a neighboring roof. A fireman had placed his
back against a tall chimney, and seemed to be acting
as sentinel. His glance fell directly down into
the barricade.
“There’s an embarrassing watcher,”
said Enjolras.
Jean Valjean had returned Enjolras’ rifle, but
he had his own gun.
Without saying a word, he took aim
at the fireman, and, a second later, the helmet, smashed
by a bullet, rattled noisily into the street.
The terrified soldier made haste to disappear.
A second observer took his place. This one was
an officer. Jean Valjean, who had re-loaded his
gun, took aim at the newcomer and sent the officer’s
casque to join the soldier’s. The officer
did not persist, and retired speedily. This time
the warning was understood. No one made his appearance
thereafter on that roof; and the idea of spying on
the barricade was abandoned.
“Why did you not kill the man?” Bossuet
asked Jean Valjean.
Jean Valjean made no reply.
Chapter XII
disorder A partisan of order
Bossuet muttered in Combeferre’s ear:
“He did not answer my question.”
“He is a man who does good by gun-shots,”
said Combeferre.
Those who have preserved some memory
of this already distant epoch know that the National
Guard from the suburbs was valiant against insurrections.
It was particularly zealous and intrepid in the days
of June, 1832. A certain good dram-shop keeper
of Pantin des Vertus or la Cunette, whose
“establishment” had been closed by the
riots, became leonine at the sight of his deserted
dance-hall, and got himself killed to preserve the
order represented by a tea-garden. In that bourgeois
and heroic time, in the presence of ideas which had
their knights, interests had their paladins.
The prosiness of the originators detracted nothing
from the bravery of the movement. The diminution
of a pile of crowns made bankers sing the Marseillaise.
They shed their blood lyrically for the counting-house;
and they defended the shop, that immense diminutive
of the fatherland, with Lacedaemonian enthusiasm.
At bottom, we will observe, there
was nothing in all this that was not extremely serious.
It was social elements entering into strife, while
awaiting the day when they should enter into equilibrium.
Another sign of the times was the
anarchy mingled with governmentalism [the barbarous
name of the correct party]. People were for order
in combination with lack of discipline.
The drum suddenly beat capricious
calls, at the command of such or such a Colonel of
the National Guard; such and such a captain went into
action through inspiration; such and such National
Guardsmen fought, “for an idea,” and on
their own account. At critical moments, on “days”
they took counsel less of their leaders than of their
instincts. There existed in the army of order,
veritable guérilleros, some of the sword,
like Fannicot, others of the pen, like Henri Fonfrede.
Civilization, unfortunately, represented
at this epoch rather by an aggregation of interests
than by a group of principles, was or thought itself,
in peril; it set up the cry of alarm; each, constituting
himself a centre, defended it, succored it, and protected
it with his own head; and the first comer took it
upon himself to save society.
Zeal sometimes proceeded to extermination.
A platoon of the National Guard would constitute itself
on its own authority a private council of war, and
judge and execute a captured insurgent in five minutes.
It was an improvisation of this sort that had slain
Jean Prouvaire. Fierce Lynch law, with which
no one party had any right to reproach the rest, for
it has been applied by the Republic in America, as
well as by the monarchy in Europe. This Lynch
law was complicated with mistakes. On one day
of rioting, a young poet, named Paul Aimé Garnier,
was pursued in the Place Royale, with a
bayonet at his loins, and only escaped by taking refuge
under the porte-cochère of N. They
shouted: “There’s another of
those Saint-Simonians!” and they wanted to kill
him. Now, he had under his arm a volume of the
memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon.
A National Guard had read the words Saint-Simon on
the book, and had shouted: “Death!”
On the 6th of June, 1832, a company
of the National Guards from the suburbs, commanded
by the Captain Fannicot, above mentioned, had itself
decimated in the Rue de la Chanvrerie out of caprice
and its own good pleasure. This fact, singular
though it may seem, was proved at the judicial investigation
opened in consequence of the insurrection of 1832.
Captain Fannicot, a bold and impatient bourgeois, a
sort of condottiere of the order of those whom we
have just characterized, a fanatical and intractable
governmentalist, could not resist the temptation to
fire prematurely, and the ambition of capturing the
barricade alone and unaided, that is to say, with his
company. Exasperated by the successive apparition
of the red flag and the old coat which he took for
the black flag, he loudly blamed the generals and
chiefs of the corps, who were holding council and did
not think that the moment for the decisive assault
had arrived, and who were allowing “the insurrection
to fry in its own fat,” to use the celebrated
expression of one of them. For his part, he thought
the barricade ripe, and as that which is ripe ought
to fall, he made the attempt.
He commanded men as resolute as himself,
“raging fellows,” as a witness said.
His company, the same which had shot Jean Prouvaire
the poet, was the first of the battalion posted at
the angle of the street. At the moment when they
were least expecting it, the captain launched his men
against the barricade. This movement, executed
with more good will than strategy, cost the Fannicot
company dear. Before it had traversed two thirds
of the street it was received by a general discharge
from the barricade. Four, the most audacious,
who were running on in front, were mown down point-blank
at the very foot of the redoubt, and this courageous
throng of National Guards, very brave men but lacking
in military tenacity, were forced to fall back, after
some hesitation, leaving fifteen corpses on the pavement.
This momentary hesitation gave the insurgents time
to re-load their weapons, and a second and very destructive
discharge struck the company before it could regain
the corner of the street, its shelter. A moment
more, and it was caught between two fires, and it
received the volley from the battery piece which,
not having received the order, had not discontinued
its firing.
The intrepid and imprudent Fannicot
was one of the dead from this grape-shot. He
was killed by the cannon, that is to say, by order.
This attack, which was more furious
than serious, irritated Enjolras. “The
fools!” said he. “They are getting
their own men killed and they are using up our ammunition
for nothing.”
Enjolras spoke like the real general
of insurrection which he was. Insurrection and
repression do not fight with equal weapons. Insurrection,
which is speedily exhausted, has only a certain number
of shots to fire and a certain number of combatants
to expend. An empty cartridge-box, a man killed,
cannot be replaced. As repression has the army,
it does not count its men, and, as it has Vincennes,
it does not count its shots. Repression has as
many regiments as the barricade has men, and as many
arsenals as the barricade has cartridge-boxes.
Thus they are struggles of one against a hundred,
which always end in crushing the barricade; unless
the revolution, uprising suddenly, flings into the
balance its flaming archangel’s sword. This
does happen sometimes. Then everything rises,
the pavements begin to seethe, popular redoubts abound.
Paris quivers supremely, the quid divinum is given
forth, a 10th of August is in the air, a 29th of July
is in the air, a wonderful light appears, the yawning
maw of force draws back, and the army, that lion,
sees before it, erect and tranquil, that prophet,
France.
Chapter XIII
passing gleams
In the chaos of sentiments and passions
which defend a barricade, there is a little of everything;
there is bravery, there is youth, honor, enthusiasm,
the ideal, conviction, the rage of the gambler, and,
above all, intermittences of hope.
One of these intermittences,
one of these vague quivers of hope suddenly traversed
the barricade of the Rue de la Chanvrerie at the moment
when it was least expected.
“Listen,” suddenly cried
Enjolras, who was still on the watch, “it seems
to me that Paris is waking up.”
It is certain that, on the morning
of the 6th of June, the insurrection broke out afresh
for an hour or two, to a certain extent. The obstinacy
of the alarm peal of Saint-Merry reanimated some fancies.
Barricades were begun in the Rue du Poirier and the
Rue des Gravilliers. In front of the Porte
Saint-Martin, a young man, armed with a rifle, attacked
alone a squadron of cavalry. In plain sight, on
the open boulevard, he placed one knee on the ground,
shouldered his weapon, fired, killed the commander
of the squadron, and turned away, saying: “There’s
another who will do us no more harm.”
He was put to the sword. In the
Rue Saint-Denis, a woman fired on the National Guard
from behind a lowered blind. The slats of the
blind could be seen to tremble at every shot.
A child fourteen years of age was arrested in the
Rue de la Cossonerie, with his pockets full of cartridges.
Many posts were attacked. At the entrance to the
Rue Bertin-Poiree, a very lively and utterly unexpected
fusillade welcomed a regiment of cuirrassiers, at
whose head marched Marshal General Cavaignac de Barague.
In the Rue Planche-Mibray, they threw old pieces
of pottery and household utensils down on the soldiers
from the roofs; a bad sign; and when this matter was
reported to Marshal Soult, Napoleon’s old lieutenant
grew thoughtful, as he recalled Suchet’s saying
at Saragossa: “We are lost when the old
women empty their pots de chambre on our
heads.”
These general symptoms which presented
themselves at the moment when it was thought that
the uprising had been rendered local, this fever of
wrath, these sparks which flew hither and thither above
those deep masses of combustibles which are called
the faubourgs of Paris, all this,
taken together, disturbed the military chiefs.
They made haste to stamp out these beginnings of conflagration.
They delayed the attack on the barricades
Maubuee, de la Chanvrerie and Saint-Merry until these
sparks had been extinguished, in order that they might
have to deal with the barricades only and be able to
finish them at one blow. Columns were thrown
into the streets where there was fermentation, sweeping
the large, sounding the small, right and left, now
slowly and cautiously, now at full charge. The
troops broke in the doors of houses whence shots had
been fired; at the same time, manoeuvres by the cavalry
dispersed the groups on the boulevards. This
repression was not effected without some commotion,
and without that tumultuous uproar peculiar to collisions
between the army and the people. This was what
Enjolras had caught in the intervals of the cannonade
and the musketry. Moreover, he had seen wounded
men passing the end of the street in litters, and
he said to Courfeyrac: “Those wounded
do not come from us.”
Their hope did not last long; the
gleam was quickly eclipsed. In less than half
an hour, what was in the air vanished, it was a flash
of lightning unaccompanied by thunder, and the insurgents
felt that sort of leaden cope, which the indifference
of the people casts over obstinate and deserted men,
fall over them once more.
The general movement, which seemed
to have assumed a vague outline, had miscarried; and
the attention of the minister of war and the strategy
of the generals could now be concentrated on the three
or four barricades which still remained standing.
The sun was mounting above the horizon.
An insurgent hailed Enjolras.
“We are hungry here. Are
we really going to die like this, without anything
to eat?”
Enjolras, who was still leaning on
his elbows at his embrasure, made an affirmative sign
with his head, but without taking his eyes from the
end of the street.
Chapter XIV
wherein will appear the name
of Enjolras’ mistress
Courfeyrac, seated on a paving-stone
beside Enjolras, continued to insult the cannon, and
each time that that gloomy cloud of projectiles which
is called grape-shot passed overhead with its terrible
sound he assailed it with a burst of irony.
“You are wearing out your lungs,
poor, brutal, old fellow, you pain me, you are wasting
your row. That’s not thunder, it’s
a cough.”
And the bystanders laughed.
Courfeyrac and Bossuet, whose brave
good humor increased with the peril, like Madame Scarron,
replaced nourishment with pleasantry, and, as wine
was lacking, they poured out gayety to all.
“I admire Enjolras,” said
Bossuet. “His impassive temerity astounds
me. He lives alone, which renders him a little
sad, perhaps; Enjolras complains of his greatness,
which binds him to widowhood. The rest of us
have mistresses, more or less, who make us crazy, that
is to say, brave. When a man is as much in love
as a tiger, the least that he can do is to fight like
a lion. That is one way of taking our revenge
for the capers that mesdames our grisettes play
on us. Roland gets himself killed for Angelique;
all our heroism comes from our women. A man without
a woman is a pistol without a trigger; it is the woman
that sets the man off. Well, Enjolras has no
woman. He is not in love, and yet he manages to
be intrepid. It is a thing unheard of that a
man should be as cold as ice and as bold as fire.”
