I. THE CHARYBDIS OF THE FAUBOURG SAINT ANTOINE AND THE
SCYLLA OF THE FAUBOURG DU TEMPLE



THE TWO MOST memorable barricades which the observer of social diseases
might mention do not belong to the period in which the action of this
book is placed. These two barricades, symbols both, under two different
aspects, of a terrible situation, rose from the earth at the time of the
fatal insurrection of June, 1848, the grandest street war which history has
seen.

It sometimes happens that, even against principles, even against
liberty, equality, and fraternity, even against universal suffrage, even
against the government of all by all, from the depths of its anguish, of
its dis- couragements, of its privations, of its fevers, of its distresses,
of its miasmas, of its ignorance, of its darkness, that great madman, the
rabble, protests, and the populace gives battle to the people.

The vagabonds attack the common right; the ochlocracy rises against
the demos.

Those are mournful days; for there is always a certain amount of right
even in this madness, there is suicide in this duel, and these words, which
are intended for insults, vagabonds, rabble, ochlocracy, populace, indicate,
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 outcasts.

As for us, we never pronounce these words save with sorrow and with res-
pect, for when philosophy fathoms the facts to which they correspond, it
often finds in them many grandeurs among the miseries. Athens was an
ochlocracy; the vagabonds made Holland; the populace more than once
saved Rome; and the rabble followed Jesus Christ.

There is no thinker who has not sometimes contemplated the nether
magnificences.

It was of this rabble, doubtless, that St. Jerome thought, and of all
those poor people, and of all those vagabonds, and of all those wretches,
whence sprang the apostles and the martyrs, when he uttered those
mysterious words: Fex urbis, lex orbis.

The exasperations of this multitude which suffers and which bleeds, its
violences in misconstruction of the principles which are its life, its forcible
resistance to the law, are popular coups d'etat, and must be repressed. The
honest man devotes himself to it, and, for very love for that multitude, he
battles against it. But how excusable he feels it, even while opposing it; how
he venerates it, even while resisting it! It is one of those rare moments
when, in doing what we have to do, we feel something which disconcerts
and which almost dissuades from going further; we persist, we are compelled
to; but the conscience, though satisfied, is sad, and the performance
of the duty is marred by an oppression of heart.

June, 1848, was, let us hasten to say, a thing apart, and almost impossible
to class in the philosophy of history. All that we have just said must
be set aside when we consider that extraordinary emeute in which was felt
the sacred anxiety of labour demanding its rights It must be put down, and
that was duty, for it attacked the republic. But, at bottom, what was June,
1848? A revolt of the people against itself.

When the subject is not lost sight of, there is no digression; let us then
be permitted for a moment to arrest the reader's attention upon the two
absolutely unique barricades of which we have just spoken, and which charac-
terised that insurrection.

One obstructed the entrance to the Faubourg Saint Antoine, the other de-
fended the approaches of the Faubourg du Temple; those before whom arose,
under the bright blue sky of June, these two frightful masterpieces of
civil war, will never forget them.

The barricade Saint Antoine was monstrous; it was three stories high
and seven hundred feet long. It barred from one corner to the other the
vast mouth of the Faubourg, that is to say, three streets; ravined, jagged,
notched, abrupt, indented with an immense rent, buttressed with mounds
which were themselves bastions, pushing out capes here and there, strongly
supported by the two great promontories of houses of the Faubourg, it rose
like a cyclopean embankment at the foot of the terrible square which saw the
14th of July. Nineteen barricades stood at intervals along the streets in
the rear of this mother barricade. Merely from seeing it, you felt in the
Faubourg the immense agonising suffering which had reached that extreme
moment when distress rushes into catastrophe. Of what was this barricade
made? Of the ruins of three six-story houses, torn down for the purpose,
said some. Of the prodigy of all passions said others. It had the woeful
aspect of all the works of hatred: Ruin. You might say: who built that? You
might also say: who destroyed that? It was the improvisation of ebullition.
Here! that door! that grating! that shed! that casement! that broken furnace!
that cracked pot! Bring all! throw on all! push, roll, dig, dismantle,
overturn, tear down all! It was the collaboration of the pavement, the pebble,
the timber, the iron bar, the chip, the broken square, the stripped chair,
the cabbage stump, the scrap, the rag, and the malediction. It was great and
it was little. It was the bottomless pit parodied upon the spot by chaos come
again. The mass with the atom; the side wall thrown down and the broken
dish; a menacing fraternisation of all rubbish. Sisyphus had cast in his
rock and Job his potsherd. Upon the whole, terrible. It was the acropolis
of the ragamuffins. Carts overturned roughened the slope; an immense
dray was displayed there, crosswise, the axle pointing to the sky, and
seemed a scar upon that tumultuous facade; an omnibus, cheerily hoisted
by main strength to the very top of the pile, as if the architects of that
savagery would add sauciness to terror, presented its unharnessed pole to
unknown horses of the air. This gigantic mass, the alluvium of emeute,
brought before the mind an Ossa upon Pelion of all the revolutions; '93
upon '89, the 9th Thermidor upon the 10th of August, the 18th Brumaire
upon the 21st of January, Vendemaire upon Prairial, 1848 upon 1830. The
place deserved the pains, and that barricade was worthy to appear on the
very spot where the Bastille had disappeared. Were the ocean to make
dykes, it would build them thus. The fury of the flood was imprinted upon
that misshapen obstruction. What flood? The multitude. You would have
thought you saw uproar petrified. You would have thought you heard, upon
that barricade, as if there they had been upon their hive, the humming
of the enormous black bees of progress by force. Was it a thicket? was
it a Bacchanal? was it a fortress? Dizziness seemed to have built it by
flappings of its wing. There was something of the cloaca in this redoubt
and something of Olympus in this jumble. You saw there, in a chaos full of
despair, rafters from roofs, patches from garrets with their wall paper,
window sashes with all their glass planted in the rubbish, awaiting artil-
lery, chimneys torn down, wardrobes, tables, benches, a howling topsy-
turvy,and those thousand beggarly things, the refuse even of the mendicant,
which contain at once fury and nothingness. One would have said that it
was the tatters of a people, tatters of wood, of iron, of bronze, of stone,
and that the Faubourg Saint Antoine had swept them there to its door by
one colossal sweep of the broom, making of its misery its barricade. Logs
shaped like chopping blocks, dislocated chains, wooden frames with brackets
having the form of gibbets, wheels projecting horizontally from the
rubbish, amalgamated with this edifice of anarchy the forbidding form of
the old tortures suffered by the people. The barricade Saint Antoine made
a weapon of everything; all that civil war can throw at the head of society
came from it; it was not battle, it was paroxysm; the carbines which
defended that stronghold, among which were some blunderbusses, scattered
bits of delftware, knuckle-bones, coat buttons, even table castors,
dangerous projectiles on account of the copper. This barricade was furious;
it threw up to the clouds an inexpressible clamour; at certain moments
defying the army, it covered itself with multitude and with tempest; a mob
of flaming heads crowned it; a swarming filled it; its crest was thorny with
muskets, with swords, with clubs, with axes, with pikes, and with bayonets;
a huge red flag fluttered in the wind; there were heard cries of command,
songs of attack, the roll of the drum, the sobs of women, and the dark wild
laughter of the starving. It was huge and living; and, as from the back of an
electric beast there came from it a crackling of thunders. The spirit of
revolution covered with its cloud that summit whereon growled this voice of
the people which is like the voice of God; a strange majesty emanated from
that titanic hodful of refuse. It was a garbage heap and it was Sinai.

As we have before said it attacked in the name of the Revolution, what?
the Revolution. This barricade, chance, disorder, bewilderment, misunder-
standing, the unknown, had opposed to it the Constituent Assembly, the
sovereignty of the people, universal suffrage, the nation, the republic;
and it was the Carmagnole defying the Marseillaise.

An insane, but heroic defiance, for this old Faubourg is a hero.

The Faubourg and its redoubt lent each other aid. The Faubourg put
its shoulder to the redoubt, the redoubt braced itself upon the Faubourg.
The huge barricade extended like a cliff upon which broke the strategy of
the generals of Africa. Its caverns, its excrescences, its warts, its humps,
made grimaces, so to speak, and sneered beneath the smoke. Grape vanished
there in the shapeless; shells sank in, were swallowed up, were engulfed;
bullets succeeded only in boring holes; of what use to cannonade chaos?
And regiments, accustomed to the most savage sights of war, looked with
anxious eye upon this kind of wild beast redoubt, by its bristling, a
wild boar, and by its enormity, a mountain.

A mile from there, at the corner of the Rue du Temple which runs into
the boulevard near the Chateau d'Eau, if you advanced your head boldly
beyond the point formed by the front of the Dallemagne warehouse, you
perceived in the distance, beyond the canal, in the street which mounts the
slopes of Belleville, at the culminating point of the hill, a strange wall
reaching the second story of the house fronts, a sort of hyphen between the
houses on the right and the houses on the left, as if the street had folded
back its highest wall to shut itself abruptly in. This wall was built of
pavingstones. It was straight, correct, cold, perpendicular, levelled with
the square, built by the line, aligned by the plummet. Cement doubtless
there was none, but as in certain Roman walls, that did not weaken its rigid
architecture. From its height its depth could be guessed. The entablature was
mathematically parallel to the base. Here and there could be distinguished,
on the grey surface, loopholes almost invisible, which resembled black
threads. These loopholes were separated from each other by equal inter
vals. The street was deserted as far as could be seen. Every window and
every door closed. In the background rose this obstruction, which made of
the street a cul-de-sac; an immovable and quiet wall; nobody could be seen,
nothing could be heard, not a cry, not a sound, not a breath. A sepulchre.

The dazzling June sun flooded this terrible thing with light.

This was the barricade of the Faubourg du Temple.

As soon as the ground was reached and it was seen, it was impossible,
even for the boldest, not to become thoughtful before this mysterious
apparition. It was fitted, dovetailed, imbricated, rectilinear, symmetrical,
and deathly. There was in it science and darkness. You felt that the chief
of that barricade was a geometer or a spectre. You beheld it and you spoke
low.

From time to time, if anybody, soldier, officer, or representative of the
people, ventured to cross the solitary street, a sharp and low whistling was
heard, and the passer fell wounded or dead, or, if he escaped, a ball was seen
to bury itself in some closed shutter, in a space between the stores, in the
plastering of a wall. Sometimes a large ball. For the men of the barricade
had made of two pieces of cast-iron gas-pipe, stopped at one end with
oakum and fire-clay, two small guns. No useless expenditure of powder.
Almost every shot told. There were a few corpses here and there, and pools
of blood upon the pavement. I recollect a white butterfly flying back and
forth in the street. Summer does not abdicate.

In the vicinity, the pavements of the porte-cocheres were covered with
wounded.

You felt yourself beneath the eye of somebody whom you did not see,
and that the whole length of the street was held under aim.

Massed behind the sort of saddleback which the narrow bridge over
the canal makes at the entrance to the Faubourg du Temple, the soldiers
of the attacking column, calm and collected, looked upon this dismal
redoubt, this immobility, this impassability, whence death came forth.
Some crept on the ground as far as the top of the curve of the bridge, taking
care that their shakos did not show over it.

The valiant Colonel Monteynard admired this barricade with a shudder.
"How that is built!" said he to a representative. "Not one stone projects
beyond another. It is porcelain." At that moment a ball broke the cross on his
breast, and he fell.

"The cowards!" it was said. "But let them show themselves! let us see
them! they dare not? they hide?" The barricade of the Faubourg du Temple,
defended by eighty men, attacked by ten thousand, held out three days.
On the fourth day, they did as at Zaatcha and at Constantine; they pierced
through the houses, they went along the roofs, the barricade was taken.
Not one of the eighty cowards thought of flight; all were killed, except the
chief, Barthelemy, of whom we shall speak presently.

The barricade St. Antoine was the tumult of thunders; the barricade du
Temple was silence. There was between these two redoubts the difference
between the terrible and the ominous. The one seemed a gaping mouth;
the other a mask.

Admitting that the gloomy and gigantic insurrection of June was composed
of an anger and an enigma; you felt in the first barricade the dragon,
and behind the second the sphinx.

These two fortresses were built by two men, one named Cournet, the
other Barthelemy. Cournet made the barricade Saint Antoine; Barthelemy
the barricade du Temple. Each was the image of him who built it.

Cournet was a man of tall stature; he had broad shoulders, a red face,
a muscular arm, a bold heart, a loyal soul, a sincere and terrible eye.
Intrepid, energetic, irascible, stormy, the most cordial of men, the most
formidable of warriors. War, conflict, the melee, were the air he breathed,
and put him in good-humour. He had been a naval officer, and, from his
carriage and his voice, you would have guessed that he sprang from the
ocean, and that he came from the tempest; he continued the hurricane in
battle. Save in genius, there was in Cournet something of Danton, as, save
in divinity, there was in Danton something of Hercules.

Barthelemy, thin, puny, pale, taciturn, was a kind of tragic gamin who,
struck by a sergent de ville, watched for him, waited for him, and killed
him, and, at seventeen, was sent to the galleys. He came out, and built this
barricade.

Later, a terrible thing, at London, both outlaws, Barthelemy killed
Cournet. It was a mournful duel. Some time after, caught in the meshes of
one of those mysterious fatalities in which passion is mingled, catastrophes
in which French justice sees extenuating circumstances, and in which
English justice sees only death, Barthelemy was hung. The gloomy social
edifice is so constructed, that, thanks to material privation, thanks to moral
darkness, this unfortunate being who contained an intelligence, firm certainly,
great perhaps, began with the galleys in France, and ended with the
gallows in England. Barthelemy, on all occasions, hoisted but one flag; the
black flag.



II. WHAT CAN BE DONE IN THE ABYSS BUT TO TALK



SIXTEEN YEARS tell in the subterranean education of the emeute, and June,
1848, understood it far better than June, 1832. Thus the barricade of the
Rue de la Chanvrerie was only a rough draught and an embryo compared with
the two colossal barricades which we have just sketched; but, for the
period, it was formidable.

The insurgents, under the eye of Enjolras, for Marius no longer looked
to anything, turned the night to advantage. The barricade was not only
repaired, but made larger. They raised it two feet. Iron bars planted in
the paving-stones resembled lances in rest. All sorts of rubbish added,
and brought from all sides, increased the exterior intricacy. The redoubt
was skilfully made over into a wall within and a thicket without.

They rebuilt the stairway of paving-stones, which permitted ascent, as
upon a citadel wall.

They put the barricade in order, cleared up the basement room, took
the kitchen for a hospital, completed the dressing of the wounds; gathered
up the powder scattered over the floor and the tables, cast bullets, made
cartridges, scraped lint, distributed the arms of the fallen, cleaned the
interior of the redoubt, picked up the fragments, carried away the corpses.

They deposited the dead in a heap in the little Rue Mondetour, of
which they were still masters. The pavement was red for a long time at that
spot. Among the dead were four National Guards of the banlieue. Enjolras
had their uniforms laid aside.

Enjolras advised two hours of sleep. Advice from Enjolras was an
order. Still, three or four only profited by it. Feuilly employed these two
hours in engraving this inscription on the wall which fronted the wineshop:

"VIVENT LES PEUPLES!"

These three words, graven in the stone with a nail, were still legible on
that wall in 1848.

The three women took advantage of the night's respite to disappear
finally, which made the insurgents breathe more freely.

They found refuge in some neighbouring house.

Most of the wounded could and would still fight. There were, upon a
straw mattress and some bunches of straw, in the kitchen now become a
hospital, five men severely wounded, two of whom were Municipal Guards.
The wounds of the Municipal Guards were dressed first.

Nothing now remained in the basement room but Mabeuf, under his black
cloth, and Javert bound to the post.

"This is the dead-room," said Enjolras.

In the interior of this room, feebly lighted by a candle, at the very end
the funereal table being behind the post like a horizontal bar, a sort of
large dim cross was produced by Javert standing, and Mabeuf lying.

The pole of the omnibus, although maimed by the musketry, was still
high enough for them to hang a flag upon it.

Enjolras, who had this quality of a chief, always to do as he said,
fastened the pierced and bloody coat of the slain old man to this pole.

No meals could now be had. There was neither bread nor meat. The fifty
men of the barricade, in the sixteen hours that they had been there,
had very soon exhausted the meagre provisions of the wine-shop. In a given
time, every barricade which holds out, inevitably becomes the raft of
le Meduse. They must resign themselves to famine. They were in the early
hours of that Spartan day of the 6th of June, when, in the barricade Saint
Merry, Jeanne, surrounded by insurgents who were asking for bread, to all
those warriors, crying: "Something to eat!" answered: "What for? it is three
o'clock. At four o'clock we shall be dead."

As they could eat nothing, Enjolras forbade drinking. He prohibited
wine, and put them on allowance of brandy.

They found in the cellar some fifteen bottles, full and hermetically
sealed. Enjolras and Combeferre examined them. As they came up Combeferre
said: "It is some of the old stock of Father Hucheloup who began as
a grocer."

"It ought to be genuine wine," observed Bossuet. "It is lucky that Gran-
taire is asleep. If he were on his feet, we should have hard work to save
those bottles." Enjolras, in spite of the murmurs, put his veto upon the
fifteen bottles, and in order that no one should touch them, and that they
might be as it were consecrated, he had them placed under the table on
which Father Mabeuf lay.

About two o'clock in the morning, they took a count. There were left
thirty-seven of them.

Day was beginning to dawn. They had just extinguished the torch which
had been replaced in its socket of paving-stones. The interior of the
barricade, that little court taken in on the street, was drowned in darkness,
and seemed, through the dim twilight horror, the deck of a disabled ship.
The combatants going back and forth, moved about in it like black forms.
Above this frightful nest of shadow, the stories of the mute houses were
lividly outlined; at the very top the wan chimneys appeared. The sky had
that charming undecided hue, which is perhaps white, and perhaps blue.
Some birds were flying with joyful notes. The tall house which formed the
rear of the barricade, being towards the east, had a rosy reflection upon
its roof. At the window on the third story, the morning breeze played with
the grey hairs on the dead man's head.

"I am delighted that the torch is extinguished," said Courfeyrac to
Feuilly. "That torch, startled in the wind, annoyed me. It appeared to be
afraid. The light of a torch resembles the wisdom of a coward; it is not
clear, because it trembles."

The dawn awakens minds as well as birds: all were chatting.

Joly, seeing a cat prowling about a water-spout, extracted philosophy
therefrom.

"What is the cat?" he exclaimed. "It is a correction. God, having made
the mouse, said: ‘Hold here, I have made a blunder.' And he made the cat.
The cat 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, spoke of the dead, of
Jean Prouvaire, of Bahorel, of Mabeuf, and even of Le Cabuc, and of the
stern sadness of Enjolras. He said:

"Harmodius and Aristogeiton, Brutus, Chereas, Stephanus, Cromwell, Char-
lotte Corday, Sand--all, after the blow, had their moment of anguish. Our
hearts are so fluctuating, and human life is such a mystery that, even in
a civic murder, even in a liberating murder, if there be such, the remorse
of having stricken a man surpasses the joy of having served the human
race."

And, such is the course of conversation, a moment afterwards by a
transition from Jean Prouvaire's rhymes, Combeferre was comparing the
translators of the Georgics, Raux with Cournand, Cournand with Delille,
pointing out the few passages translated by Malfilatre, particularly the
prodigies at the death of Caesar; and from this word, Caesar, they came to
Brutus.

"Caesar," said Combeferre, "fell justly. Cicero was severe upon Caesar,
and he was right. This severity is not diatribe. When Zoilus insults Homer,
when Maevius insults Virgil, when Vise insults Moliere, when Pope insults
Shakspeare, when Freron insults Voltaire, it is an old law of envy and
hatred which is at work; genius attracts insult, great men are always barked
at more or less. But Zoilus and Cicero are two. Cicero is a judge through
the soul, even as Brutus is a judge through the sword. I condemn, for my
own part, that final justice, the sword; but antiquity admitted it. Caesar,
the violator of the Rubicon, conferring, as coming from himself, the digni-
ties which came from the people, not rising upon the entrance of the senate,
acted, as Eutropius says, the part of a king and almost of a tyrant, regia ac
pene tyrannica. He was a great man; so much the worse, or so much the better;
the lesson is the greater. His twenty-three wounds touch me less than the
spittle in the face of Jesus Christ. Caesar was stabbed by senators; Christ
was slapped by lackeys. In the greater outrage, we feel the God."

Bossuet, overlooking the talkers from the top of the heap of pavingstones,
exclaimed, carbine in hand:

"O Cydathenaeum, O Myrrhinus, O Probalinthe, O graces of aeantides.
Oh! who will give me to pronounce the verses of Homer like a Greek
of Laurium or of Edapteon?"



III. LIGHT AND DARKNESS



ENJOLRAS had gone to make a reconnaissance. He went out by the Little
Rue Mondetour, creeping along by the houses.

The insurgents, we must say, were full of hope. The manner in which they
had repelled the attack during the night, had led them almost to contempt
in advance for the attack at daybreak. They awaited it, and smiled at
it. They had no more doubt of their success than of their cause. Moreover,
help was evidently about to come. They counted on it. With that facility for
triumphant prophecy which is a part of the strength of the fighting French-
man, they divided into three distinct phases the day which was opening: at
six o'clock in the morning a regiment, "which had been laboured with,"
would come over. At noon, insurrection of all Paris; at sundown, revolution.

They heard the tocsin of Saint Merry, which had not been silent a moment
since the evening; a proof that the other barricade, the great one, that of
Jeanne, still held out.

All these hopes were communicated from one to another in a sort of cheer-
ful yet terrible whisper, which resembled the buzz of a hive of bees at
war.

Enjolras reappeared. He returned from his gloomy eagle's walk in the
obscurity without. He listened for a moment to all this joy with folded
arms, one hand over his mouth Then, fresh and rosy in the growing whiteness
of the morning, he said:

"The whole army of Paris fights. A third of that army is pressing upon
the barricade in which you are. Besides the National Guard, I distinguished
the shakos of the Fifth of the line and the colours of the Sixth Legion. You
will be attacked in an hour. As for the people, they were boiling yesterday,
but this morning they do not stir. Nothing to expect, nothing to hope. No
more from a Faubourg than from a regiment. You are abandoned."

These words fell upon the buzzing of the groups, and wrought the effect
which the first drops of the tempest produce upon the swarm. All were
dumb. There was a moment of inexpressible silence, when you might have
heard the flight of death.

This moment was short.

A voice, from the most obscure depths of the groups, cried to Enjolras:
"So be it. Let us make the barricade twenty feet high, and let us all
stand by it. Citizens, let us offer the protest of corpses. Let us show
that, if the people abandon the republicans, the republicans do not
abandon the people."

These words relieved the minds of all from the painful cloud of personal
anxieties. They were greeted by an enthusiastic acclamation.

The name of the man who thus spoke was never known; it was some obscure
blouse-wearer, an unknown, a forgotten man, a passing hero, that great
anonymous always found in human crises and in social births, who, at
the proper instant, speaks the decisive word supremely, and who vanishes
into the darkness after having for a moment represented, in the light
of a flash, the people and God.

This inexorable resolution so filled the air of June 6, 1832, that, almost
at the same hour, in the barricade of Saint Merry, the insurgents raised this
shout which was proved on the trial, and which has become historical: "Let
them come to our aid or let them not come, what matter? Let us die here to
the last man."

As we see, the two barricades, although essentially isolated, communicated.



IV. FIVE LESS, ONE MORE



AFTER THE MAN of the people, who decreed "the protest of corpses," had
spoken and given the formula of the common soul, from all lips arose a
strangely satisfied and terrible cry, funereal in meaning and triumphant
in tone:

"Long live death! Let us all stay!"

"Why all?" said Enjolras.

"All! all!"

Enjolras resumed:

"The position is good, the barricade is fine. Thirty men are enough.
Why sacrifice forty?"

