



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’état_ 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, Vendemiaire 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 cesspool 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 Château-d’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 biscaïen 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-cochères 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, Barthélemy, 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, Barthélemy. Cournet made the Saint-Antoine
barricade; Barthélemy 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.

Barthélemy, 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, Barthélemy
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, Barthélemy
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.
Barthélemy, on occasion, flew but one flag, the black flag.






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 Mondétour 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 Malfilâtre, particularly the prodigies of Cæsar’s death; and at that
word, Cæsar, the conversation reverted to Brutus.

“Cæsar,” said Combeferre, “fell justly. Cicero was severe towards
Cæsar, and he was right. That severity is not diatribe. When Zoïlus
insults Homer, when Mævius insults Virgil, when Visé insults Molière,
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 Zoïlus 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. Cæsar, 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 pene 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. Cæsar 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 Cydathenæum, Oh Myrrhinus, Oh Probalinthus, Oh graces of the
Æantides! Oh! Who will grant me to pronounce the verses of Homer like a
Greek of Laurium or of Edapteon?”







Enjolras had been to make a reconnaissance. He had made his way out
through Mondétour 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
geneses 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.






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 Mondétour is
free, and through the Rue des Prêcheurs one can reach the Marché 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 Thermopylæ, 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 Mondétour 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 Mondétour 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.






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
Chimæra 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 Thermopylæ, 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.






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 Mondétour 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.”







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
crossroads, 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 Mondétour 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 Mondétour, 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 reappeared; 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.






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 Prêcheurs. 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 epaulement, 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.




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 buckshot 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!”







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 chimæras, 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.






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 buckshot and biscaïens, 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.






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 Lacedæmonian
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 guerilleros, some of the sword,
like Fannicot, others of the pen, like Henri Fonfrède.

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 No. 6. 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.






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-Poirée, 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 Maubuée, 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,
manœuvres 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.






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 Angélique; 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 manœuvres 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-le-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.






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:

“On est laid à Nanterre,
C’est la faute à Voltaire;
Et bête à Palaiseau,
C’est la faute à Rousseau.”

“Men are ugly at Nanterre,
’Tis the fault of Voltaire;
And dull at Palaiseau,
’Tis the fault of Rousseau.”


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,
C’est la faute à Voltaire;
Je suis un petit oiseau,
C’est la faute à Rousseau.”

“I am not a notary,
’Tis the fault of Voltaire;
I’m a little bird,
’Tis the fault of Rousseau.”


A fifth bullet only succeeded in drawing from him a third couplet.

“Joie est mon caractère,
C’est la faute à Voltaire;
Misère est mon trousseau,
C’est la faute à Rousseau.”

“Joy is my character,
’Tis the fault of Voltaire;
Misery is my trousseau,
’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, reappeared, 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 Antæus 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:

“Je suis tombé par terre,
C’est la faute à Voltaire;
Le nez dans le ruisseau,
C’est la faute à . . . “

“I have fallen to the earth,
’Tis the fault of Voltaire;
With my nose in the gutter,
’Tis the fault of . . . ”


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.






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
Barrière 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
Thénardiers, 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 infusoriæ, 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.”







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, Thénardier 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.






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,
nonetheless, 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 Mondétour 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!”







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 Mondétour 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 Éponine. 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
Armé, No. 7.”


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 Armé?”


“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 Prêcheurs.

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 reappeared and cried: “It is done.”


A gloomy chill traversed Marius’ heart.




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 régime, 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, Thermopylæ.

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! _Vitælampada 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 epilepsies. 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.






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 reappear, 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, buckshot or a biscaïen 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 bareheaded.

“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 François I. at Marignan. Homer says: “Diomedes
cuts the throat of Axylus, son of Teuthranis, who dwelt in happy
Arisba; Euryalus, son of Mecistæus, exterminates Dresos and Opheltios,
Esepius, and that Pedasus whom the naiad Abarbarea bore to the
blameless Bucolion; Ulysses overthrows Pidytes of Percosius;
Antilochus, Ablerus; Polypætes, 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 Satnoïs.” 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.






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 reappears 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.






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.






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 Éponine 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.