Enjolras did not appear to be listening,
but had any one been near him, that person would have
heard him mutter in a low voice: “Patria.”
Bossuet was still laughing when Courfeyrac exclaimed:
“News!”
And assuming the tone of an usher making an announcement,
he added:
“My name is Eight-Pounder.”
In fact, a new personage had entered
on the scene. This was a second piece of ordnance.
The artillery-men rapidly performed
their manoeuvres in force and placed this second piece
in line with the first.
This outlined the catastrophe.
A few minutes later, the two pieces,
rapidly served, were firing point-blank at the redoubt;
the platoon firing of the line and of the soldiers
from the suburbs sustained the artillery.
Another cannonade was audible at some
distance. At the same time that the two guns
were furiously attacking the redoubt from the Rue de
la Chanvrerie, two other cannons, trained one from
the Rue Saint-Denis, the other from the Rue Aubry-lé-Boucher,
were riddling the Saint-Merry barricade. The
four cannons echoed each other mournfully.
The barking of these sombre dogs of
war replied to each other.
One of the two pieces which was now
battering the barricade on the Rue de la Chanvrerie
was firing grape-shot, the other balls.
The piece which was firing balls was
pointed a little high, and the aim was calculated
so that the ball struck the extreme edge of the upper
crest of the barricade, and crumbled the stone down
upon the insurgents, mingled with bursts of grape-shot.
The object of this mode of firing
was to drive the insurgents from the summit of the
redoubt, and to compel them to gather close in the
interior, that is to say, this announced the assault.
The combatants once driven from the
crest of the barricade by balls, and from the windows
of the cabaret by grape-shot, the attacking columns
could venture into the street without being picked
off, perhaps, even, without being seen, could briskly
and suddenly scale the redoubt, as on the preceding
evening, and, who knows? take it by surprise.
“It is absolutely necessary
that the inconvenience of those guns should be diminished,”
said Enjolras, and he shouted: “Fire on
the artillery-men!”
All were ready. The barricade,
which had long been silent, poured forth a desperate
fire; seven or eight discharges followed, with a sort
of rage and joy; the street was filled with blinding
smoke, and, at the end of a few minutes, athwart this
mist all streaked with flame, two thirds of the gunners
could be distinguished lying beneath the wheels of
the cannons. Those who were left standing continued
to serve the pieces with severe tranquillity, but
the fire had slackened.
“Things are going well now,”
said Bossuet to Enjolras. “Success.”
Enjolras shook his head and replied:
“Another quarter of an hour
of this success, and there will not be any cartridges
left in the barricade.”
It appears that Gavroche overheard this remark.
Chapter XV
gavroche outside
Courfeyrac suddenly caught sight of
some one at the base of the barricade, outside in
the street, amid the bullets.
Gavroche had taken a bottle basket
from the wine-shop, had made his way out through the
cut, and was quietly engaged in emptying the full
cartridge-boxes of the National Guardsmen who had been
killed on the slope of the redoubt, into his basket.
“What are you doing there?” asked Courfeyrac.
Gavroche raised his face:
“I’m filling my basket, citizen.”
“Don’t you see the grape-shot?”
Gavroche replied:
“Well, it is raining. What then?”
Courfeyrac shouted: “Come in!”
“Instanter,” said Gavroche.
And with a single bound he plunged into the street.
It will be remembered that Fannicot’s
company had left behind it a trail of bodies.
Twenty corpses lay scattered here and there on the
pavement, through the whole length of the street.
Twenty cartouches for Gavroche meant a provision
of cartridges for the barricade.
The smoke in the street was like a
fog. Whoever has beheld a cloud which has fallen
into a mountain gorge between two peaked escarpments
can imagine this smoke rendered denser and thicker
by two gloomy rows of lofty houses. It rose gradually
and was incessantly renewed; hence a twilight which
made even the broad daylight turn pale. The combatants
could hardly see each other from one end of the street
to the other, short as it was.
This obscurity, which had probably
been desired and calculated on by the commanders who
were to direct the assault on the barricade, was useful
to Gavroche.
Beneath the folds of this veil of
smoke, and thanks to his small size, he could advance
tolerably far into the street without being seen.
He rifled the first seven or eight cartridge-boxes
without much danger.
He crawled flat on his belly, galloped
on all fours, took his basket in his teeth, twisted,
glided, undulated, wound from one dead body to another,
and emptied the cartridge-box or cartouche as a monkey
opens a nut.
They did not dare to shout to him
to return from the barricade, which was quite near,
for fear of attracting attention to him.
On one body, that of a corporal, he found a powder-flask.
“For thirst,” said he, putting it in his
pocket.
By dint of advancing, he reached a
point where the fog of the fusillade became transparent.
So that the sharpshooters of the line ranged on the
outlook behind their paving-stone dike and the sharpshooters
of the banlieue massed at the corner of the street
suddenly pointed out to each other something moving
through the smoke.
At the moment when Gavroche was relieving
a sergeant, who was lying near a stone door-post,
of his cartridges, a bullet struck the body.
“Fichtre!” ejaculated
Gavroche. “They are killing my dead men
for me.”
A second bullet struck a spark from
the pavement beside him. A third overturned
his basket.
Gavroche looked and saw that this
came from the men of the banlieue.
He sprang to his feet, stood erect,
with his hair flying in the wind, his hands on his
hips, his eyes fixed on the National Guardsmen who
were firing, and sang:
Then he picked up his basket, replaced
the cartridges which had fallen from it, without missing
a single one, and, advancing towards the fusillade,
set about plundering another cartridge-box. There
a fourth bullet missed him, again. Gavroche sang:
“Je
ne suis pas notaire, “I
am not a notary,
C’est
la faute a Voltaire; ’Tis the fault
of Voltaire;
Je
suis un petit oiseau, I’m
a little bird,
C’est
la faute a Rousseau.” ’Tis
the fault of Rousseau.”
A fifth bullet only succeeded in drawing
from him a third couplet.
“Joie
est mon caractère, “Joy is
my character,
C’est
la faute a Voltaire; ’Tis the fault
of Voltaire;
Misere
est mon trousseau, Misery is my
trousseau,
C’est
la faute a Rousseau.” ’Tis
the fault of Rousseau.”
Thus it went on for some time.
It was a charming and terrible sight.
Gavroche, though shot at, was teasing the fusillade.
He had the air of being greatly diverted. It was
the sparrow pecking at the sportsmen. To each
discharge he retorted with a couplet. They aimed
at him constantly, and always missed him. The
National Guardsmen and the soldiers laughed as they
took aim at him. He lay down, sprang to his feet,
hid in the corner of a doorway, then made a bound,
disappeared, re-appeared, scampered away, returned,
replied to the grape-shot with his thumb at his nose,
and, all the while, went on pillaging the cartouches,
emptying the cartridge-boxes, and filling his basket.
The insurgents, panting with anxiety, followed him
with their eyes. The barricade trembled; he sang.
He was not a child, he was not a man; he was a strange
gamin-fairy. He might have been called the invulnerable
dwarf of the fray. The bullets flew after him,
he was more nimble than they. He played a fearful
game of hide and seek with death; every time that
the flat-nosed face of the spectre approached, the
urchin administered to it a fillip.
One bullet, however, better aimed
or more treacherous than the rest, finally struck
the will-o’-the-wisp of a child. Gavroche
was seen to stagger, then he sank to the earth.
The whole barricade gave vent to a cry; but there
was something of Antaeus in that pygmy; for the gamin
to touch the pavement is the same as for the giant
to touch the earth; Gavroche had fallen only to rise
again; he remained in a sitting posture, a long thread
of blood streaked his face, he raised both arms in
the air, glanced in the direction whence the shot had
come, and began to sing:
He did not finish. A second bullet
from the same marksman stopped him short. This
time he fell face downward on the pavement, and moved
no more. This grand little soul had taken its
flight.
Chapter XVI
how from A brother one becomes
A father
At that same moment, in the garden
of the Luxembourg, for the gaze of the
drama must be everywhere present, two children
were holding each other by the hand. One might
have been seven years old, the other five. The
rain having soaked them, they were walking along the
paths on the sunny side; the elder was leading the
younger; they were pale and ragged; they had the air
of wild birds. The smaller of them said:
“I am very hungry.”
The elder, who was already somewhat
of a protector, was leading his brother with his left
hand and in his right he carried a small stick.
They were alone in the garden.
The garden was deserted, the gates had been closed
by order of the police, on account of the insurrection.
The troops who had been bivouacking there had departed
for the exigencies of combat.
How did those children come there?
Perhaps they had escaped from some guard-house which
stood ajar; perhaps there was in the vicinity, at
the Barriere d’Enfer; or on the Esplanade de
l’Observatoire, or in the neighboring carrefour,
dominated by the pediment on which could be read:
Invenerunt parvulum pannis involutum, some mountebank’s
booth from which they had fled; perhaps they had,
on the preceding evening, escaped the eye of the inspectors
of the garden at the hour of closing, and had passed
the night in some one of those sentry-boxes where people
read the papers? The fact is, they were stray
lambs and they seemed free. To be astray and
to seem free is to be lost. These poor little
creatures were, in fact, lost.
These two children were the same over
whom Gavroche had been put to some trouble, as the
reader will recollect. Children of the Thenardiers,
leased out to Magnon, attributed to M. Gillenormand,
and now leaves fallen from all these rootless branches,
and swept over the ground by the wind. Their
clothing, which had been clean in Magnon’s day,
and which had served her as a prospectus with M. Gillenormand,
had been converted into rags.
Henceforth these beings belonged to
the statistics as “Abandoned children,”
whom the police take note of, collect, mislay and find
again on the pavements of Paris.
It required the disturbance of a day
like that to account for these miserable little creatures
being in that garden. If the superintendents
had caught sight of them, they would have driven such
rags forth. Poor little things do not enter public
gardens; still, people should reflect that, as children,
they have a right to flowers.
These children were there, thanks
to the locked gates. They were there contrary
to the regulations. They had slipped into the
garden and there they remained. Closed gates
do not dismiss the inspectors, oversight is supposed
to continue, but it grows slack and reposes; and the
inspectors, moved by the public anxiety and more occupied
with the outside than the inside, no longer glanced
into the garden, and had not seen the two delinquents.
It had rained the night before, and
even a little in the morning. But in June, showers
do not count for much. An hour after a storm,
it can hardly be seen that the beautiful blonde day
has wept. The earth, in summer, is as quickly
dried as the cheek of a child. At that period
of the solstice, the light of full noonday is, so
to speak, poignant. It takes everything.
It applies itself to the earth, and superposes itself
with a sort of suction. One would say that the
sun was thirsty. A shower is but a glass of water;
a rainstorm is instantly drunk up. In the morning
everything was dripping, in the afternoon everything
is powdered over.
Nothing is so worthy of admiration
as foliage washed by the rain and wiped by the rays
of sunlight; it is warm freshness. The gardens
and meadows, having water at their roots, and sun
in their flowers, become perfuming-pans of incense,
and smoke with all their odors at once. Everything
smiles, sings and offers itself. One feels gently
intoxicated. The springtime is a provisional paradise,
the sun helps man to have patience.
