بخش 4 کتاب 12

BOOK TWELVE

CORINTHE

HISTORY OF CORINTHE FROM ITS FOUNDATION

PARISIANS TODAY WHO enter the rue Rambuteau coming from Les Halles and notice, on their right, opposite the rue Mondétour, a basket weaver’s shop whose sign is a basket in the shape of the emperor, Napoléon the Great, with this inscription: NAPOLÉON IS MADE

ENTIRELY OF WICKERWORK

have no inkling of the terrible scenes that this same spot saw barely thirty years ago.

This is the site of the rue de la Chanvrerie, which used to be spelled Chanverrerie in old deeds, as well as the famous tavern known as Corinthe.

You will recall all that has been said about the barricade put up on this spot and eclipsed, as it happens, by the barricade at Saint-Merry. It is over this famous barricade in the rue de la Chanvrerie, nowadays vanished into the mists of time, that we will now throw a little light.

I hope, for the sake of the tale’s clarity, we may be allowed to resort to a simple device already used on Waterloo. Anyone wanting to get a pretty precise image of the jumble of houses that stood in those days near the tip of Saint-Eustache, at the northeast corner of Les Halles of Paris, where the rue Rambuteau comes out today, has only to imagine an N, joining the rue Saint-Denis at the top and Les Halles at the bottom. The two vertical strokes would be the rue de la Grande-Truanderie and the rue de la Chanvrerie and the horizontal stroke would be the rue de la Petite-Truanderie.1 The old rue Mondétour cut the three strokes at the most tortured angles. So much so that the tangled maze of the four streets was enough to create, over a space of less than two hundred square yards between Les Halles and the rue Saint-Denis on one side, and between the rue du Cygne and the rue des Prêcheurs on the other, seven islands of houses, bizarrely shaped, of varying sizes, placed crookedly and apparently randomly and barely separated, like blocks of stone on a building site, by narrow crevices.

We say narrow crevices and we can’t give a better idea of these dark, constricted, angular lanes, bordered by eight-storey slums. These slums were so decrepit that, in the streets of la Chanvrerie and de la Petite-Truanderie, the façades were propped up by wooden beams that ran from one house to the next. The street was narrow and the gutters wide, so anyone walking along had to wend their way on a pavement that was always wet, alongside shops like cellars, great big iron-hooped curbstones, unbelievable mounds of rubbish, alley gates fortified with enormous age-old grilles. The rue Rambuteau laid waste to all that.

The name Mondétour wonderfully conjures up the way the whole of this road network snaked around. A bit farther along, this was even better expressed by the rue Pirouette, which flowed into the rue Mondétour.

The pedestrian coming from the rue Saint-Denis and going into the rue de la Chanvrerie saw it gradually shrivel away in front of him as though he had stepped into an elongated funnel. At the end of the street, which was incredibly short, he found the way barred on the Les Halles side by a tall row of houses and he would have thought himself in a dead end if he did not see, to right and left, two black trenches down which he could escape. This was the rue Mondétour, which went off to join the rue des Prêcheurs on one side, and, on the other, the rue du Cygne and the rue de la Petite-Truanderie. At the bottom of this sort of dead end, at the corner of the right-hand trench, you noticed a house that was not nearly as tall as the rest and that formed a sort of promontory on the street.

It is in this house, only two stories high, that an illustrious tavern had been merrily chugging along for the past three hundred years. This tavern made a joyous racket on the very spot old Théophile2 noted in these two lines: Here bobs the horrible skeleton

Of a poor lover who hanged himself.3

The position was good and the tavern was handed down from father to son.

In the days of Mathurin Régnier4 the tavern was called the Pot-aux-Roses and as plays on words were all the rage, the sign was a post—poteau—painted rose pink. In the last century, the worthy Natoire,5 one of the masters of whimsy now scorned by the school of rigidity, having got tipsy several times in this tavern at the very table where Régnier got plastered, had painted a bunch of Corinth grapes on a rose pink post out of gratitude. The publican gleefully changed his sign and had these words done in gold letters below the bunch of grapes: au Raisin de Corinthe. Hence the name, Corinthe. Nothing comes more naturally to staggering drunks than elliptical expressions. The elliptical expression is the zigzagging phrase. Corinthe had gradually dethroned the Pot-aux-Roses. The last publican of the dynasty, old man Hucheloup, not even having a clue about the tradition anymore, had had the post painted blue.

A downstairs room where the bar was, a room on the first floor where the billiard table was, a wooden spiral staircase going through the ceiling, wine on the tables, soot on the walls, candles in broad daylight—that was what the tavern was like. A stairwell with a trapdoor in the basement room led to the cellar. On the second floor were the Hucheloups’ rooms. You went up by a staircase, more like a ladder than a staircase, the only entrance being a door hidden in the main room on the first floor. Under the roof, two garrets with dormer windows, servants’ nests. The kitchen shared the ground floor with the bar-room.

Old father Hucheloup may have been a born chemist; he was certainly a cook. You not only drank in his tavern, you ate there. Hucheloup had invented an excellent thing you could only get at his establishment and that was stuffed carp, which he called carpes au gras. This was eaten by the light of a tallow candle or an oil lamp from the days of Louis XVI on tables where an oilskin was nailed down as a tablecloth. People came from miles around. One fine day, Hucheloup decided the time had come to alert the passing trade to his “specialty”; he dipped a brush into a pot of black and as his spelling was peculiar to him, just like his cooking, he improvised on a wall outside this remarkable inscription: CARPES HO GRAS

One winter the storms and squalls got it into their heads to wipe out the s at the end of the first word and the g at the start of the third, and this is what was left: CARPE HO RAS

With the help of time and the rain, a humble gastronomical advertisement had become a profound piece of advice: Seize the hours.

And so it was that, not knowing French, old father Hucheloup had come up with Latin and brought philosophy out of the kitchen; wanting simply to erase Lent, he had equalled Horace. And the striking thing was that this also meant: Come into my tavern.

Not a trace of all this exists today. The Mondétour maze was ripped up and largely opened up in 1847 and may well be no more at the present time. The rue de la Chanvrerie has disappeared, and Corinthe with it, under the pavement of the rue Rambuteau.

As we said, Corinthe was one of those places where Courfeyrac and his friends gathered, if not rallied. It was Grantaire who had discovered Corinthe. He had gone in because of the Carpe horas and had gone back because of the Carpes au gras. They drank there, they ate there, they spouted there; they paid little, they paid badly, they did not pay at all, yet they were always welcome. Old man Hucheloup was a good sport.

This good sport, Hucheloup, as we said, was a moustachioed keeper of the grittier sort of tavern; an amusing variety. He always looked as if he was in a bad mood, seemed bent on intimidating the clientele, growled at people coming into his place, and looked like he’d rather pick a fight with them than serve them soup. And yet, we say again, everyone was always welcome. This quirkiness ensured that the place was always full, and brought him young men who would say to each other: “Come and see old man Hucheloup blow his top.” He had been a fencing master. He had a way of bursting out laughing all of a sudden. Big booming voice, but a good old fellow with it. He was at bottom a comedian behind a tragic mask; he liked nothing better than to scare you; a bit like those snuffboxes in the shape of a pistol. The shot is a sneeze. His wife, mother Hucheloup, was an uncommonly ugly bearded woman.

