BOOK EIGHT: ENCHANTMENTS AND DESOLATIONS

I. Sunshine

THE reader has understood that Eponine, having recognised through the grating
the inhabitant of that Rue Plumet, to which Marius had sent her, had begun by
diverting the bandits from the Rue Minot, had then conducted Marius thither, and
that after several days of ecstasy before that grating, Marius, drawn by. that
force which pushes the iron towards the magnet and the lover towards the stones
of which the house of her whom he loves it built, had finally entered Cosette's
garden as Romeo did the garden of Juliet. It had even been easier for him than
for Romeo; Romeo was obliged to scale a wall, Marius had only to push aside a
little one of the bars of the decrepit grating, which was loosened in its rusty
socket, like the teeth of old people. Marius was slender, and easily passed
through.

As there was never anybody in the street, and as, moreover, Marius entered the
garden only at night, be ran no risk of being seen.

From that blessed and holy hour when a kiss affianced these two souls, Marius
came every evening. If, at this period of her life, Cosette had fallen into the
love of a man who was unscrupulous and a libertine. she would have been ruined;
for there are generous natures which give themselves, and Cosette was one. One
of the tha magnanimities of woman is to yield. Love. at that height at which it is
absolute, is associated with an inexpressibly celestial blindness of modesty.
But what risks do you run, O noble souls! Often, you give the heart, we take
the body. Your heart remains to you, and you look upon it in the darkness, and
shudder. Love has no middle term; either it destroys, or it saves. All human
destiny is this dilemma. This dilemma, destruction or salvation, no fatality
proposes more inexorably than love. Love is life, if it be not death. Cradle;
coffin also. The same sentiment says yes and no in the human heart. Of all the
things which God has made, the human heart is that which sheds most light, and,
alas! most night.

God willed that the love which Cosette met, should be one of those loves which
save.

Through all the month of May of that year 1832, there were there, every night,
in that poor, wild garden, under that shrubbery each day more odorous and more
dense, two beings composed of every chastity and every innocence, overflowing
with all the felicities of Heaven, more nearly archangels than men, pure, noble,
intoxicated, radiant, who were resplendent to each other in the darkness. It
seemed to Cosette that Marius had a crown, and to Marius that Cosette had a halo.
They touched each other, they beheld each other, they clasped each other's hands,
they pressed closely to each other; but there was a distance which they did not
pass. not that they respected it; they were ignorant of it. Marius felt a bar-
rier, the purity of Cosette, and Cosette felt a support, the loyalty of Marius.
The first kiss was the last also. Marius, since, had not gone beyond touching
Cosette's hand, or her neckerchief, or her ringlets, with his lips. Cosette was
to him a perfume, and not a woman. He breathed her. She refused nothing and he
asked nothing. Cosette was happy, and Marius was satisfied. They lived in that
ravishing condition which might be called the dazzling of a soul by a soul. It
was that ineffable first embrace of two virginities in the ideal. Two swans
meeting upon the jungfran.

At that hour of love, an hour when passion is absolutely silent under the omni-
potence of ecstasy, Marius, the pure and seraphic Marius, would have been capable
rather of visiting a public woman than of lifting Cosette's dress to the height
of her ankle. Once, on a moonlight night, Cosette stooped to pick up something
from the ground, her dress loosened and displayed the rounding of her boson Mar-
ius turned away his eyes.

What passed between these two beings? Nothing. They were adoring each other.

At night, when they were there, this garden seemed a living and sacred place.
All the flowers opened about them, and proffered them their incense; they too
opened their souls and poured than forth to the flowers: the lusty and vigorous
vegetation trembled full of sap and intoxication about these two innocent crea-
tures, and they spoke words of love at which the trees thrilled.

What were these words? Whispers, nothing more. These whispers were enough to a-
rouse and excite all this nature. A magic power, which one can hardly understand by
this prattle, which is made to be borne away and dissipated like whiffs of smoke
by the wind under the leaves. Take from these murmurs of two lovers that melody
which springs from the soul, and which accompanies them like a lyre, what remains
is only a shade, You say: What! is that all? Yes, childish things, repetitions, laughs
about nothing, inutilities, absurdities, all that is deepest and most sublime in the
world! the only things which are worth being said and listened to.

These absurdities, these poverties, the man who has never heard them, the man
who has never uttered them, is an imbecile and a wicked man.

Cosette said to Marius:

"Do you know my name is Euphrasie

"Euphrasie? Why no, your name is Cosette."

"Oh! Cosette is such an ugly name that they gave me somehow when I was little.
But my real name is Euphrasie. Don't you like that name, Euphrasier?"

"Yes--but Cosette is not ugly."

"Do you like it better than Euphrasier?"

"Why--yes."

"Then I like it better, too. It is true it is pretty, Cosette. Call me Cosette."

And the smile which she added made of this dialogue an idyl worthy of a celestial
grove.

At another time she looked at him steadily and exclaimed: "Monsieur, you are hand-
some, you are beautiful, you are witty, you are not stupid in the least, you are
much miser than I, but I defy you with this word: I love you!"

And Marius, in a cloudless sky, thought he heard a strophe sung by a star.

Or again, she gave him a little tap because he coughed, and said to him:

"Do not cough, monsieur. I do not allow coughing here without permission. It is
very naughty to cough and disturb me. I want von to be well, because, in the first
place, if you were not well, I should he very unhappy. What will you have me do
for you!"

And that was all purely divine.

Once Marius said to Cosette:

"Just think, I thought at one time that your name was Ursula." This made them laugh
the whole evening.

In the midst of another conversation, he lutppened to exclaim:

"Oh! one day at the Luxembourg I would have been glad to break the rest of the
bones of an Invalide!"

But he stopped short and went no further. He would have been obliged to speak to
Cosmic of her garter, and that was impossible for him. There was an unknown coast
there, the flesh, before which this immense innocent love recoiled with a kind of
sacred awe.

Marius imagined life with Cosette like this, without anything else: to come every
evening to the Rue Plumet, to put aside the complaisant old bar of the president's
grating, to sit side by side upon this seat, to behold through the trees the scin-
tillation of the commencing night, to make the fold of the knee of his pantaloons
intimate with the fulness of Cosette's dress, to caress her thumbnail. to say dear-
est to her, to inhale one otter the other the odour of the same flower, for ever,
indefinitely. During this time the clouds were passing above their heads. Every
breath of wind bears away More dreams front man titan clouds from the sky.

That this chaste, almost severe, love was absolutely without gallantry, we will not
say. "To pay compliments" to her whom we love is the first method of caressing, a
demi-audacity venturing. A,compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.
Pleasure sets her soft seal there, even while hiding herself. Before pleasure the
heart recoils, to love better. Marius' soft words, all saturated as:hey were with
chimera, were, so to speak, sky-blue, The birds, when they are flying on high beside
the angels, must hear such words:There was mingled with them, however, life, human-
ity, all the positiveness of which Marius was capable. It was what is said in the
grotto, a prelude to what will be said in the alcove: a lyrical effusion, the strophe
and the sonnet mingled, the gentle hyperboles of cooing, all the re-finements of ado-
ration arranged in a bouquet and exhaling a subtle celestial perfume, an ineffable
warbling of heart to heart.

"Oh!" murmured Marius, "how beautiful you are! I dare not look at you. That is why
I stare at you. You are a grace. I do not know what is the matter with me. The hem
of your dress, when the tip of your shoe appears, completely overwhelms me. And then
what enchanting glow when I see a glimpse of your thought. Toe reason astonishingly.
It seems to me at times that you are a dream. Speak, I am listening to you, I am won-
dering at .you. O Cosette! how strange and charming it is! am really mad. You are ador-
able. Mademoiselle. I study your feet with the microscope and your soul with the tel-
escope."

And Cosette answered:

"I have been loving you a little more every minute since this morning."

Questions and answers fared as they might in this dialogue, always falling naturally
at last upon love, like those loaded toys which always fall upon their base.

Cosette's whole person was alertness, innnuousness, transpar ency. whiteness, candour,
radiance. We might say of Cosette that . she was pellucid. She gave to him who saw her
a sensation or Apra and of dawn. There was dew in her eyes. Cosette was a condensation
of auroral light in womanly form.

It was quite natural that Marius, adoring her, should admire her. But the truth is
that this little schoolgirl, fresh from the convent mill, talked with an exquisite pen-
etration and said at times all manner of true and delicate words. Her prattle was con-
versation. She made no mistakes, and saw clearly. Woman feels and speaks with the tender
instinct of the heart, that infallibility. Nobody knows like a woman how to say things
at the same time sweet mid profound. Sweetness and depth, this is all of woman; this is
all of Heaven.

In this fulness of felicity, at every instant tears came to their eyes. An insect trodden
upon, a feather falling from a nest, a twig of hawthorn broken, moved their pity, and
their ecstasy, sweetly drowned in melancholy, seemed to ask nothing better than to weep.
The most sovereign symptom of Love, is a tenderness sometimes almost insupportable.

And, by the side of this--all these contradictions are the lightning play of love--they
were fond of laughing, and laughed with a charming freedom, and so familiarly that they
sometimes seemed almost like two boys. Nevertheless, though hearts intoxicated with chas-
tity may be all unconscious, nature, who can never be forgotten, is always present. There
she is, with her aim, animal yet sublime; and whatever may be the innocence of souls, we
feel, in the most modest intercourse, the adorable and mysterious shade which separates
a couple of lovers from a pair of friends.

They worshipped each other.

The permanent and the immutable continue. There is loving, there is smiling and laughing,
and little pouts with the lips, and interlacing of the fingers, and fondling speech, yet
that does not hinder eternity. Two lovers hide in the evening, in the twilight, in the
invisible with the birds, with the roses, they fascinate each other in the shadow with
their hearts which they throw into their eyes, they murmur, they whisper, and during all
this time immense librations of stars fill infinity.



II. THE STUPEFACTION OF COMPLETE HAPPINESS



THEIR existence was vague, bewildered with happiness. They did not perceive the cholera
which decimated Paris that very month. They bad been as confidential with each other as
they could be, but this had not gone very far beyond their names. Marius had told Cosette
that he was an orphan, that his name was Marius Pontmercy, that he was a lawyer, that he
lived by writing things for publishers, that his father was a colonel, that he was a hero,
and that he, Marius, had quarrelled with his grandfather who was rich. He had also said
something about being a baron; but that had produced no effect upon Cosette. Marius baron!
She did not comprehend. She did not know what that word meant. Marius was Marius. On her
part she had confided to him that she had been brought up at the Convent of the Petit Pic-
pus, that her mother was dead as well as his. that her father's name was M. Fauchelevent,
that he was very kind, that he gave much to the poor, but that he was poor himself, and
that he deprived himself of everything while he deprived her of nothing.

Strange to say, in the kind of symphony in which Marius had been living since he had seen
Cosette, the past, even the most recent. bad become so confused and distant to him that
what Cosette told him satisfied him fully. He did not even think to speak to her of the
night adventure at the Gorbeau tenement, the Thdnardiers, the burning, and the strange
attitude and the singular flight of her father. Marius had temporarily forgotten all
that; he did not even know at night what he had done in the morning, nor where he had
breakfasted, nor who had spoken to him; he had songs in his ear which rendered him deaf
to every other thought; he existed only during the hours in which he saw Cosette. Then,
as he was in Heaven, it was quite natural that he should forget the earth. They were both
supporting with languor the undefinable burden of the immaterial pleasures. Thus live
these somnambulists called lovers.

Alas! who has not experienced all these things? why comes there an hour when we leave
this azure, and why does life continue afterwards?

Love almost replaces thought. Love is a burning forgetfulness of all else. Ask logic then
of passion. There is no more an absolute logical chain in the human heart than there is a
perfect geometrical figure in the celestial mechanics. To Cosette and Marius there was
nothing in being beyond Marius and Cosette. The universe about them had fallen out of
sight. They lived in a golden moment. There was nothing before, nothing after. It is
doubtful if Marius thought whether Cosette had a father. He was so dazzled that all was
effaced from his brain. Of what then did they talk, these lovers? We have seen, of the
flowers, the swallows, the setting sun, the rising of the moon, of all important things.
They had told all, except everything. The all of lovers is nothing. But the father, the
realities, the garret, those bandits, that adventure, what was the use? and was he quite
certain that that nightmare was real? They were two, they adored each other, there was
nothing but that. Everything else was not. It is probable that this oblivion of the hell
behind us is a part of arrival at paradise. Have we seen demons? are there any? have we
trembled: have we suffered? We know nothing now about that. A rosy cloud rests upon it
all.

These two beings, then, were living thus, very high, with all the improbability of nature;
neither at the nadir nor at the zenith, between man and the seraph, above earth, below
the ether, in the cloud; scarcely flesh and bone, soul and ecstasy from head to foot; too
sublimated already to walk upon the earth, and yet too much weighed down with humanity to
disappear in the sky, in suspension like atoms which are awaiting precipitation; apparently
outside of destiny; ignoring that beaten track yesterday, to-day, to-morrow astounded,
swooping, floating; at times, light enough to soar into the infinity; almost ready for the
eternal flight.

They were sleeping awake in this rocking cradle. O splendid lethargy of the real over-
whelmed by the ideal!

Sometimes, beautiful as was Cosette, Marius closed his eyes before her. With closed eyes
is the best way of looking at the soul.

Marius and Cosette did not ask where this would lead them. They looked upon themselves as
arrived. It is a strange demand for men to ask that love should anywhither.



III. SHADOW COMMENCES



JEAN VALIEAN suspected nothing.

Cosette, a little less dreamy than Marius, was cheerful, and that was enough to make Jean
Valjean happy. The thoughts of Cosette, her tender preoccupations, the image of Marius
which filled her soul, detracted nothing from the incomparable purity of her beautiful,
chaste, and smiling forehead. She was at the age when the maiden bears her love as the
angel bears her lily. And then when two lovers have an understanding they always get a-
long well any third person who might disturb their love, is kept in perfect blindness by
a very few precautions, always the same for all lovers. Thus never any objections from
Cosette to Jean Valjean. Did he wish to take a walk? yes, my dear father. Did he wish to
remain at home? very well. Would he spend the evening with Cosette? she was in raptures.
As he always retired at ten o'clock, at such times Marius would not come to the garden
till after that hour, when from the street he would hear Cosette open the glass-door
leading out on the steps. We need not say that Marius was never met by day. Jean Valjean
no longer even thought that Marius was in existence. Once, only, one morning, he happened
to say to Cosette: "Why, you have something white on your back!" The evening before, Mar-
ius, in a transport, had pressed Cosette against the wall.

Old Toussaint who went to bed early, thought of nothing but going to sleep, once her work
was done, and was ignorant of all, like Jean Valjean.

Never did Marius set foot into the house. When he was with Cosettc they hid themselves in
a recess near the steps, so that they could neither be seen nor heard from the street,
and they sat there, contenting themselves often, by way of conversation, with pressing
each other's hands twenty times a minute while looking into the branches of the trees. At
such moments, a thunderbolt might have fallen within thirty paces of them, and they,would
not have suspected it, so deeply was the reverie of the one absorbed and buried in the
reverie of the other.

Limpid purities. Hours all white, almost all alike. Such loves as these are a collection
of lily leaves and dove-down.

The whole garden was between them and the street. Whenever Marius came in and went out,
he carefully replaced the bar of the grating in such a way that no derangement was visi-
ble.

He went away commonly about midnight, returning to Courfeyrac's. Courfeyrac said to Baho-
rel;

"Would you believe it? Marius comes home nowadays at one. o'clock in the morning."

Bahorel answered:

"What would you expect? every young person has his wild oats." At times Courfeyrac folded
his arms, assumed a serious air, and said to Marius:

"You are getting dissipated, young man!"

Courfeyrac, a practical man, was not pleased at this reflection of an invisible paradise
upon Marius; he had little taste for unpublished passions, lie was impatient at them, and
he occasionally would serve Marius with a summons to return to the real.

One morning, he threw out this admonition:

"My dear fellow, you strike me at present as being situated in the moon, kingdom of dream,
province of illusion, capital Soap-Bubble. Come, be a good boy, what is her name?"

But nothing could make Marius "confess." You might have tom his nails out sooner than one
of the two sacred syllables which composed that ineffable name, Cosette. True love is lum-
inous as the dawn, and silent as the grave. Only there was, to Courfeyrac, this change in
Marius, that he had a radiant taciturnity.

During this sweet month of May, Marius and Cosette knew these transcendent joys:

To quarrel and to say monsieur and mademoiselle, merely to say Marius and Cosette better
afterwards;

To talk at length, and with most minute detail, of people who did not interest them in the
least; a further proof that, in this ravislog opera which is called love, the libretto Is
almost nothing;

For Marius, to listen to Cosette talking dress;

For Cosette, to listen to Marius talking politics;

To hear, knee touching knee, the waggons roll along the Rue de Babylon;

To gaze upon the same planet in space, or the same Worm glow In the grass;

To keep silence together; a pleasure still greater than to talk;

Etc., etc.

Meanwhile various complications were approaching.

One evening Marius was making his way to the rendezvous by the Boulevard des In; he usually
walked with his head bent flown; as he was just turning the corner of the Rue Mulct, he
heard some one saying very near him:

"Good evening, Monsieur Marius."

He looked up, and recognised Eponine.

This produced a singular effect upon him. He had not thought even once of this girl since
the day she brought him to the Rue Phtmet, he had not seen her again, and she had completely
gone out of his mind. He had motives of gratitude only towards her; he owed his present hap-
piness to her, and still it was annoying to hint to meet her.

It is a mistake to suppose that passion, when it is fortunate and pure, leads man to a state
of perfection; it leads him simply, as we have said, to a state of forgetfulness. In this
situation man forgets to be bad, but he also forgets to be good. Gratitude, duty, necessary
and troublesome memories, vanish. At any other time Marius would have felt very differently
towards Eponine. Absorbed in Cosette, he had not even dearly m his mind that this Eponine's
name was Eponine Thenardier, and that she bore a name written in his father's will, that
name to which he would have been, a few months before, so ardently devoted. We show Marius
just as he was. His father himself, disappeared somewhat from his soul beneath the splendour
of his love.

He answered with some embarrassment:

"What is it you, Eponine?"

"Why do you speak to me so sternly? Have I done anything to you?"

"No," answered he.

Certainly, he had nothing against her. Far from it. Only, he felt that he could not do oth-
erwise, now that he had whispered to Cosette, than speak coldly to Eponine.

As he was silent, she exclaimed:

"Tell me now--"

Then she stopped. It seemed as if words failed this creature, once so reckless and so bold.
She attempted to smile and could not. She resumed:

"Well?--"

Then she was silent again, and stood with her eyes cast down. "Good evening, Monsieur Marius,"
said she all at once abruptly, and she went away.



IV. CAB ROLLS IN ENGLISH AND YELPS IN ARGOT



THE next day, it was the 3rd of June, the 3rd of June, 1832, a date which must be noted on ac-
count of the grave events which were at that time suspended over the horizon of Paris like
thunder-clouds.

Marius, at nightfall, was following the same path as the evening before, with the same rap-
turous thoughts in his heart, when he perceived, under the trees of the boulevard, Eponine
approaching him. Two days in succession, this was too much. turned hastily, left the boule-
vard, changed his route, and went to the Rue Pima through the Rue Monsieur.

This caused Eponine to follow him to the Rue Plumet, a thing which she had not done before.
She bad been content until then to see him on his way through the boulevard without even
seeking to meet him. The evening previous, only, had she tried to speak to him.

Eponine followed him then, without a suspicion on his part. She saw him push dside the bar
of the grating, and glide into the garden.

"Why!" said she, "he is going into the house."

She approached the grating, felt of the bars one after another, and easily recognised the
one which Marius had displaced.

She murmured in an undertone, with a mournful accent: "None of that, Lisette!"

She sat down upon the surbase of the grating, close beside the bar, as if she were guarding
it. It was just at the point at which the grating joined the neighbouring wall. There was an
obscure corner there, in which Eponine was entirely hidden.

She remained thus for more than an hour, without stirring and without breathing, a prey to
her own thoughts.

About ten o'clock in the evening, one of the two or three passers in the Rue Plumet, a be-
lated old bourgeois who was hurrying through this deserted and ill-famed place, keeping a-
long the garden grating, on reaching the angle which the grating made with the wall, heard
a sullen and threatening voice which said:

"I wouldn't be surprised if he came every evening!"

He cast his eyes about him, saw nobody, dared not look into that dark corner, and was very
much frightened. He doubled his pace.

This person had reason to hasten, for a very few moments afterwards six men, who were walk-
ing separately and at some distance from each other along the wall, and who might have been
taken for a tipsy patrol, entered the Rue Plumet.

The first to arrive at the grating of the garden stopped and waited for the others: in a
second they were all six together.

These men began to talk in a low voice.

"It is Moline," said one of them.

"Is there a cab' in the garden?" asked another.

"I don't know. At all events I have /eve = a bullet which we will make him mmificr."

"Have you some mastic to frangir the mime"

'Dog. 'Drought. From the Spanish Ilevar, ',Eat.

'To break a pane by means of a plaster of mastic, which, sticking to the window, holds the
glass and prevents noise.

"The grating is old,".added a fifth, who had a voice like a ventriloquist.

"So much the better," said the second who had spoken. "It will not criblcra I under the
baaringuc,2 and will not be so hard to fazed:cr.'

The sixth, who bad not yet opened his mouth, began to examine the grating as Eponine had
done an hour before, grasping each bar successively and shaking it carefully. In this way
he came to the bar which Marius had loosened. Just as he was about to lay hold of this bar,
a hand, starting abruptly from the shadow, fell upon his arm, he felt himself pushed sharp-
ly back by the middle of his breast, and a roughened voice said to him without crying out:

"There is a cab."

At the same time he saw a pale girl standing before him.

The man felt that commotion which is always given by the unexpected. He bristled up hide-
ously; nothing is so frightful tb see as ferocious beasts which are startled, their appear-
ance when terrified is terrifying. He recoiled, and stammered:

"What is this creature?"

"Your daughter."

It was indeed Eponine who was speaking to Thenardier.

On the appearance of Eponine the five others, that is to say, CIaquesous, Gueulemer, Babet,
Montparnasse, and l3rujon, approached without a sound, without haste, without saying a word,
with the ominous slowness peculiar to these men of the night.

In their hands might be distinguished some strangely hideous tools. Gueulenter had one of
those crooked crowbars which the prowlers call fanchons.

"Ah, there, what are you doing here? what do you want of us? are you crazy?" exclaimed The-
nardier, as much as one can exclaim in a whisper. "What do you come and hinder us in our
work for?"

Eponine began to laugh and sprang to his neck.

"I am here, my darling father, because I am here. Is there any law against sitting upon the
stones in these days? It is you who shouldn't be here. What are you coming here for, since
it is a biscuit? I told Magnon so. There is nothing to do here. But embrace me now, my dear
good father! What a long time since I have seen you! You are out then?"

Thenardier tried to free himself from Eponine's arms, and muttered:

"Very well. You have embraced me. Yes, I am out. I am not in. Now, be off."

But Eponine did not loose her hold and redoubled her caresses.

"My darling father, how did you do it? You must have a good deal of wit to get out of that!
Tell me about it! And my mother? where is my mother? Give me some news of mamma."

Thenardier answered:

"She is well, I don't know, let me alone, I tell you to be off."

"I don't want to go away just now," said Eponine, With the pettishness of a spoiled child,
"you send me away when here it is four months that I haven't seen you, and when I have hard-
ly had time to embrace you."

And she caught her father again by the neck.

"Ah! come now, this is foolish," said Babet.

"Let us hurry!" said Gueulemer, "the coquezers may come along." The ventriloquist sang this
distich:

Nous if sommes pas le jour de ran,
A becoter papa maman.'

Eponine turned towards the five bandits.

"Why, this is Monsieur Brujon. Good-day, Monsieur Babet. Good-day, Monsieur Claquesous.
Don't you remember me, Monsieur Gueulemer? How goes it, Montparnasse?"

"Yes, they recognise you," said Thenardier. "But good-day, good night, keep off I don't dis-
turb us!"

It is the hour for foxes, and not for pullets," said Montparnasse. You see well enough that
we are going to gontincr logo," 2.added Babet.

Eponine took Montparnasse's hand.

"Take care," said he, "you will cut yourself, I have a lingre 3 open."

"My darling Montparnasse," answered Eponine very gently, "we must have confidence in people.
I am my father's daughter, perhaps. Monsieur Babet, Monsieur Gueulemer, it is I who Was charg-
ed with finding out about this affair."

It is remarkable that Eponine did not speak argot. Since she bad known Marius, that horrid
language had become impossible to her.

She pressed in her little hand, as bony and weak as the band of a corpse, the great rough
fingers of Gueulemer, and continued:

"You know very well that I am not a fool. Ordinarily you believe me. I have done you service
on occasion. Well, I have learned all about this, you would expose yourself uselessly, do you
see. I swear to you that there is nothing to be done in that house."

"There are lone women," said Gueulemer.

"No. The people have moved away."

"The candles have not, anyhow!" said Babet.

And he showed Eponine, through the top of the trees, a light which was moving about in the
garret of the cottage. It was Toussaint, who had sat up to hang out her clothes to dry.

Eponine made a final effort.

"Well," said she, "they are very poor people, and it is a shanty where there isn't a sou."

"Go to the devil!" cried Thenardier. "When we have turned the house over, and when we have
put the cellar at the top and the garret at the bottom, we will tell you what. there is inside,
and whether it is balles, ronds, or brogues."

And he pushed her to pass by.

"My good friend Monsieur Montparnasse," said Eponine, "I beg you, you who are a good boy,
don't go in!"

"Take care, you will cut yourself," replied Montparnasse. Thenardier added. with his deci-
sive tone:

"Clear out, fee, and let men do their work!"

Eponine let go of Montparnasse's hand, which she had taken again. and said:

"You will go into that house then?"

"Just a little!" said the ventriloquist, with a sneer.

Then she placed her back against the grating, faced the six bandits who were armed to the
teeth, and to whom the night gave faces of demons, and said in a low and firm voice:

"Well, I, won't have it."

They stopped astounded. The ventriloquist, however, finished his sneer. She resumed.

"Friends! listen to me. That isn't the thing. Now I speak. In the first place, if you go into
the Braden, if you touch this grating. I shall cry out. I shall rap on doors, I shall wake
everybody up, I shall have all six of your arrested. I shall call the serpents de vine."

"She would do it," said Thenardier in a low tone to Brujon and the ventriloquist.

She shook her head, and added:

"Beginning with my father!"

Thenardier approached.

"Not so near, goodman!" said she.

He drew back. muttering between his teeth: "Why, what is the matter with her?" and he added:

"Slut!"

She began to laugh in a terrible way:

"As you will, you shall not go in. I am not the daughter of a dog, for I am the daughter of
a wolf. There are six of you, what is that to me? You are men. Now, I am a woman. I am not

afraid of not a bit. I tell you that you shall not go into this house, becau does not please
me. If you approach, I shall bark. I told you am the cab, I don't care for you. Go your ways,
you annoy me. where you like, but don't come here, I forbid it! You have knive have feet and
hands. That makes no difference, come on now!"

She took a step towards the bandits, she was terrible, she b to laugh.

"The devil! I am not afraid. This summer, I shall be hungry; t winter, I shall be cold. Are
they fools, these geese of men, to thi that they can make a girl afraid! Of what! afraid? Ah,
pshaw, i deed! Because you have hussies of mistresses who hide under the be when you raise
your voice, it won't do here! I, I am not afraid o anything!"

She kept her eye fixed upon Thenardier, and said;

"Not even you, father!"

Then she went on, casting her ghastly bloodshot eyes over the bandits:

"What is it to me whether somebody picks me up to-morrow on the pavement of the Rue Plumet,
beaten to death with a dub by my father, or whether they find me in a year in the ditches of
Saint Cloud, or at the Ile de Cygnes, among the old rotten rubbish and the dead dogs?"

She was obliged to stop; a dry cough seized her, her breath came like a rattle from her nar-
row and feeble chest.

She resumed;

"I have but to cry out, they come, bang! You are six; but I ant everybody."

Thenardier made a movement towards her.

" 'Proach not!" cried she.

He stopped, and said to her mildly:

"Well, no; I will not approach, but don't speak so loud. Daughter, you want then to hinder
us in our work? Still we must earn our livmg. Have you no love for your father now?"

"You bother me," said Eponine.

"Still we must live, we must eat

"Die."

Saying which, she sat down on the surbase of the grating, humming:

Mon bras si dodu,
Ma jambe bien faite,
Et le temps perdu'
So plump is my arm,
My leg so well formed,
'et my time has no charm.

She had her elbow on her knee and her chin in her hand, and she was swinging her foot with
an air of indifference. I ler dress was lull of holes, and showed her sharp shoulder-blades.
The neighbouring lamp lit up her profile and her attitude. Nothing could be more resolute
or more surprising.

The six assassins, sullen and abashed at being held in check by a girl, went under the pro-
tecting shade of the lantern and held counsel, with humiliated and furious shrugs of their
shoulders.

She watched them the while with a quiet yet indomitable air.

"Something is the matter with her, said Babet. "Some reason. Is she in love with the cab?
But it is a pity to lose it.Two women, an old fellow who lodges in a back-yard, there are
pretty good curtains at the windows. The old fellow must be a guinal. I think it is a
good thing."

"Well, go in the rest of you," exclaimed Montparnasse. "Do the thing. I will stay here with
the girl, and if she trips--"

He made the open knife which he had in his hand gleam in the light of the lantern.

Thenardier said not a word and seemed ready for anything. Brujon, who was something of an
oracle, and who had, as we know, "got up the thing," had not yet spoken. He appeared thought-
ful. He had a reputation for recoiling from nothing, and they knew that he had plundered,
from sheer bravado, a police station. Moreover he made verses and songs, which gave him a
great authority. Babet questioned him.

"You don't say anything, Brujon?"

Brujon remained silent a minute longer, then he shook his head in several different ways,
and at last decided to speak.

"Here: I met two sparrows fighting this morning; to-night, I run against a woman quarrelling.
All this is bad. Let us go away." They went away.

As they went, Montparnasse murmured;

"No matter, if they had said so, I would have made her feel the weight of my band.

Babel. answered:

"Not I. I don't strike a lady."

At the corner of the street, they stopped and exchanged this enigmatic dialogue in a smoth-
ered voice:

"Where are we going to sleep to-night?"

"Under Path:."

"Have you the key of the grating with you, Thenardier?"

"Humph."

Eponine, who had not taken.her eyes off from them, saw them turn back the way they had come.
She rose and began to creep along the walls and houses behind them. She followed them as far
as the boulevard. There, they separated, and she saw these men sink away in the obscurity
into which they seemed to melt.



V. THINGS OF THE NIGHT


AFTER THE DEPARTURE of the bandits, the Rue Plumet resumed its quiet night appearance.

What had just taken place in this street would not have astonished a forest. The trees, the
copse, the heath, the branches roughly intertangled, the tall grass, have a darkly mysterious
existence; this wild multitude sees there sudden apparitions of the invisible; there what is
below man distinguishes through the dark what is above man; and there in the night meet
things unknown by us living men. Nature, bristling and tawny, is startled at certain ap-
proaches in which she seems to feel the supernatural. The forces of the shadow know each
other, and have mysterious balancings among themselves. Teeth and claws dread the intangible.
Bloodthirsty brutality, voracious and starving appetites in quest of prey, instincts armed
with nails and jaws which find in the belly their origin and their object, behold and snuff
with anxiety the impassive spectral figure prowling beneath a shroud, standing in its dim
shivering robe, and seeming to them to live with a dead and terrible life. These brutalities,
which are matter only, confusedly dread having to do with the infinite dark condensed into
an unknown being. A black figure barring the passage stops the wild beast short. That which
comes from the graveyard intimidates and disconcerts that which comes from the den; the fer-
ocious is afraid of the sinister: wolves recoil before a ghoul.