There are beings who demand nothing
further; mortals, who, having the azure of heaven,
say: “It is enough!” dreamers absorbed
in the wonderful, dipping into the idolatry of nature,
indifferent to good and evil, contemplators of cosmos
and radiantly forgetful of man, who do not understand
how people can occupy themselves with the hunger of
these, and the thirst of those, with the nudity of
the poor in winter, with the lymphatic curvature of
the little spinal column, with the pallet, the attic,
the dungeon, and the rags of shivering young girls,
when they can dream beneath the trees; peaceful and
terrible spirits they, and pitilessly satisfied.
Strange to say, the infinite suffices them. That
great need of man, the finite, which admits of embrace,
they ignore. The finite which admits of progress
and sublime toil, they do not think about. The
indefinite, which is born from the human and divine
combination of the infinite and the finite, escapes
them. Provided that they are face to face with
immensity, they smile. Joy never, ecstasy forever.
Their life lies in surrendering their personality in
contemplation. The history of humanity is for
them only a detailed plan. All is not there;
the true All remains without; what is the use of busying
oneself over that detail, man? Man suffers, that
is quite possible; but look at Aldebaran rising!
The mother has no more milk, the new-born babe is
dying. I know nothing about that, but just look
at this wonderful rosette which a slice of wood-cells
of the pine presents under the microscope! Compare
the most beautiful Mechlin lace to that if you can!
These thinkers forget to love. The zodiac thrives
with them to such a point that it prevents their seeing
the weeping child. God eclipses their souls.
This is a family of minds which are, at once, great
and petty. Horace was one of them; so was Goethe.
La Fontaine perhaps; magnificent egoists of the infinite,
tranquil spectators of sorrow, who do not behold Nero
if the weather be fair, for whom the sun conceals the
funeral pile, who would look on at an execution by
the guillotine in the search for an effect of light,
who hear neither the cry nor the sob, nor the death
rattle, nor the alarm peal, for whom everything is
well, since there is a month of May, who, so long
as there are clouds of purple and gold above their
heads, declare themselves content, and who are determined
to be happy until the radiance of the stars and the
songs of the birds are exhausted.
These are dark radiances.
They have no suspicion that they are to be pitied.
Certainly they are so. He who does not weep does
not see. They are to be admired and pitied, as
one would both pity and admire a being at once night
and day, without eyes beneath his lashes but with a
star on his brow.
The indifference of these thinkers,
is, according to some, a superior philosophy.
That may be; but in this superiority there is some
infirmity. One may be immortal and yet limp:
witness Vulcan. One may be more than man and
less than man. There is incomplete immensity in
nature. Who knows whether the sun is not a blind
man?
But then, what? In whom can we
trust? Solem quis dicere falsum audeat?
Who shall dare to say that the sun is false? Thus
certain geniuses, themselves, certain Very-Lofty mortals,
man-stars, may be mistaken? That which is on
high at the summit, at the crest, at the zenith, that
which sends down so much light on the earth, sees
but little, sees badly, sees not at all? Is not
this a desperate state of things? No. But
what is there, then, above the sun? The god.
On the 6th of June, 1832, about eleven
o’clock in the morning, the Luxembourg, solitary
and depopulated, was charming. The quincunxes
and flower-beds shed forth balm and dazzling beauty
into the sunlight. The branches, wild with the
brilliant glow of midday, seemed endeavoring to embrace.
In the sycamores there was an uproar of linnets, sparrows
triumphed, woodpeckers climbed along the chestnut trees,
administering little pecks on the bark. The flower-beds
accepted the legitimate royalty of the lilies; the
most august of perfumes is that which emanates from
whiteness. The peppery odor of the carnations
was perceptible. The old crows of Marie de Medici
were amorous in the tall trees. The sun gilded,
empurpled, set fire to and lighted up the tulips,
which are nothing but all the varieties of flame made
into flowers. All around the banks of tulips
the bees, the sparks of these flame-flowers, hummed.
All was grace and gayety, even the impending rain;
this relapse, by which the lilies of the valley and
the honeysuckles were destined to profit, had nothing
disturbing about it; the swallows indulged in the
charming threat of flying low. He who was there
aspired to happiness; life smelled good; all nature
exhaled candor, help, assistance, paternity, caress,
dawn. The thoughts which fell from heaven were
as sweet as the tiny hand of a baby when one kisses
it.
The statues under the trees, white
and nude, had robes of shadow pierced with light;
these goddesses were all tattered with sunlight; rays
hung from them on all sides. Around the great
fountain, the earth was already dried up to the point
of being burnt. There was sufficient breeze to
raise little insurrections of dust here and there.
A few yellow leaves, left over from the autumn, chased
each other merrily, and seemed to be playing tricks
on each other.
This abundance of light had something
indescribably reassuring about it. Life, sap,
heat, odors overflowed; one was conscious, beneath
creation, of the enormous size of the source; in all
these breaths permeated with love, in this interchange
of reverberations and reflections, in this marvellous
expenditure of rays, in this infinite outpouring of
liquid gold, one felt the prodigality of the inexhaustible;
and, behind this splendor as behind a curtain of flame,
one caught a glimpse of God, that millionaire of stars.
Thanks to the sand, there was not
a speck of mud; thanks to the rain, there was not
a grain of ashes. The clumps of blossoms had just
been bathed; every sort of velvet, satin, gold and
varnish, which springs from the earth in the form
of flowers, was irreproachable. This magnificence
was cleanly. The grand silence of happy nature
filled the garden. A celestial silence that is
compatible with a thousand sorts of music, the cooing
of nests, the buzzing of swarms, the flutterings of
the breeze. All the harmony of the season was
complete in one gracious whole; the entrances and
exits of spring took place in proper order; the lilacs
ended; the jasmines began; some flowers were tardy,
some insects in advance of their time; the van-guard
of the red June butterflies fraternized with the rear-guard
of the white butterflies of May. The plantain
trees were getting their new skins. The breeze
hollowed out undulations in the magnificent enormity
of the chestnut-trees. It was splendid.
A veteran from the neighboring barracks, who was gazing
through the fence, said: “Here is the Spring
presenting arms and in full uniform.”
All nature was breakfasting; creation
was at table; this was its hour; the great blue cloth
was spread in the sky, and the great green cloth on
earth; the sun lighted it all up brilliantly.
God was serving the universal repast. Each creature
had his pasture or his mess. The ring-dove found
his hemp-seed, the chaffinch found his millet, the
goldfinch found chickweed, the red-breast found worms,
the green finch found flies, the fly found infusoriae,
the bee found flowers. They ate each other somewhat,
it is true, which is the misery of evil mixed with
good; but not a beast of them all had an empty stomach.
The two little abandoned creatures
had arrived in the vicinity of the grand fountain,
and, rather bewildered by all this light, they tried
to hide themselves, the instinct of the poor and the
weak in the presence of even impersonal magnificence;
and they kept behind the swans’ hutch.
Here and there, at intervals, when
the wind blew, shouts, clamor, a sort of tumultuous
death rattle, which was the firing, and dull blows,
which were discharges of cannon, struck the ear confusedly.
Smoke hung over the roofs in the direction of the
Halles. A bell, which had the air of an appeal,
was ringing in the distance.
These children did not appear to notice
these noises. The little one repeated from time
to time: “I am hungry.”
Almost at the same instant with the
children, another couple approached the great basin.
They consisted of a goodman, about fifty years of age,
who was leading by the hand a little fellow of six.
No doubt, a father and his son. The little man
of six had a big brioche.
At that epoch, certain houses abutting
on the river, in the Rues Madame and d’Enfer,
had keys to the Luxembourg garden, of which the lodgers
enjoyed the use when the gates were shut, a privilege
which was suppressed later on. This father and
son came from one of these houses, no doubt.
The two poor little creatures watched
“that gentleman” approaching, and hid
themselves a little more thoroughly.
He was a bourgeois. The same
person, perhaps, whom Marius had one day heard, through
his love fever, near the same grand basin, counselling
his son “to avoid excesses.” He had
an affable and haughty air, and a mouth which was
always smiling, since it did not shut. This mechanical
smile, produced by too much jaw and too little skin,
shows the teeth rather than the soul. The child,
with his brioche, which he had bitten into but had
not finished eating, seemed satiated. The child
was dressed as a National Guardsman, owing to the
insurrection, and the father had remained clad as
a bourgeois out of prudence.
Father and son halted near the fountain
where two swans were sporting. This bourgeois
appeared to cherish a special admiration for the swans.
He resembled them in this sense, that he walked like
them.
For the moment, the swans were swimming,
which is their principal talent, and they were superb.
If the two poor little beings had
listened and if they had been of an age to understand,
they might have gathered the words of this grave man.
The father was saying to his son:
“The sage lives content with
little. Look at me, my son. I do not love
pomp. I am never seen in clothes decked with gold
lace and stones; I leave that false splendor to badly
organized souls.”
Here the deep shouts which proceeded
from the direction of the Halles burst out with fresh
force of bell and uproar.
“What is that?” inquired the child.
The father replied:
“It is the Saturnalia.”
All at once, he caught sight of the
two little ragged boys behind the green swan-hutch.
“There is the beginning,” said he.
And, after a pause, he added:
“Anarchy is entering this garden.”
In the meanwhile, his son took a bite
of his brioche, spit it out, and, suddenly burst out
crying.
“What are you crying about?” demanded
his father.
“I am not hungry any more,” said the child.
The father’s smile became more accentuated.
“One does not need to be hungry in order to
eat a cake.”
“My cake tires me. It is stale.”
“Don’t you want any more of it?”
“No.”
The father pointed to the swans.
“Throw it to those palmipeds.”
The child hesitated. A person
may not want any more of his cake; but that is no
reason for giving it away.
The father went on:
“Be humane. You must have compassion on
animals.”
And, taking the cake from his son, he flung it into
the basin.
The cake fell very near the edge.
The swans were far away, in the centre
of the basin, and busy with some prey. They had
seen neither the bourgeois nor the brioche.
The bourgeois, feeling that the cake
was in danger of being wasted, and moved by this useless
shipwreck, entered upon a telegraphic agitation, which
finally attracted the attention of the swans.
They perceived something floating,
steered for the edge like ships, as they are, and
slowly directed their course toward the brioche, with
the stupid majesty which befits white creatures.
“The swans [cygnes] understand
signs [signes],” said the bourgeois, delighted
to make a jest.
At that moment, the distant tumult
of the city underwent another sudden increase.
This time it was sinister. There are some gusts
of wind which speak more distinctly than others.
The one which was blowing at that moment brought clearly
defined drum-beats, clamors, platoon firing, and the
dismal replies of the tocsin and the cannon. This
coincided with a black cloud which suddenly veiled
the sun.
The swans had not yet reached the brioche.
“Let us return home,”
said the father, “they are attacking the Tuileries.”
He grasped his son’s hand again. Then he
continued:
“From the Tuileries to the Luxembourg,
there is but the distance which separates Royalty
from the peerage; that is not far. Shots will
soon rain down.”
He glanced at the cloud.
“Perhaps it is rain itself that
is about to shower down; the sky is joining in; the
younger branch is condemned. Let us return home
quickly.”
“I should like to see the swans
eat the brioche,” said the child.
The father replied:
“That would be imprudent.”
And he led his little bourgeois away.
The son, regretting the swans, turned
his head back toward the basin until a corner of the
quincunxes concealed it from him.
In the meanwhile, the two little waifs
had approached the brioche at the same time as the
swans. It was floating on the water. The
smaller of them stared at the cake, the elder gazed
after the retreating bourgeois.
Father and son entered the labyrinth
of walks which leads to the grand flight of steps
near the clump of trees on the side of the Rue Madame.