Around 1830, old man Hucheloup died. The secret of the carpes au gras died with him. His widow, who was barely consolable, kept the tavern going. But the cooking degenerated and became execrable, and the wine, which had always been bad, was now shocking. Courfeyrac and his friends continued to haunt Corinthe, though—out of pity, said Bossuet.

Widow Hucheloup was short-winded and misshapen, full of country memories. She relieved their tiresomeness by her pronunciation. She had her own way of saying things that spiced up these springtime village reminiscences of hers. Once upon a time it had been her delight, she claimed, to hear “the bread-breasts sing in the hawkthorns.” The room on the upper floor, where the “restaurant” was, was a great long well crammed with stools, stepladders, chairs, benches, and tables and with a rickety old billiard table. You reached it by the spiral staircase that came out in a corner of the room in a square hole like a ship’s hatch.

This room, lit by a single narrow window and an oil lamp that was always burning, was a real shambles. All the furniture with four legs behaved as though they had three. As sole decoration, the whitewashed walls had this quatrain in honour of mother Hucheloup: She passes at ten paces, she horrifies at two,

A wart lives up her nose, so risky—true;

You’re worried all the time she’ll blow down the house,

And that one fine day her nose will fall into her mouth.6

This was written in charcoal on the wall.

Ma Hucheloup, true to life, went back and forth morning and night in front of those four lines with perfect serenity. Two servants, called Matelotte, Fish Stew, and Gibelotte, Rabbit Stew, whose real names no one ever knew, helped Ma Hucheloup deck the tables with the carafes of dark rotgut wine and the various gruels that were served to the hungry in earthenware bowls. Matelotte, fat, round, ruddy, and loud, former favourite sultaness of the late Hucheloup, was uglier than any mythological monster you care to name; and yet, as it is only fitting that the servant should always trail behind the mistress of the house, she was not as ugly as Ma Hucheloup. Gibelotte, long, delicate, white with a lymphatic whiteness, with rings round her eyes, drooping eyelids, always exhausted and overwhelmed, suffering from what we might call chronic fatigue, first up, last to bed, served everyone, even the other servant, silently and sweetly, smiling beneath the fatigue with a sort of sleepy vague smile.

There was a mirror above the bar.

Before entering the restaurant room, you could read this line written in chalk over the door by Courfeyrac: REVEL IF YOU CAN AND EAT IF YOU DARE.

PRELIMINARY GAIETIES

L’AIGLE DE MEAUX, AS WE know, lived rather more with Joly than anywhere else. He had a room the way a bird has a branch. The two friends lived together, ate together, slept together. They shared everything, even Musichetta, a little. They were what the hooded friars call bini,1 a pair. On the morning of June 5, they went off to have breakfast at Corinthe. Joly was all stuffed up with a bad head cold that Laigle was beginning to share. Laigle’s coat was threadbare, but Joly was dapper.

It was about nine in the morning when they pushed open the door of Corinthe. They went up to the first floor. Matelotte and Gibelotte greeted them.

“Oysters, cheese, and ham,” said Laigle.

And they sat down at a table. The tavern was empty; they were the only ones there. Gibelotte recognized Joly and Laigle and plunked a bottle of wine on the table.

As they were downing their first oysters, a head appeared at the stairwell hatch and a voice said: “I was just passing when I caught a heady whiff of Brie from the street. I’m coming in.” It was Grantaire. Grantaire took a stool and planted himself at the table. Gibelotte, seeing Grantaire, put another two bottles of wine on the table. That made three.

“Are you going to drink those two bottles?” Laigle asked Grantaire.

Grantaire answered: “Everyone else is ingenious, you alone are ingenuous. No one ever balked at two bottles.” The others had begun by eating, Grantaire began by drinking. Half a bottle was swiftly dispatched.

“Have you got hollow legs?” said Laigle.

“You obviously have,” said Grantaire. He emptied his glass and added: “Dear me, Laigle of the funeral orations,2 your coat has had it.” “I should hope so,” Laigle retorted. “It means we get on well together, my coat and I. It’s taken on all my wrinkles, it doesn’t get in my way at all, it has moulded itself to all my deformities, it goes along with all my movements, I only know it’s there because it keeps me warm. Old coats are exactly the same as old friends.” “True,” cried Joly, chiming in. “An old coat is an old goat.”

“Especially,” said Grantaire, “in the mouth of a man stuffed up with a cold.”

“Grantaire,” Laigle asked, “did you come from the boulevard?”

“No.”

“We just saw the head of the procession go by, Joly and I.”

“It is a barvellous sight,” said Joly.

“This street is so quiet!” cried Laigle. “Who would ever suspect that Paris is in pandemonium? You can really tell it used to be all convents around here! Du Breul and Sauval list all of them and so does the abbé Lebeuf. They were all around here, the place was crawling with them, the shod, the unshod, the tonsured, 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. The place was riddled with them.” “Don’t talk to me about monks,” Grantaire cut in. “It makes you want to scratch yourself.” Then he exclaimed: “Errk! I’ve just swallowed a bad oyster. Looks like my hypochondria’s back. The oysters are off, the servants are dogs. How I hate the human race. I was in the rue Richelieu just now and I went past the big public library. That great mound of oyster shells3 they call a library—it makes me sick just thinking about it. All that paper! All that ink! All that scribbling! Someone wrote all that! What moron once said that man was a biped without feathers? And then I ran into a pretty girl I know, lovely as springtime, a girl worthy of being called Floréal, and she was delighted, overjoyed, delirious, in seventh heaven, the poor silly goose, because yesterday some ghastly banker, pitted with smallpox, deigned to fancy her! Alas! A woman watches the quack treating her as keenly as her case of thrush; cats chase mice as well as birds. This little madam, not even two months ago, was sitting pretty in a garret, fitting the little copper rings in the eyeholes of corsets, what do you call those things? She sewed, she slept on a camp bed, she lived with a flowerpot for company, she was content. Now she’s a lady banker. This transformation happened overnight. I met the victim this morning, jubilant. The awful part of it is that the brazen hussy was just as pretty today as she was yesterday. Her financier didn’t show on her face. Roses are better or worse than women in that you can see when the grubs have been attacking them. Ah, there is no morality on this earth. I call as my witness the myrtle, symbol of love, the laurel, symbol of war, the olive, that ninny, symbol of peace, the apple that nearly choked Adam with its pips, and the fig leaf, ancestor of the petticoat. As to justice, do you want to know what justice is? The Gauls covet Clusium, Rome defends Clusium and asks them what wrong Clusium has done to them. Brennus replies: ‘The wrong Alba did to you, the wrong Fidenae did to you, the wrong the Aequi, the Volsci, and the Sabines did to you.4 They were your neighbours. The Clusians are ours. We understand neighbourliness the same way you do. You stole Alba, we are taking Clusium.’ Rome says: ‘You will not take Clusium.’ Brennus took Rome. Then he cried: ‘Vae victis!’ Woe to the vanquished! That’s what justice is! Ah, in this world, there are only beasts of prey! only eagles! only eagles! It makes my skin crawl.” He held his glass out to Joly, who refilled it, then he drank, and proceeded, almost without having been interrupted by this glass of wine which no one noticed, not even himself.