They replied:

"Because nobody wants to go away."

"Citizens," cried Enjolras, and there was in his voice almost an angry
tremor, "the republic is not rich enough in men to incur useless expenditures.
Vainglory is a squandering. If it is the duty of some to go away, that
duty should be performed as well as any other."

Enjolras, the man of principle, had over his co-religionists that sort of
omnipotence which emanates from the absolute. Still, notwithstanding this
omnipotence, there was a murmur.

Chief to his finger-ends, Enjolras, seeing that they murmured, insisted.
He resumed haughtily:

"Let those who fear to be one of but thirty, say so."

The murmurs redoubled.

"Besides," observed a voice from one of the groups, "to go away is easily
said. The barricade is hemmed in."

"Not towards the markets," said Enjolras. "The Rue Mondetour is
open, and by the Rue des Precheurs one can reach the Marche des Innocents."

"And there," put in another voice from the group, "he will be taken.
He will fall upon some grand guard of the line or the banlieue. They will
see a man going by in cap and blouse. ‘Where do you come from, fellow?
you belong to the barricade, don't you?' And they look at your hands. You
smell of powder. Shot."

Enjolras, without answering, touched Combeferre's shoulder, and they
both went into the basement room.

They came back a moment afterwards. Enjolras held out in his hands
the four uniforms which he had reserved. Combeferre followed him, bringing
the cross belts and shakos.

"With this uniform," said Enjolras, "you can mingle with the ranks and
escape. Here are enough for four."

And he threw the four uniforms upon the unpaved ground.

No wavering in the stoical auditory. Combeferre spoke:

"Come," said he, "we must have a little pity. Do you know what the
question is now? It is a question of women. Let us see. Are there any wives,
yes or no? are there any children, yes or no? Are there, yes or no, any
mothers, who rock the cradle with their foot and who have heaps of little
ones about them? Let him among you who have never seen the breast of a
nursing-woman hold up his hand. Ah! you wish to die, I wish it also, I, who
am speaking to you, but I do not wish to feel the ghosts of women wringing
their hands about me. Die, so be it, but do not make others die. Suicides
like those which will be accomplished here are sublime; but suicide is strict,
and can have no extension; and as soon as it touches those next you, the
name of suicide is murder. Think of the little flaxen heads, and think of the
white hairs. Listen, but a moment ago, Enjolras, he just told me of it, saw at
the corner of the Rue du Cygne a lighted casement, a candle in a poor win-
dow, in the fifth story, and on the glass the quivering shadow of the head of
an old woman who appeared to have passed the night in watching and to be
still waiting. She is perhaps the mother of one of you. Well, let that man go
away, and let him hasten to say to his mother: ‘Mother, here I am!' Let him
feel at ease, the work here will be done just as well. When a man supports
his relatives by his labour, he has no right to sacrifice himself. That is
deserting his family. And those who have daughters, and those who have
sisters! Do you think of it? You get killed, here you are dead, very well, and
to-morrow? Young girls who have no bread, that is terrible. Man begs,
woman sells. Ah! those charming beings, so graceful and so sweet, who
have bonnets of flowers, 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 maidens on the earth, that Jeanne, that Lise, that
Mimi, those adorable and noble creatures who are your benediction and
your pride, oh, God, they will be hungry! What would you have me say to
you? There is a market for human flesh; and it is not with your shadowy
hands, fluttering about them, that you can prevent them from entering it!
Think of the street, think of the pavement covered with passers, think of
the shops before which women walk to and fro with bare shoulders,
through the mud. Those women also have been pure. Think of your sisters,
those who have them. Misery, prostitution, the sergents de ville, Saint
Lazare, such will be the fall of those delicate beautiful girls, those fragile
wonders of modesty, grace, and beauty, fresher than the lilacs of the month
of May. Ah! you are killed! ah! you are no longer with them! Very well; you
desired to deliver the people from monarchy, you give your maidens to the
police. Friends, beware, have compassion. Women, hapless women, are not
in the habit of reflecting much. We boast that women have not received
the education of men, we prevent them from reading, we prevent them
from thinking, we prevent them from interesting themselves in politics; will
you prevent them from going tonight to the Morgue and identifying your
corpses? Come, those who have families must be good fellows and give us a
grasp of the hand and go away, and leave us to the business here all alone.
I know well that it requires courage to go, it is difficult; but the more diffi-
cult it is, the more praiseworthy. You say: I have a musket, I am at the
barricade, come the worst, I stay. Come the worst, that is very soon said.
My friends, there is a morrow; you will not be here on that morrow, but
your families will. And what suffering! See, a pretty, healthy child that has
cheeks like an apple, that babbles, that prattles, that jabbers, that laughs,
that smells sweet under the kiss, do you know what becomes of him when
he is abandoned? I saw one, very small, no taller than that. His father was
dead. Some poor people had taken him in from charity, but they had no
bread for themselves. The child was always hungry. It was winter. He did
not cry. They saw him go up to the stove where there was never any fire,
and the pipe of which, you know, was plastered with yellow clay. The child
picked off some of that clay with his little fingers and ate it. His breathing
was hard, his face livid, his legs soft, his belly big, He said nothing. They
spoke to him, he did not answer. He died. He was brought to the Necker
Hospital to die, where I saw him. I was surgeon at that hospital. Now, if
there are any fathers among you, fathers whose delight it is to take a walk
on Sunday holding in their great strong hand the little hand of their child,
let each of those fathers imagine that that child is his own. That poor bird,
I remember him well, it seems to me that I see him now, when he lay naked
upon the dissecting table, his ribs projecting under his skin like graves
under the grass of a church-yard. We found a kind of mud in his stomach.
There were ashes in his teeth. Come, let us search our conscience and take
counsel with our hearts. Statistics show that the mortality of abandoned
children is fifty-five per cent. I repeat it, it is a question of wives, it is a
question of mothers, it is a question of young girls, it is a question of babes.
Do I speak to you for yourselves? We know very well what you are; we
know very well that you are all brave, good heavens! we know very well that
your souls are filled with joy and glory at giving your life for the great
cause; we know very well that you feel that you are elected to die usefully
and magnificently, and that each of you clings to his share of the triumph.
Well and good. But you are not alone in this world. There are other beings
of whom we must think. We must not be selfish."

All bowed their heads with a gloomy air.

Strange contradictions of the human heart in its most sublime moments!
Combeferre, who spoke thus, was not an orphan. He remembered the moth-
ers of others, and he forgot his own. He was going to be killed. He was
"selfish."

Marius, fasting, feverish, successively driven from every hope, stranded
upon grief, most dismal of shipwrecks, saturated with violent emotions and
feeling the end approach, was sinking deeper and deeper into that visionary
stupor which always precedes the fatal hour when voluntarily accepted.

A physiologist might have studied in him the growing symptoms of that
febrile absorption known and classified by science, and which is to suffer-
ing what ecstasy is to pleasure. Despair also has its ecstacy. Marius had
reached that point. He witnessed it all as from without; as we have said,
the things which were occurring before him, seemed afar off; he perceived
thewhole, but did not distinguish the details. He saw the comers and goers
through a bewildering glare. He heard the voices speak as from the depth
of an abyss.

Still this moved him. There was one point in this scene which pierced
through to him, and which woke him. He had now but one idea, to die, and
he would not be diverted from it; but he thought, in his funereal somnambulism,
that while destroying oneself it is not forbidden to save another.

He raised his voice:

"Enjolras and Combeferre are right," said he; "no useless sacrifice. I
add my voice to theirs, and we must hasten. Combeferre has given the cri-
teria. There are among you some who have families, mothers, sisters, wives,
children. Let those leave the ranks."

Nobody stirred.

"Married men and supports of families, out of the ranks!" repeated
Marius.

His authority was great. Enjolras was indeed the chief of the barricade,
but Marius was its saviour.

"I order it," cried Enjolras.

"I beseech you," said Marius.

Then, roused by the words of Combeferre, shaken by the order of
Enjolras, moved by the prayer of Marius, those heroic men began to inform
against each other. "That is true," said a young man to a middle-aged man.
"You are the father of a family. Go away." "It is you rather," answered the
man, "you have two sisters whom you support." And an unparalleled conflict
broke out. It was as to which should not allow himself to be laid at the
door of the tomb.

"Make haste," said Courfeyrac, "in a quarter of an hour it will be too
late."

"Citizens," continued Enjolras, "this is the republic, and universal suffrage
reigns. Designate yourselves those who ought to go."

They obeyed. In a few minutes five were unanimously designated and
left the ranks.

"There are five!" exclaimed Marius.

There were only four uniforms.

"Well," resumed the five, "one must stay."

And it was who should stay, and who should find reasons why the others
should not stay. The generous quarrel recommenced.

"You, you have a wife who loves you." "As for 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, you are seventeen, it is too soon."

These grand revolutionary barricades were rendezvous of heroisms.

The improbable there was natural. These men were not astonished at each
other.

"Be quick," repeated Courfeyrac.

Somebody cried out from the group, to Marius:

"Designate yourself, which must stay."

"Yes," said the five, "choose. We will obey you."

Marius now believed no emotion possible. Still at this idea: to select a
man for death, all his blood flowed back towards his heart. He would have
turned pale if he could have been paler.

He advanced towards the five, who smiled upon him, and each, his eye
full of that grand flame which we see in the depth of history over the
Thermopylas, cried to him:

"Me! me! me!"

And Marius, in a stupor, counted them; there were still five! Then his
eyes fell upon the four uniforms.

At this moment a fifth uniform dropped, as if from heaven, upon the
four others.

The fifth man was saved.

Marius raised his eyes and saw M. Fauchelevent.

Jean Valjean had just entered the barricade.

Whether by information obtained, or by instinct, or by chance, he
came by the little Rue Mondetour. Thanks to his National Guard dress,
he had passed easily.

The sentry placed by the insurgents in the Rue Mondetour, had not giv-
en the signal of alarm for a single National Guard. He permitted him
to get into the street, saying to himself: "he is a reinforcement, probably,
and at the very worst a prisoner." The moment was too serious for the
sentinel to be diverted from his duty and his post of observation.

At the moment Jean Valjean entered the redoubt, nobody had noticed him,
all eyes being fixed upon the five chosen ones and upon the four uniforms.
Jean Valjean, himself, saw and understood, and silently, he stripped off
his coat, and threw it upon the pile with the others.

The commotion was indescribable.

"Who is this man?" asked Bossuet.

"He is," answered Combeferre, "a man who saves others."

Marius added in a grave voice:

"I know him."

This assurance was enough for all.

Enjolras turned towards Jean Valjean:

"Citizen, you are welcome."

And he added:

"You know that we are going to die."

Jean Valjean, without answering, helped the insurgent whom he saved
to put on his uniform.



V. WHAT HORIZON IS VISIBLE FROM THE TOP OF THE BARRICADE



THE SITUATION of all, in this hour of death and in this inexorable place,
found its resultant and summit in the supreme melancholy of Enjolras.

Enjolras had within himself the plenitude of revolution; he was incomplete
notwithstanding, as much as the absolute can be; he clung too much to Saint
Just, and not enough to Anacharsis Clootz; still his mind, in the society
of the Friends of the A B C, had at last received a certain polarisation
from the ideas of Combeferre; for some time, he had been leaving little
by little the narrow form of dogma, and allowing himself to tread the broad
paths of progress and he had come to accept, as its definitive and magni-
ficent evolution, the transformation of the great French Republic into the
immense human republic. As to the immediate means, in a condition of
violence, he wished them to be violent; in that he had not varied; and he
was still of that epic and formidable school, which is summed up in this
word: 'Ninety-three.

Enjolras was standing on the paving-stone steps, his elbow upon the
muzzle of his carbine. He was thinking; he started, as at the passing of a
gust; places where death is have such tripodal effects. There came from his
eyes, full of the interior sight, a kind of stifled fire. Suddenly he raised
his head, his fair hair waved backwards like that of the angel upon his sombre
car of stars, it was the mane of a startled lion flaming with a halo, and
Enjolras exclaimed:

"Citizens, do you picture to yourselves the future? The streets of the
cities flooded with light, green branches upon the thresholds, the nations
sisters, men just, the old men blessing the children, the past loving the
present, thinkers in full liberty, believers in full equality, for religion
the heavens; God priest direct, human conscience become the altar, no more
hatred, the fraternity of the workshop and the school, for reward and for
penalty notoriety, to all, labour, for all, law, over all, peace, no more
bloodshed, no more war, mothers happy! To subdue matter is the first step; to
realise the ideal is the second. Reflect upon what progress has already done.
Once the early human races looked with terror upon the hydra which blew
upon the waters, the dragon which vomited fire, the griffin monster of the
air, which flew with the wings of an eagle and the claws of a tiger; fearful
animals which were above man. Man, however, has laid his snares, the
sacred snares of intelligence, and has at last caught the monsters. We have
tamed the hydra, and he is called the steamer; we have tamed the dragon,
and he is called the locomotive; we are on the point of taming the griffin,
we have him already, and he is called the balloon. The day when this
promethean work shall be finished, and when man shall have definitely har-
nessed to his will the triple chimera of the ancients, the hydra, the dragon,
and the griffin, he will be the master of the water, the fire, and the air, and
he will be to the rest of the animated creation what the ancient gods were
formerly to him. Courage, and forward! Citizens, whither are we tending?
To science made government, to the force of things, recognised as the only
public force, to the natural law having its sanction and its penalty in itself
and promulgated by its self-evidence, to a dawn of truth, corresponding
with the dawn of the day. We are tending towards the union of the peoples;
we are tending towards the unity of man. No more fictions; no more para-
sites. The real governed by the true, such is the aim. Civilisation will hold
its courts on the summit of Europe, and later at the centre of the conti-
nents, in a grand parliament of intelligence. Something like this has been
seen already. The Amphictyons had two sessions a year, one at Delphi,
place of the gods, the other at Thermopyla, place of the heroes. Europe
will have her Amphictyons; the globe will have its Amphictyons. France
bears within her the sublime future. This is the gestation of the nineteenth
century. That which was sketched by Greece is worth being finished by
France. Listen to me, then, Feuilly, valiant working-man, man of the people,
man of the peoples, I venerate thee. Yes, thou seest clearly future ages;
yes, thou art right. Thou hadst neither father nor mother, Feuilly; thou
hast adopted humanity for thy mother, and the right for thy father. Thou
art going to die here; that is, to triumph. Citizens, whatever may happen
to-day, through our defeat as well as through our victory, we are going to
effect a revolution. Just as conflagrations light up the whole city, revolutions
light up the whole human race. And what revolution shall we effect? I
have just said, the revolution of the True. From the political point of view,
there is but one single principle: the sovereignty of man over himself. This
sovereignty of myself over myself is called Liberty. Where two or several of
these sovereignties associate the state begins. But in this association there is
no abdication. Each sovereignty gives up a certain portion of itself to form
the common right. That portion is the same for all. This identity of concession
which each makes to all, is Equality. The common right is nothing
more or less than the protection of all radiating upon the right of each.
This protection of all over each is called Fraternity. The point of intersection
of all these aggregated sovereignties is called Society. This intersection
being a junction, this point is a knot. Hence what is called the social tie.
Some say social contract; which is the same thing, the word contract being
etymologically formed with the idea of tie. Let us understand each other in
regard to equality; for, if liberty is the summit, equality is the base. Equality,
citizens, is not all vegetation on a level, a society of big spears of grass
and little oaks; a neighbourhood of jealousies emasculating each other; it is,
civilly, all aptitudes having equal opportunity; politically, all votes having
equal weight; religiously, all consciences having equal rights. Equality has
an organ: gratuitous and obligatory instruction. The right to the alphabet,
we must begin by that. The primary school obligatory upon all the higher
school offered to all, such is the law. From the identical school springs
equal society. Yes, instruction! Light! Light! all comes from light, and all
returns to it. Citizens, the nineteenth century is grand, but the twentieth
century will be happy. Then there will be nothing more like old history.
Men will no longer have to fear, as now, a conquest, an invasion, a usur-
pation, a rivalry of nations with the armed hand, an interruption of
civilisation depending on a marriage of kings, a birth in the hereditary
tyrannies, a partition of the peoples by a Congress, a dismemberment by
the downfall of a dynasty, a combat of two religions meeting head to head,
like two goats of darkness, upon the bridge of the infinite; they will no
longer have to fear famine, speculation, prostitution from distress, misery
from lack of work, and the scaffold, and the sword, and the battle, and all
the brigandages of chance in the forest of events. We might almost say:
there will be no events more. Men will be happy. The human race will fulfil
its law as the terrestrial globe fulfils its; harmony will be re-established
between the soul and the star; the soul will gravitate about the truth like the
star about the light. Friends, the hour in which we live, and in which I
speak to you, is a gloomy hour, but of such is the terrible price of the
future. A revolution is a toll-gate. Oh! the human race shall be delivered,
uplifted, and consoled! We affirm it on this barricade. Whence shall arise
the shout of love, if it be not from the summit of sacrifice? O my brothers,
here is the place of junction between those who think and those who
suffer; this barricade is made neither of paving-stones, nor of timbers, nor
of iron; it is made of two mounds, a mound of ideas and a mound of sorrows.
Misery here encounters the ideal. Here day embraces night, and
says: I will die with thee and thou shalt be born again with me. From the
pressure of all desolations faith gushes forth. Sufferings bring their agony
here, and ideas their immortality. This agony and this immortality are to
mingle and compose our death. Brothers, he who dies here dies in the
radiance of the future, and we are entering a grave illuminated by the
dawn."

Enjolras broke off rather than ceased, his lips moved noiselessly, as if he
were continuing to speak to himself, and they looked at him with attention,
endeavouring still to hear. There was no applause; but they whispered for a
long time. Speech being breath, the rustling of intellects resembles the
rustling of leaves.



VI. MARIUS HAGGARD, JAVERT LACONIC



LET US TELL what was passing in Marius' thoughts.

Remember the condition of his mind. As we have just mentioned, all
was now to him a dream. His understanding was troubled. Marius, we must
insist, was under the shadow of the great black wings which open above the
dying. He felt that he had entered the tomb, it seemed to him that he was
already on the other side of the wall and he no longer saw the faces of the
living save with the eyes of one dead.

How came M. Fauchelevent there? Why was he there? What did he come
to do? Marius put none of these questions. Besides, our despair having
this peculiarity that it enwraps others as well as ourselves, it
seemed logical to him that everybody should come to die.

Only he thought of Cosette with an oppression of the heart.

Moreover M. Fauchelevent did not speak to him, did not look at him,
and had not even the appearance of hearing him when Marius said: I know
him.

As for Marius, this attitude of M. Fauchelevent was a relief to him, and
if we might employ such a word for such impressions, we should say,
pleased him. He had always felt it absolutely impossible to address a word
to that enigmatic man, who to him was at once equivocal and imposing. It
was also a very long time since he had seen him; which, with Marius' timid
and reserved nature, increased the impossibility still more.

The five men designated went out of the barricade by the little Rue
Mondetour; they resembled National Guards perfectly; one of them went
away weeping. Before starting, they embraced those who remained.
When the five men sent away into life had gone, Enjolras thought of
the one condemned to death. He went into the basement room. Javert,
tied to the pillar, was thinking.

"Do you need anything?" Enjolras asked him.

Javert answered:

"When shall you kill me?"

"Wait. We need all our cartridges at present."

"Then, give me a drink," said Javert.

Enjolras presented him with a glass of water himself, and, as Javert was
bound, he helped him to drink.

"Is that all?" resumed Enjolras.

"I am uncomfortable at this post," answered Javert. "It was not affecti-
onate to leave me to pass the night here. Tie me as you please, but you can
surely lay me on a table. Like the other."

And with a motion of his head he indicated M. Mabeuf's body.

There was, it will be remembered, at the back of the room, a long wide
table, upon which they had cast balls and made cartridges. All the cartridges
being made and all the powder used up, this table was free.

At Enjolras' order, four insurgents untied Javert from the post. While
they were untying him, a fifth held a bayonet to his breast. They left his
hands tied behind his back, they put a small yet strong whipcord about his
feet, which permitted him to take fifteen-inch steps like those who are
mounting the scaffold, and they made him walk to the table at the back of
the room, on which they extended him, tightly bound by the middle of his
body.

For greater security, by means of a rope fixed to his neck, they added
to the system of bonds which rendered all escape impossible, that species of
ligature, called in the prisons a martingale, which, starting from the back of
the neck, divides over the stomach, and is fastened to the hands after passing
between the legs.

While they were binding Javert, a man, on the threshold of the door,
gazed at him with singular attention. The shade which this man produced
made Javert turn his head. He raised his eyes and recognised Jean Valjean.
He did not even start, he haughtily dropped his eyelids, and merely said: "It
is very natural."



VII. THE SITUATION GROWS SERIOUS



IT WAS GROWING light rapidly. But not a window was opened, not a door
stood ajar; it was the dawn, not the hour of awakening. The extremity of
the Rue de la Chanvrerie opposite the barricade had been evacuated by the
troops, as we have said; it seemed free, and lay open for wayfarers with an
ominous tranquillity. The Rue Saint Denis was as silent as the avenue of
the Sphinxes at Thebes. Not a living being at the corners, which were
whitening in a reflection of the sun. Nothing is so dismal as this bright-
ness of deserted streets.

They saw nothing, but they heard. A mysterious movement was taking place
at some distance. It was evident that the critical moment was at hand.
As in the evening the sentries were driven in; but this time all.

The barricade was stronger than at the time of the first attack. Since
the departure of the five, it had been raised still higher.

On the report of the sentry who had been observing the region of the
markets, Enjolras, for fear of a surprise from the rear, formed an important
resolution. He had barricaded the little passage of the Rue Mondetour,
which till then had been open. For this purpose they unpaved the length
of a few more houses. In this way, the barricade, walled in upon three
streets, in front upon the Rue de la Chanvrerie, at the left upon the Rue
du Cygne and la Petite Truanderie, at the right upon the Rue Mondetour,
was really almost impregnable; it is true that they were fatally shut in. It
had three fronts, but no longer an outlet. "A fortress, but mousetrap," said
Courfeyrac with a laugh.

Enjolras had piled up near the door of the wine-shop some thirty
paving-stones, "torn up uselessly," said Bossuet.

The silence was now so profound on the side from which the attack
must come, that Enjolras made each man resume his post for combat.
A ration of brandy was distributed to all.

Nothing is more singular than a barricade which is preparing for an
assault. Each man chooses his place, as at a play. They lean on their sides,
their elbows, their shoulders. There are some who make themselves stalls
with paving-stones. There is a corner of a wall which is annoying, they
move away from it; here is a redan which may be a protection, they take
shelter in it. The left-handed are precious; they take places which are
inconvenient for the rest. Many make arrangements to fight sitting down.
They wish to be at their ease in killing, and comfortable in dying. In the
deadly war of June, 1848, an insurgent, who had a terrible aim, and who
fought from the top of a terrace, on a roof, had a Voltaire armchair carried
up there; a charge of grape found him in it.

As soon as the chief has ordered the decks cleared for the fight, all dis-
orderly movements cease; no more skirmishing with one another; no more
coteries; no more asides; no more standing apart; that which is in all minds
converges, and changes into expectation of the assailant. A barricade before
danger, chaos; in danger, discipline. Peril produces order.

As soon as Enjolras had taken his double-barrelled carbine, and placed
himself on a kind of battlement which he had reserved, all were silent. A
little dry snapping sound was heard confusedly along the wall of pavingstones.
They were cocking their muskets.

Moreover, their bearing was firmer and more confident than ever; excess
of sacrifice is a support; they had hope no longer, but they had despair.
Despair, final arm, which sometimes gives victory; Virgil has said so.
Supreme resources spring from extreme resolutions. To embark in death
is sometimes the means of escaping a shipwreck; and the coffin-lid
becomes a plank of safety.