As soon as they had disappeared from
view, the elder child hastily flung himself flat on
his stomach on the rounding curb of the basin, and
clinging to it with his left hand, and leaning over
the water, on the verge of falling in, he stretched
out his right hand with his stick towards the cake.
The swans, perceiving the enemy, made haste, and in
so doing, they produced an effect of their breasts
which was of service to the little fisher; the water
flowed back before the swans, and one of these gentle
concentric undulations softly floated the brioche towards
the child’s wand. Just as the swans came
up, the stick touched the cake. The child gave
it a brisk rap, drew in the brioche, frightened away
the swans, seized the cake, and sprang to his feet.
The cake was wet; but they were hungry and thirsty.
The elder broke the cake into two portions, a large
one and a small one, took the small one for himself,
gave the large one to his brother, and said to him:
“Ram that into your muzzle.”
Chapter XVII
mortuus Pater Filium Moriturum
Expectat
Marius dashed out of the barricade,
Combeferre followed him. But he was too late.
Gavroche was dead. Combeferre brought back the
basket of cartridges; Marius bore the child.
“Alas!” he thought, “that
which the father had done for his father, he was requiting
to the son; only, Thenardier had brought back his father
alive; he was bringing back the child dead.”
When Marius re-entered the redoubt
with Gavroche in his arms, his face, like the child,
was inundated with blood.
At the moment when he had stooped
to lift Gavroche, a bullet had grazed his head; he
had not noticed it.
Courfeyrac untied his cravat and with
it bandaged Marius’ brow.
They laid Gavroche on the same table
with Mabeuf, and spread over the two corpses the black
shawl. There was enough of it for both the old
man and the child.
Combeferre distributed the cartridges
from the basket which he had brought in.
This gave each man fifteen rounds to fire.
Jean Valjean was still in the same
place, motionless on his stone post. When Combeferre
offered him his fifteen cartridges, he shook his head.
“Here’s a rare eccentric,”
said Combeferre in a low voice to Enjolras. “He
finds a way of not fighting in this barricade.”
“Which does not prevent him
from defending it,” responded Enjolras.
“Heroism has its originals,” resumed Combeferre.
And Courfeyrac, who had overheard, added:
“He is another sort from Father Mabeuf.”
One thing which must be noted is,
that the fire which was battering the barricade hardly
disturbed the interior. Those who have never traversed
the whirlwind of this sort of war can form no idea
of the singular moments of tranquillity mingled with
these convulsions. Men go and come, they talk,
they jest, they lounge. Some one whom we know
heard a combatant say to him in the midst of the grape-shot:
“We are here as at a bachelor breakfast.”
The redoubt of the Rue de la Chanvrerie, we repeat,
seemed very calm within. All mutations and all
phases had been, or were about to be, exhausted.
The position, from critical, had become menacing,
and, from menacing, was probably about to become desperate.
In proportion as the situation grew gloomy, the glow
of heroism empurpled the barricade more and more.
Enjolras, who was grave, dominated it, in the attitude
of a young Spartan sacrificing his naked sword to the
sombre genius, Epidotas.
Combeferre, wearing an apron, was
dressing the wounds: Bossuet and Feuilly were
making cartridges with the powder-flask picked up by
Gavroche on the dead corporal, and Bossuet said to
Feuilly: “We are soon to take the diligence
for another planet”; Courfeyrac was disposing
and arranging on some paving-stones which he had reserved
for himself near Enjolras, a complete arsenal, his
sword-cane, his gun, two holster pistols, and a cudgel,
with the care of a young girl setting a small dunkerque
in order. Jean Valjean stared silently at the
wall opposite him. An artisan was fastening Mother
Hucheloup’s big straw hat on his head with a
string, “for fear of sun-stroke,” as he
said. The young men from the Cougourde d’Aix
were chatting merrily among themselves, as though
eager to speak patois for the last time. Joly,
who had taken Widow Hucheloup’s mirror from
the wall, was examining his tongue in it. Some
combatants, having discovered a few crusts of rather
mouldy bread, in a drawer, were eagerly devouring
them. Marius was disturbed with regard to what
his father was about to say to him.
Chapter XVIII
the vulture become prey
We must insist upon one psychological
fact peculiar to barricades. Nothing which is
characteristic of that surprising war of the streets
should be omitted.
Whatever may have been the singular
inward tranquillity which we have just mentioned,
the barricade, for those who are inside it, remains,
none the less, a vision.
There is something of the apocalypse
in civil war, all the mists of the unknown are commingled
with fierce flashes, revolutions are sphinxes, and
any one who has passed through a barricade thinks he
has traversed a dream.
The feelings to which one is subject
in these places we have pointed out in the case of
Marius, and we shall see the consequences; they are
both more and less than life. On emerging from
a barricade, one no longer knows what one has seen
there. One has been terrible, but one knows it
not. One has been surrounded with conflicting
ideas which had human faces; one’s head has
been in the light of the future. There were corpses
lying prone there, and phantoms standing erect.
The hours were colossal and seemed hours of eternity.
One has lived in death. Shadows have passed by.
What were they?
One has beheld hands on which there
was blood; there was a deafening horror; there was
also a frightful silence; there were open mouths which
shouted, and other open mouths which held their peace;
one was in the midst of smoke, of night, perhaps.
One fancied that one had touched the sinister ooze
of unknown depths; one stares at something red on one’s
finger nails. One no longer remembers anything.
Let us return to the Rue de la Chanvrerie.
All at once, between two discharges,
the distant sound of a clock striking the hour became
audible.
“It is midday,” said Combeferre.
The twelve strokes had not finished
striking when Enjolras sprang to his feet, and from
the summit of the barricade hurled this thundering
shout:
“Carry stones up into the houses;
line the windowsills and the roofs with them.
Half the men to their guns, the other half to the
paving-stones. There is not a minute to be lost.”
A squad of sappers and miners, axe
on shoulder, had just made their appearance in battle
array at the end of the street.
This could only be the head of a column;
and of what column? The attacking column, evidently;
the sappers charged with the demolition of the barricade
must always precede the soldiers who are to scale it.
They were, evidently, on the brink
of that moment which M. Clermont-Tonnerre, in
1822, called “the tug of war.”
Enjolras’ order was executed
with the correct haste which is peculiar to ships
and barricades, the only two scenes of combat where
escape is impossible. In less than a minute,
two thirds of the stones which Enjolras had had piled
up at the door of Corinthe had been carried up to
the first floor and the attic, and before a second
minute had elapsed, these stones, artistically set
one upon the other, walled up the sash-window on the
first floor and the windows in the roof to half their
height. A few loop-holes carefully planned by
Feuilly, the principal architect, allowed of the passage
of the gun-barrels. This armament of the windows
could be effected all the more easily since the firing
of grape-shot had ceased. The two cannons were
now discharging ball against the centre of the barrier
in order to make a hole there, and, if possible, a
breach for the assault.
When the stones destined to the final
defence were in place, Enjolras had the bottles which
he had set under the table where Mabeuf lay, carried
to the first floor.
“Who is to drink that?” Bossuet asked
him.
“They,” replied Enjolras.
Then they barricaded the window below,
and held in readiness the iron cross-bars which served
to secure the door of the wine-shop at night.
The fortress was complete. The
barricade was the rampart, the wine-shop was the dungeon.
With the stones which remained they stopped up the
outlet.
As the defenders of a barricade are
always obliged to be sparing of their ammunition,
and as the assailants know this, the assailants combine
their arrangements with a sort of irritating leisure,
expose themselves to fire prematurely, though in appearance
more than in reality, and take their ease. The
preparations for attack are always made with a certain
methodical deliberation; after which, the lightning
strikes.
This deliberation permitted Enjolras
to take a review of everything and to perfect everything.
He felt that, since such men were to die, their death
ought to be a masterpiece.
He said to Marius: “We
are the two leaders. I will give the last orders
inside. Do you remain outside and observe.”
Marius posted himself on the lookout
upon the crest of the barricade.
Enjolras had the door of the kitchen,
which was the ambulance, as the reader will remember,
nailed up.
“No splashing of the wounded,” he said.
He issued his final orders in the
tap-room in a curt, but profoundly tranquil tone;
Feuilly listened and replied in the name of all.
“On the first floor, hold your
axes in readiness to cut the staircase. Have
you them?”
“Yes,” said Feuilly.
“How many?”
“Two axes and a pole-axe.”
“That is good. There are
now twenty-six combatants of us on foot. How
many guns are there?”
“Thirty-four.”
“Eight too many. Keep those
eight guns loaded like the rest and at hand.
Swords and pistols in your belts. Twenty men to
the barricade. Six ambushed in the attic windows,
and at the window on the first floor to fire on the
assailants through the loop-holes in the stones.
Let not a single worker remain inactive here.
Presently, when the drum beats the assault, let the
twenty below stairs rush to the barricade. The
first to arrive will have the best places.”
These arrangements made, he turned to Javert and said:
“I am not forgetting you.”
And, laying a pistol on the table, he added:
“The last man to leave this room will smash
the skull of this spy.”
“Here?” inquired a voice.
“No, let us not mix their corpses
with our own. The little barricade of the Mondetour
lane can be scaled. It is only four feet high.
The man is well pinioned. He shall be taken thither
and put to death.”
There was some one who was more impassive
at that moment than Enjolras, it was Javert.
Here Jean Valjean made his appearance.
He had been lost among the group of
insurgents. He stepped forth and said to Enjolras:
“You are the commander?”
“Yes.”
“You thanked me a while ago.”
“In the name of the Republic.
The barricade has two saviors, Marius Pontmercy and
yourself.”
“Do you think that I deserve a recompense?”
“Certainly.”
“Well, I request one.”
“What is it?”
“That I may blow that man’s brains out.”
Javert raised his head, saw Jean Valjean,
made an almost imperceptible movement, and said:
“That is just.”
As for Enjolras, he had begun to re-load
his rifle; he cut his eyes about him:
“No objections.”
And he turned to Jean Valjean:
“Take the spy.”
Jean Valjean did, in fact, take possession
of Javert, by seating himself on the end of the table.
He seized the pistol, and a faint click announced
that he had cocked it.
Almost at the same moment, a blast of trumpets became
audible.
“Take care!” shouted Marius from the top
of the barricade.
Javert began to laugh with that noiseless
laugh which was peculiar to him, and gazing intently
at the insurgents, he said to them:
“You are in no better case than I am.”
“All out!” shouted Enjolras.
The insurgents poured out tumultuously,
and, as they went, received in the back, may
we be permitted the expression, this sally
of Javert’s:
“We shall meet again shortly!”
Chapter XIX
Jean Valjean takes his revenge
When Jean Valjean was left alone with
Javert, he untied the rope which fastened the prisoner
across the middle of the body, and the knot of which
was under the table. After this he made him a
sign to rise.
Javert obeyed with that indefinable
smile in which the supremacy of enchained authority
is condensed.
Jean Valjean took Javert by the martingale,
as one would take a beast of burden by the breast-band,
and, dragging the latter after him, emerged from the
wine-shop slowly, because Javert, with his impeded
limbs, could take only very short steps.
Jean Valjean had the pistol in his hand.
In this manner they crossed the inner
trapezium of the barricade. The insurgents, all
intent on the attack, which was imminent, had their
backs turned to these two.
Marius alone, stationed on one side,
at the extreme left of the barricade, saw them pass.
This group of victim and executioner was illuminated
by the sepulchral light which he bore in his own soul.
Jean Valjean with some difficulty,
but without relaxing his hold for a single instant,
made Javert, pinioned as he was, scale the little
entrenchment in the Mondetour lane.
