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.