





The Parisians who nowadays on entering on the Rue Rambuteau at the end
near the Halles, notice on their right, opposite the Rue Mondétour, a
basket-maker’s shop having for its sign a basket in the form of
Napoleon the Great with this inscription:—

NAPOLEON IS MADE
WHOLLY OF WILLOW,


have no suspicion of the terrible scenes which this very spot witnessed
hardly thirty years ago.

It was there that lay the Rue de la Chanvrerie, which ancient deeds
spell Chanverrerie, and the celebrated public-house called _Corinthe_.

The reader will remember all that has been said about the barricade
effected at this point, and eclipsed, by the way, by the barricade
Saint-Merry. It was on this famous barricade of the Rue de la
Chanvrerie, now fallen into profound obscurity, that we are about to
shed a little light.

May we be permitted to recur, for the sake of clearness in the recital,
to the simple means which we have already employed in the case of
Waterloo. Persons who wish to picture to themselves in a tolerably
exact manner the constitution of the houses which stood at that epoch
near the Pointe Saint-Eustache, at the northeast angle of the Halles of
Paris, where to-day lies the embouchure of the Rue Rambuteau, have only
to imagine an N touching the Rue Saint-Denis with its summit and the
Halles with its base, and whose two vertical bars should form the Rue
de la Grande-Truanderie, and the Rue de la Chanvrerie, and whose
transverse bar should be formed by the Rue de la Petite-Truanderie. The
old Rue Mondétour cut the three strokes of the N at the most crooked
angles. So that the labyrinthine confusion of these four streets
sufficed to form, on a space three fathoms square, between the Halles
and the Rue Saint-Denis on the one hand, and between the Rue du Cygne
and the Rue des Prêcheurs on the other, seven islands of houses, oddly
cut up, of varying sizes, placed crosswise and hap-hazard, and barely
separated, like the blocks of stone in a dock, by narrow crannies.

We say narrow crannies, and we can give no more just idea of those
dark, contracted, many-angled alleys, lined with eight-story buildings.
These buildings were so decrepit that, in the Rue de la Chanvrerie and
the Rue de la Petite-Truanderie, the fronts were shored up with beams
running from one house to another. The street was narrow and the gutter
broad, the pedestrian there walked on a pavement that was always wet,
skirting little stalls resembling cellars, big posts encircled with
iron hoops, excessive heaps of refuse, and gates armed with enormous,
century-old gratings. The Rue Rambuteau has devastated all that.

The name of Mondétour paints marvellously well the sinuosities of that
whole set of streets. A little further on, they are found still better
expressed by the _Rue Pirouette_, which ran into the Rue Mondétour.

The passer-by who got entangled from the Rue Saint-Denis in the Rue de
la Chanvrerie beheld it gradually close in before him as though he had
entered an elongated funnel. At the end of this street, which was very
short, he found further passage barred in the direction of the Halles
by a tall row of houses, and he would have thought himself in a blind
alley, had he not perceived on the right and left two dark cuts through
which he could make his escape. This was the Rue Mondétour, which on
one side ran into the Rue de Prêcheurs, and on the other into the Rue
du Cygne and the Petite-Truanderie. At the bottom of this sort of
cul-de-sac, at the angle of the cutting on the right, there was to be
seen a house which was not so tall as the rest, and which formed a sort
of cape in the street. It is in this house, of two stories only, that
an illustrious wine-shop had been merrily installed three hundred years
before. This tavern created a joyous noise in the very spot which old
Theophilus described in the following couplet:—

Là branle le squelette horrible
D’un pauvre amant qui se pendit.47


The situation was good, and tavern-keepers succeeded each other there,
from father to son.

In the time of Mathurin Regnier, this cabaret was called the
_Pot-aux-Roses_, and as the rebus was then in fashion, it had for its
sign-board, a post (_poteau_) painted rose-color. In the last century,
the worthy Natoire, one of the fantastic masters nowadays despised by
the stiff school, having got drunk many times in this wine-shop at the
very table where Regnier had drunk his fill, had painted, by way of
gratitude, a bunch of Corinth grapes on the pink post. The keeper of
the cabaret, in his joy, had changed his device and had caused to be
placed in gilt letters beneath the bunch these words: “At the Bunch of
Corinth Grapes” (_“Au Raisin de Corinthe”_). Hence the name of
Corinthe. Nothing is more natural to drunken men than ellipses. The
ellipsis is the zig-zag of the phrase. Corinthe gradually dethroned the
Pot-aux-Roses. The last proprietor of the dynasty, Father Hucheloup, no
longer acquainted even with the tradition, had the post painted blue.

A room on the ground floor, where the bar was situated, one on the
first floor containing a billiard-table, a wooden spiral staircase
piercing the ceiling, wine on the tables, smoke on the walls, candles
in broad daylight,—this was the style of this cabaret. A staircase with
a trap-door in the lower room led to the cellar. On the second floor
were the lodgings of the Hucheloup family. They were reached by a
staircase which was a ladder rather than a staircase, and had for their
entrance only a private door in the large room on the first floor.
Under the roof, in two mansard attics, were the nests for the servants.
The kitchen shared the ground floor with the tap-room.

Father Hucheloup had, possibly, been born a chemist, but the fact is
that he was a cook; people did not confine themselves to drinking alone
in his wine-shop, they also ate there. Hucheloup had invented a capital
thing which could be eaten nowhere but in his house, stuffed carps,
which he called _carpes au gras_. These were eaten by the light of a
tallow candle or of a lamp of the time of Louis XVI., on tables to
which were nailed waxed cloths in lieu of table-cloths. People came
thither from a distance. Hucheloup, one fine morning, had seen fit to
notify passers-by of this “specialty”; he had dipped a brush in a pot
of black paint, and as he was an orthographer on his own account, as
well as a cook after his own fashion, he had improvised on his wall
this remarkable inscription:—

CARPES HO GRAS.

One winter, the rain-storms and the showers had taken a fancy to
obliterate the S which terminated the first word, and the G which began
the third; this is what remained:—

CARPE HO RAS.

Time and rain assisting, a humble gastronomical announcement had become
a profound piece of advice.

In this way it came about, that though he knew no French, Father
Hucheloup understood Latin, that he had evoked philosophy from his
kitchen, and that, desirous simply of effacing Lent, he had equalled
Horace. And the striking thing about it was, that that also meant:
“Enter my wine-shop.”


Nothing of all this is in existence now. The Mondétour labyrinth was
disembowelled and widely opened in 1847, and probably no longer exists
at the present moment. The Rue de la Chanvrerie and Corinthe have
disappeared beneath the pavement of the Rue Rambuteau.

As we have already said, Corinthe was the meeting-place if not the
rallying-point, of Courfeyrac and his friends. It was Grantaire who had
discovered Corinthe. He had entered it on account of the _Carpe horas_,
and had returned thither on account of the _Carpes au gras_. There they
drank, there they ate, there they shouted; they did not pay much, they
paid badly, they did not pay at all, but they were always welcome.
Father Hucheloup was a jovial host.

Hucheloup, that amiable man, as was just said, was a wine-shop-keeper
with a moustache; an amusing variety. He always had an ill-tempered
air, seemed to wish to intimidate his customers, grumbled at the people
who entered his establishment, and had rather the mien of seeking a
quarrel with them than of serving them with soup. And yet, we insist
upon the word, people were always welcome there. This oddity had
attracted customers to his shop, and brought him young men, who said to
each other: “Come hear Father Hucheloup growl.” He had been a
fencing-master. All of a sudden, he would burst out laughing. A big
voice, a good fellow. He had a comic foundation under a tragic
exterior, he asked nothing better than to frighten you, very much like
those snuff-boxes which are in the shape of a pistol. The detonation
makes one sneeze.

Mother Hucheloup, his wife, was a bearded and a very homely creature.

About 1830, Father Hucheloup died. With him disappeared the secret of
stuffed carps. His inconsolable widow continued to keep the wine-shop.
But the cooking deteriorated, and became execrable; the wine, which had
always been bad, became fearfully bad. Nevertheless, Courfeyrac and his
friends continued to go to Corinthe,—out of pity, as Bossuet said.

