Les Misérables, v. 5/5: Jean Valjean
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Title: Les Misérables, v. 5/5: Jean Valjean
Author: Victor Hugo
Translator: Sir Lascelles Wraxall
Release date: April 18, 2015 [eBook #48735]
Most recently updated: October 24, 2024
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/48735
Credits: Produced by Laura Natal & Marc D'Hooghe (Images generously made available by the Hathi Trust.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LES MISÉRABLES, V. 5/5: JEAN VALJEAN ***
LES MISÉRABLES.
BY
VICTOR HUGO.
PART FIFTH.
JEAN VALJEAN.
AUTHORIZED TRANSLATION BY LAWRENCE WRAXALL.
BOSTON:
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY.
1887
[Illustration: The Death of Jean Valjean]
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
JEAN VALJEAN.
BOOK I.
THE WAR WITHIN FOUR WALLS.
I. THE CHARYBDIS OF THE FAUBOURG ST. ANTOINE AND
THE SCYLLA OF THE FAUBOURG DU TEMPLE
II. NOTHING TO DO IN THE ABYSS BUT TALK.
III. CLEARING AND CLOUDING
IV. FIVE LESS AND ONE MORE
V. THE HORIZON ONE SEES FROM THE BARRICADE'S SUMMIT
VI. MARIUS HAGGARD, JAVERT LACONIC
VII. THE SITUATION BECOMES AGGRAVATED
VIII. THE ARTILLERY SETS TO WORK IN EARNEST
IX. EMPLOYMENT OF THE POACHER'S OLD SKILL
AND HIS UNERRING SHOT, WHICH HAD AN
INFLUENCE ON THE CONDEMNATION IN 1796
X. DAWN
XI. THE SHOT WHICH DOES NOT MISS AND WHICH KILLS NOBODY
XII. DISORDER THE PARTISAN OF ORDER
XIII. GLEAMS WHICH FADE
XIV. IN WHICH WE READ THE NAME OF THE MISTRESS OF ENJOLRAS
XV. GAVROCHE OUTSIDE
XVI. HOW A BROTHER BECOMES A FATHER
XVII. MORTUUS PATER FILIUM MORITURUM EXPECTAT
XVIII. THE VULTURE BECOMES PREY
XIX. JEAN VALJEAN REVENGES HIMSELF
XX. THE DEAD ARE RIGHT AND THE LIVING ARE NOT WRONG
XXI. THE HEROES
XXII. STEP BY STEP
XXIII. ORESTES SOBER AND PYLADES DRUNK
XXIV. PRISONER!
BOOK II.
THE INTESTINE OF LEVIATHAN.
I. THE EARTH IMPOVERISHED BY THE SEA
II. THE OLD HISTORY OF THE SEWER
III. BRUNESEAU
IV. CONCEALED DETAILS
V. PRESENT PROGRESS
VI. FUTURE PROGRESS
BOOK III.
MUD, BUT SOUL.
I. THE CLOACA AND ITS SURPRISES
II. EXPLANATION
III. THE TRACKED MAN
IV. HE TOO BEARS HIS CROSS
V. SAND, LIKE WOMAN, HAS A FINENESS THAT IS PERFIDIOUS
VI. THE FONTIS
VII. SOMETIMES ONE IS STRANDED WHERE HE THINKS TO LAND
VIII. THE TOM COAT-SKIRT
IX. MARIUS APPEARS DEAD TO A CONNOISSEUR
X. RETURN OF THE SON PRODIGAL OF HIS LIFE
XI. A SHAKING IN THE ABSOLUTE
XII. THE GRANDFATHER
BOOK IV.
JAVERT DERAILED
BOOK V.
GRANDSON AND GRANDFATHER.
I. WHERE WE AGAIN MEET THE TREE WITH THE ZINC PATCH
II. MARIUS, LEAVING CIVIL WAR, PREPARES FOR A DOMESTIC WAR
III. MARIUS ATTACKS
IV. MLLE. GILLENORMAND HAS NO OBJECTIONS TO THE MATCH
V. DEPOSIT YOUR MONEY IN A FOREST RATHER THAN WITH A NOTARY
VI. THE TWO OLD MEN, EACH IN HIS FASHION,
DO EVERYTHING FOR COSETTE'S HAPPINESS
VII. THE EFFECTS OF DREAMING BLENDED WITH HAPPINESS
VIII. TWO MEN IMPOSSIBLE TO FIND
BOOK VI.
THE SLEEPLESS NIGHT.
I. FEBRUARY 16, 1833
II. JEAN VALJEAN STILL HAS HIS ARM IN A SLING
III. THE INSEPARABLE
IV. IMMORTALE JECUR
BOOK VII.
THE LAST DROP IN THE BITTER CUP.
I. THE SEVENTH CIRCLE AND THE EIGHTH HEAVEN
II. THE OBSCURITY WHICH A REVELATION MAY CONTAIN
BOOK VIII.
TWILIGHT DECLINES.
I. THE GROUND-FLOOR ROOM
II. OTHER BACKWARD STEPS
III. THEY REMEMBER THE GARDEN IN THE RUE PLUMET
IV. ATTRACTION AND EXTINCTION
BOOK IX.
SUPREME DARKNESS, SUPREME DAWN.
I. PITY THE UNHAPPY, BUT BE INDULGENT TO THE HAPPY
II. THE LAST FLUTTERINGS OF THE LAMP WITHOUT OIL
III. A PEN IS TOO HEAVY FOR THE MAN WHO
LIFTED FAUCHELEVENT'S CART
IV. A BOTTLE OF INK WHICH ONLY WHITENS
V. A NIGHT BEHIND WHICH IS DAY
VI. THE GRASS HIDES, AND THE RAIN EFFACES
ILLUSTRATIONS.
THE DEATH OF JEAN VALJEAN Vol. V. Frontispiece
Drawn by G. Jeanniot.
THE DEATH OF GAVROCHE
Drawn by G. Jeanniot.
JEAN VALJEAN.
BOOK I.
THE WAR WITHIN FOUR WALLS.
CHAPTER I.
THE CHARYBDIS OF THE FAUBOURG ST. ANTOINE AND THE SCYLLA OF THE
FAUBOURG DU TEMPLE.
The two most memorable barricades which the observer of social diseases
can mention do not belong to the period in which the action of this
book is laid. These two barricades, both symbols under different
aspects of a formidable situation, emerged from the earth during the
fatal insurrection of June, 1848, the greatest street-war which history
has seen. It happens sometimes that the canaille, that great despairing
crowd, contrary to principles, even contrary to liberty, equality, and
fraternity, even contrary to the universal vote, the government of all
by all, protests, in the depths of its agony, its discouragement, its
destitution, its fevers, its distresses, its miasmas, its ignorance,
and its darkness, and the populace offers battle to the people. The
beggars attack the common right, the ochlocracy rises in insurrection
against the demos. Those are mournful days; for there is always a
certain amount of right even in this mania, there is suicide in this
duel, and these words, intended to be insults, such as beggars,
canaille, ochlocracy, and populace, prove, 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
part, we never pronounce these words without grief and respect, for
when philosophy probes the facts with which they correspond it often
finds much grandeur by the side of misery. Athens was an ochlocracy;
the beggars produced Holland; the populace more than once saved
Rome; and the canaille followed the Saviour. There is no thinker who
has not at times contemplated the magnificence below. Saint Jerome
doubtless thought of this canaille, of all these poor people, all these
vagabonds, and all the wretches whence the apostles and martyrs issued,
when he uttered the mysterious words,--"Fex urbis, lux orbis."
The exasperations of this mob, which suffers and which bleeds, its
unwilling violence against the principles which are its life, its
assaults upon the right, are popular coups d'état, and must be
repressed. The just man devotes himself, and through love for this
very mob, combats it. But how excusable he finds it while resisting
it; how he venerates it, even while opposing it! It is one of those
rare moments in which a man while doing his duty feels something that
disconcerts him, and almost dissuades him from going further; he
persists, and must do so, but the satisfied conscience is sad, and
the accomplishment of the duty is complicated by a contraction of the
heart. June, 1848, was, let us hasten to say, a separate fact, and
almost impossible to classify in the philosophy of history. All the
words we have uttered must be laid aside when we have to deal with
this extraordinary riot, in which the holy anxiety of labor claiming
its right was felt. It must be combated, and it was a duty to do so,
for it attacked the Republic; but, in reality, what was June, 1848?
A revolt of the people against itself. When the subject is not left
out of sight there is no digression, and hence we may be permitted to
concentrate the reader's attention momentarily upon the two absolutely
unique barricades to which we have alluded, and which characterized
this insurrection. The one blocked up the entrance to the Faubourg St.
Antoine, the other defended the approaches to the Faubourg du Temple;
those before whom these two frightful masterpieces of civil war were
raised in the dazzling June sun will never forget them.
The St. Antoine barricade was monstrous; it was three stories high and
seven hundred feet in width. It barred from one corner to the other the
vast mouth of the faubourg, that is to say, three streets; ravined,
slashed, serrated, surmounted by an immense jagged line, supported
by masses which were themselves bastions, pushing out capes here and
there, and powerfully reinforced by the two great promontories of the
houses of the faubourg, it rose like a Cyclopean wall at the back of
the formidable square which had seen July 14. There were nineteen
barricades erected in the streets behind the mother barricade; but, on
seeing it, you felt in the faubourg the immense agonizing suffering
which had reached that extreme stage in which misery desires to come
to a catastrophe. Of what was this barricade made? Of the tumbling in
of three six-storied houses demolished on purpose, say some; of the
prodigy of all the passions, say others. It possessed the lamentable
aspect of all the buildings of hatred, ruin. You might ask who
built this, and you might also ask who destroyed this. It was the
improvisation of the ebullition. Here with that door, that grating,
that awning, that chimney, that broken stove, that cracked stewpan!
Give us anything! Throw everything in! Push, roll, pick, dismantle,
overthrow, and pull down everything! It was a collaboration of the
pavement-stones, beams, iron bars, planks, broken windows, unseated
chairs, cabbage-stalks, rags, tatters, and curses. It was great and it
was little; it was the abyss parodied on the square by the hurly-burly.
It was the mass side by side with the atom, a pulled-down wall and a
broken pipkin, a menacing fraternization of all fragments, into which
Sisyphus had cast his rock and Job his potsherds. Altogether it was
terrible,--it was the acropolis of the barefooted. Overturned carts
studded the slope; an immense wagon spread out across it, with its
wheels to the sky, and looked like a scar on this tumultuous façade; an
omnibus gayly hoisted by strength of arm to the very top of the pile,
as if the architects of this savage edifice had wished to add mockery
to the horror, offered its bare pole to the horses of the air. This
gigantic mound, the alluvium of the riot, represented to the mind an
Ossa upon Pelion of all revolutions,--'93 upon '89, the 9th Thermidor
upon the 10th August, the 18th Brumaire upon January 21st, Vendémiaire
upon Prairial, 1848 upon 1830. The place was worth the trouble, and
this barricade was worthy of appearing upon the very spot whence the
Bastille had disappeared. If the ocean made dykes it would build them
in this way, and the fury of the tide was stamped on this shapeless
encumbrance. What tide? The multitude. You fancied that you saw a
petrified riot, and heard the enormous dark bees of violent progress
humming about this barricade as if they had their hive there. Was it a
thicket? Was it a Bacchanalian feast? Was it a fortress? Vertigo seemed
to have built it with the flapping of its wings! There was a sewer in
this redoubt, and something Olympian in this mass. You saw there in a
confused heap, full of desperation, gables of roofs, pieces of garrets
with their painted paper, window-frames with all their panes planted
in the rubbish and awaiting the cannon, pulled-down mantelpieces,
chests of drawers, tables, benches, a howling topsy-turvy, and those
thousand wretched things cast away even by a beggar which contain at
once fury and nothingness. It may be said that it was the rags of a
people, rags of wood, of iron, of bronze, of stone; that the Faubourg
St. Antoine had swept them to their door with a gigantic broom, and
made a barricade of their misery. Logs resembling executioners' blocks,
disjointed chains, anvil-frames of the shape of gallows, horizontal
wheels emerging from the heap, produced on this edifice of anarchy the
representation of the old punishment suffered by the people. The St.
Antoine barricade made a weapon of everything. All that civil war can
throw at the head of society came from it; it was not a fight but a
paroxysm: the muskets which defended this redoubt, among which were
several blunderbusses, discharged stones, bones, coat-buttons, and even
the casters of night-commodes, very dangerous owing to the copper.
This barricade was furious; it hurled an indescribable clamor into the
clouds; at certain moments when challenging the army it was covered
with a crowd and a tempest; it had a prickly crest of guns, sabres,
sticks, axes, pikes, and bayonets; a mighty red flag fluttered upon
it in the breeze, and the cries of command, the songs of attack, the
rolling of the drum, the sobs of women, and the sardonic laughter of
men dying of starvation could be heard there. It was immeasurable and
living, and a flash of lightning issued from it as from the back of an
electric animal. The spirit of revolution covered with its cloud this
summit, where that voice of the people which resembles the voice of God
was growling, and a strange majesty was disengaged from this Titanic
mass of stones. It was a dungheap, and it was Sinai.
As we said above, it attacked in the name of the revolution--what?
The revolution. It, this barricade, an accident, a disorder, a
misunderstanding, an unknown thing, had, facing it, the constituent
assembly, the sovereignty of the people, universal suffrage,
the nation, the republic: and it was the Carmagnole defying the
Marseillaise. A mad defiance, but heroic, for this old faubourg is a
hero. The faubourg and its redoubt supported each other; the faubourg
rested on the redoubt, and the redoubt backed against the faubourg.
The vast barricade was like a cliff against which the strategy of the
African generals was broken. Its caverns, its excrescences, its warts,
its humps, made grimaces, if we may employ the expression, and grinned
behind the smoke. The grape-shot vanished in the shapeless heap; shells
buried themselves in it and were swallowed up; cannon-balls only
succeeded in forming holes, for of what use is it bombarding chaos? And
the regiments, accustomed to the sternest visions of war, gazed with
anxious eye at this species of wild-beast redoubt, which was a boar
through its bristling and a mountain through its enormity.
A quarter of a league farther on, at the corner of the Rue du Temple,
which debouches on the boulevard near the Chateau d'Eau, if you boldly
advanced your head beyond the point formed by the projection of the
magazine Dallemagne, you could see in the distance across the canal,
and at the highest point of the ascent to Belleville, a strange wall
rising to the second floor and forming a sort of connecting link
between the houses on the right and those on the left, as if the
street had folded back its highest wall in order to close itself up.
This was built of paving-stones; it was tall, straight, correct, cold,
perpendicular, and levelled with the plumb-line and the square; of
course there was no cement, but, as in some Roman walls, this in no
way disturbed its rigid architecture. From its height, its thickness
could be guessed, for the entablature was mathematically parallel
to the basement At regular distances almost invisible loopholes,
resembling black threads, could be distinguished in the gray wall,
separated from each other by equal intervals. This street was deserted
throughout its length, and all the windows and doors were closed. In
the background rose this bar, which converted the street into a blind
alley; it was a motionless and tranquil wall; no one was seen, nothing
was heard, not a cry, nor a sound, nor a breath. It was a sepulchre.
The dazzling June sun inundated this terrible thing with light,--it
was the barricade of the Faubourg du Temple. So soon as you reached
the ground and perceived it, it was impossible even for the boldest
not to become pensive in the presence of this mysterious apparition.
It was adjusted, clamped, imbricated, rectilinear, symmetrical, and
funereal; science and darkness were there. You felt that the chief of
this barricade was a geometrician or a spectre, and as you gazed you
spoke in a whisper. From time to time if any one--private, officer,
or representative of the people--ventured to cross the solitary road,
a shrill faint whistling was heard, and the passer-by fell wounded or
dead; or, if he escaped, a bullet could be seen to bury itself in some
shutter, or the stucco of the wall. Sometimes it was a grape-shot,
for the man of the barricade had made out of gas-pipes, stopped up
at one end with tow and clay, two small cannon. There was no useless
expenditure of gunpowder, and nearly every shot told. There were a
few corpses here and there, and patches of blood on the pavement. I
remember a white butterfly that fluttered up and down the street;
summer does not abdicate. All the gateways in the vicinity were crowded
with corpses, and you felt in this street that you were covered by
some one you could not see, and that the whole street was under the
marksman's aim.
The soldiers of the attacking column, massed behind the species of
ridge which the canal bridge forms at the entrance of the Faubourg du
Temple, watched gravely and thoughtfully this mournful redoubt, this
immobility, this impassiveness, from which death issued. Some crawled
on their stomachs to the top of the pitch of the bridge, while careful
not to let their shakos pass beyond it. Brave Colonel Monteynard
admired this barricade with a tremor. "How it is built," he said to a
representative; "not a single paving-stone projects beyond the other.
It is made of porcelain." At this moment a bullet smashed the cross
on his chest and he fell. "The cowards!" the troops shouted, "Why do
they not show themselves? They dare not! They hide!" The barricade of
the Faubourg du Temple, defended by eighty men and attacked by ten
thousand, held out for three days, and on the fourth day the troops
acted as they had done at Zaatcha and Constantine,--they broke through
houses, passed along roofs, and the barricade was taken. Not one of the
eighty cowards dreamed of flying; all were killed with the exception of
Barthélemy, the chief, to whom we shall allude directly. The barricade
of St. Antoine was the tumult of the thunder; the barricade of the
Temple was the silence. There was between the two barricades the same
difference as exists between the formidable and the sinister. The one
seemed a throat, the other a mask. Admitting that the gigantic and dark
insurrection of June was composed of a fury and an enigma, the dragon
was seen in the first barricade and the sphinx behind the second.
These two fortresses were built by two men, Cournet and Barthélemy:
Cournet made the St. Antoine barricade, Barthélemy the Temple
barricade, and each of them was the image of the man who built it.
Cournet was a man of tall stature; he had wide shoulders, a red face, a
smashing fist, a brave heart, a loyal soul, a sincere and terrible eye.
He was intrepid, energetic, irascible, and stormy; the most cordial
of men, and the most formidable of combatants. War, contest, medley
were the air he breathed, and put him in good temper. He had been an
officer in the navy, and from his gestures and his voice it could be
divined that he issued from the ocean and came from the tempest; he
continued the hurricane in battle. Omitting the genius, there was in
Cournet something of Danton, as, omitting the divinity, there was
in Danton something of Hercules. Barthélemy, thin, weak, pale, and
taciturn, was a species of tragical gamin, who, having been struck by
a policeman, watched for him, waited for him, and killed him, and at
the age of seventeen was sent to the galleys. He came out and built
this barricade. At a later date, when both were exiles in London,
Barthélemy killed Cournet: it was a melancholy duel. Some time after
that, Barthélemy, caught in the cog-wheels of one of those mysterious
adventures in which passion is mingled, catastrophes in which French
justice sees extenuating circumstances and English justice only sees
death, was hanged. The gloomy social edifice is so built that, owing to
maternal denudation and moral darkness, this wretched being, who had
had an intellect, certainly firm and possibly great, began with the
galleys in France and ended with the gibbet in England. Barthélemy only
hoisted one flag,--it was the black one.
CHAPTER II.
NOTHING TO DO IN THE ABYSS BUT TALK.
Sixteen years count in the subterranean education of revolt, and June,
1848, knew a great deal more than June, 1832. Hence the barricade in
the Rue de la Chanvrerie was only a sketch and an embryo when compared
with the two colossal barricades which we have just described; but
for the period it was formidable. The insurgents, under the eye of
Enjolras,--for Marius no longer looked at anything,--had turned the
night to good account: the barricade had not only been repaired but
increased. It had been raised two feet, and iron bars planted in the
paving-stones resembled lances in rest. All sorts of rubbish, added and
brought from all sides, complicated the external confusion, and the
redoubt had been cleverly converted into a wall inside and a thicket
outside. The staircase of paving-stones, which allowed the top of the
barricade to be reached, was restored, the ground-floor of the room
of the inn was cleared out, the kitchen converted into an infirmary,
the wounds were dressed, the powder scattered about the tables and
floor was collected, bullets were cast, cartridges manufactured,
lint plucked, the fallen arms distributed; the dead were carried off
and laid in a heap in the Mondétour Lane, of which they were still
masters. The pavement remained for a long time red at that spot. Among
the dead were four suburban National Guards, and Enjolras ordered their
uniforms to be laid on one side. Enjolras had advised two hours' sleep,
and his advice was an order; still, only three or four took advantage
of it, and Feuilly employed the two hours in engraving this inscription
on the wall facing the wine-shop,--
"LONG LIVE THE PEOPLES."
These four words, carved in the stone with a nail, could still be read
on this wall in 1848. The three women took advantage of the respite
to disappear entirely, which allowed the insurgents to breathe more
at their ease; and they contrived to find refuge in some neighboring
house. Most of the wounded could and would still fight. There were,
on a pile of mattresses and trusses of straw laid in the kitchen
converted into an infirmary, five men seriously wounded, of whom two
were Municipal Guards; the wounds of the latter were dressed first. No
one remained in the ground-floor room save Mabœuf under his black
cere-cloth, and Javert fastened to the post.