VI. MARIUS BECOMES SO REAL AS TO GIVE COSETTE HIS ADDRESS



WHILE this species of dog in human form was mounting guard over the grating, and the six ban-
dits were slinking away before a girl, Marius was with Cosette.

Never had the sky been more studded with stars, or more charming, the trees more tremulous,
the odour of the shrubs more penetrating; never had the birds gone to sleep in the leaves with
a softer sound; never had all the harmonies' of the universal serenity better responded to the
interior music of love; never had Marius been more enamoured, more happy, more in ecstasy. But
he had found Cosette sad. Cosette had been weeping. Her eyes were red.

It was the first cloud in this wonderful dream.

Marius' first word was;

"What is the matter?"

"See."

Then she sat down on the seat near the stairs, and as he took his place all trembling beside
her, she continued;

"My father told me this morning to hold myself in readiness, that he had business, and that
perhaps we should go away."

Marius shuddered from head to foot.

When we are at the end of life, to die means to go away; when we are at the beginning, to go
away means to die.

For six weeks Marius, gradually, slowly, by degrees, had been each day taking possession of
Cosette. A possession entirely ideal, but thorough. As we have entirely explained, in the
first love, the soul is taken far before the body; afterwards the body is taken far before
the soul; sometimes the soul is not taken at all; the Faublas and the Prudhommes add; be-
cause there is none; but the sarcasm is fortunately a blasphemy. Marius then possessed Cos-
ette, as minds possess; but he wrapped her in his whole soul, and clasped her jealously
with an incredible conviction. He possessed her smile, her breath, her perfume, the deep
radiance of her blue eyes, the softness of her skin when he touched her hand, the charming
mark that she had on her neck, all her thoughts. They had agreed never to go to sleep with-
out dreaming of each other, and they had kept their word. He possessed all Cosette's dreams.
He beheld untiringly, and he sometimes touched with his breath, the short hairs at the back
of her neck, and he declared to himself that there was not one of those little hairs which
did not belong to him, Marius. He gazed upon and adored the things which she wore, her knot
of ribbon, her gloves, her cuffs, her slippers, as sacred objects of which he was master.
He thought that he was lord of those pretty shell-combs which she had in her hair, and he
said to himself even, dim and confused stammerings of dawning desire, that there was not a
thread of her dress, not a mesh in her stockings, not a fold of her corset, which was not
his. At Cosette's side, he felt near his wealth, near his property, near his despot, and
near his slave. It seemed as if they so mingled their souls, that if they desired to take
them back again, it would have been impossible to identify them. "This one is mine." "No,
it is mine." "I assure you that you are mistaken. This is really I." "What you take for
you, is I." Marius was something which was a part of Cosette, and Cosette was something
which was a part of Marius. Marius felt Cosette living within him. To have Cosette, to
possess Cosette, this to him was not separable from breathing. Into the midst of this
faith, of this intoxication, of this virginal possession, marvellous and absolute, of
this sovereignty, these words; "We are going away," fell all at once, and the sharp
voice of reality cried to him: "Cosette is not yours!"

Marius awoke. For six weeks Marius had lived, as we have said, outside of life; this
word, going away, brought. him roughly back to it.

He could not find a word. She said to him in her turn. "What is the matter ?"

He answered so low that Cosette hardly heard him :

"I don't understand what you have said."

She resumed:

"This morning my father told me to arrange all my little affairs and to be ready, that
he would give me his clothes to pack, that he was obliged to take a journey, that we were
going away, that we must have a large trunk for me and a small one for him, to get 'all
that ready within a week from now, and that we should go perhaps to England."

"But it is monstrous!" exclaimed Marius.

It is certain that at that moment, in Marius' mind, no abuse of power, no violence, no
abomination of the most cruel tyrants, no action of Busiris, Tiberius, or Henry VIII.,
was equal in ferocity to this: M. Fauchelevent taking his daughter to England because
he has business.

He asked in a feeble voice:

"And when would you start ?"

"He didn't say when,"

"And when should you return ?"

"He didn't say when."

Marius arose, and said coldly:

"Cosette, shall you go ?"

Cosette turned upon him her beautiful eyes full of anguish and answered with a sort of
bewilderment:

"Where?"

"To England? shall you go?"

"Why do you speak so to me?"

"I ask you if you shall go ?"

"What would you have me do?" said she, clasping her hands. "So, you will go?"

"If my father goes?"

"So, you will go?"

Cosette took Marius' hand and pressed it without answering.

"Very well," said Marius. "Then I shall go elsewhere."

Cosette felt the meaning of this word still more than she understood it. She turned so
pale that her face became white in the darkness. She stammered :

"What do you mean?"

Marius looked at her, then slowly raised his eyes towards heaven and answered;

"Nothing."

When his eyes were lowered, he saw Cosette smiling upon him. The smile of the woman whom
we love has a brilliancy which we can see by night.

"How stupid we are! Marius, I have an idea."

"What?"

"Go if we go! I will tell you where! Come and join me where I am!"

Marius was now a man entirely awakened. He had fallen back into reality. He cried to Cos-
ette:

"Go with you? are you mad? But it takes money, and I have none! Go to England? Why I owe
now, I don't know, more than ten louis to Courfeyrac, one of my friends whom you do not
know! Why I have an old hat which is not worth three francs, I have a coat from which
some of the buttons are gone in front, my shirt is all torn, my elbows are out, my boots
let in the water; for six weeks I have not thought of it, and I have not told you about
it. Cosette! I am a miserable wretch. You only see me at night, and you give me your
love; if you should see me by clay, you would give me a sou! Go to England? All! I have
not the means to pay for a passport!"

He threw himself against a tree which was near by, standing with his arms above his head,
his forehead against the bark, feeling neither the tree which was chafing his skin. nor
the fever which was hammering his temples, motionless, and ready to fall, like a statue
of Despair.

He was a long time thus. One might remain through eternity in such abysses. At last he
turned. He heard behind him a little stifled sound, soft and sad.

It was Cosette sobbing.

She had been weeping more than two hours while Marius had been thinking.

He came to her, fell on his knees, and, prostrating himself slowly, he took the tip of
her foot which peeped from under her dress and kissed it.

She allowed it in silence. There are moments when woman accepts, like a goddess sombre
and resigned, the religion of love.

"Do not weep," said he.

She murmured;

"Because I am perhaps going away, and you cannot come!" He continued;

"Do you love me?"

She answered him by sobbing out that word of Paradise which is never more enrapturing
than when it comes through tears;

"I adore you."

He continued with a tone of voice which was an inexpressible CUM:

"Do not weep. Tell me, will you do this for me, not to weep?" "Do you love me, too?"
said she.

He caught her hand.

Because I have never given my word of honour to anybody, because I stand in awe of my
word of honour. I feel that my father is at my side. Now, I give you my most sacred
word of honour that, if you go away, I shall die."

There was in the tone with which he pronounced these.words a melancholy so solemn and
so quiet, that Cosette trembled. She felt that chill which is given by a stern and true fact
passing over us. From the shock she ceased weeping.

"Now listen," said he, "do not expect me to-morrow"

"Why not?"

"Do not expect me till the day after tomorrow!"

"Oh! why not?"

"You will see."

"A day without seeing you! Why, that is impossible."

"Let us sacrifice one day to gain perhaps a whole life."

And Marius added in an under tone, and aside:

"He is a man who changes none of his habits, and he has never received anybody till
evening."

"What man are you speaking of?" inquired Cosette.

"Me? I said nothing."

"What is it you hope for, then?"

"Wait till day after to-morrow."

"You wish it?"

"Yes, Cosette."

She took his head in both her hands, rising on tiptoe to reach his height, and striving
to see his hope in his eyes.

Marius continued;

"It occurs to me, you must know my address, something may hall' pen, we don't know; I
live with that friend named Courfeyrac, Rue de la Verrerie, number 16."

He put his hand in his pocket, took out a penknife, and wrote with the blade upon the
plastering of the wall;

16, Rue de la Verrerie.

Cosette, meanwhile, began to look into his eyes again.

"Tell me your idea. Marius, you have an idea. Tell me. Oh! tell me, so that I may pass
a good night!"

"My idea is this: that it is impossible that God should wish to separate us. Expect me
day after to-morrow."

"What shall I do till then?" said Cosette. "You, you are out doors! you go, you come!
How happy men are. I have to stay alone. Oh! how sad I shall be! What is it you are going
to do to-morrow evening, tell me?"

"I shall try a plan."

"Then I will pray God, and I will think of you from now till then, that you may succeed.
I will not ask any more questions, since you wish me not to. You are my master. I shall
spend my evening tomorrow singing that music of Euryanthe which you love, and which you
came to hear one evening behind my shutter. But day after tomorrow you will come early;
I shall expect you at night, at nine o'clock precisely. I forewarn you. Oh, dear! how
sad it is that the days are long!You understand;--when the clock strikes nine, I shall
be in the garden."

"And I too."

And without saying it, moved by the same thought, drawn on by those electric currents
which put two lovers in continual communication, both intoxicated with pleasure even
in their grief. they fell into each other's arms, without perceiving that their lips
were joined, while their uplifted eyes, overflowing with ecstasy and full of tears,
were fixed upon the stars.

When Marius went out, the street was empty. It was the moment when Eponine was follow-
ing the bandits to the boulevard.

While Marius was thinking with his head against the tree, an idea had passed through
his mind: an idea, alas! which he himself deemed senseless and impossible. He had
formed a desperate resolution.



VII. THE OLD HEART AND YOUNG HEART IN PRESENCE



GRANDFATHER GILLENORMAND had, at this period, fully completed his ninety-first
year. He still lived with Mademoiselle Gillenormand, Rue des Mlles du Cal wire, No. 6, in
that old house which belonged to him. He was, as we remember, one of those antique
old men who await death still erect, whom age loads without making them stoop, and
whom grief itself does not bend.

Still, for some time, his daughter had said: "My father is failing." He no longer
beat the servants; he struck his cane with less animation on the landing of the
stairs, when Basque was slow in opening the door. The revolution of July had hardly
exasperated him for six months. He had seen almost tranquilly in the Moniteur if this
coupling of words: M. Humblot Conte, peer of France. The fact is, that the old man
was filled with dejection. He did not bend, he did not yield; that was no more a
part of his physical than of his moral nature: but he felt himself interiorly fail-
ing. Four years he had been waiting for Marius, with his foot down, that is just the
word, in the conviction that that naughty little scapegrace would ring at his door
some day or other: now he had come, In certain gloomy hours, to say to himself that
even if Marius should delay, but little longer--lt was not death that was insupport-
able to him; it was the idea that perhaps be should never see Marius again. Never
see Marius again,--that had not, even for an instant, entered into his thought until
this day; now this idea began to appear to him, and it chilled him. Absence, as al-
ways happens when feelings are natural and true, had only increased his grandfather's
love for the ungrateful child who had gone away like that. It is on December nights,
with the thermometer at zero, that we think most of the sun. M. Gillenormand was, or
thought himself, in any event, incapable of taking a step, he the grandfather, to-
wards his grandson; "I would die first," said he. He acknowledged no fault on his
part; but he thought of Marius only with a deep tenderness and the mute despair of
an old goodman who is going away into the darkness.

He was beginning to lace his teeth, which added to his sadness.

M. Gillenormand, without however acknowledging it to himself, for he would have been
furious and ashamed at it, had never loved a mistress as he loved Marius.

He had had hung in his room, at the foot of his bed, as the first thing which he wish-
ed to see on awaking, an old portrait of his other daughter, she who was dead, Madame
Pontmercy, a portrait taken when she was eighteen years old. He looked at this por-
trait incessantly. He happened one day to say, while looking at it:

"I think it looks like the child."

"Like my sister?" replied Mademoiselle Gillenormand. "Why yes."

The old man added:

"And like him also."

Once, as he was sitting, his knees pressed together, and his eyes almost closed, in a
posture of dejection, his daughter ventured to saw to him:

"Father, are you still so angry with him?"

She stopped, not daring to go further.

"With whom?" asked he.

"With that poor Marius?"

He raised his old head, laid his thin and wrinkled fist upon the table, and cried in
his most irritated and quivering tone:

"Poor Marius, you say? That gentleman is a rascal, a worthless knave, a little un-
grateful vanity, with no heart, no soul, a proud, a wicked man!"

And he turned away that his daughter might not see the tear he had in his eyes.

Three days later, after a silence which had lasted for four hours, he said to his
daughter snappishly:

"I have had the honour to beg Mademoiselle Gillenormand never to speak to me of him."

Aunt. Gillenormand gave up all attempts and came to this profound diagnosis: "My fa-
ther never loved my sister very much after her folly. It is clear that he detests
Marius."

"After her folly" meant: after she married the colonel.

Still, as may have been conjectured, Mademoiselle Gillenormand had failed in her at-
tempt to substitute her favourite, the officer of lancers, for Marius. The supplanter
Theodule had not succeeded. Monsieur Gillenormand had not accepted the quid pro quo.
The void in the heart does not accommodate itself to a proxy. Theodule, for his part,
even while snuffing the inheritance, revolted at the drudgery of pleasing. The good-
man wearied the lancer, and the lancer shocked the goodman. Lieutenant Theodule was
lively doubtless, but a babbler; frivolous, but vulgar; a good liver, but of had com-
pany; he had mistresses, it is true, and he talked about them a good deal, that is
also true; but he talked about them badly. All his qualities had a defect. Monsieur
Gillenormand was wearied out with hearing him tell of all the favours that he had won
in the neighbourhood of his barracks, Ruc de Babvlone. And then Lieutenant Tht:odule
sometimes came in his uniform with the tricolour cockade. This rendered him altogether
insupportable. Grandfather Gillenormand, at last, said to his daughter: "I have had
enough of him, your Theodule. I have little taste for warriors in time of peace. En-
tertain him yourself, if you like. I am not sure, but I like the sabrers even better
than the trailers of the sabre. The clashing of blades in battle is not so wretched,
after all, as the rattling of the sheaths on the pavement. And then, to harness him-
self like a bully, and to strap himself up like a flirt, to wear a corset under a cui-
rass, is to he ridiculous twice over. A genuine man keeps himself at an equal distance
from swagger and roguery. Neither hector, nor heartless. Keep your Theodule for your-
self."

It was of no use for his daughter to say: "Still he is your grandnephew," it turned
out that Monsieur Gillenormand, who was grandfather to the ends of his nails, was not
grand-uncle at all.

In reality, as be had good judgment and made the comparison, Theodule only served
to increase his regret for Marius.

One evening, it was the 4th of June, which did not prevent Monsieur Gillenormand from
having a blazing fire in his fireplace, he had said goodnight to his daughter who was
sewing in the adjoining room. He was alone in his room with the rural scenery, his
feet upon the andirons, half enveloped in his vast coromandel screen with nine folds,
leaning upon his table on which two candles were burning under a green shade, buried
in his tapestried armchair, a book in his hand, but not reading. He was dressed, ac-
cording to his custom, en incroyable, and resembled an antique portrait of Garat.
This would have caused him to be followed in the streets, but hi daughter always cov-
ered him when he went out, with a huge bishop doublet, which hid his dress. At home,
except in gettingup and going to bed. he never wore a dressing-gown. "It gives on old
look," said he.

Monsieur Gillenormand thought of Marius lovingly and bitterly; and, as usual, the bit-
terness predominated. An increase of tenderness always ended by boiling over and turn-
ing into indignation. He was at that point where we seek to adopt a course, and to ac-
cept what rends us. He was just explaining to himself that there was now no longer any
reason for Marius to return, that if he had been going to return, he would have done
so already, that he must give him up. He endeavoured to bring himself to the idea that
it was over with, and that he would die without seeing "that gentleman" again. But his
whole nature revolted; his old paternity could not consent to it. "What?" said he,
this was his sorrowful refrain, "he will not come back!" His bald head had fallen u-
pon his breast, and he was vaguely fixing a lamentable and irritated look upon the em-
bers on his hearth.

In the deepest of this reverie, his old domestic, Basque, came in and asked:

"Can monsieur receive Monsieur Marius?"

The old man straightened up, pallid and like a corpse which rises under a galvanic
shock. All his blood had flown back to his heart. He faltered:

"Monsieur Marius what?"

"I don't know," answer Basque, intimidated and thrown out of ountenance by his master's
appearance. "I have not seen him. vicolette just told me: There is a young man here,
say that it is lonsieur Marius."

M. Gillenormand stammered out in a whisper:

"Show him in."

And he remained in the same attitude, his head shaking, his eyes red on the door. It
opened. A young man entered. It was Marius.

Marius stopped at the door, as if waiting to be asked to come in. His almost wretched
dress was not perceived in the obscurity produced by the green shade. Only his face,
calm and grave, but strangely sad, could be distinguished.

M. Gillenonnand, as if congested with astonishment and joy, sat for some moments
without seeing anything but a light, as when is in presence of an apparition. He was
almost fainting; he perceived Marius through a blinding haze. It was indeed he, it was
Marius!

At last! after four years! He seized him, so to speak, all over at once. He thought
him beautiful, noble, striking, adult, a column, with graceful attitude and pleasing
air. He would gladly have opened his arms, called him, rushed upon him, his heart
melted in rapture, affectionate words welled and overflowed in his breast; indeed,
all his tenderness started up and came to his lips, and, through the contrast which
was the groundwork of his nature, there came forth a harsh word. He said abruptly:

"What is it you come here for?"

Marius answered with embarrassment:

"Monsieur----"

Gillenormand would have had Marius throw himself into his arms. He was displeased
with Marius and with himself. He felt that he was rough, and that Mariuts was cold.
It was to the goodman an insupportable and irritating anguish, to feel himself so ten-
der and so much in tears within, while he could only be harsh without. The bitterness
returned. He interrupted Marius was a sharp tone:

"Then what do you come for?"

This then signified: If you don't come to embrace me. Marius looked at his grandfa-
ther, whose pallor had changed to marble. "Monsieur---"

The old man continued, in a stern voice:

"Do you come to ask my pardon have you seen your fault?"

He thought to put Marius on the track, and that "the child" was going to bend. Marius
shuddered; it was the disavowal of his father which was asked of him; he cast down his
eyes and answered:

"No, monsieur."

"And then." exclaimed the old man impetuously, with a grief which was bitter and full
of anger, "what do you want with me?"

Marius clasped his hands, took a step, and said in a feeble and trembling voice:

"Monsieur, have pity on me."

This word moved M. Gillenormand; spoken sooner, it would have softened him, but it
came too late. The grandfather arose; he supported himself upon his cane with both
hands, his lips were white, his forehead quivered, but his tall stature commanded
the stooping

"Pity on you, monsieur! The youth asks pity from the old man of ninety-one! You are
entering life, I am leaving it; you go to the theatre, the ball, the cafe, the bill-
iard-room; you have wit, you please the women, you are a handsome fellow, while I
cannot leave my chimney corner in midsummer; you are rich, with the only riches there
are, while I have all the poverties of old age; infirmity, isolation. You have your
thirty-two teeth, a good stomach, a keen eye, strength, appetite, health, cheerful-
ness, a forest of black hair, while I have not even white hair left; I have lost my
teeth, I am losing my legs, I am losing my memory, there are three names of streets
which I am always confounding, the Rue Chariot, the Rue du Chaume. and the Rue Saint
Claude, there is where I am; you have the whole future before you full of sunshine,
while I am beginning not to see another drop of it, so deep am I getting into the night;
you are in love, of course, I am not loved by anybody in the world; and you ask pity
of me. Zounds, Moliere forgot this. If that is the' way you jest at the Palais, Messieurs
Lawyers, I offer you my sincere compliments. You are funny fellows."

And the octogenarian resumed in an angry and stern voice: "Come now, what do you
want of me?"

"Monsieur," said Marius, "I know that my presence is displeasing to you, but I come
only to ask one thing of you, and then I will go i away mmediately."

"You are a fool!" said the old man. "Who tells you to go away?"

This was the translation of those loving words which he had deep in his heart: Come,
ask my pardon now! Throw yourself on my neck! M. Gillenormand felt that Marius was
going to leave him in a few moments, that his unkind reception repelled him, that his
harshness was driving him away; he said all this to himself, and his anguish increas-
ed; and as his anguish immediately turned into anger, his harshness augmented. He
would have had Marius comprehended, and Marius did not comprehend; which rendered
the goodman furious. He continued:

"What! you have left me! me, your grandfather, you have left my house to go nobody
knows where; you have afflicted your aunt, you have been, that is clear, it is more
pleasant, leading the life of a bachelor, playing the elegant, going home at all
hours, amusing yourself; you have not given me a sign of life; you have contracted
debts without even telling me to pay them; you have made yourself a breaker of win-
dows and a rioter, and, at the end of four years, you come to my house, and have
nothing to say but that!"

This violent method of pushing the .grandson to tenderness produced only silence on
the part of Marius. M. Gillenormand folded his arms, a posture which with hint was
particularly imperious, and apostrophised Marius bitterly.

"Let us make an end of it. You have come to ask something of me, say you? Well what?
what is it? speak!"

"Monsieur," said Marius, with the look of a man who feels that he is about to fall
into an abyss, "I come to ask your permission to marry."

M. Gillenormand rang. Basque half opened the door.

"Send my daughter in."

A second later--the door opened again. Mademoiselle Gillenormand did not come in,
but showed herself. Marius was standing. mute, his arms hanging down, with the look
of a criminal, M. Gillenormand was coming and going up and down the room. He turned
towards his daughter and said to her:

"Nothing. It is Monsieur Marius. Bid him good evening. Monsieur wishes to marry.
That is all. Go."

The crisp, harsh tones of the old man's voice announced a strange fulness of feel-
ing. The aunt looked at Marius with a bewildered air, appeared hardly to recognise
him, allowed neither a motion nor a syllable to escape her, and disappeared at a
breath from her father, quicker than a dry leaf before a hurricane.

Meanwhile Grandfather Gillenormand had returned and stood with his back to the
fireplace.

"You marry! at twenty-one! You have arranged that! You have nothing but a permis-
sion to ask! a formality. Sit down, monsieur. Well, you have had a revolution since
I had the honour to see you. The Jacobins have had the upper hand. You ought to be
satisfied. You are a republican, are you not, since you are a baron? You arrange
that. The republic is sauce to the barony. Are you decorated by July?--did you take
a bit of the Louvre, monsieur? There is close by here, in the Rue Saint Antoine,
opposite the Rue des Nonaindkres, a ball incrusted in the wall of the third story
of a house with this inscription: July 28th, 1830. Go and see that. That produces
a good effect. All! Pretty things those friends of yours do. By the way, are they
not making a fountain in the square of the monument of M. the Duke de Berry? So
you want to marry? Whom? can the question be asked without indiscretion
He stopped, and, before Marius had had time to answer, be added violently:

"Come now, you have a business? your fortune made? how much do you earn at your
lawyer's trade?"

"Nothing," said Marius, with a firmness and resolution which were almost savage.

"Nothing? you have nothing to live on but the twelve hundred livres which I send
you?"

Marius made no answer. M. Gillenormand continued: "Then I understand the girl is
rich?"

"As I am."

"What no dowry?"

"Some expectations?"

"I believe not."

"With nothing to her back! and what is the father?"

"I do not know."

"What is her name?"

"Mademoiselle Fauchelevent."

"Fauchewhat?"

"Fauchelevent."

"Pttt!" said the old man.

"Monsieur!" exclaimed Marius.

Gillenormand interrupted him with the tone of a man wilt is talking to himself.

"That is it, twenty-one, no business, twelve hundred livres.a year, Madame the Bar-
oness Pontmercy will go to the market to buy two sous' worth of parsley."

"Monsieur," said Marius, in the desperation of the last vanishing hope, "I suppli-
cate you! I conjure you, in the name of heaven, with clasped hands, monsieur, I
throw myself at your feet, allow me to marry her!"

The old man burst into a shrill, dreary laugh, through which he coughed and spoke.

"Ha, ha, ha! you said to yourself, 'The devil! I will go and find that old wig, that
silly dolt What a pity that I am not twenty-five! how I would toss him a good
respectful notice! how I would give him the go-by. Never mind, I will say to him:
Old idiot, you are too happy to see me, I desire to marry, I desire to espouse
mamselle no matter whom, daughter of monsieur no matter what, I have no shoes, she
has no chemise, all right; I desire to throw, to the dogs my,carccr, my future, my
youth, my life; I desire to make a plunge into misery with a wife at my neck, that
is my idea, you must consent to it! and the old fossil will consent.' Go, my boy,
as you like, tie your stone to yourself, espouse your Pousselevent, your Couplevent
--Never, monsieur! never!"

"Father!"

"Never!"

At the tone in which this "never" was pronounced Marius lost all hope. He walked
the room with slow steps, his head bowed down, tottering, more like a man who is
dying than like one who is going away. M. Gillenormand followed him with his eyes,
and, at the moment the door opened and Marius was going out, he took four steps
with the senile vivacity of impetuous and self-willed old men, seized Marius by
the collar, drew him back forcibly into the room, threw him into an armchair, and
said to him:

"Tell me about it!"

It was that single word, father, dropped by Marius, which had caused this revolu-
tion.

Marius looked at him in bewilderment. The changing countenance of M. Gillenormand
expressed nothing now but a rough and ineffable good-nature. The guardian had given
place to the grandfather.

"Come, let us see, speak, tell me about your love scrapes, jabber, tell me all!
Lord! how foolish these young folks are!"

"Father," resumed Marius--

The old man's whole face shone with an unspeakable radiance. "Yes! that is it!
call me father, and you shall see!"

There was now something so kind, so sweet, so open, so paternal, in this abrupt-
ness, that Marius, in this sudden passage from discouragement to hope, was, as it
were, intoxicated, stupefied. He was sitting near the tables, the light of the
candle made the wretchedness of his dress apparent, and the grandfather gazed at
it in astonishment.

"Well, father," said Marius--

"Come now," interrupted M. Gillenormand, "then you really haven't a sou? you are
dressed like a robber."

He fumbled in a drawer and took out a purse, which he laid upon the table:

"Here, there is a hundred lottis, buy yourself a bat."

"Father," pursued Marius, "my good father, if you knew. I love her. You don't
realise it; the first time that I saw her was at the Luxembourg, she came there;
in the beginning I did not pay much attention to her, and then I do not know how
it came about, 1 fell in love with her. Oh! how wretched it has made me! Now at
last I see her every day, at her own house, her father does not know it, only
think that they are going away, we see each other in the garden in the evening,
her father wants to take her to England, then I said to myself: I will go and see
my grandfather and tell him about it. I should go crazy in the first place, I
should die, I should make myself sick, I should throw myself into the river. I
must marry her because I should go crazy. Now, that is the whole truth, I do not
believe that 1 have forgotten anything. She lives in a garden where there is a
railing, in the Rue Plumet. It is near the Invalides."

Grandfather Gillenormand, radiant with joy, had sat down by Marius' side. While
listening to hint and enjoying the sound of his voice, he enjoyed at the same
time a long pinch of snuff. At that word, Rue Plumet, he checked his inspiration
and let the rest of his snuff fall on his knees.

"Rue Plumet!--you say Rue Plumet?--Let us see now!--Are there not
some barracks down there? Why yes, that is it. Your cousin ThEodule has
told me about her. The lancer, the officer.--A lassie, my good friend, a
lassie!--Lord yes, Rue Plumet. That is what used to be called Rue Blomet.
It comes back to me now. I have heard tell about this little girl of the
grating in the Rue Plumet. In a garden, a Pamela. Your taste is not bad. They
say she is nice. Between ourselves, I believe that ninny of a lancer has paid
his court to her a little. I do not know how far it went. After all that does
not amount to anything. And then, we must not believe him. He is a
boaster. Marius! I think it is very well for a young man like you to be in
love. It belongs to your age. I like you better in love than as a Jacobin. I
like you better taken by a petticoat, Lord! by twenty petticoats, than by
Monsieur de Robespierre. For my part, I do myself this justice that in the
matter of sansculottes, I have never liked anything but women. Pretty
women are pretty women, the devil! there is no objection to that. As to the
little girl, she receives you unknown to papa. That is all right. I have had
adventures like that myself. More than one. Do you know how we do? we
don't take the thing ferociously; we don't rush into the tragic; we don't
conclude with marriage and with Monsieur the Mayor and his scarf. We
are altogether a shrewd fellow. We have good sense. Slip over it, mortals,
don't marry. We come and find grandfather who is a goodman at heart, and
who almost always has a few rolls of louis in an old drawer; we say to him:

'Grandfather, that's how it is.' And grandfather says: 'That is all natural.
Youth must fare and old age must wear. I have been young, you will be old.
Go on, my boy, you will repay this to your grandson. There are two hundred
pistoles. Amuse yourself, roundly! Nothing better! that is the way the
thing should be done. We don't marry, but that doesn't hinder.' You under-
stand me?"

Marius, petrified and unable to articulate a word, shook his head.

The goodman burst into a laugh, winked his old eye, gave him a tap on
the knee, looked straight into his eyes with a significant and sparkling
expression, and said to him with the most amorous shrug of the shoulders:

"Stupid! make her your mistress."

Marius turned pale. He had understood nothing of all that his grand-
father had been saying. This rigmarole of Rue Blomet, of Pamela, of
barracks, of a lancer, had passed before Marius like a phantasmagoria.
Nothing of all could relate to Cosette, who was a lily. The goodman was
wandering. But this wandering had terminated in a word which Marius did
understand, and which was a deadly insult to Cosette. That phrase, make
her your mistress, entered the heart of the chaste young man like a sword.

He rose, picked up his hat which was on the floor, and walked towards
the door with a firm and assured step. There he turned, bowed profoundly
before his grandfather, raised his head again and said:

"Five years ago you outraged my father; to-day you have outraged my
wife. I ask nothing more of you, monsieur. Adieu."

Grandfather Gillenormand, astounded, opened his mouth, stretched
out his arms, attempted to rise, but before he could utter a word, the door
closed and Marius had disappeared.

The old man was for a few moments motionless, and as it were thunder-stricken,
unable to speak or breathe, as if a hand were clutching his throat. At last
he tore himself from his chair, ran to the door as fast as a man who is
ninety-one can run, opened it and cried:

"Help! help!"

His daughter appeared, then the servants. He continued with a pitiful
rattle in his voice:

"Run after him! catch him! what have I done to him! he is mad! he is
going away! Oh! my God! oh! my God!--this time he will not come back!"

He went to the window which looked upon the street, opened it with
his tremulous old hands, hung more than half his body outside, while
Basque and Nicolette held him from behind, and cried:

"Marius! Marius! Marius! Marius!"

But Marius was already out of hearing, and was at that very moment
turning the corner of the Rue Saint Louis.

The octogenarian carried his hands to his temples two or three times,
with an expression of anguish, drew back tottering, and sank into an
armchair, pulseless, voiceless, tearless, shaking his head, and moving
his lips with a stupid air, having now nothing in his eyes or in his
heart but something deep and mournful, which resembled night.



　　　BOOK NINTH
WHERE ARE THEY GOING?