“Brennus, who takes Rome, is an eagle; the banker, who takes the little working girl, is an eagle. One is as shameless as the other. So we may as well believe in nothing. There’s only one reality: drinking. Whatever your opinion, whether you are for the lean cock like the canton of Uri, or for the fat cock like the canton of Glaris,5 it matters little, so drink. You talk to me about the boulevard, the procession, etc. Well, well, so there’s going to be another revolution, is there? This poverty of means amazes me on the part of the good Lord. He has to keep on greasing the groove of events without letup. Things get stuck, they won’t shift. Quick, a revolution. The good Lord’s hands are black all the time from this dreadful dirty oil. In his place, I’d keep it simple, I wouldn’t keep cranking up my machinery in an endless restaging, I’d promptly lead the human race by the horns, I’d knit events together stitch by stitch without breaking the thread, I wouldn’t have any tricks up my sleeve, I wouldn’t have any fancy repertoire. What you lot call ‘progress’ runs on two engines, people and events. But the sad thing is that, from time to time, something exceptional is called for. For events as for people, the stock company’s not enough; there have to be geniuses among people, and among events, revolutions. Great accidents are the rule, the nature of things can’t do without them, and going on the way comets appear, you could be forgiven for thinking that heaven itself needs star attractions. The moment you least expect it, God plasters a meteor across the wall of the firmament. Some bizarre star shoots out, emphasized by an enormous tail. And that’s the reason Caesar dies. Brutus strikes him with a knife, and God strikes him with a comet.6 Hey presto! Up pops an aurora borealis, up pops a revolution, up pops a great man; ‘93 in big letters, Napoléon in the starring role, the comet of 18117 at the top of the bill. Ah, and what a beautiful bill it is, blue and all studded with stunning flashing lights! Boom! Boom! What an amazing show! Look up, you gawking spectators. Everything’s out of control, the star as well as the play. Good God, it’s both too much and not enough. Such resources, plucked from the grab bag of the exceptional, seem magnificent, yet they are really rather poor. My friends, Providence is down to expedients. A revolution—what does that prove? That God is hard up. He stages a coup d’état, because there is a break in the connection between the present and the future and because, even being God, he can’t make the two ends meet. In fact, this confirms my conjectures about the state of Jehovah’s fortunes; and to see so much uneasiness up above as well as down below, so much meanness and stinginess and miserliness and distress in heaven as well as on earth, from the bird, who doesn’t have a grain of millet, to little old me, who doesn’t have a hundred thousand livres a year in income, to see the fate of humanity, which is pretty threadbare, and even the fate of royalty, which is showing its warp—witness the hanging of the prince de Condé,8 to see winter, which is nothing more than a rip in the zenith that the wind blows through, to see all those streaks like tatters in the brand-new crimson of the morning over the hilltops, to see the dewdrops, those fake pearls, to see the frost, that jewellery paste, to see humanity coming apart at the seams and events patched up, and so many spots on the sun, and so many holes in the moon, to see so much misery everywhere, I suspect God is not rich. He keeps up appearances, it’s true, but I sense the straits He’s in. He throws a revolution the way a merchant whose coffers are empty throws a ball. We must not judge gods by appearances. Beneath the gilding of the heavens I glimpse a destitute universe. There is bankruptcy in creation. That’s why I’m out of sorts. You see, it’s June 5, it’s almost night; I’ve been waiting for the day to come since morning. It hasn’t come yet and I bet it won’t come all day. That’s like the lack of punctuality of a poorly paid clerk. Yes, everything’s badly organized, nothing hangs together, this old world is a shambles, I’m going over to the opposition. Everything’s going to rack and ruin; the world is a pain in the neck. It’s like children: The people who want them don’t have any, those who don’t want them, do. Net result: I’m riled. On top of that, Laigle de Meaux, that baldy, hurts my eyes. It humiliates me to think I’m the same age as that cue ball. Otherwise, I criticize but I don’t insult. The world is what it is. I’m talking here without any malice and to ease my conscience. Receive, Eternal Father, the assurance of my sincere esteem. Ah, by all the saints on Olympus and by all the gods in heaven, I was not made to be Parisian, meaning, to ricochet forever between two gangs, like a shuttlecock between two racquets, from the strutting flâneurs to the loudmouth louts! I was made to be a Turk gazing all the livelong day at oriental scatterbrains performing that exquisite Egyptian dancing, lewd as the dreams of a celibate, or a hick from Beauce, or a Venetian gentleman surrounded by gentle dames, or a German princeling,9 providing half a foot soldier to the German Confederation and filling his spare time drying his socks on his hedge, that is, on his border! That’s what I was born for! Yes, I say Turk, and I’m not about to unsay it. I don’t understand why everyone’s so hard on the Turks; Mohammed has his good side; let’s have some respect for the inventor of seraglios full of houris and of paradises full of odalisques!10 Let’s not insult Mohammedanism, the only religion that comes complete with a henhouse! On that note, I insist on drinking. The earth is one huge silly prank. And it seems they’re going to fight, all these half-wits, bash each other’s heads in, slaughter each other, in the middle of summer, in the month of Prairial,11 when they could be going off to the countryside with some luscious creature on their arm to breathe in that great cup of tea of freshly mown hay! They really are too silly for words. An old broken oil lamp I saw just a moment ago in a junk shop prompts me to make this point: It’s time to illuminate the human race. Yes, I’ve come over all sad again! What a thing it is to swallow an oyster or a revolution the wrong way! I’m getting gloomy again. Oh, this rotten old world! We vie against one another, we depose one another, we prostitute ourselves, we kill one another—and then we put up with it all in the end!” Here Grantaire, after this fit of eloquence, had a well-earned fit of coughing.

“Speaking of revolution,” said Joly, “it would appear that Barius is decibedly aborous.”

“Who of, do we know?” asked Laigle.

“Do.”

“No?”

“Do, I told you!”

“The love life of Marius!” cried Grantaire. “I can see it now. Marius is a mist and he will have found himself some vapour. Marius is a born poet. Say poet and you say madman. Tymbraes Apollo.12 Marius and his Marie, or his Maria, or his Mariette, or his Marion, they must make pretty hilarious lovers. I can see it all. Ecstasies in which they forget to kiss. Chaste here below but going at it for all they’re worth in infinity. They are souls with senses. They sleep together among the stars.” Grantaire was getting stuck into his second bottle and perhaps his second harangue when a new creature emerged from the square hole at the top of the stairs. This was a boy of under ten, in rags, tiny, sallow, with a sharp little muzzle of a face, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, hair all over the place, soaked with rain, looking pleased.