The Widow Hucheloup was breathless and misshapen and given to rustic
recollections. She deprived them of their flatness by her
pronunciation. She had a way of her own of saying things, which spiced
her reminiscences of the village and of her springtime. It had formerly
been her delight, so she affirmed, to hear the _loups-de-gorge_
(_rouges-gorges_) _chanter dans les ogrepines_ (_aubépines_)—to hear
the redbreasts sing in the hawthorn-trees.

The hall on the first floor, where “the restaurant” was situated, was a
large and long apartment encumbered with stools, chairs, benches, and
tables, and with a crippled, lame, old billiard-table. It was reached
by a spiral staircase which terminated in the corner of the room at a
square hole like the hatchway of a ship.

This room, lighted by a single narrow window, and by a lamp that was
always burning, had the air of a garret. All the four-footed furniture
comported itself as though it had but three legs—the whitewashed walls
had for their only ornament the following quatrain in honor of Mame
Hucheloup:—

Elle étonne à dix pas, elle épouvente à deux,
Une verrue habite en son nez hasardeux;
On tremble à chaque instant qu’elle ne vous la mouche
Et qu’un beau jour son nez ne tombe dans sa bouche.48


This was scrawled in charcoal on the wall.

Mame Hucheloup, a good likeness, went and came from morning till night
before this quatrain with the most perfect tranquillity. Two
serving-maids, named Matelote and Gibelotte,49 and who had never been
known by any other names, helped Mame Hucheloup to set on the tables
the jugs of poor wine, and the various broths which were served to the
hungry patrons in earthenware bowls. Matelote, large, plump, redhaired,
and noisy, the favorite ex-sultana of the defunct Hucheloup, was
homelier than any mythological monster, be it what it may; still, as it
becomes the servant to always keep in the rear of the mistress, she was
less homely than Mame Hucheloup. Gibelotte, tall, delicate, white with
a lymphatic pallor, with circles round her eyes, and drooping lids,
always languid and weary, afflicted with what may be called chronic
lassitude, the first up in the house and the last in bed, waited on
every one, even the other maid, silently and gently, smiling through
her fatigue with a vague and sleepy smile.

Before entering the restaurant room, the visitor read on the door the
following line written there in chalk by Courfeyrac:—

Régale si tu peux et mange si tu l’oses.50





Laigle de Meaux, as the reader knows, lived more with Joly than
elsewhere. He had a lodging, as a bird has one on a branch. The two
friends lived together, ate together, slept together. They had
everything in common, even Musichetta, to some extent. They were, what
the subordinate monks who accompany monks are called, _bini_. On the
morning of the 5th of June, they went to Corinthe to breakfast. Joly,
who was all stuffed up, had a catarrh which Laigle was beginning to
share. Laigle’s coat was threadbare, but Joly was well dressed.

It was about nine o’clock in the morning, when they opened the door of
Corinthe.

They ascended to the first floor.

Matelote and Gibelotte received them.

“Oysters, cheese, and ham,” said Laigle.

And they seated themselves at a table.

The wine-shop was empty; there was no one there but themselves.

Gibelotte, knowing Joly and Laigle, set a bottle of wine on the table.

While they were busy with their first oysters, a head appeared at the
hatchway of the staircase, and a voice said:—

“I am passing by. I smell from the street a delicious odor of Brie
cheese. I enter.” It was Grantaire.

Grantaire took a stool and drew up to the table.

At the sight of Grantaire, Gibelotte placed two bottles of wine on the
table.

That made three.

“Are you going to drink those two bottles?” Laigle inquired of
Grantaire.

Grantaire replied:—

“All are ingenious, thou alone art ingenuous. Two bottles never yet
astonished a man.”


The others had begun by eating, Grantaire began by drinking. Half a
bottle was rapidly gulped down.

“So you have a hole in your stomach?” began Laigle again.

“You have one in your elbow,” said Grantaire.

And after having emptied his glass, he added:—

“Ah, by the way, Laigle of the funeral oration, your coat is old.”


“I should hope so,” retorted Laigle. “That’s why we get on well
together, my coat and I. It has acquired all my folds, it does not bind
me anywhere, it is moulded on my deformities, it falls in with all my
movements, I am only conscious of it because it keeps me warm. Old
coats are just like old friends.”


“That’s true,” ejaculated Joly, striking into the dialogue, “an old
goat is an old abi” (_ami_, friend).

“Especially in the mouth of a man whose head is stuffed up,” said
Grantaire.

“Grantaire,” demanded Laigle, “have you just come from the boulevard?”


“No.”


“We have just seen the head of the procession pass, Joly and I.”


“It’s a marvellous sight,” said Joly.

“How quiet this street is!” exclaimed Laigle. “Who would suspect that
Paris was turned upside down? How plainly it is to be seen that in
former days there were nothing but convents here! In this neighborhood!
Du Breul and Sauval give a list of them, and so does the Abbé Lebeuf.
They were all round here, they fairly swarmed, booted and barefooted,
shaven, bearded, gray, black, white, Franciscans, Minims, Capuchins,
Carmelites, Little Augustines, Great Augustines, old Augustines—there
was no end of them.”


“Don’t let’s talk of monks,” interrupted Grantaire, “it makes one want
to scratch one’s self.”


Then he exclaimed:—

“Bouh! I’ve just swallowed a bad oyster. Now hypochondria is taking
possession of me again. The oysters are spoiled, the servants are ugly.
I hate the human race. I just passed through the Rue Richelieu, in
front of the big public library. That pile of oyster-shells which is
called a library is disgusting even to think of. What paper! What ink!
What scrawling! And all that has been written! What rascal was it who
said that man was a featherless biped?51 And then, I met a pretty girl
of my acquaintance, who is as beautiful as the spring, worthy to be
called Floréal, and who is delighted, enraptured, as happy as the
angels, because a wretch yesterday, a frightful banker all spotted with
small-pox, deigned to take a fancy to her! Alas! woman keeps on the
watch for a protector as much as for a lover; cats chase mice as well
as birds. Two months ago that young woman was virtuous in an attic, she
adjusted little brass rings in the eyelet-holes of corsets, what do you
call it? She sewed, she had a camp bed, she dwelt beside a pot of
flowers, she was contented. Now here she is a bankeress. This
transformation took place last night. I met the victim this morning in
high spirits. The hideous point about it is, that the jade is as pretty
to-day as she was yesterday. Her financier did not show in her face.
Roses have this advantage or disadvantage over women, that the traces
left upon them by caterpillars are visible. Ah! there is no morality on
earth. I call to witness the myrtle, the symbol of love, the laurel,
the symbol of air, the olive, that ninny, the symbol of peace, the
apple-tree which came nearest rangling Adam with its pips, and the
fig-tree, the grandfather of petticoats. As for right, do you know what
right is? The Gauls covet Clusium, Rome protects Clusium, and demands
what wrong Clusium has done to them. Brennus answers: ‘The wrong that
Alba did to you, the wrong that Fidenæ did to you, the wrong that the
Eques, the Volsci, and the Sabines have done to you. They were your
neighbors. The Clusians are ours. We understand neighborliness just as
you do. You have stolen Alba, we shall take Clusium.’ Rome said: ‘You
shall not take Clusium.’ Brennus took Rome. Then he cried: ‘Væ victis!’
That is what right is. Ah! what beasts of prey there are in this world!
What eagles! It makes my flesh creep.”