"This is the charnel-house," said Enjolras.
In the interior of this room, which was scarce lighted by a solitary
candle, the mortuary table at the end being behind the post like a
horizontal bar, a sort of large vague cross resulted from Javert
standing and Mabœuf lying down. Although the pole of the omnibus was
mutilated by the bullets, sufficient remained for a flag to be attached
to it. Enjolras, who possessed that quality of a chief of always doing
what he said, fastened to it the bullet-pierced and blood-stained coat
of the killed old man. No meal was possible, for there was neither
bread nor meat. The fifty men during the sixteen hours they had stood
at the barricade speedily exhausted the scanty provisions of the inn.
At a given moment every barricade that holds out becomes the raft of
the _Méduse_, and the combatants must resign themselves to hunger.
They had reached the early hours of that Spartan day, June 6, when at
the barricade of St. Merry, Jeanne, surrounded by insurgents who cried
for bread, answered, "What for? It is three o'clock; at four we shall
be dead." As they could no longer eat, Enjolras prohibited drinking;
he put the wine under an interdict, and served out the spirits. Some
fifteen full bottles, hermetically sealed, were found in the cellar,
which Enjolras and Combeferre examined. Combeferre on coming up again
said, "It belongs to Father Hucheloup's stock at the time when he was
a grocer." "It must be real wine," Bossuet observed; "it is lucky that
Grantaire is asleep, for if he were up, we should have a difficulty in
saving those bottles." Enjolras, in spite of the murmurs, put his veto
on the fifteen bottles, and in order that no one might touch them, and
that they should be to some extent sacred, he had placed them under the
table on which Father Mabœuf lay.
At about two in the morning they counted their strength; there were
still thirty-seven. Day was beginning to appear, and the torch, which
had been returned to its stone lantern, was extinguished. The interior
of the barricade, that species of small yard taken from the street, was
bathed in darkness, and resembled, through the vague twilight horror,
the deck of a dismasted ship. The combatants moved about like black
forms. Above this frightful nest of gloom the floors of the silent
houses stood out lividly, and above them again the chimney-pots were
assuming a roseate hue. The sky had that charming tint which may be
white and may be blue, and the birds flew about in it with twitterings
of joy. The tall house which formed the background of the barricade
looked to the east, and had a pink reflection on its roof. At the
third-floor window the morning breeze blew about the gray hair on the
head of the dead man.
"I am delighted that the torch is put out," Courfeyrac said to Feuilly.
"That flame flickering in the breeze annoyed me, for it seemed to be
frightened. The light of torches resembles the wisdom of cowards; it
illumines badly because it trembles."
The dawn arouses minds like birds, and all were talking. Joly, seeing a
cat stalking along a gutter, extracted this philosophy from the fact.
"What is the cat?" he exclaimed. "It is a correction. _Le bon Dieu_
having made a mouse, said to himself, 'Hilloh! I have done a foolish
trick,' and he made the cat, which is the erratum of the mouse. The
mouse plus the cat is the revised and corrected proof of creation."
Combeferre, surrounded by students and workmen, was talking of the
dead, of Jean Prouvaire, of Bahorel, of Mabœuf, and even of Cabuc,
and the stern sorrow of Enjolras. He said,--
"Harmodius and Aristogiton, Brutus, Chereas, Stephanus, Cromwell,
Charlotte Corday, Sand, all had their moment of agony after the blow
was struck. Our heart is so quivering, and human life such a mystery,
that even in a civic murder, even in a liberating murder, if there be
such a thing, the remorse at having struck a man exceeds the joy of
having benefited the human race."
And, such are the meanderings of interchanged words, a moment later, by
a transition which came from Jean Prouvaire's verses, Combeferre was
comparing together the translators of the Georgics, Raux with Cournand,
Cournand with Delille, and pointing out the few passages translated by
Malfilâtre, especially the wonders of the death of Cæsar, and at that
name the conversation reverted to Brutus.
"Cæsar," said Combeferre, "fell justly. Cicero was severe to Cæsar,
and was in the right, for such severity is not a diatribe. When Zoïlus
insults Homer, when Mævius insults Virgil, when Visé insults Molière,
when Pope insults Shakspeare, when Fréron insults Voltaire, it is an
old law of envy and hatred being carried out; for genius attracts
insult, and great men are all barked at more or less. But Zoïlus and
Cicero are different. Cicero is a justiciary with thought in the same
way as Brutus is a justiciary with the sword. For my part, I blame that
last justice, the glaive; antiquity allowed it. Cæsar, the violator of
the Rubicon, conferring, as if coming from him, dignities that came
from the people, and not rising on the entrance of the senate, behaved,
as Eutropius said, like a king, and almost like a tyrant, _regiâ ac
pene tyrannica_. He was a great man; all the worse or all the better,
the lesson is the more elevated. His three-and-twenty wounds affect me
less than the spitting on the brow of Christ. Cæsar is stabbed by the
senators, Christ is buffeted by soldiers. God is felt in the greater
outrage."
Bossuet, standing on a pile of stones, and commanding the speaker,
exclaimed, gun in hand,--
"O Cydathenæum! O Myrrhinus! O Probalynthus! O graces of Æanthus! Oh,
who will inspire me to pronounce the verses of Homer like a Greek of
Laureum or Edapteon!"
CHAPTER III.
CLEARING AND CLOUDING.
Enjolras had gone out to reconnoitre, and had left by the Mondétour
Lane, keeping in the shadow of the houses. The insurgents, we must
state, were full of hope: the way in which they had repulsed the night
attack almost made them disdain beforehand the attack at daybreak.
They waited for it and smiled at it, and no more doubted of their
success than of their cause; moreover, help was evidently going to
reach them, and they reckoned on it. With that facility of triumphant
prophecy which is a part of the strength of the French fighter, they
divided into three certain phases the opening day,--at six in the
morning a regiment, which had been worked upon, would turn; at mid-day
insurrection all over Paris; at sunset the revolution. The tocsin of
St. Merry, which had not ceased once since the previous evening, could
be heard, and this was a proof that the other barricade, the great
one, Jeanne's, still held out. All these hopes were interchanged by
the groups with a species of gay and formidable buzzing which resemble
the war-hum of a swarm of bees. Enjolras reappeared returning from his
gloomy walk in the external darkness. He listened for a moment to all
this joy with his arms folded, and then said, fresh and rosy in the
growing light of dawn,--
"The whole army of Paris is out, and one third of that army is
preparing to attack the barricade behind which you now are. There is,
too, the National Guard. I distinguished the shakos of the fifth line
regiment and the colors of the sixth legion. You will be attacked in
an hour; as for the people, they were in a state of ferment yesterday,
but this morning do not stir. There is nothing to wait for, nothing to
hope; no more a faubourg than a regiment You are abandoned."
These words fell on the buzzing groups, and produced the same effect
as the first drops of a storm do on a swarm. All remained dumb, and
there was a moment of inexpressible silence, in which death might have
been heard flying past This moment was short, and a voice shouted to
Enjolras from the thickest of the crowd,--
"Be it so. Let us raise the barricade to a height of twenty feet, and
all fall upon it. Citizens, let us offer the protest of corpses, and
show that if the people abandon the republicans, the republicans do not
abandon the people."
These words disengaged the thoughts of all from the painful cloud of
individual anxieties, and an enthusiastic shout greeted them. The
name of the man who spoke thus was never known; he was Rome unknown
blouse-wearer, an unknown man, a forgotten man, a passing hero, that
great anonymous always mixed up in human crises and social Geneses,
who at the given moment utters the decisive word in a supreme fashion,
and who fades away into darkness after having represented for a minute,
in the light of a flash, the people and God. This inexorable resolution
was so strongly in the air of June 6, 1832, that almost at the same
hour the insurgents of the St. Merry barricade uttered this cry, which
became historical,--"Whether they come to our help, or whether they do
not, what matter! Let us all fall here, to the last man!" As we see,
the two barricades, though materially isolated, communicated.
CHAPTER IV.
FIVE LESS AND ONE MORE.
After the man, whoever he aright be, who decreed the "protest of
corpses," had spokes, sad given the formula of the common soul, a
strangely satisfied and terrible cry issued from every mouth, funereal
in its meaning and triumphal in its accent.
"Long live death! Let us all remain here."
"Why all?" Enjolras asked.
"All, all!"
Enjolras continued,--
"The position is good and the barricade fine. Thirty men are
sufficient, then why sacrifice forty?"
They replied,--
"Because not one of us will go away."
"Citizens," Enjolras cried, and there was in his voice an almost
irritated vibration, "the republic is not rich enough in men to make
an unnecessary outlay. If it be the duty of some to go away, that duty
must be performed like any other."
Enjolras, the man-principle, had over his co-religionists that kind of
omnipotence which is evolved from the absolute. Still, however great
that omnipotence might be, they murmured. A chief to the tips of his
fingers, Enjolras, on seeing that they murmured, insisted. He continued
haughtily,--
"Let those who are afraid to be only thirty say so."
The murmurs were redoubled.
"Besides," a voice in the throng remarked, "it is easy to say, 'Go
away,' but the barricade is surrounded."
"Not on the side of the markets," said Enjolras. "The Rue Mondétour
is free, and the Marché des Innocents can be reached by the Rue des
Prêcheurs."
"And then," another voice in the group remarked, "we should be caught
by falling in with some grand rounds of the line or the National Guard.
They will see a man passing in blouse and cap: 'Where do you come from?
Don't you belong to the barricade?' and they will look at your hands;
you smell of powder, and will be shot."
Enjolras, without answering, touched Combeferre's shoulder, and both
entered the ground-floor room. They came out again a moment after,
Enjolras holding in his outstretched hands the four uniforms which
he had laid on one side, and Combeferre followed him carrying the
cross-belts and shakos.
"In this uniform," Enjolras said, "it is easy to enter the ranks and
escape. Here are four at any rate."
And he threw the four uniforms on the unpaved ground; but as no one
moved in the stoical audience, Combeferre resolved to make an appeal.
"Come," he said, "you must show a little pity. Do you know what the
question is here? It is about women. Look you, are there wives,--yes
or no? Are there children,--yes or no? Are these nothing, who rock a
cradle with their foot, and have a heap of children around them? Let
him among you who has never seen a nurse's breast hold up his hand.
Ah! you wish to be killed. I wish it too, I who am addressing you; but
I do not wish to feel the ghosts of women twining their arms around
me. Die,--very good; but do not cause people to die. Suicides like
the one which is about to take place here are sublime; but suicide is
restricted, and does not allow of extension, and so soon as it affects
your relations, suicide is called murder. Think of the little fair
heads, and think too of the white hair. Listen to me! Enjolras tells
me that just now he saw at the corner of the Rue du Cygne a candle at
a poor window on the fifth floor, and on the panes the shaking shadow
of an old woman who appeared to have spent the night in watching at
the window; she is perhaps the mother of one of you. Well, let that
man go, and hasten to say to his mother, 'Mother, here I am!' Let him
be easy in his mind, for the work will be done here all the same. When
a man supports his relatives by his toil, he has no longer any right
to sacrifice himself, for that is deserting his family. And then,
too, those who have daughters, and those who have sisters! Only think
of them. You let yourselves be killed, you are dead, very good; and
to-morrow? It is terrible when girls have no bread, for man begs, but
woman sells. Oh, those charming, graceful, and gentle creatures with
flowers in their caps, who fill the house with chastity, who sing,
who 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
blessing and your pride,--ah, my God! they will starve. What would you
have me say to you? There is a human flesh-market, and you will not
prevent them entering it with your shadowy hands trembling around them.
Think of the street; think of the pavement covered with strollers;
think of the shops before which women in low-necked dresses come and
go in the mud. Those women, too, were pure. Think of your sisters,
you who have any; misery, prostitution, the police. St Lazare, that
is what these delicate maidens, these fragile marvels of chastity,
modesty, and beauty, fresher than the lilies in May, will fall to. Ah,
you have let yourselves be killed! Ah, you are no longer there! That
is,--very good,--you have wished to withdraw the people from royalty,
and you give your daughters to the police. My friends, take care and
have compassion; we are not wont to think much about women, hapless
women; we trust to the fact that women have not received the education
of men. They are prevented reading, thinking, or occupying themselves
with politics; but will you prevent them going to-night to the Morgue
and recognizing your corpses? Come, those who have families must be
good fellows, and shake our hand and go away, leaving us to do the job
here all alone. I am well aware that courage is needed to go away, and
that it is difficult; but the more difficult the more meritorious it
is. Ton say, 'I have a gun and am at the barricade; all the worse, I
remain.' 'All the worse' is easily said. My friends, there is a morrow,
and that morrow you will not see; but your families will see it. And
what sufferings! Stay; do you know what becomes of a healthy child
with cheeks like an apple, who chatters, prattles, laughs, and smiles
as fresh as a kiss, when he is abandoned? I saw one, quite little,
about so high; his father was dead, and poor people had taken him in
through charity; but they had not bread for themselves. The child was
always hungry; it was winter-time, but though he was always hungry
he did not cry. He was seen to go close to the stove, whose pipe was
covered with yellow earth. The boy detached with his fingers a piece of
this earth and ate it; his breathing was hoarse, his face livid, his
legs soft, and his stomach swollen. He said nothing, and when spoken
to made no answer. He is dead, and was brought to die at the Necker
Hospital, where I saw him, for I was a student there. Now, if there be
any fathers among you, fathers who delight in taking a walk on Sunday,
holding in their powerful hand a child's small fingers, let each of
these fathers fancy this lad his own. The poor brat I can remember
perfectly; I fancy I see him now, and when he lay on the dissecting
table, his bones stood out under his skin like the tombs under the
grass of a cemetery. We found a sort of mud in his stomach, and he had
ashes between his teeth. Come, let us examine our conscience and take
the advice of our heart; statistics prove that the mortality among
deserted children is fifty-five per cent. I repeat, it is a question
of wives, of mothers, of daughters, and babes. Am I saying anything
about you? I know very well what you are. I know that you are all
brave. I know that you have all in your hearts the joy and glory of
laying down your lives for the great cause. I know very well that you
feel yourselves chosen to die usefully and magnificently, and that each
of you clings to his share of the triumph. Very good. But you are not
alone in this world, and there are other beings of whom you must think;
you should not be selfish."
All hung their heads with a gloomy air. Strange contradictions of the
human heart in the sublimest moments! Combeferre, who spoke thus,
was not an orphan; he remembered the mothers of others and forgot
his own; he was going to let himself be killed, and was "selfish."
Marius, fasting and feverish, who had successively given up all hope,
cast ashore on grief, the most mournful of shipwrecks, saturated with
violent emotions, and feeling the end coming, had buried himself deeper
and deeper in that visionary stupor which ever precedes the fatal and
voluntarily accepted hour. A physiologist might have studied in him
the growing symptoms of that febrile absorption which is known and
classified by science, and which is to suffering what voluptuousness
is to pleasure, for despair also has its ecstasy. Marius had attained
that stage; as we have said, things which occurred before him appeared
to him remote, he distinguished the ensemble, but did not perceive the
details. He saw people coming and going before him in a flash, and he
heard voices speaking as if from the bottom of an abyss. Still this
affected him, for there was in this scene a point which pierced to him
and aroused him. He had but one idea, to die, and he did not wish to
avert his attention from it; but he thought in his gloomy somnambulism
that in destroying himself he was not prohibited from saving somebody.
He raked his voice,--
"Enjolras and Combeferre are right," he said: "let us have no useless
sacrifice. I join them, and we must make haste. Combeferre has told you
decisive things: there are men among you who have families, mothers,
sisters, wives, and children. Such must leave the ranks."
Not a soul stirred.
"Married men and supporters of families will leave the ranks," Marius
repeated.
His authority was great, for though Enjolras was really the chief of
the barricade, Marius was its savior.
"I order it," Enjolras cried.
"I implore it," Marius said.
Then these heme men, stirred up by Combeferre's speech, shaken by
Enjolras's order, and moved by Marius's entreaty, began denouncing one
another. "It is true," a young man said to a grown-up man, "you are a
father of a family: begone!" "No! you ought to do so rather," the man
replied, "for you have two sisters to support;" and an extraordinary
contest broke out, in which each struggled not to be thrust out of the
tomb.
"Make haste," said Combeferre; "in a quarter of an hour there will no
longer be time."
"Citizens," Enjolras added, "we have a republic here, and universal
suffrage reigns. Point out yourselves the men who are to leave us."
They obeyed, and at the end of a few minutes five were unanimously
pointed out and left the ranks.
"There are five of them!" Marius exclaimed.
There were only four uniforms.
"Well," the five replied, "one will have to remain behind."
And then came who should remain, and who should find reasons for others
not to remain. The generous quarrel began again.
"You have a wife who loves you.--You have your old mother.--You have
neither father nor mother; what will become of your three little
brothers?--You are the father of five children.--You have a right to
live, for you are only seventeen, and it is too early to die."
These great revolutionary barricades were meeting-places of heroisms.
The improbable was simple there, and these men did not astonish one
another.
"Make haste," Courfeyrac repeated.
Cries to Marius came from the groups.
"You must point out the one who is to remain."
"Yes," the five said; "do you choose, and we will obey you."
Marius did not believe himself capable of any emotion; still, at this
idea of choosing a man for death all the blood flowed back to his
heart, and he would have tamed pale could he have grown paler. He
walked up to the five, who smiled upon him, and each, with his eye full
of that great flame which gleams through history on Thermopylæ, cried
to him,--
"I! I! I!"
And Marius stupidly counted them. There were still five! Then his eyes
settled on the four uniforms. All at once a fifth uniform fell, as if
from heaven, on the other four; the fifth man was saved. Marius raised
his eyes, and recognized M. Fauchelevent.
Jean Valjean had just entered the barricade; either through information
he had obtained, through instinct, or through accident, he arrived by
the Mondétour Lane, and, thanks to his National Guard uniform, passed
without difficulty. The vedette stationed by the insurgents in the Rue
Mondétour had no cause to give the alarm-signal for a single National
Guard, and had let him enter the street, saying to himself, "He is
probably a reinforcement, or at the worst a prisoner." The moment was
too serious for a sentry to turn away from his duty or his post of
observation. At the moment when Jean Valjean entered the redoubt, no
one noticed him, for all eyes were fixed on the five chosen men and the
four uniforms. Jean Valjean, however, had seen and heard, and silently
took off his coat and threw it on the pile formed by the other coats.
The emotion was indescribable.
"Who is this man?" Bossuet asked.
"He is a man," Combeferre replied, "who saves his fellow-man."
Marius added in a grave voice,--
"I know him."
This bail was sufficient for all, and Enjolras turned to Jean Valjean.
"Citizen, you are welcome."
And he added,--
"You are aware that you will die."
Jean Valjean, without answering, helped the man he was saving to put on
his uniform.
CHAPTER V.
THE HORIZON ONE SEES FROM BARRICADE'S SUMMIT.
The situation of the whole party in this fatal hour, and at this
inexorable spot, had as result and pinnacle the supreme melancholy of
Enjolras. Enjolras had within him the plenitude of the revolution;
he was imperfect, however, so far as the absolute can be so,--he had
too much of St. Just and not enough of Anacharsis Clootz; still his
mind in the society of the Friends of the A. B. C. had eventually
received a certain magnetism of Combeferre's ideas. For some time past
he had been gradually emerging from the narrow form of dogmatism and
yielding to the expansion of progress, and in the end he had accepted,
as the definitive and magnificent evolution, the transformation of
the great French republic into the immense human republic. As for the
immediate means, a violent situation being given, he was willing to be
violent; in that he did not vary, and he still belonged to that epic
and formidable school which is resumed in the words "'93." Enjolras
was standing on the paving-stone steps, with one of his elbows on the
muzzle of his gun. He was thinking; he trembled, as men do when a
blast passes, for spots where death lurks produce this tripod effect.
A sort of stifled fire issued from beneath his eyelashes, which were
full of the internal glance. All at once he raised his head, his light
hair fell back like that of the angel on the dark quadriga composed of
stars, and he cried:--
"Citizens, do you represent the future to yourselves? The streets of
towns inundated with light, green branches on the thresholds, nations
sisters, men just, old men blessing children, the past loving the
present, men thinking at perfect liberty, believers enjoying perfect
equality, for religion the heaven, God, the direct priest, the human
conscience converted into an altar, no more hatred, the fraternity of
the workshop and the school, notoriety the sole punishment and reward,
work for all, right for all, peace for all, no more bloodshed, no more
wars, and happy mothers! To subdue the matter is the first step, to
realize the ideal is the second. Reflect on what progress has already
done; formerly the first human races saw with terror the hydra that
breathed upon the waters, the dragon that vomited fire, the griffin
which was the monster of the air, and which flew with the wings of an
eagle and the claws of a tiger, pass before their eyes,--frightful
beasts which were below man. Man, however, set his snares, the sacred
snares of intellect, and ended by catching the monsters in them. We
have subdued the hydra, and it is called the steamer; we have tamed
the dragon, and it is called the locomotive; we are on the point of
taming the griffin, we hold it already, and it is called the balloon.