Making his choice without hesitation from among the three even though he obviously didn’t know any of them, the boy addressed Laigle de Meaux.

“Are you Monsieur Bossuet?” he asked.

“That’s my nickname,” answered Laigle. “What do you want?”

“All right. A big fair-headed fellow on the boulevard says to me: ‘Do you know mother Hucheloup?’ ‘Yes,’ I says, ‘rue Chanvrerie, widow of the old geezer.’ He says to me: ‘Get yourself over there. You’ll find Monsieur Bossuet there. Tell him from me: A—B—C.’ They’re pulling your leg, aren’t they? He gave me six sous.” “Joly, lend me ten sous,” said Laigle. Then he turned to Grantaire: “Grantaire, lend me ten sous.” That made twenty sous, which Laigle promptly gave the boy.

“Thank you, Monsieur,” the boy said.

“What’s your name?” asked Laigle.

“Turnip, Gavroche’s friend.”

“Stay here with us,” said Laigle.

“Have breakfast with us,” said Grantaire.

The child replied: “I can’t, I’m in the procession, I’m the one crying, ‘Down with Polignac.’” And kicking his foot way out behind him, which is the most respectful of all possible bows, he took off.

Once the child was gone, Grantaire took the floor again: “That is pure gamin, pure Paris boy. There are many varieties in the gamin genus. The notary’s boy is known as a gutter-leaper, a saute-ruisseau, the cook’s boy is known as a pot-stirrer, a marmiton, the baker’s boy is known as a pastry-puff, a mitron, the foot-man’s boy is known as a groom, the sailor boy is known as a latherer, a mousse, the soldier boy is known as a drummer boy, a tapin, the painter’s boy is known as an apprentice dauber, a rapin, the merchant’s boy is known as an errand boy, a runner, a trottin, the boy courtier is known as a junior gentleman-in-waiting, a menin, the king’s boy is known as a dauphin, the boy god is known as a bambino.” Laigle, meanwhile, was musing; he said in a small voice:

“ABC. That’d be: Lamarque’s funeral.”

“The big fair-headed fellow,” observed Grantaire, “that’d be Enjolras alerting you.”

“Will we go?” said Bossuet.

“It’s raining,” said Joly. “I swore I’d go through fire, not water. I do’d wad do catch a cold.” “I’m staying put,” said Grantaire. “I prefer breakfast to a hearse.”

“Conclusion: We’re staying,” Laigle summed up. “Well, then, we’d better drink. Anyway, you can miss the funeral without missing the riot.” “Ah, the riod! I’b all for it,” cried Joly.

Laigle rubbed his hands together: “So we’re going to go back to the revolution of 1830. Actually, it’s a bit tight in the arms for the people now.” “I really couldn’t care less about your revolution,” said Grantaire. “I don’t abhor this particular government. It’s a crown tempered with a cotton cap. It’s a sceptre ending in an umbrella. In fact, today, I’m just reminded by the weather, Louis-Philippe could use his royalty at both ends, extend the sceptre end against the people and open up the umbrella end against the skies.” The room grew dark, huge clouds now completely blotted out the sun. There was no one in the tavern or on the street, everybody having gone “to see the events.” “Is it midday or midnight?” cried Bossuet. “You can’t see a bloody thing. Gibelotte, some light on the subject!” Grantaire went on forlornly drinking.

“Enjolras looks down on me,” he murmured. “Enjolras must have said: Joly is sick. Grantaire is drunk. So he sent Turnip for Bossuet. If he’d come to get me, I’d have gone with him. Too bad for Enjolras! I won’t be going to his funeral!” This resolution taken, Bossuet, Joly, and Grantaire did not budge from the tavern. At around two in the afternoon, the table they were leaning on was covered in empty bottles. Two candles were burning on it, one in a bright green copper candlestick, the other in the neck of a cracked carafe. Grantaire had led Joly and Bossuet to the wine; Bossuet and Joly had jollied Grantaire up again.

Speaking of Grantaire, since midday, he had progressed beyond wine, a mediocre source of dreams. Wine, with serious drunkards, has only a succès d’estime. When it comes to inebriety, there is black magic and white magic; wine is merely white magic. Grantaire was a daring drinker of dreams. The black hole of a fearful drunkenness gaping open before him, far from stopping him in his tracks, drew him in. He had abandoned the bottle and taken to the tankard. The tankard is a bottomless pit. Not having either opium or hashish to hand, and wanting to fill his brain with twilight dimness, he had resorted to that frightening mix of eau-de-vie, stout, and absinthe that produces such terrible sluggishness. It is from these three vapours, beer, eau-de-vie, and absinthe, that the soul is turned to lead. They are three forms of darkness, the celestial butterfly drowns in them; and, in a membranous smog vaguely condensed into a bat’s wing, three mute furies, Nightmare, Night, and Death, form and flit over the sleeping Psyche.13 Grantaire had not yet reached that dismal point—far from it. He was wildly gay, and Bossuet and Joly kept pace with him. They clinked glasses. Grantaire added rambling gestures to the eccentric emphasis of his words and ideas; he sat straddling his stool, resting his left hand on his knee with dignity, his arm at a right angle, and, with his cravat loose and his glass full in his right hand, he tossed these solemn words to the fat servant, Matelotte: “Let the palace doors be opened! Let everyone belong to the Académie Française and have the right to kiss Madame Hucheloup! Let’s drink to that.” Then he turned toward Ma Hucheloup and added: “Antique woman consecrated by use, approach, that I may contemplate you!” And Joly shouted: “Batelotte and Bibelotte, dod’t give Gradtaire ady bore to drik. He spedds crazy abouds of boney. Since this borning, he’s already eaden up two francs nidety-five centibes in desperade extravagandce.” Grantaire went on: “Who the hell took the stars down without my permission only to put them on again, this time disguised as candles?” Bossuet, completely plastered, had kept his cool.

He had gone and sat on the sill of the open window, getting his back wet with the falling rain, and he contemplated his two friends.

All of a sudden, he heard a racket behind him, the sound of running, cries of “To arms!” He turned round and saw, in the rue Saint-Denis, at the end of the rue de la Chanvrerie, Enjolras flying past, musket in hand, and Gavroche with his pistol, Feuilly with his sabre, Courfeyrac with his sword, Jean Prouvaire with his carbine, Combeferre with his musket, Bahorel with his rifle, and the whole stormy armed mob that followed them.

The rue de la Chanvrerie was scarcely as long as the range of a rifle. Bossuet improvised a megaphone with both hands cupped around his mouth and shouted: “Courfeyrac! Courfeyrac! Ahoy there!” Courfeyrac heard the call, spotted Bossuet, and took a few steps into the rue de la Chanvrerie, shouting a “What do you want?” that got crossed on the way with a “Where are you going?” “To make a barricade,” answered Courfeyrac.