He held out his glass to Joly, who filled it, then he drank and went
on, having hardly been interrupted by this glass of wine, of which no
one, not even himself, had taken any notice:—

“Brennus, who takes Rome, is an eagle; the banker who takes the
grisette is an eagle. There is no more modesty in the one case than in
the other. So we believe in nothing. There is but one reality: drink.
Whatever your opinion may be in favor of the lean cock, like the Canton
of Uri, or in favor of the fat cock, like the Canton of Glaris, it
matters little, drink. You talk to me of the boulevard, of that
procession, _et cætera, et cætera_. Come now, is there going to be
another revolution? This poverty of means on the part of the good God
astounds me. He has to keep greasing the groove of events every moment.
There is a hitch, it won’t work. Quick, a revolution! The good God has
his hands perpetually black with that cart-grease. If I were in his
place, I’d be perfectly simple about it, I would not wind up my
mechanism every minute, I’d lead the human race in a straightforward
way, I’d weave matters mesh by mesh, without breaking the thread, I
would have no provisional arrangements, I would have no extraordinary
repertory. What the rest of you call progress advances by means of two
motors, men and events. But, sad to say, from time to time, the
exceptional becomes necessary. The ordinary troupe suffices neither for
event nor for men: among men geniuses are required, among events
revolutions. Great accidents are the law; the order of things cannot do
without them; and, judging from the apparition of comets, one would be
tempted to think that Heaven itself finds actors needed for its
performance. At the moment when one expects it the least, God placards
a meteor on the wall of the firmament. Some queer star turns up,
underlined by an enormous tail. And that causes the death of Cæsar.
Brutus deals him a blow with a knife, and God a blow with a comet.
_Crac_, and behold an aurora borealis, behold a revolution, behold a
great man; ’93 in big letters, Napoleon on guard, the comet of 1811 at
the head of the poster. Ah! what a beautiful blue theatre all studded
with unexpected flashes! Boum! Boum! extraordinary show! Raise your
eyes, boobies. Everything is in disorder, the star as well as the
drama. Good God, it is too much and not enough. These resources,
gathered from exception, seem magnificence and poverty. My friends,
Providence has come down to expedients. What does a revolution prove?
That God is in a quandry. He effects a _coup d’état_ because he, God,
has not been able to make both ends meet. In fact, this confirms me in
my conjectures as to Jehovah’s fortune; and when I see so much distress
in heaven and on earth, from the bird who has not a grain of millet to
myself without a hundred thousand livres of income, when I see human
destiny, which is very badly worn, and even royal destiny, which is
threadbare, witness the Prince de Condé hung, when I see winter, which
is nothing but a rent in the zenith through which the wind blows, when
I see so many rags even in the perfectly new purple of the morning on
the crests of hills, when I see the drops of dew, those mock pearls,
when I see the frost, that paste, when I see humanity ripped apart and
events patched up, and so many spots on the sun and so many holes in
the moon, when I see so much misery everywhere, I suspect that God is
not rich. The appearance exists, it is true, but I feel that he is hard
up. He gives a revolution as a tradesman whose money-box is empty gives
a ball. God must not be judged from appearances. Beneath the gilding of
heaven I perceive a poverty-stricken universe. Creation is bankrupt.
That is why I am discontented. Here it is the 4th of June, it is almost
night; ever since this morning I have been waiting for daylight to
come; it has not come, and I bet that it won’t come all day. This is
the inexactness of an ill-paid clerk. Yes, everything is badly
arranged, nothing fits anything else, this old world is all warped, I
take my stand on the opposition, everything goes awry; the universe is
a tease. It’s like children, those who want them have none, and those
who don’t want them have them. Total: I’m vexed. Besides, Laigle de
Meaux, that bald-head, offends my sight. It humiliates me to think that
I am of the same age as that baldy. However, I criticise, but I do not
insult. The universe is what it is. I speak here without evil intent
and to ease my conscience. Receive, Eternal Father, the assurance of my
distinguished consideration. Ah! by all the saints of Olympus and by
all the gods of paradise, I was not intended to be a Parisian, that is
to say, to rebound forever, like a shuttlecock between two battledores,
from the group of the loungers to the group of the roysterers. I was
made to be a Turk, watching oriental houris all day long, executing
those exquisite Egyptian dances, as sensuous as the dream of a chaste
man, or a Beauceron peasant, or a Venetian gentleman surrounded by
gentlewoman, or a petty German prince, furnishing the half of a
foot-soldier to the Germanic confederation, and occupying his leisure
with drying his breeches on his hedge, that is to say, his frontier.
Those are the positions for which I was born! Yes, I have said a Turk,
and I will not retract. I do not understand how people can habitually
take Turks in bad part; Mohammed had his good points; respect for the
inventor of seraglios with houris and paradises with odalisques! Let us
not insult Mohammedanism, the only religion which is ornamented with a
hen-roost! Now, I insist on a drink. The earth is a great piece of
stupidity. And it appears that they are going to fight, all those
imbeciles, and to break each other’s profiles and to massacre each
other in the heart of summer, in the month of June, when they might go
off with a creature on their arm, to breathe the immense heaps of
new-mown hay in the meadows! Really, people do commit altogether too
many follies. An old broken lantern which I have just seen at a
bric-à-brac merchant’s suggests a reflection to my mind; it is time to
enlighten the human race. Yes, behold me sad again. That’s what comes
of swallowing an oyster and a revolution the wrong way! I am growing
melancholy once more. Oh! frightful old world. People strive, turn each
other out, prostitute themselves, kill each other, and get used to it!”


And Grantaire, after this fit of eloquence, had a fit of coughing,
which was well earned.

“À propos of revolution,” said Joly, “it is decidedly abberent that
Barius is in lub.”


“Does any one know with whom?” demanded Laigle.

“Do.”


“No?”


“Do! I tell you.”


“Marius’ love affairs!” exclaimed Grantaire. “I can imagine it. Marius
is a fog, and he must have found a vapor. Marius is of the race of
poets. He who says poet, says fool, madman, _Tymbræus Apollo_. Marius
and his Marie, or his Marion, or his Maria, or his Mariette. They must
make a queer pair of lovers. I know just what it is like. Ecstasies in
which they forget to kiss. Pure on earth, but joined in heaven. They
are souls possessed of senses. They lie among the stars.”


Grantaire was attacking his second bottle and, possibly, his second
harangue, when a new personage emerged from the square aperture of the
stairs. It was a boy less than ten years of age, ragged, very small,
yellow, with an odd phiz, a vivacious eye, an enormous amount of hair
drenched with rain, and wearing a contented air.

The child unhesitatingly making his choice among the three, addressed
himself to Laigle de Meaux.

“Are you Monsieur Bossuet?”


“That is my nickname,” replied Laigle. “What do you want with me?”


“This. A tall blonde fellow on the boulevard said to me: ‘Do you know
Mother Hucheloup?’ I said: ‘Yes, Rue Chanvrerie, the old man’s widow;’
he said to me: ‘Go there. There you will find M. Bossuet. Tell him from
me: “A B C”.’ It’s a joke that they’re playing on you, isn’t it. He
gave me ten sous.”


“Joly, lend me ten sous,” said Laigle; and, turning to Grantaire:
“Grantaire, lend me ten sous.”


This made twenty sous, which Laigle handed to the lad.

“Thank you, sir,” said the urchin.

“What is your name?” inquired Laigle.

“Navet, Gavroche’s friend.”


“Stay with us,” said Laigle.

“Breakfast with us,” said Grantaire.

The child replied:—

“I can’t, I belong in the procession, I’m the one to shout ‘Down with
Polignac!’”


And executing a prolonged scrape of his foot behind him, which is the
most respectful of all possible salutes, he took his departure.

The child gone, Grantaire took the word:—

“That is the pure-bred gamin. There are a great many varieties of the
gamin species. The notary’s gamin is called Skip-the-Gutter, the cook’s
gamin is called a scullion, the baker’s gamin is called a _mitron_, the
lackey’s gamin is called a groom, the marine gamin is called the
cabin-boy, the soldier’s gamin is called the drummer-boy, the painter’s
gamin is called paint-grinder, the tradesman’s gamin is called an
errand-boy, the courtesan gamin is called the minion, the kingly gamin
is called the dauphin, the god gamin is called the bambino.”


In the meantime, Laigle was engaged in reflection; he said half aloud:—

“A B C, that is to say: the burial of Lamarque.”


“The tall blonde,” remarked Grantaire, “is Enjolras, who is sending you
a warning.”


“Shall we go?” ejaculated Bossuet.

“It’s raiding,” said Joly. “I have sworn to go through fire, but not
through water. I don’t wand to ged a gold.”


“I shall stay here,” said Grantaire. “I prefer a breakfast to a
hearse.”