I. JEAN VALJEAN



THAT VERY DAY, towards four o'clock in the afternoon, Jean Valjean was
sitting alone upon the reverse of one of the most solitary embankments of
the Champ de Mars. Whether from prudence, or from a desire for meditation,
or simply as a result of one of those insensible changes of habits
which creep little by little into all lives, he now rarely went out with
Cosette. He wore his working-man's waistcoat, brown linen trousers, and
his cap with the long visor hid his face. He was now calm and happy in
regard to Cosette; what had for some time alarmed and disturbed him was
dissipated; but within a week or two anxieties of a different nature had
come upon him. One day, when walking on the boulevard, he had seen
Thenardier; thanks to his disguise, Thenardier had not recognised him; but
since then Jean Valjean had seen him again several times, and he was now
certain that Thenardier was prowling about the quartier. This was sufficient
to make him take a serious step. Thenardier there! this was all dangers
at once. Moreover, Paris was not quiet: the political troubles had this
inconvenience for him who had anything in his life to conceal, that the
police had become very active, and very secret, and that in seeking to track
out a man like Pepin or Morey, they would be very likely to discover a man
like Jean Valjean. Jean Valjean had decided to leave Paris, and even France,
and to pass over to England. He had told Cosette. In less than a week he
wished to be gone. He was sitting on the embankment in the Champ de
Mars, revolving all manner of thoughts in his mind, Thenardier, the police,
the journey, and the difficulty of procuring a passport.

On all these points he was anxious.

Finally, an inexplicable circumstance which had just burst upon him,
and with which he was still warm, had added to his alarm. On the morning
of that very day, being the only one up in the house, and walking in the
garden before Cosette's shutters were open, he had suddenly come upon this
line scratched upon the wall, probably with a nail.

16, Rue de la Verrerie.

It was quite recent, the lines were white in the old black mortar, a tuft
of nettles at the foot of the wall was powdered with fresh fine plaster. It
had probably been written during the night. What was it? an address? a signal
for others? a warning for him? At all events, it was evident that the gar-
den had been violated, and that some persons unknown had penetrated into
it. He recalled the strange incidents which had already alarmed the house.
His mind worked upon this canvass. He took good care not to speak to
Cosette of the line written on the wall, for fear of frightening her.

In the midst of these meditations, he perceived, by a shadow which the
sun had projected, that somebody had just stopped upon the crest of the
embankment immediately behind him. He was about to turn round, when
a folded paper fell upon his knees, as if a hand had dropped it from above
his head. He took the paper, unfolded it, and read on it this word, written
in large letters with a pencil:

REMOVE.

Jean Valjean rose hastily, there was no longer anybody on the embankment; he
looked about him, and perceived a species of being larger than a child, small-
er than a man, dressed in a grey blouse and trousers of dirtcoloured cotton
velvet, which jumped over the parapet and let itself slide into the ditch of
the Champ de Mars.

Jean Valjean returned home immediately, full of thought.



II. MARIUS



MARIUS HAD LEFT M. Gillenormand's desolate. He had entered with a very
small hope; he came out with an immense despair.

Still, and those who have observed the beginnings of the human heart
will understand it, the lancer, the officer, the ninny, the cousin ThEodule,
had left no shadow in his mind. Not the slightest. The dramatic poet might
apparently hope for some complications from this revelation, made in the
very teeth of the grandson by the grandfather. But what the drama would
gain, the truth would lose. Marius was at that age when we believe no ill;
later comes the age when he believes all. Suspicions are nothing more nor
less than wrinkles. Early youth has none. What overwhelms Othello, glides
over Candide. Suspect Cosette! There are a multitude of crimes which
Marius could have more easily committed.

He began to walk the streets, the resource of those who suffer. He
thought of nothing which he could ever remember. At two o'clock in the
morning he returned to Courfeyrac's, and threw himself, dressed as he was,
upon his mattress. It was broad sunlight when he fell asleep, with that
frightful, heavy slumber in which the ideas come and go in the brain. When
he awoke, he saw standing in the room, their hats upon their heads, all
ready to go out, very busy, Courfeyrac, Enjolras, Feuilly, and Combeferre.
Courfeyrac said to him:

"Are you going to the funeral of General Lamarque?"

It seemed to him that Courfeyrac was speaking Chinese.

He went out some time after them. He put into his pocket the pistols
which Javert had confided to him at the time of the adventure of the 3rd
of February, and which had remained in his hands. These pistols were still
loaded. It would be difficult to say what obscure thought he had in his mind
in taking them with him.

He rambled about all day without knowing where; it rained at intervals, he
did not perceive it; for his dinner he bought a penny roll at a baker's,
put it in his pocket, and forgot it. It would appear that he took a
bath in the Seine without being conscious of it. There are moments when
a man has a furnace in his brain. Marius was in one of those moments. He
hoped nothing more, he feared nothing more; he had reached this condition
since the evening before. He waited for night with feverish impatience,
he had but one clear idea; that was, that at nine o'clock he should see
Cosette. This last happiness was now his whole future;afterwards, dark-
ness. At intervals, while walking along the most deserted boulevards, he
seemed to hear strange sounds in Paris. He roused himself from his reverie,
and said: "Are they fighting?"

At nightfall, at precisely nine o'clock, as he had promised Cosette, he
was in the Rue Plumet. When he approached the grating he forgot everything
else. It was forty-eight hours since he had seen Cosette, he was going
to see her again, every other thought faded away, and he felt now only a
deep and wonderful joy. Those minutes in which we live centuries always
have this sovereign and wonderful peculiarity, that for the moment while
they are passing, they entirely fill the heart.

Marius displaced the grating, and sprang into the garden. Cosette was
not at the place where she usually waited for him. He crossed the thicket
and went to the recess near the steps. "She is waiting for me there," said
he. Cosette was not there. He raised his eyes, and saw the shutters of the
house were closed. He took a turn around the garden, the garden was
deserted. Then he returned to the house, and, mad with love, intoxicated,
dismayed, exasperated with grief and anxiety, like a master who returns
home in an untoward hour, he rapped on the shutters.He rapped, he
rapped again, at the risk of seeing the window open and the forbidding face
of the father appear and ask him: "What do you want?" This was nothing
compared with what he now began to see. When he had rapped, he raised
his voice and called Cosette. "Cosette!" cried he. "Cosette!" repeated he
imperiously. There was no answer. It was settled. Nobody in the garden;
nobody in the house.

Marius fixed his despairing eyes upon that dismal house, as black, as
silent, and more empty than a tomb. He looked at the stone seat where he
had passed so many adorable hours with Cosette. Then he sat down upon
the steps, his heart full of tenderness and resolution, he blessed his
love in the depths of his thought, and he said to himself that since
Cosette was gone, there was nothing more for him but to die.

Suddenly he heard a voice which appeared to come from the street,
and which cried through the trees:

"Monsieur Marius!"

He arose.

"Hey?" said he.

"Monsieur Marius, is it you?"

"Yes."

"Monsieur Marius," added the voice, "your friends are expecting you
at the barricade, in the Rue de la Chanvrerie."

This voice was not entirely unknown to him. It resembled the harsh
and roughened voice of Eponine. Marius ran to the grating, pushed aside
the movable bar, passed his head through, and saw somebody who appeared
to him to be a young man rapidly disappearing in the twilight.



III. M. MABEUF



JEAN VALJEAN'S PURSE was useless to M. Mabeuf. M. Mabeuf, in his ven-
erable childlike austerity, had not accepted the gift of the stars; he did not
admit that a star could coin itself into gold louis. He did not guess that
what fell from the sky came from Gavroche. He carried the purse to the Com-
missary of Police of the quartier, as a lost article, placed by the finder
at the disposition of claimants. The purse was lost, in fact. We need not
say that nobody reclaimed it, and it did not help M. Mabeuf.

For the rest, M. Mabeuf had continued to descend.

The experiments upon indigo had succeeded no better at the Jardin
des Plantes than in his garden at Austerlitz. The year before, he owed his
housekeeper her wages; now, we have seen, he owed three quarters of his
rent. The pawnbroker, at the expiration of thirteen months, had sold the
plates of his Flora. Some coppersmith had made saucepans of them. His
plates gone, being no longer able even to complete the broken sets of his
Flora which he still possessed, he had given up engravings and text at a
wretched price to a secondhand bookseller, as odd copies. He had now no-
thing left of the work of his whole life. He began to eat up the money from
these copies. When he saw that this slender resource was failing him, he
renounced his garden and left it uncultivated. Before this, and for a long
time before, he had given up the two eggs and the bit of beef which he used
to eat from time to time. He dined on bread and potatoes. He had sold his
last furniture, then all his spare bedding and clothing, then his collections
of plants and his pictures; but he still had his most precious books, several
of which were of great rarity, among others Les Quadrins Historiques de la
Bible, edition of 1560, La Concordance des Bibles of Pierre de Besse, Les
Marguerites de la Marguerite of Jean de la Haye with a dedication to the Queen
of Navarre, the book On the charge and dignity of the Ambassador by the Sieur
de Villiers Hotman, a Florilegium Rabbinicum of 1644, a Tibullus of 1567
with this splendid inscription: Venetiis, in adibus Manutianis; finally a Dio-
genes Laertius, printed at Lyons in 1644, containing the famous variations of
the manuscript 411, of the thirteenth century, in the Vatican, and those of
the two manuscripts of Venice, 393 and 394, so fruitfully consulted by
Henri Estienne, andall the passages in the Doric dialect which are found
only in the celebrated manuscript of the twelfth century of the library of
Naples. M. Mabeuf never made a fire in his room, and went to bed by daylight
so as not to burn a candle. It seemed that he had now no neighbours, he was
shunned when he went out; he was aware of it. The misery of a child is in-
teresting to a mother, the misery of a young man is interesting to a young
woman, the misery of an old man is interesting to nobody. This is of all
miseries the coldest. Still Father Mabeuf had not entirely lost his child-
like serenity. His eye regained some vivacity when it was fixed upon his
books, and he smiled when he thought of the Diogenes Laertius, which was
a unique copy. His glass bookcase was the only piece of furniture which he
had preserved beyond what was indispensable.

One day Mother Plutarch said to him:

"I have nothing to buy the dinner with."

What she called the dinner was a loaf of bread and four or five potatoes.

"On credit?" said M. Mabeuf.

"You know well enough that they refuse me."

M. Mabeuf opened his library, looked long at all his books one after
another, as a father, compelled to decimate his children, would look at
them before choosing, then took one of them hastily, put it under his arm,
and went out. He returned two hours afterwards with nothing under his
arm, laid thirty sous on the table, and said:

"You will get some dinner."

From that moment, Mother Plutarch saw settling over the old man's
white face a dark veil which was never lifted again.

The next day, the day after, every day, he had to begin again. M.
Mabeuf went out with a book and came back with a piece of money. As the
bookstall keepers saw that he was forced to sell, they bought from him for
twenty sous what he had paid twenty francs for, sometimes to the same
booksellers. Volume by volume, the whole library passed away. He said at
times: "I am eighty years old however," as if he had some lingering hope
of reaching the end of his days before reaching the end of his books. His
sadness increased. Once, however, he had a pleasure. He went out with a
Robert Estienne which he sold for thirty-five sous on the Quai Malaquais
and returned with an Aldine which he had bought for forty sous in the Rue
des Gres. "I owe five sous," said he to Mother Plutarch, glowing with joy.
That day he did not dine.

He belonged to the Society of Horticulture. His poverty was known
there. The president of this society came to see him, promised to speak to
the Minister of Agriculture and Commerce about him, and did so. "Why,
how now!" exclaimed the minister. "I do believe! An old philosopher! a
botanist! an inoffensive man! We must do something for him!" The next
day M. Mabeuf received an invitation to dine at the minister's. Trembling
with joy, he showed the letter to Mother Plutarch. "We are saved!" said
he. On the appointed day, he went to the minister's. He perceived that his
ragged cravat, his large, old, square coat, and his shoes polished with egg,
astonished the ushers. Nobody spoke to him, not even the minister. About
ten o'clock in the evening, as he was still expecting a word, he heard the
minister's wife, a beautiful lady in a low-necked dress, whom he had not
dared to approach, asking: "What can that old gentleman be?" He returned
home on foot, at midnight, in a driving rain. He had sold an Elzevir to pay
for a fiacre to go with.

He had acquired the habit, every evening before going to bed, of reading
a few pages in his Diogenes Laertius. He knew Greek well enough to
enjoy the peculiarities of the text which he possessed. He had now no other
joy. Some weeks rolled by. Suddenly Mother Plutarch fell sick. There is
one thing sadder than having nothing with which to buy bread from the
baker; that is, having nothing with which to buy drugs from the apothe-
cary. One night, the doctor had ordered a very dear potion. And then,
the sickness was growing worse, a nurse was needed. M. Mabeuf opened his
bookcase; there was nothing more there. The last volume had gone. The
Diogenes Laertius alone remained.

He put the unique copy under his arm and went out; it was the 4th of
June, 1832; he went to the Porte Saint Jacques, to Royol's Successor's, and
returned with a hundred francs. He laid the pile of five-franc pieces on the
old servant's bedroom table, and went back to his room without saying a
word.

The next day, by dawn, he was seated on the stone post in the garden,
and he might have been seen from over the hedge all the morning motion-
less, his head bowed down, his eye vaguely fixed upon the withered beds.
At intervals he wept; the old man did not seem to perceive it. In the a-
fternoon, extraordinary sounds broke out in Paris. They resembled musket
shots, and the clamour of a multitude.

Father Mabeuf raised his head. He saw a gardener going by, and asked:

"What is that?"

The gardener answered, his spade upon his shoulder, and in the most
quiet tone:

"It's the Emeutes."

"What Emeutes?"

"Yes. They are fighting."

"What are they fighting for?"

"Oh! Lordy!" said the gardener.

"Whereabouts?" continued M. Mabeuf.

"Near the Arsenal."

Father Mabeuf went into the house, took his hat, looked mechanically for
a book to put under his arm, did not find any, said: "Ah! it is true!"
and went away with a bewildered air.



　　BOOK TENTH
JUNE 5TH, 1832



I. THE SURFACE OF THE QUESTION



OF WHAT is the Emeute composed? of nothing and of everything. Of an
electricity gradually evolved, of a flame suddenly leaping forth, of a
wandering force, of a passing wind. This wind meets talking tongues,
dreaming brains, suffering souls, burning passions, howling miseries,
and sweeps them away.

Whither?

At hazard. Across the state, across the laws, across the prosperity and
the insolence of others.

Irritated convictions, eager enthusiasms, excited indignations, the
repressed instincts of war, exalted young courage, noble impulses; curiosity,
the taste for change, the thirst for the unexpected, that sentiment which
gives us pleasure in reading the bill of a new play, and which makes the
ringing of the prompter's bell at the theatre a welcome sound; vague
hatreds, spites, disappointments, every vanity which believes that destiny
has caused it to fail; discomforts, empty dreams, ambitions shut in by high
walls, whoever hopes for an issue from a downfall; finally, at the very bot-
tom, the mob, that mud which takes fire, such are the elements of the Emeute.

Whatever is greatest and whatever is most infamous; the beings who
prowl about outside of everything, awaiting an opportunity, bohemians,
people without occupation, loafers about the street-corners, those who
sleep at night in a desert of houses, with no other roof than the cold clouds
of the sky, those who ask their bread each day from chance and not from
labour, the unknown ones of misery and nothingness, the bare arms, the
bare feet, belong to the Emeute.

Whoever feels in his soul a secret revolt against any act whatever of the
state, of life or of fate, borders on the Emeute, and, so soon as it appears,
begins to shiver, and to feel himself uplifted by the whirlwind.

The Emeute is a sort of waterspout in the social atmosphere which sudden-
ly takes form in certain conditions of temperature, and which, in its
whirling, mounts, runs, thunders, tears up, razes, crushes, demolishes,
uproots, dragging with it the grand natures and the paltry, the strong
man and the feeble mind, the trunk of the tree and the blade of straw.
Woe to him whom it sweeps away, as well as to him whom it comes to
smite! It breaks them one against the other.

It communicates to those whom it seizes a mysterious and extraordinary
power. It fills the first comer with the force of events; it makes projectiles
of everything. It makes a bullet of a pebble, and a general of a street porter.
If we may believe certain oracles of crafty politics, from the governmental
point of view, something of the Emeute is desirable. System: the Emeute
strengthens those governments which it does not overthrow. It tests the
army, it concentrates the bourgeoisie; it calls out the muscles of the
police; it determines the strength of the social frame. It is a gymnastic
training; it is almost hygienic. Power is healthier after an Emeute, as a
man is after a rubbing.

The Emeute, thirty years ago, was looked upon from still other points
of view.

There is a theory for everything which proclaims itself "common sense;"
Philinte against Alceste; meditation offered between the true and the
false; explanation, admonition, a somewhat haughty extenuation which,
because it is a mixture of blame and excuse, thinks itself wisdom, and
is often only pedantry. An entire political school, called the compromise
school, has sprung from this. Between cold water and warm water, this is
the party of tepid water. This school, with its pretended depth, wholly
superficial, which dissects effect without going back to the causes, from
the height of a half-science, chides the agitations of the public square.

To hear this school: "The Emeutes with which the achievement of
1830 was complicated, robbed that great event of a portion of its purity.
The revolution of July had been a fine breeze of the popular wind, quickly
followed by blue sky. They brought back the cloudy sky. They degraded
that revolution, at first so remarkable for unanimity, into a quarrel. In
the revolution of July, as in all sudden progress, there were some secret
fractures; the Emeute rendered them sensible. We might say; 'Ah! this is
broken.' After the revolution of July, the deliverance only was felt; after
the Emeutes, the catastrophe was felt.

"Every emeute closes the shops, depresses the funds, terrifies the stock-
board, suspends commerce, shackles business, precipitates failures; no more
money, private fortunes shaken, the public credit disturbed, manufactures
disconcerted, capital hoarded, labour depreciated, fear everywhere; reactions
in all the cities. Hence yawning gulfs. It has been calculated that the first
day of an emeute costs France twenty millions, the second forty, the third sixty.
An emeute of three days costs a hundred and twenty millions, that is to say,
looking only at the financial result, is equivalent to a disaster, a shipwreck,
or the loss of a battle, which should annihilate a fleet of sixty vessels of
the line.

"Beyond a doubt, historically, emeutes had their beauty; the war of the
pavements is no less grand and no less pathetic than the war of the thickets;
in the one there is the soul of forests; in the other the heart of cities; one
has Jean Chouan, the other has Jeanne. The emeutes illuminated, with red light,
but splendidly, all the most original outgrowths of the Parisian character,
generosity, devotion, stormy gaiety, students proving that bravery is part
of intelligence, the National Guard unwavering, bivouacs of shopkeepers,
fortresses of gamins, scorn of death among the people on the street. Schools
and legions came in conflict. After all, between the combatants, there was
only a difference of age; they were the same race; they are the same stoical
men who die at twenty for their ideas, at forty for their families. The army,
always sad in civil wars, opposed prudence to audacity. The emeutes, at the
same time that they manifested the intrepidity of the people, effected the
education of the courage of the bourgeois.

"Very well. But is it all worth the bloodshed? And to the bloodshed add the
future darkened, progress incriminated, anxiety among the best men, noble
liberals despairing, foreign absolutism delighted with these wounds inflicted
on the revolution by itself, the vanquished of 1830 triumphing and saying:
‘We told you so!' Add Paris enlarged perhaps, but France surely diminished.
Add, for we must tell all, the massacres which too often dishonoured the
victory of order grown ferocious over liberty grown mad. Taken altogether,
emeutes have been disastrous."

Thus speaks this almost wisdom with which the bourgeoisie, that
almost people, so gladly contents itself.

As for us, we reject this too broad and consequently too convenient
word, emeute. Between a popular movement and a popular movement, we
make a distinction. We do not ask whether an emeute cost as much as a
battle. In the first place wherefore a battle? Here arises the question of war.
Is war less a scourge than the emeute a calamity? And then, are all emeutes
calamities? And what if the 14th of July did cost a hundred and twenty millions?
The establishment of Philip V. in Spain cost France two thousand
millions. Even at the same price, we should prefer the 14th of July. Moreover,
we put aside these figures, which seem to be reasons, and which are
only words. An emeute given, we examine it in itself. In all that is said by
the theoretic objection above set forth, only the effect is in question, we
seek for the cause.

We specify.



II. THE BOTTOM OF THE QUESTION



THERE IS THE EMEUTE, there is the insurrection; they are two angers; one
is wrong, the other is right. In democratic states, the only governments
founded in justice, it sometimes happens that a fraction usurps; then the
whole rises up, and the necessary vindication of its right may go so far as
to take up arms. In all questions which spring from the collective
sovereignty, the war of the whole against the fraction is insurrection; the
attack of the fraction against the whole is an emeute; according as the
Tuileries contain the King or contain the Convention, they are justly or
unjustly attacked. The same cannon pointed against the multitude is wrong
the 10th of August, and right the 14th of Vendemiaire. Similar in appearance,
different at bottom; the Swiss defend the false, Bonaparte defends the
true. What universal suffrage has done in its freedom and its sovereignty
cannot be undone by the street. So, in the affairs of pure civilisation; the
instinct of the masses, yesterday clear-sighted, may tomorrow be clouded.
The same fury is lawful against Terray, and absurd against Turgot. The
breaking of machines, the pillaging of storehouses, the tearing up of rails,
the demolition of docks, the false means of the multitudes, the denials of
justice by the people to progress, Ramus assassinated by the students,
Rousseau driven out of Switzerland with stones, is the emeute. Israel
against Moses, Athens against Phocion, Rome against Scipio, is the emeute;
Paris against the Bastille is insurrection. The soldiers against Alexander, the
sailors against Christopher Columbus, this is the same revolt; an impious
revolt; why? Because Alexander does for Asia with the sword what Chris-
topher Columbus does for America with the compass; Alexander, like
Columbus, finds a world. These gifts of a world to civilisation are such
extensions of light that all resistance to them is criminal. Sometimes the
people counterfeits fidelity to itself. The mob is traitor to the people. Is
there, for instance, anything more strange than that long and bloody
protest of the contraband saltmakers, a legitimate chronic revolt, which, at
the decisive moment, on the day of safety, at the hour of the people's
victory, espouses the throne, turns Chouan, and from insurrection against
makes itself an emeute for! Dreary masterpieces of ignorance! The contraband
saltmaker escapes the royal gallows, and, with a bit of rope at his neck,
mounts the white cockade. Death to the excise gives birth to Vive le Roi.
Saint Bartholomew assassins, September murderers, Avignon massacres,
assassins of Coligny, assassins of Madame de Lamballe, assassins of Brune,
Miquelets, Verdets, Cadenettes, companions of Jehu, Chevaliers du Brassard,
such is emeute. La Vendee is a great Catholic emeute. The sound of
the advancing right knows itself, it does not always get clear of the quaking
of the overthrown masses; there are foolish rages, there are cracked bells;
every tocsin does not ring with the ring of bronze. The clash of passions
and of ignorances is different from the shock of progress. Rise, if you will,
but to grow. Show me to which side you are going. There is no insurrection
but forward. Every other rising is evil; every violent step backwards is an
emeute; to retreat is an act of violence against the human race. Insurrection
is the Truth's access of fury; the paving stones which insurrection tears
up, throw off the spark of right. These stones leave to the emeute only
their mud. Danton against Louis XVI. is insurrection, Hebert against Danton
is emeute.

Hence it is that, if insurrection, in given cases, may be, as Lafayette
said, the most sacred of duties, an emeute may be the most deadly of
crimes.

There is also some difference in the intensity of caloric; the insurrection
is often a volcano, the emeute is often a fire of straw.

The revolt, as we have said, is sometimes on the part of power.
Polignac is an emeuter; Camille Desmoulins is a governor.

Sometimes, insurrection is resurrection.

The solution of everything by universal suffrage being a fact entirely
modern, and all history anterior to that fact being, for four thousand years,
filled with violated right and the suffering of the people, each period of history
brings with it such protest as is possible to it. Under the Casars there
was no insurrection, but there was Juvenal.

The facit indignatio replaces the Gracchi.

Under the Casars there is the exile of Syene; there is also the man of
the Annales.

We do not speak of the sublime exile of Patmos, who also overwhelms the
real world with a protest in the name of the ideal, makes of a vision a
tremendous satire, and throws upon Nineveh-Rome, upon Babylon-Rome,
upon Sodom-Rome, the flaming reverberation of the Apocalypse.

John upon his rock is the Sphinx upon her pedestal; we cannot comprehend
him; he is a Jew, and it is Hebrew; but the man who wrote the Annales is
a Latin, let us rather say he is a Roman.

As the Neros reign darkly, they should be pictured so. Work with the
graver only would be pale; into the grooves should be poured a concentrated
prose which bites.

Despots are an aid to thinkers. Speech enchained is speech terrible.
The writer doubles and triples his style when silence is imposed by a master
upon the people. There springs from this silence a certain mysterious
fulness which filters and freezes into brass in the thoughts. Compression
in the history produces conciseness in the historian. The granitic solidity
of some celebrated prose is only a condensation produced by the tyrant.
Tyranny constrains the writer to shortenings of diameter which are
increases of strength. The Ciceronian period, hardly sufficient upon Verres,
would lose its edge upon Caligula. Less roundness in the phrase, more
intensity in the blow. Tacitus thinks with his arm drawn back.
The nobility of a great heart, condensed into justice and truth, strikes
like a thunderbolt.

Be it said in passing, it is noteworthy that Tacitus was not historically
superimposed upon Casar. The Tiberii were reserved for him. Casar and
Tacitus are two successive phenomena whose meeting seems mysteriously
avoided by Him who, in putting the centuries on the stage, rules the
entrances and the exits. Casar is grand, Tacitus is grand; God spares these
two grandeurs by not dashing them against each other. The judge, striking
Casar, might strike too hard, and be unjust. God did not will it. The
great wars of Africa and Spain, the destruction of the Cilician pirates,
civilisation introduced into Gaul, into Britain, into Germany, all this glory
covers the Rubicon. There is a delicacy of divine justice here, hesitating to
let loose the terrible historian upon the illustrious usurper, saving Casar
from Tacitus, and according to the genius the extenuating circumstances.

Certainly, despotism is always despotism, even under the despot of genius.
There is corruption under illustrious tyrants, but the moral pestilence
is more hideous still under infamous tyrants. In these reigns nothing
veils the shame; and makers of examples, Tacitus as well as Juvenal,
belabour to best purpose in presence of ignominy without excuse.

Rome smells worse under Vitellius than under Sylla. Under Claudius
and under Domitian, there is a deformity of baseness corresponding to the
ugliness of the tyrant. The foulness of the slaves is a direct result of the
despot; a miasma exhales from these crouching consciences which reflect
the master; the public powers are unclean; hearts are small, consciences are
sunken, souls are puny; this is so under Caracalla, this is so under Commodus,
this is so under Heliogabalus, while there comes from the Roman Senate
under Casar only the rank odour peculiar to the eagle's eyrie.

Hence the coming, apparently late, of the Tacituses and of the Juvenals;
it is at the hour of evidence that the demonstrator appears.

But Juvenal and Tacitus, even like Isaiah in the biblical times, even like
Dante in the Middle Ages, are men; the emeute and the insurrection are
the multitude, which sometimes is wrong, sometimes is right.

In the most usual cases emeute springs from a material fact; insurrection
is always a moral phenomenon. The emeute is Masaniello, the insurrection
is Spartacus. Insurrection borders on the mind, emeute on the stomach;
Gaster is irritated; but Gaster, certainly, is not always wrong. In
cases of famine, emeute, Buzancais, for instance, has a true, pathetic, and
just point of departure. Still it remains emeute. Why? because having reason
at bottom, it was wrong in form. Savage, although right, violent,
although strong, it struck at hazard; it marched like the blind elephant,
crushing; it left behind it the corpses of old men, women, and children; it
poured out, without knowing why, the blood of the inoffensive and the
innocent. To nurture the people is a good end; to massacre it is an evil
means.

Every armed protest, even the most legitimate, even the 10th of August,
even the 14th of July, ends with the same trouble. Before the right is
evolved, there is tumult and foam. In the beginning insurrection is an
emeute, even as the river is a torrent. Ordinarily it ends in this ocean,
revolution. Sometimes, however, coming from those high mountains which
rule the moral horizon, justice, wisdom, reason, right, made of the purest
snow of the ideal, after a long fall from rock to rock, after having reflected
the sky in its transparency and been swollen by a hundred affluents in the
majestic path of triumph, insurrection suddenly loses itself in some bourgeois
quagmire, like the Rhine in a marsh.

All this is of the past, the future is different. Universal suffrage is so
far admirable that it dissolves the emeute in its principle, and by giving a
vote to insurrection, it takes away its arms. The vanishing of war, of the
war of the streets as well as the war of the frontiers, such is inevitable
progress. Whatever may be To-day, peace is To-morrow.

However, insurrection, emeute, in what the first differs from the second,
the bourgeois, properly speaking, knows little of these shades. To him,
all is sedition, rebellion pure and simple, revolt of the dog against the
master, attempt to bite which must be punished by chain and kennel, barking,
yelping, till the day when the dog's head, suddenly enlarged, stands out
dimly in the darkness with a lion's face.

Then the bourgeois cries: Vive le peuple!

This explanation given, what, for history, is the movement of June,
1832? is it an emeute? is it an insurrection?

It is an insurrection.

We may happen, in this presentation of a fearful event, sometimes to
say the emeute, but only to denote the surface facts, and always maintaining
the distinction between the form emeute and the substance insurrection.

This movement of 1832 had, in its rapid explosion and in its dismal
extinction, so much grandeur that those even who see in it only an emeute
do not speak of it without respect. To them it is like a remnant of 1830.
"Excited imaginations," say they, "do not calm down in a day. A revolution
is not cut off square. It has always some necessary undulations before
returning to the condition of peace like a mountain on descending towards
the plain. There are no Alps without their Jura nor Pyrenees without
Asturias.

This pathetic crisis of contemporary history, which the memory of Parisians
calls the epoch of emeutes, is surely a characteristic period amid the
stormy periods of this century. A last word before resuming the narrative.

The events which we are about to relate belong to that dramatic and
living reality which the historian sometimes neglects, for lack of time and
space. In them, however, we insist, in them is the life, the palpitation, the
quivering of humanity. Little incidents, we believe we have said, are, so to
speak, the foliage of great events and are lost in the distance of history. The
epoch known as that of emeutes abounds in details of this kind. The judicial
investigations, for other reasons than history, did not reveal everything, nor
perhaps get to the bottom of everything. We shall therefore bring to light,
among the known and public circumstances, some things which have never
been known, deeds, over some of which oblivion has passed; over others,
death. Most of the actors in those gigantic scenes have disappeared; from
the morrow they were silent; but what we shall relate, we can say that we
saw. We shall change some names, for history relates and does not inform
against, but we shall paint reality. From the nature of the book which we
are writing, we only show one side and an episode, and that certainly the
least known, of the days of the 5th and 6th of June, 1832; but we shall do
it in such a way that the reader may catch a glimpse, under the gloomy veil
which we are about to lift, of the real countenance of that fearful public
tragedy.



III. A BURIAL: OPPORTUNITY FOR RE-BIRTH



IN THE SPRING OF 1832, although for three months the cholera had chilled
all hearts and thrown over their agitation an inexpressibly mournful calm,
Paris had for a long time been ready for a commotion. As we have said, the
great city resembles a piece of artillery; when it is loaded the falling of a
spark is enough, the shot goes off. In June, 1832, the spark was the death
of General Lamarque.