“Why not here! This is the place for it! Make one here!”

“You’re right, Laigle,” said Courfeyrac.

And at a sign from Courfeyrac, the mob rushed into the rue de la Chanvrerie.

NIGHT BEGINS TO FALL ON GRANTAIRE

THE PLACE WAS in fact exactly right with its funnel-shaped entrance from the street tapering at the bottom and ending in a dead end, where the Corinthe caused a bottleneck, the rue Mondétour easily blocked off both left and right, and no attack possible except via the rue Saint-Denis, that is, from the front and without cover. Bossuet on the turps had the sure eye of Hannibal on the wagon.

At the eruption of the gathering, horror took hold of the whole street. There was not a passerby who did not rapidly slip away. In a flash, from one end to the other, left, right, and centre, shops, stalls, alleyway gates, windows, Persian blinds, attics, shutters of all shapes and sizes were slammed shut, from the ground floor to the rooftops. A frightened old woman had even stuck a mattress in front of her window on two clothesline poles, to cushion the musketry. The tavern was the only place open, and that for the good reason that that is where the crowd had rushed to.

“Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” sighed Ma Hucheloup.

Bossuet had gone down to meet Courfeyrac.

Joly, who had run to the window, shouted: “Courfeyrac, you should dave grabbed ad ubbrella. You’re going to catch a colb.” Meanwhile, in a matter of minutes, twenty iron bars had been ripped off the grate over the shop front of the tavern, twenty yards of pavement had been ripped up, Gavroche and Bahorel had seized and tipped over the narrow dray of a lime manufacturer named Anceau, this dray containing three barrels full of lime, which they stashed under the piles of cobblestones; Enjolras had lifted up the trapdoor to the cellar and all the widow Hucheloup’s empty kegs had gone to flank the barrels of lime; Feuilly, with his fingers accustomed to colouring the delicate blades of fans, had buttressed the barrels and the dray with two massive piles of rubble. Rubble improvised like everything else, obtained who knows where. Wooden support beams had been ripped off the front of a neighbouring house and laid over the kegs. When Bossuet and Courfeyrac turned round, half the street was already barricaded with a rampart taller than a man. There is nothing like the hand of the people when it comes to throwing up by tearing down.

Matelotte and Gibelotte had joined the workers. Gibelotte came and went, loaded with debris. Her weariness was a help to the barricade. She served up cobblestones the way she would serve wine, looking half-asleep.

An omnibus drawn by two white horses went past at the end of the street.

Bossuet bounded over the pavement, ran, stopped the driver, made the passengers get down, gave his hand to the ladies, sent the conductor packing and returned, leading carriage and horses by the bridle.

“Omnibuses,” he said, “do not pass by the Corinthe. Non licet omnibus adire Corinthum.”1

A second later, the unhitched horses were wandering off down the rue Mondétour and the omnibus was lying on its side, completing the roadblock.

Ma Hucheloup, shattered, had taken refuge upstairs.

Her eyes were glazed and she looked around without seeing, crying very softly. Her cries of horror didn’t dare come out of her throat.

“It’s the end of the world,” she muttered.

Joly planted a kiss on Ma Hucheloup’s fat red wrinkled neck and said to Grantaire: “My friend, I’ve always considered a woman’s neck to be an infinitely delicate thing.” But Grantaire was climbing up to the highest reaches of the dithyramb. Matelotte had gone back upstairs, Grantaire had grabbed her by the waist and pushed her toward the window, with long peals of laughter.

“Matelotte is ugly!” he yelled. “Matelotte is a dream come true of ugliness! Matelotte is a pipe dream. Here’s the secret of her birth: One fine day, a Gothic Pygmalion2 making cathedral gargoyles fell in love with one of them, the most horrible one. He begged Love to give her life and Matelotte was the result. Look at her, citizens! She has chrome yellow hair like Titian’s mistress3 and she’s a good girl. Take my word for it, she’ll put up a good fight. Every good girl contains a hero. As for mother Hucheloup, she’s a good old sort. Look at the moustache she’s got! She inherited it from her husband. A real hussar, all right! She’ll put up a fight, too. Between the two of them, they’ll put fear into the place. Comrades, we will overthrow the government, true as it is that there are fifteen intermediate acids between margaric acid and formic acid. Anyhow, I couldn’t care less. Gentlemen, my father always detested me because I was no good at mathematics. I am only good at love and liberty. I am the unflappable Grantaire! Never having had money, I’ve never become accustomed to it, which means I’ve never missed it; but if I had been rich, no one else would’ve been poor! I’d have shown ‘em! Oh, if only good hearts had good big purses! How much better it would be! I can imagine Jesus Christ with Rothschild’s fortune! How much good he’d do then! Kiss me, Matelotte! You are so shy and sensual! You’ve got cheeks that cry out for a sister’s kiss and lips that cry out for the kiss of a lover!” “Shut up, you wine cask!” said Courfyerac.

Grantaire replied: “I am Capitoul, municipal magistrate of Toulouse and master of flower games!”4 Enjolras, who was standing on top of the roadblock, fusil in hand, lifted up his handsome, austere face. Enjolras, we know, had something of the Spartan and the Puritan. He would have died at Thermopylae with Leonidas and would have burned Drogheda with Cromwell.5 “Grantaire!” he shouted. “Go and sleep off the booze away from here. This is the place for intoxication—not drunkenness. Do not dishonour the barricade!” Those angry words had an incredible effect on Grantaire. You’d have sworn he’d just had a glass of cold water thrown in his face. He suddenly seemed sobered up. He sat down, leaned on a table near the window, looked at Enjolras with ineffable sweetness and said to him: “You know I believe in you.” “Go away.”

“Let me sleep here.”

“Go and sleep somewhere else,” yelled Enjolras.

But Grantaire kept gazing steadily at him with loving, troubled eyes, and he replied: “Let me sleep here—until I die.” Enjolras gave him a disdainful glare: “Grantaire, you are not capable of believing, thinking, wanting, living, or dying.” Grantaire retorted in a grave voice: “You’ll see.”

He stammered out a few more unintelligible words, then his head fell heavily on the table, and, as commonly happens in the second stage of inebriety into which Enjolras had so rudely and brusquely pushed him, a moment later he was fast asleep.

AN ATTEMPT AT CONSOLING WIDOW HUCHELOUP

BAHOREL, IN ECSTASIES over the barricade, cried: “There’s the street nicely cropped off for you! Doesn’t it look splendid!” Courfeyrac, helping to demolish the tavern all the while, sought to console the widow who owned it.