“Conclusion: we remain,” said Laigle. “Well, then, let us drink.
Besides, we might miss the funeral without missing the riot.”


“Ah! the riot, I am with you!” cried Joly.

Laigle rubbed his hands.

“Now we’re going to touch up the revolution of 1830. As a matter of
fact, it does hurt the people along the seams.”


“I don’t think much of your revolution,” said Grantaire. “I don’t
execrate this Government. It is the crown tempered by the cotton
night-cap. It is a sceptre ending in an umbrella. In fact, I think that
to-day, with the present weather, Louis Philippe might utilize his
royalty in two directions, he might extend the tip of the sceptre end
against the people, and open the umbrella end against heaven.”


The room was dark, large clouds had just finished the extinction of
daylight. There was no one in the wine-shop, or in the street, every
one having gone off “to watch events.”


“Is it midday or midnight?” cried Bossuet. “You can’t see your hand
before your face. Gibelotte, fetch a light.”


Grantaire was drinking in a melancholy way.

“Enjolras disdains me,” he muttered. “Enjolras said: ‘Joly is ill,
Grantaire is drunk.’ It was to Bossuet that he sent Navet. If he had
come for me, I would have followed him. So much the worse for Enjolras!
I won’t go to his funeral.”


This resolution once arrived at, Bossuet, Joly, and Grantaire did not
stir from the wine-shop. By two o’clock in the afternoon, the table at
which they sat was covered with empty bottles. Two candles were burning
on it, one in a flat copper candlestick which was perfectly green, the
other in the neck of a cracked carafe. Grantaire had seduced Joly and
Bossuet to wine; Bossuet and Joly had conducted Grantaire back towards
cheerfulness.

As for Grantaire, he had got beyond wine, that merely moderate inspirer
of dreams, ever since midday. Wine enjoys only a conventional
popularity with serious drinkers. There is, in fact, in the matter of
inebriety, white magic and black magic; wine is only white magic.
Grantaire was a daring drinker of dreams. The blackness of a terrible
fit of drunkenness yawning before him, far from arresting him,
attracted him. He had abandoned the bottle and taken to the beerglass.
The beer-glass is the abyss. Having neither opium nor hashish on hand,
and being desirous of filling his brain with twilight, he had had
recourse to that fearful mixture of brandy, stout, absinthe, which
produces the most terrible of lethargies. It is of these three vapors,
beer, brandy, and absinthe, that the lead of the soul is composed. They
are three grooms; the celestial butterfly is drowned in them; and there
are formed there in a membranous smoke, vaguely condensed into the wing
of the bat, three mute furies, Nightmare, Night, and Death, which hover
about the slumbering Psyche.

Grantaire had not yet reached that lamentable phase; far from it. He
was tremendously gay, and Bossuet and Joly retorted. They clinked
glasses. Grantaire added to the eccentric accentuation of words and
ideas, a peculiarity of gesture; he rested his left fist on his knee
with dignity, his arm forming a right angle, and, with cravat untied,
seated astride a stool, his full glass in his right hand, he hurled
solemn words at the big maid-servant Matelote:—

“Let the doors of the palace be thrown open! Let every one be a member
of the French Academy and have the right to embrace Madame Hucheloup.
Let us drink.”


And turning to Madame Hucheloup, he added:—

“Woman ancient and consecrated by use, draw near that I may contemplate
thee!”


And Joly exclaimed:—

“Matelote and Gibelotte, dod’t gib Grantaire anything more to drink. He
has already devoured, since this bording, in wild prodigality, two
francs and ninety-five centibes.”


And Grantaire began again:—

“Who has been unhooking the stars without my permission, and putting
them on the table in the guise of candles?”


Bossuet, though very drunk, preserved his equanimity.

He was seated on the sill of the open window, wetting his back in the
falling rain, and gazing at his two friends.

All at once, he heard a tumult behind him, hurried footsteps, cries of
“To arms!” He turned round and saw in the Rue Saint-Denis, at the end
of the Rue de la Chanvrerie, Enjolras passing, gun in hand, and
Gavroche with his pistol, Feuilly with his sword, Courfeyrac with his
sword, and Jean Prouvaire with his blunderbuss, Combeferre with his
gun, Bahorel with his gun, and the whole armed and stormy rabble which
was following them.

The Rue de la Chanvrerie was not more than a gunshot long. Bossuet
improvised a speaking-trumpet from his two hands placed around his
mouth, and shouted:—

“Courfeyrac! Courfeyrac! Hohée!”


Courfeyrac heard the shout, caught sight of Bossuet, and advanced a few
paces into the Rue de la Chanvrerie, shouting: “What do you want?”
which crossed a “Where are you going?”


“To make a barricade,” replied Courfeyrac.

“Well, here! This is a good place! Make it here!”


“That’s true, Aigle,” said Courfeyrac.

And at a signal from Courfeyrac, the mob flung themselves into the Rue
de la Chanvrerie.






The spot was, in fact, admirably adapted, the entrance to the street
widened out, the other extremity narrowed together into a pocket
without exit. Corinthe created an obstacle, the Rue Mondétour was
easily barricaded on the right and the left, no attack was possible
except from the Rue Saint-Denis, that is to say, in front, and in full
sight. Bossuet had the comprehensive glance of a fasting Hannibal.

Terror had seized on the whole street at the irruption of the mob.
There was not a passer-by who did not get out of sight. In the space of
a flash of lightning, in the rear, to right and left, shops, stables,
area-doors, windows, blinds, attic skylights, shutters of every
description were closed, from the ground floor to the roof. A terrified
old woman fixed a mattress in front of her window on two clothes-poles
for drying linen, in order to deaden the effect of musketry. The
wine-shop alone remained open; and that for a very good reason, that
the mob had rushed into it.—“Ah my God! Ah my God!” sighed Mame
Hucheloup.

Bossuet had gone down to meet Courfeyrac.

Joly, who had placed himself at the window, exclaimed:—

“Courfeyrac, you ought to have brought an umbrella. You will gatch
gold.”


In the meantime, in the space of a few minutes, twenty iron bars had
been wrenched from the grated front of the wine-shop, ten fathoms of
street had been unpaved; Gavroche and Bahorel had seized in its
passage, and overturned, the dray of a lime-dealer named Anceau; this
dray contained three barrels of lime, which they placed beneath the
piles of paving-stones: Enjolras raised the cellar trap, and all the
widow Hucheloup’s empty casks were used to flank the barrels of lime;
Feuilly, with his fingers skilled in painting the delicate sticks of
fans, had backed up the barrels and the dray with two massive heaps of
blocks of rough stone. Blocks which were improvised like the rest and
procured no one knows where. The beams which served as props were torn
from the neighboring house-fronts and laid on the casks. When Bossuet
and Courfeyrac turned round, half the street was already barred with a
rampart higher than a man. There is nothing like the hand of the
populace for building everything that is built by demolishing.

Matelote and Gibelotte had mingled with the workers. Gibelotte went and
came loaded with rubbish. Her lassitude helped on the barricade. She
served the barricade as she would have served wine, with a sleepy air.

An omnibus with two white horses passed the end of the street.

Bossuet strode over the paving-stones, ran to it, stopped the driver,
made the passengers alight, offered his hand to “the ladies,” dismissed
the conductor, and returned, leading the vehicle and the horses by the
bridle.

“Omnibuses,” said he, “do not pass the Corinthe. _Non licet omnibus
adire Corinthum_.”


An instant later, the horses were unharnessed and went off at their
will, through the Rue Mondétour, and the omnibus lying on its side
completed the bar across the street.

Mame Hucheloup, quite upset, had taken refuge in the first story.

Her eyes were vague, and stared without seeing anything, and she cried
in a low tone. Her terrified shrieks did not dare to emerge from her
throat.

“The end of the world has come,” she muttered.

Joly deposited a kiss on Mame Hucheloup’s fat, red, wrinkled neck, and
said to Grantaire: “My dear fellow, I have always regarded a woman’s
neck as an infinitely delicate thing.”


But Grantaire attained to the highest regions of dithryamb. Matelote
had mounted to the first floor once more, Grantaire seized her round
her waist, and gave vent to long bursts of laughter at the window.