The day on which that Promethean task is terminated and man has
definitively attached to his will the triple antique chimera, the
dragon, the hydra, and the griffin, he will be master of water, fire,
and air, and he will be to the rest of animated creation what the
ancient gods were formerly to him. Courage, and forward! Citizens,
whither are we going? To science made government, to the strength of
things converted into the sole public strength, to the natural law
having its sanction and penalty in itself and promulgating itself by
evidence, and to a dawn of truth corresponding with the dawn of day.
We are proceeding to a union of the peoples; we are proceeding to a
unity of man. No more fictions, no more parasites. The real governed
by the true is our object. Civilization will hold its assize on the
summit of Europe, and eventually in the centre of the continent, in
a great Parliament of intellect. Something like this has been seen
already; the Amphictyons held two sessions a year, one at Delphi, the
place of the gods, the other at Thermopylæ, the place of heroes. Europe
will have her Amphictyons, the globe will have its Amphictyons, France
bears the sublime future within her, and this is the gestation of the
19th century. What Greece sketched out is worthy of being finished by
France. Hearken to me, Feuilly, valiant workman, man of the people, man
of the people. I venerate thee; yes, thou seest clearly future times;
yes, thou art right. Thou hast neither father nor mother, Feuilly, and
thou hast adopted humanity as thy mother and right as thy father. Thou
art about to die here, that is to say, to triumph. Citizens, whatever
may happen to-day, we are about to make a revolution, by our defeat as
well as by our victory. In the same way as fires light up a whole city,
revolutions light up the whole human race. And what a revolution shall
we make? I have just told you, the revolution of the True. From the
political point of view, there is but one principle, the sovereignty of
man over himself. This sovereignty of me over me is called liberty, and
where two or three of these liberties are associated the State begins.
But in this association there is no abdication, and each sovereignty
concedes a certain amount of itself to form the common right. This
quality is the same for all, and this identity of concession which each
makes to all is called Equality. The common right is nought but the
protection of all radiating over the right of each. This protection
of all over each is termed Fraternity. The point of intersection of
all aggregated societies is called Society, and this intersection
being a junction, the point is a knot. Hence comes what is called the
social tie; some say the social contract, which is the same thing, as
the word contract is etymologically formed with the idea of a tie.
Let us come to an understanding about equality; for if liberty be the
summit, equality is the base. Equality, citizens, is not all vegetation
on a level, a society of tall blades of grass and small oaks, or a
neighborhood of entangled jealousies; it is, civilly, every aptitude
having the same opening, politically, all votes having the same weight,
and religiously, all consciences having the same right. Equality
has an organ in gratuitous and compulsory education, and it should
begin with the right to the alphabet. The primary school imposed on
all, the secondary school offered to all, such is the law, and from
the identical school issues equal instruction. Yes, instruction!
Light, light! Everything comes from light and everything returns to
it Citizens, the 19th century is great, but the 20th century will be
happy. Then there will be nothing left resembling ancient history,
there will be no cause to fear, as at the present day, a conquest, an
invasion, usurpation, an armed rivalry of nations, an interruption of
civilization depending on a marriage of kings, a birth in hereditary
tyrannies, a division of peoples by Congress, a dismemberment by the
collapse of dynasties, a combat of two religions, clashing, like two
goats of the darkness, on the bridge of infinity; there will be no
cause longer to fear famine, exhaustion, prostitution through destiny,
misery through stoppage of work, and the scaffold, and the sword, and
battles, and all the brigandage of accident in the forest of events;
we might almost say there will be no more events, we shall be happy;
the human race will accomplish its law as the terrestrial globe does
its law; harmony will be restored between the soul and the planet, and
the soul will gravitate round the truth as the planet does round light.
Friends, the hour we are now standing in is a gloomy hour, but there
are such terrible purchases of the future. Oh, the human race will be
delivered, relieved, and consoled! We affirm it on this barricade,
and where should the cry of love be raised if not on the summit of
the sacrifice? Oh, my brothers, this is the point of junction between
those who think and those who suffer. This barricade is not made of
paving-stones, beams, and iron bars; it is made of two masses,--a
mass of ideas and a mass of sorrows. Misery meets then the ideal; day
embraces the night there, and says to it, 'I am about to die with thee,
and thou wilt be born again with me.' Faith springs from the embrace
of all the desolations; sufferings bring hither their agony, and ideas
their immortality. This agony and this immortality are about to be
mingled and compose one death. Brothers, the man who dies here dies in
the radiance of the future, and we shall enter a tomb all filled with
dawn."
Enjolras interrupted himself rather than was silent; his lips moved
silently as if he were talking to himself, which attracted attention,
and in order still to try to hear him they held their tongues. There
was no applause, but they whispered together for a long time. Language
being breath, the rustling of intellects resembles the rustling of
leaves.
CHAPTER VI.
MARIUS HAGGARD, JAVERT LACONIC.
Let us describe what was going on in Marius's thoughts. Our readers
will remember his state of mind, for, as we just now said, everything
was only a vision to him. His appreciation was troubled, for he was
(we urge the fact) beneath the shadow of the great gloomy wings opened
above the dying. He felt that he had entered the tomb, he fancied that
he was already on the other side of the wall, and he only saw the faces
of the living with the eyes of a dead man. How was M. Fauchelevent
present? Why was he here, and what did he come to do? Marius did not
ask himself all these questions. Moreover, as our despair has the
peculiar thing about it that it envelops others as it does ourselves,
it appeared to him logical that everybody should die. Still he thought
of Cosette with a contraction of the heart. However, M. Fauchelevent
did not speak to him, did not look at him, and did not even seem to
hear Marius when he raised his voice, saying, "I know him." As for
Marius, this attitude of M. Fauchelevent relieved him, and if such
a word were permissible for such impressions, we might say that it
pleased him. He had ever felt an absolute impossibility in addressing
this enigmatical man, who was at once equivocal and imposing to him. It
was a very long time too since he had seen him; and this augmented the
impossibility for a timid and reserved nature like Marius's.
The five men selected left the barricade by the Mondétour Lane,
perfectly resembling National Guards. One of them wept as he went away,
and before doing so they embraced those who remained. When the five
men sent back to life had left, Enjolras thought of the one condemned
to death. He went to the ground-floor room, where Javert, tied to the
post, was reflecting.
"Do you want anything?" Enjolras asked him.
Javert answered,--
"When will you kill me?"
"Wait. We require all our cartridges at this moment."
"In that case, give me some drink," Javert said.
Enjolras himself held out to him a glass of water, and, as Javert was
bound, helped him to drink.
"Is that all?" Enjolras resumed.
"I feel uncomfortable at this post," Javert replied; "you did not act
kindly in leaving me fastened to it the whole night. Bind me as you
please, but you might surely lay me on a table, like the other man."
And with a nod of the head he pointed to M. Mabœuf's corpse. It
will be remembered that there was at the end of the room a long, wide
table on which bullets had been run and cartridges made. All the
cartridges being made, and all the powder expended, this table was
free. By Enjolras's order, four insurgents unfastened Javert from
the post, and while they did so a fifth held a bayonet to his chest.
His hands remained fastened behind his back, a thin strong cord was
attached to his feet, which enabled him to step fifteen inches, like
those who are going to ascend the scaffold, and he was forced to walk
to the table at the end of the room, on which they laid him, securely
fastened round the waist. For greater security, a system of knotting
was employed by means of a cord fastened to the neck, which rendered
any escape impossible; it was the sort of fastening called in prisons a
martingale, which starts from the nape, of the neck, is crossed on the
stomach, and is turned round the hands after passing between the legs.
While Javert was being bound, a man standing in the doorway regarded
him with singular attention, and the shadow this man cast caused Javert
to turn his head. He raised his eyes and recognized Jean Valjean, but
he did not even start; he merely looked down haughtily, and restricted
himself to saying, "It is all plain."
CHAPTER VII.
THE SITUATION BECOMES AGGRAVATED.
Day grew rapidly, but not a window opened, not a door was ajar; it was
the dawn, not an awaking. The end of the Rue de la Chanvrerie opposed
to the barricade had been evacuated by the troops, as we stated; it
appeared to be free and open for passers-by with sinister tranquillity.
The Rue St. Denis was dumb as the Avenue of the Sphinxes at Thebes;
there was not a living being on the square, which a sunbeam whitened.
Nothing is so melancholy as this brightness of deserted streets;
nothing could be seen, but something could be heard, and there was a
mysterious movement at a certain distance off. It was evident that the
critical moment was arriving, and, as on the previous evening, the
vedettes fell back, but this time all of them did so. The barricade
was stronger than at the prior attack, for since the departure of the
five it had been heightened. By the advice of the vedette who had been
watching the region of the Halles, Enjolras, through fear of a surprise
in the rear, formed a serious resolution. He barricaded the small
passage of the Mondétour Lane, which had hitherto remained free, and
for this purpose a further portion of the street was unpaved. In this
way the barricade, walled in on three sides,--in front by the Rue de
la Chanvrerie, on the left by the Rue du Cygne, and on the right by
the Rue Mondétour,--was truly almost impregnable, but it is true that
they were fatally enclosed within it. It had three fronts but no issue,
it was a fortress but a mouse-trap, as Courfeyrac said with a smile.
Enjolras had some thirty paving-stones piled up by the door of the inn.
"They dug up more than enough," said Bossuet. The silence was now so
profound in the direction whence the attack must come, that Enjolras
ordered all his men to return to their fighting-posts, and a ration of
brandy was distributed to each man.
Nothing is more curious than a barricade preparing for an assault;
every man chooses his place, as at the theatre. They crowd, elbow, and
shoulder one another, and some make stalls of paving-stones. Here an
angle of the wall is in the way, and it is avoided; there is a redan
which may offer protection, and they seek shelter in it. Left-handed
men are precious, for they take places inconvenient for others. Many
arrange so as to fight seated, for they wish to be at their ease to
kill, and comfortable in dying. In the fatal war of June, 1848, an
insurgent, who was a wonderful marksman, and who fought from a terraced
roof, had a Voltaire easy-chair carried there, and was knocked over
in it by a volley of grape-shot. So soon as the chief has given the
signal for action all disorderly movements cease; there is no longer
any sharp-shooting, any conversations or asides: all that minds contain
converges, and is changed into the expectation of the assailant. A
barricade before danger is a chaos, in danger discipline, for peril
produces order. So soon as Enjolras had taken his double-barrelled
gun, and placed himself at a species of parapet which he reserved for
himself, all were silent; a quick, sharp crackling ran confusedly along
the wall of paving-stones; it was the muskets being cocked. However,
the attitudes were haughtier and more confident than ever, for an
excess of sacrifice is a consolidation, and though they no longer had
hope, they had despair,--despair, that last weapon, which at times
gives victory, as Virgil tells us. Supreme resources issue from extreme
resolutions. To embark on death is at times the means of escaping the
shipwreck, and the cover of the coffin becomes a plank of salvation.
As on the previous evening, all their attention was turned upon the
end of the street, which was now lighted up and visible. They had not
long to wait ere the movement began again, distinctly in the direction
of St. Leu, but it did not resemble the sound of the first attack. A
rattling of chains, the alarming rolling of a heavy weight, a clang
of bronze leaping on the pavement, and a species of solemn noise,
announced that a sinister engine was approaching; there was a tremor
in the entrails of these old peaceful streets, pierced and built for
the fruitful circulation of interests and ideas, and which are not made
for the monstrous rolling of the wheels of war. The fixity of the eyes
turned toward the end of the street became stern, as a cannon appeared.
The gunners pushed the gun on; the limber was detached, and two men
supported the carriage, while four were at the wheels; others followed
with the tumbril, and the lighted match could be seen smoking.
"Fire!" shouted Enjolras.
The whole barricade burst into a flame, and the detonation was
frightful; an avalanche of smoke covered and concealed the gun and
the men. A few seconds after the cloud was dispersed, and the gun and
the men reappeared; the gunners were bringing it up to the front of
the barricade, slowly, correctly, and without hurry; not one had been
wounded. Then the captain of the gun, hanging with his whole weight
on the breech to elevate the muzzle, began pointing the gun with the
gravity of an astronomer setting a telescope.
"Bravo for the artillery!" cried Bossuet.
And all the men at the barricade clapped their hands. A moment after
the gun, standing in the very centre of the street across the gutter,
was in position, and a formidable mouth yawned at the barricade.
"Come, we are going to be gay," said Courfeyrac. "Here is the
brutality; after the fillip the blow with the fist The army is
extending its heavy paw toward us, and the barricade is going to be
seriously shaken. The musketry-fire feels, and the cannon takes."
"It is an eight-pounder of the new pattern in bronze," Combeferre
added. "Those guns, if the proportion of ten parts of tin to one
hundred of copper is exceeded, are liable to burst, for the excess of
tin renders them too soft. It thus happens that have holes and cavities
in the vent, and in order to obviate this danger and be able to load,
it would perhaps be advisable to revert to the process of the 14th
century, circling and reinforcing the gun with a series of steel rings,
without any welding from the breech to the trunnions. In the mean while
they remedy the defect as well as they can, and they manage to discover
where the holes are in the vent of the gun by means of a searcher; but
there is a better method in Gribeauval's movable star."
"In the 16th century," Bossuet observed, "guns were rifled."
"Yes," Combeferre replied; "that augments the ballistic force, but
lessens the correctness of aim. At short distances the trajectory has
not all the desirable rigidness, the parabola is exaggerated, the
path of the projectile is not sufficiently rectilinear for it to hit
intermediate objects, though that is a condition of fighting whose
importance grows with the proximity of the enemy and the precipitation
of the firing. This defective tension of the curve of the projectile
in rifled cannon of the 16th century emanated from the weakness of the
charge; weak charges for such engines are imposed by the ballistic
necessities, such, for instance, as the preservation of the carriage.
After all, the cannon, that despot, cannot do all that it wishes, and
strength is a great weakness. A cannon-ball goes only six hundred
leagues an hour, while light covers seventy thousand leagues per
second. This is the superiority of Jesus Christ over Napoleon."
"Reload your guns," said Enjolras.
In what manner would the revetment of the barricade behave against a
cannon-ball? Would a breach be formed? That was the question. While
the insurgents were reloading their guns the artillerymen loaded the
cannon. The anxiety within the redoubt was profound; the shot was
fired, and the detonation burst forth.
"Present!" a joyous voice cried.
And at the same time as the cannon-ball struck the barricade, Gavroche
bounded inside it. He came from the direction of the Rue du Cygne,
and actively clambered over the accessory barricade which fronted the
labyrinth of the Little Truanderie. Gavroche produced greater effect at
the barricade than the cannon-ball did; for the latter was lost in the
heap of rubbish. It had broken a wheel of the omnibus, and finished the
old truck, on seeing which the insurgents burst into a laugh.
"Persevere!" cried Bossuet to the gunners.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE ARTILLERY SETS TO WORK IN EARNEST.
Gavroche was surrounded, but he had no time to report anything, as
Marius, shuddering, drew him on one side.
"What have you come to do here?"
"What a question?" the boy said; "and you, pray?"
And he gazed fixedly at Marius with his epic effrontery: his eyes were
dilated by the proud brightness which they contained. It was with a
stern accent that Marius continued,--
"Who told you to return? I only trust that you have delivered my letter
at its address."
Gavroche felt some degree of remorse in the matter of the letter; for,
in his hurry to return to the barricade, he had got rid of it rather
than delivered it. He was forced to confess to himself that he had
confided somewhat too lightly in this stranger, whose face he had not
even been able to distinguish. It is true that this man was bareheaded,
but that was not enough. In short, he reproached himself quietly for
his conduct, and feared Marius's reproaches. He took the simplest
process to get out of the scrape,--he told an abominable falsehood.
"Citizen, I delivered the letter to the porter. The lady was asleep,
and she will have the letter when she wakes."
Marius had two objects in sending the letter,--to bid Cosette farewell
and save Gavroche. He was obliged to satisfy himself with one half of
what he wanted. The connection between the Bending of the letter and M.
Fauchelevent's presence at the barricade occurred to his mind, and he
pointed him out to Gavroche.
"Do you know that man?"
"No," said Gavroche.
Gavroche, in truth, as we know, had only seen Jean Valjean by night.
The troubled and sickly conjectures formed in Marius's mind were
dissipated. Did he know M. Fauchelevent's opinions? Perhaps he was a
republican; hence his presence in the action would be perfectly simple.
In the mean while Gavroche had run to the other end of the barricade,
crying, "My gun!" and Courfeyrac ordered it to be given to him.
Gavroche warned "his comrades," as he called them, that the barricade
was invested, and he had found great difficulty in reaching it. A
battalion of the line, with their arms piled in the Little Truanderie,
was observing on the side of the Rue du Petit Cygne; on the opposite
side the Municipal Guard occupied the Rue des Prêcheurs; while in front
of them they had the main body of the army. This information given,
Gavroche added,--
"I authorize you to give them a famous pill."
Enjolras was in the mean while watching at his loop-hole with open
ears; for the assailants, doubtless little satisfied with the
gun-shot, had not repeated it. A company of line infantry had come up
to occupy the extremity of the street behind the gun. The soldiers
unpaved the street, and erected with the stones a small low wall,
a species of epaulement, only eighteen inches high, and facing the
barricade. At the left-hand angle of this work could be seen the head
of a suburban column, massed in the Rue St. Denis. Enjolras, from his
post, fancied he could hear the peculiar sound produced by canister
when taken out of its box, and he saw the captain of the gun change his
aim and turn the gun's muzzle slightly to the left. Then the gunners
began loading, and the captain of the gun himself took the port-fire
and walked up to the vent.
"Fall on your knees all along the barricade," Enjolras shouted.
The insurgents, scattered in front of the wine-shop, and who had
left their posts on Gavroche's arrival, rushed pell-mell toward the
barricade; but ere Enjolras's order was executed, the discharge took
place with the frightful rattle of a round of grape-shot; it was
one, in fact. The shot was aimed at the opening in the redoubt, and
ricochetted against the wall, killing two men and wounding three. If
this continued, the barricade would be no longer tenable, for the
grape-shot entered it. There was a murmur of consternation.
"Let us stop a second round," Enjolras said: and levelling his
carbine he aimed at the captain of the gun, who was leaning over the
breech and rectifying the aim. He was a handsome young sergeant of
artillery, fair, gentle-faced, and having the intelligent look peculiar
to that predestined and formidable arm which, owing to its constant
improvement, must end by killing war. Combeferre, who was standing by
Enjolras's side, gazed at this young man.
"What a pity!" said Combeferre. "What a hideous thing such butchery is!
Well, when there are no kings left there will be no war. Enjolras, you
aim at that sergeant, but do not notice him. Just reflect that he is a
handsome young man; he is intrepid. You can see that he is a thinker,
and these young artillerymen are well educated; he has a father,
mother, and family; he is probably in love; he is but twenty-five years
of age at the most, and might be your brother."
"He is so," said Enjolras.
"Yes," Combeferre added, "and mine too. Do not kill him."
"Let me alone. It must be."
And a tear slowly coursed down Enjolras's marble cheek. At the same
time he pulled the trigger and the fire flashed forth. The artilleryman
turned twice on his heel, with his arms stretched out before him, and
his head raised as if to breathe the air, and then fell across the
cannon motionless. His back could be seen, from the middle of which a
jet of blood gushed forth; the bullet had gone right through his chest,
and he was dead. It was necessary to bear him away and fill up his
place, and thus a few minutes were gained.
CHAPTER IX.
EMPLOYMENT OF THE POACHER'S OLD SKILL AND HIS UNERRING SHOT, WHICH HAD
AN INFLUENCE ON THE CONDEMNATION IN 1796.
Opinions varied in the barricade, for the firing of the piece was going
to begin again, and the barricade could not hold out for a quarter of
an hour under the grape-shot; it was absolutely necessary to abate the
firing. Enjolras gave the command.
"We must have a mattress here."
"We have none," said Combeferre; "the wounded are lying on them."
Jean Valjean, seated apart on a bench, near the corner of the
wine-shop, with his gun between his legs, had not up to the present
taken any part in what was going on. He did not seem to hear the
combatants saying around him, "There is a gun that does nothing." On
hearing the order given by Enjolras, he rose. It will be remembered
that on the arrival of the insurgents in the Rue de la Chanvrerie,
an old woman, in her terror of the bullets, placed her mattress in
front of her window. This window, a garret window, was on the roof
of a six-storied house, a little beyond the barricade. The mattress,
placed across it, leaning at the bottom upon two clothes-props, was
held above by two ropes, which, at a distance, seemed two pieces of
pack-thread, and were fastened to nails driven into the frames of the
roof. These cords could be distinctly seen on the sky, like hairs.
"Can any one lend me a double-barrelled gun?" Jean Valjean asked.
Enjolras, who had just reloaded his, handed it to him. Jean Valjean
aimed at the garret window and fired; one of the two cords of the
mattress was cut asunder, and it hung by only one thread. Jean Valjean
fired the second shot, and the second cord lashed the garret window;
the mattress glided between the two poles and fell into the street The
insurgents applauded, and every voice cried,--
"There is a mattress."
"Yes," said Combeferre, "but who will go and fetch it?"