As on the evening before, the attention of all was turned, and we might
almost say threw its weight upon the end of the street, now lighted and
visible.They had not long to wait. Activity distinctly recommenced in the
direction Saint Leu, but it did not resemble the movement of the first
attack. A rattle of chains, the menacing jolt of a mass, a clicking of brass
bounding over the pavement, a sort of solemn uproar, announced that an
ominous body of iron was approaching. There was a shudder in the midst
of those peaceful old streets, cut through and built up for the fruitful
circulation of interests and ideas, and which were not made for the mon-
strous rumbling of the wheels of war.

The stare of all the combatants upon the extremity of the street became
wild. A piece of artillery appeared.

The gunners pushed forward the piece; it was all ready to be loaded;
the forewheels had been removed; two supported the carriage, four were
at the wheels, others followed with the caisson. The smoke of the burning
match was seen.

"Fire!" cried Enjolras.

The whole barricade flashed fire, the explosion was terrible; an ava-
lanche of smoke covered and effaced the gun and the men; in a few seconds
the cloud dissipated, and the cannon and the men reappeared; those in
charge of the piece placed it in position in front of the barricade, slowly,
correctly, and without haste. Not a man had been touched. Then the gunner,
bearing his weight on the breech, to elevate the range, began to point
the cannon with the gravity of an astronomer adjusting a telescope.
"Bravo for the gunners!" cried Bossuet.

And the whole barricade clapped hands.

A moment afterwards, placed squarely in the very middle of the street,
astride of the gutter, the gun was in battery. A formidable mouth was
opened upon the barricade.

"Come, be lively!" said Courfeyrac. "There is the brute. After the fil-
lip, the knock-down. The army stretches out its big paw to us. The barr-
icade is going to be seriously shaken. The musketry feels, the artillery
takes."

"It is a bronze eight-pounder, new model," added Combeferre. "Those
pieces, however little they exceed the proportion of ten parts of tin to a
hundred of copper, are liable to burst. The excess of tin makes them too
tender. In that case they have hollows and chambers in the vent. To obviate
this danger, and to be able to force out the load, it would be necessary,
perhaps, to return to the process of the fourteenth century, hooping, and to
strengthen the piece exteriorly, by a succession of steel rings unsoldered,
from the breech to the trunnion. In the meanwhile, they remedy the defect
as they can; they find out where the holes and the hollows in the bore of a
cannon are by means of a searcher. But there is a better way, that is the
movable star of Gribeauval."

"In the sixteenth century," observed Bossuet, "they rifled their cannon."

"Yes," answered Combeferre, "that augments the ballistic power, but
diminishes the accuracy of the aim. In a short range, the trajectory has not
the stiffness desirable, the parabola is exaggerated, the path of the project-
ile is not rectilinear enough to permit it to hit the intermediate objects, a
necessity of combat, however, the importance of which increases with the
proximity of the enemy and the rapidity of the firing. This want of tension
in the curve of the projectile, in the rifled cannon of the sixteenth century,
is due to the feebleness of the charge; feeble charges, for this kind of arm,
are required by the necessities of ballistics, such as, for instance, the pre-
servation of the carriages. Upon the whole, artillery, that despot, cannot do
all it would; strength is a great weakness. A cannon ball makes only two thou-
sand miles an hour; light makes two hundred thousand miles a second.
Such is the superiority of Jesus Christ over Napoleon."

"Reload arms," said Enjolras.

How was the facing of the barricade going to behave under fire? would
the shot make a breach? That was the question. While the insurgents were
reloading their muskets, the gunners loaded the cannon.

There was intense anxiety in the redoubt.

The gun went off; the detonation burst upon them.

"Present!" cried a cheerful voice.

And at the same time with the ball, Gavroche tumbled into the barricade.
He came by way of the Rue du Cygne, and he had nimbly clambered over the
minor barricade, which fronted upon the labyrinth of the Petite Truanderie.

Gavroche produced more effect in the barricade than the ball.

The ball lost itself in the jumble of the rubbish. At the very utmost it
broke a wheel of the omnibus, and finished the old Anceau cart. Seeing
which, the barricade began to laugh.

"Proceed," cried Bossuet to the gunners.


VIII. THE GUNNERS PRODUCE A SERIOUS IMPRESSION



THEY surrounded Gavroche.

But he had no time to tell anything. Marius, shuddering, took him
aside.

"What have you come here for?"

"Hold on!" said the boy. "What have you come for?"

And he looked straight at Marius with his epic effrontery. His eyes
grew large with the proud light which was in them.

Marius continued, in a stern tone:

"Who told you to come back? At least you carried my letter to its
address?"

Gavroche had some little remorse in relation to that letter. In his haste
to return to the barricade, he had got rid of it rather than delivered it.
He was compelled to acknowledge to himself that he had intrusted it rather
rashly to that stranger, whose face even he could not distinguish. True,
this man was bareheaded, but that was not enough. On the whole, he had
some little interior remonstrances on this subject, and he feared Marius'
reproaches. He took, to get out of the trouble, the simplest course; he
lied abominably.

"Citizen, I carried the letter to the porter. The lady was asleep. She
will get the letter when she wakes up."

Marius, in sending this letter, had two objects: to say farewell to Cos-
ette, and to save Gavroche. He was obliged to be content with the half
of what he intended.

The sending of his letter, and the presence of M. Fauchelevent in the
barricade, this coincidence occurred to his mind. He pointed out M.
Fauchelevent to Gavroche.

"Do you know that man?"

"No," said Gavroche.

Gavroche, in fact, as we have just mentioned, had only seen Jean Valjean
in the night.

The troubled and sickly conjectures which had arisen in Marius' mind
were dissipated. Did he know M. Fauchelevent's opinions? M.

Fauchelevent was a republican, perhaps. Hence his very natural presence
in this conflict.

Meanwhile Gavroche was already at the other end of the barricade, crying:
"My musket!"

Courfeyrac ordered it to be given him.

Gavroche warned his "comrades," as he called them, that the barricade
was surrounded. He had had great difficulty in getting through. A battalion
of the line whose muskets were stacked in la Petite Truanderie, were obser-
ving the side on the Rue du Cygne; on the opposite side the municipal guard
occupied the Rue des Precheurs. In front, they had the bulk of the army.
This information given, Gavroche added:

"I authorise you to give them a dose of pills."

Meanwhile Enjolras, on his battlement, was watching, listening with
intense attention.

The assailants, dissatisfied doubtless with the effect of their fire, had
not repeated it.

A company of infantry of the line had come in and occupied the extremity
of the street, in the rear of the gun. The soldiers tore up the pavement,
and with the stones constructed a little low wall, a sort of breastwork,
which was hardly more than eighteen inches high, and which fronted the
barricade. At the corner on the left of this breastwork, they saw the
head of the column of a battalion of the banlieue massed in the Rue St.
Denis.

Enjolras, on the watch, thought he distinguished the peculiar sound
which is made when canisters of grape are taken from the caisson, and he
saw the gunner change the aim and incline the piece slightly to the left.
Then the cannoneers began to load. The gunner seized the linstock himself
and brought it near the touch-hole.

"Heads down, keep close to the wall!" cried Enjolras, "and all on your
knees along the barricade!"

The insurgents, who were scattered in front of the wine-shop, and who
had left their posts of combat on Gavroche's arrival, rushed pell-mell
towards the barricade; but before Enjolras' order was executed, the dis-
charge took place with the fearful rattle of grapeshot. It was so in fact.
The charge was directed at the opening of the redoubt, it ricocheted
upon the wall, and this terrible ricochet killed two men and wounded three.
If that continued, the barricade was no longer tenable. It was not proof
against grape.

There was a sound of consternation.

"Let us prevent the second shot, at any rate," said Enjolras.

And, lowering his carbine, he aimed at the gunner, who, at that moment,
bending over the breech of the gun, was correcting and finally adjust-
ing the aim.



This gunner was a fine-looking sergeant of artillery, quite young, of fair
complexion, with a very mild face, and the intelligent air peculiar to
that predestined and formidable arm which, by perfecting itself in horror,
must end in killing war.

Combeferre, standing near Enjolras, looked at this young man.

"What a pity!" said Combeferre. "What a hideous thing these butcheries
are! Come, when there are no more kings, there will be no more war.
Enjolras, you are aiming at that sergeant, you are not looking at him. Just
think that he is a charming young man; he is intrepid; you see that he is a
thinker; these young artillery-men are well educated; he has a father, a
mother, a family; he is in love probably; he is at most twenty-five years
old; he might be your brother."

"He is," said Enjolras.

"Yes," said Combeferre, "and mine also. Well, don't let us kill him."

"Let me alone. We must do what we must."

And a tear rolled slowly down Enjolras' marble cheek.

At the same time he pressed the trigger of his carbine. The flash leaped
forth. The artillery-man turned twice round, his arms stretched out before
him, and his head raised as if to drink the air, then he fell over on his
side upon the gun, and lay there motionless. His back could be seen, from
the centre of which a stream of blood gushed upwards. The ball had entered
his breast and passed through his body. He was dead.

It was necessary to carry him away and to replace him. It was indeed
some minutes gained.



IX. USE OF THAT OLD POACHER SKILL, AND THAT INFALLIBLE
SHOT WHICH INFLUENCED THE CONVICTION OF 1796



THERE WAS confusion in the counsel of the barricade. The gun was about
to be fired again. They could not hold out a quarter of an hour in that
storm of grape. It was absolutely necessary to deaden the blows.

Enjolras threw out his command:

"We must put a mattress there."

"We have none," said Combeferre, "the wounded are on them."

Jean Valjean, seated apart on a block, at the corner of the wine-shop,
his musket between his knees, had, up to this moment, taken no part in
what was going on. He seemed not to hear the combatants about him say:
"There is a musket which is doing nothing."

At the order given by Enjolras, he got up.

It will be remembered that on the arrival of the company in the Rue
de la Chanvrerie, an old woman, foreseeing bullets, had put her mattress
before her window. This window, a garret window, was on the roof of a
house of six stories standing a little outside of the barricade. The mat-
tress, placed crosswise, rested at the bottom upon two clothes-poles, and
was sustained above by two ropes which, in the distance, seemed like threads,
and which were fastened to nails driven into the window casing. These two
ropes could be seen distinctly against the sky like hairs.

"Can somebody lend me a double-barrelled carbine?" said Jean Valjean.

Enjolras, who had just reloaded his, handed it to him.

Jean Valjean aimed at the window and fired.

One of the two ropes of the mattress was cut.

The mattress now hung only by one thread.

Jean Valjean fired the second barrel. The second rope struck the glass
of the window. The mattress slid down between the two poles and fell into
the street.

The barricade applauded.

All cried:

"There is a mattress."

"Yes," said Combeferre, "but who will go after it?"

The mattress had, in fact, fallen outside of the barricade, between the
besieged and the besiegers. Now, the death of the gunner having exasperated
the troops, the soldiers, for some moments, had been lying on their
faces behind the line of paving-stones which they had raised, and, to make
up for the compulsory silence of the gun, which was quiet while its service
was being reorganised, they had opened fire on the barricade. The insurgents
made no response to this musketry, to spare their ammunition. The fusilade
was broken against the barricade; but the street, which it filled with balls,
was terrible.

Jean Valjean went out at the opening, entered the street, passed through
the storm of balls, went to the mattress, picked it up, put it on his
back, and returned to the barricade.

He put the mattress into the opening himself. He fixed it against the
wall in such a way that the artillerymen did not see it.

This done, they awaited the charge of grape.

They had not long to wait.

The cannon vomited its package of shot with a roar. But there was no
ricochet. The grape miscarried upon the mattress. The desired effect was
obtained. The barricade was preserved.

"Citizen," said Enjolras to Jean Valjean, "the republic thanks you."

Bossuet admired and laughed. He exclaimed:

"It is immoral that a mattress should have so much power. Triumph of that
which yields over that which thunders. But it is all the same; glory to the
mattress which nullifies a cannon."



X. DAWN



AT THAT MOMENT Cosette awoke.

Her room was small, neat, retired, with a long window to the east,
looking upon the back-yard of the house.

Cosette knew nothing of what was going on in Paris. She had not been
out of her room in the evening, and she had already withdrawn to it when
Toussaint said: "It appears that there is a row."

Cosette had slept few hours, but well. She had had sweet dreams which
was partly owing perhaps to her little bed being very white. Somebody who
was Marius had appeared to her surrounded by a halo. She awoke with the
sun in her eyes, which at first produced the effect of a continuation of her
dream.

Her first emotion, on coming out of this dream, was joyous. Cosette felt
entirely reassured. She was passing through, as Jean Valjean had done
a few hours before, that reaction of the soul which absolutely refuses
woe. She began to hope with all her might without knowing why. Then came
an oppression of the heart. Here were three days now that she had not seen
Marius. But she said to herself that he must have received her letter, that
he knew where she was, and that he had so much tact, that he would find
means to reach her. And that certainly to-day, and perhaps this very morning.
It was broad day, but the rays of light were very horizontal, she thought
it was very early; that she must get up, however, to receive Marius.

She felt that she could not live without Marius, and that consequently,
that was enough, and that Marius would come. No objection was admissible.
All that was certain. It was monstrous enough already to have suffered
three days. Marius absent three days, it was horrible in the good God. Now
this cruel sport of Heaven was an ordeal that was over. Marius was coming,
and would bring good news. Thus is youth constituted; it quickly wipes its
eyes; it believes sorrow useless and does not accept it. Youth is the smile
of the future before an unknown being which is itself. It is natural for it
to be happy. It seems as though it breathed hope.

Besides, Cosette could not succeed in recalling what Marius had said to
her on the subject of this absence which was to last but one day, or what
explanation he had given her about it. Everybody has noticed with what
address a piece of money which you drop on the floor, runs and hides, and
what art it has in rendering itself undiscoverable. There are thoughts which
play us the same trick; they hide in a corner of our brain; it is all over;
they are lost; impossible to put the memory back upon them. Cosette was a
little vexed at the useless petty efforts which her recollection made. She
said to herself that it was very naughty of her and very wicked to have
forgotten words uttered by Marius.

She got up and performed the two ablutions, of the soul and the body,
her prayer and her toilette.

We may, in extreme cases, introduce the reader into a nuptial chamber,
not into a maiden's chamber. Verse would hardly dare, prose ought
not.

It is the interior of a flower yet unblown, it is a whiteness in the shade,
it is the inmost cell of a closed lily which ought not to be looked upon by
man, while yet it has not been looked upon by the sun. Woman in the bud
is sacred. The innocent bed which is thrown open, the adorable seminudity
which is afraid of itself, the white foot which takes refuge in a slipper,
the bosom which veils itself before a mirror as if that mirror were an
eye; the chemise which hastens up to hide the shoulder at the snapping
of a piece of furniture, or at the passing of a waggon, the ribbons tied,
the clasps hooked, the lacings drawn, the starts, the shivers of cold and
of modesty, the exquisite shyness in every movement, the almost winged an-
xiety where there is no cause for fear; the successive phases of the dress
as charming as the clouds of the dawn; it is not fitting that all this
should be described, and it is too much, indeed, to refer to it.

The eye of man should be more religious still before the rising of a
young maiden than before the rising of a star. The possibility of touch
should increase respect. The down of peach, the dust of the plum, the rad-
iated crystal of the snow, the butterfly's wing powdered with feathers,
are gross things in presence of that chastity which does not even know that
it is chaste. The young maiden is only the gleam of a dream, and is not yet
statue. Her alcove is hidden in the shadows of the ideal. The indiscreet
touch of the eye defaces this dim penumbra. Here, to gaze is to profane.

We will show nothing, then, of all that pleasant little confusion on
Cosette's awakening.

An Eastern tale relates that the rose was made white by God but that
Adam having looked at it at the moment it was half opened, it was ashamed
and blushed. We are of those who feel themselves speechless before young
maidens and flowers, finding them venerable.

Cosette dressed herself very quickly, combed and arranged her hair, which
was a very simple thing at that time, when women did not puff out their
ringlets and plaits with cushions and rolls, and did not put crinoline in
their hair. Then she opened the window and looked all about, hoping to
discover something of the street, a corner of a house, a patch of pavement,
and to be able to watch for Marius there. But she could see nothing of the
street. The back-yard was surrounded with high walls, and a few gardens
only were in view. Cosette pronounced these gardens hideous; for the first
time in her life she found flowers ugly. The least bit of a street gutter
would have been more to her mind. She finally began to look at the sky, as
if she thought that Marius might come that way also.

Suddenly, she melted into tears. Not that it was fickleness of soul; but,
hopes cut off by faintness of heart, such was her situation. She vaguely felt
some indefinable horror. Things float in the air in fact. She said to herself
that she was not sure of anything; that to lose from sight, was to lose; and
the idea that Marius might indeed return to her from the sky, appeared no
longer charming, but dismal.

Then, such are these clouds, calmness returned to her, and hope, and a
sort of smile, unconscious, but trusting in God.

Everybody was still in bed in the house. A rural silence reigned. No
shutter had been opened. The porter's box was closed. Toussaint was not
up, and Cosette very naturally thought that her father was asleep. She must
have suffered indeed, and she must have been still suffering, for she said
to herself that her father had been unkind; but she counted on Marius. The
eclipse of such a light was entirely impossible. At intervals she heard at
some distance a kind of sullen jar, and she said: "It is singular that people
are opening and shutting porte-cocheres so early." It was the cannon battering
the barricade.

There was, a few feet below Cosette's window, in the old black cornice of
the wall, a nest of martins; the corbel of this nest made a little project-
ion beyond the cornice, so that the inside of this little paradise could
be seen from above. The mother was there, opening her wings like a fan
over her brood; the father flew about, went away, then returned, bringing
in his bill food and kisses. The rising day gilded this happy thing, the
great law Multiply was there, smiling and august, and this sweet mystery was
blossoming in the glory of the morning. Cosette, her hair in the sunshine,
her soul in chimera, made luminous by love within, and the dawn without,
bent over as if mechanically, and, almost without daring to acknowledge
to herself that she was thinking of Marius at the same time, began to look
at these birds, this family, this male and this female, this mother and
these little ones, with the deep restlessness which a nest gives to a
maiden.



XI. THE SHOT WHICH MISSES NOTHING AND KILLS NOBODY



THE FIRE of the assailants continued. The musketry and the grape alter-
nated, without much damage indeed. The top of the facade of Corinth alone
suffered; the window of the first story and the dormer windows on the
roof, riddled with shot and ball, were slowly demolished. The combatants
who were posted there, had to withdraw. Besides, this is the art of attack-
ing barricades; to tease for a long time, in order to exhaust the ammunition
of the insurgents if they commit the blunder of replying. When it is per-
ceived, from the slackening of their fire, that they have no longer either
balls or powder, the assault is made. Enjolras did not fall into this snare;
the barricade did not reply.

At each platoon fire, Gavroche thrust out his cheek with his tongue, a
mark of lofty disdain:

"That's right," said he, "tear up the cloth. We want lint."

Courfeyrac jested with the grape about its lack of effect, and said to
the cannon:

"You are getting diffuse, my goodman."

In a battle people force themselves upon acquaintance, as at a ball. It
is probable that this silence of the redoubt began to perplex the besieg-
ers, and make them fear some unlooked-for accident, and that they felt the
need of seeing through that heap of paving-stones and knowing what was
going on behind that impassable wall, which was receiving their fire
without answering it. The insurgents suddenly perceived a casque shining
in the sun upon a neighbouring roof. A sapper was backed up against a tall
chimney, and seemed to be there as a sentinel. He looked directly into the
barricade.

"There is a troublesome overseer," said Enjolras.

Jean Valjean had returned his carbine to Enjolras, but he had his
musket.

Without saying a word, he aimed at the sapper, and, a second afterwards,
the casque, struck by a ball, fell noisily into the street. The startled
soldier hastened to disappear.

A second observer took his place. This was an officer. Jean Valjean,
who had reloaded his musket, aimed at the new-comer, and sent the officer's
casque to keep company with the soldier's. The officer was not
obstinate, and withdrew very quickly. This time the warning was understood.
Nobody appeared upon the roof again, and they gave up watching
the barricade.

"Why didn't you kill the man?" asked Bossuet of Jean Valjean.

Jean Valjean did not answer.



XII. DISORDER A PARTISAN OF ORDER



BOSSUET murmured in Combeferre's ear:

"He has not answered my question."

"He is a man who does kindness by musket shots," said Combeferre.

Those who retain some recollection of that now distant period know that
the National Guard of the banlieue was valiant against the insurrections.
It was particularly eager and intrepid in the days of June, 1832. Many
a good wineshopkeeper of Pantin, of the Vertus or of La Cunette, whose
"establishment" was without custom in consequence of the emeute, became
leonine on seeing his dancing-hall deserted, and died to preserve order
represented by the tavern. In those days, at once bourgeois and heroic,
in presence of ideas which had their knights, interests had their pala-
dins. The prosaic motive detracted nothing from the bravery of the action.
The decrease of a pile of crowns made bankers sing the Marseillaise. They
poured out their blood lyrically for the counter; and with a Lacedamonian
enthusiasm they defended the shop, that immense diminutive of one's
native land.

In reality we must say, there was nothing in all this which was not very
serious. It was the social elements entering into conflict while awaiting
the day when they shall enter into equilibrium.

Another sign of that time was anarchy mingled with governmentalism
(barbarous name of the correct party). Men were for order without dis-
cipline. The drum beat unawares, at the command of some colonel of the
National Guard, capricious roll-calls; many a captain went to the fire by
inspiration; many a National Guard fought "from fancy," and on his own
account. In the critical moments, on the "days," they took counsel less
of their chiefs than of their instincts. There were in the army of order
genuine guerrillas, some of the sword like Fannicot; others of the pen,
like Henri Fonfrede.

Civilisation, unfortunately represented at that epoch rather by an aggre-
gation of interests than by a group of principles, was, or thought itself
in peril; it raised the cry of alarm; every man making himself a centre,
defended it, aided it, and protected it, in his own way; and anybody and
everybody took it upon himself to save society.

Zeal sometimes goes to the extent of extermination. Such a platoon of
National Guards constituted themselves, of their own private authority, a
court-martial, and condemned and executed an insurgent prisoner in five
minutes. It was an improvisation of this kind which had killed Jean Prou-
vaire. Ferocious Lynch law, with which no party has the right to reproach
others, for it is applied by the republic in America as well as by monarchy
in Europe. This Lynch law is liable to mistakes. During an emeute, a young
poet, named Paul Aime Garnier, was pursued in the Place Royale at the
point of the bayonet, and only escaped by taking refuge under the porteco-
chere of Number 6. The cry was: There is another of those Saint Simonians!
and there was an attempt to kill him. Now, he had under his arm a volume
of the memoirs of the Duke de Saint Simon. A National Guard had read
upon this book the name: Saint Simon, and cried: "Kill him."

On the 6th of June, 1832, a company of National Guards of the banlieue,
commanded by Captain Fannicot, before mentioned, got themselves, through
whim and for sport's sake, decimated in the Rue de la Chanvrerie. The
fact, singular as it may seem, was proven by the judicial investigation
entered upon after the insurrection of 1832. Captain Fannicot, a bold and
impatient bourgeois, a kind of condottiere of the order of those we have
just characterised, a fanatical and insubordinate governmentalist, could not
resist the impulse to open fire before the hour, and the ambition of taking
the barricade by himself all alone, that is, with his company. Exasperated by
the successive appearance of the red flag and the old coat which he took
for the black flag, he loudly blamed the generals and chiefs of corps, who
were holding counsel, and did not deem that the moment for the decisive
assault had come, and were leaving, according to a celebrated expression of
one of them, "the insurrection to cook in its own juice." As for him, he
thought the barricade ripe, and, as what is ripe ought to fall, he made
the attempt.