“Matelote is homely!” he cried: “Matelote is of a dream of ugliness!
Matelote is a chimæra. This is the secret of her birth: a Gothic
Pygmalion, who was making gargoyles for cathedrals, fell in love with
one of them, the most horrible, one fine morning. He besought Love to
give it life, and this produced Matelote. Look at her, citizens! She
has chromate-of-lead-colored hair, like Titian’s mistress, and she is a
good girl. I guarantee that she will fight well. Every good girl
contains a hero. As for Mother Hucheloup, she’s an old warrior. Look at
her moustaches! She inherited them from her husband. A hussar indeed!
She will fight too. These two alone will strike terror to the heart of
the banlieue. Comrades, we shall overthrow the government as true as
there are fifteen intermediary acids between margaric acid and formic
acid; however, that is a matter of perfect indifference to me.
Gentlemen, my father always detested me because I could not understand
mathematics. I understand only love and liberty. I am Grantaire, the
good fellow. Having never had any money, I never acquired the habit of
it, and the result is that I have never lacked it; but, if I had been
rich, there would have been no more poor people! You would have seen!
Oh, if the kind hearts only had fat purses, how much better things
would go! I picture myself Jesus Christ with Rothschild’s fortune! How
much good he would do! Matelote, embrace me! You are voluptuous and
timid! You have cheeks which invite the kiss of a sister, and lips
which claim the kiss of a lover.”


“Hold your tongue, you cask!” said Courfeyrac.

Grantaire retorted:—

“I am the capitoul52 and the master of the floral games!”


Enjolras, who was standing on the crest of the barricade, gun in hand,
raised his beautiful, austere face. Enjolras, as the reader knows, had
something of the Spartan and of the Puritan in his composition. He
would have perished at Thermopylæ with Leonidas, and burned at Drogheda
with Cromwell.

“Grantaire,” he shouted, “go get rid of the fumes of your wine
somewhere else than here. This is the place for enthusiasm, not for
drunkenness. Don’t disgrace the barricade!”


This angry speech produced a singular effect on Grantaire. One would
have said that he had had a glass of cold water flung in his face. He
seemed to be rendered suddenly sober.

He sat down, put his elbows on a table near the window, looked at
Enjolras with indescribable gentleness, and said to him:—

“Let me sleep here.”


“Go and sleep somewhere else,” cried Enjolras.

But Grantaire, still keeping his tender and troubled eyes fixed on him,
replied:—

“Let me sleep here,—until I die.”


Enjolras regarded him with disdainful eyes:—

“Grantaire, you are incapable of believing, of thinking, of willing, of
living, and of dying.”


Grantaire replied in a grave tone:—

“You will see.”


He stammered a few more unintelligible words, then his head fell
heavily on the table, and, as is the usual effect of the second period
of inebriety, into which Enjolras had roughly and abruptly thrust him,
an instant later he had fallen asleep.






Bahorel, in ecstasies over the barricade, shouted:—

“Here’s the street in its low-necked dress! How well it looks!”


Courfeyrac, as he demolished the wine-shop to some extent, sought to
console the widowed proprietress.

“Mother Hucheloup, weren’t you complaining the other day because you
had had a notice served on you for infringing the law, because
Gibelotte shook a counterpane out of your window?”


“Yes, my good Monsieur Courfeyrac. Ah! good Heavens, are you going to
put that table of mine in your horror, too? And it was for the
counterpane, and also for a pot of flowers which fell from the attic
window into the street, that the government collected a fine of a
hundred francs. If that isn’t an abomination, what is!”


“Well, Mother Hucheloup, we are avenging you.”


Mother Hucheloup did not appear to understand very clearly the benefit
which she was to derive from these reprisals made on her account. She
was satisfied after the manner of that Arab woman, who, having received
a box on the ear from her husband, went to complain to her father, and
cried for vengeance, saying: “Father, you owe my husband affront for
affront.” The father asked: “On which cheek did you receive the blow?”
“On the left cheek.” The father slapped her right cheek and said: “Now
you are satisfied. Go tell your husband that he boxed my daughter’s
ears, and that I have accordingly boxed his wife’s.”


The rain had ceased. Recruits had arrived. Workmen had brought under
their blouses a barrel of powder, a basket containing bottles of
vitriol, two or three carnival torches, and a basket filled with
fire-pots, “left over from the King’s festival.” This festival was very
recent, having taken place on the 1st of May. It was said that these
munitions came from a grocer in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine named Pépin.
They smashed the only street lantern in the Rue de la Chanvrerie, the
lantern corresponding to one in the Rue Saint-Denis, and all the
lanterns in the surrounding streets, de Mondétour, du Cygne, des
Prêcheurs, and de la Grande and de la Petite-Truanderie.

Enjolras, Combeferre, and Courfeyrac directed everything. Two
barricades were now in process of construction at once, both of them
resting on the Corinthe house and forming a right angle; the larger
shut off the Rue de la Chanvrerie, the other closed the Rue Mondétour,
on the side of the Rue de Cygne. This last barricade, which was very
narrow, was constructed only of casks and paving-stones. There were
about fifty workers on it; thirty were armed with guns; for, on their
way, they had effected a wholesale loan from an armorer’s shop.

Nothing could be more bizarre and at the same time more motley than
this troop. One had a round-jacket, a cavalry sabre, and two
holster-pistols, another was in his shirt-sleeves, with a round hat,
and a powder-horn slung at his side, a third wore a plastron of nine
sheets of gray paper and was armed with a saddler’s awl. There was one
who was shouting: “Let us exterminate them to the last man and die at
the point of our bayonet.” This man had no bayonet. Another spread out
over his coat the cross-belt and cartridge-box of a National Guardsman,
the cover of the cartridge-box being ornamented with this inscription
in red worsted: _Public Order_. There were a great many guns bearing
the numbers of the legions, few hats, no cravats, many bare arms, some
pikes. Add to this, all ages, all sorts of faces, small, pale young
men, and bronzed longshoremen. All were in haste; and as they helped
each other, they discussed the possible chances. That they would
receive succor about three o’clock in the morning—that they were sure
of one regiment, that Paris would rise. Terrible sayings with which was
mingled a sort of cordial joviality. One would have pronounced them
brothers, but they did not know each other’s names. Great perils have
this fine characteristic, that they bring to light the fraternity of
strangers. A fire had been lighted in the kitchen, and there they were
engaged in moulding into bullets, pewter mugs, spoons, forks, and all
the brass table-ware of the establishment. In the midst of it all, they
drank. Caps and buckshot were mixed pell-mell on the tables with
glasses of wine. In the billiard-hall, Mame Hucheloup, Matelote, and
Gibelotte, variously modified by terror, which had stupefied one,
rendered another breathless, and roused the third, were tearing up old
dish-cloths and making lint; three insurgents were assisting them,
three bushy-haired, jolly blades with beards and moustaches, who
plucked away at the linen with the fingers of seamstresses and who made
them tremble.

The man of lofty stature whom Courfeyrac, Combeferre, and Enjolras had
observed at the moment when he joined the mob at the corner of the Rue
des Billettes, was at work on the smaller barricade and was making
himself useful there. Gavroche was working on the larger one. As for
the young man who had been waiting for Courfeyrac at his lodgings, and
who had inquired for M. Marius, he had disappeared at about the time
when the omnibus had been overturned.

Gavroche, completely carried away and radiant, had undertaken to get
everything in readiness. He went, came, mounted, descended, re-mounted,
whistled, and sparkled. He seemed to be there for the encouragement of
all. Had he any incentive? Yes, certainly, his poverty; had he wings?
yes, certainly, his joy. Gavroche was a whirlwind. He was constantly
visible, he was incessantly audible. He filled the air, as he was
everywhere at once. He was a sort of almost irritating ubiquity; no
halt was possible with him. The enormous barricade felt him on its
haunches. He troubled the loungers, he excited the idle, he reanimated
the weary, he grew impatient over the thoughtful, he inspired gayety in
some, and breath in others, wrath in others, movement in all, now
pricking a student, now biting an artisan; he alighted, paused, flew
off again, hovered over the tumult, and the effort, sprang from one
party to another, murmuring and humming, and harassed the whole
company; a fly on the immense revolutionary coach.