The mattress, in truth, had fallen outside the barricade, between the
besiegers and besieged. Now, as the death of the sergeant of artillery
had exasperated the troops, for some time past they had been lying flat
behind the pile of paving-stones which they had raised; and in order to
make up for the enforced silence of the gun, they had opened fire on
the barricade. The insurgents, wishing to save their ammunition, did
not return this musketry: the fusillade broke against the barricade,
but the street which it filled with bullets was terrible. Jean Valjean
stepped out of the gap, entered the street, traversed the hail of
bullets, went to the mattress, picked it up, placed it on his back, and
re-entering the barricade, himself placed the mattress in the gap,
and fixed it against the wall, so that the gunners should not see it.
This done, they waited for the next round, which was soon fired. The
gun belched forth its canister with a hoarse roar, but there was no
ricochet, and the grape-shot was checked by the mattress. The expected
result was obtained, and the barricade saved.
"Citizen," Enjolras said to Jean Valjean, "the republic thanks you."
Bossuet admired, and laughingly said,--
"It is immoral for a mattress to have so much power: it is the triumph
of that which yields over that which thunders. But no matter, glory to
the mattress that annuls a cannon!"
CHAPTER X.
DAWN.
At this moment Cosette awoke: her bed-room was narrow, clean,
circumspect, with a long window on the east side looking out into the
court-yard of the house. Cosette knew nothing of what was going on in
Paris, for she had returned to her bed-room at the time when Toussaint
said, "There is a row." Cosette had slept but a few hours, though well.
She had had sweet dreams, which resulted perhaps from the fact that
her small bed was very white. Somebody, who was Marius, appeared to
her in light; and she rose with the sun in her eyes, which at first
produced the effect of a continuation of her dream upon her. Her first
thought on coming out of the dream was of a smiling nature, and she
felt quite reassured. Like Jean Valjean a few hours before, she was
passing through that reaction of the soul which absolutely desires no
misfortune. She began hoping with all her strength, without knowing
why, and then suffered from a contraction of the heart. She had not
seen Marius for three days; but she said to herself that he must have
received her letter, that he knew where she was, that he was clever and
would find means to get to her,--certainly to-day, and perhaps that
very morning. It was bright day, but the sunbeam was nearly horizontal,
and so she thought that it must be early, but that she ought to rise
in order to receive Marius. She felt that she could not live without
Marius, and that consequently was sufficient, and Marius would come. No
objection was admissible; all this was certain. It was monstrous enough
to have suffered for three days: Marius absent for three days, that was
horrible on the part of le bon Dieu. Now this cruel suspense sent from
on high was a trial passed through; Marius was about to come and bring
good news. Thus is youth constituted: it wipes away its tears quickly,
and finding sorrow useless, does not accept it. Youth is the smile of
the future of an unknown thing, which is itself: it is natural for it
to be happy, and it seems as if its breath were made of hope.
However, Cosette could not succeed in recalling to mind what Marius had
said to her on the subject of this absence, which was only to last one
day, and what explanation he had given her about it. Every one will
have noticed with what skill a coin let fall on the ground runs to
hide itself, and what art it has in rendering itself invisible. There
are thoughts which play us the same trick; they conceal themselves
in a corner of our brain: it is all over, they are lost, and it is
impossible to recall them to memory. Cosette felt somewhat vexed at the
little useless effort her memory made, and said to herself that it was
very wrong and culpable of her to forget words pronounced by Marius.
She left her bed, and performed the two ablutions of the soul and the
body, her prayers and her toilette.
We may, if absolutely required, introduce a reader into a nuptial
chamber, but not into a virgin's room. Verse could hardly venture
it, prose ought not. It is the interior of a still closed flower, a
whiteness in the gloaming, the inner cell of a closed lily, which must
not be gazed at by man till it has been gazed at by the sun. Woman
in the bud is sacred: this innocent bud which discovers itself, this
adorable semi-nudity which is afraid of itself, this white foot which
takes refuge in a slipper, this throat which veils itself before a
mirror as if the mirror were an eye, this chemise which hurriedly rises
and covers the shoulder at the sound of a piece of furniture creaking
or a passing vehicle, these knotted strings, this stay-lace, this
tremor, this shudder of cold and shame, this exquisite shyness in every
movement, this almost winged anxiety when there is nothing to fear,
the successive phases of the apparel, which are as charming as the
clouds of dawn,--it is not befitting that all this should be described,
and it is too much to have merely indicated it. The eye of man must
to even more religious before the rising of a maiden than before the
rising of a star. The possibility of attaining ought to be turned into
augmented respect. The down of the peach, the first bloom of the plum,
the crystal radiate of the snow, the butterfly's wing Powdered with
feathers, are but coarse things by the side of this chastity, which
does not know itself that it is chaste. The maiden is only the flash
of the dream, and is not yet a statue; her alcove is concealed in the
dim part of the ideal, and the indiscreet touch of the eye brutalizes
this vague twilight. In this case contemplation is profanation. We will
therefore say nothing about the sweet awaking and rising of Cosette. An
Eastern fable tells us that the rose was made white by God, but that
Adam having looked at it for a moment when it opened, it felt ashamed,
and turned pink. We are of those who feel themselves abashed in the
presence of maidens and flowers, for we find them worthy of veneration.
Cosette dressed herself very rapidly, and combed and dressed her hair,
which was very simple at that day, when women did not swell their
ringlets and plaits with cushions and pads, and placed no crinoline
in their hair. Then she opened the window and looked all around,
hoping to discern a little of the street, an angle of the house, or
a corner of the pavement, to watch for Marius. But nothing could be
seen of the outside: the court-yard was surrounded by rather lofty
walls, and was bounded by other gardens. Cosette declared these gardens
hideous, and for the first time in her life considered flowers ugly.
The paltriest street gutter would have suited her purpose better; and
she resolved to look up to heaven, as if she thought that Marius might
possibly come thence. Suddenly she burst into tears, not through any
fickleness of temperament, but her situation consisted of hopes dashed
with despondency. She confusedly felt something horrible; that it was
really in the air. She said to herself that she was sure of nothing,
that letting herself out of sight was losing herself; and the idea
that Marius might return to her from heaven appeared to her no longer
charming but lugubrious. Then--for such these clouds are--calmness
returned, and hope, and a species of smile, unconscious, but trusting
in God.
Everybody was still asleep in the house, and a provincial silence
prevailed. No shutter was opened, and the porter's lodge was still
closed. Toussaint was not up, and Cosette naturally thought that her
father was asleep. She must have suffered greatly, and must still be
suffering, for she said to herself that her father had been unkind,
but she reckoned on Marius. The eclipse of such a light was decidedly
impossible. At moments she heard some distance off a sort of heavy
shock, and thought how singular it was that gates were opened and shut
at so early an hour; it was the sound of the cannon-balls battering
the barricade. There was a martin's nest a few feet below Cosette's
window in the old smoke-blackened cornice, and the mouth of the
nest projected a little beyond the cornice, so that the interior of
this little Paradise could be seen from above. The mother was there
expanding her wings like a fan over her brood; the male bird fluttered
round, went away, and then returned, bringing in his bill food and
kisses. The rising day gilded this happy thing; the great law, increase
and multiply, was there smiling and august; and the sweet mystery
was unfolded in the glory of the morn. Cosette, with her hair in the
sunshine, her soul in flames, enlightened by love within and the dawn
without, bent forward as if mechanically, and, almost without daring to
confess to herself that she was thinking at the same time of Marius,
she began looking at these birds, this family, this male and female,
this mother and her little ones, with all the profound agitation which
the sight of a nest occasions a virgin.
CHAPTER XI.
THE SHOT WHICH DOES NOT MISS AND WHICH KILLS NOBODY.
The fire of the assailants continued, and the musketry and grape-shot
alternated, though without producing much mischief. The upper part of
Corinth alone suffered, and the first-floor and garret windows, pierced
by slugs and bullets, gradually lost their shape. The combatants posted
there were compelled to withdraw; but, in fact, such are the tactics
of an attack on a barricade,--to skirmish for a long time and exhaust
the ammunition of the insurgents, if they commit the error of returning
the fire. When it is discovered by the slackening of their fire that
they have no powder or ball left, the assault is made. Enjolras had not
fallen into this trap, and the barricade did not reply. At each platoon
fire Gavroche thrust his tongue into his cheek, a sign of supreme
disdain.
"That's good," he said; "tear up the linen, for we require lint."
Courfeyrac addressed the grape-shot on its want of effect, and said to
the cannon,--
"You are becoming diffuse, my good fellow."
In battle, intrigues take place as at a ball; and it is probable that
the silence of the redoubt was beginning to render the assailants
anxious, and make them fear lest some unexpected incident had occurred.
They felt a need of seeing clearly through this pile of paving-stones,
and what was going on behind this impassive wall, which received shots
without answering them. The insurgents suddenly perceived a helmet
glistening in the sun upon an adjoining roof: a sapper was leaning
against a tall chimney-pot and apparently a sentry there. He looked
down into the barricade.
"That's a troublesome spy," said Enjolras.
Jean had returned Enjolras his fowling-piece, but still had his own
musket. Without saying a word he aimed at the sapper, and a second
later the helmet, struck by a bullet, fell noisily into the street.
The soldier disappeared with all possible haste. A second watchman
took his place, and it was an officer. Jean Valjean, who had reloaded
his musket, aimed at the new-comer, and sent the officer's helmet to
join the private's. The officer was not obstinate, but withdrew very
quickly. This time the hint was understood, and no one again appeared
on the roof.
"Why did you not kill the man?" Bossuet asked Jean Valjean, who,
however, made no reply.
CHAPTER XII.
DISORDER THE PARTISAN OF ORDER.
Bossuet muttered in Combeferre's ear,--
"He has not answered my question."
"He is a man who does kind actions with musket-shots," said Combeferre.
Those who have any recollection of this now distant epoch know that the
suburban National Guards were valiant against the insurrection, and
they were peculiarly brave and obstinate in the days of June, 1832. Any
worthy landlord, whose establishment the insurrection injured, became
leonine on seeing his dancing-room deserted, and let himself be killed
in order to save order represented by the suburban public-house. At
this time, which was at once heroic and bourgeois, in the presence
of ideas which had their knights, interests had their Paladins, and
the prosaic nature of the motive took away none of the bravery of
the movement. The decrease of a pile of crowns made bankers sing the
Marseillaise, men lyrically shed their blood for the till, and defended
with Lacedæmonian enthusiasm the shop, that immense diminutive of the
country. Altogether there was a good deal that was very serious in all
this; social interests were entering into a contest, while awaiting
the day when they would enter a state of equilibrium. Another sign of
this time was the anarchy mingled with the governmentalism (a barbarous
name of the correct party), and men were for order without discipline.
The drums played unexpectedly fancy calls, at the command of some
colonel of the National Guard: one captain went under fire through
inspiration, while some National Guards fought "for the idea," and on
their own account. In critical moments during the riots men followed
the advice of their chiefs less than their own instincts, and there
were in the army of order real Guerilleros, some of the sword like
Fannicot, and others of the pen like Henry Fonfrède. Civilization,
unhappily represented at this period more by an aggregation of
interests than by a group of principles, was, or believed itself to
be, in danger; it uttered the alarm cry, and every man, constituting
himself a centre, defended, succored, and protected it in his own way,
and the first comer took on himself to save society.
Zeal sometimes went as far as extermination; a platoon of National
Guards constituted themselves of their own authority a council of war,
and tried and executed in five minutes an insurgent prisoner. It was
an improvisation of this nature which killed Jean Prouvaire. It is
that ferocious Lynch law with which no party has the right to reproach
another, for it is applied by the Republic in America as by monarchy
in Europe. This Lynch law was complicated by mistakes. On a day of
riot a young poet of the name of Paul Aimé Garnier was pursued on
the Place Royale at the bayonet's point, and only escaped by taking
shelter under the gateway at No. 6. "There's another of those Saint
Simonians," they shouted, and wished to kill him. Now, he had under
his arm a volume of the Memoirs of the Duc de Saint Simon; a National
Guard read on the back the words "Saint Simon," and shouted, "Death to
him!" On June 6, 1832, a company of suburban National Guards, commanded
by Captain Fannicot, to whom we have already referred, decimated
the Rue de la Chanvrerie for his own good pleasure, and on his own
authority. This fact, singular though it is, was proved by the judicial
report drawn up in consequence of the insurrection of 1832. Captain
Fannicot, an impatient and bold bourgeois, a species of condottiere
of order, and a fanatical and insubmissive governmentalist, could not
resist the attraction of firing prematurely, and taking the barricade
all by himself, that is to say, with his company. Exasperated at the
successive apparition of the red flag and the old coat, which he took
for the black flag, he loudly blamed the generals and commanders of
corps, who were holding councils, as they did not think the decisive
moment for assault had arrived, but were "letting the insurrection stew
in its own gravy," according to a celebrated expression of one of them.
As for him, he thought the barricade ripe, and as everything that is
ripe is bound to fall, he made the attempt.
He commanded men as resolute as himself. "Mad-men," a witness called
them. His company, the same which had shot Jean Prouvaire, was the
first of the battalion posted at the street corner. At the moment when
it was least expected the captain dashed his men at the barricade;
but this movement, executed with more good-will than strategy, cost
Fannicot's company dearly. Before it had covered two thirds of the
street a general discharge from the barricade greeted it; four, the
boldest men of all, running at the head, were shot down in point-blank
range at the very foot of the barricade, and this courageous mob of
National Guards, very brave men, but not possessing the military
tenacity, was compelled to fall back after a few moments, leaving
fifteen corpses in the street. The momentary hesitation gave the
insurgents time to reload, and a second and most deadly discharge
assailed the company before the men were able to regain their shelter
at the corner of the street. In a moment they were caught between two
fires, and received the volley from the cannon, which, having no orders
to the contrary, did not cease firing. The intrepid and imprudent
Fannicot was one of those killed by this round of grape-shot; he was
laid low by the cannon. This attack, which was more furious than
serious, irritated Enjolras.
"The asses!" he said, "they have their men killed and expend our
ammunition for nothing."
Enjolras spoke like the true general of the riot that he was:
insurrection and repression do not fight with equal arms; for the
insurrection, which can be soon exhausted, has only a certain number of
rounds to fire and of combatants to expend. An expended cartouche-box
and a killed man cannot have their place filled up. Repression,
on the other hand, having the army, does not count men, and having
Vincennes, does not count rounds. Repression has as many regiments
as the barricade has men, and as many arsenals as the barricade has
cartouche-boxes. Hence these are always contests of one man against a
hundred, which ever end by the destruction of the barricade, unless
revolution, suddenly dashing up, casts into the balance its flashing
archangel's glaive. Such things happen, and then everything rises,
paving-stones get into a state of ebullition, and popular redoubts
swarm. Paris has a sovereign tremor, the _quid divinum_ is evolved;
there is an August 10 or a July 29 in the air, a prodigious light
appears, the yawning throat of force recoils, and the army, that lion,
sees before it, standing erect and tranquil, that prophet, France.
CHAPTER XIII.
GLEAMS WHICH FADE.
In the chaos of feelings and passions which defend a barricade there is
everything,--bravery, youth, the point of honor, enthusiasm, the ideal,
conviction, the obstinacy of the gambler, and above all intermitting
gleams of hope. One of these intermittences, one of these vague
quiverings of hope, suddenly ran along the Chanvrerie barricade at the
most unexpected moment.
"Listen," Enjolras, who was ever on the watch, exclaimed. "I fancy that
Paris is waking up."
It is certain that on the morning of June 6 the insurrection had for an
hour or two a certain reanimation. The obstinacy of the tocsin of St.
Merry aroused a few slight desires, and barricades were begun in the
Rue du Poirier and in the Rue des Gravilliers. In front of the Porte
St. Martin, a young man armed with a gun attacked a squadron of cavalry
alone, unprotected, and on the open boulevard he knelt down, raised his
gun, fired and killed the Major, and then turned away, saying, "There's
another who will do us no more mischief." He was cut down. In the Rue
St. Denis a woman fired at the National Guard from behind a Venetian
shutter, and the wooden laths could be seen to tremble every moment.
A boy of fourteen was arrested in the Rue de la Cossonnerie with his
pockets full of cartridges, and several guard-houses were attacked. At
the entrance of the Rue Bertin Poirée a very sharp and quite unexpected
fusillade greeted a regiment of cuirassiers, at the head of which rode
General Cavaignac de Barague. In the Rue Planche Mibray old crockery
and household utensils were thrown from the roofs down on the troops;
this was a bad sign, and when Marshal Soult was informed of the fact,
Napoleon's old lieutenant became pensive, for he remembered Suchet's
remark at Saragossa: "We are lost when old women empty their pots de
chambre on our heads." These general symptoms manifested at a moment
when the riots were supposed to be localized, this fever of anger
which regained the upper hand, these will-o'-the-wisps flying here and
there over the profound masses of combustible matter which are called
the faubourgs of Paris, and all the accompanying facts, rendered the
chiefs anxious, and they hastened to extinguish the beginnings of the
conflagration. Until these sparks were quenched, the attacks on the
barricades Maubuée, de la Chanvrerie, and St. Merry were deferred, so
that all might be finished at one blow. Columns of troops were sent
through the streets in a state of fermentation, clearing the large
streets and searching the smaller ones, on the right and on the left,
at one moment slowly and cautiously, at another at quick march. The
troops broke open the doors of the houses whence firing was heard,
and at the same time cavalry manœuvres dispersed the groups on
the boulevards. This repression was not effected without turmoil, and
that tumultuous noise peculiar to collisions between the army and the
people, and it was this that had attracted Enjolras's attention in the
intervals between the cannonading and the platoon fire. Moreover, he
had seen wounded men carried along the end of the street on litters,
and said to Courfeyrac, "Those wounded are not our handiwork."
The hope lasted but a short time, and the gleam was quickly eclipsed.
In less than half an hour what there was in the air vanished; it was
like a flash of lightning without thunder, and the insurgents felt
that leaden pall, which the indifference of the people casts upon
abandoned obstinate men, fall upon them again. The general movement,
which seemed to have been obscurely designed, failed, and the attention
of the Minister of War and the strategy of the generals could now be
concentrated on the three or four barricades that remained standing.
The sun rose on the horizon, and an insurgent addressed Enjolras,--
"We are hungry here. Are we really going to die like this, without
eating?"
Enjolras, still leaning at his parapet, made a nod of affirmation,
without taking his eyes off the end of the street.
CHAPTER XIV.
IN WHICH WE READ THE NAME OF THE MISTRESS OF ENJOLRAS.
Courfeyrac, seated on a stone by the side of Enjolras, continued to
insult the cannon, and each time that the gloomy shower of projectiles
which is called a grape-shot passed with its monstrous noise he greeted
it with an ironical remark.
"You are wasting your breath, my poor old brute, and I feel sorry for
you, as your row is thrown away. That is not thunder, but a cough."
And those around him laughed Courfeyrac and Bossuet, whose valiant
good-humor increased with danger, made up for the want of food, like
Madame Scarron, by jests, and as wine was short, poured out gayety for
all.
"I admire Enjolras," said Bossuet. "His temerity astonishes me. He
lives alone, which, perhaps, renders him a little sad; and Enjolras is
to be pitied for his greatness, which attaches him to widowhood. We
fellows have all, more or less, mistresses, who make us mad, that is
to say brave, and when a man is as full of love as a tiger the least
he can do is to fight like a lion. That is a way of avenging ourselves
for the tricks which our grisettes play us. Roland lets himself be
killed to vex Angelique, and all our heroism comes from our women. A
man without a woman is like a pistol without a hammer, and it is the
woman who makes the man go off. Well, Enjolras has no woman, he is not
in love, and finds means to be intrepid. It is extraordinary that a man
can be cold as ice and daring as fire."
Enjolras did not appear to listen; but any one who had been near him
might have heard him murmur, in a low voice, _Patria._ Bossuet laughed
again, when Courfeyrac shouted, "Here's something fresh."
And assuming the voice of a groom of the chambers who announces a
visitor, he added,---"Mr. Eight-Pounder."
In fact, a new character had come on the stage; it was a second
piece of artillery. The gunners rapidly got it into position by the
side of the first one, and this was the beginning of the end. A few
minutes later both guns, being actively served, were at work against
the barricade, and the platoon fire of the line and the suburban
National Guards supported the artillery. Another cannonade was audible
some distance off. At the same time that the two guns were furiously
assaulting the redoubt in the Rue de la Chanvrerie, two other pieces
placed in position, one in the Rue St. Denis, the other in the Rue
Aubry le Boucher, were pounding the St. Merry barricade. The four guns
formed a lugubrious echo to one another, the barks of the grim dogs of
war answered one another. Of the two guns now opened on the barricade
of the Rue de la Chanvrerie, one fired shell, the other solid shot.
The gun which fired the latter was pointed at a slight elevation, and
the firing was so calculated that the ball struck the extreme edge of
the crest of the barricades, and hurled the broken paying-stones on
the heads of the insurgents. This mode of fire was intended to drive
the combatants from the top of the redoubt, and compel them to close
up in the interior; that is to say, it announced the assault. Once the
combatants were driven from the top of the barricade by the cannon, and
from the windows of the public-house by the canister, the columns of
attack could venture into the street without being aimed at, perhaps
without even being seen, suddenly escalade the barricade, as on the
previous evening, and take it by surprise.