Lamarque was a man of renown and of action. He had had successively, under
the Empire and under the Restoration, the two braveries necessary to the
two epochs, the bravery of the battlefield and the bravery of the rostrum.
He was eloquent as he had been valiant; men felt a sword in his speech.
Like Foy, his predecessor, after having upheld command, he upheld liberty.
He sat between the left and the extreme left loved by the people because
he accepted the chances of the future, loved by the masses because he had
served the emperor well. He was, with Counts Gerard andDrouet, one of
Napoleon's marshals in petto. The treaties of 1815 regarded him as a
personal offence. He hated Wellington with a direct hatred which pleased
the multitude; and for seventeen years, hardly noticing intermediate
events, he had majestically preserved the sadness of Waterloo. In his
death-agony, at his latest hour, he had pressed against his breast a sword
which was presented to him by the officers of the Hundred Days. Napoleon
died pronouncing the word armee, Lamarque pronouncing the word patrie.

His death, which had been looked for, was dreaded by the people as a
loss, and by the government as an opportunity. This death was a mourning.
Like everything which is bitter, mourning may turn into revolt. This is
what happened.

The eve and the morning of the 5th of June, the day fixed for the
funeral of Lamarque, the Faubourg Saint Antoine, through the edge of
which the procession was to pass, assumed a formidable aspect. That
tumultuous network of streets was full of rumour. Men armed themselves
as they could. Some joiners carried their bench-claw "to stave in the doors."
One of them had made a dagger of a shoe-hook by breaking off the hook
and sharpening the stump. Another, in the fever "to attack," had slept for
three nights without undressing. A carpenter named Lombier met a comrade,
who asked him: "Where are you going?" "Well! I have no arms."
"What then?" "I am going to my yard to look for my compasses." "What
for?" "I don't know," said Lombier. A certain Jacqueline, a man of business,
hailed every working-man who passed by with: "Come, you!" He
bought ten sous' worth of wine, and said: "Have you any work?" "No." "Go
to Filspierre's, between the Barriere Montreuil and the Barriere Charonne,
you will find work." They found at Filspierre's cartridges and arms. Certain
known chiefs did the post; that is to say, ran from one house to another to
assemble their people. At Barthelemy's, near the Barriere du Trone, and
at Capet's, at the Petit Chapeau, the drinkers accosted each other seriously.
They were heard to say: "Where is your pistol?" "Under my blouse." "And
yours?" "Under my shirt." On the Rue Traversiere, in front of the Roland
workshop, and in the Cour de la Maison Brulee, in front of Bernier's
machine-shop, groups were whispering. Among the most ardent a certain
Mavot was noticed, who never worked more than a week in one shop, the
masters sending him away, "because they had to dispute with him every
day." Mavot was killed the next day in the barricade, in the Rue Menilmontant.
Pretot, who was also to die in the conflict, seconded Mavot, and
to this question: "What is your object?" answered: "Insurrection." Some
working-men, gathered at the corner of the Rue de Bercy, were waiting for
a man named Lemarin, revolutionary officer for the Faubourg Saint
Marceau. Orders were passed about almost publicly.

On the 5th of June, then, a day of mingled rain and sunshine, the proces-
sion of General Lamarque passed through Paris with the official military
pomp, somewhat increased by way of precaution. Two battalions, drums
muffled, muskets reversed, ten thousand National Guards, their sabres at
their sides, the batteries of artillery of the National Guard, escorted the
coffin. The hearse was drawn by young men. The officers of the Invalides
followed immediately bearing branches of laurel. Then came a countless
multitude, strange and agitated, the sectionaries of the Friends of the
People, the Law School, the Medical School, refugees from all nations,
Spanish, Italian, German, Polish flags, horizontal tri-coloured flags, e-
very possible banner, children waving green branches, stone-cutters and
carpenters, who were on a strike at that very moment, printers recognisable
by their paper caps, walking two by two, three by three, uttering cries, al-
mostall brandishing clubs, a few swords, without order, and yet with a single
soul, now a rout, now a column. Some platoons chose chiefs; a man, armed
with a pair of pistols openly worn, seemed to be passing others in review
as they filed off before him. On the cross alleys of the boulevards, in the
branches of the trees, on the balconies, at the windows, on the roofs, were
swarms of heads, men, women, children; their eyes were full of anxiety. An
armed multitude was passing by, a terrified multitude was looking on.

The government also was observing. It was observing, with its hand
upon the hilt of the sword. One might have seen, all ready to march, with
full cartridge-boxes, guns and musquetoons loaded, in the Place Louis XV.,
four squadrons of carbineers, in the saddle, trumpets at their heads, in the
Latin Quarter and at the Jardin des Plantes, the Municipal Guard, en echelon
from street to street, at the Halle aux Vins a squadron of dragoons, at
La Greve one half of the 12th Light, the other half at the Bastille, the 6th
dragoons at the Celestins, the Court of the Louvre full of artillery. The rest
of the troops were stationed in the barracks, without counting the regiments
in the environs of Paris. Anxious authority held suspended over the
threatening multitude twenty-four thousand soldiers in the city, and thirty
thousand in the banlieue.

Divers rumours circulated in the cortege. They talked of legitimist
intrigues; they talked of the Duke of Reichstadt, whom God was marking
for death at that very moment when the populace was designating him for
empire. A personage still unknown announced that at the appointed hour
two foremen who had been won over, would open to the people the doors
of a manufactory of arms. The dominant expression on the uncovered fore
heads of most of those present, was one of subdued enthusiasm. Here and
there in this multitude, a prey to so many violent, but noble, emotions,
could also be seen some genuine faces of malefactors and ignoble mouths,
which said "pillage!" There are certain agitations which stir up the bottom
of the marsh, and which make clouds of mud rise in the water. A phenomenon
to which "well-regulated" police are not strangers.

The cortege made its way, with a feverish slowness, from the house of
death along the boulevards as far as the Bastille. It rained from time to time;
the rain had no effect upon that throng. Several incidents, the coffin drawn
around the Vendome column, the stones thrown at the Duke de Fitz-James
who was seen on a balcony with his hat on, the Gallic cock torn from a pop-
ular flag and dragged in the mud, a sergent de ville wounded by a sword
thrust at the Porte Saint Martin, an officer of the 12th Light saying aloud:
"I am a republican," the Polytechnic School unlooked for after its forced
countersign, the cries: Vive l'ecole polytechnique! Vive la republique! marked
the progress of the procession. At the Bastille, long and formidable files of
the curious from the Faubourg Saint Antoine made their junction with the
cortege, and a certain terrible ebullition began to upheave the multitude.
One man was heard saying to another: "Do you see that man with the
red beard? it is he who will say when we must draw." It would appear that
the same red beard was found afterwards with the same office in another
emeute; the Quenisset affair.

The hearse passed the Bastille, followed the canal, crossed the little
bridge, and reached the esplanade of the Bridge of Austerlitz. There it
stopped. At this moment a bird's-eye view of this multitude would have
presented the appearance of a comet, the head of which was at the
esplanade, while the tail, spreading over the Quai Bourdon, covered the
Bastille, and stretched along the boulevard as far as the Porte Saint
Martin. A circle was formed about the hearse. The vast assemblage became
silent. Lafayette spoke and bade farewell to Lamarque. It was a touching
and august moment, all heads were uncovered, all hearts throbbed. Sud-
denly a man on horseback, dressed in black, appeared in the midst of the
throng with a red flag, others say with a pike surmounted by a red cap.
Lafayette turned away his head. Exelmans left the cortege.

This red flag raised a storm and disappeared in it. From the Boulevard
Bourdon to the Bridge of Austerlitz one of those shouts which resemble
billows moved the multitude. Two prodigious shouts arose: Lamarque to
the Pantheon! Lafayette to the Hotel de Ville! Some young men, amid the
cheers of the throng, harnessed themselves, and began to draw Lamarque
in the hearse over the bridge of Austerlitz, and Lafayette in a fiacre
along the Quai Morland.

In the crowd which surrounded and cheered Lafayette, was noticed and
pointed out a German, named Ludwig Snyder, who afterwards died a
centenarian, who had also been in the war of 1776 and who had fought
at Trenton under Washington, and under Lafayette at Brandywine.
Meanwhile, on the left bank, the municipal cavalry was in motion, and
had just barred the bridge, on the right bank the dragoons left the
Celestins and deployed along the Quai Morland. The men who were drawing
Lafayette suddenly perceived them at the corner of the Quai, and cried:
"the dragoons!" The dragoons were advancing at a walk, in silence, their
pistols in their holsters, their sabres in their sheaths, their muske-
toons in their rests, with an air of gloomy expectation.

At two hundred paces from the little bridge, they halted. The fiacre in
which Lafayette was, made its way up to them, they opened their ranks, let
it pass, and closed again behind it. At that moment the dragoons and the
multitude came together. The women fled in terror.

What took place in that fatal moment? nobody could tell. It was the
dark moment when two clouds mingle. Some say that a trumpet-flourish
sounding the charge was heard from the direction of the Arsenal, others
that a dagger-thrust was given by a child to a dragoon. The fact is that
three shots were suddenly fired, the first killed the chief of the squad-
ron, Cholet, the second killed an old deaf woman who was closing her window
inthe Rue Contrescarpe, the third singed the epaulet of an officer; a woman
cried: "They are beginning too soon!" and all at once there was seen, from
the side opposite the Quai Morland, a squadron of dragoons which had
remained in barracks turning out on the gallop, with swords drawn, from
the Rue Bassompierre and the Boulevard Bourdon, and sweeping all before
them.

There are no more words, the tempest breaks loose, stones fall like hail,
musketry bursts forth, many rush headlong down the bank and cross the lit-
tle arm of the Seine now filled up, the yards of the Ile Louviers, that
vast ready-made citadel, bristle with combatants, they tear up stakes, they
fire pistol-shots, a barricade is planned out, the young men crowded back,
pass the Bridge of Austerlitz with the hearse at a run, and charge on the
Municipal Guard, the carbineers rush up, the dragoons ply the sabre, the
mass scatters in every direction, a rumour of war flies to the four corners
of Paris, men cry: "To arms!" they run, they tumble, they fly, they resist.
Wrath sweeps along the emeute as the wind sweeps along a fire.



IV. THE EBULLITIONS OF FORMER TIMES



NOTHING IS MORE EXTRAORDINARY than the first swarming of an emeute.
Everything bursts out everywhere at once. Was it foreseen? yes. Was it
prepared? no. Whence does it spring? from the pavements. Whence does it
fall? from the clouds. Here the insurrection has the character of a plot;
there of an improvisation. The first comer takes possession of a current of
the multitude and leads it whither he will. A beginning full of terror with
which is mingled a sort of frightful gaiety. At first there are clamours, the
shops close, the displays of the merchants disappear; then some isolated
shots; people flee; butts of guns strike against porte-cocheres; you hear the
servant girls laughing in the yards of the houses and saying: There is going
to be a row!

A quarter of an hour had not elapsed and here is what had taken place
nearly at the same time at twenty different points in Paris. In the Rue
Sainte Croix de la Bretonnerie, some twenty young men, with beards and
long hair, entered a smoking-room and came out again a moment afterwards,
bearing a horizontal tricolour flag covered with crape,and having at
their head three men armed, one with a sword, another with a gun, the
third with a pike.

In the Rue des Nonaindieres, a well-dressed bourgeois, who was pursy,
had a sonorous voice, a bald head, a high forehead, a black beard, and one
of those rough moustaches which cannot be smoothed down, offered cartridges
publicly to the passers-by.

In the Rue Saint Pierre Montmartre, some men with bare arms paraded a
black flag on which these words could be read in white letters: Repub-
lic or death. In the Rue des Jeuneurs, the Rue du Cadran, the Rue
Montorgueil, and the Rue Mandar, appeared groups waving flags on which
were visible in letters of gold, the word section with a number. One of
these flags was red and blue with an imperceptible white stripe between.
A manufactory of arms was rifled, on the Boulevard Saint Martin, and
three armourer's shops, the first in the Rue Beaubourg, the second in the
Rue Michel le Comte, the third in the Rue du Temple. In a few minutes
the thousand hands of the multitude seized and carried off two hundred
and thirty muskets nearly all double-barrelled, sixty-four swords, eighty-
three pistols. To arm more people, one took the gun, another the bayonet.
Opposite the Quai de la Greve, young men armed with muskets installed
themselves with the women to shoot. One of them had a musket with a
match-lock. They rang, entered, and set to making cartridges. One of
these women said: "I did not know what cartridges were, my husband told
me to." A throng broke into a curiosity shop in the Rue des Vieilles
Haudriettes and took some yataghans and Turkish arms.

The corpse of a mason killed by a musket shot was lying in the Rue de
la Perle.

And then, right bank, left bank, on the quais, on the boulevards, in the
Latin quartier, in the region of the markets, breathless men, working-men,
students, sectionaries, read proclamations, cried: "To arms!" broke the
street lamps, unharnessed waggons, tore up the pavements, broke in the
doors of the houses, uprooted the trees, ransacked the cellars, rolled
hogsheads, heaped up paving stones, pebbles, pieces of furniture, boards,
made barricades.

They forced the bourgeois to help them. They went into the women's houses,
they made them give up the sword and the gun of their absent husbands,
and wrote over the door with Spanish white: "the arms are delivered."
Some signed "with their names" receipts for the gun and sword, and said:
"send for them to-morrow to the mairie." They disarmed the solitary sentinels
in the streets and the National Guards going to their municipality. They
tore off the officers' epaulets. In the Rue du Cimetiere Saint Nicolas, an
officer of the National Guard, pursued by a troop armed with clubs and foils,
took refuge with great difficulty in a house which he was able to leave
only at night, and in disguise.

In the Quartier St. Jacques, the students came out of their hotels in
swarms, and went up the Rue Saint Hyacinthe to the cafe Du Progres or
down to the cafe Des Sept Billards, on the Rue des Mathurins. There,
before the doors, some young men standing upon the posts distributed
arms. They pillaged the lumberyard on the Rue Transnonain to make barri-
cades. At a single point, the inhabitants resisted, at the corner of the
Rues Sainte Avoye and Simon le Franc where they destroyed the barricade
themselves. At a single point, the insurgents gave way; they abandoned
a barricade commenced in the Rue du Temple after having fired upon a
detachment of the National Guard, and fled through the Rue de la Cor-
derie. The detachment picked up in the barricade a red flag, a package
of cartridges, and three hundred pistol balls. The National Guards tore
up the flag and carried the shreds at the point of their bayonets.

All that we are here relating slowly and successively took place at once
in all points of the city in the midst of a vast tumult, like a multitude of
flashes in a single peal of thunder.

In less than an hour twenty-seven barricades rose from the ground in
the single quartier of the markets. At the centre was that famous house, No.
50, which was the fortress of Jeanne and her hundred and six companions,
and which, flanked on one side by a barricade at Saint Merry, and on
other by a barricade on the Rue Maubuee, commanded three streets, the
Rue des Arcis, the Rue Saint Martin, and the Rue Aubry le Boucher on
which it fronted. Two barricades at right angles ran back, one from the
Rue Montorgueil to the Grande Truanderie, the other from the Rue Geoffroy
Langevin to the Rue Sainte Avoye. Without counting innumerable barricades
in twenty other quartiers of Paris, in the Marais, at Mount Sainte Gen-
evieve; one, on the Rue Menilmontant, where could be seen a portecochere
torn from its hinges; another near the little bridge of the Hotel Dieu
made with an ecossaise unhitched and overturned, within three hundred
yards of the prefecture of police.

At the barricade on the Rue des Menetriers, a well-dressed man distri-
buted money to the labourers. At the barricade on the Rue Grenetat a
horseman appeared and handed to him who appeared to be the chief of the
barricade a roll which looked like a roll of money. "This," said he, "is to
pay the expenses, wine, et coetera." A young man of a light complexion,
without a cravat, went from one barricade to another carrying orders. An-
other, with drawn sword and a blue police cap on his head, was stationing
sentinels. In the interior, within the barricades, wine-shops and porters'
lodges were converted into guard-houses. Moreover, the emeute was conducted
accordingto the soundest military tactics. The narrow, uneven, sinuous streets,
full of turns and corners, were admirably chosen; the environs of the markets
in particular, a network of streets more intricate than a forest. The
Society of the Friends of the People, it was said, had assumed the direction
of the insurrection in the Quartier Sainte Avoye. A man, killed in Rue du
Ponceau, who was searched, had a plan of Paris upon him.

What had really assumed the direction of the emeute was a sort of unknown
impetuosity which was in the atmosphere. The insurrection, abruptly, had
built the barricades with one hand, and with the other seized nearly all
the posts of the garrison. In less than three hours, like a train of
powder which takes fire, the insurgents had invaded and occupied on the
right bank, the Arsenal, the Mayor's office of the Place Royale, all the
Marais, the Popincourt manufactory of arms, the Galiote, the Chateau d'Eau,
all of the streets near the markets; on the left bank, the barracks of
the Veterans, Sainte Pelagie, the Place Maubert, the powder-mill of the
Deux Moulins, all the Barrieres. At five o'clock in the afternoon they were
masters of the Bastille, the Lingerie, the Blancs Manteaux; their scouts
touched the Place des Victoires, and threatened the Bank, the barracks of
the Petits Peres, and the Hotel des Postes. The third of Paris was in the
emeute.

At all points the struggle had commenced on a gigantic scale; and from
the disarmings, from the domiciliary visits, from the armourers' shops
hastily invaded, there was this result, that the combat which was commenced
by throwing stones, was continued by throwing balls.

About six o'clock in the afternoon, the arcade Du Saumon became a field
of battle. The emeute was at one end, the troops at the end opposite.
They fired from one grating to the other. One observer, a dreamer, the
author of this book, who had gone to get a near view of the volcano, found
himself caught in the arcade between the two fires. He had nothing but the
projection of the pilasters which separate the shops to protect him from
the balls; he was nearly half an hour in this delicate situation.

Meanwhile the drums beat the long roll, the National Guards dressed
and armed themselves in haste, the legions left the mairies, the regiments
left their barracks. Opposite the arcade De l'Ancre, a drummer received a
thrust from a dagger. Another, on the Rue du Cygne, was assailed by some
thirty young men, who destroyed his drum and took away his sword.

Another was killed in the Rue Grenier Saint Lazare. In the Rue Michel le
Comte three officers fell dead one after another. Several Municipal Guards,
wounded in the Rue des Lombards, turned back.

In front of the Cour Batave, a detachment of National Guards found a red
flag bearing this inscription: Republican revolution, No. 127. Was it a
revolution, in fact?

The insurrection had made the centre of Paris a sort of inextricable,
tortuous, colossal citadel.

There was the focus, there was evidently the question. All the rest were
only skirmishes. What proved that there all would be decided, was that they
were not yet fighting there.

In some regiments, the soldiers were doubtful, which added to the fright-
ful obscurity of the crisis. They remembered the popular ovation which
in July, 1830, had greeted the neutrality of the 53rd of the line. Two
intrepid men, who had been proved by the great wars, Marshal de Lobau
and General Bugeaud, commanded, Bugeaud under Lobau. Enormous patrols,
composed of battalions of the line surrounded by entire companies
of the National Guard, and preceded by a commissary of police with his
badge, went out reconnoitring the insurgent streets. On their side, the
insurgents placed pickets at the corners of the streets and boldly sent
patrols ouside of the barricades. They kept watch on both sides. The gov-
ernment, with an army in its hand, hesitated; night was coming on, and
the tocsin of Saint Merry began to be heard. The Minister of War of the
time, Marshal Soult, who had seen Austerlitz, beheld this with gloomy
countenance.

These old sailors, accustomed to correct manoeuvring, and having no re-
source or guide, save tactics, that compass of battles, are completely lost
in presence of that immense foam which is called the wrath of the people.
The wind of revolutions is not tractable.

The National Guard of the banlieue hurried together in disorder. A
battalion of the 12th Light ran down from Saint Denis, the 14th of the
Line arrived from Courbevoie, the batteries of the Military School had
taken position at the Carrousel; artillery came from Vincennes.

Solitude reigned at the Tuileries. Louis Philippe was full of serenity.



V. ORIGINALITY OF PARIS



WITHIN TWO YEARS, as we have said, Paris had seen more than one insur-
rection. Outside of the insurgent quartiers, nothing is usually more
strangely calm than the physiognomy of Paris during an emeute. Paris
accustoms itself very quickly to everything--it is only an emeute--and Paris
is so busy that it does not trouble itself for so slight a thing. These col-
ossal cities alone can contain at the same time a civil war, and an indes-
cribably strange tranquillity. Usually, when the insurrection begins; when
the drum, the long-roll, the generale, are heard, the shopkeeper merely
says: "It seems there is some squabble in the Rue Saint Martin."

Or:

"Faubourg Saint Antoine."

Often he adds with unconcern:

"Somewhere down that way."

Afterwards when he distinguishes the dismal and thrilling uproar of
musketry and the firing of platoons, the shopkeeper says:

"It is getting warm, then! Hullo, it is getting warm!"

A moment afterwards, if the emeute approaches and increases, he prec-
ipitately shuts his shop, and hastily puts on his uniform; that is to
say, places his goods in safety and risks his person.

There is firing at the street corners, in an arcade, in a cul-de-sac;
barricades are taken, lost, and retaken; blood flows, the fronts of the
houses are riddled with grape, balls kill people in their beds, corpses
encumber the pavement. A few streets off, you hear the clicking of bill-
iard balls in the cafes.

The theatres open their doors and play comedies; the curious chat and
laugh two steps from these streets full of war. The fiacres jog along; passers
are going to dine in the city. Sometimes in the very quartier where there is
fighting. In 1831 a fusilade was suspended to let a wedding party pass by.

At the time of the insurrection of the 12th of May, 1839, in the Rue
Saint Martin, a little infirm old man, drawing a hand-cart surmounted by
a tricoloured rag, in which there were decanters filled with some liquid,
went back and forth from the barricade to the troops and from the troops
to the barricade, impartially offering glasses of cocoa--now to the government,
now to the anarchy.

Nothing is more strange; and this is the peculiar characteristic of the
emeutes of Paris, which is not found in any other capital. Two things are
requisite for it, the greatness of Paris and its gaiety. It requires the city
of Voltaire and of Napoleon.

This time, however, in the armed contest of the 5th of June, 1832, the
great city felt something which was, perhaps, stronger than herself. She was
afraid. You saw everywhere, in the most distant and the most "disinterested"
quartiers, doors, windows, and shutters closed in broad day. The courageous
armed, the poltroons hid. The careless and busy wayfarer disappeared.
Many streets were as empty as at four o'clock in the morning. Alarming
stories were circulated, ominous rumours were spread. "That they were
masters of the Bank;" "that, merely at the cloisters of Saint Merry,
there were six hundred, intrenched and fortified in the church;" "that the
Line was doubtful;" "that Armand Carrel had been to see Marshal Clausel
and that the marshal had said: Have one regiment in the place first;" "that
Lafayette was sick, but that he had said to them notwithstanding: I am with
you. I will follow you anywhere where there is room for a chair;" "that it
was necessary to keep on their guard; that in the night there would be people
who would pillage the isolated houses in the deserted quartiers of Paris (in
this the imagination of the police was recognised, that Anne Radcliffe mixed
with government);" "that a battery had been planted in the Rue Aubry le
Boucher;" "that Lobau and Bugeaud were consulting; and that at midnight,
or at daybreak at the latest, four columns would march at once upon the
centre of the emeute, the first coming from the Bastille, the second from
the Porte Saint Martin, the third from La Greve, the fourth from the markets;"
"that perhaps also the troops would evacuate Paris and retire to the
Champ de Mars;" "that nobody knew what might happen, but that certainly,
this time, it was serious." They were concerned about Marshal Soult's hes-
itation. "Why doesn't he attack right away?" It is certain that he was
deeply absorbed. The old lion seemed to scent in that darkness some
unknown monster.

Evening came, the theatres did not open; the patrols made their round
spitefully; passers were searched; the suspicious were arrested. At nine
o'clock there were more than eight hundred persons under arrest; the pre-
fecture of police was crowded, the Conciergerie was crowded, La Force was
crowded. At the Conciergerie, in particular, the long vault which is called
the Rue de Paris was strewn with bundles of straw, on which lay a throng of
prisoners, whom the man of Lyons, Lagrange, harangued valiantly. The
rustling of all this straw, stirred by all these men, was like the sound of a
shower. Elsewhere the prisoners lay in the open air in the prison yards,
piled one upon another. Anxiety was everywhere, and a certain tremor, little
known to Paris.

People barricaded themselves in their houses; wives and mothers were ter-
rified; you heard only this: Oh! my God! he has not come back! In the dis-
tance there was heard very rarely the rumbling of a waggon. People listened,
on their door-sills, to the rumours, the cries, the tumults, the dull and
indistinct sounds, things of which they said: That is the cavalry, or: Those
are the ammunition waggons galloping down, the trumpets, the drums, the
musketry, and above all, that mournful tocsin of Saint Merry. They expect-
ed the first cannon-shot. Men rose up at the corners of the streets and
disappeared, crying: "Go home!" And they hastened to bolt their doors.
They said: "How will it end?" From moment to moment, as night fell, Paris
seemed coloured more dismally with the fearful flame of the emeute.




　　　　　　BOOK ELEVENTH
THE ATOM FRATERNISES WITH THE HURRICANE



I. SOME INSIGHT INTO THE ORIGIN OF GAVROCHE'S POETRY?
INFLUENCE OF AN ACADEMICIAN UPON THAT POETRY



AT THE MOMENT the insurrection, springing up at the shock of the people
with the troops in front of the Arsenal, determined a backward movement
in the multitude which was following the hearse and which, for the whole
length of the boulevards, weighed, so to say, upon the head of the procession,
there was a frightful reflux. The mass wavered, the ranks broke, all
ran, darted, slipped away, some with cries of attack, others with the pallor
of flight. The great river which covered the boulevards divided in a twinkling,
overflowed on the right and on the left, and poured in torrents into
two hundred streets at once with the rushing of an opened mill-sluice. At
this moment a ragged child who was coming down the Rue Menilmontant,
holding in his hand a branch of laburnum in bloom, which he had just gathered
on the heights of Belleville, caught sight, before a second-hand
dealer's shop, of an old horse pistol. He threw his flowering branch upon
the pavement, and cried:

"Mother What's-your-name, I'll borrow your machine."

And he ran off with the pistol.

Two minutes later, a flood of terrified bourgeois who were fleeing through
the Rue Amelot and the Rue Basse, met the child who was brandishing his
pistol and singing:

La nuit on ne voit rien,
Le jour on voit tres-bien,
D'un ecrit apocryphe
Le bourgeois s'ebouriffe,
Pratiquez la vertu,
Tutu chapeau pointu!

It was little Gavroche going to war.

On the boulevard he perceived that the pistol had no hammer.

Whose was this refrain which served him to time his march, and all the
other songs which, on occasion, he was fond of singing? we do not know.
Who knows? his own perhaps. Gavroche besides kept up with all the popular
airs in circulation, and mingled with them his own warbling. A sprite
and a devil, he made a medley of the voices of nature and the voices of Paris.
He combined the repertory of the birds with the repertory of the workshops.
He knew some painters' boys, a tribe contiguous to his own. He had
been, as it appears, three months a printer's apprentice. He had done an
errand one day for Monsieur Baour-Lormian, one of the Forty. Gavroche
was a gamin of letters.

Gavroche moreover had no suspicion that on that wretched rainy night
when he had offered the hospitality of his elephant to two brats, it was for
his own brothers that he had acted the part of Providence. His brothers in
the evening, his father in the morning; such had been his night. On leaving
the Rue des Ballets at early dawn, he had returned in haste to the elephant,
artistically extracted the two momes, shared with them such breakfast as he
could invent, then went away, confiding them to that good mother, the street,
who had almost brought him up himself. On leaving them, he had given them
rendezvous for the evening at the same place, and left them this discourse
as a farewell: "I cut stick, otherwise spoken, I esbigne, or, as they say at the
court, I haul off; Brats, if you don't find papa and mamma, come back here
tonight. I will strike you up some supper and put you to bed." The two children,
picked up by some sergent de ville and put in the retreat, or stolen by some
mountebank, or simply lost in the immense Chinese Parisian turmoil, had
not returned. The lower strata of the existing social world are full of these
lost traces. Gavroche had not seen them since. Ten or twelve weeks had
elapsed since that night. More than once he had scratched the top of his
head and said: "Where the devil are my two children?"

Meanwhile he had reached, pistol in hand, the Rue du Pont aux Choux.
He noticed that there was now, in that street, but one shop open, and, a
matter worthy of reflection, a pastry-cook's shop. This was a providential
opportunity to eat one more apple-puff before entering the unknown.
Gavroche stopped, fumbled in his trousers, felt in his fob, turned out his
pockets, found nothing in them, not a sou, and began to cry: "Help!"

It is hard to lack the final cake.

Gavroche none the less continued on his way.

Two minutes later, he was in the Rue Saint Louis. While passing
through the Rue du Parc Royal he felt the need of some compensation for
the impossible apple-puff, and he gave himself the immense pleasure of
tearing down the theatre posters in broad day.

A little further along, seeing a group of well-to-do persons pass by,
who appeared to him to be men of property, he shrugged his shoulders, and
spit out at random this mouthful of philosophic bile:

"These rich men, how fat they are! they stuff themselves. They wallow
in good dinners. Ask them what they do with their money. They don't know
anything about it. They eat it, they do! How much of it the belly carries
away."



II. GAVROCHE ON THE MARCH



THE BRANDISHING OF A PISTOL without a hammer, holding it in one's hand
in the open street, is such a public function that Gavroche felt his spirits
rise higher with every step. He cried, between the snatches of the Marseillaise
which he was singing:

"It's all going well. I suffer a good deal in my left paw, I am broken
with my rheumatism, but I am content, citizens. The bourgeois have nothing
to do but to behave themselves, I am going to sneeze subversive
couplets at them. What are the detectives? they are dogs. By jinks! don't let
us fail in respect for dogs. Now I wish I had one to my pistol. I come from
the boulevard, my friends, it is getting hot, it is boiling over a little, it is
simmering. It is time to skim the pot. Forward, men! let their impure blood
water the furrows! I give my days for my country. I shall never see my con-
cubine again, n-e-ver, over, yes. Never! but it's all the same, let us be joyful!
let us fight, egad! I have had enough of despotism."

At that moment, the horse of a lancer of the National Guard, who was
passing, having fallen down, Gavroche laid his pistol on the pavement, and
raised up the man, then he helped to raise the horse. After which he picked
up his pistol, and resumed his way.

In the Rue de Thorigny, all was peace and silence. This apathy, suited
to the Marais, contrasted with the vast surrounding uproar. Four gossips
were chatting upon a doorstep. Scotland has her trios of witches, but Paris
has her quartettes of gossips; and the "thou shalt be king," would be quite
as ominously cast at Bonaparte in the Baudoyer Square as at Macbeth in
the heath of Armuyr. It would be almost the same croaking.

The gossips of the Rue de Thorigny were busy only with their own
affairs. They were three portresses and a rag-picker with her basket and
hook.

The four seemed standing at the four corners of old age, which are
decay, decrepitude, ruin, and sorrow.

The rag-picker was humble. In this out-door society, the rag-picker
bows, the portress patronises. That is a result of the sweepings which are, as
the portresses will, fat or lean, according to the fancy of her who makes the
head. There may be kindness in the broom.

This rag-picker was a grateful basket, and she smiled, what a smile! to
the three portresses. Such things as this were said:

"Ah, now, your cat is always spiteful, is she?"

"Luddy! cats, you know, are nat'rally the enemies of dogs. It is the dogs
that complain."

"And folks, too."

"Still, cats' fleas don't get on folks."

"That's not the trouble, dogs are dangerous. I remember one year there
was so many dogs they had to put it in the papers. It was the time they
had the big sheep at the Tuileries to draw the King of Rome's little waggon.
Do you remember the King of Rome?"

"Me, I liked the Duke of Bourdeaux better."

"For my part, I knew Louis XVII. I like Louis XVII. better."