“Mother Hucheloup, weren’t you complaining just the other day that you’d been fined for breaking the law because Gibelotte had shaken a bedspread out your window?” “Yes, my good Monsieur Courfeyrac. Oh, my God! Are you going to put that table on your horrible pile, too? And, as for the bedspread, and also for a flowerpot that fell onto the street from an attic, the government took a hundred francs off me in fines. Tell me that isn’t an abomination!” “Well, then, mother Hucheloup! We’re avenging you!”

Mother Hucheloup did not seem to much appreciate the benefit of this compensation they were getting for her. She was satisfied in the manner of the Arab woman who, having received a slap from her husband, went off to complain to her father, calling for vengeance and saying: “Father, you owe my husband affront for affront.” The father asked: “Which cheek did he slap?” “The left cheek.” The father then slapped the right cheek and said: “Now you’re happy. Go and tell your husband he slapped my daughter, but I slapped his wife.” The rain had stopped. Recruits arrived. Under their smocks, workers had smuggled in a powder keg, a basket containing bottles of vitriol, two or three carnival torches, and a wicker basket full of Chinese paper lanterns “left over from the king’s birthday, la fête du roi.” Which fête was quite recent, having taken place on the first of May. It was said that this ammunition came from a grocer named Pépin in the faubourg Saint-Antoine. They broke the only streetlamp in the rue de la Chanvrerie, the corresponding streetlamp in the rue Saint-Denis, and all the streetlamps in the surrounding streets of Mondétour, du Cygne, des Prêcheurs, and de la Grande- and de la Petite-Truanderie.

Enjolras, Combeferre, and Courfeyrac directed everything. Now two barricades were under construction at the same time, both leaning against the house of Corinthe at right angles; the bigger of the two closed off the rue de la Chanvrerie, the smaller closed off the rue Mondétour on the rue du Cygne side. This last barricade, which was extremely narrow, was built exclusively out of barrels and cobblestones. There were about fifty workers there, some thirty armed with muskets, for on their way over, they had borrowed wholesale from an armourer’s shop.

You could not get a more odd and motley crew. One had a short coat, a cavalry sabre, and two horse pistols, another was in shirtsleeves with a round hat and a powder horn dangling at his side, a third had padded his chest with a breastplate of nine sheets of grey packing paper and was armed with a saddler’s awl. One of them cried: “Let’s exterminate them to the last man and die on the point of our bayonets!” This man had no bayonet. Another displayed over his greatcoat a leather cross-belt and a cartridge pouch of the National Guard, the pouch cover adorned with this inscription in red wool: Public Order. Plenty of fusils bearing the numbers of legions, not many hats, no cravats, lots of bare arms, a few pikes. Add to that all the different ages, all the different faces, little pallid young men, suntanned dockworkers. All of them were rushing around frantically and while they gave each other a hand they talked about their prospects—how they would have help by three o’clock in the morning, how they were sure of one regiment, how Paris would rise up. Terrible words, delivered with a sort of cordial joviality. You’d have thought they were brothers, yet they did not know each other’s names. The beautiful thing about great danger is that it brings out the fraternity of strangers.

A fire had been lit in the kitchen and they were melting down into a bullet mould pitchers, spoons, forks, all the cabaret’s metalware, and drinking all the while. Caps and bits of buckshot lay around on the tables next to the glasses of wine. In the billiard room, Ma Hucheloup, Matelotte, and Gibelotte, variously changed by terror, one stupefied, one breathless, the third now actually awake, were tearing up old dishcloths and making lint; three insurgents were helping them, three great strapping lads with long hair, beards, and moustaches, who were going through the cloth with the nimble fingers of laundry supervisors and throwing them into a flutter.

The tall man that Courfeyrac, Combeferre, and Enjolras had noticed the moment he approached the crowd at the corner of the rue des Billettes was making himself useful working on the small barricade. Gavroche was working on the big one. As for the young man who had waited at Courfeyrac’s place for him and had asked for Monsieur Marius, he had disappeared more or less at the same time the omnibus had been overturned.

Gavroche, radiant and completely airborne, had taken on the job of keeping things moving. He came and went, climbed up, clambered down, climbed back up, bustled, sparkled. He seemed to be there to goad everyone else on. Was there something spurring him on? Yes, of course there was, his misery. Did he have wings? Yes, of course he did, his exhilaration. Gavroche was a human whirlwind. He was to be seen constantly, he was to be heard never-endingly. He filled the air, being everywhere at once. He was almost annoyingly ubiquitous—no letup was possible with him around. The whole enormous barricade felt him on its rump. He vexed the loafers, roused the layabouts, revived the weary, annoyed the reflective, cheered up some, kept others on their toes, stirred others to fury, got everyone going; he stung a student, bit into a worker, he landed, stopped, took off again, flying above the mayhem and the effort, leaping from one group to the next, babbling, buzzing, and harrassing the whole team; a fly on the vast revolutionary coach.

Perpetual motion was in his tiny arms and perpetual clamour in his tiny lungs: “Go to it! More cobblestones! More barrels! More thingummies! Where can we find some? A sack of rubble to block up that hole for me. It’s too small, this barricade of yours. It needs to be higher. Pile everything on, chuck everything on, toss everything on. Break up the house. A barricade, it’s child’s play. Look, here’s a glass door.” This made the workers snort: “A glass door! What do you want us to do with a glass door, pipsqueak?” “Hercules yourselves, are you?” retorted Gavroche. “A glass door is an excellent thing in a barricade. Doesn’t stop it being attacked, but makes it harder to take. Haven’t you ever snitched apples over a wall that’s got the bottoms of glass bottles stuck on it, then? A glass door’ll cut the corns off the feet of the National Guard when they try to climb up on the barricade. Crikey! Glass is treacherous. Gosh, you haven’t got unbridled imaginations, have you, my comrades!” But what he was really furious about was his pistol’s not having a “dog”—a hammer. He went from one man to the next demanding: “A musket! I want a musket! Why won’t anyone give me a musket?” “A musket, you!” said Combeferre.

“Listen!” said Gavroche. “Why not? I had one all right in 1830 when there was a bit of strife with Charles X!” Enjolras shrugged his shoulders.

“When there are enough to go round the men, we’ll start handing them out to boys.”

Gavroche spun around proudly and shot back: “If you’re killed before me, I’ll take yours.” “Brat!” said Enjolras.

“Novice!” said Gavroche.

An elegant stray fop strolling at the end of the street became a diversion.

Gavroche called out to him: “Come and join us, young man! Aren’t you going to do anything for this old homeland of ours, then?” The fop fled.

PREPARATIONS

THE NEWSPAPERS OF the day that said the barricade in the rue de la Chanvrerie, that “almost impregnable structure” as they called it, reached a level as high as the second storey, were mistaken. The fact is that it got no higher on average than six or seven feet. It was built in such a way that the combatants could, at will, either disappear behind the barrier or peer over it or even scramble up on top of it by means of four rows of cobblestones laid on top of each other and arranged in tiers on the inside like a flight of steps. From the outside the front of the barricade, composed of piles of cobblestones and barrels held together by beams and boards that interlocked with the wheels of Anceau’s cart and the overturned omnibus, looked hideously tangled and impossible to get out of. But an exit big enough for a man to get through had been provided between the wall of the houses and the end of the barricade that was farthest away from the cabaret, so that there was a way out. The beam of the omnibus was set upright and held in place with ropes, and a red flag, tied to this beam, fluttered over the barricade.