"The annoyance of these guns must be reduced," said Enjolras; and he
shouted, "Fire at the artillerymen!"
All were ready: the barricade, which had so long been silent, was
belted with flame; seven or eight rounds succeeded one another with
a sort of rage and joy; the street was filled with a blinding smoke,
and at the expiration of a few minutes there might be confusedly
seen through the mist, all striped with flame, two thirds of the
artillerymen lying under the gun-wheels. Those who remained standing
continued to serve the guns with a stern tranquillity, but the fire was
reduced.
"Things are going well," said Bossuet to Enjolras; "that is a success."
Enjolras shook his head, and replied,--
"Another quarter of an hour of that success, and there will not be ten
cartridges left in the barricade."
It appears that Gavroche heard the remark.
CHAPTER XV.
GAVROCHE OUTSIDE.
Courfeyrac all at once perceived somebody in the street, at the foot
of the barricade, amid the shower of bullets. Gavroche had fetched a
hamper from the pot-house, passed through the gap, and was quickly
engaged in emptying into it the full cartouche-boxes of the National
Guards killed on the slope of the barricade.
"What are you doing there?" Courfeyrac said.
Gavroche looked up.
"Citizen, I am filling my hamper."
"Do you not see the grape-shot?"
Gavroche replied,--
"Well, it is raining; what then?"
Courfeyrac cried, "Come in."
"Directly," said Gavroche.
And with one bound he reached the street. It will be borne in mind
that Fannicot's company, in retiring, left behind it a number of
corpses; some twenty dead lay here and there all along the pavement
of the street. That made twenty cartouche-boxes for Gavroche, and a
stock of cartridges for the barricade. The smoke lay in the street
like a fog; any one who has seen a cloud in a mountain gorge,
between two precipitous escarpments, can form an idea of this smoke,
contracted, and as it were rendered denser, by the two dark lines
of tall houses. It rose slowly, and was incessantly renewed; whence
came a gradual obscurity, which dulled even the bright daylight. The
combatants could scarce see one another from either end of the street,
which was, however, very short. This darkness, probably desired and
calculated on by the chiefs who were about to direct the assault on
the barricade, was useful for Gavroche. Under the cloak of this smoke,
and thanks to his shortness, he was enabled to advance a considerable
distance along the street unnoticed, and he plundered the first seven
or eight cartouche-boxes without any great danger. He crawled on his
stomach, galloped on all fours, took his hamper in his teeth, writhed,
glided, undulated, wound from one corpse to another, and emptied the
cartouche-box as a monkey opens a nut. They did not cry to him from the
barricade, to which he was still rather close, to return, for fear of
attracting attention to him. On one corpse, which was a corporal's, he
found a powder-flask.
"For thirst," he said, as he put it in his pocket.
While moving forward, he at length reached the point where the fog of
the fire became transparent, so that the sharp-shooters of the line,
drawn up behind their parapet of paving-stones, and the National Guard
at the corner of the street, all at once pointed out to one another
something stirring in the street. At the moment when Gavroche was
taking the cartridges from a sergeant lying near a post, a bullet
struck the corpse.
"Oh, for shame!" said Gavroche; "they are killing my dead for me."
A second bullet caused the stones to strike fire close to him, while
a third upset his hamper. Gavroche looked and saw that it came from
the National Guards. He stood upright, with his hair floating in the
breeze, his hands on his hips, and his eyes fixed on the National
Guards who were firing, and he sang,--
"On est laid à Nanterre,
C'est la faute à Voltaire,
Et bête à Palaiseau,
C'est la faute à Rousseau."
Then he picked up his hamper, put into it the cartridges scattered
around without missing one, and walked toward the firing party, to
despoil another cartouche-box. Then a fourth bullet missed him.
Gavroche sang,--
"Je ne suis pas notaire,
C'est la faute à Voltaire;
Je suis petit oiseau,
C'est la faute à Rousseau."
A fifth bullet only succeeded so far as to draw a third couplet from
him,--
"Joie est mon caractère,
C'est la faute à Voltaire;
Misère est mon trousseau,
C'est la faute à Rousseau."
They went on for some time longer, and the sight was at once terrific
and charming; Gavroche, while fired at, ridiculed the firing, and
appeared to be greatly amused. He was like a sparrow deriding the
sportsmen, and answered each discharge by a verse. The troops aimed at
him incessantly, and constantly missed him, and the National Guards
and the soldiers laughed while covering him. He lay down, then rose
again, hid himself in a doorway, then bounded, disappeared, reappeared,
ran off, came back, replied to the grape-shot by putting his fingers
to his nose, and all the while plundered cartridges, emptied boxes,
and filled his hamper. The insurgents watched him, as they panted with
anxiety, but while the barricade trembled he sang. He was not a child,
he was not a man, he was a strange goblin gamin, and he resembled the
invulnerable dwarf of the combat. The bullets ran after him, but he was
more active than they; he played a frightful game of hide-and-seek with
death: and each time that the snub-nosed face of the spectre approached
the gamin gave it a fillip. One bullet, however, better aimed or more
treacherous than the rest, at length struck the will-o'-the-wisp lad;
Gavroche was seen to totter and then sink. The whole barricade uttered
a cry, but there was an Antæus in this pygmy: for a gamin to touch the
pavement is like the giant touching the earth; and Gavroche had only
fallen to rise again. He remained in a sitting posture, a long jet of
blood ran down his face, he raised both arms in the air, looked in the
direction whence the shot had come, and began singing,--
"Je suis tombé par terre,
C'est la faute à Voltaire;
Le nez dans le ruisseau,
C'est la faute à--"
He did not finish, for a second shot from the same marksman stopped him
short. This time he lay with his face on the pavement, and did not stir
again. This little great soul had flown away.
[Illustration: THE DEATH OF GAVROCHE.]
CHAPTER XVI.
HOW A BROTHER BECOMES A FATHER.
There were at this very moment in the Luxembourg garden--for the eye
of the drama must be everywhere present--two lads holding each other's
hand. One might be seven, the other five, years of age. As they were
wet through with the rain they walked along sunshiny paths; the elder
led the younger, both were in rags and pale, and they looked like wild
birds. The younger said, "I am very hungry." The elder, who had already
a protecting air, led his brother with the left hand, and had a switch
in his right. They were alone in the garden, which was deserted, as the
gates were closed by police order on account of the insurrection. The
troops who had bivouacked there had issued forth for the exigences of
the combat. How were these children here? Perhaps they had escaped from
some guard-room where the door was left ajar; perhaps in the vicinity,
at the Barrière d'Enfer, on the esplanade of the Observatory, or in the
neighboring square overshadowed by the cornice, on which may be read,
_Invenerunt parvulum pannis involutum_, there was some mountebank's
booth from which they had fled; perhaps they had on the previous
evening kept out of sight of the garden inspectors at the hour of
closing, and had spent the night in one of those summer-houses in which
people read the papers: the fact is, that they were wandering about,
and seemed to be free. To be a wanderer, and to appear free, is to be
lost, and these poor little creatures were really lost The two lads
were the same about whom Gavroche had been in trouble, and whom the
reader will remember, sons of Thénardier, let out to Magnon, attributed
to M. Gillenormand, and now leaves fallen from all these rootless
branches, and rolled along the ground by the wind.
Their clothes, clean in the time of Magnon, and which served her as
a prospectus to M. Gillenormand, had become rags; and these beings
henceforth belonged to the statistics of "deserted children," whom
the police pick up, lose, and find again on the pavement of Paris. It
needed the confusion of such a day as this for these two poor little
wretches to be in this garden. If the inspectors had noticed these rags
they would have expelled them, for poor little lads do not enter public
gardens, and yet it ought to be remembered that as children they have a
right to flowers. They were here, thanks to the locked gates, and were
committing an offence; they had stepped into the garden and remained
there. Though locked gates do not give a holiday to the keepers, and
their surveillance is supposed to continue, it grows weaker and rests;
and the inspectors, also affected by the public affairs, and more
busied about the outside than the inside, did not look at the garden,
and had not seen the two delinquents. It had rained on the previous
evening, and even slightly on this morning, but in June, showers are of
no great consequence. People hardly perceive, an hour after a storm,
that this fair beauteous day has wept, for the earth dries up as
rapidly as a child's cheek. At this moment of the solstice the midday
light is, so to speak, poignant, and it seizes everything. It clings to
and spreads itself over the earth with a sort of suction, and we might
say that the sun is thirsty. A shower is a glass of water, and rain is
at once drunk up. In the morning everything glistens, in the afternoon
everything is dusty. Nothing is so admirable as verdure cleansed by
the rain and dried by the sun; it is warm freshness. Gardens and
fields, having water in their roots and sunshine in their flowers,
become censers of incense, and smoke with all their perfumes at once.
Everything laughs, sings, and offers itself, and we feel softly
intoxicated: summer is a temporary Paradise, and the sun helps man to
be patient.
There are beings who ask no more,--living creatures who, having the
azure of heaven, say it is enough; dreamers absorbed in the prodigy,
drawing from the idolatry of nature indifference to good and evil;
contemplators of the Cosmos, radiantly distracted from man, who do not
understand how people can trouble themselves about the hunger of one
person, the thirst of another, the nudity of the poor man in winter,
the lymphatic curvature of a small backbone, the truck-bed, the garret,
the cell, and the rags of young shivering girls, when they can dream
under the trees: they are peaceful and terrible minds, pitilessly
satisfied, and, strange to say, infinitude suffices them. They ignore
that great want of man, the finite which admits of an embrace, and do
not dream of the finite which admits of progress, that sublime toil.
The indefinite, which springs from the divine and human combination
of the infinite and the finite, escapes them, and provided that they
can be face to face with immensity, they smile. They never feel joy,
but always ecstasy, and their life is one of abstraction. The history
of humanity is to them but a grand detail: the All is not in it, the
All remains outside of it. Of what use is it to trouble one's self
about that item, man? Man suffers, it is possible, but just look at
Aldebaran rising! The mother has no milk left, the new-born babe is
dying. I know nothing of all that, but just look at the marvellous rose
made by a sprig of hawthorn when looked at through a microscope; just
compare the finest Mechlin lace with that! These thinkers forget to
love, and the zodiac has such an attraction over them that it prevents
them seeing the weeping child. God eclipses their soul, and they are a
family of minds at once great and little. Homer belonged to it; so did
Goethe, and possibly Lafontaine, magnificent egotists of the infinite,
calm spectators of sorrow, who do not see Nero if the weather be fine;
from whom the sun hides the pyre; who would look at a guillotining to
seek a light effect in it; who hear neither cries nor sobs, nor the
death-rattle nor the tocsin; for whom everything is good, since there
is the month of May; who so long as they have clouds of purple and gold
above their heads declare themselves satisfied; and who are determined
to be happy until the radiance of the stars and the song of birds are
exhausted.
These are darkly radiant, and they do not suspect that they are to be
pitied. But they are certainly so, for the man who does not weep does
not see. We must admire and pity them, as we would pity and admire a
being at once night and day, who had no eyes under his brows, but a
star in the centre of his forehead. The indifference of these thinkers
is, according to some, a grand philosophy. Be it so; but in this
superiority there is infirmity. A man may be immortal and limp, as
witness Vulcan, and he may be more than man and less than man; there
is immense incompleteness in nature, and who knows whether the sun be
not blind? But in that case, whom to trust? _Solem quis dicere falsum
audeat?_ Hence, certain geniuses, certain human deities, star-men,
might be mistaken? What is above at the summit, at the zenith, which
pours so much light on the earth, might see little, see badly, not see
at all? Is not that desperate? No: but what is there above the sun? God.
On June 6, 1832, at about eleven in the forenoon, the Luxembourg,
solitary and depopulated, was delicious. The quincunxes and flower-beds
sent balm and dazzlement into the light, and the branches, wild in the
brilliancy of midday, seemed trying to embrace one another. There was
in the sycamores a twittering of linnets, the sparrows were triumphal,
and the woodpeckers crept along the chestnut, gently tapping holes in
the bark. The beds accepted the legitimate royalty of the lilies, for
the most august of perfumes is that which issues from whiteness. The
sharp odor of the carnations was inhaled, and the old rooks of Marie
de Medicis made love on the lofty trees. The sun gilded, purpled,
and illumined the tulips, which are nothing but all the varieties of
flame made into flowers. All around the tulip-beds hummed the bees,
the flashes of these fire-flowers. All was grace and gayety, even the
coming shower, for that relapse by which the lilies of the valley
and honeysuckles would profit had nothing alarming about it, and the
swallows made the delicious menace of flying low. What was there
inhaled happiness: life smelt pleasantly, and all this nature exhaled
candor, help, assistance, paternity, caresses, and dawn. The thoughts
that fell from heaven were as soft as a babe's little hand that we
kiss. The statues under the trees, nude and white, were robed in
dresses of shadow shot with light; these goddesses were all ragged with
sunshine, and beams hung from them on all sides. Around the great basin
the earth was already so dry as to be parched, and there was a breeze
sufficiently strong to create here and there small riots of dust. A
few yellow leaves remaining from the last autumn joyously pursued one
another, and seemed to be sporting.
The abundance of light had something strangely reassuring about it;
life, sap, heat, and exhalations overflowed, and the greatness of the
source could be felt beneath creation. In all these blasts penetrated
with love, in this movement of reflections and gleams, in this
prodigious expenditure of beams, and in this indefinite outpouring of
fluid gold, the prodigality of the inexhaustible could be felt; and
behind this splendor, as behind a curtain of flames, glimpses of God,
that millionnaire of the stars, could be caught. Thanks to the sand,
there was not a speck of mud; and, thanks to the rain, there was not a
grain of dust The bouquets had just performed their ablutions, and all
the velvets, all the satins, all the varnish, and all the gold which
issue from the earth in the shape of flowers, were irreproachable.
This magnificence was clean, and the grand silence of happy nature
filled the garden,--a heavenly silence, compatible with a thousand
strains of music, the fondling tones from the nests, the buzzing of
the swarms, and the palpitations of the wind. All the harmony of the
season was blended into a graceful whole, the entrances and exits of
spring took place in the desired order, the lilacs were finishing,
and the jessamine beginning, a few flowers were behindhand, a few
insects before their time, and the vanguard of the red butterflies of
June fraternized with the rearguard of the white butterflies of May.
The plane-trees were putting on a fresh skin, and the breeze formed
undulations in the magnificent enormity of the chest-nut-trees. It was
splendid. A veteran from the adjoining barracks who was looking through
the railings said, "Spring presents arms in full dress."
All nature was breakfasting; the creation was at table; it was the
hour: the great blue cloth was laid in heaven, and the great green
one on earth, while the sun gave an _à giorno_ illumination. God was
serving His universal meal, and each being had its pasture or its
pasty. The wood-pigeon found hempseed, the chaffinch found millet, the
goldfinch found chickweed, the redbreast found worms, the bee found
flowers, the fly found infusoria, and the greenfinch found flies. They
certainly devoured one another to some extent, which is the mystery of
evil mingled with good, but not a single animal had an empty stomach.
The two poor abandoned boys had got near the great basin, and somewhat
confused by all this light, tried to hide themselves, which is the
instinct of the poor and the weak in the presence of magnificence, even
when it is impersonal, and they kept behind the swan's house. Now and
then, at intervals when the wind blew, confused shouts, a rumbling,
a sort of tumultuous death-rattle which was musketry, and dull blows
which were cannon-shots, could be heard. There was smoke above the
roofs in the direction of the markets, and a bell which seemed to be
summoning sounded in the distance. The children did not seem to notice
the noises, and the younger lad repeated every now and then in a low
voice, "I am hungry."
Almost simultaneously with the two boys another couple approached
the basin, consisting of a man of about fifty, leading by the hand a
boy of six years of age. It was doubtless a father with his son. The
younger of the two had a cake in his hand. At this period certain
contiguous houses in the Rue Madame and the Rue d'Enfer had keys to
the Luxembourg, by which the lodgers could let themselves in when the
gates were locked; but this permission has since been withdrawn. This
father and son evidently came from one of these houses. The two poor
little creatures saw "this gentleman" coming, and hid themselves a
little more. He was a citizen, and perhaps the same whom Marius during
his love-fever had one day heard near the same great basin counselling
his son "to avoid excesses." He had an affable and haughty look, and a
mouth which, as it did not close, always smiled. This mechanical smile,
produced by too much jaw and too little skin, shows the teeth rather
than the soul. The boy with the bitten cake which he had not finished,
seemed glutted; the boy was dressed in a National Guard's uniform, on
account of the riots, and the father remained in civilian garb for the
sake of prudence. Father and son had halted near the great basin, in
which the two swans were disporting. This bourgeois appeared to have a
special admiration for the swans, and resembled them in the sense that
he walked like them. At this moment the swans were swimming, which is
their principal talent, and were superb. Had the two little fellows
listened, and been of an age to comprehend, they might have overheard
the remarks of a serious man; the father was saying to his son,--
"The sage lives contented with little; look at me, my son, I do not
care for luxury. You never see me in a coat glistening with gold and
precious stones; I leave that false lustre to badly-organized minds."
Here the deep shouts which came from the direction of the Halles broke
out, with a redoublement of hells and noise.
"What is that?" the lad asked.
The father replied,--
"That is the saturnalia."
All at once he perceived the two little ragged boys standing motionless
behind the swan's green house.
"Here is the beginning," he said.
And after a silence he added,--
"Anarchy enters this garden."
In the mean while the boy bit the cake, spat it out again, and suddenly
began crying.
"Why are you crying?" the father asked.
"I am no longer hungry," said the boy.
The father's smile became more marked than ever.
"You need not be hungry to eat a cake."
"I am tired of cake; it is so filling."
"Don't you want any more?"
"No."
The father showed him the swans.
"Throw it to those palmipeds."
The boy hesitated, for if he did not want any more cake that was no
reason to give it away.
The father continued,--
"Be humane: you ought to have pity on animals."
And, taking the cake from his son, he threw it into the basin, where it
fell rather near the bank. The swans were some distance off, near the
centre of the basin, and engaged with some prey: they had seen neither
the citizen nor the cake. The citizen, feeling that the cake ran a
risk of being lost, and affected by this useless shipwreck, began a
telegraphic agitation which eventually attracted the attention of the
swans. They noticed something floating on the surface, tacked, like the
vessels they are, and came towards the cake slowly, with the majesty
that befits white beasts.
"Swans understand signs," said the bourgeois, pleased at his own
cleverness.
At this moment the distant tumult of the city was suddenly swollen.
This time it was sinister, and there are some puffs of wind which
speak more distinctly than others. The one which blew at this moment
distinctly brought up the rolling of drums, shouts, platoon fires, and
the mournful replies of the tocsin, and the cannon. This coincided with
a black cloud which suddenly veiled the sky. The swans had not yet
reached the cake.
"Let us go home," the father said; "they are attacking the Tuileries,"
He seized his son's hand again, and then continued,---
"From the Tuileries to the Luxembourg there is only the distance which
separates the royalty from the peerage; and that is not far. It is
going to rain musketry."
He looked at the cloud,--
"And perhaps we shall have rain of the other sort too; heaven is
interfering: the younger branch is condemned. Let us make haste home."
"I should like to see the swans eat the cake," said the boy.
"It would be imprudent," the father answered; and he led away his
little bourgeois. The son, regretting the swans, turned his head
toward the basin, until a bend in the quincunxes concealed it from
him. The two little vagabonds had in the mean while approached the
cake simultaneously with the swans. It was floating on the water; the
smaller boy looked at the cake; the other looked at the citizen, who
was going off. Father and son entered the labyrinth of trees that runs
to the grand staircase of the clump of trees in the direction of the
Rue Madame. When they were no longer in sight, the elder hurriedly lay
down full length on the rounded bank of the basin, and holding by his
left hand, while bending over the water, till he all but fell in, he
stretched out his switch toward the cake with the other. The swans,
seeing the enemy, hastened up, and in hastening their breasts produced
an effect useful to the little fisher: the water flowed back in front
of the swans, and one of the gentle, concentric undulations slightly
impelled the cake toward the boy's switch. When the swans came up, the
stick was touching the cake; the lad gave a quick blow, startled the
swans, seized the cake, and arose. The cake was soaking, but they were
hungry and thirsty. The elder boy divided the cake into two parts, a
large one and a small one, kept the small one for himself, and gave the
larger piece to his brother, saying,--
"Shove that into your gun."
CHAPTER XVII.
MORTUUS PATER FILIUM MORITURUM EXPECTAT.
Marius rushed out of the barricade, and Combeferre followed him; but it
was too late, and Gavroche was dead. Combeferre brought in the hamper
of cartridges, and Marius the boy. Alas! he thought he was requiting
the son for what the father had done for his father; but Thénardier had
brought in his father alive, while he brought in the lad dead. When
Marius re-entered the barricade with Gavroche in his arms, his face was
deluged with blood, like the boy's; for at the very instant when he
stooped to pick up Gavroche, a bullet had grazed his skull, but he had
not noticed it. Courfeyrac took off his neckcloth and bound Marius's
forehead; Gavroche was deposited on the same table with Mabœuf,
and the black shawl was spread over both bodies; it was large enough
for the old man and the child. Combeferre distributed the cartridges
which he had brought in, and they gave each man fifteen rounds to fire.