"How dear meat is, Ma'am Patagon!"

"Oh! don't speak of it, the butchering is horrid. Horridly horrid. They
have nothing but tough meat nowadays."

Here the rag-picker intervened!

"Ladies, business is very dull. The garbage heaps are shabby. Folks
don't throw anything away in these days. They eat everything."

"There are poorer people than you, Vargouleme."

"Oh, that is true!" replied the rag-picker, with deference, "for my part
I have an occupation."

There was a pause, and the rag-picker, yielding to that necessity for
display which lies deepest in the human heart, added:

"In the morning when I get home, I pick over the basketful, I make
my sorties (probably sortings). That makes heaps in my room. I put the
rags in a basket, the cores in a tub, the linens in my closet, the woollens in
my bureau, the old papers in the corner of the window, the things good to
eat into my plate, the bits of glass in the fireplace, the old shoes behind the
door, and the bones under my bed."

Gavroche, who had stopped behind, was listening.

"Old women," said he, "what business have you now talking politics?"

A volley assailed him, composed of a quadruple hoot.

"There is another scoundrel!"

"What has he got in his stump? A pistol."

"I want to know, that beggar of a mome!"

"They are never quiet if they are not upsetting the government."

Gavroche, in disdain, made no other reply than merely to lift the end
of his nose with his thumb while he opened his hand to its full extent.

The rag-picker cried:

"Spiteful go-bare-paws!"

She who answered to the name of Ma'am Patagon clapped her hands in horror.

"There is going to be troubles, that's sure. That rascal over there with
a beard, I used to see him go by every morning with a young thing in a pink
cap under his arm; to-day I see him go by, he was giving his arm to a musket.
Ma'am Bacheux says that there was a revolution last week at--at--at--where
is the place?--at Pontoise. And then see him there with his pistol, that
horrid blackguard? It seems the Celestins are all full of cannon. What
would you have the government do with the scapegraces who do nothing but
invent ways to disturb people, when we are beginning to be a little quiet,
after all the troubles we have had, good Lord God, that poor queen that I
see go by in the cart! And all this is going to make snuff dearer still.
It is infamous! and surely I will go to see you guillotined, you scoundrel."

"You sniffle, my ancient," said Gavroche. "Blow your promontory."

And he passed on.

When he reached the Rue Pavee, the rag-picker recurred to his mind,
and he soliloquised thus:

"You do wrong to insult the Revolutionists, Mother Heap-in-the-corner.
This pistol is in your interest. It is so that you may have more things
good to eat in your basket."

Suddenly he heard a noise behind him: it was the portress Patagon
who had followed him, and who, from a distance, was shaking her fist at
him, crying:

"You are nothing but a bastard!"

"Yes," said Gavroche, "I amuse myself at that in a profound manner."

Soon after, he passed the Hotel Lamoignon. There he shouted out his
appeal:

"En route for battle!"

And he was seized with a fit of melancholy. He looked at his pistol with
a reproachful air, which seemed an endeavour to soften it:

"I go off," said he to it, "but you do not go off."

One dog may distract attention from another. A very lean cur was passing.
Gavroche was moved to pity.

"My poor bow-wow," said he, "have you swallowed a barrel, then, that
all the hoops show?"

Then he bent his steps towards the Orme Saint Gervais



III. JUST INDIGNATION OF A BARBER



THE WORTHY BARBER, who drove away the two little boys to whom
Gavroche opened the paternal intestines of the elephant, was at this
moment in his shop, busy shaving an old legionary soldier who had served
under the empire. They were chatting. The barber had naturally spoken
to the veteran of the emeute, then of General Lamarque and from La-
marque they had come to the emperor. Hence a conversation between a
barber and a soldier, which Prudhomme, if he had been present, would
have enriched with arabesques, and which he would have entitled: Dialogue
of the razor and the sabre.

"Monsieur," said the wig-maker, "how did the emperor mount on
horseback?"

"Badly. He didn't know how to fall. So he never fell."

"Did he have fine horses? he must have had fine horses!'

"The day he gave me the cross, I noticed his animal. She was a running
mare, perfectly white. Her ears were very wide apart, saddle deep,
head fine, marked with a black star, neck very long, knees strongly jointed,
ribs protruding, shoulders sloping, hind quarters powerful. A little more
than fifteen hands high."

"A pretty horse," said the barber.

"It was the animal of his majesty."

The barber felt that after this word a little silence was proper, he conformed
to it, then resumed:

"The emperor was never wounded but once, was he, monsieur?"

The old soldier answered with the calm and sovereign tone of a man
who was there:

"In the heel. At Ratisbon. I never saw him so well dressed as he was
that day. He was as neat as a penny."

"And you, Monsieur Veteran, you must have been wounded often?"

"I?" said the soldier, "ah! no great thing. I got two sabre slashes in my
neck at Marengo, a ball in my right arm at Austerlitz, another in my left
hip at Jena, at Friedland a bayonet thrust--there--at Moscow seven or
eight lance thrusts, no matter where, at Lutzen a shell burst which crushed
my finger--Ah! and then at Waterloo a bullet in my leg. That is all."

"How beautiful it is," exclaimed the barber with a pindaric accent, "to
die on the field of battle! Upon my word, rather than die in my bed, of sickness,
slowly, a little every day, with drugs, plasters, syringes, and medicine,
I would prefer a cannon ball in my belly."

"You are not fastidious," said the soldier.

He had hardly finished when a frightful crash shook the shop. A pane
of the window had been suddenly shattered.

The barber became pallid.

"O God!" cried he, "there is one!"

"What?"

"A cannon ball."

"Here it is," said the soldier.

And he picked up something which was rolling on the floor. It was a
stone.

The barber ran to the broken window and saw Gavroche, who was running
with all his might towards the Saint Jean market. On passing the bar-
ber's shop, Gavroche, who had the two momes on his mind, could not
resist the desire to bid him good day, and had sent a stone through
his sash.

"See!" screamed the barber, who from white had become blue, "he makes
mischief for the sake of mischief. What has anybody done to that gamin?"



IV. THE CHILD WONDERS AT THE OLD MAN



MEANWHILE Gavroche at the Saint Jean market where the guard was
already disarmed, had just--effected his junction--with a band led by
Enjolras, Courfeyrac, Combeferre, and Feuilly. They were almost armed.
Bahorel and Jean Prouvaire had joined them and enlarged the group.
Enjolras had a double-barrelled fowling piece. Combeferre a National
Guard's musket bearing the number of the legion, and at his waist two pistols
which could be seen, his coat being unbuttoned, Jean Prouvaire an old
cavalry musketoon, Bahorel a carbine; Courfeyrac was brandishing an
unsheathed sword-cane. Feuilly, a drawn sabre in his hand, marched in the
van, crying: "Poland for ever!"

They came from the Quai Morland cravatless, hatless, breathless, soaked
by the rain, lightning in their eyes. Gavroche approached them calmly:

"Where are we going?"

"Come on," said Courfeyrac.

Behind Feuilly marched, or rather bounded, Bahorel, a fish in the water
of the emeute. He had a crimson waistcoat, and those words which crush
everything. His waistcoat overcame a passer, who cried out in desperation:

"There are the reds!"

"The reds, the reds!" replied Bahorel. "A comical fear, bourgeois. As
for me, I don't tremble before a red poppy, the little red hood inspires me
with no dismay. Bourgeois, believe me, leave the fear of red to horned cattle."

He caught sight of a piece of wall on which was placarded the most peaceful
sheet of paper in the world, a permission to eat eggs, a charge for Lent,
addressed by the Archbishop of Paris to his "ouailles" [flock].

Bahorel exclaimed:

"Ouailles; polite way of saying oies" [geese].

And he tore the charge from the wall. This conquered Gavroche.
From that moment, Gavroche began to study Bahorel.

"Bahorel," observed Enjolras, "you are wrong. You should have let
that charge alone, it is not with it that we have to do. You are expending
your wrath uselessly. Economise your ammunition. We don't fire out of
rank,--no more with the soul than with the gun."

"Each in his own way, Enjolras," retorted Bahorel. "This bishop's
prosing annoys me, I want to eat eggs without anybody's permission. You
have the cold burning style; I amuse myself. Besides, I am not exhausting
myself, I am gaining new energy; and if I tore down that charge, by Hercules!
it was to give me an appetite."

This word Hercules, struck Gavroche. He sought every opportunity to
instruct himself, and this tearer-down of posters had his esteem. He asked
him:

"What does that mean, Hercules?"

Bahorel answered:

"It means holy name of a dog in Latin."

Here Bahorel recognised at a window a pale young man with a black
beard, who was looking at them as they were passing, probably a Friend of
the A B C. He cried to him:

"Quick, cartridges! para bellum."

"Bel homme! [Handsome man!] that is true," said Gavroche, who now
understood Latin.

A tumultuous cortege accompanied them, students, artists, young men
affiliated to the Cougourde d'Aix, working-men, rivermen, armed with
clubs and bayonets; a few, like Combeferre, with pistols thrust into their
waistbands. An old man, who appeared very old, was marching with this
band. He was not armed, and he was hurrying, that he should not be left
behind, although he had a thoughtful expression. Gavroche perceived him:

"Whossat?" said he to Courfeyrac.

"That is an old man."

It was M. Mabeuf.



V. THE OLD MAN



WE MUST TELL what had happened.

Enjolras and his friends were on the Boulevard Bourdon, near the
warehouses, at the moment the dragoons charged. Enjolras, Courfeyrac,
and Combeferre were among those who took to the Rue Bassomipierre,
crying: "To the barricades!" In the Rue Lesdiguieres they met an old man
trudging along. What attracted their attention was, that this goodman was
walking zigzag, as if he were drunk. Moreover, he had his hat in his hand,
although it had been raining all the morning, and was raining hard at that
very moment. Courfeyrac recognised Father Mabeuf. He knew him from
having seen him many times accompanying Marius to the door. Knowing
the peaceful and more than timid habits of the old church-warden-book-
worm, and astounded at seeing him in the midst of this tumult, within two
steps of the cavalry charges, almost in the midst of a fusilade, barehead-
ed in the rain, and walking among the bullets, he went up to him, and the
emeuter of five-and-twenty and the octogenarian exchanged this dialogue:

"Monsieur Mabeuf, go home."

"What for?"

"There is going to be a row."

"Very well."

"Sabre strokes, musket shots, Monsieur Mabeuf."

"Very well."

"Cannon shots."

"Very well. Where are you going, you boys?"

"We are going to pitch the government over."

"Very well."

And he followed them. From that moment he had not uttered a word.
His step had suddenly become firm; some working-men had offered him an
arm, he refused with a shake of the head. He advanced almost to the front
rank of the column, having at once the motion of a man who is walking,
and the countenance of a man who is asleep.

"What a desperate goodman!" murmured the students. The rumour ran
through the assemblage that he was--an ancient Conventionist--an old
regicide. The company had turned into the Rue de la Verrerie.

Little Gavroche marched on with all his might with this song, which
made him a sort of clarion. He sang:

Voici la lune qui parait,
Quand irons-nous dans la foret?
Demandait Charlot a Charlotte.
Tou tou tou
Pour Chatou.
Je n'ai qu'un Dieu, qu'un roi, qu'un liard et qu'une botte.
Pour avoir bu de grand matin
La rosee a meme le thym,
Deux moineaux etaient en ribote.
Zi zi zi
Pour Passy
Je n'ai qu'un Dieu, qu'un roi, qu'un liard et qu'une botte.
Et ces deux pauvres petits loups
Comme deux grives etaient souls;
Un tigre en riait dans sa grotte.
Don don don
Pour Meudon.
Je n'ai qu'un Dieu, qu'un roi, qu'un liard et qu'une botte.
L'un jurait et l'autre sacrait
Quand irons-nous dans la foret?
Demandait Charlot a Charlotte.
Tin tin tin
Pour Pantin.
Je n'ai qu'un Dieu, qu'un roi, qu'un liard et qu'une botte.

See the moon is shining, when shall we go into the woods? asked Charley of Charlotte.
Too, too, too, for Chatou. I have but one God, one king, one farthing, and one boot.
For having drunk in early morn, dew and thyme, two sparrows were in a fuddle.
Zi, zi, zi, for Passy. I have but one God, one king, one farthing, and one boot.
And these two poor little wolves were as drunk as two thrushes; a tiger laughed at it in
his cave.
Don, don, don, for Meudon. I have but one God, one king, one farthing, and one boot.
One swore and the other cursed. When shall we go into the woods? asked Charley of
Charlotte.
Tin, tin, tin, for Pantin. I have but one God, one king, one farthing, and one boot.

They made their way towards Saint Merry.



VI. RECRUITS



THE BAND INCREASED at every moment. Towards the Rue des Billettes a
man of tall stature, who was turning grey, whose rough and bold mien
Courfeyrac, Enjolras, and Combeferre noticed, but whom none of them
knew, joined them. Gavroche, busy singing, whistling, humming, going forward
and rapping on the shutters of the shops with the butt of his
hammerless pistol, paid no attention to this man.

It happened that, in the Rue de la Verrerie, they passed by Courfeyrac's
door.

"That is lucky," said Courfeyrac, "I have forgotten my purse and I have
lost my hat." He left the company and went up to his room, four stairs at a
time. He took an old hat and his purse. He took also a large square box, of
the size of a big valise, which was hidden among his dirty clothes. As he was
running down again, the portress hailed him:

"Monsieur de Courfeyrac?"

"Portress, what is your name?" responded Courfeyrac.

The portress stood aghast.

"Why, you know it very well; I am the portress, my name is Mother
Veuvain."

"Well, if you call me Monsieur de Courfeyrac again, I shall call you
Mother de Veuvain. Now, speak, what is it? What do you want?"

"There is somebody who wishes to speak to you."

"Who is it?"

"I don't know."

"Where is he?"

"In my lodge."

"The devil!" said Courfeyrac.

"But he has been waiting more than an hour for you to come home!"
replied the portress.

At the same time, a sort of young working-man, thin, pale, small, freck-
led, dressed in a torn blouse and patched pantaloons of ribbed velvet,
and who had rather the appearance of a girl in boy's clothes than of a man,
came out of the lodge and said to Courfeyrac in a voice which, to be sure,
was not the least in the world like a woman's voice.

"Monsieur Marius, if you please?"

"He is not in."

"Will he be in this evening?"

"I don't know anything about it."

And Courfeyrac added: "As for myself, I shall not be in."

The young man looked fixedly at him, and asked him:

"Why so?"

"Because."

"Where are you going then?"

"What is that to you?"

"Do you want me to carry your box?"

"I am going to the barricades."

"Do you want me to go with you?"

"If you like," answered Courfeyrac. "The road is free; the streets
belong to everybody."

And he ran off to rejoin his friends. When he had rejoined them, he
gave the box to one of them to carry. It was not until a quarter of an hour
afterwards that he perceived that the young man had in fact followed them.
A mob does not go precisely where it wishes. We have explained that
a gust of wind carries it along. They went beyond Saint Merry and found
themselves, without really knowing how, in the Rue Saint Denis.




BOOK TWELFTH
CORINTH



I. HISTORY OF CORINTH FROM ITS FOUNDATION



THE PARISIANS who, to-day, upon entering the Rue Rambuteau from the
side of the markets, notice on their right, opposite the Rue Mondetour, a
basket-maker's shop, with a basket for a sign, in the shape of the Emperor
Napoleon the Great, with this inscription:

NAPOLEON EST FAIT
TOUT EN OSIER,

NAPOLeON IS MADE,
ALL OF WILLOW BRAID.

do not suspect the terrible scenes which this very place saw thirty years ago.
Here were the Rue de la Chanvrerie, which the old signs spelled Chanverrerie,
and the celebrated wine-shop called Corinth.

The reader will remember all that has been said about the barricade
erected on this spot and eclipsed elsewhere by the barricade of Saint Merry.
Upon this famous barricade of the Rue de la Chanvrerie, now fallen into
deep obscurity, we are about to throw some little light.

Permit us to recur, for the sake of clearness, to the simple means
already employed by us for Waterloo. Those who would picture to themselves
with sufficient exactness the confused blocks of houses which stood at
that period near the Pointe Saint Eustache, at the northeast corner of the
markets of Paris, where is now the mouth of the Rue Rambuteau, have only
to figure to themselves, touching the Rue Saint Denis at its summit, and the
markets at its base, an N, of which the two vertical strokes would be the
Rue de la Grande Truanderie and the Rue de la Chanvrerie, and the Rue de
la Petite Truanderie would make the transverse stroke. The old Rue
Mondetour cut the three strokes at the most awkward angles. So that the
labyrinthine entanglement of these four streets sufficed to make, in a space
of four hundred square yards, between the markets and the Rue Saint
Denis, in one direction, and between the Rue du Cygne and the Rue des
Precheurs in the other direction, seven islets of houses, oddly intersecting,
of various sizes, placed crosswise and as if by chance, and separated but
slightly, like blocks of stone in a stone yard, by narrow crevices.

We say narrow crevices, and we cannot give a more just idea of those
obscure, contracted, angular lanes, bordered by ruins eight stories high.
These houses were so dilapidated, that in the Rues de la Chanvrerie and
de la Petite Truanderie, the fronts were shored up with beams, reaching
from one house to another. The street was narrow and the gutter wide, the
passer walked along a pavement which was always wet, beside shops that
were like cellars, great stone blocks encircled with iron, immense garbage
heaps, and alley gates armed with enormous and venerable gratings. The
Rue Rambuteau has devastated all this.

The name Mondetour pictures marvellously well the windings of all this
route. A little further along you found them still better expressed by the
Rue Pirouette, which ran into the Rue Mondetour.

The passer who came from the Rue Saint Denis into the Rue de la Chan-
vrerie saw it gradually narrow away before him as if he had entered an
elongated funnel. At the end of the street, which was very short, he found
the passage barred on the market side, and he would have thought himself
in a cul-de-sac, if he had not perceived on the right and on the left two
black openings by which he could escape. These were the Rue Mondetour,
which communicated on the one side with the Rue des Precheurs, on the
other with the Rues du Cygne and Petite Truanderie. At the end of this
sort of cul-de-sac, at the corner of the opening on the right, might be
seen a house lower than the rest, and forming a kind of cape on the street.
In this house, only two stories high, had been festively installed for
three hundred years an illustrious wine-shop. This wine-shop raised a
joyful sound in the very place which old Theophile has rendered famous
in these two lines:

La branle le squelette horrible
D'un pauvre amant qui se pendit.2
There rattles the horrible skeleton
of a poor lover who hung himself.

The location was good. The proprietorship descended from father to
son.

In the times of Mathurin Regnier, this wine-shop was called the Pot
aux Roses (the Pot of Roses), and as rebuses were in fashion, it had for a sign
a post (poteau) painted rose colour. In the last century, the worthy Natoire,
one of the fantastic masters now held in disdain by the rigid school, having
got tipsy several times in this wine-shop at the same table where Regnier
had got drunk, out of gratitude painted a bunch of Corinth grapes upon
the rose-coloured post. The landlord, from joy, changed his sign and had
gilded below the bunch these words: The Grape of Corinth. Hence the name
Corinth. Nothing is more natural to drinkers than an ellipsis. The ellipsis is
the zigzag of phrase. Corinth gradually dethroned the Pot aux Roses. The
last landlord of the dynasty, Father Hucheloup, not even knowing the tradition,
had the post painted blue.

A basement room in which was the counter, a room on the first floor in
which was the billiard table, a spiral wooden staircase piercing the ceiling,
wine on the tables, smoke on the walls, candles in broad day, such was the
wine-shop. A stairway with a trap-door in the basement-room led to the
cellar. On the second floor were the rooms of the Hucheloups. You
ascended by a stairway, which was rather a ladder than a stairway, the only
entrance to which was by a back door in the large room on the first floor. In
the attic, two garret rooms, with dormer windows, nests for servants. The
kitchen divided the ground-floor with the counting-room.

Father Hucheloup was perhaps a born chemist, he was certainly a
cook; people not only drank in his wine-shop, they ate there. Hucheloup
had invented an excellent dish which was found only at his house; it was
stuffed carps which he called carpes au gras. This was eaten by the light
of a tallow candle or a lamp of the time of Louis XVI., upon tables on which
an oil-cloth was nailed for a tablecloth. Men came there from a distance.
Hucheloup, one fine morning, thought proper to advertise by-passers of his
"specialty;" he dipped a brush in a pot of blacking, and as he had an or-
thography of his own, even as he had a cuisine of his own, he improvised upon
his wall this remarkable inscription:

CARPES HO GRAS.

One winter, the showers and the storms took a fancy to efface the S
which terminated the first word and the G which commenced the third; it
was left like this:

CARPE HO RAS.

Time and the rain aiding, a humble gastronomic advertisement had
become a profound piece of advice.

So that it happened that, not knowing French, Father Hucheloup had
known Latin, that he had brought philosophy out of his kitchen and that,
desiring simply to eclipse Careme, he had equalled Horace. And what was
striking was that this also meant: Enter my wineshop.

Nothing of all this is at present in existence. The Mondetour labyrinth
was ripped up and opened wide in 1847, and probably is now no more. The
Rue de la Chanvrerie and Corinth have disappeared under the pavements
of the Rue Rambuteau.

As we have said, Corinth was one of the meeting, if not rallying places,
of Courfeyrac and his friends. It was Grantaire who had discovered
Corinth. He had entered on account of Carpe Horas, and he returned on
account of Carpes au Gras. They drank there, they ate there, they shouted
there; they paid little, they paid poorly, they did not pay at all, they
were always welcome. Father Hucheloup was a goodman.

Hucheloup, a goodman, we have just said, was a cook with moustaches:
an amusing variety. He had always an ill-humoured face, seemed to wish
to intimidate his customers, grumbled at people who came to his house,
and appeared more disposed to pick a quarrel with them than to serve them
their soup. And still, we maintain, they were always welcome. This oddity
had brought custom to his shop, and led young men to him, saying to each
other: "Come and hear Father Hucheloup grumble." He had been a fencing-
master. He would suddenly burst out laughing. Coarse voice, good devil.
His was a comic heart, with a tragic face; he asked nothing better than
to frighten you, much like those snuff-boxes which have the shape of a
pistol. The discharge is a sneeze.

His wife was Mother Hucheloup, a bearded creature, and very ugly.

Towards 1830, Father Hucheloup died. With him the secret of the carpes
au gras was lost. His widow, scarcely consolable, continued the wineshop.
But the cuisine degenerated and became execrable, the wine, which
had always been bad, became frightful. Courfeyrac and his friends continued
to go to Corinth, however--"from pity," said Bossuet.

Widow Hucheloup was short-winded and deformed, with memories of
the country. She relieved their tiresomeness by her pronunciation. She had
a way of her own of saying things which spiced her village and spring-time
reminiscences. It had once been her fortune, she affirmed, to hear "the
lead-breasts sing in the hawkthorns."

The room on the first floor, in which was "the restaurant," was a long
and wide room, encumbered with stools, crickets, chairs, benches, and
tables, and a rickety old billiard-table. It was reached by the spiral staircase
which terminated at the corner of the room in a square hole like the hatchway
of a ship.

This room, lighted by a single narrow window and by a lamp which was al-
ways burning, had the appearance of a garret. All the pieces of furniture
on four legs behaved as if they had but three. The whitewashed walls
had no ornament except this quatrain in honour of Ma'am Hucheloup:

Elle etonne a dix pas, elle epouvante a deux,
Une verrue habite en son nez hasardeux;
On tremble a chaque instant qu'elle ne vous la mouche,
Et qu'un beau jour son nez ne tombe dans a bouche.3
She astounds at ten paces, she terrifies at two,
a wart inhabits her dangerous nose,
you tremble every moment lest she blow it you,
and lest some fine day her nose may fall into her mouth.

This was written in charcoal upon the wall.

Ma'am Hucheloup, the original, went back and forth from morning till
night before this quatrain in perfect tranquillity. Two servants, called
Chowder and Fricassee, and for whom nobody had ever known any other
names, helped Ma'am Hucheloup to put upon the tables the pitchers of
blue wine and the various broths which were served to the hungry in
earthen dishes. Chowder, fat, round, red, and boisterous, former favourite
sultana of the defunct Hucheloup, was uglier than any mythological monster;
still, as it is fitting that the servant should always keep behind the
mistress, she was less ugly than Ma'am Hucheloup. Fricassee, long, del-
icate, white with a lymphatic whiteness, rings around her eyes, eyelids
drooping, always exhausted and dejected, subject to what might be called
chronic weariness, up first, in bed last, served everybody, even the other
servant, mildly and in silence, smiling through fatigue with a sort of
vague sleepy smile.

Before entering the restaurant room, you might read upon the door
this line written in chalk by Courfeyrac:

Regale si tu peux et mange si tu l'oses.4
Feast if you can and eat if you dare.



II. PRELIMINARY GAIETY



LAIGLE DE MEAUX, we know, lived more with Joly than elsewhere. He had
a lodging as the bird has a branch. The two friends lived together, ate
together, slept together. Everything was in common with them, even
Musichetta a little. They were what, among the Chapeau Brothers, are
called bini. On the morning of the 5th of June, they went to breakfast at
Corinth. Joly, whose head was stopped up, had a bad cold, which Laigle
was beginning to share. Laigle's coat was threadbare, but Joly was well
dressed.

It was about nine o'clock in the morning door of Corinth.

They went up to the first floor.

Chowder and Fricassee received them: "Oysters, cheese, and ham,"
said Laigle.

And they sat down at a table.

The wine-shop was empty; they two only were there.

Fricassee, recognising Joly and Laigle, put a bottle of wine on the table.
As they were at their first oysters, a head appeared at the hatchway of
the stairs, and a voice said:

"I was passing. I smelt in the street a delicious odour of Brie cheese. I
have come in."

It was Grantaire.

Grantaire took a stool and sat down at the table.

Fricassee, seeing Grantaire, put two bottles of wine on the table.
That made three.

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

Grantaire answered:

"All are ingenious, you alone are ingenuous. Two bottles never astonished
a man."

The others had begun by eating. Grantaire began by drinking. A half
bottle was quickly swallowed.

"Have you a hole in your stomach?" resumed Laigle.

"You surely have one in your elbow," said Grantaire.

And, after emptying his glass, he added:

"Ah, now, Laigle of the funeral orations, your coat is old."

"I hope so," replied Laigle. "That makes us agree so well, my coat and I.
It has got all my wrinkles, it doesn't bind me anywhere, it has fitted it-
self to all my deformities, it is complaisant to all my motions; I feel it
only because it keeps me warm. Old coats are the same thing as old friends."

"That's true," exclaimed Joly, joining in the dialogue, "an old habit
[coat] is an old abi [friend]."

"Especially," said Grantaire, "in the mouth of a man whose head is
stopped up."

"Grantaire," asked Laigle, "do you come from the boulevard?"

"No."

"We just saw the head of the procession pass, Joly and I."

"It is a barvellous spectacle," said Joly.

"How quiet this street is!" exclaimed Laigle. "Who would suspect that
Paris is all topsy-turvy? You see this was formerly all monasteries about
here! Du Breul and Sauval give the list of them, and the Abbe Lebeuf. They
were all around here, they swarmed, the shod, the unshod, the shaven, the
bearded, the greys, the blacks, the whites, the Franciscans, the Minimi, the
Capuchins, the Carmelites, the Lesser Augustines, the Greater Augustines,
the Old Augustines. They littered."

"Don't talk about monks," interrupted Grantaire, "it makes me want
to scratch."

Then he exclaimed:

"Peugh! I have just swallowed a bad oyster. Here's the hypochondria
upon me again. The oysters are spoiled, the servants are ugly. I hate human
kind. I passed just now in the Rue Richelieu before the great public library.
This heap of oyster shells, which they call a library, disgusts me to think
of. How much paper! how much ink! how much scribbling! Somebody has
written all that! What booby was it who said that man is a biped with fea-
thers? And then, I met a pretty girl whom I knew, beautiful as Spring, worthy
to be called Floreal, and delighted, transported, happy, with the angels, the
poor creature, because yesterday a horrid banker, pitted with small-pox,
deigned to fancy her. Alas! woman watches the publican no less than the
fop; cats chase mice as well as birds. This damsel, less than two months ago,
was a good girl in a garret, she fixed the little ring, of copper in the eyelets
of corsets, how do you call it? She sewed, she had a bed, she lived with a
flower-pot, she was contented. Now she is a bankeress. This transformation
was wrought last night. I met the victim this morning, full of joy. The
hideous part of it is, that the wench was quite as pretty to-day as yesterday.
Her financier didn't appear on her face. Roses have this much more or less
than women, that the traces which worms leave on them are visible. Ah!
there is no morality upon the earth; I call to witness the myrtle, the symbol
of love, the laurel, the symbol of war, the olive; that goose, the symbol
of peace, the apple, which almost strangled Adam with its seed, and the fig,
the grandfather of petticoats. As to rights, do you want to know what rights
are? The Gauls covet Clusium, Rome protects Clusium, and asks them
what Clusium has done to them. Brennus answers: ‘What Alba did to you,
what Fidena did to you, what the Aqui, the Volsci, and the Sabines did to
you. They were your neighbours. The Clusians are ours. We understand
neighbourhood as you do. You stole Alba, we take Clusium.' Rome says:
‘You will not take Clusium.' Brennus took Rome. Then he cried: ‘Va victis!'
That is what rights are. Ah! in this world, what beasts of prey! what eagles!
it makes me crawl all over."

He reached his glass to Joly, who filled it again, then he drank, and
proceeded, almost without having been interrupted by this glass of wine,
which nobody perceived, not even himself.