He commanded men as resolute as himself, "madmen," said a witness. His
company, the same which had shot the poet Jean Prouvaire, was the first
of the battalion posted at the corner of the street. At the moment when
it was least expected, the captain hurled his men against the barricade.
This movement, executed with more zeal than strategy, cost the Fannicot
company dear. Before it had passed over two-thirds of the street, it was
greeted by a general discharge from the barricade. Four, the most daring,
who were running in advance, were shot down at the muzzles of the muskets,
at the very foot of the redoubt; and this courageous mob of National Guards,
very brave men, but who had no military tenacity, had to fall back, after
some hesitation, leaving fifteen dead upon the pavement. The moment of
hesitation gave the insurgents time to reload, and a second discharge,
very murderous, reached the company before it was able to regain the corner
of the street, its shelter. At one moment it was taken between two storms of
balls, and it received the volley of the piece in battery which, receiving no
orders, had not discontinued its fire. The intrepid and imprudent Fannicot
was one of those killed by this volley. He was slain by the cannon, that
is to say, by order.

This attack, more furious than serious, irritated Enjolras.

"The fools!" said he. "They are getting their men killed and using up
our ammunition, for nothing."

Enjolras spoke like the true general of emeute that he was. Insurrection
and repression do not contend with equal arms. Insurrection, readily
exhaustible, has but a certain number of shots to fire, and but a certain
number of combatants to expend. A cartridge-box emptied, a man killed,
are not replaced. Repression, having the army, does not count men, and,
having Vincennes, does not count shots. Repression has as many regiments
as the barricade has men, and as many arsenals as the barricade has car-
tridge-boxes. Thus they are struggles of one against a hundred, which
always end in the destruction of the barricade; unless revolution, abruptly
appearing, casts into the balance its flaming archangel's sword. That hap-
pens. Then everything rises, the pavements begin to ferment, the redoubts
of the people swarm, Paris thrills sovereignly, the quid divinum is set free,
a 10th of August is in the air, a 29th of July is in the air, a marvellous
light appears, the yawning jaws of force recoil, and the army, that lion,
sees before it, erect and tranquil, this prophet, France.



XIII. GLEAMS WHICH PASS



IN THE CHAOS of sentiments and passions which defend a barricade, there is
something of everything; there is bravery, youth, honour, enthusiasm, the
ideal, conviction, the eager fury of the gamester, and above all, intervals
of hope.

One of those intervals, one of those vague thrills of hope, suddenly
crossed, at the most unexpected moment, the barricade of the Rue de la
Chanvrerie.

"Hark!" abruptly exclaimed Enjolras, who was constantly on the alert,
"it seems to me that Paris is waking."

It is certain that on the morning of the 6th of June the insurrection
had, for an hour or two, a certain recrudescence. The obstinacy of the
tocsin of Saint Merry reanimated some dull hopes. In the Rue du Poirier,
in the Rue des Gravilliers, barricades were planned out. In front of the
Porte Saint Martin, a young man, armed with a carbine, attacked singly a
squadron of cavalry. Without any shelter, in the open boulevard, he
dropped on one knee, raised his weapon to his shoulder, fired, killed the
chief of the squadron, and turned round saying: "There is another who will
do us no more harm." He was sabred. In the Rue Saint Denis, a woman fired
upon the Municipal Guard from behind a Venetian blind. The slats of the
blind were seen to tremble at each report. A boy of fourteen was arrested in
the Rue de la Cossonerie with his pockets full of cartridges. Several posts
were attacked. At the entrance of the Rue Bertin Poiree, a very sharp and
entirely unexpected fusilade greeted a regiment of cuirassiers, at the head
of which marched General Cavaignac de Baragne. In the Rue Planche Mibray
they threw upon the troops, from the roofs, old fragments of household
vessels and utensils; a bad sign; and when this fact was reported to Marshal
Soult, the old lieutenant of Napoleon grew thoughtful, remembering the
saying of Suchet at Saragossa: "We are lost when the old women empty their
pots upon our heads."

These general symptoms which were manifested just when it was supposed
the emeute was localised, this fever of wrath which was regaining the
upper hand, these sparks which flew here and there above those deep
masses of combustible material which are called the Faubourgs of Paris,
all taken together rendered the military chiefs anxious. They hastened to
extinguish these beginnings of conflagration. They delayed, until these
sparks should be quenched, the attack on the barricades Maubuee, de la
Chanvrerie, and Saint Merry, that they might have them only to deal with,
and might be able to finish all at one blow. Columns were thrown into the
streets in fermentation, sweeping the large ones, probing the small on the
right, on the left, sometimes slowly and with precaution, sometimes at a
double quick step. The troops beat in the doors of the houses from which
there had been firing; at the same time manoeuvres of cavalry dispersed the
groups on the boulevards. This repression was not accomplished without
noise, nor without that tumultuous uproar peculiar to shocks between the
army and the people. This was what Enjolras caught, in the intervals of the
cannonade and the musketry. Besides, he had seen some wounded passing
at the end of the street upon litters, and said to Courfeyrac: "Those
wounded do not come from our fire."

The hope did not last long; the gleam was soon eclipsed. In less than
half an hour that which was in the air vanished; it was like heat lightning,
and the insurgents felt that kind of leaden pall fall upon them which the
indifference of the people casts over the wilful when abandoned.

The general movement, which seemed to have been vaguely projected, had
miscarried; and the attention of the Minister of War and the strategy of
the generals could now be concentrated upon the three or four barricades
remaining standing.

The sun rose above the horizon.

An insurgent called to Enjolras:

"We are hungry here. Are we really going to die like this without
eating?"

Enjolras, still leaning upon his battlement, without taking his eyes off
the extremity of the street, nodded his head.



XIV. IN WHICH WILL BE FOUND THE NAME OF ENJOLRAS' MISTRESS



COURFEYRAC, seated on a paving-stone beside Enjolras, continued his
insults to the cannon, and every time that that gloomy cloud of projectiles
which is known by the name of grape passed by, with its monstrous sound,
he received it with an outburst of irony.

"You are tiring your lungs, my poor old brute, you trouble me, you are
wasting your racket. That is not thunder; no, it is a cough."

And those about him laughed.

Courfeyrac and Bossuet, whose valiant good-humour increased with the
danger, like Madame Scarron, replaced food by pleasantry, and, as they
had no wine, poured out cheerfulness for all.

"I admire Enjolras," said Bossuet. "His impassive boldness astonishes me.
He lives alone, which renders him perhaps a little sad. Enjolras suffers
for his greatness, which binds him to widowhood. The rest of us have all,
more or less, mistresses who make fools of us, that is to say braves. When
we are as amorous as a tiger the least we can do is to fight like a lion. It
is a way of avenging ourselves for the tricks which Mesdames our grisettes
play us. Roland gets himself killed to spite Angelica; all our heroisms come
from our women. A man without a woman, is a pistol without a hammer; it is
the woman who makes the man go off. Now, Enjolras has no woman. He is not
in love, and he finds a way to be intrepid. It is a marvellous thing that
a man can be as cold as ice and as bold as fire."

Enjolras did not appear to listen, but had anybody been near him he
would have heard him murmur in an undertone, "Patria."

Bossuet was laughing still when Courfeyrac exclaimed:

"Something new!"

And, assuming the manner of an usher announcing an arrival, he
added:

"My name is Eight-Pounder."

In fact, a new personage had just entered upon the scene. It was a second
piece of ordnance.

The artillerymen quickly executed the manoeuvres, and placed this second
piece in battery near the first.

This suggested the conclusion.

A few moments afterwards, the two pieces, rapidly served, opened directly
upon the redoubt; the platoon firing of the line and the banlieue sup-
ported the artillery.

Another cannonade was heard at some distance. At the same time that
two cannon were raging against the redoubt in the Rue de la Chanvrerie,
two other pieces of ordnance, pointed, one on the Rue Saint Denis, the
other on the Rue Aubry le Boucher, were riddling the barricade St. Merry.
The four cannon made dreary echo to one another.

The bayings of the dismal dogs of war answered each other.

Of the two pieces which were now battering the barricade in the Rue
de la Chanvrerie, one fired grape, the other ball.

The gun which threw balls was elevated a little, and the range was calcu-
lated so that the ball struck the extreme edge of the upper ridge of the
barricade, dismantled it, and crumbled the paving-stones over the insur-
gents in showers.

This peculiar aim was intended to drive the combatants from the summit
of the redoubt, and to force them to crowd together in the interior, that
is, it announced the assault.

The combatants once driven from the top of the barricade by the balls
and from the windows of the wine-shop by the grape, the attacking
columns could venture into the street without being watched, perhaps even
without being under fire, suddenly scale the redoubt, as on the evening
before, and, who knows? take it by surprise.

"We must at all events diminish the inconvenience of those pieces,"
said Enjolras, and he cried: "fire upon the cannoneers!"

All were ready. The barricade, which had been silent for a long time, open-
ed fire desperately; seven or eight discharges succeeded each other with a
sort of rage and joy; the street was filled with a blinding smoke, and after
a few minutes, through this haze pierced by flame, they could confusedly
make out two thirds of the cannoneers lying under the wheels of the guns.
Those who remained standing continued to serve the pieces with rigid com-
posure, but the fire was slackened.

"This goes well," said Bossuet to Enjolras. "Success."

Enjolras shook his head and answered:

"A quarter of an hour more of this success, and there will not be ten
cartridges in the barricade."

It would seem that Gavroche heard this remark.



XV. GAVROCHE OUTSIDE



COURFEYRAC suddenly perceived somebody at the foot of the barricade,
outside in the street, under the balls.

Gavroche had taken a basket from the wine-shop, had gone out by the opening,
and was quietly occupied in emptying into his basket the full cartridge-
boxes of the National Guards who had been killed on the slope of the redoubt.

"What are you doing there?" said Courfeyrac.

Gavroche cocked up his nose.

"Citizen, I am filling my basket."

"Why, don't you see the grape?"

Gavroche answered:

"Well, it rains. What then?"

Courfeyrac cried:

"Come back!"

"Directly," said Gavroche.

And with a bound, he sprang into the street.

It will be remembered that the Fannicot company, on retiring, had left
behind them a trail of corpses.

Some twenty dead lay scattered along the whole length of the street on
the pavement. Twenty cartridge-boxes for Gavroche, a supply of cartridges
for the barricade.

The smoke in the street was like a fog. Whoever has seen a cloud fall
into a mountain gorge between two steep slopes can imagine this smoke
crowded and as if thickened by two gloomy lines of tall houses. It rose
slowly and was constantly renewed; hence a gradual darkening which even
rendered broad day pallid. The combatants could hardly perceive each
other from end to end of the street, although it was very short.

This obscurity, probably desired and calculated upon by the leaders who
were to direct the assault upon the barricade, was of use to Gavroche.

Under the folds of this veil of smoke, and thanks to his small size, he
could advance far into the street without being seen. He emptied the
first seven or eight cartridge-boxes without much danger.

He crawled on his belly, ran on his hands and feet, took his basket in
his teeth, twisted, glided, writhed, wormed his way from one body to
another, and emptied a cartridge-box as a monkey opens a nut.

From the barricade, of which he was still within hearing, they dared
not call to him to return, for fear of attracting attention to him.

On one corpse, that of a corporal, he found a powder-flask.

"In case of thirst," said he as he put it into his pocket.

By successive advances, he reached a point where the fog from the firing
became transparent.

So that the sharp-shooters of the line drawn up and on the alert behind
their wall of paving-stones, and the sharp-shooters of the banlieue massed
at the corner of the street, suddenly discovered something moving in the
smoke.

Just as Gavroche was relieving a sergeant who lay near a stone-block of
his cartridges, a ball struck the body.

"The deuce!" said Gavroche. "So they are killing my dead for me."

A second ball splintered the pavement beside him. A third upset his
basket.

Gavroche looked and saw that it came from the banlieue.

He rose up straight, on his feet, his hair in the wind, his hands upon his
hips, his eye fixed upon the National Guards who were firing, and he sang:

On est laid a Nanterre
C'est la faute a Voltaire,
Et bete a Palaiseau,
C'est la faute a Rousseau.

They're ugly in Nanterre
Because of Voltaire,
And stupid in Palaiseau
Because of Rousseau.

Then he picked up his basket, put into it the cartridge which had fallen
out, without losing a single one, and, advancing towards the fusilade, began
to empty another cartridge-box. There a fourth ball just missed him again.
Gavroche sang:

Je ne suis pas notaire,
C'est la faute a Voltaire;
Je suis petit oiseau,
C'est la faute a Rousseau.

I'm no notary
Because of Voltaire;
I'm just a sparrow
Because of Rousseau.

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

Joie est mon caractere,
C'est la faute a Voltaire;
Misere est mon trousseau,
C'est la faute a Rousseau.

Joy's my nature
Because of Voltaire;
Misery's my trousseau
Because of Rousseau.

This continued thus for some time.

The sight was appalling and fascinating. Gavroche, fired at, mocked
the firing. He appeared to be very much amused. It was the sparrow peck
ing at the hunters. He replied to each discharge by a couplet. They aimed
at him incessantly, they always missed him. The National Guards and the
soldiers laughed as they aimed at him. He lay down, then rose up, hid
himself in a doorway, then sprang out, disappeared, reappeared, escaped,
returned, retorted upon the volleys by wry faces, and meanwhile pillaged
cartridges, emptied cartridge-boxes, and filled his basket. The insurgents,
breathless with anxiety, followed him with their eyes. The barricade was
trembling; he was singing. It was not a child; it was not a man; it was
a strange fairy gamin. One would have said the invulnerable dwarf of the
melee. The bullets ran after him, he was more nimble than they. He was
playing an indescribably terrible game of hide-and-seek with death; every
time the flat-nosed face of the spectre approached, the gamin snapped his
fingers.

One bullet, however, better aimed or more treacherous than the others,
reached the Will-o'-the-wisp child. They saw Gavroche totter, then he
fell. The whole barricade gave a cry; but there was an Antaus in this pigmy;
for the gamin to touch the pavement is like the giant touching the earth;
Gavroche had fallen only to rise again; he sat up, a long stream of blood
rolled down his face, he raised both arms in air, looked in the direction
whence the shot came, and began to sing:

Je suis tombe par terre,
C'est la faute a Voltaire,
La nez dans le ruisseau,
C'est la faute a----

I dropped from the air
Because of Voltaire,
To the gutter I go
Because of....

He did not finish. A second ball from the same marksman cut him
short. This time he fell with his face upon the pavement, and did not stir
again. That little great soul had taken flight.



XVI. HOW BROTHER BECOMES FATHER



THERE WERE at that very moment in the garden of the Luxembourg--for
the eye of the drama should be everywhere present--two children holding
each other by the hand. One might have been seven years old, the other
five. Having been soaked in the rain, they were walking in the paths on the
sunny side; the elder was leading the little one; they were pale and in rags;
they looked like wild birds. The smaller said: "I want something to eat."
The elder, already something of a protector, led his brother with his
left hand and had a stick in his right hand.

They were alone in the garden. The garden was empty, the gates being
closed by order of the police on account of the insurrection. The troops
which had bivouacked there had been called away by the necessities of the
combat.

How came these children there? Had they haply escaped from some half-open
guard-house; was there perchance in the neighbourhood, at the Barriere d'Enfer,
or on the esplanade of the Observatoire, or in the neighbouring square over-
looked by the pediment on which we read: invenerunt parvulum pannis involutum,
some mountebank's tent from which they had fled; had they perchance, the eve-
ning before, evaded the eye of the gardenkeepers at the hour of closing, and
had they passed the night in some one of those boxes in which people read
the papers? The fact is, that they were wandering, and that they seemed free.
To be wandering and to seem free is to be lost. These poor little ones were
lost indeed.

These two children were the very same about whom Gavroche had been in trou-
ble, and whom the reader remembers. Children of the Thenardiers, rented out
to Magnon, attributed to M. Gillenormand, and now leaves fallen from all
these rootless branches, and whirled over the ground by the wind.

Their clothing, neat in Magnon's time, and which served her as a prospectus
in the sight of M. Gillenormand, had become tatters. These creatures be-
longed henceforth to the statistics of "abandoned children," whom the po-
lice report, collect, scatter, and find again on the streets of Paris.

It required the commotion of such a day for these little outcasts to be
in this garden. If the officers had noticed them, they would have driven
away these rags. Poor children cannot enter the public gardens; still one
would think that, as children, they had a right in the flowers.

These were there, thanks to the closed gates. They were in violation of the
rules. They had slipped into the garden, and they had stayed there. Closed
gates do not dismiss the keepers, the oversight is supposed to continue,
but it is relaxed and at its ease; and the keepers, also excited by the
public anxiety and busier with matters without than within, no longer paid
attention to the garden and had not seen the two delinquents.

It had rained the night before, and even a little that morning. But in June
showers are of no account. It is with difficulty that we can realise, an
hour after a storm, that this fine fair day has been rainy. The ground in
summer is as soon dry as the cheek of a child.

At this time of the solstice, the light of the full moon is, so to speak,
piercing. It seizes upon everything. It applies itself and spreads itself
over the earth with a sort of suction. One would say that the sun was thir-
sty. A shower is a glass of water; a rain is swallowed immediately. In the
morning all is streaming, in the afternoon all is dusty.

Nothing is so admirable as a verdure washed by the rain and wiped by
the sunbeam; it is warm freshness. The gardens and the meadows, having
water at their roots and sunshine in their flowers, become vases of incense,
and exhale all their perfumes at once. All these laugh, sing, and proffer
themselves. We feel sweet intoxication. Spring is a provisional paradise;
sunshine helps to make man patient.

There are people who ask nothing more; living beings who, having the
blue sky, say: "it is enough!" dreamers absorbed in marvel, drawing from
idolatry of nature an indifference to good and evil, contemplators of the
cosmos radiantly diverted from man, who do not understand how anybody can
busy himself with the hunger of these, with the thirst of those, with the
nakedness of the poor in winter, with the lymphatic curvature of a little
backbone, with the pallet, with the garret, with the dungeon, and with the
rags of shivering little girls, when he might dream under the trees; peace-
ful and terrible souls, pitilessly content. A strange thing, the infinite
is enough for them. This great need of man, the finite, which admits of
embrace, they ignore. The finite, which admits of progress, sublime toil,
they do not think of. The indefinite, which is born of the combination
human and divine, of the infinite and the finite, escapes them. Provided
they are face to face with immensity, they smile. Never joy, always ecstasy.
To lose themselves is their life. The history of humanity to them is only a
fragmentary plan; All is not there, the true All is still beyond; what is the
use of busying ourselves with this incident, man? man suffers, it is possi-
ble; but look at Aldebaran rising yonder! The mother has no milk, the new-
born dies, I know nothing about that, but look at this marvellous rosette
formed by a transverse section of the sapwood of the fir tree when exam-
ined by the microscope! compare me that with the most beautiful Mechlin
lace! These thinkers forget to love. The zodiac has such success with them
that it prevents them from seeing the weeping child. God eclipses the soul.
There is a family of such minds, at once little and great. Horace belonged
to it, Goethe belonged to it, La Fontaine perhaps; magnificent egotists of
the infinite, tranquil spectators of grief, who do not see Nero if the weather
is fine, from whom the sunshine hides the stake, who would behold the
guillotine at work, watching for an effect of light, who hear neither the cry,
nor the sob, nor the death-rattle, nor the tocsin, to whom all is well, since
there is a month of May, who, so long as there are clouds of purple and
gold above their heads, declare themselves content, and who are determined
to be happy until the light of the stars and the song of the birds are
exhausted.

They are of a dark radiance. They do not suspect that they are to be
pitied. Certainly they are. He who does not weep does not see. We should
admire and pity them, as we would pity and admire a being at once light
and darkness, with no eyes under his brows and a star in the middle of his
forehead.

In the indifference of these thinkers, according to some, lies a superior
philosophy. So be it; but in this superiority there is some infirmity.
One may be immortal and a cripple; Vulcan for instance. One may be more
than man and less than man. The immense incomplete exists in nature.
Who knows that the sun is not blind?

But then, what! in whom trust? Solem quis dicere falsum audeat? Thus
certain geniuses themselves, certain Most High mortals, star men, may
have been deceived! That which is on high, at the top, at the summit, in
the zenith, that which sends over the earth so much light, may see little,
may see badly, may see nothing! Is not that disheartening? No. But what
is there, then, above the sun? The God.

On the 6th June, 1832, towards eleven o'clock in the morning, the
Luxembourg, solitary and unpeopled, was delightful. The quincunxes and
the parterres projected themselves into the light in balms and dazzlings.
The branches, wild with the noonday brilliance, seemed seeking to
embrace each other. There was in the sycamores a chattering of linnets,
the sparrows were jubilant, the woodpeckers climbed up the horse-chestnuts,
tapping with their beaks the wrinkles in the bark. The flower beds accept-
ed the legitimate royalty of the lilies; the most august of perfumes is
that which comes from whiteness. You inhaled the spicy odour of the pinks.
The old rooks of Marie de' Medici were amorous in the great trees. The
sun gilded, empurpled, and kindled the tulips, which are nothing more nor
less than all varieties of flame made flowers. All about the tulip beds
whirled the bees, sparks from these flame-flowers. All was grace and gaiety,
even the coming rain; that old offender, by whom the honeysuckles and the
lilies of the valley would profit, produced no disquiet; the swallows flew
low, charming menace. He who was there breathed happiness; life was sweet;
all this nature exhaled candour, help, assistance, paternity, caress, dawn.
The thoughts which fell from the sky were as soft as the child's little hand
which you kiss.

The statues under the trees, bare and white, had robes of shade torn by
light; these goddesses were all tattered by the sunshine; it hung from them
in shreds on all sides. Around the great basin, the earth was already so dry
as to be almost baked. There was wind enough to raise here and there little
emeutes of sand. A few yellow leaves, relics of the last autumn, chased
one another joyously, and seemed to be playing the gamin.

The abundance of light was inexpressibly comforting. Life, sap, warmth,
odour, overflowed; you felt beneath creation the enormity of its source;
in all these breezes saturated with love, in this coming and going of re-
flections and reverberations, in this prodigious expenditure of rays, in
this indefinite outlay of fluid gold, you felt the prodigality of the in-
exhaustible; and behind this splendour, as behind a curtain of flame, you
caught a glimpse of God, the millionaire of stars.

Thanks to the sand, there was not a trace of mud; thanks to the rain,
there was not a speck of dust. The bouquets had just been washed; all the
velvets, all the satins, all the enamels, all the golds, which spring from
the earth in the form of flowers, were irreproachable. This magnificence was
tidy. The great silence of happy nature filled the garden. A celestial si-
lence compatible with a thousand melodies, cooings of nests, hummings of
swarms, palpitations of the wind. All the harmony of the season was accom-
plished in a graceful whole; the entrances and exits of spring took place in
the desired order; the lilacs ended, the jessamines began; some flowers were
belated, some insects in advance; the vanguard of the red butterflies of June
fraternised with the rearguard of the white butterflies of May. The plane-
trees were getting a new skin. The breeze scooped out waves in the mag-
nificent vastness of the horse-chestnuts. It was resplendent. A veteran
of the adjoining barracks, looking through the grating, said: "There is
spring under arms and in full dress."

All nature was breakfasting; creation was at table; it was the hour; the
great blue cloth was spread in the sky, and the great green cloth over
the earth; the sun shone a giorno. God was serving up the universal repast.
Every creature had its food or its fodder. The ringdove found hempseed,
the chaffinch found millet, the goldfinch found chickweed, the redbreast
found worms, the bee found flowers, the fly found infusoria, the grossbeak
found flies. They ate one another a little, to be sure, which is the mys-
tery of evil mingled with good; but not an animal had an empty stomach.
The two little abandoned creatures were near the great basin, and slight-
ly disturbed by all this light, they endeavoured to hide, an instinct of
the poor and feeble before magnificence, even impersonal, and they kept
behind the shelter for the swans.

Here and there, at intervals, when the wind fell, they confusedly heard
cries, a hum, a kind of tumultuous rattle, which was the musketry, and
sullen jars, which were reports of cannon. There was smoke above the roofs
in the direction of the markets. A bell, which appeared to be calling,
sounded in the distance.