Jean Valjean was still at the same spot, motionless on his bench. When
Combeferre offered him his fifteen cartridges he shook his head.
"That is a strange eccentric," Combeferre said in a whisper to
Enjolras. "He manages not to fight inside this barricade."
"Which does not prevent him from defending it," Enjolras answered.
"Heroism has its original characters," Combeferre resumed.
And Courfeyrac, who overheard him, said,--
"He is a different sort from Father Mabœuf."
It is a thing worth mentioning, that the fire which struck the
barricade scarce disturbed the interior. Those who have never passed
the tornado of a warfare of this nature cannot form any idea of the
singular moments of calmness mingled with these convulsions. Men
come and go, they talk, they jest, they idle. A friend of ours heard
a combatant say to him, in the midst of the grape-shot, "It is like
being at a bachelor's breakfast here." The redoubt in the Rue de la
Chanvrerie, we repeat, appeared internally most calm; and all the
incidents and phases were, or would shortly be, exhausted. The position
had become from critical menacing, and from menacing was probably about
to become desperate. In proportion as the situation grew darker an
heroic gleam more and more purpled the barricade. Enjolras commanded
it in the attitude of a young Spartan, devoting his bare sword to the
gloomy genius, Epidotas. Combeferre, with an apron tied round him, was
dressing the wounded. Bossuet and Feuilly were making cartridges with
the powder-flask found by Gavroche on the dead corporal, and Bossuet
was saying to Feuilly, "We are soon going to take the diligence for
another planet." Courfeyrac, seated on the few paving-stones which he
had set aside near Enjolras, was preparing and arranging an entire
arsenal--his sword-cane, his gun, two hostler-pistols, and a club--
with the ease of a girl setting a small what-not in order. Jean
Valjean was silently looking at the wall facing him, and a workman was
fastening on his head, with a piece of string, a broad-brimmed straw
bonnet of Mother Hucheloup's, "for fear of sun-strokes," as he said.
The young men of the Aix Cougourde were gayly chatting together, as if
desirous to talk patois for the last time: Joly, who had taken down
Widow Hucbeloup's mirror, was examining his tongue in it; while a few
combatants, who had discovered some nearly mouldering crusts of bread
in a drawer, were eating them greedily. Marius was anxious about what
his father would say to him.
CHAPTER XVIII.
THE VULTURE BECOMES PREY.
We must lay a stress upon a psychological fact peculiar to barricades,
for nothing which characterizes this surprising war of streets ought
to be omitted. Whatever the internal tranquillity to which we have
just referred may be, the barricade does not the less remain a vision
for those who are inside it There is an apocalypse in a civil war, all
the darkness of the unknown world is mingled with these stern flashes,
revolutions are sphinxes, and any one who has stood behind a barricade
believes that he has gone through a dream. What is felt at these spots,
as we have shown in the matter of Marius, and whose consequences we
shall see, is more and less than life. On leaving a barricade, a man
no longer knows what he has seen; he may have been terrible, but he is
ignorant of the fact. He has been surrounded there by combating ideas
which possessed human faces, and had his head in the light of futurity.
There were corpses laid low and phantoms standing upright; and the
hours were colossal, and seemed hours of eternity. A man has lived in
death, and shadows have passed. What was it? He has seen hands on which
was blood; it was a deafening din, but at the same time a startling
silence: there were open mouths that cried, and other open mouths which
were silent, and men were in smoke, perhaps in night. A man fancies he
has touched the sinister dripping of unknown depths, and he looks at
something red which he has in his nails, but he no longer recollects
anything.
Let us return to the Rue de la Chanvrerie. Suddenly, between two
discharges, the distant sound of a clock striking was heard.
"It is midday," said Combeferre.
The twelve strokes had not died out ere Enjolras drew himself up to his
full height and hurled the loud cry from the top of the barricade,--
"Take up the paving-stones into the house, and line the windows with
them. One half of you to the stones, the other half to the muskets.
There is not a moment to lose."
A party of sappers, with their axes on their shoulders, had just
appeared in battle-array at the end of the street. This could only
be the head of a column; and of what column? Evidently the column
of attack; for the sappers ordered to demolish the barricade always
precede the troops appointed to escalade it. It was plain that the
moment was at hand which M. Clermont Tonnerre called in 1822 "a strong
pull."
Enjolras's order was carried out with that correct speed peculiar to
ships and barricades, the only two battle-fields whence escape is
impossible. In less than a minute two thirds of the paving-stones which
Enjolras had ordered to be piled up against the door of Corinth were
carried to the first-floor and attic, and before a second minute had
passed these paving-stones, artistically laid on one another, walled
up one half of the window. A few spaces carefully arranged by Feuilly,
the chief constructor, allowed the gun-barrels to pass through. This
armament of the windows was the more easily effected because the
grape-shot had ceased. The two cannon were now firing solid shot at the
centre of the barricade, in order to make a hole, and if possible a
breach, for the assault. When the stones intended for the final assault
were in their places, Enjolras carried to the first-floor the bottles
he had placed under the table on which Mabœuf lay.
"Who will drink that?" Bossuet asked him.
"They will," Enjolras answered.
Then the ground-floor window was also barricaded, and the iron bars
which closed the door at night were held in readiness. The fortress
was complete; the barricade was the rampart, and the wine-shop the
keep. With the paving-stones left over the gap was stopped up. As the
defenders of a barricade are always obliged to save their ammunition,
and the besiegers are aware of the fact, the latter combine their
arrangements with a sort of irritating leisure, expose themselves
before the time to the fire, though more apparently than in reality,
and take their ease. The preparations for the attack are always made
with a certain methodical slowness, and after that comes the thunder.
This slowness enabled Enjolras to revise and render everything perfect.
He felt that since such men were about to die, their death must be a
masterpiece. He said to Marius,--
"We are the two chiefs. I am going to give the final orders inside,
while you remain outside and watch."
Marius posted himself in observation on the crest of the barricade,
while Enjolras had the door of the kitchen, which it will be remembered
served as ambulance, nailed up.
"No splashing on the wounded," he said.
He gave his final instructions in the ground-floor room in a sharp but
wonderfully calm voice, and Feuilly listened and answered in the name
of all.
"At the first-floor hold axes ready to cut down the stairs. Have you
them?"
"Yes," Feuilly answered.
"How many?"
"Two axes and a crowbar."
"Very good. In all, twenty-six fighting men left. How many guns are
there?"
"Thirty-four."
"Eight too many. Keep those guns loaded like the others, and within
reach. Place your sabres and pistols in your belts. Twenty men to
the barricade. Six will ambush themselves in the garret and at the
first-floor window, to fire on the assailants through the loop-holes in
the paving-stones. There must not be an idle workman here. Presently,
when the drummer sounds the charge, the twenty men below will rush to
the barricade, and the first to arrive will be the best placed."
These arrangements made, he turned to Javert, and said to him,--
"I have not forgotten you."
And laying a pistol on the table he added,--
"The last man to leave here will blow out this spy's brains."
"Here?" a voice answered.
"No, let us not have this corpse near ours. It is easy to stride over
the small barricade in Mondétour Lane, as it is only four feet high.
This man is securely bound, so lead him there and execute him."
Some one was at this moment even more stoical than Enjolras; it was
Javert. Here Jean Valjean appeared; he was mixed up with the group of
insurgents, but stepped forward and said to Enjolras,--
"Are you the commander?"
"Yes."
"You thanked me just now."
"In the name of the Republic. The barricade has two saviors,--Marius
Pontmercy and yourself."
"Do you think that I deserve a reward?"
"Certainly."
"Well, then, I ask one."
"What is it?"
"To let me blow out that man's brains myself."
Javert raised his head, saw Jean Valjean, gave an imperceptible start,
and said, "It is fair."
As for Enjolras, he was reloading his gun. He looked around him.
"Is there no objection?"
And he turned to Jean Valjean.
"Take the spy."
Jean Valjean took possession of Javert by seating himself on the end of
the table. He seized the pistol, and a faint clink showed that he had
cocked it. Almost at the same moment the bugle-call was heard.
"Mind yourselves!" Marius shouted from the top of the barricade.
Javert began laughing that noiseless laugh peculiar to him, and,
looking intently at the insurgents, said to them,--
"You are no healthier than I am."
"All outside," Enjolras cried.
The insurgents rushed tumultuously forth, and as they passed, Javert
smote them on the back, so to speak, with the expression, "We shall
meet again soon."
CHAPTER XIX.
JEAN VALJEAN REVENGES HIMSELF.
So soon as Jean Valjean was alone with Javert he undid the rope which
fastened the prisoner round the waist, the knot of which was under the
table. After this, he made him a signal to rise. Javert obeyed with
that indefinable smile in which the supremacy of enchained authority is
condensed. Jean Valjean seized Javert by the martingale, as he would
have taken an ox by its halter, and dragging him after him, quitted
the wine-shop slowly, for Javert, having his feet hobbled, could only
take very short steps. Jean Valjean held the pistol in his hand, and
they thus crossed the inner trapeze of the barricade; the insurgents,
prepared for the imminent attack, turned their backs.
Marius alone, placed at the left extremity of the barricade, saw them
pass. This group of the victim and the executioner was illumined by the
sepulchral gleams which he had in his soul. Jean Valjean forced Javert
to climb over the barricade with some difficulty, but did not loosen
the cord. When they had crossed the bar, they found themselves alone
in the lane, and no one could now see them, for the elbow formed by
the houses hid them from the insurgents. The corpses removed from the
barricade formed a horrible pile a few paces from them. Among the dead
could be distinguished a livid face, dishevelled hair, a pierced hand,
and a half-naked female bosom; it was Éponine. Javert looked askance at
this dead girl, and said with profound calmness,--
"It seems to me I know that girl."
Then he turned to Jean Valjean, who placed the pistol under his arm,
and fixed on Javert a glance which had no need of words to say,
"Javert, it is I."
Javert answered, "Take your revenge."
Jean Valjean took a knife from his pocket and opened it.
"A clasp-knife," Javert exclaimed. "You are right, that suits you
better."
Jean Valjean cut the martingale which Javert had round his neck, then
he cut the ropes on his wrists, and stooping down, those on his feet;
then rising again, he said, "You are free."
It was not easy to astonish Javert, still, master though he was of
himself, he could not suppress his emotion; he stood gaping and
motionless, while Jean Valjean continued,--
"I do not believe that I shall leave this place. Still, if by accident
I do, I live under the name of Fauchelevent, at No. 7, Rue de l'Homme
Armé."
Javert gave a tigerish frown, which opened a corner of his mouth, and
muttered between his teeth,--
"Take care!"
"Begone!" said Jean Valjean.
Javert added,--
"You said Fauchelevent, Rue de l'Homme Armé?"
"No. 7."
Javert repeated in a low voice,---"No. 7."
He rebuttoned his frock-coat, restored his military stiffness between
his shoulders, made a half turn, crossed his arms while supporting his
chin with one of his hands, and walked off in the direction of the
markets. Jean Valjean looked after him. After going a few yards Javert
turned and said,--
"You annoy me. I would sooner be killed by you."
Javert did not even notice that he no longer addressed Jean Valjean
with familiarity.
"Begone!" said Jean Valjean.
Javert retired slowly, and a moment after turned the corner of the Rue
des Prêcheurs. When Javert had disappeared, Jean Valjean discharged the
pistol in the air, and then returned to the barricade, saying,--
"It is all over."
This is what had taken place in the mean while. Marius, more occupied
with the outside than the inside, had not hitherto attentively regarded
the spy fastened up at the darkened end of the ground-floor room. When
he saw him in the open daylight bestriding the barricade, he recognized
him, and a sudden hope entered his mind. He remembered the inspector of
the Rue de Pontoise, and the two pistols he had given him, which he,
Marius, had employed at this very barricade, and he not only remembered
his face but his name.
This recollection, however, was foggy and disturbed, like all his
ideas. It was not an affirmation he made so much as a question which he
asked himself. "Is that not the Police Inspector, who told me that his
name was Javert?" Marius shouted to Enjolras, who had just stationed
himself at the other end of the barricade,--
"Enjolras?"
"Well?"
"What is that man's name?"
"Which man?"
"The police agent. Do you know his name?"
"Of course I do, for he told it to us."
"What is it?"
"Javert."
Marius started, but at this moment a pistol-shot was heard, and Jean
Valjean reappeared, saying, "_It is all over._" A dark chill crossed
Marius's heart.
CHAPTER XX.
THE DEAD ARE RIGHT AND THE LIVING ARE NOT WRONG.
The death-struggles of the barricade were about to begin, and
everything added to the tragical majesty of this supreme moment,--a
thousand mysterious sounds in the air, the breathing of armed masses
set in motion in streets which could not be seen, the intermittent
gallop of cavalry, the heavy rumor of artillery, the platoon firing and
the cannonade crossing each other in the labyrinth of Paris, the smoke
of the battle rising all golden above the roofs, distant and vaguely
terrible cries, flashes of menace everywhere, the tocsin of St. Merry,
which now had the sound of a sob, the mildness of the season, the
splendor of the sky full of sunshine and clouds, the beauty of the day,
and the fearful silence of the houses. For since the previous evening
the two rows of houses in the Rue de la Chanvrerie had become two
walls,--ferocious walls with closed doors, closed windows, and closed
shutters.
At that day, so different from the present time, when the hour arrived
in which the people wished to be done with a situation which had lasted
too long, with a conceded charter or a restricted suffrage, when
the universal wrath was diffused in the atmosphere, when the city
consented to an upheaving of paving-stones, when the insurrection made
the bourgeoisie smile by whispering its watchword in their ear, then
the inhabitant, impregnated with riot, so to speak, was the auxiliary
of the combatant, and the house fraternized with the improvised
fortress which it supported. When the situation was not ripe, when the
insurrection was not decidedly accepted, when the masses disavowed the
movement, it was all over with the combatants, the town was changed
into a desert round the revolt, minds were chilled, the asylums were
walled up, and the street became converted into a defile to help
the army in taking the barricade. A people cannot be forced to move
faster than it wishes by a surprise, and woe to the man who tries to
compel it; a people will not put up with it, and then it abandons the
insurrection to itself. The insurgents become lepers; a house is an
escarpment, a door is a refusal, and a façade is a wall. This wall
sees, hears, and will not; it might open and save you, but no, the wall
is a judge, and it looks at you and condemns you. What gloomy things
are these closed houses! They seem dead though they are alive, and
life, which is, as it were, suspended, clings to them. No one has come
out for the last four-and-twenty hours, but no one is absent. In the
interior of this rock people come and go, retire to bed and rise again;
they are in the bosom of their family, they eat and drink, and are
afraid, terrible to say. Fear excuses this formidable inhospitality,
and the alarm offers extenuating circumstanced. At times even, and this
has been witnessed, the fear becomes a passion, and terror may be
changed into fury, and prudence into rage; hence the profound remark,
"The enraged moderates." There are flashes of supreme terror, from
which passion issues like a mournful smoke. "What do these people want?
They are never satisfied; they compromise peaceable men. As if we had
not had revolutions of that nature! What have they come to do here? Let
them get out of it as they can. All the worse for them, it is their
fault, and they have only what they deserve. That does not concern
us. Look at our poor street torn to pieces by cannon: they are a heap
of scamps; above all do not open the door." And the house assumes the
aspect of a tomb: the insurgent dies a lingering death before their
door; he sees the grape-shot and naked sabres arrive; if he cries out,
he knows there are people who hear him but will not help him; there are
walls which might protect him, and men who might save him, and these
walls have ears of flesh, and these men have entrails of stone.
Whom should we accuse? Nobody and everybody,--the imperfect times in
which we live. It is always at its own risk and peril that the Utopia
converts itself into an insurrection, and becomes an armed protest
instead of a philosophic protest,--a Pallas and no longer a Minerva.
The Utopia which grows impatient and becomes a riot knows what awaits
it, and it nearly always arrives too soon. In that case it resigns
itself, and stoically accepts the catastrophe in lieu of a triumph.
It serves, without complaining, and almost exculpating them, those
who deny it, and its magnanimity is to consent to abandonment. It is
indomitable against obstacles, and gentle toward ingratitude. Is it
ingratitude after all? Yes, from the human point of view; no, from the
individual point of view. Progress is the fashion of man; the general
life of the human race is called progress; and the collective step of
the human race is also called progress. Progress marches; it makes the
great human and earthly journey toward the celestial and divine; it
has its halts where it rallies the straying flock; it has its stations
where it meditates, in the presence of some splendid Canaan suddenly
unveiling its horizon; it has its nights when it sleeps; and it is one
of the poignant anxieties of the thinker to see the shadow on the human
soul, and to feel in the darkness sleeping progress, without being able
to awaken it.
"God is perhaps dead," Gérard de Nerval said one day to the writer of
these lines, confounding progress with God, and taking the interruption
of the movement for the death of the Being. The man who despairs is
wrong: progress infallibly reawakens, and we might say that it moves
even when sleeping, for it has grown. When we see it upright again
we find that it is taller. To be ever peaceful depends no more on
progress than on the river; do not raise a bar, or throw in a rock,
for the obstacle makes the water foam, and humanity boil. Hence come
troubles; but after these troubles we notice that way has been made.
Until order, which is nought else than universal peace, is established,
until harmony and unity reign, progress will have revolutions for
its halting-places. What, then, is progress? We have just said, the
permanent life of the peoples. Now, it happens at times that the
momentary life of individuals offers a resistance to the eternal life
of the human race.
Let us avow without bitterness that the individual has his distinct
interest, and can without felony stipulate for that interest and defend
it; the present has its excusable amount of egotism, momentary right
has its claims, and cannot be expected to sacrifice itself incessantly
to the future. The generation which at the present moment is passing
over the earth is not forced to abridge it for the generations, its
equals, after all, whose turn will come at a later date. "I exist,"
murmurs that some one, who is everybody. "I am young and in love, I am
old and wish to rest, I am father of a family, I work, I prosper, I do
a good business, I have houses to let, I have money in the funds, I
am happy, I have wife and children, I like all that, I wish to live,
and so leave us at peace." Hence at certain hours a profound coldness
falls on the magnanimous vanguard of the human race. Utopia, moreover,
we confess it, emerges from its radiant sphere in waging war. It, the
truth of to-morrow, borrows its process, battle, from the falsehood
of yesterday. It, the future, acts like the past; it, the pure idea,
becomes an assault. It complicates its heroism with a violence for
which it is but fair that it should answer,--a violence of opportunity
and expediency, contrary to principles, and for which it is fatally
punished. The Utopia, when in a state of insurrection, combats with
the old military code in its hand; it shoots spies, executes traitors,
suppresses living beings and hurls them into unknown darkness. It makes
use of death, a serious thing. It seems that the Utopia no longer pats
faith in the radiance, which is its irresistible and incorruptible
strength. It strikes with the sword, but no sword is simple; every
sword has two edges, and the man who wounds with one wounds himself
with the other.
This reservation made, and made with all severity, it is impossible for
us not to admire, whether they succeed or no, the glorious combatants
of the future, the confessors of the Utopia. Even when they fail they
are venerable, and it is perhaps in ill-success that they possess
most majesty. Victory, when in accordance with progress, deserves the
applause of the peoples, but an heroic defeat merits their tenderness.
The one is magnificent, the other sublime. With us who prefer martyrdom
to success, John Brown is greater than Washington, and Pisacane greater
than Garibaldi. There should be somebody to take the part of the
conquered, and people are unjust to these great assayers of the future
when they foil. Revolutionists are accused of sowing terror, and every
barricade appears an attack. Their theory is incriminated, their object
is suspected, their after-thought is apprehended, and their conscience
is denounced. They are reproached with elevating and erecting against
the reigning social fact a pile of miseries, griefs, iniquities, and
despair, and with pulling down in order to barricade themselves behind
the ruins and combat. People shout to them, "You are unpaving hell!"
And they might answer, "That is the reason why our barricade is made
of good intentions." The best thing is certainly the pacific solution;
after all, let us allow, when people see the pavement, they think of
the bear, and it is a good will by which society is alarmed. But it
depends on society to save itself, and we appeal to its own good-will.
No violent remedy is necessary: study the evil amicably, and then cure
it,--that is all we desire.
However this may be, those men, even when they have fallen, and
especially then, are august, who at all points of the universe, with
their eyes fixed on France, are struggling for the great work with the
inflexible logic of the ideal; they give their life as a pure gift
for progress, they accomplish the will of Providence, and perform a
religious act. At the appointed hour, with as much disinterestedness as
an actor who takes up his cue, they enter the tomb in obedience to the
divine scenario, and they accept this hopeless combat and this stoical
disappearance in order to lead to its splendid and superior universal
consequences. The magnificent human movement irresistibly began on July
14. These soldiers are priests, and the French revolution is a gesture
of God. Moreover, there are--and it is proper to add this distinction
to the distinctions already indicated in another chapter,--there are
accepted insurrections which are called revolutions; and there are
rejected revolutions which are called riots. An insurrection which
breaks out is an idea which passes its examination in the presence of
the people. If the people drops its blackball, the idea is dry fruit,
and the insurrection is a street-riot. Waging war at every appeal and
each time that the Utopia desires it is not the fact of the peoples;
for nations have not always, and at all hours, the temperament of
heroes and martyrs. They are positive; _a priori_ insurrection is
repulsive to them, in the first place, because it frequently has
a catastrophe for result, and, secondly, because it always has an
abstraction as its starting-point.