Perpetual motion was in his little arms and perpetual clamor in his
little lungs.

“Courage! more paving-stones! more casks! more machines! Where are you
now? A hod of plaster for me to stop this hole with! Your barricade is
very small. It must be carried up. Put everything on it, fling
everything there, stick it all in. Break down the house. A barricade is
Mother Gibou’s tea. Hullo, here’s a glass door.”


This elicited an exclamation from the workers.

“A glass door? what do you expect us to do with a glass door,
tubercle?”


“Hercules yourselves!” retorted Gavroche. “A glass door is an excellent
thing in a barricade. It does not prevent an attack, but it prevents
the enemy taking it. So you’ve never prigged apples over a wall where
there were broken bottles? A glass door cuts the corns of the National
Guard when they try to mount on the barricade. Pardi! glass is a
treacherous thing. Well, you haven’t a very wildly lively imagination,
comrades.”


However, he was furious over his triggerless pistol. He went from one
to another, demanding: “A gun, I want a gun! Why don’t you give me a
gun?”


“Give you a gun!” said Combeferre.

“Come now!” said Gavroche, “why not? I had one in 1830 when we had a
dispute with Charles X.”


Enjolras shrugged his shoulders.

“When there are enough for the men, we will give some to the children.”


Gavroche wheeled round haughtily, and answered:—

“If you are killed before me, I shall take yours.”


“Gamin!” said Enjolras.

“Greenhorn!” said Gavroche.

A dandy who had lost his way and who lounged past the end of the street
created a diversion! Gavroche shouted to him:—

“Come with us, young fellow! well now, don’t we do anything for this
old country of ours?”


The dandy fled.






The journals of the day which said that that _nearly impregnable
structure_, of the barricade of the Rue de la Chanvrerie, as they call
it, reached to the level of the first floor, were mistaken. The fact
is, that it did not exceed an average height of six or seven feet. It
was built in such a manner that the combatants could, at their will,
either disappear behind it or dominate the barrier and even scale its
crest by means of a quadruple row of paving-stones placed on top of
each other and arranged as steps in the interior. On the outside, the
front of the barricade, composed of piles of paving-stones and casks
bound together by beams and planks, which were entangled in the wheels
of Anceau’s dray and of the overturned omnibus, had a bristling and
inextricable aspect.

An aperture large enough to allow a man to pass through had been made
between the wall of the houses and the extremity of the barricade which
was furthest from the wine-shop, so that an exit was possible at this
point. The pole of the omnibus was placed upright and held up with
ropes, and a red flag, fastened to this pole, floated over the
barricade.

The little Mondétour barricade, hidden behind the wine-shop building,
was not visible. The two barricades united formed a veritable redoubt.
Enjolras and Courfeyrac had not thought fit to barricade the other
fragment of the Rue Mondétour which opens through the Rue des Prêcheurs
an issue into the Halles, wishing, no doubt, to preserve a possible
communication with the outside, and not entertaining much fear of an
attack through the dangerous and difficult street of the Rue des
Prêcheurs.

With the exception of this issue which was left free, and which
constituted what Folard in his strategical style would have termed a
branch and taking into account, also, the narrow cutting arranged on
the Rue de la Chanvrerie, the interior of the barricade, where the
wine-shop formed a salient angle, presented an irregular square, closed
on all sides. There existed an interval of twenty paces between the
grand barrier and the lofty houses which formed the background of the
street, so that one might say that the barricade rested on these
houses, all inhabited, but closed from top to bottom.

All this work was performed without any hindrance, in less than an
hour, and without this handful of bold men seeing a single bear-skin
cap or a single bayonet make their appearance. The very bourgeois who
still ventured at this hour of riot to enter the Rue Saint-Denis cast a
glance at the Rue de la Chanvrerie, caught sight of the barricade, and
redoubled their pace.

The two barricades being finished, and the flag run up, a table was
dragged out of the wine-shop; and Courfeyrac mounted on the table.
Enjolras brought the square coffer, and Courfeyrac opened it. This
coffer was filled with cartridges. When the mob saw the cartridges, a
tremor ran through the bravest, and a momentary silence ensued.

Courfeyrac distributed them with a smile.

Each one received thirty cartridges. Many had powder, and set about
making others with the bullets which they had run. As for the barrel of
powder, it stood on a table on one side, near the door, and was held in
reserve.

The alarm beat which ran through all Paris, did not cease, but it had
finally come to be nothing more than a monotonous noise to which they
no longer paid any attention. This noise retreated at times, and again
drew near, with melancholy undulations.

They loaded the guns and carbines, all together, without haste, with
solemn gravity. Enjolras went and stationed three sentinels outside the
barricades, one in the Rue de la Chanvrerie, the second in the Rue des
Prêcheurs, the third at the corner of the Rue de la Petite Truanderie.

Then, the barricades having been built, the posts assigned, the guns
loaded, the sentinels stationed, they waited, alone in those
redoubtable streets through which no one passed any longer, surrounded
by those dumb houses which seemed dead and in which no human movement
palpitated, enveloped in the deepening shades of twilight which was
drawing on, in the midst of that silence through which something could
be felt advancing, and which had about it something tragic and
terrifying, isolated, armed, determined, and tranquil.






During those hours of waiting, what did they do?

We must needs tell, since this is a matter of history.

While the men made bullets and the women lint, while a large saucepan
of melted brass and lead, destined to the bullet-mould smoked over a
glowing brazier, while the sentinels watched, weapon in hand, on the
barricade, while Enjolras, whom it was impossible to divert, kept an
eye on the sentinels, Combeferre, Courfeyrac, Jean Prouvaire, Feuilly,
Bossuet, Joly, Bahorel, and some others, sought each other out and
united as in the most peaceful days of their conversations in their
student life, and, in one corner of this wine-shop which had been
converted into a casement, a couple of paces distant from the redoubt
which they had built, with their carbines loaded and primed resting
against the backs of their chairs, these fine young fellows, so close
to a supreme hour, began to recite love verses.

What verses? These:—

Vous rappelez-vous notre douce vie,
Lorsque nous étions si jeunes tous deux,
Et que nous n’avions au cœur d’autre envie
Que d’être bien mis et d’être amoureux,

Lorsqu’en ajoutant votre âge à mon âge,
Nous ne comptions pas à deux quarante ans,
Et que, dans notre humble et petit ménage,
Tout, même l’hiver, nous était printemps?

Beaux jours! Manuel était fier et sage,
Paris s’asseyait à de saints banquets,
Foy lançait la foudre, et votre corsage
Avait une épingle où je me piquais.

Tout vous contemplait. Avocat sans causes,
Quand je vous menais au Prado dîner,
Vous étiez jolie au point que les roses
Me faisaient l’effet de se retourner.

Je les entendais dire: Est elle belle!
Comme elle sent bon!  Quels cheveux à flots!
Sous son mantelet elle cache une aile,
Son bonnet charmant est à peine éclos.

J’errais avec toi, pressant ton bras souple.
Les passants croyaient que l’amour charmé
Avait marié, dans notre heureux couple,
Le doux mois d’avril au beau mois de mai.

Nous vivions cachés, contents, porte close,
Dévorant l’amour, bon fruit défendu,
Ma bouche n’avait pas dit une chose
Que déjà ton cœur avait répondu.

La Sorbonne était l’endroit bucolique
Où je t’adorais du soir au matin.
C’est ainsi qu’une âme amoureuse applique
La carte du Tendre au pays Latin.

O place Maubert! O place Dauphine!
Quand, dans le taudis frais et printanier,
Tu tirais ton bas sur ta jambe fine,
Je voyais un astre au fond du grenier.

J’ai fort lu Platon, mais rien ne m’en reste;
Mieux que Malebranche et que Lamennais,
Tu me démontrais la bonté céleste
Avec une fleur que tu me donnais.

Je t’obéissais, tu m’étais soumise;
O grenier doré! te lacer! te voir
Aller et venir dès l’aube en chemise,
Mirant ton jeune front à ton vieux miroir.