The little Mondétour barricade, hidden behind the tavern, could not be seen. The two barricades together formed a real redoubt. Enjolras and Courfeyrac had not seen fit to barricade the other end of the rue Mondétour that offers a way to Les Halles through the rue des Prêcheurs, no doubt wanting to preserve a possible connection with the outside and having little fear of being attacked by the dangerous and difficult alleyway known as the rue des Prêcheurs.

Except for this passage remaining free, constituting what Folard, in his style of strategy, would have called an inner trench, and also taking into account the narrow exit provided on the rue de la Chanvrerie, the inside of the barricade, where the tavern formed a salient angle, presented an irregular quadrilateral closed on all sides. There was a gap of about twenty feet between the main barrier and the tall houses that formed the back of the street, so you could say that the barricade backed onto those houses, which were all inhabited but sealed tight from top to bottom.

All this labour was carried out without hindrance in under an hour and without this handful of daring men seeing one fur cap or one bayonet emerge. The few bourgeois who still ventured into the rue Saint-Denis at that point in the riot shot a glance down the rue de la Chanvrerie, saw the barricade, and stepped lively on their way.

When the two barricades were finished and the flag run up, a table was dragged out of the tavern and Courfeyrac hopped up on this table. Enjolras brought over the square box and Courfeyrac opened it. This box had been 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.

Every man was issued with thirty cartridges; many of them had powder and set about making more of them with the bullets that were being cast. As for the powder keg, it was on a table by itself, near the door, kept in reserve.

The long rappel that rolled throughout Paris went on and on but in the end, it was merely a monotonous background noise which they paid no further attention to. At times, this noise moved away, at times it came closer, wavering mournfully.

The muskets and carbines were loaded, all together, unhurriedly, with solemn gravity. Enjolras went and positioned three sentinels outside the barricades, one in the rue de la Chanvrerie, the second in the rue des Prêcheurs, the third at the corner of la Petite-Truanderie.

Then, with the barricades built, the posts assigned, the guns loaded, the scouts positioned, alone in these fearsome streets where no one walked anymore, surrounded by these mute and seemingly dead houses where no human movement pulsed, enveloped in the darkling shadows of twilight, in the middle of this obscurity and this silence, in which they could feel something indescribably tragic and terrifying advancing, isolated, armed, resolute, and calm, they waited.

WHILE WAITING

IN THOSE HOURS of waiting, what did they do?

We have to tell you, since this is history.

While the men were making cartridges and the women lint, while a large saucepan, full of molten pewter and lead destined for the bullet mould, was smoking on a burning stove, while the scouts were keeping watch over the barricades with their weapons on their arms, while Enjolras, whom nothing could distract, was watching over the scouts, Combeferre, Courfeyrac, Jean Prouvaire, Feuilly, Bossuet, Joly, Bahorel, and a few others besides sought each other out and came together as in their most tranquil schooldays when they would huddle together, chattering, and in a corner of the tavern that had been turned into a casemate, two feet from the redoubt they had put up, their primed and loaded carbines resting on the backs of their chairs, these beautiful young men, so near their final hour, began to recite a love poem.

Which poem? This one:1

Do you remember our sweet life,

When we were both so young,

And our hearts had but one desire

To look good and be in love!

When we added your age to mine

We did not have forty years between us,

And in our humble little home,

Everything, even winter, was spring to us!

Beautiful days! Manuel was proud and wise,

Paris sat down to sacred banquets,

Foy launched thunder, and your corsage

Had a pin that I pricked myself on.

Everyone looked at you. Lawyer without a cause,

When I took you to the Prado to dine,

You were so pretty the roses

Seemed to me to gaze after you.

I heard them say: How beautiful she is!

How good she smells! What flowing hair!

Under her cape she is hiding wings;

Her lovely bonnet is barely blooming.

I wandered with you, squeezing your soft arm.

Passersby thought that charmed love

Had married, in our happy couple,

The sweet month of April to gorgeous May.

We lived hidden, happy, behind closed doors,

Devouring love, that lovely forbidden fruit;

My mouth could not say a thing

Before already your heart answered.

The Sorbonne was a country retreat

Where I adored you from morning to night.

That’s how a soul in love applies

The Tender card2 to the quartier Latin.

O, place Maubert! O, place Dauphine!

When, in our fresh springtime hovel,

You ran your arms over your fine legs,

I could see a star at the back of the garret.

I’ve read a lot of Plato, but none of it has stuck;

Better than Malebranche and Lamennais3

You showed me heavenly bounty

In a flower you gave me.

I obeyed you, you submitted to me.

O golden garret! To enfold you! To see you

Come and go at dawn in a chemise,

Gazing at your fresh face in your old mirror!

And who, tell me, could lose the memory

Of those days of dawns and stars,

Of ribbons, of flowers, of gauze and moiré,

Where love stutters in such charming argot!

Our garden was a pot of tulips;

You cloaked the window with a petticoat;

I took the bowl of the clay pipe,

And I gave you the japanned cup.

And the great calamities that made us laugh!

Your burned muff, your lost boa!

And that dear portrait of the divine Shakespeare

That we sold so we could eat at night!

I was a beggar, you were charitable.

I kissed your fresh round arms on the wing.

Dante in folio served us as a table

To gaily munch through a hundred chestnuts.

The first time in my joyful hovel

That I took a kiss from your fiery lips,

When you went off dishevelled and red,

I stayed all pale and believed in God!

Do you remember our endless happiness,

And all those fichus that turned to rags!

Oh! So many sighs, from our hearts full of shadow,

Soared up into the endless heavens!

The hour, the place, these memories of youth recalled, a few stars starting to twinkle in the sky, the funereal repose of those deserted streets, the imminence of the inexorable adventure gearing up, gave a pathetic charm to these lines murmured softly in the twilight by Jean Prouvaire, who, as we said before, was a very gentle poet.

Meanwhile a paper lantern had been lit at the little barricade, and at the big one, one of those wax torches you see at Mardi Gras in front of the carriages loaded with masks heading for the Courtille. These torches, as we know, came from the faubourg Saint-Antoine.

The torch had been placed in a cage of cobblestones closed on three sides to shelter it from the wind, and positioned so that all the light fell on the flag. The street and the barricade remained plunged in darkness and nothing but the flag could be seen, wonderfully lit up as though by some enormous dimmed lantern.

This light added to the scarlet of the flag an indescribably terrible crimson.

THE MAN RECRUITED IN THE RUE DES BILLETTES

NIGHT HAD WELL and truly fallen, but nothing happened. All that could be heard was dim muffled sounds and the odd volley of gunfire, but these were rare, not long sustained, and remote. This respite was dragging on, a sign that the government was taking its time and gathering its forces. These fifty men were expecting sixty thousand.