For, and this is a grand fact, those who devote themselves do so for
the ideal, and the ideal alone. An insurrection is an enthusiasm, and
enthusiasm may become a fury, whence comes an upraising of muskets. But
every insurrection which aims at a government or a regime aims higher.
Hence, for instance, we will dwell on the fact that what the chiefs of
the insurrection of 1832, and especially the young enthusiasts of the
Rue de la Chanvrerie, combated was not precisely Louis Philippe. The
majority, speaking candidly, did justice to the qualities of this king
who stood between monarchy and revolution, and not one of them hated
him. But they attacked the younger branch of the right divine in Louis
Philippe, as they had attacked the elder branch in Charles X., and what
they wished to overthrow in overthrowing the Monarchy in France was, as
we have explained, the usurpation of man over man, and the privilege
opposing right throughout the universe. Paris without a king has as its
counterstroke the world without despots. They reasoned in this way.
Their object was far off without doubt, vague perhaps, and retreating
before the effort, but grand.
So it is. And men sacrifice themselves for these visions, which are
for the sacrificed nearly always illusions, but illusions with which
the whole of human certainty is mingled. The insurgent poetizes and
gilds the insurrection, and men hurl themselves into these tragical
things, intoxicating themselves upon what they are about to do. Who
knows? Perhaps they will succeed; they are the minority; they have
against them an entire army; but they are defending the right, natural
law, the sovereignty of each over himself, which allows of no possible
abdication, justice, and truth, and, if necessary, they die like
the three hundred Spartans. They do not think of Don Quixote, but
of Leonidas, and they go onward, and once the battle has begun they
do not recoil, but dash forward head down-wards, having for hope an
extraordinary victory, the revolution completed, progress restored to
liberty, the aggrandizement of the human race, universal deliverance,
and at the worst a Thermopylæ. These combats for progress frequently
fail, and we have explained the cause. The mob is restive against the
impulse of the Paladins; the heavy masses, the multitudes, fragile
on account of their very heaviness, fear adventures, and there is
adventure in the ideal. Moreover, it must not be forgotten that
these are interests which are no great friends of the ideal and the
sentimental. Sometimes the stomach paralyzes the heart. The greatness
and beauty of France are, that she does not grow so stout as other
nations, and knots the rope round her hips with greater facility. She
is the first to wake and the last to fall asleep; she goes onward. She
is seeking.
The reason of this is because she is artistic. The ideal is nought else
than the culminating point of logic, in the same way as the beautiful
is only the summit of the true. Artistic peoples are also consistent
peoples; loving beauty is to see light. The result of this is, that
the torch of Europe, that is to say of civilization, was first borne
by Greece, who passed it to Italy, who passed it to France. Divine
enlightening nations! _Vita lampada tradunt._ It is an admirable thing
that the poetry of a people is the element of its progress, and the
amount of civilization is measured by the amount of imagination. Still,
a civilizing people must remain masculine; Corinth yes, but Sybaris
no, for the man who grows effeminate is bastardized. A man must be
neither dilettante nor virtuoso, but he should be artistic. In the
matter of civilization, there must not be refinement, but sublimation,
and on that condition the pattern of the ideal is given to the human
race. The modern ideal has its type in art and its means in science. It
is by science that the august vision of the poet, the social beauty,
will be realized, and Eden will be remade by A + B. At the point which
civilization has reached exactitude is a necessary element of the
splendid, and the artistic feeling is not only served but completed
by the scientific organ; the dream must calculate. Art, which is the
conqueror, ought to have science, which is the mover, as its base. The
strength of the steed is an imported factor, and the modern mind is the
genius of Greece, having for vehicle the genius of India,--Alexander
mounted on an elephant. Races petrified in dogma or demoralized by time
are unsuited to act as guides to civilization. Genuflection before
the idol or the crown-piece ruins the muscle which moves and the will
that goes. Hieratic or mercantile absorption reduces the radiance of a
people, lowers its horizon by lowering its level, and withdraws from it
that both human and divine intelligence of the universal object which
renders nations missionaries. Babylon has no ideal, nor has Carthage
while Athens and Rome have, and retain, even through all the nocturnal
density of ages, a halo of civilization.
France is of the same quality, as a people, as Greece and Rome; she
is Athenian through the beautiful, and Roman through her grandeur.
Besides, she is good, and is more often than other nations in the
humor for devotion and sacrifice. Still, this humor takes her and
leaves her; and this is the great danger for those who run when she
merely wishes to walk, or who walk when she wishes to halt. France
has her relapses into materialism, and at seasons the ideas which
obstruct this sublime brain have nothing that recalls French grandeur,
and are of the dimensions of a Missouri or a South Carolina. What is
to be done? The giantess plays the dwarf, and immense France feels a
fancy for littleness. That is all. To this nothing can be said, for
peoples like planets have the right to be eclipsed. And that is well,
provided that light return and the eclipse does not degenerate into
night. Dawn and resurrection are synonymous, and the reappearance
of light is synonymous with the existence of the Ego. Let us state
these facts calmly. Death on a barricade, or a tomb in exile, is an
acceptable occasion for devotion, for the real name of devotion is
disinterestedness. Let the abandoned be abandoned, let the exiles be
exiled, and let us confine ourselves to imploring great nations not
to recoil too far when they do recoil. Under the pretext of returning
to reason, it is not necessary to go too far down the incline. Matter
exists, the moment exists, interests exist, the stomach exists, but the
stomach must not to the sole wisdom. Momentary life has its rights, we
admit, but permanent life has them also. Alas! To have mounted does not
prevent falling, and we see this in history more frequently than we
wish; a nation is illustrious, it tastes of the ideal, then it bites
into the mud and finds it good, and when we ask it why it abandons
Socrates for Falstaff, it replies, "Because I like statesmen."
One word before returning to the barricade. A battle like the one which
we are describing at this moment is only a convulsion toward the ideal.
Impeded progress is sickly, and has such tragic attacks of epilepsy.
This malady of progress, civil war, we have met as we passed along, and
it is one of the social phases, at once an act and an interlude of that
drama whose pivot is a social condemnation, and whose veritable title
is "Progress." Progress! This cry, which we raise so frequently, is our
entire thought, and at the point of our drama which we We reached, as
the idea which it contains has still more than one trial to undergo,
we may be permitted, even if we do not raise the veil, to let its
gleams pierce through clearly. The book which the reader has before him
at this moment is, from one end to the other, in its entirety and its
details, whatever the intermittences, exceptions, and short-comings may
be, the progress from evil to good, from injustice to justice, from
falsehood to truth, from night to day, from appetite to conscience,
from corruption to life, from bestiality to duty, from hell to heaven,
and from nothingness to God. The starting-point is matter, the terminus
the soul; the hydra at the commencement, the angel at the end.
CHAPTER XXI.
THE HEROES.
Suddenly the drum beat the charge, and the attack was a hurricane. On
the previous evening the barricade had been silently approached in the
darkness as by a boa; but at present, in broad daylight, within this
gutted street, surprise was impossible; besides, the armed force was
unmasked, the cannon had begun the roaring, and the troops rushed upon
the barricade. Fury was now skill. A powerful column of line infantry,
intersected at regular intervals by National Guards and dismounted
Municipal Guards, and supported by heavy masses that could be heard
if not seen, debouched into the street at a running step, with drums
beating, bugles braying, bayonets levelled, and sappers in front, and
imperturbable under the shower of projectiles dashed straight at the
barricade with all the weight of a bronze battering-ram. But the wall
held out firmly, and the insurgents fired impetuously; the escaladed
barricade displayed a flashing mane. The attack was so violent that it
was in a moment inundated by assailants; but it shook off the soldiers
as the lion does the dogs, and it was only covered with besiegers as
the cliff is with foam, to reappear a minute later scarped, black, and
formidable.
The columns, compelled to fall back, remained massed in the street,
exposed but terrible, and answered the redoubt by a tremendous
musketry-fire. Any one who has seen fireworks will remember the piece
composed of a cross-fire of lightnings, which is called a bouquet.
Imagine this bouquet, no longer vertical but horizontal, and bearing
at the end of each jet a bullet, slugs, or iron balls, and scattering
death. The barricade was beneath it. On either side was equal
resolution. The bravery was almost barbarous, and was complicated by a
species of heroic ferocity which began with self-sacrifice. It was the
epoch when a National Guard fought like a Zouave. The troops desired an
end, and the insurrection wished to wrestle. The acceptance of death in
the height of youth and health converts intrepidity into a frenzy, and
each man in this action had the grandeur of the last hour. The street
was covered with corpses. The barricade had Marius at one of its ends
and Enjolras at the other. Enjolras, who carried the whole barricade
in his head, reserved and concealed himself. Three soldiers fell under
his loop-hole without even seeing him, while Marius displayed himself
openly, and made himself a mark. More than once half his body rose
above the barricade. There is no more violent prodigal than a miser who
takes the bit between his teeth, and no man more startling in action
than a dreamer. Marius was formidable and pensive, and in the battle
was like a dream. He looked like a ghost firing. The cartridges of the
besieged were exhausted, but not their sarcasms; and they laughed in
the tornado of the tomb in which they stood. Courfeyrac was bareheaded.
"What have you done with your hat?" Bossuet asked him; and Courfeyrac
answered,--
"They carried it away at last with cannon-balls."
Or else they made haughty remarks.
"Can you understand," Feuilly exclaimed bitterly, "those men,"---and he
mentioned names, well-known and even celebrated names that belonged to
the old army,---"who promised to join us and pledged their honor to aid
us, and who are generals, and abandon us?"
And Combeferre restricted himself to replying with a grave smile,--
"They are people who observe the rules of honor as they do the
stars,--a long distance off."
The interior of the barricade was so sown with torn cartridges that
it seemed as if there had been a snow-storm. The assailants had the
numbers and the insurgents the position. They were behind a wall, and
crushed at point-blank range the soldiers who were stumbling over
the dead and wounded. This barricade, built as it was, and admirably
strengthened, was really one of those situations in which a handful
of men holds a legion in check. Still, constantly recruited and
growing beneath the shower of bullets, foe column of attack inexorably
approached, and little by little, step by step, but with certainty, the
army squeezed the barricade as the screw does the press.
The assaults succeeded each other, and the horror became constantly
greater. Then there broke out on this pile of paving-stones, in
this Rue de la Chanvrerie, a struggle worthy of the wall of Troy.
These sallow, ragged, and exhausted men, who had not eaten for
four-and-twenty hours, who had not slept, who had only a few rounds
more to fire, who felt their empty pockets for cartridges,--these men,
nearly all wounded, with head or arm bound round with a blood-stained
blackish rag, having holes in their coat from which the blood flowed,
scarce armed with bad guns and old rusty sabres, became Titans.
The barricade was ten times approached, assaulted, escaladed, and
never captured. To form an idea of the contest it would be necessary
to imagine a heap of terrible courages set on fire, and that you
are watching the flames. It was not a combat, but the interior
of a furnace; mouths breathed flames there, and the faces were
extraordinary. The human form seemed impossible there, the combatants
flashed, and it was a formidable sight to see these salamanders of the
mêlée flitting about in this red smoke. The successive and simultaneous
scenes of this butchery are beyond our power to depict, for the epic
alone has the right to fill twelve thousand verses with a battle. It
might have been called that Inferno of Brahminism, the most formidable
of the seventeen abysses, which the Veda calls the Forest of Swords.
They fought foot to foot, body to body, with pistol-shots, sabre-cuts,
and fists, close by, at a distance, above, below, on all sides, from
the roof of the house, from the wine-shop, and even from the traps of
the cellars into which some had slipped. The odds were sixty to one,
and the frontage of Corinth half demolished was hideous. The window,
pock-marked with grape-shot, had lost glass and frame, and was only a
shapeless hole tumultuously stopped up with paving-stones. Bossuet was
killed. Feuilly was killed, Courfeyrac was killed, Joly was killed.
Combeferre, traversed by three bayonet stabs in the breast at the
moment when he was raising a wounded soldier, had only time to look up
to heaven, and expired. Marius, still fighting, had received so many
wounds, especially in the head, that his face disappeared in blood and
looked as if it were covered by a red handkerchief. Enjolras alone was
not wounded; when he had no weapon he held out his arm to the right
or left, and an insurgent placed some instrument in his hand. He had
only four broken sword-blades left,--one more than Francis I. had at
Marignano.
Homer says: "Diomed slew Axylus, the son of Teuthras, who dwelt
in well-built Arisba; Euryalus, son of Mecisteus, slew Dresus and
Opheltius, Æsepus and Pedasus, whom the Naiad Abarbarea brought forth
to blameless Bucolion; Ulysses killed Percosian Pidytes; Antilochus,
Ablerus; Polypœtes, Astyalus; Polydamas, Otus of Cyllene; and
Teucer, Aretaus. Meganthius fell by the spear of Euripilus; Agamemnon,
king of heroes, struck down Elatus, born in the walled town which the
sounding river Satniois washes."
In our old poems of the Gesta, Esplandian attacks with a flaming
falchion Swantibore, the giant margins, who defends himself by storming
the knight with towers which he uproots. Our old mural frescos show
us the two Dukes of Brittany and Bourbon armed for war and mounted,
and approaching each other, axe in hand, masked with steel, shod with
steel, gloved with steel, one caparisoned with ermine and the other
draped in azure; Brittany with his lion between the two horns of his
crown, and Bourbon with an enormous _fleur-de-lys_ at his visor. But
in order to be superb it is not necessary to wear, like Yvon, the
ducal morion, or to have in one hand a living flame like Esplandian;
it is sufficient to lay down one's life for a conviction or a loyal
deed. This little simple soldier, yesterday a peasant of Bearne or
the Limousin, who prowls about, cabbage-cutter by his side, round the
nursemaids in the Luxembourg, this young, pale student bowed over an
anatomical study or book, a fair-haired boy who shaves himself with a
pair of scissors,--take them both, breathe duty into them, put them
face to face in the Carrefour Boucherat or the Planche Mibray blind
alley, and let one fight for his flag and the other combat for his
ideal, and let them both imagine that they are contending for their
country, and the struggle will be colossal; and the shadow cast by
these two contending lads on the great epic field where humanity is
struggling will be equal to that thrown by Megarion, King of Lycia,
abounding in tigers, as he wrestles with the immense Ajax, the equal of
the gods.
CHAPTER XXII.
STEP BY STEP.
When there were no chiefs left but Enjolras and Marius at the two
ends of the barricade, the centre, which had so long been supported
by Courfeyrac, Bossuet, Joly, Feuilly, and Combeferre, yielded. The
cannon, without making a practicable breach, had severely injured the
centre of the redoubt, then the crest of the wall had disappeared
under the balls and fallen down, and the fragments which had collected
both inside and out had in the end formed two slopes, the outer one of
which offered an inclined plane by which to attack. A final assault was
attempted thus, and this assault was successful; the bristling mass of
bayonets, hurled forward at a run, came up irresistibly, and the dense
line of the attacking column appeared in the smoke on the top of the
scarp. This time it was all over, and the band of insurgents defending
the centre recoiled pell-mell.
Then the gloomy love of life was rekindled in some; covered by this
forest of muskets, several did not wish to die. It is the moment when
the spirit of self-preservation utters yells, and when the beast
reappears in man. They were drawn up against the six-storied house at
the back of the barricade, and this house might be their salvation.
This house was barricaded, as it were walled up from top to bottom, but
before the troops reached the interior of the redoubt, a door would
have time to open and shut, and it would be life for these desperate
men; for at the back of this house were streets, possible flight, and
space. They began kicking and knocking at the door, while calling,
crying, imploring, and clasping their hands. But no one opened. The
dead head looked down on them from the third-floor window. But Marius
and Enjolras, and seven or eight men who rallied round them, had rushed
forward to protect them. Enjolras shouted to the soldiers, "Do not
advance," and as an officer declined to obey he killed the officer. He
was in the inner yard of the redoubt, close to Corinth, with his sword
in one hand and carbine in the other, holding open the door of the
wine-shop, which he barred against the assailants. He shouted to the
desperate men, "There is only one door open, and it is this one;" and
covering them with his person, and alone facing a battalion, he made
them pass behind him. All rushed in, and Enjolras, whirling his musket
round his head, drove back the bayonets and entered the last, and there
was a frightful moment, during which the troops tried to enter and the
insurgents to bar the door. The latter was closed with such violence
that the five fingers of a soldier who had caught hold of a doorpost
were cut off clean, and remained in the crevice. Marius remained
outside; a bullet broke his collar-bone, and he felt himself fainting
and falling. At this moment, when his eyes were already closed, he felt
the shock of a powerful hand seizing him, and his fainting-fit scarce
left him time for this thought, blended with the supreme recollection
of Cosette, "I am made prisoner and shall be shot."
Enjolras, not seeing Marius among those who had sought shelter in the
house, had the same idea, but they had reached that moment when each
could only think of his own death. Enjolras put the bar on the door,
bolted and locked it, while the soldiers beat it with musket-butts, and
the sappers attacked it with their axes outside. The assailants were
grouped round this door, and the siege of the wine-shop now began. The
soldiers, let us add, were full of fury; the death of the sergeant of
artillery had irritated them, and then, more mournful still, during the
few hours that preceded the attack a whisper ran along the ranks that
the insurgents were mutilating their prisoners, and that there was the
headless body of a soldier in the cellar. This species of fatal rumor
is the general accompaniment of civil wars, and it was a false report
of the same nature which at a later date produced the catastrophe of
the Rue Transnonain. When the door was secured, Enjolras said to the
others,--
"Let us sell our lives dearly."
Then he went up to the table on which Mabœuf and Gavroche were
lying; under the black cloth two forms could be seen straight and
livid, one tall, the other short, and the two faces were vaguely
designed under the cold folds of the winding-sheet. A hand emerged
from under it, and hung toward the ground; it was that of the old man.
Enjolras bent down and kissed this venerable hand, in the same way as
he had done the forehead on the previous evening. They were the only
two kisses he had ever given in his life.
Let us abridge. The barricade had resisted like a gate of Thebes, and
the wine-shop resisted like a house of Saragossa. Such resistances are
violent, and there is no quarter, and a flag of truce is impossible;
people are willing to die provided that they can kill. When Suchet says
"capitulate," Palafox answers, "After the war with cannon, the war
with the knife." Nothing was wanting in the attack on the Hucheloup
wine-shop: neither paving-stone showering from the window and roof on
the assailants, and exasperating the troops by the frightful damage
they committed, nor shots from the attics and cellar, nor the fury of
the attack, nor the rage of the defence, nor, finally, when the door
gave way, the frenzied mania of extermination. When the assailants
rushed into the wine-shop, their feet entangled in the panels of
the broken door which lay on the ground, they did not find a single
combatant. The winding staircase, cut away with axes, lay in the middle
of the ground-floor room, a few wounded men were on the point of dying,
all who were not killed were on the first-floor, and a terrific fire
was discharged thence through the hole in the ceiling which had been
the entrance to the restaurant. These were the last cartridges, and
when they were expended and nobody had any powder or balls left, each
man took up two of the bottles reserved by Enjolras, and defended the
stairs with these frightfully fragile weapons. They were bottles of
aquafortis. We describe the gloomy things of carnage exactly as they
are: the besieged, alas! makes a weapon of everything. Greek fire did
not dishonor Archimedes, boiling pitch did not dishonor Bayard; every
war is a horror, and there is no choice. The musketry-fire of the
assailants, though impeded and discharged from below, was murderous;
and the brink of the hole was soon lined with dead heads, whence
dripped long red and steaming jets. The noise was indescribable, and a
compressed burning smoke almost threw night over the combat. Words fail
to describe horror when it has reached this stage. There were no longer
men in this now infernal struggle, no longer giants contending against
Titans. It resembled Milton and Dante more than Homer, for demons
attacked and spectres resisted. It was a monster heroism.
CHAPTER XXIII.
ORESTES SOBER AND PYLADES DRUNK.
At length, by employing the skeleton of the staircase, by climbing up
the walls, clinging to the ceiling, and killing on the very edge of the
trap the last who resisted, some twenty assailants, soldiers, National
and Municipal Guards, mostly disfigured by wounds in the face received
in this formidable ascent, blinded by blood, furious and savage,
burst into the first-floor room. There was only one man standing
there,--Enjolras; without cartridges or sword, he only held in his hand
the barrel of his carbine, whose butt he had broken on the heads of
those who entered. He had placed the billiard-table between himself and
his assailants, he had fallen back to the end of the room, and there,
with flashing eye and head erect, holding the piece of a weapon in his
hand, he was still sufficiently alarming for a space to be formed round
him. A cry was raised,--
"It is the chief; it was he who killed the artilleryman; as he has
placed himself there, we will let him remain there. Shoot him on the
spot!"