Et qui donc pourrait perdre la mémoire
De ces temps d’aurore et de firmament,
De rubans, de fleurs, de gaze et de moire,
Où l’amour bégaye un argot charmant?

Nos jardins étaient un pot de tulipe;
Tu masquais la vitre avec un jupon;
Je prenais le bol de terre de pipe,
Et je te donnais le tasse en japon.

Et ces grands malheurs qui nous faisaient rire!
Ton manchon brûlé, ton boa perdu!
Et ce cher portrait du divin Shakespeare
Qu’un soir pour souper nons avons vendu!

J’étais mendiant et toi charitable.
Je baisais au vol tes bras frais et ronds.
Dante in folio nous servait de table
Pour manger gaîment un cent de marrons.

La première fois qu’en mon joyeux bouge
Je pris un baiser à ta lèvre en feu,
Quand tu t’en allais décoiffée et rouge,
Je restai tout pâle et je crus en Dieu!

Te rappelles-tu nos bonheurs sans nombre,
Et tous ces fichus changés en chiffons?
Oh que de soupirs, de nos cœurs pleins d’ombre,
Se sont envolés dans les cieux profonds!53


The hour, the spot, these souvenirs of youth recalled, a few stars
which began to twinkle in the sky, the funeral repose of those deserted
streets, the imminence of the inexorable adventure, which was in
preparation, gave a pathetic charm to these verses murmured in a low
tone in the dusk by Jean Prouvaire, who, as we have said, was a gentle
poet.

In the meantime, a lamp had been lighted in the small barricade, and in
the large one, one of those wax torches such as are to be met with on
Shrove-Tuesday in front of vehicles loaded with masks, on their way to
la Courtille. These torches, as the reader has seen, came from the
Faubourg Saint-Antoine.

The torch had been placed in a sort of cage of paving-stones closed on
three sides to shelter it from the wind, and disposed in such a fashion
that all the light fell on the flag. The street and the barricade
remained sunk in gloom, and nothing was to be seen except the red flag
formidably illuminated as by an enormous dark-lantern.

This light enhanced the scarlet of the flag, with an indescribable and
terrible purple.






Night was fully come, nothing made its appearance. All that they heard
was confused noises, and at intervals, fusillades; but these were rare,
badly sustained and distant. This respite, which was thus prolonged,
was a sign that the Government was taking its time, and collecting its
forces. These fifty men were waiting for sixty thousand.

Enjolras felt attacked by that impatience which seizes on strong souls
on the threshold of redoubtable events. He went in search of Gavroche,
who had set to making cartridges in the tap-room, by the dubious light
of two candles placed on the counter by way of precaution, on account
of the powder which was scattered on the tables. These two candles cast
no gleam outside. The insurgents had, moreover, taken pains not to have
any light in the upper stories.

Gavroche was deeply preoccupied at that moment, but not precisely with
his cartridges. The man of the Rue des Billettes had just entered the
tap-room and had seated himself at the table which was the least
lighted. A musket of large model had fallen to his share, and he held
it between his legs. Gavroche, who had been, up to that moment,
distracted by a hundred “amusing” things, had not even seen this man.

When he entered, Gavroche followed him mechanically with his eyes,
admiring his gun; then, all at once, when the man was seated, the
street urchin sprang to his feet. Any one who had spied upon that man
up to that moment, would have seen that he was observing everything in
the barricade and in the band of insurgents, with singular attention;
but, from the moment when he had entered this room, he had fallen into
a sort of brown study, and no longer seemed to see anything that was
going on. The gamin approached this pensive personage, and began to
step around him on tiptoe, as one walks in the vicinity of a person
whom one is afraid of waking. At the same time, over his childish
countenance which was, at once so impudent and so serious, so giddy and
so profound, so gay and so heart-breaking, passed all those grimaces of
an old man which signify: Ah bah! impossible! My sight is bad! I am
dreaming! can this be? no, it is not! but yes! why, no! etc. Gavroche
balanced on his heels, clenched both fists in his pockets, moved his
neck around like a bird, expended in a gigantic pout all the sagacity
of his lower lip. He was astounded, uncertain, incredulous, convinced,
dazzled. He had the mien of the chief of the eunuchs in the slave mart,
discovering a Venus among the blowsy females, and the air of an amateur
recognizing a Raphael in a heap of daubs. His whole being was at work,
the instinct which scents out, and the intelligence which combines. It
was evident that a great event had happened in Gavroche’s life.

It was at the most intense point of this preoccupation that Enjolras
accosted him.

“You are small,” said Enjolras, “you will not be seen. Go out of the
barricade, slip along close to the houses, skirmish about a bit in the
streets, and come back and tell me what is going on.”


Gavroche raised himself on his haunches.

“So the little chaps are good for something! that’s very lucky! I’ll
go! In the meanwhile, trust to the little fellows, and distrust the big
ones.” And Gavroche, raising his head and lowering his voice, added, as
he indicated the man of the Rue des Billettes: “Do you see that big
fellow there?”


“Well?”


“He’s a police spy.”


“Are you sure of it?”


“It isn’t two weeks since he pulled me off the cornice of the Port
Royal, where I was taking the air, by my ear.”


Enjolras hastily quitted the urchin and murmured a few words in a very
low tone to a longshoreman from the winedocks who chanced to be at
hand. The man left the room, and returned almost immediately,
accompanied by three others. The four men, four porters with broad
shoulders, went and placed themselves without doing anything to attract
his attention, behind the table on which the man of the Rue des
Billettes was leaning with his elbows. They were evidently ready to
hurl themselves upon him.

Then Enjolras approached the man and demanded of him:—

“Who are you?”


At this abrupt query, the man started. He plunged his gaze deep into
Enjolras’ clear eyes and appeared to grasp the latter’s meaning. He
smiled with a smile than which nothing more disdainful, more energetic,
and more resolute could be seen in the world, and replied with haughty
gravity:—

“I see what it is. Well, yes!”


“You are a police spy?”


“I am an agent of the authorities.”


“And your name?”


“Javert.”


Enjolras made a sign to the four men. In the twinkling of an eye,
before Javert had time to turn round, he was collared, thrown down,
pinioned and searched.

They found on him a little round card pasted between two pieces of
glass, and bearing on one side the arms of France, engraved, and with
this motto: _Supervision and vigilance_, and on the other this note:
“JAVERT, inspector of police, aged fifty-two,” and the signature of the
Prefect of Police of that day, M. Gisquet.

Besides this, he had his watch and his purse, which contained several
gold pieces. They left him his purse and his watch. Under the watch, at
the bottom of his fob, they felt and seized a paper in an envelope,
which Enjolras unfolded, and on which he read these five lines, written
in the very hand of the Prefect of Police:—

“As soon as his political mission is accomplished, Inspector Javert
will make sure, by special supervision, whether it is true that the
malefactors have instituted intrigues on the right bank of the Seine,
near the Jena bridge.”


The search ended, they lifted Javert to his feet, bound his arms behind
his back, and fastened him to that celebrated post in the middle of the
room which had formerly given the wine-shop its name.

Gavroche, who had looked on at the whole of this scene and had approved
of everything with a silent toss of his head, stepped up to Javert and
said to him:—

“It’s the mouse who has caught the cat.”


All this was so rapidly executed, that it was all over when those about
the wine-shop noticed it.

Javert had not uttered a single cry.

At the sight of Javert bound to the post, Courfeyrac, Bossuet, Joly,
Combeferre, and the men scattered over the two barricades came running
up.

Javert, with his back to the post, and so surrounded with ropes that he
could not make a movement, raised his head with the intrepid serenity
of the man who has never lied.

“He is a police spy,” said Enjolras.

And turning to Javert: “You will be shot ten minutes before the
barricade is taken.”


Javert replied in his most imperious tone:—

“Why not at once?”


“We are saving our powder.”


“Then finish the business with a blow from a knife.”


“Spy,” said the handsome Enjolras, “we are judges and not assassins.”


Then he called Gavroche:—

“Here you! go about your business! Do what I told you!”


“I’m going!” cried Gavroche.