These children did not seem to notice these sounds. The smaller one
repeated from time to time in an undertone: "I want something to eat."

Almost at the same time with the two children, another couple approach-
ed the great basin. This was a goodman of fifty, who was leading by the
hand a goodman of six. Doubtless a father with his son. The goodman
of six had a big bun in his hand.

At that period, certain adjoining houses, in the Rue Madame and the
Rue d'Enfer, had keys to the Luxemburg which the occupants used when
the gates were closed, a favour since suppressed. This father and this
son probably came from one of those houses.

The two poor little fellows saw "this Monsieur" coming, and hid
themselves a little more closely.

He was a bourgeois. The same, perhaps, whom one day Marius, in spite
of his love fever, had heard, near this same great basin, counselling his
son "to beware of extremes." He had an affable and lofty manner, and a
mouth which, never closing, was always smiling. This mechanical smile,
produced by too much jaw and too little skin, shows the teeth rather than
the soul. The child, with his bitten bun, which he did not finish, seemed
stuffed. The boy was dressed as a National Guard, on account of the emeute,
and the father remained in citizen's clothes for the sake of prudence.

The father and son stopped near the basin in which the two swans were
sporting. This bourgeois appeared to have a special admiration for
the swans. He resembled them in this respect, that he walked like them.
For the moment, the swans were swimming, which is their principal
talent, and they were superb.

If the two poor little fellows had listened, and had been of an age to
understand, they might have gathered up the words of a grave man. The
father said to the son:

"The sage lives content with little. Behold me, my son. I do not love
pomp. Never am I seen with coats bedizened with gold and gems; I leave
this false splendour to badly organised minds."

Here the deep sounds, which came from the direction of the markets,
broke out with a redoubling of bell and of uproar.

"What is that?" inquired the child.

The father answered:

"They are saturnalia."

Just then he noticed the two little ragged fellows standing motionless
behind the green cottage of the swans.

"There is the beginning," said he.

And after a moment, he added:

"Anarchy is entering this garden."

Meanwhile the son bit the bun, spit it out, and suddenly began to cry.

"What are you crying for?" asked the father.

"I am not hungry any more," said the child.

The father's smile grew broad.

" You don't need to be hungry, to eat a cake."

"I am sick of my cake. It is stale."

"You don't want any more of it?"

"No."

The father showed him the swans.

"Throw it to those palmipeds."

The child hesitated. Not to want any more of one's cake, is no reason
for giving it away.

The father continued.

"Be humane. We must take pity on the animals."

And, taking the cake from his son, he threw it into the basin.

The cake fell near the edge.

The swans were at a distance, in the centre of the basin, and busy with
some prey. They saw neither the bourgeois nor the bun.

The bourgeois, feeling that the cake was in danger of being lost, and
aroused by this useless shipwreck, devoted himself to a telegraphic agitation
which finally attracted the attention of the swans.

They perceived something floating, veered about like the ships they
are, and directed themselves slowly towards the bun with that serene
majesty which is fitting to white animals.

"Cygnes [swans] understand signes [signs]," said the bourgeois,
delighted at his wit.

Just then the distant tumult in the city suddenly increased again. This
time it was ominous. There are some gusts of wind that speak more dis-
tinctly than others. That which blew at that moment brought clearly the
rolls of drums, shouts, platoon firing, and the dismal replies of the tocsin
and the cannon. This was coincident with a black cloud which abruptly shut
out the sun.

The swans had not yet reached the bun.

"Come home," said the father, "they are attacking the Tuileries."

He seized his son's hand again. Then he continued:

"From the Tuileries to the Luxembourg, there is only the distance which
separates royalty from the peerage; it is not far. It is going to rain
musket-balls."

He looked at the cloud.

"And perhaps also the rain itself is going to rain; the heavens are joining
in; the younger branch is condemned. Come home, quick."

"I should like to see the swans eat the bun," said the child.

The father answered:

"That would be an imprudence."

And he led away his little bourgeois.

The son, regretting the swans, turned his head towards the basin, until
a turn in the rows of trees hid it from him.

Meanwhile, at the same time with the swans, the two little wanderers
had approached the bun. It was floating on the water. The smaller was
looking at the cake, the larger was looking at the bourgeois who was going
away.

The father and the son entered the labyrinth of walks which leads to
the grand stairway of the cluster of trees on the side towards the Rue
Madame.

As soon as they were out of sight, the elder quickly lay down with his
face over the rounded edge of the basin, and, holding by it with his left
hand, hanging over the water, almost falling in, with his right hand reached
his stick towards the cake. The swans, seeing the enemy, made haste, and in
making haste produced an effect with their breasts which was useful to the
little fisher; the water flowed back before the swans, and one of those
smooth concentric waves pushed the bun gently towards the child's stick.
As the swans came up, the stick touched the cake. The child made a quick
movement, drew in the bun, frightened the swans, seized the cake, and got
up. The cake was soaked; but they were hungry and thirsty. The eldest
broke the bun into two pieces, one large and one small, took the small one
for himself, gave the large one to his little brother, and said to him:

"Stick that in your gun."



XVII. MORTUUS PATER FILIUM MORITURUM EXPECTAT



MARIUS had sprung out of the barricade. Combeferre had followed him.
But it was too late. Gavroche was dead. Combeferre brought back the basket
of cartridges; Marius brought back the child.

"Alas!" thought he, "what the father had done for his father he was
returning to the son; only Thenardier had brought back his father living,
while he brought back the child dead."

When Marius re-entered the redoubt with Gavroche in his arms, his
face, like the child's, was covered with blood.

Just as he had stooped down to pick up Gavroche, a ball grazed his
skull; he did not perceive it.

Courfeyrac took off his cravat and bound up Marius' forehead.

They laid Gavroche on the same table with Mabeuf, and they stretched
the black shawl over the two bodies. It was large enough for the old man
and the child.

Combeferre distributed the cartridges from the basket which he had
brought back.

This gave each man fifteen shots.

Jean Valjean was still at the same place, motionless upon his block.
When Combeferre presented him his fifteen cartridges, he shook his head.
"There is a rare eccentric," said Combeferre in a low tone to Enjolras.
"He finds means not to fight in this barricade."

"Which does not prevent him from defending it," answered Enjolras.

"Heroism has its originals," replied Combeferre.

And Courfeyrac, who had overheard, added:

"He is a different kind from Father Mabeuf."

A notable fact, the fire which was battering the barricade hardly disturb-
ed the interior. Those who have never passed through the whirlwind of
this kind of war can have no idea of the singular moments of tranquillity
which are mingled with these convulsions. Men come and go, they chat,
they joke, they lounge. An acquaintance of ours heard a combatant say to
him in the midst of the grape: This is like a bachelor's breakfast. The
redoubt in the Rue de la Chanvrerie, we repeat, seemed very calm within.
Every turn and every phase of fortune had been or would soon be exhausted.
The position from critical had become threatening, and from threatening
was probably becoming desperate. In proportion as the condition of affairs
grew gloomy the heroic gleam empurpled the barricade more and more.
Enjolras, grave, commanded it, in the attitude of a young Spartan devoting
his drawn sword to the sombre genius Epidotas.

Combeferre, with apron at his waist, was dressing the wounded;

Bossuet and Feuilly were making cartridges with the flask of powder taken
by Gavroche from the dead corporal, and Bossuet said to Feuilly: We shall
soon take the diligence for another planet; Courfeyrac, upon the few paving-
stones which he had reserved for himself near Enjolras, was disposing and
arranging a whole arsenal, his sword-cane, his musket, two horse-pistols,
and a pocket pistol, with the care of a girl who is putting a little work-box
in order. Jean Valjean was looking in silence at the opposite wall. A work-
ingman was fastening on his head with a string a large straw hat belonging to
Mother Hucheloup, for fear of sun-stroke, said he. The young men of the
Cougourde d'Aix were chatting gaily with one another, as if they were in a
hurry to talk patois for the last time. Joly, who had taken down the widow
Hucheloup's mirror, was examining his tongue in it. A few combatants, having
discovered some crusts of bread, almost mouldy, in a drawer, were eating
them greedily. Marius was anxious about what his father would say to him.



XVIII. THE VULTURE BECOMES PREY



WE must dwell upon a psychological fact, peculiar to barricades. Nothing
which characterises this surprising war of the streets should be omitted.

Whatever be that strange interior tranquillity of which we have just
spoken, the barricade, for those who are within, is none the less a vision.

There is an apocalypse in civil war, all the mists of the unknown are
mingled with these savage flames, revolutions are sphinxes, and he who has
passed through a barricade, believes he has passed through a dream.

What is felt in those places, as we have indicated in reference to Marius,
and as we shall see in what follows, is more and is less than life. Once
out of the barricade, a man no longer knows what he has seen in it. He was
terrible, he does not know it. He was surrounded by combating ideas which
had human faces; he had his head in the light of the future. There were
corpses lying and phantoms standing. The hours were colossal, and seemed
hours of eternity. He lived in death. Shadows passed by. What were they?
He saw hands on which there was blood; it was an appalling uproar, it was
also a hideous silence; there were open mouths which shouted, and other
open mouths which held their peace; he was in the smoke, in the night,
perhaps. He thinks he has touched the ominous ooze of the unknown depths;
he sees something red in his nails. He remembers nothing more.

Let us return to the Rue de la Chanvrerie.

Suddenly between two discharges they heard the distant sound of a
clock striking.

"It is noon," said Combeferre.

The twelve strokes had not sounded when Enjolras sprang to his feet,
and flung down from the top of the barricade this thundering shout:

"Carry some paving-stones into the house. Fortify the windows with
them. Half the men to the muskets, the other half to the stones. Not a
minute to lose."

A platoon of sappers, their axes on their shoulders, had just appeared in
order of battle at the end of the street.

This could only be the head of a column; and of what column? The column
of attack, evidently. The sappers, whose duty it is to demolish the
barricade, must always precede the soldiers whose duty it is to scale it.
They were evidently close upon the moment which Monsieur de Clermont
Tonnerre, in 1822, called "the twist of the necklace."

Enjolras' order was executed with the correct haste peculiar to ships
and barricades, the only places of combat whence escape is impossible. In
less than a minute, two-thirds of the paving-stones which Enjolras had had
piled up at the door of Corinth were carried up to the first story and to the
garret; and before a second minute had elapsed, these stones, artistically
laid one upon another, walled up half the height of the window on the first
story and the dormer windows of the attic. A few openings, carefully
arranged by Feuilly, chief builder, allowed musket barrels to pass through.
This armament of the windows could be performed the more easily since
the grape had ceased. The two pieces were now firing balls upon the centre
of the wall, in order to make a hole, and if it were possible, a breach for the
assault.

When the paving-stones, destined for the last defence, were in position,
Enjolras had them carry up to the first story the bottles which he had
placed under the table where Mabeuf was.

"Who will drink that?" Bossuet asked him.

"They," answered Enjolras.

Then they barricaded the basement window, and they held in readiness
the iron cross-pieces which served to bar the door of the wine-shop on
the inside at night.

The fortress was complete. The barricade was the rampart, the wineshop
was the donjon.

With the paving-stones which remained, they closed up the opening
beside the barricade.

As the defenders of a barricade are always obliged to husband their
ammunition, and as the besiegers know it, the besiegers perfect their
arrangements with a sort of provoking leisure, expose themselves to fire
before the time, but in appearance more than in reality, and take their
ease. The preparations for attack are always made with a certain methodical
slowness, after which, the thunderbolt.

This slowness allowed Enjolras to look over the whole, and to perfect the
whole. He felt that since such men were to die, their death should be a
masterpiece.

He said to Marius: "We are the two chiefs; I will give the last orders
within. You stay outside and watch."

Marius posted himself for observation upon the crest of the barricade.
Enjolras had the door of the kitchen, which, we remember, was the
hospital, nailed up.

"No spattering on the wounded," said he.

He gave his last instructions in the basement-room in a quick, but deep
and calm voice; Feuilly listened, and answered in the name of all.

"First story, hold your axes ready to cut the staircase. Have you them?"

"Yes," said Feuilly.

"How many?"

"Two axes and a pole-axe."

"Very well. There are twenty-six effective men left."

"How many muskets are there?"

"Thirty-four."

"Eight too many. Keep these eight muskets loaded like the rest, and at
hand. Swords and pistols in your belts. Twenty men to the barricade. Six
in ambush at the dormer windows and at the window on the first story to
fire upon the assailants through the loopholes in the paving-stones. Let
there be no useless labourer here. Immediately, when the drum beats the
charge, let the twenty from below rush to the barricade. The first there
will get the best places."

These dispositions made, he turned towards Javert, and said to him:

"I won't forget you."

And, laying a pistol on the table, he added:

"The last man to leave this room will blow out the spy's brains!"

"Here?" inquired a voice.

"No, do not leave this corpse with ours. You can climb over the little
barricade on the Rue Mondetour. It is only four feet high. The man is well
tied. You will take him there, and execute him there."

There was one man, at that moment, who was more impassible than
Enjolras; it was Javert.

Here Jean Valjean appeared.

He was in the throng of insurgents. He stepped forward, and said to
Enjolras:

"You are the commander?"

"Yes."

"You thanked me just now."

"In the name of the republic. The barricade has two saviours, Marius
Pontmercy and you."

"Do you think that I deserve a reward?"

"Certainly."

"Well, I ask one."

"What?"

"To blow out that man's brains myself."

Javert raised his head, saw Jean Valjean, made an imperceptible movement,
and said:

"That is appropriate."

As for Enjolras, he had begun to reload his carbine; he cast his eyes
about him:

"No objection."

And turning towards Jean Valjean: "Take the spy."

Jean Valjean, in fact, took possession of Javert by sitting down on the
end of the table. He caught up the pistol, and a slight click announced that
he had cocked it.

Almost at the same moment, they heard a flourish of trumpets.

"Come on!" cried Marius, from the top of the barricade.

Javert began to laugh with that noiseless laugh which was peculiar to
him, and, looking fixedly upon the insurgents, said to them:

"Your health is hardly better than mine."

"All outside?" cried Enjolras.

The insurgents sprang forward in a tumult, and, as they went out, they
received in the back, allow us the expression, this speech from Javert:

"Farewell till immediately!"



XIX. JEAN VALJEAN TAKES HIS REVENGE



WHEN Jean Valjean was alone with Javert, he untied the rope that held the
prisoner by the middle of the body, the knot of which was under the table.
Then he motioned to him to get up.

Javert obeyed, with that undefinable smile into which the supremacy of
enchained authority is condensed.

Jean Valjean took Javert by the martingale as you would take a beast
of burden by a strap, and, drawing him after him, went out of the wine-shop
slowly, for Javert, with his legs fettered, could take only very short steps.

Jean Valjean had the pistol in his hand.

They crossed thus the interior trapezium of the barricade. The insurgents,
intent upon the imminent attack, were looking the other way.

Marius, alone, placed towards the left extremity of the wall, saw them
pass. This group of the victim and the executioner borrowed a light from
the sepulchral gleam which he had in his soul.

Jean Valjean, with some difficulty, bound as Javert was, but without
letting go of him for a single instant, made him scale the little intrenchment
on the Rue Mondetour.

When they had climbed over this wall, they found themselves alone
in the little street. Nobody saw them now. The corner of the house hid
them from insurgents. The corpses carried out from the barricades made a
terrible mound a few steps off.

They distinguished in a heap of dead, a livid face, a flowing head of
hair, a wounded hand, and a woman's breast half naked. It was Eponine.

Javert looked aside at this dead body, and, perfectly calm, said in an
undertone:

"It seems to me that I know that girl."

Then he turned towards Jean Valjean.

Jean Valjean put the pistol under his arm, and fixed upon Javert a look
which had no need of words to say: "Javert, it is I."

Javert answered.

"Take your revenge."

Jean Valjean took a knife out of his pocket, and opened it

"A surin!" exclaimed Javert. "You are right. That suits you better."

Jean Valjean cut the martingale which Javert had about his neck, then
he cut the ropes which he had on his wrists, then, stooping down, he cut
the cord which he had on his feet; and, rising, he said to him:

"You are free."

Javert was not easily astonished. Still, complete master as he was of
himself, he could not escape an emotion. He stood aghast and motionless.
Jean Valjean continued:

"I don't expect to leave this place. Still, if by chance I should, I live,
under the name of Fauchelevent, in the Rue de l'Homme Arme, Number Seven."

Javert had the scowl of a tiger half opening the corner of his mouth,
and he muttered between his teeth:

"Take care."

"Go," said Jean Valjean.

Javert resumed:

"You said Fauchelevent, Rue de l'Homme Arme?"

"Number Seven."

Javert repeated in an undertone: "Number seven." He buttoned his
coat, restored the military stiffness between his shoulders, turned half
round, folded his arms, supporting his chin with one hand, and walked off
in the direction of the markets. Jean Valjean followed him with his eyes.
After a few steps, Javert turned back, and cried to Jean Valjean:

"You annoy me. Kill me rather."

Javert did not notice that his tone was more respectful towards Jean
Valjean.

"Go away," said Jean Valjean.

Javert receded with slow steps. A moment afterwards, he turned the
corner of the Rue des Precheurs.

When Javert was gone, Jean Valjean fired the pistol in the air.

Then he re-entered the barricade and said: "It is done."

Meanwhile what had taken place is this:

Marius, busy rather with the street than the wine-shop, had not until
then looked attentively at the spy who was bound in the dusky rear of the
basement-room.

When he saw him in broad day clambering over the barricade on his way
to die, he recognised him. A sudden reminiscence came into his mind.
He remembered the inspector of the Rue de Pontoise, and the two pistols
which he had handed him and which he had used, he, Marius, in this very
barricade; and not only did he recollect the face, but he recalled the name.
This reminiscence, however, was misty and indistinct, like all his ideas.
It was not an affirmation which he made to himself, it was a question which
he put: "Is not this that inspector of police who told me his name was
Javert?"

Perhaps there was still time to interfere for this man? But he must first
know if it were indeed that Javert.

Marius called to Enjolras, who had just taken his place at the other end
of the barricade.

"Enjolras!"

"What?"

"What is that man's name?"

"Who?"

"The police officer. Do you know his name?"

"Of course. He told us."

"What is his name?"

"Javert."

Marius sprang up.

At that moment they heard the pistol-shot.

Jean Valjean reappeared and cried: "It is done."

A dreary chill passed through the heart of Marius.



XX. THE DEAD ARE RIGHT AND THE LIVING ARE NOT WRONG



THE DEATH-AGONY of the barricade was approaching.

All things concurred in the tragic majesty of this supreme moment; a
thousand mysterious disturbances in the air, the breath of armed masses
set in motion in streets which they could not see, the intermittent gallop
of cavalry, the heavy concussion of artillery on the march, the platoon
firing and the cannonades crossing each other in the labyrinth of Paris, the
smoke of the battle rising all golden above the roofs, mysterious cries,
distant, vaguely terrible flashes of menace everywhere, the tocsin of Saint
Merry which now had the sound of a sob, the softness of the season, the
splendour of the sky full of sunshine and of clouds, the beauty of the day,
and the appalling silence of the houses.

For, since evening, the two rows of houses in the Rue de la Chanvrerie
had become two walls; savage walls. Doors closed, windows closed, shutters
closed.

In those days, so different from these in which we live, when the hour
had come in which the people wished to make an end of a state of affairs
which had lasted too long, of a granted charter or of a constitutional
country, when the universal anger was diffused in the atmosphere, when the
city consented to the upheaval of its pavements, when insurrection made the
bourgeoisie smile by whispering its watchword in its ear, then the inhabitant
filled with emeute, so to speak, was the auxiliary of the combatant, and
the house fraternised with the impromptu fortress which leaned upon it.
When the condition of affairs was not ripe, when the insurrection was not
decidedly acceptable, when the mass disavowed the movement, it was all
over with the combatants, the city changed into a desert about the revolt,
souls were chilled, asylums were walled up, and the street became a defile
to aid the army in taking the barricade.

A people cannot be surprised into a more rapid progress than it wills.
Woe to him who attempts to force its hand! A people does not allow itself
to be used. Then it abandons the insurrection to itself. The insurgents
become pestiferous. A house is an escarpment, a door is a refusal, a fac-
ade is a wall. This wall sees, hears, and will not. It might open and save
you. No. This wall is a judge. It looks upon you and condemns you. How gloomy
are these closed houses! They seem dead, they are living. Life, which is as
it were suspended in them, still exists. Nobody has come out of them for
twenty-four hours, but nobody is missing. In the interior of this rock, peo-
ple go and come, they lie down, they get up; they are at home there; they
drink and eat; they are afraid there, a fearful thing! Fear excuses this ter-
rible inhospitality; it tempers it with timidity, a mitigating circumstance.
Sometimes even, and this has been seen, fear becomes passion; fright may
change into fury, as prudence into rage; hence this saying so profound: The
madmen of moderation. There are flamings of supreme dismay from which
rage springs like a dismal smoke. "What do these people want? They are
never contented. They compromise peaceable men as if we had not had revo-
lution enough like this! What do they come here for? Let them get out
of it themselves. So much the worse for them. It is their own fault. They
have only got what they deserve. It doesn't concern us. Here is our poor
street riddled with balls. They are a parcel of scamps. Above all, don't
open the door." And the house puts on the semblance of a tomb. The insur-
gent before that door is in his last agony; he sees the grape and the drawn
sabres coming; if he calls, he knows that they hear him, but that they will
not come; there are walls which might protect him, there are men who might
save him; and those walls have ears of flesh, and those men have bowels of
stone.

Whom shall he accuse?

Nobody, and everybody.

The imperfect age in which we live.

It is always at her own risk and peril that Utopia transforms herself into
insurrection, and from a philosophic protest becomes an armed protest, from
Minerva, Pallas. The Utopia which grows impatient and becomes emeute knows
what awaits her; almost always she is too soon. Then she resigns herself,
and stoically accepts, instead of triumph, catastrophe. She serves, without
complaining, and exonerating them even, those who deny her, and it is her
magnanimity to consent to abandonment. She is indomitable against hindrance
and gentle towards ingratitude.

But is it ingratitude?

Yes, from the point of view of the race.

No, from the point of view of the individual.

Progress is the mode of man. The general life of the human race is called
Progress; the collective advance of the human race is called Progress.
Progress marches; it makes the great human and terrestrial journey towards
the celestial and the divine; it has its halts where it rallies the belated
flock; it has its stations where it meditates, in sight of some splendid Canaan
suddenly unveiling its horizon; it has its nights when it sleeps; and it is
one of the bitter anxieties of the thinker to see the shadow upon the human
soul, and to feel in the darkness progress asleep, without being able to waken
it.

"God is dead perhaps," said Gerard de Nerval one day, to him who writes these
lines, confounding progress with God, and mistaking the interruption of the
movement for the death of the Being.

He who despairs is wrong. Progress infallibly awakens, and, in short,
we might say that it advances even in sleep, for it has grown. When we see
it standing again, we find it taller. To be always peaceful belongs to
progress no more than to the river; raise no obstruction, cast in no rock; the
obstacle makes water foam and humanity seethe. Hence troubles; but after
these troubles, we recognise that there has been some ground gained. Until
order, which is nothing more nor less than universal peace, be established,
until harmony and unity reign, progress will have revolutions for stations.

What then is progress? We have just said. The permanent life of the
peoples.

Now, it sometimes happens that the momentary life of individuals
offers resistance to the eternal life of the human race.

Let us acknowledge it without bitterness, the individual has his distinct
interest, and may without offence set up that interest and defend it: the
present has its excusable quantum of selfishness; the life of the moment
has its rights, and is not bound to sacrifice itself continually to the fu-
ture. The generation which has now its turn of passing over the earth is not
compelled to abridge it for the generations, its equals, after all, which are
to have their turn afterwards. "I exist," murmurs that somebody whose name
is All. "I am young and I am in love, I am old and I want to rest, I am the
father of a family, I am working, I am prospering, I am doing a good business,
I have houses to rent, I have money in the government, I am happy. I
have a wife and children, I love all this, I desire to live, let me alone."
Hence, at certain periods, a deep chill upon the magnanimous vanguard of
the human race.