"Brennus, who takes Rome, is an eagle; the banker, who takes the
grisette, is an eagle. No more shame here than there. Then let us believe
in nothing. There is but one reality: to drink. Whatever may be your opin
ion, whether you are for the lean cock like the Canton of Uri, or for the
fat cock, like the Canton of Glaris, matters little, drink. You talk to me of
the boulevard, of the procession, et catera. Ah, now, there is going to be a
revolution again, is there? This poverty of means on the part of God aston-
ishes me. He has to keep greasing the grooves of events continually. It
hitches, it does not go. Quick, a revolution. God has his hands black with
this villainous cart-grease all the time. In his place, I would work more
simply, I wouldn't be winding up my machine every minute, I would lead the
human race smoothly, I would knit the facts stitch to stitch, without break-
ing the thread, I would have no emergency, I would have no extraordinary
repertory. What you fellows call progress moves by two springs, men and
events. But sad to say, from time to time the exceptional is necessary. For
events as well as for men, the stock company is not enough; geniuses are
needed among men, and revolutions among events. Great accidents are the
law; the order of things cannot get along without them; and, to see the
apparitions of comets, one would be tempted to believe that Heaven itself
is in need of star actors. At the moment you least expect it, God placards a
meteor on the wall of the firmament. Some strange star comes along,
underlined by an enormous tail. And that makes Casar die. Brutus strikes
him with a knife, and God with a comet. Crack, there is an aurora borealis,
there is a revolution, there is a great man; '93 in big letters. Napoleon with
a line to himself, the comet of 1811 at the top of the poster. Ah! the beau-
tiful blue poster, all studded with unexpected flourishes! Boom! boom!
extraordinary spectacle. Look up, loungers. All is dishevelled, the star as
well as the drama. Good God, it is too much, and it is not enough. These
resources, used in emergency, seem magnificence, and are poverty. My
friends, Providence is put to his trumps. A revolution, what does that prove?
That God is hard up. He makes a coup d'etat, because there is a solution
of continuity between the present and the future, and because he, God,
is unable to join the two ends. In fact, that confirms me in my conjectures
about the condition of Jehovah's fortune; and to see so much discomfort
above and below, so much rascality and odiousness and stinginess and dis-
tress in the heavens and on the earth, from the bird which has not a grain
of millet to me who have not a hundred thousand livres of income, to see
human destiny, which is very much worn out, and even royal destiny, which
shows the warp, witness the Prince of Conde hung, to see winter, which is
nothing but a rent in the zenith through which the wind blows, to see so
many tatters even in the brand new purple of the morning on the tops of
the hills, to see the dew drops, those false pearls, to see the frost, that paste,
to see humanity ripped, and events patched, and so many spots on the sun,
and so many holes in the moon, to see so much misery everywhere, I sus-
pect that God is not rich. He keeps up appearances, it is true, but I feel the
pinch. He gives a revolution as a merchant, whose credit is low, gives a ball.
We must not judge the gods from appearances. Beneath the gilding of the
sky I catch a glimpse of a poor universe. Creation is bankrupt. That is why
I am a malcontent. See, it is the fifth of June, it is very dark: since morning
I have been waiting for the daybreak, it has not come, and I will bet that it
won't come all day. It is a negligence of a badly paid clerk. Yes, everything
is badly arranged, nothing fits anything, this old world is all rickety, I range
myself with the opposition. Everything goes cross-grained; the universe is
a tease. It is like children, those who want it haven't it, those who don't
want it have it. Total: I scoff. Besides, Laigle de Meaux, that bald-head,
afflicts my sight. It humiliates me to think that I am the same age as that
knee. Still, I criticise, but I don't insult. The universe is what it is. I speak
here without malice, and to ease my conscience. Receive, Father Eternal,
the assurance of my distinguished consideration. Oh! by all saints of Olympus
and by all the gods of Paradise, I was not made to be a Parisian, that is
to say, to ricochet for ever, like a shuttlecock between two battledores, from
the company of loafers to the company of rioters! I was made to be a Turk
looking all day long at Oriental jades executing those exquisite dances of
Egypt, as lascivious as the dreams of a chaste man, or a Beauce peasant, or
a Venetian gentleman surrounded by gentledames, or a little German prince,
furnishing the half of a foot soldier to the Germanic Confederation, and
occupying his leisure in drying his socks upon his hedge, that is to say, upon
his frontier! Such is the destiny for which I was born! Yes, I said Turk, and
I don't unsay it. I don't understand why the Turks are commonly held in
bad repute; there is some good in Mahomet; respect for the inventor of
seraglios with houris, and paradises with odalisques! Let us not insult
Mahometanism, the only religion that is adorned with a hen-roost! On
that, I insist upon drinking. The earth is a great folly. And it appears that
they are going to fight, all these idiots, to get their heads broken, to mass-
acre one another, in midsummer, in the month of June, when they might
go off with some creature under their arm, to scent in the fields the huge
cup of tea of the new mown hay! Really, they are too silly. An old broken
lamp which I saw just now at a second-hand shop suggests me a reflection.
It is time to enlighten the human race. Yes, here I am again sad. What a
thing it is to swallow an oyster or a revolution the wrong way! I am getting
dismal. Oh! the frightful old world! They strive with one another, they
plunder one another, they prostitute one another, they kill one another,
they get used to one another!"

And Grantaire, after this fit of eloquence, had a fit of coughing, which
he deserved.

"Speakig of revolutiod," said Joly, "it appears that Barius is decidedly
abourous."

"Does anybody know of whom?" inquired Laigle.

"Do."

"No?"

"Do! I tell you."

"Marius' amours!" exclaimed Grantaire, "I see them now. Marius is a
fog, and he must have found a vapour. Marius is of the race of poets. He
who says poet, says fool. Tymbras Apollo. Marius and his Mary, or his Maria,
or his Marietta, or his Marion, they must make droll lovers. I imagine how
it is. Ecstasies where they forget to kiss. Chaste upon the earth, but coupling
in the infinite. They are souls which have senses. They sleep together
in the stars."

Grantaire was entering on his second bottle, and perhaps his second
harangue, when a new actor emerged from the square hole of the stairway.
It was a boy of less than ten years, ragged, very small, yellow, a mug of a
face, a keen eye, monstrous long hair, wet to the skin, a complacent look.

The child, choosing without hesitation among the three, although he
evidently knew none of them, addressed himself to Laigle de Meaux.

"Are you Monsieur Bossuet?" asked he.

"That is my nickname," answered Laigle. "What do you want of me?"

"This is it. A big light-complexioned fellow on the boulevard said to
me: Do you know Mother Hucheloup? I said: Yes, Rue de la Chanvrerie,
the widow of the old man. He said to me. Go there. You will find Monsieur
Bossuet there, and you will tell him from me: A--B--C. It is a joke
that somebody is playing on you, isn't it? He gave me ten sous."

"Joly, lend me ten sous," said Laigle, and turning towards Grantaire:
"Grantaire, lend me ten sous."

This made twenty sous which Laigle gave the child.

"Thank you, monsieur," said the little fellow.

"What is your name?" asked Laigle.

"Navet, Gavroche's friend."

"Stop with us," said Laigle.

"Breakfast with us," said Grantaire.

The child answered:

"I can't, I am with the procession, I am the one to cry, Down with
Polignac."

And giving his foot a long scrape behind him, which is the most
respectful of all possible bows, he went away.

The child gone, Grantaire resumed:

"This is the pure gamin. There are many varieties in the gamin genus.

The notary gamin is called saute-ruisseau, the cook gamin is called marmiton,
the baker gamin is called mitron, the lackey gamin is called groom, the sailor
gamin is called mousse, the soldier gamin is called tapin, the painter gamin is
called rapin, the trader gamin is called trottin, the courtier gamin is called
menin, the king gamin is called dauphin, the god gamin is called bambino."

Meanwhile Laigle was meditating; he said in an under tone:

"A--B--C, that is to say: Lamarque's funeral."

"The big light-complexioned man," observed Grantaire, "is Enjolras,
who sent to notify you."

"Shall we go?" said Bossuet.

"It raids," said Joly. "I have sword to go through fire, dot water. I
dod't wadt to catch cold."

"I stay here," said Grantaire. "I prefer a breakfast to a hearse."

"Conclusion: we stay," resumed Laigle. "Well, let us drink then.
Besides we can miss the funeral, without missing the emeute."

"Ah! the ebeute, I am id for that," exclaimed Joly.

Laigle rubbed his hands:

"Now they are going to retouch the Revolution of 1830. In fact, it
binds the people in the armholes."

"It don't make much difference with me, your revolution," said Gran-
taire. "I don't execrate this government. It is the crown tempered with
the night-cap. It is a sceptre terminating in an umbrella. In fact, to-day,
I should think, in this weather Louis Philippe could make good use of his
royalty at both ends, extend the sceptre end against the people, and open
the umbrella end against the sky."

The room was dark, great clouds were completing the suppression of the
daylight. There was nobody in the wine-shop, nor in the street, everybody
having gone "to see the events."

"Is it noon or midnight?" cried Bossuet. "We can't see a speck. Fricassee,
a light."

Grantaire, melancholy, was drinking.

Enjolras despises me," murmured he. "Enjolras said Joly is sick.
Grantaire is drunk. It was to Bossuet that he sent Navet. If he had come
for me I would have followed him. So much the worse for Enjolras! I won't
go to his funeral."

This resolution taken, Bossuet, Joly, and Grantaire did not stir from
the wine-shop. About two o'clock in the afternoon, the table on which they
were leaning was covered with empty bottles. Two candles were burning,
one in a perfectly green copper candlestick, the other in the neck of a
cracked decanter. Grantaire had drawn Joly and Bossuet towards wine;
Bossuet and Joly had led Grantaire towards joy.

As for Grantaire, since noon, he had got beyond wine, an indifferent
source of dreams. Wine, with serious drunkards, has only a quiet success.
There is, in point of inebriety, black magic and white magic, wine is only
white magic. Grantaire was a daring drinker of dreams. The blackness of a
fearful drunkenness yawning before him, far from checking him, drew him
on. He had left the bottle behind and taken to the jug. The jug is the abyss.
Having at his hand neither opium nor hashish, and wishing to fill his brain
with mist, he had had recourse to that frightful mixture of brandy, stout,
and absinthe, which produces such terrible lethargy. It is from these three
vapours, beer, bandy, and absinthe; that the lead of the soul is formed. They
are three darknesses; the celestial butterfly is drowned in them; and there
arise, in a membranous smoke vaguely condensed into bat wings, three
dumb furies, nightmare, night, death, flitting above the sleeping Psyche.

Grantaire was not yet at this dreary phase; far from it. He was extrava-
gantly gay, and Bossuet and Joly kept pace with him. They touched
glasses. Grantaire added to the eccentric accentuation of his words and
ideas incoherency of gesture; he rested his left wrist upon his knee with
dignity, his arms a-kimbo, and his cravat untied, bestriding a stool, his
full glass in his right hand, he threw out to the fat servant Chowder these
solemn words:

"Let the palace doors be opened! Let everybody belong to the
Academie Francaise, and have the right of embracing Madame Hucheloup!
let us drink."

And turning towards Ma'am Hucheloup he added:

"Antique woman consecrated by use, approach that I may gaze upon
thee!"

And Joly exclaimed:

"Chowder add Fricassee, dod't give Gradtaire ady bore to drigk. He
spedds his bodey foolishly. He has already devoured sidce this bordigg in
desperate prodigality two fragcs didety-five cedtibes."

And Grantaire replied:

"Who has been unhooking the stars without my permission to put
them on the table in the shape of candles?"

Bossuet, very drunk, had preserved his calmness.

He sat in the open window, wetting his back with the falling rain, and
gazed at his two friends.

Suddenly he heard a tumult behind him, hurried steps, cries to arms!
He turned, and saw in the Rue Saint Denis, at the end of the Rue de la
Chanvrerie, Enjolras passing, carbine in hand, and Gavroche with his
pistol, Feuilly with his sabre, Courfeyrac with his sword, Jean Prouvaire
with his musketoon, Combeferre with his musket, Bahorel with his musket,
and all the armed and stormy gathering which followed them.

The Rue de la Chanvrerie was hardly as long as the range of a carbine.
Bossuet improvised a speaking trumpet with his two hands, and shouted:

"Courfeyrac! Courfeyrac! ahoy!"

Courfeyrac heard the call, perceived Bossuet, and came a few steps into
the Rue de la Chanvrerie, crying a "what do you want?" which was met on
the way by a "where are you going?"

"To make a barricade," answered Courfeyrac.

"Well, here! This is a good place! make it here!"

"That is true, Eagle," said Courfeyrac.

And at a sign from Courfeyrac, the band rushed into the Rue de la
Chanvrerie.



III. NIGHT BEGINS TO GATHER OVER GRANTAIRE



THE PLACE WAS indeed admirably chosen, the entrance of the street wide,
the further end contracted and like a cul-de-sac, Corinth throttling it, Rue
Mondetour easy to bar at the right and left, no attack possible except from
the Rue Saint Denis, that is from the front, and without cover. Bossuet
tipsy had the coup d'?il of Hannibal fasting.

At the irruption of the mob, dismay seized the whole street, not a
passer but had gone into eclipse. In a flash, at the end, on the right, on the
left, shops, stalls, alley gates, windows, blinds, dormer-windows, shutters of
every size, were closed from the ground to the roofs. One frightened old
woman had fixed a mattress before her window on two clothes poles, as a
shield against the musketry. The wine-shop was the only house which
remained open; and that for a good reason, because the band had rushed
into it. "Oh my God! Oh my God!" sighed Ma'am Hucheloup.

Bossuet had gone down to meet Courfeyrac.

Joly, who had come to the window, cried:

"Courfeyrac, you bust take ad ubbrella. You will catch cold."

Meanwhile, in a few minutes, twenty iron bars had been wrested from
the grated front of the wine-shop, twenty yards of pavement had been torn
up, Gavroche and Bahorel had seized on its passage and tipped over the
dray of a lime merchant named Anceau, this dray contained three barrels
full of lime, which they had placed under the piles of paving stones; En-
jolras had opened the trap-door of the cellar and all the widow Hucheloup's
empty casks had gone to flank the lime barrels; Feuilly, with his fingers
accustomed to colour the delicate folds of fans, had buttressed the barrels
and the dray with two massive heaps of stones. Stones improvised like the
rest, and obtained nobody knows where. Some shoring-timbers had been
pulled down from the front of a neighbouring house and laid upon the
casks. When Bossuet and Courfeyrac turned round, half the street was
already barred by a rampart higher than a man. There is nothing like the
popular hand to build whatever can be built by demolishing.

Chowder and Fricassee had joined the labourers. Fricassee went back
and forth loaded with rubbish. Her weariness contributed to the barricade.
She served paving stones, as she would have served wine, with a sleepy air.

An omnibus with two white horses passed at the end of the street.
Bossuet sprang over the pavement, ran, stopped the driver, made the
passengers get down, gave his hand "to the ladies," dismissed the
conductor, and came back with the vehicle, leading the horses by the
bridle.

"An omnibus," said he, "doesn't pass by Corinth. Non licet omnibus
adire Corinthum."

A moment later the horses were unhitched and going off at will
through the Rue Mondetour, and the omnibus, lying on its side, completed
the barring of the street.

Ma'am Hucheloup, completely upset, had taken refuge in the first story.

Her eyes were wandering, and she looked without seeing, crying in a
whisper. Her cries were dismayed and dared not come out of her throat.

"It is the end of the world," she murmured.

Joly deposited a kiss upon Ma'am Hucheloup's coarse, red, and wrinkled
neck, and said to Grantaire: "My dear fellow, I have always considered
a woman's neck an infinitely delicate thing."

But Grantaire was attaining the highest regions of dithyramb. Chowder
having come up to the first floor, Grantaire seized her by the waist and
pulled her towards the window with long bursts of laughter.

"Chowder is ugly!" cried he; "Chowder is the dream of ugliness! Chow-
der is a chimera. Listen to the secret of her birth: a Gothic Pygmalion
who was making cathedral waterspouts, fell in love with one of them one
fine morning, the most horrible of all. He implored Love to animate her,
and that made Chowder. Behold her, citizens! her hair is the colour of
chromate of lead, like that of Titian's mistress, and she is a good girl.
I warrant you that she will fight well. Every good girl contains a hero. As
for Mother Hucheloup, she is an old brave. Look at her moustaches! she
inherited them from her husband. A hussaress, indeed, she will fight too.
They two by themselves will frighten the banlieue. Comrades, we will overturn
the government, as true as there are fifteen acids intermediate between
margaric acid and formic acid, which I don't care a fig about. Messieurs, my
father always detested me, because I could not understand mathematics. I
only understand love and liberty. I am Grantaire, a good boy. Never having
had any money, I have never got used to it, and by that means I have never
felt the need of it, but if I had been rich, there would have been no more
poor! you should have seen. Oh! if the good hearts had the fat purses, how
much better everything would go! I imagine Jesus Christ with Rothschild's
fortune! How much good he would have done! Chowder, embrace me! you
are voluptuous and timid! you have cheeks which call for the kiss of a
sister, and lips which demand the kiss of a lover."

"Be still, wine-cask!" said Courfeyrac.

Grantaire answered:

"I am Capitoul and Master of Floral Games!"

Enjolras, who was standing on the crest of the barricade, musket in
hand, raised his fine austere face. Enjolras, we know, had something of the
Spartan and of the Puritan. He would have died at Thermopyla with
Leonidas, and would have burned Drogheda with Cromwell.

"Grantaire," cried he, "go sleep yourself sober away from here. This
is the place for intoxication and not for drunkenness. Do not dishonour the
barricade!"

This angry speech produced upon Grantaire a singular effect. One
would have said that he had received a glass of cold water in his face. He
appeared suddenly sobered. He sat down, leaned upon a table near the window,
looked at Enjolras with an inexpressible gentleness, and said to him:

"Let me sleep here."

"Go sleep elsewhere," cried Enjolras.

But Grantaire, keeping his tender and troubled eyes fixed upon him,
answered:

"Let me sleep here--until I die here."

Enjolras regarded him with a disdainful eye:

"Grantaire, you are incapable of belief, of thought, of will, of life, and
of death."

He stammered out a few more unintelligible words, then his head fell
heavily upon the table, and, a common effect of the second stage of ineb-
riety into which Enjolras had rudely and suddenly pushed him, a moment
later he was asleep.



IV. ATTEMPT AT CONSOLATION UPON THE WIDOW HUCHELOUP



BAHOREL, in ecstasies with the barricade, cried:

"There is the street in a low neck, how well it looks!"

Courfeyrac, even while helping to demolish the wine-shop, sought to
console the widowed landlady.

"Mother Hucheloup, were you not complaining the other day that you
had been summoned and fined because Fricassee had shaken a rug out of
your window?"

"Yes, my good Monsieur Courfeyrac. Oh! my God! are you going to put
that table also into your horror? And besides that, for the rug, and also
for a flower-pot which fell from the attic into the street, the government
fined me a hundred francs. If that isn't an abomination!"

"Well, Mother Hucheloup, we are avenging you."

Mother Hucheloup, in this reparation which they were making her, did
not seem to very well understand her advantage. She was satisfied after
the manner of that Arab woman who, having received a blow from her husband,
went to complain to her father, crying for vengeance and saying:

"Father, you owe my husband affront for affront." The father asked: "Upon
which cheek did you receive the blow?" "Upon the left cheek." The father
struck the right cheek, and said: "Now you are satisfied. Go and tell your
husband that he has struck my daughter, but that I have struck his wife."

The rain had ceased. Recruits had arrived. Some working-men had brought
under their blouses a keg of powder, a hamper containing bottles of vit-
riol, two or three carnival torches, and a basket full of lamps, "relics of
the king's fete," which fete was quite recent, having taken place the 1st of
May. It was said that these supplies came from a grocer of the Faubourg
Saint Antoine, named Pepin. They broke the only lamp in the Rue de la
Chanvrerie, the lamp opposite the Rue Saint Denis, and all the lamps in
the surrounding streets, Mondetour, du Cygne, des Precheurs, and de la
Grande and de la Petite Truanderie.

Enjolras, Combeferre, and Courfeyrac, directed everything. Two barri-
cades were now building at the same time, both resting on the house of
Corinth and making a right angle; the larger one closed the Rue de la
Chanvrerie, the other closed the Rue Mondetour in the direction of the
Rue du Cygne. This last barricade, very narrow, was constructed only of
casks and paving stones. There were about fifty labourers there, some thirty
armed with muskets, for, on their way, they had effected a wholesale loan
from an armourer's shop.

Nothing could be more fantastic and more motley than this band. One
had a short-jacket, a cavalry sabre, and two horse-pistols; another was in
shirt sleeves, with a round hat, and a powder-horn hung at his side; a third
had a breast-plate of nine sheets of brown paper, and was armed with a sad-
dler's awl. There was one of them who cried: "Let us exterminate to the last
man, and die on the point of our bayonets!" This man had no bayonet. Another
displayed over his coat a cross-belt and cartridge-box of the National
Guard, with the box cover adorned with this inscription in red cloth: Public
Order. Many muskets bearing the numbers of their legions, few hats, no
cravats, many bare arms, some pikes. Add to this all ages, all faces, small
pale young men, bronzed wharfmen. All were hurrying, and, while helping each
other, they talked about the possible chances--that they would have help by
three o'clock in the morning--that they were sure of one regiment--that Paris
would rise. Terrible subjects, with which were mingled a sort of cordial
joviality. One would have said they were brothers, they did not know each
other's names. Great perils have this beauty, that they bring to light the
fraternity of strangers.

A fire had been kindled in the kitchen, and they were melting pitchers,
dishes, forks, all the pewter ware of the wine-shop into bullets. They
drank through it all. Percussion-caps and buck-shot rolled pell-mell upon
the tables with glasses of wine. In the billiard-room, Ma'am Hucheloup,
Chowder, and Fricassee, variously modified by terror, one being stupefied,
another breathless, the third alert, were tearing up old linen and making
lint; three insurgents assisted them, three long-haired, bearded, and
moustached wags who tore up the cloth with the fingers of a linen-draper,
and who made them tremble.

The man of tall stature whom Courfeyrac, Combeferre, and Enjolras
had noticed, at the moment he joined the company at the corner of the Rue
des Billettes, was working on the little barricade, and making himself useful
there. Gavroche worked on the large one. As for the young man who had
waited for Courfeyrac at his house, and had asked him for Monsieur Marius,
he had disappeared very nearly at the moment the omnibus was overturned.

Gavroche, completely carried away and radiant, had charged himself with
making all ready. He went, came, mounted, descended, remounted, bustled,
sparkled. He seemed to be there for the encouragement of all. Had he a
spur? yes, certainly, his misery; had he wings? yes, certainly, his joy.
Gavroche was a whirlwind. They saw him incessantly, they heard him con-
stantly. He filled the air, being everywhere at once. He was a kind of
stimulating ubiquity; no stop possible with him. The enormous barricade
felt him on its back. He vexed the loungers, he excited the idle, he re-
animated the weary, he provoked the thoughtful, kept some in cheerfulness,
others in breath, others in anger, all in motion, piqued a student, was
biting to a working-man; took position, stopped, started on, flitted above
the tumult and the effort, leaped from these to those, murmured, hummed,
and stirred up the whole train; the fly on the revolutionary coach.

Perpetual motion was in his little arms, and perpetual clamour in his
little lungs.

"Cheerly? more paving stones? more barrels? more machines? where
are there any? A basket of plaster, to stop that hole. It is too small, your
barricade. It must go higher. Pile on everything, brace it with everything.
Break up the house. A barricade is Mother Gibou's tea-party. Hold on,
there is a glass-door."

This made the labourers exclaim:

"A glass-door? what do you want us to do with a glass-door, tubercle?"

"Hercules yourselves?" retorted Gavroche. "A glass-door in a barricade
is excellent. It doesn't prevent attacking it, but it bothers them in
taking it. Then you have never hooked apples over a wall with broken bottles
on it? A glass-door, it will cut the corns of the National Guards, when
they try to climb over the barricade. Golly! glass is the devil, Ah, now,
you haven't an unbridled imagination, my comrades."

Still, he was furious at his pistol without a hammer. He went from one
to another, demanding: "A musket? I want a musket! Why don't you give
me a musket?"

"A musket for you?" said Combeferre.

"Well?" replied Gavroche, "why not? I had one in 1830, in the dispute
with Charles X."

Enjolras shrugged his shoulders.

"When there are enough for the men, we will give them to the children."

Gavroche turned fiercely, and answered him:

"If you are killed before me, I will take yours."

"Gamin!" said Enjolras.

"Smooth-face!" said Gavroche.

A stray dandy who was lounging at the end of the street made a diversion.

Gavroche cried to him:

"Come with us, young man? Well, this poor old country, you won't
do anything for her then?"

The dandy fled.



V. THE PREPARATIONS



THE JOURNALS OF THE TIME which said that the barricade of the Rue de la
Chanvrerie, that almost inexpugnable construction, as they call it, attained
the level of a second story, were mistaken. The fact is, that it did not exceed
an average height of six or seven feet. It was built in such a manner that the
combatants could, at will, either disappear behind the wall, or look over it,
and even scale the crest of it by means of a quadruple range of pavingstones
superposed and arranged like steps on the inner side. The front of the bar-
ricade on the outside, composed of piles of paving-stones and of barrels
bound together by timbers and boards which were interlocked in the wheels
of the Anceau cart and the overturned omnibus, had a bristling and
inextricable aspect.

An opening sufficient for a man to pass through had been left between the
wall of the houses and the extremity of the barricade furthest from the
wine-shop; so that a sortie was possible. The pole of the omnibus was
turned directly up and held with ropes, and a red flag fixed to this pole
floated over the barricade.

The little Mondetour barricade, hidden behind the wine-shop, was not
visible. The two barricades united formed a staunch redoubt. Enjolras and
Courfeyrac had not thought proper to barricade the other end of the Rue
Mondetour which opens a passage to the markets through the Rue des
Precheurs, wishing doubtless to preserve a possible communication with
the outside, and having little dread of being attacked from the dangerous
and difficult alley des Precheurs.

Except this passage remaining free, which constituted what Folard, in
his strategic style, would have called a branch-trench, and bearing in mind
also the narrow opening arranged on the Rue de la Chanvrerie, the interior
of the barricade, where the wine-shop made a salient angle, presented an
irregular quadrilateral closed on all sides. There was an interval of about
twenty yards between the great barricade and the tall houses which formed
the end of the street, so that we might say that the barricade leaned against
these houses all inhabited, but closed from top to bottom.

All this labour was accomplished without hindrance in less than an hour,
and without this handful of bold men seeing a bearskin-cap or a bayonet
arise. The few bourgeois who still ventured at that period of the
emeute into the Rue Saint Denis cast a glance down the Rue de la Chanvrerie,
perceived the barricade, and redoubled their pace.

The two barricades finished, the flag run up, a table was dragged out of
the wine-shop; and Courfeyrac mounted upon the table. Enjolras brought
the square box and Courfeyrac opened it. This box was filled with cartridges.
When they saw the cartridges, there was a shudder among the bravest, and
a moment of silence.

Courfeyrac distributed them with a smile.

Each one received thirty cartridges. Many had powder and set about
making others with the balls which they were moulding. As for the keg of
powder, it was on a table by itself near the door, and it was reserved.
The long roll which was running through all Paris was not discontin-
ued, but it had got to be only a monotonous sound to which they paid no
more attention, with melancholy undulations.

They loaded their muskets and their carbines all together, without preci-
pitation, with a solemn gravity. Enjolras placed three sentinels outside
the barricades, one in the Rue de la Chanvrerie, the second in the Rue des
Precheurs, the third at the corner of la Petite Truanderie.

Then, the barricades built, the posts assigned, the muskets loaded, the
videttes placed, alone in these fearful streets in which there were now no
passers, surrounded by these dumb, and as it were dead houses, which
throbbed with no human motion, enwrapped by the deepening shadows of
the twilight, which was beginning to fall, in the midst of this obscurity and
this silence, through which they felt the advance of something inexpressibly
tragical and terrifying, isolated, armed, determined, tranquil, they waited.



VI. WHILE WAITING



IN THESE HOURS of waiting what did they do? This we must tell--for this is
history.

While the men were making cartridges and the women lint, while a large
frying-pan, full of melted pewter and lead, destined for the bulletmould,
was smoking over a burning furnace, while the videttes were watching the
barricades with arms in their hands, while Enjolras, whom nothing could
distract, was watching the videttes, Combeferre, Courfeyrac, Jean Prou-
vaire, Feuilly, Bossuet, Joly, Bahorel, a few others besides, sought each
other and got together, as in the most peaceful days of their student-
chats, and in a corner of this wine-shop changed into a casemate, within
two steps of the redoubt which they had thrown up, their carbines primed
and loaded resting on the backs of their chairs, these gallant young men,
so near their last hour, began to sing love-rhymes.

What rhymes? Here they are:

Vous rappelez-vous notre douce vie,
Lorsque nous etions si jeunes tous deux,
Et que nous n'avions au coeur d'autre envie
Que d'etre bien mis et d'etre amoureux.

Lorsqu'en ajoutant votre age a mon age,
Nous ne comptions pas a deux quarante ans,
Et que, dans notre humble et petit menage,
Tout, meme l'hiver, nous etait printemps?

Beaux jours! Manuel etait fier et sage,
Paris s'asseyait a de saints banquets,
Foy lancait la foudre, et votre corsage
Avait une epingle ou je me piquais.

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

Je les entendais dire: Est-elle belle!
Comme elle sent bon! quels cheveux a flots!
Sous son mantelet elle cache une aile;
Son bonnet charmant est a peine eclos.

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

Nous vivions caches, contents, porte close,
Devorant l'amour, bon fruit defendu;
Ma bouche n'avait pas dit une chose
Que deja ton coeur avait repondu.

La Sorbonne etait l'endroit bucolique
Ou je t'adorais du soir au matin.
C'est ainsi qu'une ame amoureuse applique
La carte du Tendre au pays latin.

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

J'ai fort lu Platon, mais rien ne m'en reste
Mieux que Malebranche et que Lamennais;
Tu me demontrais la bonte celeste
Avec une fleur que tu me donnais.

Je t'obeissais, tu m'etais soumise.
O grenier dore! te lacer! te voir!
Aller et venir des l'aube en chemise,
Mirant ton front jeune a ton vieux miroir!

Et qui donc pourrait perdre la memoire
De ces temps d'aurore et de firmament,
De rubans, de fleurs, de gaze et de moire,
Ou l'amour begaye un argot charmant?

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

Et ces grands malheurs qui nous faisaient rire!
Ton manchon brule, ton boa perdu!
Et ce cher portrait du divin Shakspeare
Qu'un soir pour souper nous avons vendu!

J'etais mendiant, et toi charitable;
Je baisais au vol tes bras frais et ronds.
Dante in-folio nous servait de table
Pour manger gaiment un cent de marrons.

Le premiere fois qu'en mon joyeux bouge
Je pris un baiser a ta levre en feu,
Quand tu t'en allas decoiffee et rouge,
Je restai tout pale et je crus en Dieu!

Te rappeles-tu nos bonheurs sans nombre,
Et tous ces fichus changes en chiffons?
Oh! que de soupirs, de nos coers pleins d'ombre,
Se sont envoles dans les cieux profonds!

The hour, the place, these memories of youth recalled, the few stars
which began to shine in the sky, the funereal repose of these deserted
streets, the imminence of the inexorable event, gave a pathetic charm to
these rhymes, murmured in a low tone in the twilight by Jean Prouvaire,
who, as we have said, was a sweet poet.

Meanwhile they had lighted a lamp at the little barricade, and at the
large one, one of those wax torches which are seen on Mardi Gras in front
of the waggons loaded with masks, which are going to the Comtille. These
torches, we have seen, came from the Faubourg Saint Antoine.

The torch had been placed in a kind of cage, closed in with pavingstones
on three sides, to shelter it from the wind, and disposed in such a
manner that all the light fell upon the flag. The street and the barricade
remained plunged in obscurity, and nothing could be seen but the red flag,
fearfully lighted up, as if by an enormous dark lantern.

This light gave to the scarlet of the flag an indescribably terrible purple.



VII. THE MAN RECRUITED IN THE RUE DES BILLETTES



IT WAS NOW QUITE NIGHT, nothing came. There were only confused sounds,
and at intervals volleys of musketry; but rare, ill-sustained, and distant.
This respite, which was thus prolonged, was a sign that the government
was taking its time, and massing its forces. These fifty men were await-
ing sixty thousand.

Enjolras felt himself possessed by that impatience which seizes strong
souls on the threshold of formidable events. He went to find Gavroche who
had set himself to making cartridges in the basement room by the doubtful
light of two candles placed upon the counter through precaution on
account of the powder scattered over the tables. These two candles threw
no rays outside. The insurgents moreover had taken care not to have any
lights in the upper stories.

Gavroche at this moment was very much engaged, not exactly with his
cartridges.

The man from the Rue des Billettes had just entered the basement room
and had taken a seat at the table which was least lighted. An infantry
musket of large model had fallen to his lot, and he held it between his
knees. Gavroche hitherto, distracted by a hundred "amusing" things, had
not even seen this man.