When they had crossed this barrier,
they found themselves alone in the lane. No one
saw them. Among the heap they could distinguish
a livid face, streaming hair, a pierced hand and the
half nude breast of a woman. It was Eponine.
The corner of the houses hid them from the insurgents.
The corpses carried away from the barricade formed
a terrible pile a few paces distant.
Javert gazed askance at this body,
and, profoundly calm, said in a low tone:
“It strikes me that I know that girl.”
Then he turned to Jean Valjean.
Jean Valjean thrust the pistol under
his arm and fixed on Javert a look which it required
no words to interpret: “Javert, it is I.”
Javert replied:
“Take your revenge.”
Jean Valjean drew from his pocket a knife, and opened
it.
“A clasp-knife!” exclaimed
Javert, “you are right. That suits you
better.”
Jean Valjean cut the martingale which
Javert had about his neck, then he cut the cords on
his wrists, then, stooping down, he cut the cord on
his feet; and, straightening himself up, he said to
him:
“You are free.”
Javert was not easily astonished.
Still, master of himself though he was, he could not
repress a start. He remained open-mouthed and
motionless.
Jean Valjean continued:
“I do not think that I shall
escape from this place. But if, by chance, I
do, I live, under the name of Fauchelevent, in the
Rue de l’Homme Arme, N.”
Javert snarled like a tiger, which
made him half open one corner of his mouth, and he
muttered between his teeth:
“Have a care.”
“Go,” said Jean Valjean.
Javert began again:
“Thou saidst Fauchelevent, Rue de l’Homme
Arme?”
“Number 7.”
Javert repeated in a low voice: “Number
7.”
He buttoned up his coat once more,
resumed the military stiffness between his shoulders,
made a half turn, folded his arms and, supporting
his chin on one of his hands, he set out in the direction
of the Halles. Jean Valjean followed him with
his eyes:
A few minutes later, Javert turned round and shouted
to Jean Valjean:
“You annoy me. Kill me, rather.”
Javert himself did not notice that
he no longer addressed Jean Valjean as “thou.”
“Be off with you,” said Jean Valjean.
Javert retreated slowly. A moment
later he turned the corner of the Rue des Precheurs.
When Javert had disappeared, Jean Valjean fired his
pistol in the air.
Then he returned to the barricade and said:
“It is done.”
In the meanwhile, this is what had taken place.
Marius, more intent on the outside
than on the interior, had not, up to that time, taken
a good look at the pinioned spy in the dark background
of the tap-room.
When he beheld him in broad daylight,
striding over the barricade in order to proceed to
his death, he recognized him. Something suddenly
recurred to his mind. He recalled the inspector
of the Rue de Pontoise, and the two pistols which
the latter had handed to him and which he, Marius,
had used in this very barricade, and not only did he
recall his face, but his name as well.
This recollection was misty and troubled, however,
like all his ideas.
It was not an affirmation that he
made, but a question which he put to himself:
“Is not that the inspector of
police who told me that his name was Javert?”
Perhaps there was still time to intervene
in behalf of that man. But, in the first place,
he must know whether this was Javert.
Marius called to Enjolras, who had
just stationed himself at the other extremity of the
barricade:
“Enjolras!”
“What?”
“What is the name of yonder man?”
“What man?”
“The police agent. Do you know his name?”
“Of course. He told us.”
“What is it?”
“Javert.”
Marius sprang to his feet.
At that moment, they heard the report of the pistol.
Jean Valjean re-appeared and cried: “It
is done.”
A gloomy chill traversed Marius’ heart.
Chapter XX
the dead are in the right
and the living are not in
the
wrong
The death agony of the barricade was about to begin.
Everything contributed to its tragic
majesty at that supreme moment; a thousand mysterious
crashes in the air, the breath of armed masses set
in movement in the streets which were not visible,
the intermittent gallop of cavalry, the heavy shock
of artillery on the march, the firing by squads, and
the cannonades crossing each other in the labyrinth
of Paris, the smokes of battle mounting all gilded
above the roofs, indescribable and vaguely terrible
cries, lightnings of menace everywhere, the tocsin
of Saint-Merry, which now had the accents of a sob,
the mildness of the weather, the splendor of the sky
filled with sun and clouds, the beauty of the day,
and the alarming silence of the houses.
For, since the preceding evening,
the two rows of houses in the Rue de la Chanvrerie
had become two walls; ferocious walls, doors closed,
windows closed, shutters closed.
In those days, so different from those
in which we live, when the hour was come, when the
people wished to put an end to a situation, which had
lasted too long, with a charter granted or with a legal
country, when universal wrath was diffused in the
atmosphere, when the city consented to the tearing
up of the pavements, when insurrection made the bourgeoisie
smile by whispering its password in its ear, then the
inhabitant, thoroughly penetrated with the revolt,
so to speak, was the auxiliary of the combatant, and
the house fraternized with the improvised fortress
which rested on it. When the situation was not
ripe, when the insurrection was not decidedly admitted,
when the masses disowned the movement, all was over
with the combatants, the city was changed into a desert
around the revolt, souls grew chilled, refuges were
nailed up, and the street turned into a defile to help
the army to take the barricade.
A people cannot be forced, through
surprise, to walk more quickly than it chooses.
Woe to whomsoever tries to force its hand! A people
does not let itself go at random. Then it abandons
the insurrection to itself. The insurgents become
noxious, infected with the plague. A house is
an escarpment, a door is a refusal, a façade is a
wall. This wall hears, sees and will not.
It might open and save you. No. This wall
is a judge. It gazes at you and condemns you.
What dismal things are closed houses. They seem
dead, they are living. Life which is, as it were,
suspended there, persists there. No one has gone
out of them for four and twenty hours, but no one
is missing from them. In the interior of that
rock, people go and come, go to bed and rise again;
they are a family party there; there they eat and
drink; they are afraid, a terrible thing! Fear
excuses this fearful lack of hospitality; terror is
mixed with it, an extenuating circumstance. Sometimes,
even, and this has been actually seen, fear turns
to passion; fright may change into fury, as prudence
does into rage; hence this wise saying: “The
enraged moderates.” There are outbursts
of supreme terror, whence springs wrath like a mournful
smoke. “What do these people want?
What have they come there to do? Let them get
out of the scrape. So much the worse for them.
It is their fault. They are only getting what
they deserve. It does not concern us. Here
is our poor street all riddled with balls. They
are a pack of rascals. Above all things, don’t
open the door.” And the house assumes
the air of a tomb. The insurgent is in the death-throes
in front of that house; he sees the grape-shot and
naked swords drawing near; if he cries, he knows that
they are listening to him, and that no one will come;
there stand walls which might protect him, there are
men who might save him; and these walls have ears
of flesh, and these men have bowels of stone.
Whom shall he reproach?
No one and every one.
The incomplete times in which we live.
It is always at its own risk and peril
that Utopia is converted into revolution, and from
philosophical protest becomes an armed protest, and
from Minerva turns to Pallas.
The Utopia which grows impatient and
becomes revolt knows what awaits it; it almost always
comes too soon. Then it becomes resigned, and
stoically accepts catastrophe in lieu of triumph.
It serves those who deny it without complaint, even
excusing them, and even disculpates them, and its
magnanimity consists in consenting to abandonment.
It is indomitable in the face of obstacles and gentle
towards ingratitude.
Is this ingratitude, however?
Yes, from the point of view of the human race.
No, from the point of view of the individual.
Progress is man’s mode of existence.
The general life of the human race is called Progress,
the collective stride of the human race is called
Progress. Progress advances; it makes the great
human and terrestrial journey towards the celestial
and the divine; it has its halting places where it
rallies the laggard troop, it has its stations where
it meditates, in the presence of some splendid Canaan
suddenly unveiled on its horizon, it has its nights
when it sleeps; and it is one of the poignant anxieties
of the thinker that he sees the shadow resting on the
human soul, and that he gropes in darkness without
being able to awaken that slumbering Progress.
“God is dead, perhaps,”
said Gerard de Nerval one day to the writer of these
lines, confounding progress with God, and taking the
interruption of movement for the death of Being.
He who despairs is in the wrong.
Progress infallibly awakes, and, in short, we may
say that it marches on, even when it is asleep, for
it has increased in size. When we behold it erect
once more, we find it taller. To be always peaceful
does not depend on progress any more than it does
on the stream; erect no barriers, cast in no boulders;
obstacles make water froth and humanity boil.
Hence arise troubles; but after these troubles, we
recognize the fact that ground has been gained.
Until order, which is nothing else than universal
peace, has been established, until harmony and unity
reign, progress will have revolutions as its halting-places.
What, then, is progress? We have
just enunciated it; the permanent life of the peoples.
Now, it sometimes happens, that the
momentary life of individuals offers resistance to
the eternal life of the human race.
Let us admit without bitterness, that
the individual has his distinct interests, and can,
without forfeiture, stipulate for his interest, and
defend it; the present has its pardonable dose of egotism;
momentary life has its rights, and is not bound to
sacrifice itself constantly to the future. The
generation which is passing in its turn over the earth,
is not forced to abridge it for the sake of the generations,
its equal, after all, who will have their turn later
on. “I exist,” murmurs that
some one whose name is All. “I am young
and in love, I am old and I wish to repose, I am the
father of a family, I toil, I prosper, I am successful
in business, I have houses to lease, I have money in
the government funds, I am happy, I have a wife and
children, I have all this, I desire to live, leave
me in peace.” Hence, at certain hours,
a profound cold broods over the magnanimous vanguard
of the human race.
Utopia, moreover, we must admit, quits
its radiant sphere when it makes war. It, the
truth of to-morrow, borrows its mode of procedure,
battle, from the lie of yesterday. It, the future,
behaves like the past. It, pure idea, becomes
a deed of violence. It complicates its heroism
with a violence for which it is just that it should
be held to answer; a violence of occasion and expedient,
contrary to principle, and for which it is fatally
punished. The Utopia, insurrection, fights with
the old military code in its fist; it shoots spies,
it executes traitors; it suppresses living beings
and flings them into unknown darkness. It makes
use of death, a serious matter. It seems as though
Utopia had no longer any faith in radiance, its irresistible
and incorruptible force. It strikes with the
sword. Now, no sword is simple. Every blade
has two edges; he who wounds with the one is wounded
with the other.
Having made this reservation, and
made it with all severity, it is impossible for us
not to admire, whether they succeed or not, those the
glorious combatants of the future, the confessors of
Utopia. Even when they miscarry, they are worthy
of veneration; and it is, perhaps, in failure, that
they possess the most majesty. Victory, when it
is in accord with progress, merits the applause of
the people; but a heroic defeat merits their tender
compassion. The one is magnificent, the other
sublime. For our own part, we prefer martyrdom
to success. John Brown is greater than Washington,
and Pisacane is greater than Garibaldi.
It certainly is necessary that some
one should take the part of the vanquished.
We are unjust towards these great
men who attempt the future, when they fail.
Revolutionists are accused of sowing
fear abroad. Every barricade seems a crime.
Their theories are incriminated, their aim suspected,
their ulterior motive is feared, their conscience
denounced. They are reproached with raising,
erecting, and heaping up, against the reigning social
state, a mass of miseries, of griefs, of iniquities,
of wrongs, of despairs, and of tearing from the lowest
depths blocks of shadow in order therein to embattle
themselves and to combat. People shout to them:
“You are tearing up the pavements of hell!”
They might reply: “That is because our
barricade is made of good intentions.”
The best thing, assuredly, is the
pacific solution. In short, let us agree that
when we behold the pavement, we think of the bear,
and it is a good will which renders society uneasy.