Utopia, moreover, we must admit, departs from its radiant sphere in making
war. The truth of to-morrow, she borrows her process, battle, from the lie
of yesterday. She, the future, acts like the past. She, the pure idea,
becomes an act of force. She compromises her heroism by a violence for
which it is just that she should answer; a violence of opportunity and of
expediency, contrary to principles, and for which she is fatally punished.
Utopia insurrection fights, the old military code in her hand; she shoots
spies, she executes traitors, she suppresses living beings and casts them
into the unknown dark. She uses death, a solemn thing. It seems as though
Utopia had lost faith in the radiation of light, her irresistible and in-
corruptible strength. She strikes with the sword. Now, no sword is simple.
Every blade has two edges; he who wounds with one wounds himself with
the other.

This reservation made, and made in all severity, it is impossible for us
not to admire, whether they succeed or not, the glorious combatants of the
future, the professors of Utopia. Even when they fail, they are venerable,
and it is perhaps in failure that they have the greater majesty. Victory,
when it is according to progress, deserves the applause of the peoples; but
a heroic defeat deserves their compassion. One is magnificent, the other
is sublime. For ourselves, who prefer martyrdom to success, John Brown is
greater than Washington, and Pisacane is greater than Garibaldi.

Surely some must be on the side of the vanquished.

Men are unjust towards these great essayists of the future when they
fail.

The revolutionists are accused of striking terror. Every barricade seems
an outrage. Their theories are incriminated, their aim is suspected, their
afterthought is dreaded, their conscience is denounced. They are reproach-
ed with raising, building, and heaping up against the reigning social state
a mound of miseries, of sorrows, of iniquities, of griefs, of despairs,
and with tearing up blocks of darkness from the lower depths with which to
entrench themselves and to fight. Men cry to them: "You are unpaving hell!"
They might answer: "That is why our barricade is made of good intentions."

The best, certainly, is the peaceable solution. On the whole, let us admit,
when we see the pavement, we think of the bear, and his is a willingness
about which society is not at ease. But the salvation of society depends
upon itself; to its own willingness we appeal. No violent remedy is neces-
sary. Study evil lovingly, determine it, then cure it. To that we urge.

However this may be, even when fallen, especially when fallen, august are
they who, upon all points of the world, with eyes fixed on France, struggle
for the great work with the inflexible logic of the ideal; they give their
life a pure gift for progress; they accomplish the will of Providence; they
perform a religious act. At the appointed hour, with as much disinterested-
ness as an actor who reaches his cue, obedient to the divine scenario, they
enter into the tomb. And this hopeless combat, and this stoical disappear-
ance, they accept to lead to its splendid and supreme universal consequences
the magnificent movement of man, irresistibly commenced on the 14th of July,
1789; these soldiers are priests. The French Revolution is an act of God.

Still, there are, and it is proper to add this distinction to the distinct-
ions already indicated in another chapter, there are accepted insurrections
which are called revolutions; there are rejected revolutions which are called
emeutes. An insurrection breaking out is an idea passing its examination
before the people. If the people drops its black ball, the idea is withered
fruit; the insurrection is an affray.

To go to war upon every summons and whenever Utopia desires it, is not the
part of the peoples. The nations have not always and at every hour the tem-
perament of heroes and of martyrs.

They are positive. A priori, insurrection repels them; first, because it
often results in disaster, secondly, because it always has an abstraction for
its point of departure.

For, and this is beautiful, it is always for the ideal, and for the ideal
alone, that those devote themselves who do devote themselves. An insurrection
is an enthusiasm. Enthusiasm may work itself into anger; hence the resort
to arms. But every insurrection which is directed against a government
or a regime aims still higher. Thus, for instance, let us repeat what the
chiefs of the insurrection of 1832, and in particular the young enthusiasts
of the Rue de la Chanvrerie, fought against, was not exactly Louis Philippe.
Most of them, speaking frankly, rendered justice to the qualities of this
king, midway between the monarchy and the revolution; none hated him.
But they attacked the younger branch of divine right in Louis Philippe as
they had attacked the elder branch in Charles X.; and what they desired to
overthrow in overthrowing royalty in France as we have explained, was the
usurpation of man over man, and of privilege over right, in the whole
world. Paris without a king has, as a consequence, the world without
despots. They reasoned in this way. Their aim was distant doubtless, vague
perhaps, and receding before effort, but great.

Thus it is. And men sacrifice themselves for these visions, which, to the
sacrificed, are illusions almost always, but illusions with which, upon
the whole, all human certainty is mingled. The insurgent poetises and gilds
the insurrection. He throws himself into these tragic things, intoxicated
with what he is going to do. Who knows? they will succeed perhaps. They
are but few; they have against them a whole army; but they defend right,
natural law, that sovereignty of each over himself, of which there is no
abdication possible, justice, truth, and in case of need they die like the
three hundred Spartans. They think not of Don Quixote, but of Leonidas.
And they go forward, and, once engaged, they do not recoil, and they hurl
themselves headlong, hoping for unparalleled victory, revolution completed,
progress set at liberty, the aggrandisement of the human race, universal
deliverance; and seeing at the worst a Thermopyla.

These passages at arms for progress often fail; why, we have just told.
The throng is restive under the sway of the paladins. The heavy masses,
the multitudes, fragile on account of their very weight, dread uncertainties;
and there is uncertainty in the ideal.

Moreover, let it not be forgotten, interests are there, little friendly
to the ideal and the emotional. Sometimes the stomach paralyses the heart.
The grandeur and the beauty of France are that she cares less for the
belly than other peoples; she knots the rope about her loins more easily.
She is first awake, last asleep. She goes in advance. She is a pioneer.
That is because she is an artist.

The ideal is nothing more nor less than the culminating point of logic,
even as the beautiful is nothing more nor less than the summit of the true.
The artist people is thus the consistent people. To love beauty is to see
light. This is why the torch of Europe, that is to say, civilisation, was first
borne by Greece, who passed it to Italy, who passed it to France. Divine
pioneer peoples! Vitai lampada tradunt!

An admirable thing, the poetry of a people is the element of its progress.
The amount of civilisation is measured by the amount of imagination. Only
a civilising people must remain a manly people. Corinth, yes; Sybaris, no.
He who becomes effeminate becomes corrupt. We must be neither dilettanti
nor virtuosi; but we must be artists. In the matter of civilisation, we
must not refine, but we must sublime. On this condition, we give the human
race the pattern of the ideal.

The modern ideal has its type in art, and its means in science. It is
through science that we shall realise that august vision of the poets: soc-
ial beauty. We shall reproduce Eden by A+B. At the point which civilisation
has reached, the exact is a necessary element of the splendid, and the art-
istic sentiment is not merely served, but completed by the scientific organ;
dream must calculate. Art, which is the conqueror, must have its fulcrum in
science, which is the mover. The solidity of the mounting is important.
The modern spirit is the genius of Greece with the genius of India for its
vehicle; Alexander upon the elephant.

Races petrified in dogma or demoralised by lucre are unfit to lead civil-
isation. Genuflexion before the idol or the dollar atrophies the muscle
which walks and the will which goes. Hieratic or mercantile absorption
diminishes the radiance of a people, lowers its horizon by lowering its level,
and deprives it of that intelligence of the universal aim, at the same time
human and divine, which makes the missionary nations. Babylon has no
ideal. Carthage has no ideal. Athens and Rome have and preserve, even
through all the thick night of centuries, haloes of civilisation.

France is of the same quality of people as Greece and Italy. She is
Athenian by the beautiful, and Roman by the great. In addition she is good.
She gives herself. She is oftener than other peoples in the spirit of devotion
and sacrifice. Only this spirit takes her and leaves her. And here lies the
great peril for those who run when she wishes to walk, or who walk when
she wishes to stop. France has her relapses of materialism, and, at certain
moments, the ideas which obstruct that sublime brain lose all that recalls
French greatness, and are of the dimensions of a Missouri or of a South
Carolina. What is to be done? The giantess is playing the dwarf; immense
France has her childish whims. That is all.

To this nothing can be said. A people, like a star, has the right of eclipse.
And all is well, provided the light return and the eclipse do not degenerate
into night. Dawn and resurrection are synonyms. The reappearance of the
light is identical with the persistence of the Me.

Let us lay down these things with calmness. Death on the barricade, or
a grave in exile, is an acceptable alternative for devotion. The true name of
devotion is disinterestedness. Let the abandoned submit to abandonment,
let the exile submit to exile, and let us content ourselves with imploring the
great peoples not to recede too far, when they do recede. They must not,
under pretext of a return to reason, go too far in the descent.

Matter is, the moment is, interest is, the belly is; but the belly must
not be the only wisdom. The momentary life has its rights, we admit, but
the permanent life has its also. Alas! to have risen does not prevent falling.
We see this in history oftener than we would wish. A nation is illustrious;
it tastes the ideal; then it bites the filth, and finds it good; and if we ask why
it abandons Socrates for Falstaff, it answers: "Because I love statesmen."

A word more before returning to the conflict.

A battle like this which we are now describing is nothing but a convulsive
movement towards the ideal. Enfettered progress is sickly, and it has
these tragic epilepsies. This disease of progress, civil war, we have had to
encounter upon our passage. It is one of the fatal phases, at once act and
interlude, of this drama, the pivot of which is a social outcast, and the true
title of which is: Progress.

Progress!

This cry which we often raise, is our whole thought; and, at the present
point of this drama, the idea that it contains having still more than one
ordeal to undergo, it is permitted us perhaps, if not to lift the veil from
it, at least to let the light shine clearly through.

The book which the reader has now before his eyes is, from one end to the
other, in its whole and in its details, whatever may be the intermissions,
the exceptions, or the defaults, the march from evil to good, from injustice
to justice, from the false to the true, from night to day, from appetite to
conscience, from rottenness to life, from brutality to duty, from Hell to
Heaven, from nothingness to God. Starting point: matter; goal: the soul.
hydra at the begining, angel at the end.



XXI. THE HEROES



SUDDENLY the drum beat the charge.

The attack was a hurricane. In the evening, in the obscurity, the barri-
cade had been approached silently as if by a boa. Now, in broad day, in
this open street, surprise was entirely impossible; the strong hand, more-
over, was unmasked, the cannon had commenced the roar, the army rushed
upon the barricade. Fury was now skill. A powerful column of infantry of
the line, intersected at equal intervals by National Guards and Municipal
Guards on foot, and supported by deep masses heard but unseen, turned
into the street at a quick step, drums beating, trumpets sounding, bayonets
fixed, sappers at their head, and, unswerving under the projectiles, came
straight upon the barricade with the weight of a bronze column upon a
wall.

The wall held well.

The insurgents fired impetuously. The barricade scaled was like a mane
of flashes. The assault was so sudden that for a moment it was overflowed
by assailants; but it shook off the soldiers as the lion does the dogs,
and it was covered with besiegers only as a cliff is with foam, to reap-
pear, a moment afterwards, steep, black, and formidable.

The column, compelled to fall back, remained massed in the street,
unsheltered, but terrible, and replied to the redoubt by a fearful fulisade.
Whoever has seen fireworks remembers that sheaf made by a crossing of
flashes which is called the bouquet. Imagine the bouquet, not now vertical,
but horizontal, bearing a ball, a buckshot, or a bullet, at the point of
each of its jets of fire, and scattering death in its clusters of thunder. The
barricade was beneath it.

On both sides equal resolution. Bravery there was almost barbaric, and
was mingled with a sort of heroic ferocity which began with the sacrifice
of itself. Those were the days when a National Guard fought like a Zouave.
The troops desired to make an end of it; the insurrection desired to struggle.
The acceptance of death in full youth and in full health makes a frenzy
of intrepidity. Every man in this melee felt the aggrandisement given by
the supreme hour. The street was covered with dead.

Enjolras was at one end of the barricade, and Marius at the other.

Enjolras, who carried the whole barricade in his head, reserved and shel-
tered himself; three soldiers fell one after the other under his battlement,
without even having perceived him; Marius fought without shelter. He
took no aim. He stood with more than half his body above the summit of
the redoubt. There is no wilder prodigal than a miser who takes the bit in
his teeth; there is no man more fearful in action than a dreamer. Marius
was terrible and pensive. He was in the battle as in a dream. One would
have said a phantom firing a musket.

The cartridges of the besieged were becoming exhausted, not so their
sarcasms. In this whirlwind of the sepulchre in which they were, they
laughed.

Courfeyrac was bareheaded.

"What have you done with your hat?" inquired Bossuet.

Courfeyrac answered:

"They have knocked it off at last by their cannonade."

Or indeed they said haughty things.

"Does anybody understand these men," exclaimed Feuilly bitterly (and
he cited the names, well-known names, famous even, some of the old
army), "who promised to join us, and took an oath to help us, and who were
bound to it in honour, and who are our generals and who abandon us!"

And Combeferre simply answered with a grave smile:

"There are people who observe the rules of honour as we observe the
stars, from afar off."

The interior of the barricade was so strewn with torn cartridges that
one would have said it had been snowing.

The assailants had the numbers; the insurgents the position. They
were on the top of a wall, and they shot down the soldiers at the muzzles
of their muskets, as they stumbled over the dead and wounded and became
entangled in the escarpment. This barricade, built as it was, and admirably
supported, was really one of those positions in which a handful of men hold
a legion in check. Still, constantly reinforced and increasing under the
shower of balls, the attacking column inexorably approached, and now, little
by little, step by step, but with certainty, the army hugged the barricade
as the screw hugs the wine press.

There was assault after assault. The horror continued to increase.

Then resounded over this pile of paving-stones, in this Rue de la Chanv-
rerie, a struggle worthy of the walls of Troy. These men, wan, tattered,
and exhausted, who had not eaten for twenty-four hours, who had
not slept, who had but a few more shots to fire, who felt their pockets
empty of cartridges, nearly all wounded, their heads or arms bound with a
smutty and blackened cloth, with holes in their coats whence the blood was
flowing, scarcely armed with worthless muskets and with old hacked
swords, became Titans. The barricade was ten times approached, assaulted,
scaled, and never taken.

To form an idea of this struggle, imagine fire applied to a mass of terr-
ible valour, and that you are witnessing the conflagration. It was not a
combat, it was the interior of a furnace; there mouths breathed flame; there
faces were wonderful. There the human form seemed impossible, the combat-
ants flashed flames, and it was terrible to see going and coming in that
lurid smoke these salamanders of the fray. The successive and simultaneous
scenes of this grand slaughter, we decline to paint. The epic alone has a
right to fill twelve thousand lines with one battle.

One would have said it was that hell of Brahminism, the most formidable
of the seventeen abysses, which the Veda calls the Forest of Swords.

They fought breast to breast, foot to foot, with pistols, with sabres,
with fists, at a distance, close at hand, from above, from below, from
everywhere, from the roofs of the house, from the windows of the wine-shop,
from the gratings of the cellars into which some had slipped. They were
one against sixty. The facade of Corinth, half demolished, was hideous.
The window, riddled with grape, had lost glass and sash, and was now
nothing but a shapeless hole, confusedly blocked with paving-stones.
Bossuet was killed; Feuilly was killed; Courfeyrac was killed; Joly was killed;
Combeferre, pierced by three bayonet-thrusts in the breast, just as he was
lifting a wounded soldier, had only time to look to heaven, and expired.

Marius, still fighting, was so hacked with wounds, particularly about
his head, that the countenance was lost in blood, and you would have said
that he had his face covered with a red handkerchief.

Enjolras alone was untouched. When his weapon failed, he reached his
hand to right or left, and an insurgent put whatever weapon he could in his
grasp. Of four swords, one more than Francis I. at Marignan, he now had
but one stump remaining.

Homer says: "Diomed slays Axylus, son of Teuthras, who dwelt, in
happy Arisbe; Euryalus, son of Mecisteus, exterminates Dresos and Opheltios,
Aesepus, and that Pedasus whom the Naiad Abarbarea conceived by
the irreproachable Bucolion; Ulysses overthrows Pidutes of Percote;
Antilochus, Ablerus; Polypates, Astyalus; Polydamas, Otus of Cyllene; and
Teucer, Aretaon, Meganthis dies beneath the spear of Euripylus. Agamemnon,
King of heroes, prostrates Elatus born in the lofty city which the
sounding Satnio laves." In our old poems of exploits, Esplandian attacks the
giant Marquis Swantibore with a two-edged flame, while he defends himself
by stoning the knight with the towers which he tears up. Our ancient mural
frescoes show us the two dukes of Brittany and of Bourbon, armed, mailed,
and crested for war, on horseback, and meeting each other, battle-axe in
hand, masked with iron, booted with iron, gloved with iron, one
caparisoned with ermine, the other draped with azure; Brittany with his lion
between the two horns of his crown, Bourbon with a monstrous fleur de lys
on the vizor of his casque. But to be superb, it is not necessary to bear, like
Yvon, the ducal morion, to handle, like Esplandian, a living flame, or like
Phyles, father of Polydamas, to have brought from Ephyra a fine armour,
a present from the king of men Euphetes; it is enough to give life for a conviction
or for a loyalty. That little artless soldier, yesterday a peasant of
Beauce or Limousin, who prowls, cabbage-knife at his side, about the children's
nurses in the Luxembourg, that pale young student bending over a
piece of anatomy or a book, a fair-haired youth who trims his beard with
scissors, take them both, breathe upon them a breath of duty, place them
opposite each other in the Boucherat square or in the Cul-de-sac Blanche
Mibray, and let the one fight for his flag, and the other for his ideal, and
let them both imagine that they are fighting for the country; the strife will
be colossal; and the shadow which will be thrown upon that great epic field
where humanity is struggling, by his blue-coat and this saw-bones in quarrel,
will equal the shadow which is cast by Megaryon, King of Lycia, full of
tigers, wrestling body to body with the immense Ajax, equal of the gods.



XXII. FOOT TO FOOT



WHEN there were none of the chiefs alive save Enjolras and Marius, who
were at the extremities of the barricade, the centre, which Courfeyrac,
Joly, Bossuet, Feuilly, and Combeferre had so long sustained, gave way.
The artillery, without making a practicable breach, had deeply indented the
centre of the redoubt; there, the summit of the wall had disappeared under
the balls, and had tumbled down; and the rubbish which had fallen, sometimes
on the interior, sometimes on the exterior, had finally made, as it was
heaped up, on either side of the wall, a kind of talus, both on the inside,
and on the outside. The exterior talus offered an inclined plane for attack.

A final assault was now attempted, and this assault succeeded. The mass
bristling with bayonets and hurled at a double-quick step, came on irres-
istible, and the dense battle-front of the attacking column appeared in
the smoke at the top of the escarpment. This time, it was finished. The
group of insurgents who defended the centre fell back pell-mell.

Then grim love of life was roused in some. Covered by the aim of that
forest of muskets, several were now unwilling to die. This is a moment
when the instinct of self-preservation raises a howl, and the animal re-
appears in the man. They were pushed back to the high six-story house which
formed the rear of the redoubt. This house might be safety. This house was
barricaded, and, as it were, walled in from top to bottom. Before the troops
of the line would be in the interior of the redoubt, there was time for a door
to open and shut, a flash was enough for that, and the door of this house,
suddenly half opened and closed again immediately, to these despairing
men was life. In the rear of this house, there were streets, possible flight,
space. They began to strike this door with the butts of their muskets, and
with kicks, calling, shouting, begging, wringing their hands. Nobody
opened. From the window on the third story, the death's head looked at
them.

But Enjolras and Marius, with seven or eight who had been rallied about
them, sprang forward and protected them. Enjolras cried to the soldiers:
"Keep back!" and an officer not obeying, Enjolras killed the officer. He
was now in the little interior court of the redoubt, with his back to the
house of Corinth, his sword in one hand, his carbine in the other, keeping
the door of the wine-shop open while he barred it against the assailants.
He cried to the despairing: "There is but one door open. This one." And,
covering them with his body, alone facing a battalion, he made them pass in
behind him. All rushed in, Enjolras executing with his carbine, which he
now used as a cane, what cudgel-players call la rose couverte beat down the
bayonets about him and before him, and entered last of all; and for an
instant it was horrible, the soldiers struggling to get in, the insurgents
to close the door. The door was closed with such violence that, in shutting
into its frame, it exposed, cut off, and adhering to the casement, the thumb
and fingers of a soldier who had caught hold of it.

Marius remained without. A ball had broken his shoulder-blade; he felt that
he was fainting, and that he was falling. At that moment his eyes already
closed, he experienced the shock of a vigorous hand seizing him, and his
fainting fit, in which he lost consciousness, left him hardly time for
this thought, mingled with the last memory of Cosette: "I am taken pris-
oner. I shall be shot."

Enjolras, not seeing Marius among those who had taken refuge in the wine-
shop, had the same idea. But they had reached that moment when each has
only time to think of his own death. Enjolras fixed the bar of the door
and bolted it, and fastened it with a double turn of lock and padlock,
while they were beating furiously on the outside, the soldiers with the
butts of their muskets, the sappers with their axes. The assailants were
massed upon this door. The siege of the wine-shop was now beginning.

The soldiers, we must say, were greatly irritated.

The death of the sergeant of artillery had angered them; and then, a more
deadly thing, during the few hours which preceded the attack, it had been
told among them that the insurgents mutilated prisoners, and that there
was in the wine-shop the body of a soldier headless. This sort of unfortu-
nate rumour is the ordinary accompaniment of civil wars, and it was a false
report of this kind which, at a later day, caused the catastrophe of the
Rue Transnonain.

When the door was barricaded, Enjolras said to the rest:

"Let us sell ourselves dearly."

Then he approached the table upon which Mabeuf and Gavroche were ex-
tended. Two straight and rigid forms could be seen under the black cloth,
one large, the other small, and the two faces were vaguely outlined beneath
the stiff folds of the shroud. A hand projected from below the pall, and hung
towards the floor. It was the old man's.

Enjolras bent down and kissed that venerable hand, as in the evening he
had kissed the forehead.

They were the only kisses which he had given in his life.

We must be brief. The barricade had struggled like a gate of Thebes;
the wine-shop struggled like a house of Saragossa. Such resistances are
dogged. No quarter. No parley possible. They are willing to die provided
they kill. When Suchet says: "Capitulate," Palafox answers: "After the war
with cannon, war with the knife." Nothing was wanting to the storming of
the Hucheloup wine-shop: neither the paving-stones raining from the window
and the roof upon the besiegers, and exasperating the soldiers by their
horrible mangling, nor the shots from the cellars and the garret windows,
nor fury of attack, nor rage of defence; nor, finally, when the door yielded,
the frenzied madness of the extermination. The assailants, on rushing into
the wine-shop, their feet entangled in the panels of the door, which were
beaten in and scattered over the floor, found no combatant there. The spiral
stairway, which had been cut down with the axe, lay in the middle of the
basement room, a few wounded had just expired, all who were not killed were
in the first story, and there, through the hole in the ceiling, which had
been the entrance for the stairway, a terrific firing broke out. It was
the last of the cartridges. When they were gone, when these terrible
men in their death-agony had no longer either powder or ball, each took
two of those bottles reserved by Enjolras, of which we have spoken, and
they defended the ascent with these frightfully fragile clubs. They were
bottles of aquafortis. We describe these gloomy facts of the carnage as
they are. The besieged, alas, make a weapon of everything. Greek fire did
not dishonour Archimedes, boiling pitch did not dishonour Bayard. All war
is appalling, and there is nothing to choose in it. The fire of the be-
siegers, although difficult and from below upwards, was murderous. The edge
of the hole in the ceiling was very soon surrounded with the heads of the
dead, from which flowed long red and reeking lines. The uproar was inex-
pressible; a stifled and burning smoke made night almost over this combat.
Words fail to express horror when it reaches this degree. There were men
no longer in this now infernal conflict. They were no longer giants against
colossi. It resembled Milton and Dante rather than Homer. Demons attacked,
spectres resisted.