When he came in, Gavroche mechanically followed him with his eyes,
admiring his musket, then, suddenly, when the man had sat down, the
gamin arose. Had any one watched this man up to this time, he would have
seen him observe everything in the barricade and in the band of insurgents
with a singular attention; but since he had come into the room, he had
fallen into a kind of meditation and appeared to see nothing more of what
was going on. The gamin approached this thoughtful personage, and began
to turn about him on the points of his toes as one walks when near somebody
whom he fears to awake. At the same time, over his childish face, at
once so saucy and so serious, so flighty and so profound, so cheerful and
so touching, there passed all those grimaces of the old which signify: "Oh,
bah! impossible! I am befogged! I am dreaming! can it be? no, it isn't! why
yes! why no!" etc. Gavroche balanced himself upon his heels, clenched both
fists in his pockets, twisted his neck like a bird, expended in one measureless
pout all the sagacity of his lower lip. He was stupefied, uncertain, cred-
ulous, convinced, bewildered. He had the appearance of the chief of the
eunuchs in the slave market discovering a Venus among dumpies, and the
air of an amateur recognising a Raphael in a heap of daubs. Everything in
him was at work, the instinct which scents and the intellect which combines.

It was evident that an event had occurred with Gavroche.

It was in the deepest of this meditation that Enjolras accosted him.

"You are small," said Enjolras, "nobody will see you. Go out of the
barricades, glide along by the houses, look about the streets a little,
and come and tell me what is going on."

Gavroche straightened himself up.

"Little folks are good for something then! that is very lucky! I will go!
meantime, trust the little folks, distrust the big----"And Gavroche, raising
his head and lowering his voice, added, pointing to the man of the Rue des
Billettes:

"You see that big fellow there?"

"Well?"

"He is a spy."

"You are sure?"

"It isn't a fortnight since he pulled me by the ear off the cornice of
the Pont Royal where I was taking the air."

Enjolras hastily left the gamin, and murmured a few words very low
to a working-man from the wine docks who was there. The working-man
went out of the room and returned almost immediately, accompanied by
three others. The four men, four broad-shouldered porters, placed them-
selves, without doing anything which could attract his attention, behind
the table on which the man of the Rue des Billettes was leaning. They
were evidently ready to throw themselves upon him.

Then Enjolras approached the man and asked him:

"Who are you?"

At this abrupt question, the man gave a start. He looked straight to the
bottom of Enjolras' frank eye and appeared to catch his thought. He smiled
with a smile which, of all things in the world, was the most disdainful, the
most energetic, and the most resolute, and answered with a haughty gravity:

"I see how it is----Well, yes!"

"You are a spy?"

"I am an officer of the government."

"Your name is?"

"Javert."

Enjolras made a sign to the four men. In a twinkling, before Javert had
had time to turn around, he was collared, thrown down, bound, searched.

They found upon him a little round card framed between two glasses,
and bearing on one side the arms of France, engraved with this legend:
Surveillance et vigilance, and on the other side this endorsement: JAVERT,
inspector of police, aged fifty-two, and the signature of the prefect of
police of the time, M. Gisquet.

He had besides his watch and his purse, which contained a few gold pieces.
They left him his purse and his watch. Under the watch, at the bottom
of his fob, they felt and seized a paper in an envelope, which Enjolras
opened, and on which he read these six lines, written by the prefect's own
hand.

"As soon as his political mission is fulfilled, Inspector Javert will ascer-
tain, by a special examination, whether it be true that malefactors have
resorts on the slope of the right bank of the Seine, near the bridge of Jena."
The search finished, they raised Javert, tied his arms behind his back,
fastened him in the middle of the basement-room to that celebrated post
which had formerly given its name to the wine-shop.

Gavroche, who had witnessed the whole scene and approved the whole
by silent nods of his head, approached Javert and said to him:

"The mouse has caught the cat."

All this was executed so rapidly that it was finished as soon as it was
perceived about the wine-shop. Javert had not uttered a cry. Seeing Javert
tied to the post, Courfeyrac, Bossuet, Joly, Combeferre, and the men scat-
tered about the two barricades, ran in.

Javert, backed up against the post, and so surrounded with ropes that
he could make no movement, held up his head with the intrepid serenity
of the man who has never lied.

"It is a spy," said Enjolras.

And turning towards Javert:

"You will be shot ten minutes before the barricade is taken."

Javert replied in his most imperious tone:

"Why not immediately?"

"We are economising powder."

"Then do it with a knife."

"Spy," said the handsome Enjolras, "we are judges, not assassins."

Then he called Gavroche.

"You! go about your business! Do what I told you."

"I am going," cried Gavroche.

And stopping just as he was starting:

"By the way, you will give me his musket!" And he added: "I leave you
the musician, but I want the clarionet."

The gamin made a military salute, and sprang gaily through the opening
in the large barricade.



VIII. SEVERAL INTERROGATION POINTS CONCERNING ONE
LE CABUC, WHO PERHAPS WAS NOT LE CABUC



THE TRAGIC PICTURE which we have commenced would not be complete, the
reader would not see in their exact and real relief these grand moments
of social parturition and of revolutionary birth in which there is convul-
sion mingled with effort, were we to omit, in the outline here sketched, an
incident full of epic and savage horror which occurred almost immediately
after Gavroche's departure.

Mobs, as we know, are like snowballs, and gather a heap of tumultuous
men as they roll. These men do not ask one another whence they come.
Among the passers who had joined themselves to the company led by
Enjolras, Combeferre, and Courfeyrac, there was a person wearing a
porter's waistcoat worn out at the shoulders, who gesticulated and vocif-
erated and had the appearance of a sort of savage drunkard. This man,
who was named or nicknamed Le Cabuc, and who was moreover entirely
unknown to those who attempted to recognise him, very drunk, or feigning
to be, was seated with a few others at a table which they had brought outside
of the wine-shop. This Cabuc, while inciting those to drink who were
with him, seemed to gaze with an air of reflection upon the large house at
the back of the barricade, the five stories of which overlooked the whole
street and faced towards the Rue Saint Denis. Suddenly he exclaimed:
"Comrades, do you know? it is from that house that we must fire. If
we are at the windows, devil a one can come into the street."

"Yes, but the house is shut up," said one of the drinkers.

"Knock!"

"They won't open."

"Stave the door in!"

Le Cabuc runs to the door, which had a very massive knocker, and
raps. The door does not open. He raps a second time. Nobody answers.
A third rap. The same silence.

"Is there anybody here?" cries Le Cabuc.

Nothing stirs.

Then he seizes a musket and begins to beat the door with the butt. It
was an old alley door, arched, low, narrow, solid, entirely of oak, lined
on the inside with sheet-iron and with iron braces, a genuine postern of
a bastille. The blows made the house tremble, but did not shake the door.

Nevertheless it is probable that the inhabitants were alarmed, for they fin-
ally saw a little square window on the third story light up and open, and
there appeared at this window a candle, and the pious and frightened face
of a grey-haired goodman who was the porter.

The man who was knocking, stopped.

"Messieurs," asked the porter, "what do you wish?"

"Open!" said Le Cabuc.

"Messieurs, that cannot be."

"Open, I tell you!"

"Impossible, messieurs!"

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

"Yes, or no, will you open?"

"No, messieurs!"

"You say no?"

"I say no, my good----"

The porter did not finish. The musket went off; the ball entered under
his chin and passed out at the back of the neck, passing through the
jugular. The old man sank down without a sigh. The candle fell and was
extinguished, and nothing could now be seen but an immovable head lying
on the edge of the window, and a little whitish smoke floating towards
the roof.

"That's it!" said Le Cabuc, letting the butt of his musket drop on the
pavement.

Hardly had he uttered these words when he felt a hand pounce upon his
shoulder with the weight of an eagle's talons, and heard a voice which
said to him:

"On your knees."

The murderer turned and saw before him the white cold face of Enjolras.

Enjolras had a pistol in his hand.

At the explosion, he had come up.

He had grasped with his left hand Le Cabuc's collar, blouse, shirt, and
suspenders.

"On your knees," repeated he.

And with a majestic movement the slender young man of twenty bent the
broad-shouldered and robust porter like a reed and made him kneel in
the mud. Le Cabuc tried to resist, but he seemed to have been seized
by a superhuman grasp.

Pale, his neck bare, his hair flying, Enjolras, with his woman's face, had
at that moment an inexpressible something of the ancient Themis. His dis-
tended nostrils, his downcast eyes, gave to his implacable Greek profile that
expression of wrath and that expression of chastity which from the point
of view of the ancient world belonged to justice.

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

Le Cabuc, vanquished, no longer attempted to defend himself but trem-
bled in every limb. Enjolras let go of him and took out his watch.

"Collect your thoughts," said he. "Pray or think. You have one
minute."

"Pardon!" murmured the murderer, then he bowed his head and
mumbled some inarticulate oaths.

Enjolras did not take his eyes off his watch; he let the minute pass, then
he put his watch back into his fob. This done, he took Le Cabuc, who was
writhing against his knees and howling, by the hair, and laced the muzzle
of his pistol at his ear. Many of those intrepid men, who had so tranquilly
entered upon the most terrible of enterprises, turned away their heads.
They heard the explosion, the assassin fell face forward on the pavement,
and Enjolras straightened up and cast about him his look determined and
severe.

Then he pushed the body away with his foot, and said:

"Throw that outside."

Three men lifted the body of the wretch, which was quivering with the last
mechanical convulsions of the life that had flown, and threw it over the
small barricade into the little Rue Mondetour.

Enjolras had remained thoughtful. Shadow, mysterious and grand, was
slowly spreading over his fearful serenity. He suddenly raised his voice.

There was a silence.

"Citizens," said Enjolras, "what that man did is horrible, and what I have
done is terrible. He killed, that is why I killed him. I was forced to do
it, for the insurrection must have its discipline. Assassination is a still
greater crime here than elsewhere; we are under the eye of the revolution,
we are the priests of the republic, we are the sacramental host of duty, and
none must be able to calumniate our combat. I therefore judged and condemned
that man to death. As for myself, compelled to do what I have done, but ab-
horring it, I have judged myself also, and you shall soon see to what I
have sentenced myself."

Those who heard shuddered.

"We will share your fate," cried Combeferre.

"So be it," added Enjolras. "A word more. In executing that man, I obey-
ed necessity; but necessity is a monster of the old world, the name of
necessity is Fatality. Now the law of progress is, that monsters disappear
before angels, and that Fatality vanish before Fraternity. This is not a
moment to pronounce the word love. No matter, I pronounce it, and I glorify
it. Love, thine is the future. Death, I use thee, but I hate thee. Citizens,
there shall be in the future neither darkness nor thunderbolts; neither fero-
cious ignorance nor blood for blood. As Satan shall be no more, so Michael
shall be no more. In the future no man shall slay his fellow, the earth shall
be radiant, the human race shall love. It will come, citizens, that day when
all shall be concord, harmony, light, joy, and life; it will come, and it is
that it may come that we are going to die."

Enjolras was silent. His virgin lips closed; and he remained some time
standing on the spot where he had spilled blood, in marble immobility. His
fixed eye made all about him speak low.

Jean Prouvaire and Combeferre silently grasped hands, and, leaning upon one
another in the corner of the barricade, considered, with an admiration not
unmingled with compassion, this severe young man, executioner and priest,
luminous like the crystal, and rock also.

Let us say right here that later, after the action, when the corpses were
carried to the Morgue and searched, there was a police officer's card found
on Le Cabuc. The author of this book had in his own hands, in 1848, the
special report made on that subject to the prefect of police in 1832.
Let us add that, if we are to believe a police tradition, strange, but
probably well founded, Le Cabuc was Claquesous. The fact is, that after the
death of Le Cabuc, nothing more was heard of Claquesous. Claquesous left
no trace of his disappearance, he would seem to have been amalgamated
with the invisible. His life had been darkness, his end was night.

The whole insurgent group were still under the emotion of this tragic
trial, so quickly instituted and so quickly terminated, when Courfeyrac
again saw in the barricade the small young man who in the morning had
called at his house for Marius.

This boy, who had a bold and reckless air, had come at night to rejoin
the insurgents.




　　　BOOK THIRTEENTH
MARIUS ENTERS THE SHADOW



I. FROM THE RUE PLUMET TO THE QUARTIER SAINT DENIS



THAT VOICE WHICH through the twilight had called Marius to the barricade
of the Rue de la Chanvrerie, sounded to him like the voice of destiny.
He wished to die, the opportunity presented itself; he was knocking at the
door of the tomb, a hand in the shadow held out the key. These dreary
clefts in the darkness before despair are tempting. Marius pushed aside the
bar which had let him pass so many times, came out of the garden, and said:
"Let us go!"

Mad with grief, feeling no longer anything fixed or solid in his brain,
incapable of accepting anything henceforth from fate, after these two
months passed in the intoxications of youth and of love, whelmed at once
beneath all the reveries of despair, he had now but one desire: to make an
end of it very quick.

He began to walk rapidly. It happened that he was armed, having
Javert's pistols with him.

The young man whom he thought he had seen was lost from his eyes
in the streets.

Marius, who had left the Rue Plumet by the boulevard, crossed the
Esplanade and the Bridge of the Invalides, the Champs-Elysees, the Place
Louis XV., and entered the Rue de Rivoli. The stores were open, the gas
was burning under the arches, women were buying in the shops, people
were taking ices at the Cafe Laiter, they were eating little cakes at the
Patisserie Anglaise. However, a few post chaises were setting off at a
gallop from the Hotel des Princes and the Hotel Meurice.

Marius entered through the Delorme arcade into the Rue Saint Honore.
The shops here were closed, the merchants were chatting before their
half-open doors, people were moving about, the lamps were burning, above
the first stories all the windows were lighted as usual. There was cavalry
in the square of the Palais Royal.

Marius followed the Rue St. Honore. As he receded from the Palais
Royal, there were fewer lighted windows; the shops were entirely closed,
nobody was chatting in the doors, the street grew gloomy, and at the same
time the throng grew dense. For the passers now were a throng. Nobody was
seen to speak in this throng, and still there came from it a deep and dull
hum.

Towards the Fontaine de l'Arbre Sec, there were "gatherings," immov-
able and sombre groups, which, among the comers and goers, were like
stones in the middle of a running stream.

At the entrance of the Rue des Prouvaires, the throng no longer moved.
It was a resisting, massive, solid, compact, almost impenetrable bloc
of people, heaped together and talking in whispers. Black coats and round
hats had almost disappeared. Frocks, blouses, caps, bristly and dirty faces.
This multitude undulated confusedly in the misty night. Its whispering had
the harsh sound of a roar. Although nobody was walking, a trampling was
heard in the mud. Beyond this dense mass, in the Rue du Roule, in the Rue
des Prouvaires, and in the prolongation of the Rue Saint Honore, there was
not a single window in which a candle was burning. In those streets the
files of the lamps were seen stretching away solitary and decreasing. The
lamps of that day resembled great red stars hanging from ropes, and threw
a shadow on the pavement which had the form of a large spider. These
streets were not empty. Muskets could be distinguished in stacks, bayo-
nets moving and troops bivouacking. The curious did not pass this bound.
There circulation ceased. There the multitude ended and the army began.

Marius willed with the will of a man who no longer hopes. He had
been called, he must go. He found means to pass through the multitude
and to pass through the bivouac of the troops, he avoided the patrols,
evaded the sentinels. He made a detour, reached the Rue de Bethisy, and
made his way towards the markets. At the corner of the Rue des Bourdonnais
the lamps ended.

After having crossed the belt of the multitude and passed the fringe of
troops, he found himself in the midst of something terrible. Not a passer
more, not a soldier, not a light; nobody. Solitude, silence, night; a mys-
terious chill which seized upon him. To enter a street was to enter a cellar.

He continued to advance.

He took a few steps. Somebody passed near him running. Was it a man? a
woman? were there several? He could not have told. It had passed and
had vanished.

By a circuitous route, he came to a little street which he judged to be
the Rue de la Poterie; about the middle of this alley he ran against some
obstacle. He put out his hands. It was an overturned cart; his foot re-
cognised puddles of water, mud-holes, paving-stones, scattered and heaped
up. A barricade had been planned there and abandoned. He climbed over
the stones and found himself on the other side of the obstruction. He
walked very near the posts and guided himself by the walls of the houses.
A little beyond the barricade, he seemed to catch a glimpse of something
white in front of him. He approached, it took form. It was two white
horses! the omnibus horses unharnessed by Bossuet in the morning,
which had wandered at chance from street to street all day long, and had
finally stopped there, with the exhausted patience of brutes, who no more
comprehended the ways of man than man comprehends the ways of Prov-
idence.

Marius left the horses behind him. As he came to a street which struck
him as being the Rue du Contrat Social, a shot from a musket coming
nobody knows whence, passing at random through the obscurity, whistled
close by him, and the ball pierced a copper shaving-dish suspended before
a barber's shop. This shaving-dish with the bullet-hole could still be seen,
in 1846, in the Rue du Contrat Social, at the corner of the pillars of the
markets.

This musket-shot was life still. From that moment he met nothing more.

This whole route resembled a descent down dark stairs.

Marius none the less went forward.



II. PARIS--AN OWL'S EYE VIEW



A BEING who could have soared above Paris at that moment with the wing
of the bat or the owl would have had a gloomy spectacle beneath his eyes.

All that old quartier of the markets, which is like a city within the city,
which is traversed by the Rues Saint Denis and Saint Martin, where a thou-
sand little streets cross each other, and of which the insurgents had made
their stronghold and their field of arms, would have appeared to him like an
enormous black hole dug out in the centre of Paris. There the eye fell into
an abyss. Thanks to the broken lamps, thanks to the closed windows, there
ceased all radiance, all life, all sound, all motion. The invisible police of
the emeute watched everywhere, and maintained order, that is night. To drown
the smallness of their number in a vast obscurity and to multiply each com-
batant by the possibilities which that obscurity contains, are the necessary
tactics of insurrection. At nightfall, every window in which a candle was
lighted had received a ball. The light was extinguished, sometimes the
inhabitant killed. Thus nothing stirred. There was nothing there but fright,
mourning, stupor in the houses; in the streets a sort of sacred horror. Even
the long ranges of windows and of stories were not perceptible, the notching
of the chimneys and the roofs, the dim reflections which gleam on the
wet and muddy pavement. The eye which might have looked from above into
that mass of shade would have caught a glimpse here and there perhaps,
from point to point, of indistinct lights, bringing out broken and
fantastic lines, outlines of singular constructions, something like ghostly
gleams, coming and going among ruins; these were the barricades. The rest
was a lake of obscurity, misty, heavy, funereal, above which rose, motionless
and dismal silhouettes, the tower Saint Jacques, the church Saint Merry,
and two or three others of those great buildings of which man makes giants
and of which night makes phantoms.

All about this deserted and disquieted labyrinth, in the quartiers where
the circulation of Paris was not stopped, and where a few rare lamps shone
out, the aerial observer might have distinguished the metallic scintillation
of sabres and bayonets, the sullen rumbling of artillery, and the swarming
of silent battalions augmenting from moment to moment; a formidable girdle
which was tightening and slowly closing about the emeute.

The invested quartier was now only a sort of monstrous cavern; everything
in it appeared to be sleeping or motionless, and, as we have just seen,
none of the streets on which you might have entered, offered anything but
darkness.

A savage darkness, full of snares, full of unknown and formidable encoun-
ters, where it was fearful to penetrate and appalling to stay, where
those who entered shuddered before those who were awaiting them, where
those who waited trembled before those who were to come. Invisible com-
batants intrenched at every street-corner; the grave hidden in ambush in
the thickness of the night. It was finished. No other light to be hoped
for there henceforth save the flash of musketry, no other meeting save the
sudden and rapid apparition of death. Where? how? when? nobody knew; but
it was certain and inevitable. There, in that place marked out for the
contest, the government and the insurrection, the National Guard and the
popular societies, the bourgeoisie and the emeute were to grope their way.
For those as for these, the necessity was the same. To leave that place slain
or victors, the only possible issue henceforth. A situation so extreme, an
obscurity so overpowering, that the most timid felt themselves filled with
resolution and the boldest with terror.


Moreover, on both sides, fury, rancour, equal determination. For those
to advance was to die, and nobody thought of retreat; for those to stay was
to die, and nobody thought of flight.

All must be decided on the morrow, the triumph must be on this side or on
that, the insurrection must be a revolution or a blunder. The government
understood it as well as the factions; the least bourgeois felt it.
Hence a feeling of anguish which mingled with the impenetrable darkness
of this quartier where all was to be decided, hence a redoubling of anxiety
about this silence whence a catastrophe was to issue. But one sound could
be heard, a sound heart-rending as a death rattle, menacing as a maledic
tion, the tocsin of Saint Merry. Nothing was so blood-chilling as the
clamour of this wild and desperate bell wailing in the darkness.

As often happens, nature seemed to have put herself in accord with
what men were about to do. Nothing disturbed the funereal harmonies of
that whole. The stars had disappeared, heavy clouds filled the whole horizon
with their melancholy folds. There was a black sky over those dead
streets, as if an immense pall had unfolded itself over that immense tomb.

While a battle as yet entirely political was preparing in this same local-
ity, which had already seen so many revolutionary events, while the youth,
the secret associations, the schools, in the name of principles, and the
middle class, in the name of interests, were approaching to dash against each
other, to close with and to overthrow each other while each was hurrying
and calling the final and decisive hour of the crisis, afar off and outside of
that fatal quartier, in the deepest of the unfathomable caverns of that old,
miserable Paris, which is disappearing under the splendour of the happy and
opulent Paris, the gloomy voice of the people was heard sullenly growling.

A fearful and sacred voice, which is composed of the roar of the brute
and the speech of God, which terrifies the feeble and which warns the wise,
which comes at the same time from below like the voice of the lion and
from above like the voice of the thunder.



III. THE EXTREME LIMIT



MARIUS HAD arrived at the markets.

There all was more calm, more obscure, and more motionless still than
in the neighbouring streets. One would have said that the icy peace of
the grave had come forth from the earth and spread over the sky.

A red glare, however, cut out upon this dark background the high roofs
of the houses which barred the Rue de la Chanvrerie on the side towards
Saint Eustache. It was the reflection of the torch which was blazing in the
barricade of Corinth. Marius directed his steps towards this glare. It led
him to the Beet Market, and he dimly saw the dark mouth of the Rue des
Precheurs. He entered it. The vidette of the insurgents who was on guard
at the other end did not perceive him. He felt that he was very near what
he had come to seek, and he walked upon tiptoe. He reached in this way
the elbow of that short end of the Rue Mondetour, which was, as we re-
member, the only communication preserved by Enjolras with the outside.
Round the corner of the last house on his left, cautiously advancing his
head, he looked into this end of the Rue Mondetour.

A little beyond the black corner of the alley and the Rue de la Chan
vrerie, which threw a broad shadow, in which he was himself buried, he
perceived a light upon the pavement, a portion of the wine-shop, and
behind, a lamp twinkling in a kind of shapeless wall, and men crouching
down with muskets on their knees. All this was within twenty yards of him.
It was the interior of the barricade.

The houses on the right of the alley hid from him the rest of the wineshop,
the great barricade, and the flag.

Marius had but one step more to take.

Then the unhappy young man sat down upon a stone, folded his arms,
and thought of his father.

He thought of that heroic Colonel Pontmercy who had been so brave a
soldier, who had defended the frontier of France under the republic,
and reached the frontier of Asia under the emperor, who had seen Genoa,
Alessandria, Milan, Turin, Madrid, Vienna, Dresden, Berlin, Moscow, who
had left upon every field of victory in Europe drops of that same blood
which he, Marius, had in his veins, who had grown grey before his time in
discipline and in command, who had lived with his sword-belt buckled, his
epaulets falling on his breast, his cockade blackened by powder, his fore-
head wrinkled by the cap, in the barracks, in the camp, in the bivouac, in
the ambulance, and who after twenty years had returned from the great
wars with his cheek scarred, his face smiling, simple, tranquil, admirable,
pure as a child, having done everything for France and nothing against her.

He said to himself that his day had come to him also, that his hour had
at last struck, that after his father, he also was to be brave, intrepid, bold,
to run amidst bullets, to bare his breast to the bayonets, to pour out his
blood, to seek the enemy, to seek death, that he was to wage war in his turn
and to enter upon the field of battle, and that that field of battle upon which
he was about to enter, was the street, and that war which he was about to
wage, was civil war!

He saw civil war yawning like an abyss before him, and that in it he
was to fall.

Then he shuddered.

He thought of that sword of his father which his grandfather had sold
to a junk-shop, and which he himself had so painfully regretted. He said
to himself that it was well that that chaste and valiant sword had escaped
from him, and gone off in anger into the darkness; that if it had fled thus,
it was because it was intelligent and because it foresaw the future; because
it foreboded the emeute, the war of the gutters, the war of the pavements,
the firing from cellar windows, blows given and received from behind;
because, coming from Marengo and Friedland, it would not go to the Rue
de la Chanvrerie, because after what it had done with the father, it would
not do this with the son! He said to himself that if that sword were there, if
having received it from the bedside of his dead father, he had dared to take
it and bring it away for this night combat between Frenchmen at the street
corners, most surely it would have burned his hands, and flamed before him
like the sword of the angel! He said to himself that it was fortunate that it
was not there and that it had disappeared, that it was well, that it was just,
that his grandfather had been the true guardian of his father's glory, and
that it was better that the colonel's sword had been cried at auction, sold
to a dealer, thrown among old iron, than that it should be used to-day to
pierce the side of the country.

And then he began to weep bitterly.

It was horrible. But what could he do? Live without Cosette, he could
not. Since she had gone away, he must surely die. Had he not given her his
word of honour that he should die? She had gone away knowing that;
therefore it pleased her that Marius should die. And then it was clear that
she no longer loved him, since she had gone away thus, without notifying
him, without a word, without a letter, and she knew his address! What use
in life and why live longer? And then, indeed! to have come so far, and to
recoil! to have approached the danger, and to flee! to have come and looked
into the barricade, and to slink away! to slink away all trembling, saying: "in
fact, I have had enough of this, I have seen, that is sufficient, it is civil war,
I am going away!" To abandon his friends who were expecting him! who
perhaps had need of him! who were a handful against an army! To fail in all
things at the same time, in his love, his friendship, his word! To give his
poltroonery the pretext of patriotism! But this was impossible, and if his
father's ghost were there in the shadow and saw him recoil, he would strike
him with the flat of his sword and cry to him: "Advance, coward!"

A prey to the swaying of his thoughts, he bowed his head.

Suddenly he straightened up. A sort of splendid rectification was wrought
in his spirit. There was an expansion of thought fitted to the confinity
of the tomb; to be near death makes us see the truth. The vision of the
act upon which he felt himself, perhaps on the point of entering, appeared
to him no longer lamentable, but superb. The war of the street was suddenly
transfigured by some indescribable interior throe of the soul, before
the eye of his mind. All the tumultuous interrogation points of his reverie
thronged upon him, but without troubling him. He left none without an
answer.

Let us see, why should his father be indignant? are there not cases
when insurrection rises to the dignity of duty? what would there be then
belittling to the son of Colonel Pontmercy in the impending combat? It is
no longer Montmirail or Champaubert; it is something else. It is no longer
a question of a sacred territory, but of a holy idea. The country laments,
so be it; but humanity applauds. Besides is it true that the country mourns?
France bleeds, but liberty smiles; and before the smile of liberty, France
forgets her wound. And then, looking at the matter from a still higher
stand, why do men talk of civil war?

Civil war? What does this mean? Is there any foreign war? Is not every
war between men, war between brothers? War is modified only by its aim.
There is neither foreign war, nor civil war; there is only unjust war and
just war. Until the day when the great human concordat shall be concluded,
war, that at least which is the struggle of the hurrying future against the
lingering past, may be necessary. What reproach can be brought against
such war! War becomes shame, the sword becomes a dagger, only when it
assassinates right, progress, reason, civilisation, truth. Then, civil war or
foreign war, it is iniquitous; its name is crime. Outside of that holy thing,
justice, by what right does one form of war despise another? by what right
does the sword of Washington disown the pike of Camille Desmoulins?
Leonidas against the foreigner, Timoleon against the tyrant, which is the
greater? one is the defender, the other is the liberator. Shall we brand,
without troubling ourselves with the object, every resort to arms in the
interior of a city? then mark with infamy Brutus, Marcel, Arnold of
Blankenheim, Coligny. War of the thickets? war of the streets? Why not? it
was the war of Ambiorix, of Artaveld, of Marnix, of Pelagius. But Ambiorix
fought against Rome, Artaveld against France, Marnix against Spain, Pel-
agius against the Moors; all against the foreigner. Well, monarchy is the
foreigner; oppression is the foreigner; divine right is the foreigner.
Despotism violates the moral frontier, as invasion violates the geographical
frontier. To drive out the tyrant or to drive out the English is, in either
case, to retake your territory. There comes an hour when protest no longer
suffices; after philosophy there must be action; the strong hand finishes
what the idea has planned; Prometheus Bound begins, Aristogeiton com-
pletes; the Encyclopedie enlightens souls, the 10th of August electrifies them.
After Aschylus, Thrasybulus; after Diderot, Danton. The multitudes have
a tendency to accept a master. Their mass deposits apathy. A mob easily
totalises itself into obedience. Men must be aroused, pushed, shocked by
the very benefits of their deliverance, their eyes wounded with the truth,
light thrown them in terrible handfuls. They should be blinded a little for
their own safety; this dazzling wakens them. Hence the necessity for tocsins
and for wars. Great warriors must arise, illuminate the nations by boldness,
and shake free this sad humanity which is covered with shadow by divine
right. Casarean glory, force, fanaticism, irresponsible power, and absolute
dominion, a mob stupidly occupied with gazing, in their twilight splendour,
at these gloomy triumphs of the night. Down with the tyrant! But what?
of whom do you speak? do you call Louis Philippe the tyrant? no; no
more than Louis XVI. They are both what history is accustomed to call
good kings; but principles cannot be parcelled out, the logic of the true
is rectilinear, the peculiarity of truth is to be without complaisance; no
compromise, then; all encroachment upon man must be repressed; there is
divine right in Louis XVI., there is parce que Bourbon in Louis Philippe;
both represent in a certain degree the confiscation of the right; and to wipe
out the universal usurpation, it is necessary to fight them; it is necessary,
France always taking the initiative. When the master falls in France, he falls
everywhere. In short, to re-establish social truth, to give back to liberty her
throne, to give back the people to the people, to give back sovereignty to
man, to replace the purple upon the head of France, to restore in their ful-
ness reason and equity, to suppress every germ of antagonism by restoring
every man to himself, to abolish the obstacle which royalty opposes to the
immense universal concord, to replace the human race on a level with right,
what cause more just, and, consequently, what war more grand? These wars
construct peace.An enormous fortress of prejudices, of privileges, of super-
stitions, of lies, of exactions, of abuses, of violence, of iniquity, of dark-
ness, is still standing upon the world with its towers of hatred. It must be
thrown down. This monstrous pile must be made to fall. To conquer at Aus-
terlitz is grand; to take the Bastille is immense.

There is nobody who has not remarked it in himself, the soul, and this
is the marvel of its complicate unity and ubiquity, has the wonderful faculty
of reasoning almost coolly in the most desperate extremities; and it often
happens that disconsolate passion and deep despair, in the very agony of
their darkest soliloquies, weigh subjects and discuss theses. Logic is mingled
with convulsion, and the thread of a syllogism floats unbroken in the
dreary storm of thought. This was Marius' state of mind.

Even while thinking thus, overwhelmed but resolute, hesitating, however,
and, indeed, shuddering in view of what he was about to do, his gaze
wandered into the interior of the barricade. The insurgents were chatting
in undertone, without moving about; and that quasi-silence was felt which
marks the last phase of delay. Above them, at a third story window, Marius
distinguished a sort of spectator or witness who seemed to him singularly
attentive. It was the porter killed by Le Cabuc. From below, by the reflection
of the torch hidden among the paving-stones, this head was dimly
perceptible. Nothing was more strange in that gloomy and uncertain light,
than that livid, motionless, astonished face with its bristling hair, its star
ing eyes, and its gaping mouth, leaning over the street in an attitude of
curiosity. One would have said that he who was dead was gazing at those
who were about to die. A long trail of blood which had flowed from his
head, descended in ruddy streaks from the window to the height of the first
story, where it stopped.