But it depends on society to save itself, it is to
its own good will that we make our appeal. No
violent remedy is necessary. To study evil amiably,
to prove its existence, then to cure it. It is
to this that we invite it.
However that may be, even when fallen,
above all when fallen, these men, who at every point
of the universe, with their eyes fixed on France, are
striving for the grand work with the inflexible logic
of the ideal, are august; they give their life a free
offering to progress; they accomplish the will of
providence; they perform a religious act. At the
appointed hour, with as much disinterestedness as an
actor who answers to his cue, in obedience to the
divine stage-manager, they enter the tomb. And
this hopeless combat, this stoical disappearance they
accept in order to bring about the supreme and universal
consequences, the magnificent and irresistibly human
movement begun on the 14th of July, 1789; these soldiers
are priests. The French revolution is an act of
God.
Moreover, there are, and it is proper
to add this distinction to the distinctions already
pointed out in another chapter, there are
accepted revolutions, revolutions which are called
revolutions; there are refused revolutions, which
are called riots.
An insurrection which breaks out,
is an idea which is passing its examination before
the people. If the people lets fall a black ball,
the idea is dried fruit; the insurrection is a mere
skirmish.
Waging war at every summons and every
time that Utopia desires it, is not the thing for
the peoples. Nations have not always and at every
hour the temperament of heroes and martyrs.
They are positive. A priori,
insurrection is repugnant to them, in the first place,
because it often results in a catastrophe, in the second
place, because it always has an abstraction as its
point of departure.
Because, and this is a noble thing,
it is always for the ideal, and for the ideal alone,
that those who sacrifice themselves do thus sacrifice
themselves. An insurrection is an enthusiasm.
Enthusiasm may wax wroth; hence the appeal to arms.
But every insurrection, which aims at a government
or a regime, aims higher. Thus, for instance,
and we insist upon it, what the chiefs of the insurrection
of 1832, and, in particular, the young enthusiasts
of the Rue de la Chanvrerie were combating, was not
precisely Louis Philippe. The majority of them,
when talking freely, did justice to this king who stood
midway between monarchy and revolution; no one hated
him. But they attacked the younger branch of
the divine right in Louis Philippe as they had attacked
its elder branch in Charles X.; and that which they
wished to overturn in overturning royalty in France,
was, as we have explained, the usurpation of man over
man, and of privilege over right in the entire universe.
Paris without a king has as result the world without
despots. This is the manner in which they reasoned.
Their aim was distant no doubt, vague perhaps, and
it retreated in the face of their efforts; but it was
great.
Thus it is. And we sacrifice
ourselves for these visions, which are almost always
illusions for the sacrificed, but illusions with which,
after all, the whole of human certainty is mingled.
We throw ourselves into these tragic affairs and become
intoxicated with that which we are about to do.
Who knows? We may succeed. We are few in
number, we have a whole army arrayed against us; but
we are defending right, the natural law, the sovereignty
of each one over himself from which no abdication
is possible, justice and truth, and in case of need,
we die like the three hundred Spartans. We do
not think of Don Quixote but of Leonidas. And
we march straight before us, and once pledged, we do
not draw back, and we rush onwards with head held
low, cherishing as our hope an unprecedented victory,
revolution completed, progress set free again, the
aggrandizement of the human race, universal deliverance;
and in the event of the worst, Thermopylae.
These passages of arms for the sake
of progress often suffer shipwreck, and we have just
explained why. The crowd is restive in the presence
of the impulses of paladins. Heavy masses,
the multitudes which are fragile because of their
very weight, fear adventures; and there is a touch
of adventure in the ideal.
Moreover, and we must not forget this,
interests which are not very friendly to the ideal
and the sentimental are in the way. Sometimes
the stomach paralyzes the heart.
The grandeur and beauty of France
lies in this, that she takes less from the stomach
than other nations: she more easily knots the
rope about her loins. She is the first awake,
the last asleep. She marches forwards. She
is a seeker.
This arises from the fact that she is an artist.
The ideal is nothing but the culminating
point of logic, the same as the beautiful is nothing
but the summit of the true. Artistic peoples are
also consistent peoples. To love beauty is to
see the light. That is why the torch of Europe,
that is to say of civilization, was first borne by
Greece, who passed it on to Italy, who handed it on
to France. Divine, illuminating nations of scouts!
Vitaelampada tradunt.
It is an admirable thing that the
poetry of a people is the element of its progress.
The amount of civilization is measured by the quantity
of imagination. Only, a civilizing people should
remain a manly people. Corinth, yes; Sybaris,
no. Whoever becomes effeminate makes himself a
bastard. He must be neither a dilettante nor a
virtuoso: but he must be artistic. In the
matter of civilization, he must not refine, but he
must sublime. On this condition, one gives to
the human race the pattern of the ideal.
The modern ideal has its type in art,
and its means is science. It is through science
that it will realize that august vision of the poets,
the socially beautiful. Eden will be reconstructed
by A+B. At the point which civilization has now
reached, the exact is a necessary element of the splendid,
and the artistic sentiment is not only served, but
completed by the scientific organ; dreams must be calculated.
Art, which is the conqueror, should have for support
science, which is the walker; the solidity of the
creature which is ridden is of importance. The
modern spirit is the genius of Greece with the genius
of India as its vehicle; Alexander on the elephant.
Races which are petrified in dogma
or demoralized by lucre are unfit to guide civilization.
Genuflection before the idol or before money wastes
away the muscles which walk and the will which advances.
Hieratic or mercantile absorption lessens a people’s
power of radiance, lowers its horizon by lowering
its level, and deprives it of that intelligence, at
once both human and divine of the universal goal, which
makes missionaries of nations. Babylon has no
ideal; Carthage has no ideal. Athens and Rome
have and keep, throughout all the nocturnal darkness
of the centuries, halos of civilization.
France is in the same quality of race
as Greece and Italy. She is Athenian in the matter
of beauty, and Roman in her greatness. Moreover,
she is good. She gives herself. Oftener than
is the case with other races, is she in the humor
for self-devotion and sacrifice. Only, this humor
seizes upon her, and again abandons her. And therein
lies the great peril for those who run when she desires
only to walk, or who walk on when she desires to halt.
France has her relapses into materialism, and, at
certain instants, the ideas which obstruct that sublime
brain have no longer anything which recalls French
greatness and are of the dimensions of a Missouri
or a South Carolina. What is to be done in such
a case? The giantess plays at being a dwarf; immense
France has her freaks of pettiness. That is all.
To this there is nothing to say.
Peoples, like planets, possess the right to an eclipse.
And all is well, provided that the light returns and
that the eclipse does not degenerate into night.
Dawn and resurrection are synonymous. The reappearance
of the light is identical with the persistence of
the I.
Let us state these facts calmly.
Death on the barricade or the tomb in exile, is an
acceptable occasion for devotion. The real name
of devotion is disinterestedness. Let the abandoned
allow themselves to be abandoned, let the exiled allow
themselves to be exiled, and let us confine ourselves
to entreating great nations not to retreat too far,
when they do retreat. One must not push too far
in descent under pretext of a return to reason.
Matter exists, the minute exists,
interest exists, the stomach exists; but the stomach
must not be the sole wisdom. The life of the moment
has its rights, we admit, but permanent life has its
rights also. Alas! the fact that one is mounted
does not preclude a fall. This can be seen in
history more frequently than is desirable: A nation
is great, it tastes the ideal, then it bites the mire,
and finds it good; and if it be asked how it happens
that it has abandoned Socrates for Falstaff, it replies:
“Because I love statesmen.”
One word more before returning to
our subject, the conflict.
A battle like the one which we are
engaged in describing is nothing else than a convulsion
towards the ideal. Progress trammelled is sickly,
and is subject to these tragic épilepsies.
With that malady of progress, civil war, we have been
obliged to come in contact in our passage. This
is one of the fatal phases, at once act and entr’acte
of that drama whose pivot is a social condemnation,
and whose veritable title is Progress.
Progress!
The cry to which we frequently give
utterance is our whole thought; and, at the point
of this drama which we have now reached, the idea which
it contains having still more than one trial to undergo,
it is, perhaps, permitted to us, if not to lift the
veil from it, to at least allow its light to shine
through.
The book which the reader has under
his eye at this moment is, from one end to the other,
as a whole and in detail, whatever may be its intermittences,
exceptions and faults, the march from evil to
good, from the unjust to the just, from night to day,
from appetite to conscience, from rottenness to life,
from hell to heaven, from nothingness to God.
Point of departure: matter; point of arrival:
the soul. The hydra at the beginning, the angel
at the end.
Chapter XXI
the heroes
All at once, the drum beat the charge.
The attack was a hurricane. On
the evening before, in the darkness, the barricade
had been approached silently, as by a boa. Now,
in broad daylight, in that widening street, surprise
was decidedly impossible, rude force had, moreover,
been unmasked, the cannon had begun the roar, the
army hurled itself on the barricade. Fury now
became skill. A powerful detachment of infantry
of the line, broken at regular intervals, by the National
Guard and the Municipal Guard on foot, and supported
by serried masses which could be heard though not seen,
debauched into the street at a run, with drums beating,
trumpets braying, bayonets levelled, the sappers at
their head, and, imperturbable under the projectiles,
charged straight for the barricade with the weight
of a brazen beam against a wall.
The wall held firm.
The insurgents fired impetuously.
The barricade once scaled had a mane of lightning
flashes. The assault was so furious, that for
one moment, it was inundated with assailants; but
it shook off the soldiers as the lion shakes off the
dogs, and it was only covered with besiegers as the
cliff is covered with foam, to re-appear, a moment
later, beetling, black and formidable.
The column, forced to retreat, remained
massed in the street, unprotected but terrible, and
replied to the redoubt with a terrible discharge of
musketry. Any one who has seen fireworks will
recall the sheaf formed of interlacing lightnings
which is called a bouquet. Let the reader picture
to himself this bouquet, no longer vertical but horizontal,
bearing a bullet, buck-shot or a biscaien at the tip
of each one of its jets of flame, and picking off
dead men one after another from its clusters of lightning.
The barricade was underneath it.
On both sides, the resolution was
equal. The bravery exhibited there was almost
barbarous and was complicated with a sort of heroic
ferocity which began by the sacrifice of self.
This was the epoch when a National
Guardsman fought like a Zouave. The troop wished
to make an end of it, insurrection was desirous of
fighting. The acceptance of the death agony in
the flower of youth and in the flush of health turns
intrepidity into frenzy. In this fray, each one
underwent the broadening growth of the death hour.
The street was strewn with corpses.
The barricade had Enjolras at one
of its extremities and Marius at the other. Enjolras,
who carried the whole barricade in his head, reserved
and sheltered himself; three soldiers fell, one after
the other, under his embrasure, without having even
seen him; Marius fought unprotected. He made
himself a target. He stood with more than half
his body above the breastworks. There is no more
violent prodigal than the avaricious man who takes
the bit in his teeth; there is no man more terrible
in action than a dreamer. Marius was formidable
and pensive. In battle he was as in a dream.
One would have pronounced him a phantom engaged in
firing a gun.
The insurgents’ cartridges were
giving out; but not their sarcasms. In this whirlwind
of the sepulchre in which they stood, they laughed.
Courfeyrac was bare-headed.
“What have you done with your hat?” Bossuet
asked him.
Courfeyrac replied:
“They have finally taken it away from me with
cannon-balls.”
Or they uttered haughty comments.
“Can any one understand,”
exclaimed Feuilly bitterly, “those men, [and
he cited names, well-known names, even celebrated names,
some belonging to the old army] who had
promised to join us, and taken an oath to aid us,
and who had pledged their honor to it, and who are
our generals, and who abandon us!”