It was the heroism of monsters.



XXIII. ORESTES FASTING AND PYLADES DRUNK



AT LAST, mounting on each other's shoulders, helping themselves by the skel-
eton of the staircase, climbing up the walls, hanging to the ceiling, cutting
to pieces, at the very edge of the hatchway, the last to resist, some twenty
of the besiegers, soldiers, National Guards, Municipal Guards, pellmelt, most
disfigured by wounds in the face of this terrible ascent, blinded with blood,
furious, become savages, made an irruption into the room of the first story.
There was now but a single man there on his feet, Enjolras. Without cart-
ridges, without a sword, he had now in his hand only the barrel of his car-
bine, the stock of which he had broken over the heads of those who were en-
tering. He had put the billiard table between the assailants and himself;
he had retreated to the corner of the room, and there, with proud eye,
haughty head, and that stump of a weapon in his grasp, he was still so
formidable that a large space was left about him. A cry arose:

"This is the chief. It is he who killed the artilleryman. As he has put
himself there, it is a good place. Let him stay. Let us shoot him on the
spot."

"Shoot me," said Enjolras.

And, throwing away the stump of his carbine, and folding his arms, he
presented his breast.

The boldness that dies well always moves men. As soon as Enjolras had
folded his arms, accepting the end, the uproar of the conflict ceased in
the room, and that chaos suddenly hushed into a sort of sepulchral solem-
nity. It seemed as if the menacing majesty of Enjolras, disarmed and mot-
ionless, weighed upon that tumult, and as if, merely by the authority of
his tranquil eye, this young man, who alone had no wound, superb, bloody,
fascinating, indifferent as if he were invulnerable, compelled that sinis-
ter mob to kill him respectfully. His beauty, at that moment, augmented by
his dignity, was a resplendence, and, as if he could no more be fatigued
than wounded, after the terrible twenty-four hours which had just elapsed,
he was fresh and rosy. It was of him perhaps that the witness spoke who
said afterwards before the court-martial: "There was one insurgent whom
I heard called Apollo." A National Guard who was aiming at Enjolras,
dropped his weapon, saying: "It seems to me that I am shooting a flower."

Twelve men formed in platoon in the corner opposite Enjolras and
made their muskets ready in silence.

Then a sergeant cried: "Take aim!"

An officer intervened.

"Wait."

And addressing Enjolras:

"Do you wish your eyes bandaged?"

"No."

"Was it really you who killed the sergeant of artillery?"

"Yes."

Within a few seconds Grantaire had awakened.

Grantaire, it will be remembered, had been asleep since the day previous
in the upper room of the wine-shop sitting in a chair, leaning heavily
forward on a table.

He realised, in all its energy, strength, the old metaphor: dead drunk. The
hideous potion, the absinthe-stout-alcohol, had thrown him into a lethargy.
His table being small, and of no use in the barricade, they had left it to
him. He had continued in the same posture, his breast doubled over the ta-
ble, his head lying flat upon his arms, surrounded by glasses, jugs, and
bottles. He slept with that crushing sleep of the torpid bear and the over-
fed leech. Nothing had affected him, neither the musketry, nor the balls,
nor the grape which penetrated through the casement into the room in which
he was. Nor the prodigious uproar of the assault. Only, he responded
sometimes to the cannon with a snore. He seemed waiting there for a ball
to come and save him the trouble of awaking. Several corpses lay about
him; and, at the first glance, nothing distinguished him from those deep
sleepers of death.

Noise does not waken a drunkard; silence wakens him. This peculiarity
has been observed more than once. The fall of everything about him
augmented Grantaire's oblivion; destruction was a lullaby to him. The kind
of halt in the tumult before Enjolras was a shock to his heavy sleep. It was
the effect of a waggon at a gallop stopping short. The sleepers are roused
by it. Grantaire rose up with a start, stretched his arms, rubbed his eyes,
looked, gaped, and understood.

Drunkenness ending is like a curtain torn away. We see altogether, and
at a single glance, all that is concealed. Everything is suddenly presented
to the memory; and the drunkard who knows nothing of what has taken
place for twenty-four hours, has no sooner opened his eyes than he is aware
of all that has passed. His ideas come back to him with an abrupt lucidity;
the effacement of drunkenness, a sort of lye-wash which blinds the brain,
dissipates, and give place to clear and precise impressions of the reality.

Retired as he was in a corner and as it were sheltered behind the billiard-
table, the soldiers, their eyes fixed upon Enjolras, had not even noticed
Grantaire, and the sergeant was preparing to repeat the order:

"Take aim!" when suddenly they heard a powerful voice cry out beside
them:

"Vive la Republique! I belong to it."

Grantaire had arisen.

The immense glare of the whole combat which he had missed and in which
he had not been, appeared in the flashing eye of the transfigured
drunkard.

He repeated: "Vive la Republique!" crossed the room with a firm step,
and took his place before the muskets beside Enjolras.

"Two at one shot," said he.

And, turning towards Enjolras gently, he said to him:

"Will you permit it?"

Enjolras grasped his hand with a smile.

The smile was not finished when the report was heard.

Enjolras, pierced by eight balls, remained backed against the wall as if
the balls had nailed him there. Only he bowed his head.

Grantaire, stricken down, fell at his feet.

A few moments afterwards, the soldiers dislodged the last insurgents
who had taken refuge in the top of the house. They fired through a wooden
lattice into the garret. They fought in the attics. They threw the bodies
out of the windows, some living. Two voltigeurs, who were trying to raise
the shattered omnibus, were killed by two shots from a carbine fired from
the dormer-windows. A man in a blouse was pitched out headlong, with a bay-
onet thrust in his belly, and his death-rattle was finished upon the ground.
A soldier and an insurgent slipped together on the slope of the tiled roof,
and would not let go of each other, and fell, clasped in a wild embrace.
Similar struggle in the cellar. Cries, shots, savage stamping. Then silence.
The barricade was taken.

The soldiers commenced the search of the houses round about and the
pursuit of the fugitives.



XXIV. PRISONER



MARIUS was in fact a prisoner. Prisoner of Jean Valjean.

The hand which had seized him from behind at the moment he was falling,
and the grasp of which he had felt in losing consciousness, was the
hand of Jean Valjean.

Jean Valjean had taken no other part in the combat than to expose him-
self. Save for him, in that supreme phase of the death-struggle, nobody
would have thought of the wounded. Thanks to him, everywhere present in
the carnage like a providence, those who fell were taken up, carried into
the basement-room, and their wounds dressed. In the intervals, he repaired
the barricade. But nothing which could resemble a blow, an attack, or even
a personal defence came from his hands. He was silent, and gave aid. More-
over, he had only a few scratches. The balls refused him. If suicide were
a part of what had occurred to him in coming to this sepulchre, in that
respect he had not succeeded. But we doubt whether he had thought of sui-
cide, an irreligious act.

Jean Valjean, in the thick cloud of the combat, did not appear to see
Marius; the fact is, that he did not take his eyes from him. When a shot
struck down Marius, Jean Valjean bounded with the agility of a tiger,
dropped upon him as upon a prey, and carried him away.

The whirlwind of the attack at that instant concentrated so fiercely
upon Enjolras and the door of the wine-shop, that nobody saw Jean Valjean
cross the unpaved field of the barricade, holding the senseless Marius in
his arms, and disappear behind the corner of the house of Corinth.

It will be remembered that this corner was a sort of cape on the street;
it sheltered from balls and grape, and from sight also, a few square feet
of ground. Thus, there is sometimes in conflagrations a room which does not
burn; and in the most furious seas, beyond a promontory or at the end of a
cul-de-sac of shoals, a placid little haven. It was in this recess of the
interior trapezium of the barricade that Eponine had died.

There Jean Valjean stopped; he let Marius slide to the ground, set his
back to the wall, and cast his eyes about him.

The situation was appalling.

For the moment, for two or three minutes, perhaps, this skirt of wall was
a shelter; but how escape from this massacre? He remembered the anguish
in which he was in the Rue Polonceau, eight years before, and how he had
succeeded in escaping; that was difficult then, to-day it was impossible.
Before him he had that deaf and implacable house of six stories, which
seemed inhabited only by the dead man, leaning over his window; on his
right he had the low barricade, which closed the Petite Truanderie; to
clamber over this obstacle appeared easy, but above the crest of the wall
a range of bayonet-points could be seen. A company of the line was posted
beyond this barricade, on the watch. It was evident that to cross the bar-
ricade was to meet the fire of a platoon, and that every head which should
venture to rise above the top of the wall of paving-stones would serve as a
target for sixty muskets. At his left he had the field of combat. Death was
behind the corner of the wall.

What should he do?

A bird alone could have extricated himself from that place.

And he must decide upon the spot, find an expedient, adopt his course.
They were fighting a few steps from him; by good luck all were fiercely
intent upon a single point, the door of the wine-shop; but let one soldier,
a single one, conceive the idea of turning the house, of attacking it in flank,
and all was over.

Jean Valjean looked at the house in front of him, he looked at the barri-
cade by the side of him, then he looked upon the ground, with the violence
of the last extremity, in desperation, and as if he would have made a hole
in it with his eyes.

Beneath his persistent look, something vaguely tangible in such an agony
outlined itself and took form at his feet, as if there were a power in
the eye to develop the thing desired. He perceived a few steps from him,
at the foot of the little wall so pitilessly watched and guarded on the
outside, under some fallen paving-stones which partly hid it, an iron grating
laid flat and level with the ground. This grating, made of strong transverse
bars, was about two feet square. The stone frame which held it had been
torn up, and it was as it were unset. Through the bars a glimpse could be
caught of an obscure opening, something like the flue of a chimney or the
main of a cistern. Jean Valjean sprang forward. His old science of escape
mounted to his brain like a flash. To remove the stones, to lift the grating,
to load Marius, who was as inert as a dead body, upon his shoulders, to des-
cend, with that burden upon his back, by the aid of his elbows and knees,
into this kind of well, fortunately not very deep, to let fall over his
head the heavy iron trapdoor upon which the stones were shaken back again,
to find a foothold upon a flagged surface ten feet below the ground, this
was executed like what is done in delirium, with the strength of a giant
and the rapidity of an eagle; it required but very few moments.

Jean Valjean found himself, with Marius still senseless, in a sort of long
underground passage.

There, deep peace, absolute silence, night.

The impression which he had formerly felt in falling from the street
into the convent came back to him. Only, what he was now carrying away
was not Cosette; it was Marius.

He could now hardly hear above him, like a vague murmur, the fearful
tumult of the wine-shop taken by assault.




　　　　BOOK SECOND
THE INTESTINE OF LEVIATHAN



I. THE EARTH IMPOVERISHED BY THE SEA



PARIS throws five millions a year into the sea. And this without metaphor.
How, and in what manner? day and night. With what object? without any
object. With what thought? without thinking of it. For what return? for
nothing. By means of what organ? by means of its intestine. What is its
intestine? its sewer.

Five millions is the most moderate of the approximate figures which
the estimates of special science give.

Science, after long experiment, now knows that the most fertilising and
the most effective of manures is that of man. The Chinese we must say to
our shame, knew it before us. No Chinese peasant, Eckeberg tells us, goes
to the city without carrying back, at the two ends of his bamboo, two buckets
full of what we call filth. Thanks to human fertilisation, the earth in
China is still as young as in the days of Abraham. Chinese wheat yields a
hundred and twenty fold. There is no guano comparable in fertility to the
detritus of capital. A great city is the most powerful of stercoraries. To
employ the city to enrich the plain would be a sure success. If our gold is
filth, on the other hand, our filth is gold.

What is done with this filth, gold? It is swept into the abyss.

We fit out convoys of ships, at great expense, to gather up at the south
pole the droppings of petrels and penguins, and the incalculable element
of wealth which we have under our own hand, we send to the sea. All the
human and animal manure which the world loses, restored to the land
instead of being thrown into the water, would suffice to nourish the world.

These heaps of garbage at the corners of the stone blocks, these tumbrils
of mire jolting through the streets at night, these horrid scavengers'
carts, these fetid streams of subterranean slime which the pavement hides
from you, do you know what all this is? It is the flowering meadow, it is the
green grass, it is marjoram and thyme and sage, it is game, it is cattle, it
is the satisfied low of huge oxen at evening, it is perfumed hay, it is golden
corn, it is bread on your table, it is warm blood in your veins, it is health,
it is joy, it is life. Thus wills that mysterious creation which is transfor-
mation upon earth and transfiguration in heaven.

Put that into the great crucible; your abundance shall spring from it.
The nutrition of the plains makes the nourishment of men.

You have the power to throw away this wealth, and to think me ridiculous
into the bargain. That will cap the climax of your ignorance.

Statistics show that France, alone, makes a liquidation of a hundred
millions every year into the Atlantic from the mouths of her rivers. Mark
this: with that hundred millions you might pay a quarter of the expenses of
the government. The cleverness of man is such that he prefers to throw this
hundred millions into the gutter. It is the very substance of the people
which is carried away, here drop by drop, there in floods, by the wretched
vomiting of our sewers into the rivers, and the gigantic collection of our
rivers into the ocean. Each hiccough of our cloaca costs us a thousand
francs. From this two results: the land impoverished and the water infected.
Hunger rising from the furrow and disease rising from the river.

It is notorious, for instance, that at this hour the Thames is poisoning
London.

As for Paris, it has been necessary within a few years past, to carry most
of the mouths of the sewers down the stream below the last bridge.

A double tubular arrangement, provided with valves and sluiceways, sucking
up and flowing back, a system of elementary drainage, as simple as the lungs
of man, and which is already in full operation in several villages in England,
would suffice to bring into our cities the pure water of the fields and send
back into our fields the rich water of the cities; and this easy seesaw, the
simplest in the world, would retain in our possession the hundred millions
thrown away. We are thinking of something else.

The present system does harm in endeavouring to do good. The intention
is good, the result is sad. Men think they are purging the city, they are
emaciating the population. A sewer is a mistake. When drainage everywhere,
with its double function, restoring what it takes away, shall have
replaced the sewer, that simple impoverishing washing, then, this being
combined with the data of a new social economy, the products of the earth
will be increased tenfold, and the problem of misery will be wonderfully
diminished. Add the suppression of parasitism, it will be solved.

In the meantime, the public wealth runs off into the river, and the leakage
continues. Leakage is the word. Europe is ruining herself in this way by
exhaustion.

As for France, we have just named her figure. Now, Paris containing a
twenty-fifth of the total French population, and the Parisian guano being
the richest of all, we are within the truth in estimating at five millions
the portion of Paris in the loss of the hundred millions which France annu-
ally throws away. These five millions, employed in aid and in enjoyment,
would double the splendour of Paris. The city expends them in cloaca. So
that we may say that the great prodigality of Paris, her marvellous fete,
her Beaujon folly, her orgy, her full-handed outpouring of gold, her pageant,
her luxury, her magnificence, is her sewer.

It is in this way that, in the blindness of a vicious political economy,
we drown and let float down stream and be lost in the depths, the welfare
of all. There should be Saint Cloud nettings for the public fortune.

Economically, the fact may be summed up thus: Paris a leaky basket.

Paris, that model city, that pattern of well-formed capitals of which
every people endeavours to have a copy, that metropolis of the ideal, that
august country of the initiative, of impulse and enterprise, that centre and
that abode of mind, that nation city, that hive of the future, that marvel-
lous compound of Babylon and Corinth, from the point of view which we have
just indicated, would make a peasant of Fok-ian shrug his shoulders.

Imitate Paris, you will ruin yourself.

Moreover, particularly in this immemorial and senseless waste, Paris
herself imitates.

These surprising absurdities are not new; there is no young folly in
this. The ancients acted like the moderns. "The cloaca of Rome," says
Liebig, "absorbed all the well-being of the Roman peasant. When the
Campagna of Rome was ruined by the Roman sewer, Rome exhausted Italy,
and when she had put Italy into her cloaca, she poured Sicily in, then
Sardinia, then Africa. The sewer of Rome engulfed the world. This cloaca
offered its maw to the city and to the globe. Urbi et orbi. Eternal city,
unfathomable sewer.

In these things, as well as in others, Rome sets the example.

This example, Paris follows, with all the stupidity peculiar to cities of
genius.

For the necessities of the operation which we have just explained, Paris has
another Paris under herself; a Paris of sewers; which has its streets, its
crossings, its squares, its blind alleys, its arteries, and its circulation,
which is slime, minus the human form.

For we must flatter nothing, not even a great people; where there is every-
thing, there is ignominy by the side of sublimity; and, if Paris contains
Athens, the city of light, Tyre, the city of power, Sparta, the city of
manhood, Nineveh, the city of prodigy, it contains also Lutetia, the city of
mire.

Besides, the seal of her power is there also, and the titanic sink of Paris
realises, among monuments, that strange ideal realised in humanity by some
men, such as Machiavelli, Bacon, and Mirabeau: the sublimity of abjectness.

The subsoil of Paris, if the eye could penetrate the surface, would present
the aspect of a colossal madrepore. A sponge has hardly more defiles and pass-
ages than the tuft of earth of fifteen miles' circuit upon which rests the
ancient great city. Without speaking of the catacombs, which are a cave apart,
without speaking of the inextricable trellis of the gas-pipes, without count-
ing the vast tubular system for the distribution of living water which ends
in the hydrants, the sewers of themselves alone form a prodigious dark net-
work under both banks; a labyrinth the descent of which is its clue.

There is seen, in the humid haze, the rat, which seems the product of the
accouchement of Paris.



II. THE ANCIENT HISTORY OF THE SEWER



IMAGINE Paris taken off like a cover, a bird's-eye view of the subterranean
network of the sewers will represent upon either bank a sort of huge branch
engrafted upon the river. Upon the right bank the belt-sewer will be the
trunk of this branch, the secondary conduits will be the limbs, and the pri-
mary drains will be the twigs.

This figure is only general and half exact, the right angle, which is the
ordinary angle of this kind of underground ramification, being very rare in
vegetation.

We shall form an image more closely resembling this strange geometric plan
by supposing that we see spread upon a background of darkness some grotesque
alphabet of the East jumbled as in a medley, the shapeless letters of which
are joined to each other, apparently pell-mell and as if by chance, some-
times by their corners, sometimes by their extremities.

The sinks and the sewers played an important part in the Middle Ages, in
the Lower Empire, and in the ancient East. In them pestilence was born,
in them despots died. The multitudes regarded almost with a religious awe
these beds of corruption, monstrous cradles of death. The pit of vermin of
Benares is not less bewildering than the Pit of Lions of Babylon. Tiglath
Pilezer, according to the Rabbinical books, swore by the sink of Nineveh.
It was from the sewer of Munster that John of Leyden made his false moon
rise, and it was from the cloaca pit of Kekhschab that his eastern Mena-
chmus, Mokannah, the veiled prophet of Khorassan, made his false sunrise.

The history of men is reflected in the history of cloaca. The Gemonia
describe Rome. The sewer of Paris has been a terrible thing in time past.
It has been a sepulchre, it has been an asylum. Crime, intelligence, social
protest, liberty of conscience, thought, theft, all that human laws pursue
or have pursued, have hidden in this hole; the Maillotins in the fourteenth
century, the Tirelaines in the fifteenth, the Huguenots in the sixteenth, the
Illuminati of Morin in the seventeenth, the Chauffeurs in the eighteenth. A
hundred years ago, the blow of the dagger by night came thence, the pickpocket
in danger glided thither; the forest had its cave; Paris had its sewer. Vag-
abondage, that Gallic picareria, accepted the sewer as an affiliation of the
Cour des Miracles, and at night, crafty and ferocious, returned into the
Maubue vomitoria as into an alcove.

It was quite natural that those whose field of daily labour was the Culde-
sac Vide-Gousset, or the Rue Coupe-Gorge, should have for their nightly
abode the culvert of the Chemin Vert or the Hurepoix kennel. Hence a
swarm of traditions. All manner of phantoms haunt these long solitary
corridors, putridity and miasma everywhere; here and there a breathing-
hole through which Villon within chats with Rabelais without.

The sewer, in old Paris, is the rendezvous of all drainages and all assays.
Political economy sees in it a detritus, social philosophy sees in it a
residuum.

The sewer is the conscience of the city. All things converge into it and
are confronted with one another. In this lurid place there is darkness, but
there are no secrets. Everything has its real form, or at least its definitive
form. This can be said for the garbage-heap, that it is no liar. Frankness
has taken refuge in it. Basil's mask is found there, but we see the paste-
board, and the strings, and the inside as well as the outside, and it is
emphasised with honest mud. Scapin's false nose is close by. All the un-
cleanness of civilisation when once out of service, fall into this pit of
truth, where the immense social slipping is brought to an end. They are
swallowed up, but they are displayed in it. This pell-mell is a confession.
Here, no more false appearances, no possible plastering, the filth takes off
its shirt, absolute nakedness, rout of illusions and of mirages, nothing more
but what is, wearing the sinister face of what is ending. Reality and disap-
pearance. Here, the stump of a bottle confesses drunkenness, the handle
of a basket tells of domestic life; here, the apple core which has had lit-
erary opinions becomes again an apple core; the face on the big sou freely
covers itself with verdigris, the spittle of Caiaphas encounters Falstaff's
vomit, the louis d'or which comes from the gaming-house jostles the nail
from which hangs the suicide's bit of rope, a livid foetus rolls by wrapped
in the spangles which danced at the opera last Mardi Gras, a cap which has
judged men wallows near a rottenness which was one of Peggy's petticoats;
it is more than brotherhood, it is the closest intimacy. All that paints
besmears. The last veil is rent. A sewer is a cynic. It tells all.

This sincerity of uncleanness pleases us, and is a relief to the soul.
When a man has passed his time on the earth in enduring the spectacle of
the grand airs which are assumed by reasons of state, oaths, political
wisdom, human justice, professional honesty, the necessities of position,
incorruptible robes, it is a consolation to enter a sewer and see the
slime which befits it.

It is a lesson at the same time. As we have just said, history passes
through the sewer. The Saint Bartholomews filter drop by drop through
the pavements. The great public assassinations, the political and religious
butcheries, traverse this vault of civilisation, and push their dead into it.
To the reflecting eye, all the historic murderers are there, in the hideous
gloom, on their knees, with a little of their shroud for an apron, dolefully
sponging their work. 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, Hebert and Maillard are
there, scraping the stones, and endeavouring to efface all trace of their
deeds. Beneath these vaults we hear the broom of these spectres. We breathe
the enormous fetidness of social catastrophes. We see reddish reflections
in the corners. There flows a terrible water, in which bloody hands have
been washed.

The social observer should enter these shades. They are part of his labor-
atory. Philosophy is the microscope of thought. Everything desires to flee
from it, but nothing escape's it. Tergiversation is useless. What phase of
your character do you show in tergiversation? the shameful phase. Philosophy
pursues evil with its rigid search, and does not permit it to glide away
into nothingness. In the effacement of things which disappear, in the less-
ening of those which vanish, it recognises everything. It reconstructs the
purple from the rag and the woman from the tatter. With the cloaca it re-
produces the city; with the mire it reproduces its customs. From a fragment
it infers the amphora, or the pitcher. It recognises by the print of a
finger nail upon a parchment the difference between the Jewry of the Jud-
ngasse and the Jewry of the Ghetto. It finds in what remains what has been,
the good, the ill, the false, the true, the stain of blood in the palace,
the blot of ink in the cavern, the drop of grease in the brothel, trials
undergone, temptations welcomed, orgies spewed out, the wrinkles which
characters have received in abasing themselves, the trace of prostitution
in souls which their own grossness has made capable of it, and, on the
vest of the porters of Rome, the mark of Messalina's elbow.