　　　BOOK FOURTEENTH
THE GRANDEURS OF DESPAIR



I. THE FLAG: FIRST ACT



NOTHING CAME YET. The clock of Saint Merry had struck ten. Enjolras
and Combeferre had sat down, carbine in hand, near the opening of the
great barricade. They were not talking, they were listening; seeking to
catch even the faintest and most distant sound of a march.

Suddenly, in the midst of this dismal calm, a clear, young, cheerful
voice, which seemed to come from the Rue Saint Denis, arose and began
to sing distinctly to the old popular air, Au clair de la lune, these lines
which ended in a sort of cry similar to the crow of cock:

Mon nez est en larmes,
Mon ami Bugeaud,
Pret-moi tes gendarmes
Pour leur dire un mot.
Encapote bleue,
La poule au shako,
Voici la banlieue!
Co-cocorico!
My nose is in tears,
My good friend Bugeaud,
Just lend me your spears
To tell them my woe.
In blue cassimere,
And feathered shako,
The banlieue is here!
Co-cocorico!

They grasped each other by the hand:

"It is Gavroche," said Enjolras.

"He is warning us," said Combeferre.

A headlong run startled the empty street; they saw a creature nimbler
than a clown climb over the omnibus, and Gavroche bounded into the barricade
all breathless, saying:

"My musket! Here they are."

An electric thrill ran through the whole barricade, and a moving of
hands was heard, feeling for their muskets.

"Do you want my carbine?" said Enjolras to the gamin.

"I want the big musket," answered Gavroche.

And he took Javert's musket.

Two sentinels had been driven back, and had come in almost at the
same time as Gavroche. They were the sentinel from the end of the street,
and the vidette from de la Petite Truanderie. The vidette in the little Rue
des Precheurs remained at his post, which indicated that nothing was coming
from the direction of the bridges and the markets.

The Rue de la Chanvrerie, in which a few paving-stones were dimly
visible by the reflection of the light which was thrown upon the flag,
offered to the insurgents the appearance of a great black porch opening
into a cloud of smoke.

Every man had taken his post for the combat.

Forty-three insurgents, among them Enjolras, Combeferre, Courfeyrac,
Bossuet, Joly, Bahorel, and Gavroche, were on their knees in the great
barricade, their heads even with the crest of the wall, the barrels of
their muskets and their carbines pointed over the paving-stones as through
loopholes, watchful, silent, ready to fire. Six, commanded by Feuilly, were
stationed with their muskets at their shoulders, in the windows of the two
upper stories of Corinth.

A few moments more elapsed, then a sound of steps, measured, heavy,
numerous, was distinctly heard from the direction of Saint Leu. This
sound, at first faint, then distinct, then heavy and sonorous, approached
slowly, without halt, without interruption, with a tranquil and terrible
continuity. Nothing but this could be heard. It was at once the silence and
the sound of the statue of the Commander, but this stony tread was so in-
describably enormous and so multiplex, that it called up at the same time
the idea of a throng and of a spectre. You would have thought you heard the
stride of the fearful statue Legion. This tread approached; it approached
still nearer, and stopped. They seemed to hear at the end of the street the
breathing of many men. They saw nothing, however, only they discovered
at the very end, in that dense obscurity, a multitude of metallic threads,
as fine as needles and almost imperceptible, which moved about like those
indescribable phosphoric networks which we perceive under our closed
eyelids at the moment of going to sleep, in the first mists of slumber. They
were bayonets and musket barrels dimly lighted up by the distant reflection
of the torch.

There was still a pause, as if on both sides they were awaiting. Sud-
denly, from the depth of that shadow, a voice, so much the more ominous,
because nobody could be seen, and because it seemed as if it were the
obscurity itself which was speaking, cried:

"Who is there?"

At the same time they heard the click of the levelled muskets.

Enjolras answered in a lofty and ringing tone:

"French Revolution!"

"Fire!" said the voice.

A flash empurpled all the facades on the street, as if the door of a furnace
were opened and suddenly closed.

A fearful explosion burst over the barricade. The red flag fell. The volley
had been so heavy and so dense that it had cut the staff, that is to say,
the very point of the pole of the omnibus. Some balls, which ricocheted
from the cornices of the houses, entered the barricade and wounded several
men.

The impression produced by this first charge was freezing. The attack
was impetuous, and such as to make the boldest ponder. It was evident that
they had to do with a whole regiment at least.

"Comrades," cried Courfeyrac, "don't waste the powder. Let us wait to
reply till they come into the street."

"And first of all," said Enjolras, "let us hoist the flag again!"

He picked up the flag which had fallen just at his feet.

They heard from without the rattling of the ramrods in the muskets:
the troops were reloading.

Enjolras continued:

"Who is there here who has courage? who replants the flag on the
barricade?"

Nobody answered. To mount the barricade at the moment when without
doubt it was aimed at anew, was simply death. The bravest hesitates
to sentence himself, Enjolras himself felt a shudder. He repeated:

"Nobody volunteers?"



II. THE FLAG: SECOND ACT



SINCE THEY HAD arrived at Corinth and had commenced building the barri-
cade, hardly any attention had been paid to Father Mabeuf. M. Mabeuf,
however, had not left the company. He had entered the ground floor of
the wine-shop and sat down behind the counter. There he had been, so to
speak, annihilated in himself. He no longer seemed to look or to think.
Courfeyrac and others had accosted him two or three times, warning him
of the danger, entreating him to withdraw, but he had not appeared to hear
them. When nobody was speaking to him, his lips moved as if he were
answering somebody, and as soon as anybody addressed a word to him, his
lips became still and his eyes lost all appearance of life. Some hours before
the barricade was attacked, he had taken a position which he had not left
since, his hands upon his knees and his head bent forward as if he were
looking into an abyss. Nothing had been able to draw him out of this atti-
tude; it appeared as if his mind were not in the barricade. When everybody
had gone to take his place for the combat, there remained in the basement
room only Javert tied to the post, an insurgent with drawn sabre watching
Javert, and he, Mabeuf. At the moment of the attack, at the discharge, the
physical shock reached him, and, as it were, awakened him; he rose suddenly,
crossed the room, and at the instant when Enjolras repeated his
appeal: "Nobody volunteers?" they saw the old man appear in the doorway
of the wine-shop.

His presence produced some commotion in the group. A cry arose:

"It is the Voter! it is the Conventionist! it is the Representative of the
people!"

It is probable that he did not hear.

He walked straight to Enjolras, the insurgents fell back before him
with a religious awe, he snatched the flag from Enjolras, who drew back
petrified, and then, nobody daring to stop him, or to aid him, this old man
of eighty, with shaking head but firm foot, began to climb slowly up the
stairway of paving-stones built into the barricade. It was so gloomy and so
grand that all about him cried: "Hats off!" At each step it was frightful; his
white hair, his decrepit face, his large forehead bald and wrinkled, his hollow
eyes, his quivering and open mouth, his old arm raising the red banner,
surged up out of the shadow and grew grand in the bloody light of the
torch, and they seemed to see the ghost of '93 rising out of the earth, the
flag of terror in its hand.

When he was on the top of the last step, when this trembling and terrible
phantom, standing upon that mound of rubbish before twelve
hundred invisible muskets, rose up, in the face of death and as if he were
stronger than it, the whole barricade had in the darkness a supernatural and
colossal appearance.

There was one of those silences which occur only in the presence of
prodigies.

In the midst of this silence the old man waved the red flag and cried:

"Vive la revolution! vive la republique! fraternity! equality! and death!"

They heard from the barricade a low and rapid muttering like the murmur
of a hurried priest dispatching a prayer. It was probably the commissary
of police who was making the legal summons at the other end of the street.

Then the same ringing voice which had cried: "Who is there?" cried:

"Disperse!"

M. Mabeuf, pallid, haggard, his eyes illumined by the mournful fires of
insanity, raised the flag above his head and repeated:
"Vive la republique!"
"Fire!" said the voice.
A second discharge, like a shower of grape, beat against the barricade.
The old man fell upon his knees, then rose up, let the flag drop, and
fell backwards upon the pavement within, like a log, at full length with his
arms crossed.

Streams of blood ran from beneath him. His old face, pale and sad,
seemed to behold the sky.

One of those emotions superior to man, which make us forget even to
defend ourselves, seized the insurgents, and they approached the corpse
with a respectful dismay.

"What men these regicides are!" said Enjolras.

Courfeyrac bent over to Enjolras' ear.

"This is only for you, and I don't wish to diminish the enthusiasm. But
he was anything but a regicide. I knew him. His name was Father Mabeuf.
I don't know what ailed him to-day. But he was a brave blockhead. Just look
at his head."

"Blockhead and Brutus heart," answered Enjolras.

Then he raised his voice:

"Citizens! This is the example which the old give to the young. We
hesitated, he came! we fell back, he advanced! Behold what those who
tremble with old age teach those who tremble with fear! This patriarch is
august in the sight of the country. He has had a long life and a magnificent
death! Now let us protect his corpse, let every one defend this old man
dead as he would defend his father living, and let his presence among us
make the barricade impregnable!"

A murmur of gloomy and determined adhesion followed these words.

Enjolras stooped down, raised the old man's head, and timidly kissed
him on the forehead, then separating his arms, and handling the dead with
a tender care, as if he feared to hurt him, he took off his coat, showed the
bleeding holes to all, and said:

"There now is our flag."



III. GAVROCHE WOULD HAVE DONE BETTER TO ACCEPT ENJOLRAS' CARBINE



THEY THREW a long black shawl belonging to the widow Hucheloup over
Father Mabeuf. Six men made a barrow of their muskets, they laid the
corpse upon it, and they bore it, bareheaded, with solemn slowness, to the
large table in the basement room.

These men, completely absorbed in the grave and sacred thing which
they were doing, no longer thought of the perilous situation in which they
were.

When the corpse passed near Javert, who was still impassible, Enjolras
said to the spy:

"You! directly."

During this time little Gavroche, who alone had not left his post and
had remained on the watch, thought he saw some men approaching the
barricade with a stealthy step. Suddenly he cried:

"Take care!"

Courfeyrac, Enjolras, Jean Prouvaire, Combeferre, Joly, Bahorel,
Bosseut, all sprang tumultuously from the wine-shop. There was hardly a
moment to spare. They perceived a sparkling breadth of bayonets undula-
ting above the barricade. Municipal Guards of tall stature were
penetrating, some by climbing over the omnibus, others by the opening,
pushing before them the gamin, who fell back, but did not fly.

The moment was critical. It was that first fearful instant of the inun-
dation, when the stream rises to the level of the bank and when the water
begins to infiltrate through the fissures in the dyke. A second more, and
the barricade had been taken.

Bahorel sprang upon the first Municipal Guard who entered, and killed
him at the very muzzle of his carbine; the second killed Bahorel with
his bayonet. Another had already prostrated Courfeyrac, who was crying
"Help!" The largest of all, a kind of colossus, marched upon Gavroche with
fixed bayonet. The gamin took Javert's enormous musket in his little arms,
aimed it resolutely at the giant, and pulled the trigger. Nothing went off.
Javert had not loaded his musket. The Municipal Guard burst into a laugh
and raised his bayonet over the child.

Before the bayonet touched Gavroche the musket dropped from the soldier's
hands, a ball had struck the Municipal Guard in the middle of the forehead,
and he fell on his back. A second ball struck the other Guard, who had
assailed Courfeyrac, full in the breast, and threw him upon the pavement.

It was Marius who had just entered the barricade.



IV. THE KEG OF POWDER



MARIUS, still hidden in the corner of the Rue Mondetour, had watched the
first phase of the combat, irresolute and shuddering. However, he was not
able long to resist that mysterious and sovereign infatuation which we may
call the appeal of the abyss. Before the imminence of the danger, before
the death of M. Mabeuf, that fatal enigma, before Bahorel slain, Courfeyrac
crying "Help!" that child threatened, his friends to succour or to avenge, all
hesitation had vanished, and he had rushed into the conflict, his two pistols
in his hands. By the first shot he had saved Gavroche and by the second
delivered Courfeyrac.

At the shots, at the cries of the wounded Guards, the assailants had
scaled the intrenchment, upon the summit of which could now be seen
thronging Municipal Guards, soldiers of the Line, National Guards of the
banlieue, musket in hand. They already covered more than two-thirds of
the wall, but they did not leap into the inclosure; they seemed to hesitate,
fearing some snare. They looked into the obscure barricade as one would
look into a den of lions. The light of the torch only lighted up their
bayonets, their bearskin caps, and the upper part of their anxious and
angry faces.

Marius had now no arms, he had thrown away his discharged pistols,
but he had noticed the keg of powder in the basement room near the door.

As he turned half round, looking in that direction, a soldier aimed at
him. At the moment the soldier aimed at Marius, a hand was laid upon the
muzzle of the musket, and stopped it. It was somebody who had sprung for-
ward, the young working-man with velvet pantaloons. The shot went off,
passed through the hand, and perhaps also through the working-man, for
he fell, but the ball did not reach Marius. All this in the smoke, rather
guessed than seen. Marius, who was entering the basement room, hardly
noticed it. Still he had caught a dim glimpse of that musket directed at
him, and that hand which had stopped it, and he had heard the shot: But in
moments like that the things which we see, waver and rush headlong, and
we stop for nothing. We feel ourselves vaguely pushed towards still deeper
shadow, and all is cloud.

The insurgents, surprised, but not dismayed, had rallied. Enjolras had
cried: "Wait! don't fire at random!" In the first confusion, in fact, they
might hit one another. Most of them had gone up to the window of the second
story and to the dormer windows, whence they commanded the assailants.
The most determined, with Enjolras, Courfeyrac, Jean Prouvaire, and Com-
beferre, had haughtily placed their backs to the houses in the rear, openly
facing the ranks of soldiers and guards which crowded the barricade.

All this was accomplished without precipitation, with that strange and
threatening gravity which precedes melees. On both sides they were taking
aim, the muzzles of the guns almost touching; they were so near that
they could talk with each other in an ordinary tone. Just as the spark was
about to fly, an officer in a gorget and with huge epaulets, extended his
sword and said:

"Take aim!"

"Fire!" said Enjolras.

The two explosions were simultaneous, and everything disappeared in
the smoke.

A stinging and stifling smoke amid which writhed, with dull and feeble
groans, the wounded and the dying.

When the smoke cleared away, on both sides the combatants were seen,
thinned out, but still in the same places, and reloading their pieces in
silence.

Suddenly, a thundering voice was heard, crying:

"Begone, or I'll blow up the barricade!"

All turned in the direction whence the voice came.

Marius had entered the basement room, and had taken the keg of powder,
then he had profited by the smoke and the kind of obscure fog which
filled the intrenched inclosure, to glide along the barricade as far as that
cage of paving-stones in which the torch was fixed. To pull out the torch, to
put the keg of powder in its place, to push the pile of paving-stones upon
the keg, which stove it in, with a sort of terrible self-control--all this had
been for Marius the work of stooping down and rising up; and now all,
National Guards, Municipal Guards, officers, soldiers, grouped at the other
extremity of the barricade, beheld him with horror, his foot upon the
stones, the torch in his hand, his stern face lighted by a deadly resolution,
bending the flame of the torch towards that formidable pile in which they
discerned the broken barrel of powder, and uttering that terrific cry:

"Begone, or I'll blow up the barricade!"

Marius upon this barricade, after the octogenarian, was the vision of
the young revolution after the apparition of the old.

"Blow up the barricade!" said a sergeant, "and yourself also!"

Marius answered:

"And myself also."

And he approached the torch to the keg of powder.

But there was no longer anybody on the wall. The assailants, leaving
their dead and wounded, fled pell-mell and in disorder towards the
extremity of the street, and were again lost in the night. It was a rout.
The barricade was redeemed.



V. END OF JEAN PROUVAIRE'S RHYME



ALL FLOCKED round Marius. Courfeyrac sprang to his neck.

"You here!"

"How fortunate!" said Combeferre.

"You came in good time!" said Bossuet.

"Without you I should have been dead!" continued Courfeyrac.

"Without you I'd been gobbled!" added Gavroche.

Marius inquired:

"Where is the chief?"

"You are the chief," said Enjolras.

Marius had all day had a furnace in his brain, now it was a whirlwind.
This whirlwind which was within him, affected him as if it were without,
and were sweeping him along. It seemed to him that he was already at an
immense distance from life. His two luminous months of joy and of love,
terminating abruptly upon this frightful precipice, Cosette lost to him, this
barricade, M. Mabeuf dying for the republic, himself a chief of insurgents,
all these things appeared a monstrous nightmare. He was obliged to make a
mental effort to assure himself that all this which surrounded him was real.
Marius had lived too little as yet to know that nothing is more imminent
than the impossible, and that what we must always foresee is the unforeseen.
He was a spectator of his own drama, as of a play which one does not
comprehend.

In this mist in which his mind was struggling, he did not recognise
Javert who, bound to his post, had not moved his head during the attack
upon the barricade, and who beheld the revolt going on about him with
the resignation of a martyr and the majesty of a judge. Marius did not
even perceive him.

Meanwhile the assailants made no movement, they were heard marching
and swarming at the end of the street, but they did not venture forward,
either that they were awaiting orders, or that before rushing anew upon
that impregnable redoubt, they were awaiting reinforcements. The insur-
gents had posted sentinels, and some who were students in medicine had
set about dressing the wounded.

They had thrown the tables out of the wine-shop, with the exception
of two reserved for lint and cartridges, and that on which lay Father
Mabeuf; they added them to the barricade, and had replaced them in the
basement room by the mattresses from the beds of the widow Hucheloup,
and the servants. Upon these mattresses they had laid the wounded; as for
the three poor creatures who lived in Corinth, nobody knew what had
become of them. They found them at last, however, hidden in the cellar.

A bitter emotion came to darken their joy over the redeemed barricade.

They called the roll. One of the insurgents was missing. And who?
One of the dearest. One of the most valiant, Jean Prouvaire. They sought
him among the wounded, he was not there. They sought him among the
dead, he was not there. He was evidently a prisoner.

Combeferre said to Enjolras:

"They have our friend; we have their officer. Have you set your heart
on the death of this spy?"

"Yes," said Enjolras; "but less than on the life of Jean Prouvaire."

This passed in the basement room near Javert's post.

"Well," replied Combeferre, "I am going to tie my handkerchief to my
cane, and go with a flag of truce to offer to give them their man for
ours."

"Listen," said Enjolras, laying his hand on Combeferre's arm.

There was a significant clicking of arms at the end of the street.

They heard a manly voice cry:

"Vive la France! Vive l'avenir!"

They recognised Prouvaire's voice.

There was a flash and an explosion.

Silence reigned again.

"They have killed him," exclaimed Combeferre.

Enjolras looked at Javert and said to him:

"Your friends have just shot you."



VI. THE AGONY OF DEATH AFTER THE AGONY OF LIFE



A PECULIARITY OF THIS KIND of war is that the attack on the barricades is
almost always made in front, and that in general the assailants abstain from
turning the positions, whether it be that they dread ambuscades, or that
they fear to become entangled in the crooked streets. The whole attention
of the insurgents therefore was directed to the great barricade, which was
evidently the point still threatened, and where the struggle must infallibly
recommence. Marius, however, thought of the little barricade and went to
it. It was deserted, and was guarded only by the lamp which flickered
between the stones. The little Rue Mondetour, moreover, and the branch
streets de la Petite Truanderie and du Cygne, were perfectly quiet.

As Marius, the inspection made, was retiring, he heard his name faintly
pronounced in the obscurity:

"Monsieur Marius!"

He shuddered, for he recognised the voice which had called him two
hours before, through the grating in the Rue Plumet.

Only this voice now seemed to be but a breath.

He looked about him and saw nobody.

Marius thought he was deceived, and that it was an illusion added by
his mind to the extraordinary realities which were thronging about him.
He started to leave the retired recess in which the barricade was situated.
"Monsieur Marius!" repeated the voice.

This time he could not doubt, he had heard distinctly; he looked, and
saw nothing.

"At your feet," said the voice.

He stooped and saw a form in the shadow, which was dragging itself to-
wards him. It was crawling along the pavement. It was this that had spoken
to him.

The lamp enabled him to distinguish a blouse, a pair of torn pantaloons
of coarse velvet, bare feet, and something which resembled a pool
of blood. Marius caught a glimpse of a pale face which rose towards him
and said to him:

"You do not know me?"

"No."

"Eponine."

Marius bent down quickly. It was indeed that unhappy child. She was
dressed as a man.

"How came you here? what are you doing there?"

"I am dying," said she.

There are words and incidents which rouse beings who are crushed.

Marius exclaimed, with a start:

"You are wounded! Wait, I will carry you into the room! They will dress
your wounds! Is it serious? how shall I take you up so as not to hurt
you? Where are you hurt? Help! my God! But what did you come here for?"

And he tried to pass his arm under her to lift her.

In lifting her he touched her hand.

She uttered a feeble cry.

"Have I hurt you?" asked Marius.

"A little."

"But I have only touched your hand."

She raised her hand into Marius' sight, and Marius saw in the centre of
that hand a black hole.

"What is the matter with your hand?" said he.

"It is pierced."

"Pierced?"

"Yes."

"By what?"

"By a ball."

"How?"

"Did you see a musket aimed at you?"

"Yes, and a hand which stopped it."

"That was mine."

Marius shuddered.

"What madness! Poor child! But that is not so bad, if that is all, it is
nothing, let me carry you to a bed. They will care for you, people don't die
from a shot in the hand."

She murmured:

"The ball passed through my hand, but it went out through my back. It is
useless to take me from here. I will tell you how you can care for me,
better than a surgeon. Sit down by me on that stone."

He obeyed; she laid her head on Marius' knees, and without looking
at him, she said:

"Oh! how good it is! How kind he is! That is it! I don't suffer any
more!"

She remained a moment in silence, then she turned her head with
effort and looked at Marius.

"Do you know, Monsieur Marius? It worried me that you should go into
that garden, it was silly, since it was I who had shown you the house,
and then indeed I ought surely to have known that a young man like you--"

She stopped, and, leaping over the gloomy transitions which were
doubtless in her mind, she added with a heartrending smile:

"You thought me ugly, didn't you?"

She continued:

"See, you are lost! Nobody will get out of the barricade, now. It was I
who led you into this, it was! You are going to die, I am sure. And still when
I saw him aiming at you, I put up my hand upon the muzzle of the musket.
How droll it is! But it was because I wanted to die before you. When I got
this ball, I dragged myself here, nobody saw me, nobody picked me up. I
waited for you, I said: He will not come then? Oh! if you knew, I bit my
blouse, I suffered so much! Now I am well. Do you remember the day
when I came into your room, and when I looked at myself in your mirror,
and the day when I met you on the boulevard near some work-women?
How the birds sang! It was not very long ago. You gave me a hundred sous,
and I said to you: I don't want your money. Did you pick up your piece?
You are not rich. I didn't think to tell you to pick it up. The sun shone
bright, I was not cold. Do you remember, Monsieur Marius? Oh! I am
happy! We are all going to die."

She had a wandering, grave, and touching air. Her torn blouse showed
her bare throat. While she was talking she rested her wounded hand upon
her breast where there was another hole, from which there came with each
pulsation a flow of blood like a jet of wine from an open bung.

Marius gazed upon this unfortunate creature with profound compassion.
"Oh!" she exclaimed suddenly, "it is coming back. I am stifling!"

She seized her blouse and bit it, and her legs writhed upon the pavement.

At this moment the chicken voice of little Gavroche resounded through
the barricade. The child had mounted upon a table to load his musket
and was gaily singing the song then so popular:

En voyant Lafayette
Le gendarme repete
Sauvons-nous! sauvons-nous! sauvons-nous!

Eponine raised herself up, and listened, then she murmured:

"It is he."

And turning towards Marius:

"My brother is here. He must not see me. He would scold me."

"Your brother?" asked Marius, who thought in the bitterest and most sor-
rowful depths of his heart, of the duties which his father had bequeathed
him towards the Thenardiers, "who is your brother?"

"That little boy."

"The one who is singing?"

"Yes."

Marius started.

"Oh! don't go away!" said she, "it will not be long now!"

She was sitting almost upright, but her voice was very low and broken
by hiccoughs. At intervals the death-rattle interrupted her. She approached
her face as near as she could to Marius' face. She added with a strange
expression:

"Listen, I don't want to deceive you. I have a letter in my pocket for you.
Since yesterday. I was told to put it in the post. I kept it. I didn't want
it to reach you. But you would not like it of me perhaps when we meet again
so soon. We do meet again, don't we? Take your letter."

She grasped Marius' hand convulsively with her wounded hand, but she seemed
no longer to feel the pain. She put Marius' hand into the pocket of her
blouse. Marius really felt a paper there.

"Take it," said she.

Marius took the letter.

She made a sign of satisfaction and of consent.

"Now for my pains, promise me----"

And she hesitated.

"What?" asked Marius.

"Promise me!"

"I promise you."

"Promise to kiss me on the forehead when I am dead. I shall feel it."

She let her head fall back upon Marius' knees and her eyelids closed.
He thought that poor soul had gone. Eponine lay motionless; but just when
Marius supposed her for ever asleep, she slowly opened her eyes in which
the gloomy deepness of death appeared, and said to him with an accent the
sweetness of which already seemed to come from another world:

"And then, do you know, Monsieur Marius, I believe I was a little in
love with you."

She essayed to smile again and expired.



VII. GAVROCHE A PROFOUND CALCULATOR OF DISTANCES



MARIUS KEPT his promise. He kissed that livid forehead from which oozed
an icy sweat. This was not infidelity to Cosette; it was a thoughtful and
gentle farewell to an unhappy soul.

He had not taken the letter which Eponine had given him without a
thrill. He had felt at once the presence of an event. He was impatient to
read it. The heart of man is thus made; the unfortunate child had hardly
closed her eyes when Marius thought to unfold this paper. He laid her
gently upon the ground, and went away. Something told him that he could
not read that letter in sight of this corpse.

He went to a candle in the basement-room. It was a little note, folded
and sealed with the elegant care of a woman. The address was in a woman's
hand, and ran:

"To Monsieur, Monsieur Marius Pontmercy, at M. Courfeyrac's, Rue
de la Verrerie, No. 16."

He broke the seal and read:

"My beloved, alas! my father wishes to start immediately. We shall be
to-night in the Rue de l'Homme Arme, No. 7. In a week we shall be in
England. COSETTE June 4th."

Such was the innocence of this love that Marius did not even know
Cosette's handwriting.

What happened may be told in a few words. Eponine had done it all.
After the evening of the 3rd of June, she had had a double thought, to
thwart the projects of her father and the bandits upon the house in the
Rue Plumet, and to separate Marius from Cosette. She had changed rags with
the first young rogue who thought it amusing to dress as a woman while
Eponine disguised herself as a man. It was she who, in the Champ de Mars,
had given Jean Valjean the expressive warning: Remove. Jean Valjean return-
ed home, and said to Cosette: we start to-night, and we are going to the
Rue de l'Homme Arme with Toussaint. Next week we shall be in London.
Cosette, prostrated by this unexpected blow, had hastily written two lines
to Marius. But how should she get the letter to the post? She did not go
out alone, and Toussaint, surprised at such an errand, would surely show
the letter to M. Fauchelevent. In this anxiety, Cosette saw, through the
grating, Eponine in men's clothes, who was now prowling continually about
the garden. Cosette called "this young working-man" and handed him five
francs and the letter, saying to him: "carry this letter to its address
right away." Eponine put the letter in her pocket. The next day, June 5th,
she went to Courfeyrac's to ask for Marius, not to give him the letter, but,
a thing which every jealous and loving soul will understand, "to see."
There she waited for Marius, or, at least, for Courfeyrac--still to see. When
Courfeyrac said to her: we are going to the barricades, an idea flashed
across her mind. To throw herself into that death as she would have thrown
herself into any other, and to push Marius into it. She followed Courfeyrac,
made sure of the post where they were building the barricade; and very sure,
since Marius had received no notice, and she had intercepted the letter,
that he would at nightfall be at his usual evening rendezvous, she went
to the Rue Plumet, waited there for Marius, and sent him, in the name of
his friends, that appeal which must, she thought, lead him to the barri-
cade. She counted upon Marius' despair when he should not find Cosette;
she was not mistaken. She returned herself to the Rue de la Chanvrerie. We
have seen what she did there. She died with that tragic joy of jealous hearts
which drag the being they love into death with them, saying: nobody shall
have him!

Marius covered Cosette's letter with kisses. She loved him then? He
had for a moment the idea that now he need not die. Then he said to him
self: "She is going away. Her father takes her to England and my grandfather
refuses to consent to the marriage. Nothing is changed in the fatality."
Dreamers, like Marius, have these supreme depressions, and paths hence
are chosen in despair. The fatigue of life is insupportable; death is sooner
over. Then he thought that there were two duties remaining for him to fulfil:
to inform Cosette of his death and to send her a last farewell, and to save
from the imminent catastrophe which was approaching, this poor child,
Eponine's brother and Thenardier's son.

He had a pocket-book with him; the same that had contained the pages
upon which he had written so many thoughts of love for Cosette. He tore
out a leaf and wrote with a pencil these few lines:

"Our marriage was impossible. I have asked my grandfather, he has
refused; I am without fortune, and you also. I ran to your house, I did not
find you, you know the promise that I gave you? I keep it, I die, I love you.
When you read this, my soul will be near you, and will smile upon you."

Having nothing to seal this letter with, he merely folded the paper, and
wrote upon it this address:

"To Mademoiselle Cosette Fauchelevent, at M. Fauchelevent's, Rue de
l'Homme Arme, No. 7."

The letter folded, he remained a moment in thought, took his pocketbook
again, opened it, and wrote these four lines on the first page with the
same pencil:

"My name is Marius Pontmercy. Carry my corpse to my grandfather's,
M. Gillenormand, Rue des Filles du Calvaire, No. 6, in the Marais."

He put the book into his coat-pocket, then he called Gavroche. The
gamin, at the sound of Marius' voice, ran up with his joyous and devoted
face:

"Will you do something for me?"

"Anything," said Gavroche. "God of the good God! without you I
should have been cooked, sure."

"You see this letter?"

"Yes."

"Take it. Go out of the barricade immediately (Gavroche, disturbed,
began to scratch his ear), and to-morrow morning you will carry it to its
address, to Mademoiselle Cosette, at M. Fauchelevent's, Rue de l'Homme
Arme, No. 7."

The heroic boy answered:

"Ah, well, but in that time they'll take the barricade, and I shan't be
here."

"The barricade will not be attacked again before daybreak, according
to all appearance, and will not be taken before to-morrow noon."

The new respite which the assailants allowed the barricade was, in fact,
prolonged. It was one of those intermissions, frequent in night combats,
which are always followed by a redoubled fury.

"Well," said Gavroche, "suppose I go and carry your letter in the
morning?"

"It will be too late. The barricade will probably be blockaded; all the
streets will be guarded, and you cannot get out. Go, right away!"

Gavroche had nothing more to say; he stood there, undecided, and sadly
scratching his ear. Suddenly, with one of his birdlike motions, he took
the letter:

"All right," said he.

And he started off on a run by the little Rue Mondetour.

Gavroche had an idea which decided him, but which he did not tell, for
fear Marius would make some objection to it.

That idea was this:

"It is hardly midnight, the Rue de l'Homme Arme is not far, I will
carry the letter right away, and I shall get back in time."