And halting as he was on the point of setting out:—

“By the way, you will give me his gun!” and he added: “I leave you the
musician, but I want the clarinet.”


The gamin made the military salute and passed gayly through the opening
in the large barricade.




CABUC WHOSE NAME MAY NOT HAVE BEEN LE CABUC


The tragic picture which we have undertaken would not be complete, the
reader would not see those grand moments of social birth-pangs in a
revolutionary birth, which contain convulsion mingled with effort, in
their exact and real relief, were we to omit, in the sketch here
outlined, an incident full of epic and savage horror which occurred
almost immediately after Gavroche’s departure.

Mobs, as the reader knows, are like a snowball, and collect as they
roll along, a throng of tumultuous men. These men do not ask each other
whence they come. Among the passers-by who had joined the rabble led by
Enjolras, Combeferre, and Courfeyrac, there had been a person wearing
the jacket of a street porter, which was very threadbare on the
shoulders, who gesticulated and vociferated, and who had the look of a
drunken savage. This man, whose name or nickname was Le Cabuc, and who
was, moreover, an utter stranger to those who pretended to know him,
was very drunk, or assumed the appearance of being so, and had seated
himself with several others at a table which they had dragged outside
of the wine-shop. This Cabuc, while making those who vied with him
drunk seemed to be examining with a thoughtful air the large house at
the extremity of the barricade, whose five stories commanded the whole
street and faced the Rue Saint-Denis. All at once he exclaimed:—

“Do you know, comrades, it is from that house yonder that we must fire.
When we are at the windows, the deuce is in it if any one can advance
into the street!”


“Yes, but the house is closed,” said one of the drinkers.

“Let us knock!”


“They will not open.”


“Let us break in the door!”


Le Cabuc runs to the door, which had a very massive knocker, and
knocks. The door opens not. He strikes a second blow. No one answers. A
third stroke. The same silence.

“Is there any one here?” shouts Cabuc.

Nothing stirs.

Then he seizes a gun and begins to batter the door with the butt end.

It was an ancient alley door, low, vaulted, narrow, solid, entirely of
oak, lined on the inside with a sheet of iron and iron stays, a genuine
prison postern. The blows from the butt end of the gun made the house
tremble, but did not shake the door.

Nevertheless, it is probable that the inhabitants were disturbed, for a
tiny, square window was finally seen to open on the third story, and at
this aperture appeared the reverend and terrified face of a gray-haired
old man, who was the porter, and who held a candle.

The man who was knocking paused.

“Gentlemen,” said the porter, “what do you want?”


“Open!” said Cabuc.

“That cannot be, gentlemen.”


“Open, nevertheless.”


“Impossible, gentlemen.”


Le Cabuc took his gun and aimed at the porter; but as he was below, and
as it was very dark, the porter did not see him.

“Will you open, yes or no?”


“No, gentlemen.”


“Do you say no?”


“I say no, my goo—”


The porter did not finish. The shot was fired; the ball entered under
his chin and came out at the nape of his neck, after traversing the
jugular vein.

The old man fell back without a sigh. The candle fell and was
extinguished, and nothing more was to be seen except a motionless head
lying on the sill of the small window, and a little whitish smoke which
floated off towards the roof.

“There!” said Le Cabuc, dropping the butt end of his gun to the
pavement.

He had hardly uttered this word, when he felt a hand laid on his
shoulder with the weight of an eagle’s talon, and he heard a voice
saying to him:—

“On your knees.”


The murderer turned round and saw before him Enjolras’ cold, white
face.

Enjolras held a pistol in his hand.

He had hastened up at the sound of the discharge.

He had seized Cabuc’s collar, blouse, shirt, and suspender with his
left hand.

“On your knees!” he repeated.

And, with an imperious motion, the frail young man of twenty years bent
the thickset and sturdy porter like a reed, and brought him to his
knees in the mire.

Le Cabuc attempted to resist, but he seemed to have been seized by a
superhuman hand.

Enjolras, pale, with bare neck and dishevelled hair, and his woman’s
face, had about him at that moment something of the antique Themis. His
dilated nostrils, his downcast eyes, gave to his implacable Greek
profile that expression of wrath and that expression of Chastity which,
as the ancient world viewed the matter, befit Justice.

The whole barricade hastened up, then all ranged themselves in a circle
at a distance, feeling that it was impossible to utter a word in the
presence of the thing which they were about to behold.

Le Cabuc, vanquished, no longer tried to struggle, and trembled in
every limb.

Enjolras released him and drew out his watch.

“Collect yourself,” said he. “Think or pray. You have one minute.”


“Mercy!” murmured the murderer; then he dropped his head and stammered
a few inarticulate oaths.

Enjolras never took his eyes off of him: he allowed a minute to pass,
then he replaced his watch in his fob. That done, he grasped Le Cabuc
by the hair, as the latter coiled himself into a ball at his knees and
shrieked, and placed the muzzle of the pistol to his ear. Many of those
intrepid men, who had so tranquilly entered upon the most terrible of
adventures, turned aside their heads.

An explosion was heard, the assassin fell to the pavement face
downwards.

Enjolras straightened himself up, and cast a convinced and severe
glance around him. Then he spurned the corpse with his foot and said:—

“Throw that outside.”


Three men raised the body of the unhappy wretch, which was still
agitated by the last mechanical convulsions of the life that had fled,
and flung it over the little barricade into the Rue Mondétour.

Enjolras was thoughtful. It is impossible to say what grandiose shadows
slowly spread over his redoubtable serenity. All at once he raised his
voice.

A silence fell upon them.

“Citizens,” said Enjolras, “what that man did is frightful, what I have
done is horrible. He killed, therefore I killed him. I had to do it,
because insurrection must have its discipline. Assassination is even
more of a crime here than elsewhere; we are under the eyes of the
Revolution, we are the priests of the Republic, we are the victims of
duty, and must not be possible to slander our combat. I have,
therefore, tried that man, and condemned him to death. As for myself,
constrained as I am to do what I have done, and yet abhorring it, I
have judged myself also, and you shall soon see to what I have
condemned myself.”


Those who listened to him shuddered.

“We will share thy fate,” cried Combeferre.

“So be it,” replied Enjolras. “One word more. In executing this man, I
have obeyed necessity; but necessity is a monster of the old world,
necessity’s name is Fatality. Now, the law of progress is, that
monsters shall disappear before the angels, and that Fatality shall
vanish before Fraternity. It is a bad moment to pronounce the word
love. No matter, I do pronounce it. And I glorify it. Love, the future
is thine. Death, I make use of thee, but I hate thee. Citizens, in the
future there will be neither darkness nor thunderbolts; neither
ferocious ignorance, nor bloody retaliation. As there will be no more
Satan, there will be no more Michael. In the future no one will kill
any one else, the earth will beam with radiance, the human race will
love. The day will come, citizens, when all will be concord, harmony,
light, joy and life; it will come, and it is in order that it may come
that we are about to die.”


Enjolras ceased. His virgin lips closed; and he remained for some time
standing on the spot where he had shed blood, in marble immobility. His
staring eye caused those about him to speak in low tones.

Jean Prouvaire and Combeferre pressed each other’s hands silently, and,
leaning against each other in an angle of the barricade, they watched
with an admiration in which there was some compassion, that grave young
man, executioner and priest, composed of light, like crystal, and also
of rock.

Let us say at once that later on, after the action, when the bodies
were taken to the morgue and searched, a police agent’s card was found
on Le Cabuc. The author of this book had in his hands, in 1848, the
special report on this subject made to the Prefect of Police in 1832.

We will add, that if we are to believe a tradition of the police, which
is strange but probably well founded, Le Cabuc was Claquesous. The fact
is, that dating from the death of Le Cabuc, there was no longer any
question of Claquesous. Claquesous had nowhere left any trace of his
disappearance; he would seem to have amalgamated himself with the
invisible. His life had been all shadows, his end was night.

The whole insurgent group was still under the influence of the emotion
of that tragic case which had been so quickly tried and so quickly
terminated, when Courfeyrac again beheld on the barricade, the small
young man who had inquired of him that morning for Marius.

This lad, who had a bold and reckless air, had come by night to join
the insurgents.