III. BRUNESEAU



THE SEWER of Paris, in the Middle Ages, was legendary. In the sixteenth
century, Henry II. attempted an examination, which failed. Less than a
hundred years ago, the cloaca, Mercier bears witness, was abandoned to
itself, and became what it might.

Such was that ancient Paris, given up to quarrels, to indecisions, and to
gropings. It was for a long time stupid enough. Afterwards, '89 showed how
cities come to their wits. But, in the good old times, the capital had lit-
tle head; she could not manage her affairs either morally or materially, nor
better sweep away her filth than her abuses. Everything was an obstacle,
everything raised a question. The sewer, for instance, was refractory to all
itineracy. Men could no more succeed in guiding themselves through its
channels than in understanding themselves in the city; above, the unintel-
ligible, below, the inextricable; beneath the confusion of tongues there
was the confusion of caves; Labyrinth lined Babel.

Sometimes, the sewer of Paris took it into its head to overflow, as if
that unappreciated Nile were suddenly seized with wrath. There were, inf-
amous to relate, inundations from the sewer. At intervals, this stomach
of civilisation digested badly, the cloaca flowed back into the city's
throat, and Paris had the aftertaste of its slime. These resemblances of
the sewer to remorse had some good in them; they were warnings; very badly
received, however; the city was indignant that its mire should have so
much audacity, and did not countenance the return of the ordure. Drive it
away better.

The inundation of 1802 is a present reminiscence with Parisians of eighty.
The mire spread out in a cross in the Place des Victoires, where the
statue of Louis XIV. is; it entered the Rue Saint Honore by the two mouths
of the sewer of the Champs-Elysees, the Rue Saint Florentin by the Saint
Florentin sewer, the Rue Pierre a Poisson by the sewer of the Sonnerie,
the Rue Popincourt by the sewer of the Chemin Vert, the Rue de la
Roquette by the sewer of the Rue de Sappe; it covered the curbstones of
the Rue des Champs-Elysees to the depth of some fourteen inches; and,
on the south, by the vomitoria of the Seine performing its function in
the inverse way, it penetrated the Rue Mazarine, the Rue de l'Echaude,
and the Rue des Marais, where it stopped, having reached the length of a
hundred and twenty yards, just a few steps from the house which Racine had
lived in, respecting, in the seventeenth century, the poet more than the
king. It attained its maximum depth in the Rue Saint Pierre, where it rose
three feet above the flagging of the water-spouts, and its maximum extent
in the Rue Saint Sabin, where it spread out over a length of two hundred
and sixty-one yards.

At the commencement of this century, the sewer of Paris was still a
mysterious place. Mire can never be in good repute; but here ill-fame
reached even fright. Paris dimly realised that she had a terrible cave
beneath her. People talked of it as of that monstrous bog of Thebes which
swarmed with scolopendras fifteen feet long, and which might have served
as a bathing-tub for Behemoth. The big boots of the sewer-men never vent-
ured beyond certain known points. They were still very near the time
when the scavengers' tumbrils, from the top of which Sainte Foix frater-
nised with the Marquis of Crequi, were simply emptied into the sewer. As
for cleansing, that operation was confided to the showers, which obstructed
more than they swept out. Rome still left some poetry to her cloaca, and
called it Gemonia; Paris insulted hers and called it the Stink-Hole.
Science and superstitions were at one in regard to the horror. The Stink-
Hole was not less revolting to hygiene than to legend. The Goblin Monk had
appeared under the fetid arch of the Mouffetard sewer; the corpses of the
Marmousets had been thrown into the sewer of the Barillerie; Fagon had
attributed the fearful malignant fever of 1685 to the great gap in the
sewer of the Marais which remained yawning until 1833, in the Rue Saint
Louis, almost in front of the sign of the Gallant Messenger. The mouth of
the sewer of the Rue de la Mortellerie was famous for the pestilence which
came from it; with its pointed iron grating which looked like a row of teeth,
it lay in that fatal street like the jaws of a dragon blowing hell upon men.
The popular imagination seasoned the gloomy Parisian sink with an indefi-
nably hideous mixture of the infinite. The sewer was bottomless. The
sewer was the barathrum. The idea of exploring these leprous regions did
not occur even to the police. To tempt that unknown, to throw the lead
into that darkness, to go on a voyage of discovery in that abyss, who would
have dared? It was frightful. Somebody came forward, however. The cloaca
had its Columbus.

One day in 1805, on one of those rare visits which the emperor made to
Paris, the Minister of the Interior came to the master's private audience.
In the carrousel was heard the clatter of the swords of all those marvel-
lous soldiers of the Grand Republic and the Grand Empire; there was a
multitude of heroes at the door of Napoleon; men of the Rhine, of the
Scheldt, of the Adige, and of the Nile; companions of Joubert, of Desaix,
of Marceau, of Hoche, of Kleber; balloonists of Fleurus; grenadiers of
Mayence, pontooniers of Genoa, hussars whom the Pyramids had beheld,
artillerymen whom Junot's ball had bespattered, cuirassiers who had taken
by assault the fleet at anchor in the Zuyder Zee; these had followed Bon-
aparte over the bridge of Lodi, those had been with Murat in the trenches
of Mantua, others had preceded Lannes in the sunken road of Montebello.
The whole army of that time was there, in the Court of the Tuileries,
represented by a squad or a platoon, guarding Napoleon in repose; and it
was the splendid epoch when the grand army had behind it Marengo and before
it Austerlitz. "Sire," said the Minister of the Interior to Napoleon, "I
saw yesterday the boldest man in your empire." "Who is the man," said the
emperor quickly, "and what has he done?" "He wishes to do something, sire."
"What?" "To visit the sewers of Paris."

That man existed, and his name was Bruneseau.


IV. DETAILS IGNORED



THE VISIT was made. It was a formidable campaign; a night battle against
pestilence and asphyxia. It was at the same time a voyage of discoveries.
One of the survivors of this exploration, an intelligent working-man, then
very young, still related a few years ago the curious details which Bruneseau
thought it his duty to omit in his report to the prefect of police, as un-
worthy of the administrative style. Disinfecting processes were very rudi-
mentary at that period. Hardly had Bruneseau passed the first branchings of
the subterranean network, when eight out of the twenty labourers refused to go
further. The operation was complicated; the visit involved the cleaning; it
was necessary therefore to clean, and at the same time to measure; to note
the entrance of water, to count the gratings and the mouths, to detail the
branchings, to indicate the currents at the points of separation, to examine
the respective borders of the various basins, to fathom the little sewers
engrafted upon the principal sewer, to measure the height of each passage
under the keystone, and the width, as well at the spring of the arch as at
the level of the floor, finally to determine the ordinates of the levellings
at a right angle with each entrance of water, either from the floor of the
sewer, or from the surface of the street. They advanced with difficulty.
It was not uncommon for the step ladders to plunge into three feet of mire.
The lanterns flickered in the miasmas. From time to time, they brought
out a sewerman who had fainted. At certain places, a precipice. The soil
had sunken, the pavement had crumbled, the sewer had changed into a blind
well; they found no solid ground; one man suddenly disappeared; they had
great difficulty in recovering him. By the advice of Fourcroy, they
lighted from point to point, in the places sufficiently purified, great
cages full of oakum and saturated with resin. The wall, in places, was
covered with shapeless fungi, and one would have said with tumours; the
stone itself seemed diseased in this irrespirable medium.

Bruneseau, in his exploration, proceeded from the head towards the
mouth. At the point of separation of the two water pipes from the Grand
Hurleur, he deciphered upon a projecting stone the date 1550; this stone
indicated the limit reached by Philibert Delorme, who was charged by Henry
II. with visiting the subterranean canals of Paris. This stone was the
mark of the sixteenth century upon the sewer; Bruneseau also found the
handiwork of the seventeenth century, in the conduit of the Ponceau and
the conduit of the Rue Vieille du Temple, built between 1600 and 1650,
and the handiwork of the eighteenth century in the western section of the
collecting canal, banked up and arched in 1740. These two arches, especi-
ally the later one, that of 1740, were more cracked and more dilapidated
than the masonry of the belt sewer, which dated from 1412, the epoch
when the fresh-water brook of Menilmontant was raised to the dignity of
Grand Sewer of Paris, an advancement analogous to that of a peasant who
should become first valet de chambre to the king; something like Gros
Jean transformed into Lebel.

They thought they recognised here and there, chiefly under the Palais
de Justice, some cells of ancient dungeons built in the sewer itself.
Hideous in pace. An iron collar hung in one of these cells. They walled
them all up. Some odd things were found; among other things the skeleton
of an ourang-outang which disappeared from the Jardin des Plantes in
1800, a disappearance probably connected with the famous and incontestable
appearance of the devil in the Rue des Bernardins in the last year of the
eighteenth century. The poor devil finally drowned himself in the sewer.

Under the long arched passage which terminates at the Arche Marion, a
ragpicker's basket, in perfect preservation, was the admiration of con-
noisseurs. Everywhere, the mud, which the workmen had come to handle
boldly, abounded in precious objects, gold and silver trinkets, precious
stones, coins. A giant who should have filtered this cloaca would have had
the riches of centuries in his sieve. At the point of separation of the
two branches of the Rue du Temple and the Rue Sainte Avoye, they picked up
a singular Huguenot medal in copper, beating on one side a hog wearing a
cardinal's hat, and on the other a wolf with the tiara on his head.

The most surprising discovery was at the entrance of the Grand Sewer.
This entrance had been formerly closed by a grating, of which the hinges
only remained. Hanging to one of these hinges was a sort of shapeless and
filthy rag, which, doubtless, caught there on its passage, had fluttered
in the darkness, and was finally worn to tatters. Bruneseau approached his
lantern to this strip and examined it. It was of very fine cambric, and
they made out at the least worn of the corners a heraldic crown embroi-
dered above these seven letters: LAVBESP. The crown was a marquis's crown,
and the seven letters signified Laubespine. They recognised that what they
had before their eyes was a piece of Marat's winding-sheet. Marat, in his
youth, had had his amours. It was when he made a portion of the household
of the Count d'Artois in the capacity of physician of the stables. From these
amours, a matter of history, with a great lady, there remained to him this
sheet. Waif or souvenir. At his death, as it was the only fine linen he had
in the house, he was shrouded in it. Old women dressed out for the tomb,
in this cloth in which there had been pleasure, the tragic Friend of the
People. Bruneseau passed on. They left this scrap where it was; they did not
make an end of it. Was this contempt or respect? Marat deserved both. And
then, destiny was so imprinted upon it that they might hesitate to touch it.
Besides, we should leave the things of the grave in the place which they
choose. In short, the relic was strange. A marchioness had slept upon it;
Marat had rotted in it; it had passed through the Pantheon to come at last
to the rats of the sewer. This rag of the alcove, every fold of which Wat-
teau would once have gladly sketched, had at last become worthy of Dante's
fixed regard.

The complete visitation of the subterranean sewer system of Paris
occupied seven years, from 1805 to 1812. While yet he was performing it,
Bruneseau laid out, directed, and brought to an end some considerable
works; in 1808 he lowered the floor of the Ponceau, and creating new lines
everywhere, he extended the sewer, in 1809, under the Rue St. Denis as far
as the Fontaine des Innocents; in 1810, under the Rue Froidmanteau and
under La Salpetriere; in 1811, under the Rue Neuve des Petits Peres, the
Rue du Mail, the Rue de l'Echarpe, and the Place Royale; in 1812, under
the Rue de la Paix and the Chaussee d'Antin. At the same time, he disin-
fected and purified the whole network. After the second year, Bruneseau
was assisted by his son-in-law Nargaud.

Thus, at the beginning of this century, the old society cleansed its double
bottom and made the toilette of its sewer. It was always so much cleaned.

Tortuous, fissured, unpaved, crackling, interrupted by quagmires, broken
by fantastic elbows, rising and falling out of all rule, fetid, savage, wild,
submerged, in obscurity, with scars on its pavements and gashes on its
walls, appalling, such was, seen retrospectively, the ancient sewer of Paris.
Ramifications in every direction, crossings of trenches, branchings, goose-
tracks, stars as if in mines, coecums, cul-de-sacs, arches covered with
saltpetre, infectious cesspools, a herpetic ooze upon the walls, drops falling
from the ceiling, darkness; nothing equalled the horror of this old voiding
crypt, the digestive apparatus of Babylon, cavern, grave, gulf pierced with
streets, titanic molehill, in which the mind seems to see prowling through
the shadow, in the ordure which has been splendour, that enormous blind
mole, the past.

This, we repeat, was the sewer of former times.



V. PRESENT PROGRESS



AT PRESENT the sewer is neat, cold, straight, correct. It almost realises
the ideal of what is understood in England by the word "respectable." It
is comely and sober; drawn by the line; we might almost say fresh from the
band-box. It is like a contractor become a councillor of state. We almost
see clearly in it. The filth comports itself decently. At the first glance,
we should readily take it for one of those underground passages formerly so
common and so useful for the flight of monarchs and princes, in that good
old time "when the people loved their kings." The present sewer is a beauti-
ful sewer; the pure style reigns in it; the classic rectilinear alexandrine
which, driven from poetry, appears to have taken refuge in architecture,
seems mingled with every stone of that long darkling and whitish arch;
each discharging mouth is an arcade; the Rue de Rivoli rules the school
even in the cloaca. However, if the geometric line is in place anywhere,
it surely is in the stercorary trenches of a great city. There, all should
be subordinated to the shortest road. The sewer has now assumed a certain
official aspect. The very police reports of which it is sometimes the object
are no longer wanting in respect for it. The words which characterise it
in the administrative language are elevated and dignified. What was called
a gut is called a gallery; what was called a hole is called a vista. Villon
would no longer recognise his old dwelling in case of need. This network
of caves has still indeed its immemorial population of rodents, swarming
more than ever; from time to time, a rat, an old moustache, risks his head
at the window of the sewer and examines the Parisians; but these vermin
themselves have grown tame, content as they are with their subterranean
palace. The cloaca has now nothing of its primitive ferocity. The rain,
which befouled the sewer of former times, washes the sewer of the present
day. Do not trust in it too much, however. Miasmas still inhabit it. It
is rather hypocritical than irreproachable. The prefecture of police and
the health commission have laboured in vain. In spite of all the processes
of purification, it exhales a vague odour, suspicious as Tartuffe, after
confession.

Let us admit, as, all things considered, street-cleaning is a homage
which the sewer pays to civilisation, and as, from this point of view,
Tartuffe's conscience is an advance upon Augeas' stable, it is certain
that the sewer of Paris has been ameliorated.

It is more than an advance; it is a transmutation. Between the ancient
sewer and the present sewer, there is a revolution. Who has wrought this
revolution?

The man whom everybody forgets, and whom we have named. Brunesean.



VI. FUTURE PROGRESS



THE EXCAVATION of the sewer of Paris has been no small work. The last
ten centuries have laboured upon it, without being able to complete it any
more than to finish Paris. The sewer, indeed, receives all the impulsions of
the growth of Paris. It is, in the earth, a species of dark polyp with a
thousand antenna which grows beneath at the same time that the city grows
above. Whenever the city opens a street, the sewer puts out an arm. The
old monarchy had constructed only twenty-five thousand four hundred and
eighty yards of sewers; Paris was at that point on the 1st of January, 1806.
From that epoch, of which we shall speak again directly, the work was pro-
fitably and energetically resumed and continued; Napoleon built, the figures
are interesting, five thousand two hundred and fifty-four yards; Louis
XVIII., six thousand two hundred and forty-four; Charles X., eleven thou-
sand eight hundred and fifty-one, Louis Philippe, ninety-seven thousand
three hundred and fifty-five; the Republic of 1848, twenty-five thousand
five hundred and seventy; the existing regime, seventy-seven thousand one
hundred; in all, at the present hour, two hundred and forty-seven thousand
eight hundred and twenty-eight yards; a hundred and forty miles of sewers;
the enormous entrails of Paris. Obscure ramification always at work; unno-
ticed and immense construction.

As we see, the subterranean labyrinth of Paris is to-day more than tenfold
what it was at the commencement of the century. It is hard to realise
all the perseverance and effort which were necessary to bring this cloaca
to the point of relative perfection where it now is. It was with great dif-
ficulty that the old monarchical provostship and, in the last ten years of
the eighteenth century, the revolutionary mayoralty, had succeeded in pierc-
ing the thirteen miles of sewers which existed before 1806. All manner of
obstacles hindered this operation, some peculiar to the nature of the soil,
others inherent in the very prejudices of the labouring population of Paris.
Paris is built upon a deposit singularly rebellious to the spade, the hoe,
the drill, to human control. Nothing more difficult to pierce and to pene-
trate than that geological formation upon which is superposed the wonderful
historical formation called Paris; as soon as, under whatever form, labour
commences and ventures into that street of alluvium, subterraneous resistance
abounds. There are liquid clays, living springs, hard rocks, those soft
and deep mires which technical science calls Moutardes. The pick advances
laboriously into these calcareous strata alternating with seams of very fine
clay and laminar schistose beds, incrusted with oyster shells contemporary
with the pre-adamite oceans. Sometimes a brook suddenly throws down
an arch which has been commenced, and inundates the labourers; or a slide
of marl loosens and rushes down with the fury of a cataract, crushing the
largest of the sustaining timbers like glass. Quite recently at Villette, when
it was necessary, without interrupting navigation and without emptying the
canal, to lead the collecting sewer under the Saint Martin canal, a fissure
opened in the bed of the canal; the water suddenly rose in the works under-
ground, beyond all the power of the pumps; they were obliged to seek the
fissure, which was in the neck of the great basin, by means of a diver, and
it was not without difficulty that it was stopped. Elsewhere, near the Seine,
and even at some distance from the river, as, for instance, at Belleville,
Grande Rue, and the Luniere arcade, we find quicksands in which we sink,
and a man may be buried out of sight. Add asphyxia from the miasma,
burial by the earth falling in, sudden settlings of the bottom. Add typhus,
with which the labourers are slowly impregnated. In our day, after having
excavated the gallery of Clichy, with a causeway to receive a principal
water-pipe from the Ourcq, a work executed in a trench, over ten yards in
depth: after having, in spite of slides, by means of excavations, often putrid,
and by props, arched the Bievre from the Boulevard de l'Hopital to the
Seine; after having, to deliver Paris from the swelling waters of Montmartre
and to furnish an outlet for that fluvial sea of twenty-two acres which
stagnated near the Barriere des Martyrs, after having, we say, constructed
the line of sewers from the Barriere Blanche to the Aubervilliers road, in
four months, working day and night, at a depth of twelve yards; after hav-
ing, a thing which had not been seen before, executed entirely underground
a sewer in the Rue Barre du Bec, without a trench, twenty feet below the
surface, Superintendent Monnot died. After having arched three thousand
yards of sewers in all parts of the city, from the Rue Traversiere Saint
Antoine to the Rue de l'Ourcine; after having, by the branching of the
Arbalete, relieved the Censier Mouffetard Square from inundation by the
rain; after having built the Saint Georges sewer upon stone-work and con-
crete in the quicksand; after having directed the dangerous lowering of
the floor of the Notre Dame de Nazareth branch, Engineer Duleau died.
There are no bulletins for these acts of bravery, more profitable, how-
ever, than the stupid slaughter of the battle-field.

The sewers of Paris, in 1832, were far from being what they are today.
Bruneseau had made a beginning, but it required the cholera to determine
the vast reconstruction which has since taken place. It is surprising
to say, for instance, that, in 1821, a portion of the belt sewer, called the
Grand Canal, as at Venice, was still stagnating in the open sky, in the Rue
des Gourdes. It was only in 1823 that the city of Paris found in its pocket
the forty-nine thousand eight hundred and ninety dollars and one cent
necessary for the covering of this shame. The three absorbing wells of the
Combat, the Cunette, and Saint Mande, with their discharging mouths,
their apparatus, their pits, and their depuratory branches, date only from
1836. The intestinal canal of Paris has been rebuilt anew, and, as we have
said, increased more than tenfold within a quarter of a century.

Thirty years ago, at the period of the insurrection of the 5th and 6th of
June, it was still, in many places, almost the ancient sewer. A very large
number of streets, now vaulted, were then hollow causeways. You very
often saw, at the low point in which the gutters of a street or a square
terminated, large rectangular gratings with great bars, the iron of which
shone, polished by the feet of the multitude, dangerous and slippery for
waggons, and making the horses stumble. The official language of roads
and bridges gave to these low points and gratings the expressive name of
Cassis. In 1832, in many streets, the Rue de l'Etoile, the Rue Saint
Louis, the Rue du Temple, the Rue Vieille du Temple, the Rue Notre Dame
de Nazareth, the Rue Folie Mericourt, the Quai aux Fleurs, the Rue du
Petit Musc, the Rue de Normandie, the Rue Pont aux Biches, the Rue des
Marais, Faubourg Saint Martin, the Rue Notre Dame des Victoires,
Faubourg Montmartre, the Rue Grange Bateliere in the Champs-Elysees,
the Rue Jacob, the Rue de Tournon, the old Gothic cloaca still cynically
showed its jaws. They were enormous, sluggish gaps of stone, sometimes
surrounded by stone blocks, with monumental effrontery.

Paris, in 1806, was still almost at the same figure of sewers establish-
ed in May, 1663: five thousand three hundred and twenty-eight fathoms.
According to Bruneseau, on the 1st of January, 1832, there were forty-four
thousand and seventy-three yards. From 1806 to 1831, there were built
annually, on an average, eight hundred and twenty yards; since then there
have been constructed every year eight, and even ten thousand yards of
galleries, in masonry of small materials laid in hydraulic cement on a
foundation of concrete.

At thirty-five dollars a yard, the hundred and forty miles of sewers of
the present Paris represent nine millions.

Besides the economical progress which we pointed out in commencing,
grave problems of public hygiene are connected with this immense
question: the sewer of Paris.

Paris is between two sheets, a sheet of water and a sheet of air. The
sheet of water lying at a considerable depth under ground, but already
reached by two borings, is furnished by the bed of green sand lying
between the chalk and the jurassic limestone; this bed may be represented
by a disk with a radius of seventy miles; a multitude of rivers and brooks
filter into it; we drink the Seine, the Marne, the Yonne, the Oise, the Aisne,
the Cher, the Vienne, and the Loire, in a glass of water from the well of
Grenelle. The sheet of water is salubrious; it comes, first from heaven, then
from the earth; the sheet of air is unwholesome, it comes from the sewer.
All the miasmas of the cloaca are mingled with the respiration of the city;
hence that foul breath. The air taken from above a dunghill, this has been
scientifically determined, is purer than the air taken from above Paris. In a
given time, progress aiding, mechanisms being perfected, and light increasing,
the sheet of water will be employed to purify the sheet of air. That is to
say, to wash the sewer. By washing the sewer, of course, we understand:
restitution of the mire to the land; return of the muck to the soil, and the
manure to the fields. There will result, from this simple act, to the whole
social community, a diminution of misery and an augmentation of health.
At the present hour, the radiation of the diseases of Paris extends a hundred
and fifty miles about the Louvre, taken as the hub of this pestilential wheel.

We might say that, for ten centuries, the cloaca has been the disease
of Paris. The sewer is the taint which the city has in her blood. The popular
instinct is never mistaken. The trade of sewerman was formerly almost
as perilous, and almost as repulsive to the people, as the trade of knacker
so long stricken with horror, and abandoned to the executioner. It required
high wages to persuade a mason to disappear in that fetid ooze; the welldig-
ger's ladder hesitated to plunge into it; it was said proverbially: to descend
into the sewer is to enter the grave; and all manner of hideous legends, as we
have said, covered this colossal drain with dismay; awful sink, which bears
the traces of the revolutions of the globe as well as of the revolutions of
men, and in which we find vestiges of all the cataclysms from the shellfish
of the deluge down to the rag of Marat

JEAN VALJEAN

BOOK FIRST
WAR BETWEEN FOUR WALLS