"Shoot me!" Enjolras said.
And throwing away his weapon and folding his arms, he offered his
chest. The boldness of dying bravely always moves men. So soon as
Enjolras folded his arms, accepting the end, the din of the struggle
ceased in the room, and the chaos was suddenly appeased in a species of
sepulchral solemnity. It seemed as if the menacing majesty of Enjolras,
disarmed and motionless, produced an effect on the tumult, and that
merely by the authority of his tranquil glance, this young man, who
alone was unwounded, superb, blood-stained, charming, and indifferent
like one invulnerable, constrained this sinister mob to kill him
respectfully. His beauty, heightened at this moment by his haughtiness,
was dazzling, and as if he could be no more fatigued than wounded after
the frightful four-and-twenty hours which had elapsed, he was fresh and
rosy. It was to him that the witness referred when he said at a later
date before the court-martial, "There was an insurgent whom I heard
called Apollo." A National Guard who aimed at Enjolras lowered his
musket, saying, "I feel as if I were going to kill a flower." Twelve
men formed into a platoon in the corner opposite to the one in which
Enjolras stood, and got their muskets ready in silence. Then a sergeant
shouted, "Present!"
An officer interposed.
"Wait a minute."
And, addressing Enjolras,--
"Do you wish to have your eyes bandaged?"
"No."
"It was really you who killed the sergeant of artillery?"
"Yes."
Grantaire had been awake for some minutes past. Grantaire, it will
be remembered, had been sleeping since the past evening in the upper
room, with his head lying on a table. He realized in all its energy
the old metaphor, dead drunk. The hideous philter of absinthe, stout,
and alcohol, had thrown him into a lethargic state, and, as his table
was small, and of no use at the barricade, they had left it him. He
was still in the same posture, with his chest upon the table, his
head reeling on his arms, and surrounded by glasses and bottles. He
was sleeping the deadly sleep of the hibernating bear or the filled
leech. Nothing had roused him,--neither the platoon fire, nor the
cannon-balls, nor the canister which penetrated through the window
into the room where he was, nor the prodigious noise of the assault.
Still, he at times responded to the cannon by a snore. He seemed to be
waiting for a bullet to save him the trouble of waking; several corpses
lay around him, and at the first glance nothing distinguished him from
these deep sleepers of death.
Noise does not wake a drunkard, but silence arouses him, and this
peculiarity has been more than once observed. The fall of anything near
him increased Grantaire's lethargy, and noise lulled him. The species
of halt which the tumult made before Enjolras was a shock for this
heavy sleep. It is the effect of a galloping coach which stops short.
Grantaire started up, stretched out his arms, rubbed his eyes, looked,
yawned, and understood. Intoxication wearing off resembles a curtain
that is rent, and a man sees at once, and at a single glance, all
that it concealed. Everything presents itself suddenly to the memory,
and the drunkard, who knows nothing of what has happened during the
last twenty-four hours, has scarce opened his eyes ere he understands
it all. Ideas return with a sudden lucidity; the species of suds
that blinded the brain is dispersed, and makes way for a clear and
distinctive apprehension of the reality.
Concealed, as he was, in a corner, and sheltered, so to speak, by the
billiard-table, the soldiers, who had their eyes fixed on Enjolras, had
not even perceived Grantaire, and the sergeant was preparing to repeat
the order to fire, when all at once they heard a powerful voice crying
at their side,--
"Long live the Republic! I belong to it."
Grantaire had risen; and the immense gleam of all the combat which
he had missed appeared in the flashing glance of the transfigured
drunkard. He repeated, "Long live the Republic!" crossed the room with
a firm step, and placed himself before the muskets by Enjolras's side.
"Kill us both at once," he said.
And turning gently to Enjolras, he asked him,--
"Do you permit it?"
Enjolras pressed his hand with a smile, and this smile had not passed
away ere the detonation took place. Enjolras, pierced by eight bullets,
remained leaning against the wall as if nailed to it; he merely hung
his head. Grantaire was lying stark dead at his feet. A few minutes
later the soldiers dislodged the last insurgents who had taken refuge
at the top of the house, and were firing through a partition in the
garret. They fought desperately, and threw bodies out of windows, some
still alive. Two voltigeurs, who were trying to raise the smashed
omnibus, were killed by two shots from the attics; a man in a blouse
rushed out of them, with a bayonet thrust in his stomach, and lay on
the ground expiring. A private and insurgent slipped together down
the tiles of the roof, and as they would not loosen their hold fell
into the street, holding each other in a ferocious embrace. There
was a similar struggle in the cellar,--cries, shots, and a fierce
clashing,--then a silence. The barricade was captured, and the soldiers
began searching the adjacent houses and pursuing the fugitives.
CHAPTER XXIV.
PRISONER!
Marius was really a prisoner;--prisoner to Jean Valjean.
The hand which had clutched him behind at the moment when he was
falling, and of which he felt the pressure as he lost his senses, was
that of Jean Valjean.
Jean Valjean had taken no other part in the struggle than that of
exposing himself. Had it not been for him, in the supreme moment of
agony no one would have thought of the wounded. Thanks to him, who was
everywhere present in the carnage like a Providence, those who fell
were picked up, carried to the ground-floor room, and had their wounds
dressed, and in the intervals he repaired the barricade. But nothing
that could resemble a blow, an attack, or even personal defence, could
be seen with him, and he kept quiet and succored. However, he had only
a few scratches, and the bullets had no billet for him. If suicide
formed part of what he dreamed of when he came to this sepulchre, he
had not been successful; but we doubt whether he thought of suicide,
which is an irreligious act. Jean Valjean did not appear to see Marius
in the thick of the combat; but in truth he did not take his eyes off
him. When a bullet laid Marius low, Jean Valjean leaped upon him with
the agility of a tiger, dashed upon him as on a prey, and carried him
off.
The whirlwind of the attack was at this moment so violently
concentrated on Enjolras and the door of the wine-shop, that no one
saw Jean Valjean, supporting the fainting Marius in his arms, cross
the unpaved ground of the barricade and disappear round the corner of
Corinth. Our readers will remember this corner, which formed a sort
of cape in the street, and protected a few square feet of ground from
bullets and grape-shot, and from glances as well. There is thus at
times in fires a room which does not burn, and in the most raging seas,
beyond a promontory, or at the end of a reef, a little quiet nook. It
was in this corner of the inner trapeze of the barricade that Éponine
drew her last breath. Here Jean Valjean stopped, let Marius slip to the
ground, leaned against a wall, and looked around him.
The situation was frightful; for the instant, for two or three minutes
perhaps, this piece of wall was a shelter, but how to get out of this
massacre? He recalled the agony he had felt in the Rue Polonceau, eight
years previously, and in what way he had succeeded in escaping; it was
difficult then, but now it was impossible. He had in front of him that
implacable and silent six-storied house, which only seemed inhabited
by the dead man leaning out of his window; he had on his right the
low barricade which closed the Petite Truanderie; to climb over this
obstacle appeared easy, but a row of bayonet-points could be seen over
the crest of the barricade; they were line troops posted beyond the
barricade and on the watch. It was evident that crossing the barricade
was seeking a platoon fire, and that any head which appeared above the
wall of paving-stones would serve as a mark for sixty muskets. He had
on his left the battle-field, and death was behind the corner of the
wall.
What was he to do? A bird alone could have escaped from this place.
And he must decide at once, find an expedient, and make up his mind.
They were fighting a few paces from him, but fortunately all were
obstinately engaged at one point, the wine-shop door; but if a single
soldier had the idea of turning the house or attacking it on the flank
all would be over. Jean Valjean looked at the house opposite to him,
he looked at the barricade by his side, and then looked on the ground,
with the violence of supreme extremity, wildly, and as if he would have
liked to dig a hole with his eyes. By much looking, something vaguely
discernible in such an agony became perceptible, and assumed a shape at
his feet, as if the eyes had the power to produce the thing demanded.
He perceived a few paces from him, at the foot of the small barricade
so pitilessly guarded and watched from without, and beneath a pile of
paving-stones which almost concealed it, an iron grating, laid flat and
flush with the ground. This grating made of strong cross-bars was about
two feet square, and the framework of paving-stones which supported
it had been torn out, and it was as it were dismounted. Through the
bars a glimpse could be caught of an obscure opening, something like
a chimney-pot or the cylinder of a cistern. Jean Valjean dashed up,
and his old skill in escapes rose to his brain like a beam of light.
To remove the paving-stones, tear up the grating, take Marius, who was
inert as a dead body, on his shoulders, descend with this burden on
his loins, helping himself with his elbows and knees, into this sort
of well which was fortunately of no great depth, to let the grating
fall again over his head, to set foot on a paved surface, about ten
feet below the earth,--all this was executed like something done in
delirium, with a giant's strength and the rapidity of an eagle: this
occupied but a few minutes. Jean Valjean found himself with the still
fainting Marius in a sort of long subterranean corridor, where there
was profound peace, absolute silence, and night. The impression which
he had formerly felt in falling out of the street into the convent
recurred to him; still, what he now carried was not Cosette, but Marius.
He had scarce heard above his head like a vague murmur the formidable
tumult of the wine-shop being taken by assault.
BOOK II.
THE INTESTINE OF LEVIATHAN.
CHAPTER I.
THE EARTH IMPOVERISHED BY THE SEA.
Paris casts twenty-five millions of francs annually into the sea; and
we assert this without any metaphor. How so, and in what way? By day
and night. For what object? For no object. With what thought? Without
thinking. What to do? Nothing. By means of what organ? Its intestines.
What are its intestines? Its sewers. Twenty-five millions are the most
moderate of the approximative amounts given by the estimates of modern
science. Science, after groping for a long time, knows now that the
most fertilizing and effective of manures is human manure. The Chinese,
let us say it to our shame, knew this before we did; not a Chinese
peasant--it is Eckeberg who states the fact--who goes to the city, but
brings at either end of his bamboo a bucket full of what we call filth.
Thanks to the human manure, the soil in China is still as youthful as
in the days of Abraham, and Chinese wheat yields just one hundred and
twenty fold the sowing. There is no guano comparable in fertility
to the detritus of a capital, and a large city is the strongest of
stercoraries. To employ the town in manuring the plain would be certain
success; for if gold be dung, on the other hand our dung is gold.
What is done with this golden dung? It is swept into the gulf. We
send at a great expense fleets of ships to collect at the southern
pole the guano of petrels and penguins, and cast into the sea the
incalculable element of wealth which we have under our hand. All the
human and animal manure which the world loses, if returned to the land
instead of being thrown into the sea, would suffice to nourish the
world. Do you know what those piles of ordure are, collected at the
corners of streets, those carts of mud carried off at night from the
streets, the frightful barrels of the night-man, and the fetid streams
of subterranean mud which the pavement conceals from you? All this is
a flowering field, it is green grass, it is mint and thyme and sage,
it is game, it is cattle, it is the satisfied lowing of heavy kine at
night, it is perfumed hay, it is gilded wheat, it is bread on your
table, it is warm blood in your veins, it is health, it is joy, it is
life. So desires that mysterious creation, which is transformation
on earth and transfiguration in heaven; restore this to the great
crucible, and your abundance will issue from it, for the nutrition
of the plains produces the nourishment of men. You are at liberty
to lose this wealth and consider me ridiculous into the bargain; it
would be the masterpiece of your ignorance. Statistics have calculated
that France alone pours every year into the Atlantic a sum of half a
milliard. Note this; with these five hundred millions one quarter of
the expenses of the budget would be paid. The cleverness of man is so
great that he prefers to get rid of these five hundred millions in the
gutter. The very substance of the people is borne away, here drop by
drop, and there in streams, by the wretched vomiting of our sewers into
the rivers, and the gigantic vomiting of our rivers into the ocean.
Each eructation of our cloacas costs us one thousand francs, and this
has two results,--the earth impoverished and the water poisoned; hunger
issuing from the furrow and illness from the river. It is notorious
that at this very hour the Thames poisons London; and as regards Paris,
it has been found necessary to remove most of the mouths of the sewers
down the river below the last bridge.
A double tubular apparatus supplied with valves and flood-gates, a
system of elementary drainage as simple as the human lungs, and which
is already in full work in several English parishes, would suffice
to bring into bur towns the pure water of the fields and send to the
fields the rich water of the towns; and this easy ebb and flow, the
most simple in the world, would retain among us the five hundred
millions thrown away. But people are thinking of other things. The
present process does mischief while meaning well. The intention is
good, but the result is sorrowful; they believe they are draining
the city, while they are destroying the population. A sewer is a
misunderstanding; and when drainage, with its double functions,
restoring what it takes, is everywhere substituted for the sewer, that
simple and impoverishing washing, and is also combined with the data
of a new social economy, the produce of the soil will be increased
tenfold, and the problem of misery will be singularly attenuated.
Add the suppression of parasitisms, and it will be solved. In the
mean while the public wealth goes to the river, and a sinking takes
place,--sinking is the right word, for Europe is being ruined in this
way by exhaustion. As for France, we have mentioned the figures. Now,
as Paris contains one twenty-fifth of the whole French population,
and the Parisian guano is the richest of all, we are beneath the
truth when we estimate at twenty-five millions the share of Paris in
the half-milliard which France annually refuses. These twenty-five
millions, employed in assistance and enjoyment, would double the
splendor of Paris, and the city expends them in sewers. So that we may
say, the great prodigality of Paris, its marvellous fête, its Folie
Beaujon, its orgie, its lavishing of gold, its luxury, splendor, and
magnificence, is its sewerage. It is in this way that in the blindness
of a bad political economy people allow the comfort of all to be
drowned and wasted in the water; there ought to be St. Cloud nets to
catch the public fortunes.
Economically regarded, the fact may be thus summarized: Paris is
a regular spendthrift. Paris, that model city, that pattern of
well-conducted capitals, of which every people strives to have a copy,
that metropolis of the ideal, that august home of initiative, impulse,
and experiment, that centre and gathering-place of minds, that nation
city, that beehive of the future, that marvellous composite of Babylon
and Corinth, would make a peasant of Fo-Kian shrug his shoulders, from
our present point of view. Imitate Paris, and you will ruin yourself;
moreover, Paris imitates itself particularly in this immemorial and
insensate squandering. These surprising follies are not new; it is no
youthful nonsense. The ancients acted like the moderns. "The cloacas of
Rome," says Liebig, "absorbed the entire welfare of the Roman peasant."
When the Campagna of Rome was ruined by the Roman sewer, Rome exhausted
Italy; and when it had placed Italy in its cloaca, it poured into it
Sicily, and then Sardinia, and then Africa. The sewer of Rome swallowed
up the world. This cloaca offered its tunnels to the city and to the
world. _Urbi et orbi._ Eternal city and unfathomable drain.
For these things, as for others, Rome gives the example, and this
example Paris follows with all the folly peculiar to witty cities. For
the requirements of the operation which we have been explaining, Paris
has beneath it another Paris, a Paris of sewers, which has its streets,
squares, lanes, arteries, and circulation, which is mud, with the
human forces at least. For nothing must be flattered, not even a great
people. Where there is everything, there is ignominy by the side of
sublimity; and if Paris contain Athens the city of light, Tyre the city
of power, Sparta the city of virtue, Nineveh the city of prodigies,
it also contains Lutetia the city of mud. Moreover, the stamp of its
power is there too, and the Titanic sewer of Paris realizes among
monuments the strange ideal realized in humanity by a few men like
Machiavelli, Bacon, and Mirabeau,--the grand abject. The subsoil of
Paris, if the eye could pierce the surface, would offer the aspect of a
gigantic madrepore; a sponge has not more passages and holes than the
piece of ground, six leagues in circumference, upon which the old great
city rests. Without alluding to the catacombs, which are a separate
cellar, without speaking of the inextricable net of gas-pipes, without
referring to the vast tubular system for the distribution of running
water, the drains alone form on either bank of the river a prodigious
dark ramification, a labyrinth which has its incline for its clew.
In the damp mist of this labyrinth is seen the rat, which seems the
produce of the accouchement of Paris.
CHAPTER II.
THE OLD HISTORY OF THE SEWER.
If we imagine Paris removed like a cover, the subterranean network of
sewers, regarded from a birds'-eye view, would represent on either
bank a sort of large branch grafted upon the river. On the right bank
the encircling sewer will be the trunk of this branch, the secondary
tubes the branches, and the blind alleys the twigs. This figure is
only summary and half correct, as the right angle, which is the usual
angle in subterranean ramifications of this nature, is very rare in
vegetation. Our readers will form a better likeness of this strange
geometric plan by supposing that they see lying on a bed of darkness
some strange Oriental alphabet as confused as a thicket, and whose
shapeless letters are welded to each other in an apparent confusion,
and as if accidentally, here by their angles and there by their ends.
The sewers and drains played a great part in the Middle Ages, under the
Lower Empire and in the old East. Plague sprang from them and despots
died of it. The multitudes regarded almost with a religious awe these
beds of corruption, these monstrous cradles of death. The vermin-ditch
at Benares is not more fearful than the Lion's den at Babylon.
Tiglath-Pileser, according to the rabbinical books, swore by the
sink of Nineveh. It was from the drain of Munster that John of Leyden
produced his false moon, and it was from the cesspool-well of Kekhscheb
that his Oriental menæchmus, Mokanna, the veiled prophet of Khorassan,
brought his false sun.
The history of men is reflected in the history of the sewers, and
the Gemoniæ narrated the story of Rome. The sewer of Paris is an old
formidable thing, it has been a sepulchre, and it has been an asylum.
Crime, intellect, the social protest, liberty of conscience, thought,
robbery, all that human laws pursue or have pursued, have concealed
themselves in this den,--the Maillotins in the fourteenth century,
the cloak-stealers in the fifteenth, the Huguenots in the sixteenth,
the illuminés of Morin in the seventeenth, and the Chauffeurs in the
eighteenth. One hundred years ago the nocturnal dagger-issued from
it, and the rogue in danger glided into it; the wood had the cave and
Paris had the drain. The Truanderie, that Gallic _picareria_, accepted
the drain as an annex of the Court of Miracles, and at night, cunning
and ferocious, entered beneath the Maubuée vomitory as into an alcove.
It was very simple that those who had for their place of daily toil
the Vide-Gousset lane, or the Rue Coupe-Gorge, should have for their
nightly abode the ponceau of the Chemin-Vert or the Hure-poix cagnard.
Hence comes a swarm of recollections, all sorts of phantoms haunt these
long solitary corridors, on all sides are putridity and miasma, and
here and there is a trap through which Villon inside converses with
Rabelais outside.
The sewer in old Paris is the meeting-place of all exhaustions and of
all experiments; political economy sees there a detritus, and social
philosophy a residuum. The sewer is the conscience of the city, and
everything converges and is confronted there. In this livid spot there
is darkness, but there are no secrets. Each thing has its true form, or
at least its definitive form. The pile of ordure has this in its favor,
that it tells no falsehood, and simplicity has taken refuge there.
Basile's mask is found there, but you see the pasteboard, the threads,
the inside and out, and it is marked with honest filth. Scapin's false
nose is lying close by. All the uncleanlinesses of civilization, where
no longer of service, fall into this pit of truth; they are swallowed
up, but display themselves in it. This pell-mell is a confession:
there no false appearance nor any plastering is possible, order takes
off its shirt, there is an absolute nudity, a rout of illusions and
mirage, and there nothing but what is assuming the gloomy face of what
is finishing. Reality and disappearance. There a bottle-heel confesses
intoxication, and a basket-handle talks about domesticity; there, the
apple-core which has had literary opinions becomes once again the
apple-core, the effigy on the double son grows frankly vert-de-grised,
the saliva of Caiaphas meets the vomit of Falstaff, the louis-d'or
which comes from the gambling-hell dashes against the nail whence hangs
the end of the suicide's rope, a livid fœtus rolls along wrapped
in spangles, which danced last Shrove Tuesday at the opera, a wig
which has judged men wallows by the side of a rottenness which was
Margotton's petticoat: it is more than fraternity, it is the extremest
familiarity. All that painted itself is bedaubed, and the last veil is
torn away. The sewer is a cynic and says everything. This sincerity of
uncleanliness pleases us and reposes the mind. When a man has spent
his time upon the earth in enduring the great airs assumed by state
reasons, the oath, political wisdom, human justice, professional
probity, the austerities of the situation, and incorruptible robes, it
relieves him to enter a sewer and see there the mire which suits it.
It is instructive at the same time, for, as we said just now, history
passes through the sewer. St. Bartholomew filters there drop by
drop through the paving-stones, and great public assassinations,
political and religious butcheries, traverse this subterranean way of
civilization, and thrust their corpses into it. For the eye of the
dreamer all historical murderers are there, in the hideous gloom,
on their knees, with a bit of their winding-sheet for an apron, and
mournfully sponging their task. Louis XI. is there with Tristan,
Francis I. is there with Duprat, Charles IX. is there with his mother,
Richelieu is there with Louis XIII., Louvois is there, Letellier is
there, Hubert and Maillard are there, scratching the stones, and trying
to efface
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