And Combeferre restricted himself to replying with
a grave smile.
“There are people who observe
the rules of honor as one observes the stars, from
a great distance.”
The interior of the barricade was
so strewn with torn cartridges that one would have
said that there had been a snowstorm.
The assailants had numbers in their
favor; the insurgents had position. They were
at the top of a wall, and they thundered point-blank
upon the soldiers tripping over the dead and wounded
and entangled in the escarpment. This barricade,
constructed as it was and admirably buttressed, was
really one of those situations where a handful of men
hold a legion in check. Nevertheless, the attacking
column, constantly recruited and enlarged under the
shower of bullets, drew inexorably nearer, and now,
little by little, step by step, but surely, the army
closed in around the barricade as the vice grasps the
wine-press.
One assault followed another.
The horror of the situation kept increasing.
Then there burst forth on that heap
of paving-stones, in that Rue de la Chanvrerie, a
battle worthy of a wall of Troy. These haggard,
ragged, exhausted men, who had had nothing to eat
for four and twenty hours, who had not slept, who
had but a few more rounds to fire, who were fumbling
in their pockets which had been emptied of cartridges,
nearly all of whom were wounded, with head or arm
bandaged with black and blood-stained linen, with
holes in their clothes from which the blood trickled,
and who were hardly armed with poor guns and notched
swords, became Titans. The barricade was ten
times attacked, approached, assailed, scaled, and
never captured.
In order to form an idea of this struggle,
it is necessary to imagine fire set to a throng of
terrible courages, and then to gaze at the
conflagration. It was not a combat, it was the
interior of a furnace; there mouths breathed the flame;
there countenances were extraordinary. The human
form seemed impossible there, the combatants flamed
forth there, and it was formidable to behold the going
and coming in that red glow of those salamanders of
the fray.
The successive and simultaneous scenes
of this grand slaughter we renounce all attempts at
depicting. The epic alone has the right to fill
twelve thousand verses with a battle.
One would have pronounced this that
hell of Brahmanism, the most redoubtable of the seventeen
abysses, which the Veda calls the Forest of Swords.
They fought hand to hand, foot to
foot, with pistol shots, with blows of the sword,
with their fists, at a distance, close at hand, from
above, from below, from everywhere, from the roofs
of the houses, from the windows of the wine-shop,
from the cellar windows, whither some had crawled.
They were one against sixty.
The façade of Corinthe, half demolished,
was hideous. The window, tattooed with grape-shot,
had lost glass and frame and was nothing now but a
shapeless hole, tumultuously blocked with paving-stones.
Bossuet was killed; Feuilly was killed;
Courfeyrac was killed; Combeferre, transfixed by three
blows from a bayonet in the breast at the moment when
he was lifting up a wounded soldier, had only time
to cast a glance to heaven when he expired.
Marius, still fighting, was so riddled
with wounds, particularly in the head, that his countenance
disappeared beneath the blood, and one would have
said that his face was covered with a red kerchief.
Enjolras alone was not struck.
When he had no longer any weapon, he reached out his
hands to right and left and an insurgent thrust some
arm or other into his fist. All he had left was
the stumps of four swords; one more than Francois
I. at Marignan. Homer says: “Diomedes
cuts the throat of Axylus, son of Teuthranis, who
dwelt in happy Arisba; Euryalus, son of Mecistaeus,
exterminates Dresos and Opheltios, Esepius, and that
Pedasus whom the naiad Abarbarea bore to the blameless
Bucolion; Ulysses overthrows Pidytes of Percosius;
Antilochus, Ablerus; Polypaetes, Astyalus; Polydamas,
Otos, of Cyllene; and Teucer, Aretaon. Meganthios
dies under the blows of Euripylus’ pike.
Agamemnon, king of the heroes, flings to earth Elatos,
born in the rocky city which is laved by the sounding
river Satnois.” In our old poems of exploits,
Esplandian attacks the giant marquis Swantibore with
a cobbler’s shoulder-stick of fire, and the
latter defends himself by stoning the hero with towers
which he plucks up by the roots. Our ancient mural
frescoes show us the two Dukes of Bretagne and Bourbon,
armed, emblazoned and crested in war-like guise, on
horseback and approaching each other, their battle-axes
in hand, masked with iron, gloved with iron, booted
with iron, the one caparisoned in ermine, the other
draped in azure: Bretagne with his lion between
the two horns of his crown, Bourbon helmeted with
a monster fleur de lys on his visor.
But, in order to be superb, it is not necessary to
wear, like Yvon, the ducal morion, to have in the
fist, like Esplandian, a living flame, or, like Phyles,
father of Polydamas, to have brought back from Ephyra
a good suit of mail, a present from the king of men,
Euphetes; it suffices to give one’s life for
a conviction or a loyalty. This ingenuous little
soldier, yesterday a peasant of Bauce or Limousin,
who prowls with his clasp-knife by his side, around
the children’s nurses in the Luxembourg garden,
this pale young student bent over a piece of anatomy
or a book, a blond youth who shaves his beard with
scissors, take both of them, breathe upon
them with a breath of duty, place them face to face
in the Carrefour Boucherat or in the blind alley Planche-Mibray,
and let the one fight for his flag, and the other
for his ideal, and let both of them imagine that they
are fighting for their country; the struggle will
be colossal; and the shadow which this raw recruit
and this sawbones in conflict will produce in that
grand epic field where humanity is striving, will
equal the shadow cast by Megaryon, King of Lycia,
tiger-filled, crushing in his embrace the immense body
of Ajax, equal to the gods.
Chapter XXII
foot to foot
When there were no longer any of the
leaders left alive, except Enjolras and Marius at
the two extremities of the barricade, the centre, which
had so long sustained Courfeyrac, Joly, Bossuet, Feuilly
and Combeferre, gave way. The cannon, though
it had not effected a practicable breach, had made
a rather large hollow in the middle of the redoubt;
there, the summit of the wall had disappeared before
the balls, and had crumbled away; and the rubbish
which had fallen, now inside, now outside, had, as
it accumulated, formed two piles in the nature of slopes
on the two sides of the barrier, one on the inside,
the other on the outside. The exterior slope
presented an inclined plane to the attack.
A final assault was there attempted,
and this assault succeeded. The mass bristling
with bayonets and hurled forward at a run, came up
with irresistible force, and the serried front of
battle of the attacking column made its appearance
through the smoke on the crest of the battlements.
This time, it was decisive. The group of insurgents
who were defending the centre retreated in confusion.
Then the gloomy love of life awoke
once more in some of them. Many, finding themselves
under the muzzles of this forest of guns, did not
wish to die. This is a moment when the instinct
of self-preservation emits howls, when the beast re-appears
in men. They were hemmed in by the lofty, six-story
house which formed the background of their redoubt.
This house might prove their salvation. The building
was barricaded, and walled, as it were, from top to
bottom. Before the troops of the line had reached
the interior of the redoubt, there was time for a door
to open and shut, the space of a flash of lightning
was sufficient for that, and the door of that house,
suddenly opened a crack and closed again instantly,
was life for these despairing men. Behind this
house, there were streets, possible flight, space.
They set to knocking at that door with the butts of
their guns, and with kicks, shouting, calling, entreating,
wringing their hands. No one opened. From
the little window on the third floor, the head of
the dead man gazed down upon them.
But Enjolras and Marius, and the seven
or eight rallied about them, sprang forward and protected
them. Enjolras had shouted to the soldiers:
“Don’t advance!” and as an officer
had not obeyed, Enjolras had killed the officer.
He was now in the little inner court of the redoubt,
with his back planted against the Corinthe building,
a sword in one hand, a rifle in the other, holding
open the door of the wine-shop which he barred against
assailants. He shouted to the desperate men: “There
is but one door open; this one.” And
shielding them with his body, and facing an entire
battalion alone, he made them pass in behind him.
All precipitated themselves thither. Enjolras,
executing with his rifle, which he now used like a
cane, what single-stick players call a “covered
rose” round his head, levelled the bayonets around
and in front of him, and was the last to enter; and
then ensued a horrible moment, when the soldiers tried
to make their way in, and the insurgents strove to
bar them out. The door was slammed with such
violence, that, as it fell back into its frame, it
showed the five fingers of a soldier who had been
clinging to it, cut off and glued to the post.
Marius remained outside. A shot
had just broken his collar bone, he felt that he was
fainting and falling. At that moment, with eyes
already shut, he felt the shock of a vigorous hand
seizing him, and the swoon in which his senses vanished,
hardly allowed him time for the thought, mingled with
a last memory of Cosette: “I am taken
prisoner. I shall be shot.”
Enjolras, not seeing Marius among
those who had taken refuge in the wine-shop, had the
same idea. But they had reached a moment when
each man has not the time to meditate on his own death.
Enjolras fixed the bar across the door, and bolted
it, and double-locked it with key and chain, while
those outside were battering furiously at it, the soldiers
with the butts of their muskets, the sappers with their
axes. The assailants were grouped about that
door. The siege of the wine-shop was now beginning.
The soldiers, we will observe, were full of wrath.
The death of the artillery-sergeant
had enraged them, and then, a still more melancholy
circumstance. During the few hours which had preceded
the attack, it had been reported among them that the
insurgents were mutilating their prisoners, and that
there was the headless body of a soldier in the wine-shop.
This sort of fatal rumor is the usual accompaniment
of civil wars, and it was a false report of this kind
which, later on, produced the catastrophe of the Rue
Transnonain.
When the door was barricaded, Enjolras
said to the others:
“Let us sell our lives dearly.”
Then he approached the table on which
lay Mabeuf and Gavroche. Beneath the black cloth
two straight and rigid forms were visible, one large,
the other small, and the two faces were vaguely outlined
beneath the cold folds of the shroud. A hand
projected from beneath the winding sheet and hung
near the floor. It was that of the old man.
Enjolras bent down and kissed that
venerable hand, just as he had kissed his brow on
the preceding evening.
These were the only two kisses which
he had bestowed in the course of his life.
Let us abridge the tale. The
barricade had fought like a gate of Thebes; the wine-shop
fought like a house of Saragossa. These resistances
are dogged. No quarter. No flag of truce
possible. Men are willing to die, provided their
opponent will kill them.
When Suchet says: “Capitulate,” Palafox
replies: “After the war with cannon, the
war with knives.” Nothing was lacking in
the capture by assault of the Hucheloup wine-shop;
neither paving-stones raining from the windows and
the roof on the besiegers and exasperating the soldiers
by crushing them horribly, nor shots fired from the
attic-windows and the cellar, nor the fury of attack,
nor, finally, when the door yielded, the frenzied
madness of extermination. The assailants, rushing
into the wine-shop, their feet entangled in the panels
of the door which had been beaten in and flung on
the ground, found not a single combatant there.
The spiral staircase, hewn asunder with the axe, lay
in the middle of the tap-room, a few wounded men were
just breathing their last, every one who was not killed
was on the first floor, and from there, through the
hole in the ceiling, which had formed the entrance
of the stairs, a terrific fire burst forth. It
was the last of their cartridges. When they were
exhausted, when these formidable men on the point of
death had no longer either powder or ball, each grasped
in his hands two of the bottles which Enjolras had
reserved, and of which we have spoken, and held the
scaling party in check with these frightfully fragile
clubs. They were bottles of aquafortis.
We relate these gloomy incidents of
carnage as they occurred. The besieged man, alas!
converts everything into a weapon. Greek fire
did not disgrace Archimedes, boiling pitch did not
disgrace Bayard. All war is a thing of terror,
and there is no choice in it. The musketry of
the besiegers, though confined and embarrassed by
being directed from below upwards, was deadly.
The rim of the hole in the ceiling was speedily surrounded
by heads of the slain, whence dripped long, red and
smoking streams, the uproar was indescribable; a close
and burning smoke almost produced night over this
combat. Words are lacking to express horror when
it has reached this pitch. There were no longer
men in this conflict, which was now infernal.
They were no longer giants matched with colossi.
It resembled Milton and Dante rather than Homer.
Demons attacked, spectres resisted.
It was heroism become monstrous.
Chapter XXIII
Orestes fasting and Pylades drunk
At length, by dint of mounting on
each other’s backs, aiding themselves with the
skeleton of the staircase, climbing up the walls, clinging
to the ceiling, slashing away at the very brink of
the trap-door, the last one who offered resistance,
a score of assailants, soldiers, National Guardsmen,
municipal guardsmen, in utter confusion, the majority
disfigured by wounds in the face during that redoubtable
ascent, blinded by blood, furious, rendered savage,
made an irruption into the apartment on the first
floor. There they found only one man still on
his feet, Enjolras. Without cartridges, without
sword, he had nothing in his hand now but the barrel
of his gun whose stock he had broken over the head
of those who were entering. He had placed the
billiard table between his assailants and himself;
he had retreated into the corner of the room, and
there, with haughty eye, and head borne high, with
this stump of a weapon in his hand, he was still so
alarming as to speedily create an empty space around
him. A cry arose:
“He is the leader! It was
he who slew the artillery-man. It is well that
he has placed himself there. Let him remain there.
Let us shoot him down on the spot.”
“Shoot me,” said Enjolras.
And flinging away his bit of gun-barrel,
and folding his arms, he offered his breast.
The audacity of a fine death always
affects men. As soon as Enjolras folded his arms
and accepted his end, the din of strife ceased in
the room, and this chaos suddenly stilled into a sort
of sepulchral solemnity. The menacing majesty
of Enjolras disarmed and motionless, appeared to oppress
this tumult, and this young man, haughty, bloody,
and charming, who alone had not a wound, who was as
indifferent as an invulnerable being, seemed, by the
authority of his tranquil glance, to constrain this
sinister rabble to kill him respectfully. His
beauty, at that moment augmented by his pride, was
resplendent, and he was fresh and rosy after the fearful
four and twenty hours which had just elapsed, as though
he could no more be fatigued than wounded. It
was of him, possibly, that a witness spoke afterwards,
before the council of war: “There was an
insurgent whom I heard called Apollo.” A
National Guardsman who had taken aim at Enjolras,
lowered his gun, saying: “It seems to me
that I am about to shoot a flower.”
Twelve men formed into a squad in
the corner opposite Enjolras, and silently made ready
their guns.
Then a sergeant shouted:
“Take aim!”
An officer intervened.
“Wait.”
And addressing Enjolras:
“Do you wish to have your eyes bandaged?”
“No.”
“Was it you who killed the artillery sergeant?”
“Yes.”
Grantaire had waked up a few moments before.
Grantaire, it will be remembered,
had been asleep ever since the preceding evening in
the upper room of the wine-shop, seated on a chair
and leaning on the table.
He realized in its fullest sense the
old metaphor of “dead drunk.” The
hideous potion of absinthe-porter and alcohol had thrown
him into a lethargy. His table being small, and
not suitable for the barricade, he had been left in
possession of it. He was still in the same posture,
with his breast bent over the table, his head lying
flat on his arms, surrounded by glasses, beer-jugs
and bottles. His was the overwhelming slumber
of the torpid bear and the satiated leech. Nothing
had had any effect upon it, neither the fusillade,
nor the cannon-balls, nor the grape-shot which had
made its way through the window into the room where
he was. Nor the tremendous uproar of the assault.
He merely replied to the cannonade, now and then,
by a snore. He seemed to be waiting there for
a bullet which should spare him the trouble of waking.
Many corpses were strewn around him; and, at the first
glance, there was nothing to distinguish him from
those profound sleepers of death.
Noise does not rouse a drunken man;
silence awakens him. The fall of everything around
him only augmented Grantaire’s prostration; the
crumbling of all things was his lullaby. The sort
of halt which the tumult underwent in the presence
of Enjolras was a shock to this heavy slumber.
It had the effect of a carriage going at full speed,
which suddenly comes to a dead stop. The persons
dozing within it wake up. Grantaire rose to his
feet with a start, stretched out his arms, rubbed
his eyes, stared, yawned, and understood.
A fit of drunkenness reaching its
end resembles a curtain which is torn away. One
beholds, at a single glance and as a whole, all that
it has concealed. All suddenly presents itself
to the memory; and the drunkard who has known nothing
of what has been taking place during the last twenty-four
hours, has no sooner opened his eyes than he is perfectly
informed. Ideas recur to him with abrupt lucidity;
the obliteration of intoxication, a sort of steam
which has obscured the brain, is dissipated, and makes
way for the clear and sharply outlined importunity
of realities.
Relegated, as he was, to one corner,
and sheltered behind the billiard-table, the soldiers
whose eyes were fixed on Enjolras, had not even noticed
Grantaire, and the sergeant was preparing to repeat
his order: “Take aim!” when all at
once, they heard a strong voice shout beside them:
“Long live the Republic! I’m one
of them.”
Grantaire had risen. The immense
gleam of the whole combat which he had missed, and
in which he had had no part, appeared in the brilliant
glance of the transfigured drunken man.
He repeated: “Long live
the Republic!” crossed the room with a firm
stride and placed himself in front of the guns beside
Enjolras.
“Finish both of us at one blow,” said
he.
And turning gently to Enjolras, he said to him:
“Do you permit it?”
Enjolras pressed his hand with a smile.
This smile was not ended when the report resounded.
Enjolras, pierced by eight bullets,
remained leaning against the wall, as though the balls
had nailed him there. Only, his head was bowed.
Grantaire fell at his feet, as though struck by a
thunderbolt.
A few moments later, the soldiers
dislodged the last remaining insurgents, who had taken
refuge at the top of the house. They fired into
the attic through a wooden lattice. They fought
under the very roof. They flung bodies, some
of them still alive, out through the windows.
Two light-infantrymen, who tried to lift the shattered
omnibus, were slain by two shots fired from the attic.
A man in a blouse was flung down from it, with a bayonet
wound in the abdomen, and breathed his last on the
ground. A soldier and an insurgent slipped together
on the sloping slates of the roof, and, as they would
not release each other, they fell, clasped in a ferocious
embrace. A similar conflict went on in the cellar.
Shouts, shots, a fierce trampling. Then silence.
The barricade was captured.
The soldiers began to search the houses
round about, and to pursue the fugitives.
Chapter XXIV
prisoner
Marius was, in fact, a prisoner.
The hand which had seized him from
behind and whose grasp he had felt at the moment of
his fall and his loss of consciousness was that of
Jean Valjean.
Jean Valjean had taken no other part
in the combat than to expose himself in it. Had
it not been for him, no one, in that supreme phase
of agony, would have thought of the wounded. Thanks
to him, everywhere present in the carnage, like a
providence, those who fell were picked up, transported
to the tap-room, and cared for. In the intervals,
he reappeared on the barricade. But nothing which
could resemble a blow, an attack or even personal
defence proceeded from his hands. He held his
peace and lent succor. Moreover he had received
only a few scratches. The bullets would have
none of him. If suicide formed part of what he
had meditated on coming to this sepulchre, to that
spot, he had not succeeded. But we doubt whether
he had thought of suicide, an irreligious act.
Jean Valjean, in the thick cloud of
the combat, did not appear to see Marius; the truth
is, that he never took his eyes from the latter.
When a shot laid Marius low, Jean Valjean leaped forward
with the agility of a tiger, fell upon him as on his
prey, and bore him off.
The whirlwind of the attack was, at
that moment, so violently concentrated upon Enjolras
and upon the door of the wine-shop, that no one saw
Jean Valjean sustaining the fainting Marius in his
arms, traverse the unpaved field of the barricade
and disappear behind the angle of the Corinthe building.
The reader will recall this angle
which formed a sort of cape on the street; it afforded
shelter from the bullets, the grape-shot, and all
eyes, and a few square feet of space. There is
sometimes a chamber which does not burn in the midst
of a conflagration, and in the midst of raging seas,
beyond a promontory or at the extremity of a blind
alley of shoals, a tranquil nook. It was in this
sort of fold in the interior trapezium of the barricade,
that Eponine had breathed her last.
There Jean Valjean halted, let Marius
slide to the ground, placed his back against the wall,
and cast his eyes about him.
The situation was alarming.
For an instant, for two or three perhaps,
this bit of wall was a shelter, but how was he to
escape from this massacre? He recalled the anguish
which he had suffered in the Rue Polonceau eight years
before, and in what manner he had contrived to make
his escape; it was difficult then, to-day it was impossible.
He had before him that deaf and implacable house,
six stories in height, which appeared to be inhabited
only by a dead man leaning out of his window; he had
on his right the rather low barricade, which shut
off the Rue de la Petite Truanderie;
to pass this obstacle seemed easy, but beyond the crest
of the barrier a line of bayonets was visible.
The troops of the line were posted on the watch behind
that barricade. It was evident, that to pass the
barricade was to go in quest of the fire of the platoon,
and that any head which should run the risk of lifting
itself above the top of that wall of stones would
serve as a target for sixty shots. On his left
he had the field of battle. Death lurked round
the corner of that wall.
What was to be done?
Only a bird could have extricated itself from this
predicament.
And it was necessary to decide on
the instant, to devise some expedient, to come to
some decision. Fighting was going on a few paces
away; fortunately, all were raging around a single
point, the door of the wine-shop; but if it should
occur to one soldier, to one single soldier, to turn
the corner of the house, or to attack him on the flank,
all was over.
Jean Valjean gazed at the house facing
him, he gazed at the barricade at one side of him,
then he looked at the ground, with the violence of
the last extremity, bewildered, and as though he would
have liked to pierce a hole there with his eyes.
By dint of staring, something vaguely
striking in such an agony began to assume form and
outline at his feet, as though it had been a power
of glance which made the thing desired unfold.
A few paces distant he perceived, at the base of the
small barrier so pitilessly guarded and watched on
the exterior, beneath a disordered mass of paving-stones
which partly concealed it, an iron grating, placed
flat and on a level with the soil. This grating,
made of stout, transverse bars, was about two feet
square. The frame of paving-stones which supported
it had been torn up, and it was, as it were, unfastened.
Through the bars a view could be had
of a dark aperture, something like the flue of a chimney,
or the pipe of a cistern. Jean Valjean darted
forward. His old art of escape rose to his brain
like an illumination. To thrust aside the stones,
to raise the grating, to lift Marius, who was as inert
as a dead body, upon his shoulders, to descend, with
this burden on his loins, and with the aid of his
elbows and knees into that sort of well, fortunately
not very deep, to let the heavy trap, upon which the
loosened stones rolled down afresh, fall into its place
behind him, to gain his footing on a flagged surface
three metres below the surface, all this
was executed like that which one does in dreams, with
the strength of a giant and the rapidity of an eagle;
this took only a few minutes.
Jean Valjean found himself with Marius,
who was still unconscious, in a sort of long, subterranean
corridor.
There reigned profound peace, absolute silence, night.
The impression which he had formerly
experienced when falling from the wall into the convent
recurred to him. Only, what he was carrying to-day
was not Cosette; it was Marius. He could barely
hear the formidable tumult in the wine-shop, taken
by assault, like a vague murmur overhead.