Enjolras felt himself seized by that impatience that takes hold of the head-strong on the threshold of awe-inspiring events. He went to find Gavroche, who had settled in to making cartridges in the downstairs room by the dubious light of two candles, placed on the bar out of harm’s way as a precaution due to the powder spread over the tables. The insurgents had also been careful not to light any light in the upstairs rooms.

At that moment Gavroche was extremely preoccupied, though not exactly with his cartridges. The man from the rue des Billettes had just come into the downstairs room and had taken a seat at the table farthest from the light. A large-model infantry flintlock musket had fallen into his hands and he held it between his knees. Until that moment, distracted by a hundred “amusing” things, Gavroche had not even seen the man.

When he came in, Gavroche followed him mechanically with his eyes, admiring his musket, then, suddenly, just as the man sat down, the boy shot up. Anyone eyeing the man up to that point would have seen him taking everything in about the barricade and the band of insurgents with singular intensity, but from the moment he stepped into the barroom, he had fallen into a kind of meditative state and did not seem to see anything anymore of what was going on. The kid went over to this pensive character and began circling around him on tiptoe the way you walk when you’re frightened of waking someone up. As he did so, his little boy’s face, at once so cheeky and serious, so mobile and so deep, so chirpy and so harrowing, reproduced all the grimaces of an old man that signify: Ah, bah! Can’t be! I’ll be buggered! I must be seeing things! I must be dreaming! Can it be? … No, it’s not! Yes, it is! No, it’s not! and so on. Gavroche rocked on his heels, balled his two fists in his pockets, bobbed his head on his neck like a bird, put all the sagacity of his bottom lip into one enormous pout. He was dumbstruck, doubtful, incredulous, convinced, dazzled. He had the facial expression of the head eunuch at the slave market discovering a Venus among all the lumps of lard, or the look of an amateur recognizing a Raphael in a stack of crummy paintings. Everything in him was at work, his instinct for sniffing out and his intellectual capacity for putting two and two together. It was obvious that something powerful was happening to Gavroche.

It was at the peak of this preoccupation that Enjolras came up and spoke to him.

“You’re little,” said Enjolras. “You won’t be seen. Duck out of the barricades, slip along the houses, ferret around the streets, and come back and tell me what’s happening.” Gavroche straightened up.

“So little ‘uns are good for something, eh? That’s lucky! I’ll go. Meanwhile, trust the little ‘uns, don’t trust the big ‘uns—” Here Gavroche raised his head and lowered his voice and added, indicating the man from the rue des Billettes: “You see that big ‘un over there?” “What about him?”

“He’s a stool pigeon.”

“You sure?”

“Not even a fortnight ago, he pulled me by the ear off the ledge of the pont Royal where I was getting some fresh air.” Enjolras swiftly left the kid and murmured a few words in a whisper to a labourer from the wine docks who happened to be there. The labourer left the room and came back almost immediately with three others. These four men, four broad-shouldered porters, went and positioned themselves behind the table where the man from the rue des Billettes was leaning, without doing anything that might attract his attention. They were ready to throw themselves upon him.

Enjolras then approached the man and asked him: “Who are you?”

At this abrupt question, the man flinched. He looked Enjolras straight in his frank and open eyes and seemed to read what he was thinking there. He smiled a sneer of a smile that was the most disdainful, the most forceful, and the most resolute smile it was possible to smile and he answered with arrogant gravity: “I see what you’re up to … So, then, yes!” “You’re a spy?”

“I am a government official.”

“What’s your name?”

“Javert.”

Enjolras signalled to the four men. In the twinkling of an eye, before Javert had time to turn round, he was collared, laid out, tied up, frisked.

They found on him a small round card stuck between two bits of glass and bearing, on one side, the engraved coat of arms of France, with this legend: Surveillance et Vigilance and, on the other, this information: JAVERT, Inspector of Police, aged fifty-two; and the signature of the prefect of police of the time, Monsieur Gisquet.

On top of this, he had on him his watch and his purse, which contained a few gold coins. They let him keep his purse and his watch. Under the watch, at the bottom of his fob pocket, they felt around and found a piece of paper in an envelope that Enjolras opened. He read these lines, written in the prefect’s very own handwriting: “As soon as his political mission has been fulfilled, Inspector Javert will ascertain, by special investigation, whether it is true that malefactors have rallying points on the slope of the right bank of the Seine, near the pont d’Iéna.” The search over, they lifted Javert back onto his feet, tied his arms behind his back and bound him to that celebrated post that had once given the tavern its name, in the middle of the downstairs room.

Gavroche, who had witnessed the whole scene and approved it all with a quiet nod of the head, went up to Javert and said: “Looks like the mouse caught the cat.” All this was done so fast that it was over by the time anyone else in or around the tavern realized. Javert had not let out a single cry.

But when they saw Javert tied to the post, Courfeyrac, Bossuet, Joly, Combeferre, and the men scattered about the two barricades came running.

Javert had his back against the post and was so wound round with ropes that he couldn’t move a muscle, yet he raised his head with the intrepid serenity of a man who has never lied.

“He’s a spy,” said Enjolras.

And he turned to Javert: “You’ll be shot two minutes before the barricade is taken.”

Javert replied in his most imperious tone: “Why not right away?”

“We’re saving our powder.”

“Well, you could get it over with with a knife.”

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

Then he called Gavroche.

“You! Get about your business! Go and do what I told you.”

“I’m going,” cried Gavroche.

But he paused on the way out: “By the way, you’ll give me his musket!”

And he added: “I leave you the musician, but I want the clarinet.”

The kid gave a military salute and gaily bounded through the gap in the main barricade.

SEVERAL QUESTION MARKS REGARDING A MAN NAMED LE CABUC WHO WAS PERHAPS NOT LE CABUC

THE TRAGIC PICTURE we have begun to paint would not be complete, the reader would not see, in their exact and actual relief, these great moments of society in labour and giving birth to revolution, in which the convulsions are mixed with sheer hard work, if we leave out of the outline sketched here, an incident full of epic and savage horror that occurred almost immediately after Gavroche left.

Mobs, as we know, are like snowballs and gather as they roll a heap of rowdy men. These men do not ask each other where they come from. Among the passersby who attached themselves to the mob led by Enjolras, Combeferre, and Courfeyrac, there was a man in a porter’s jacket worn at the shoulders, who was gesticulating and vociferating and flailing his arms around for all the world like a crazy drunk. This man, going by the name or nickname of Le Cabuc (Fat-head) and otherwise completely unknown to those who claimed to know him, who was extremely drunk or pretending to be, had sat down with a few others at a table they had dragged outside the cabaret. This Le Cabuc, all the while encouraging those who were with him to drink, looked to be studying most thoughtfully the big house at the back of the barricade whose five stories dominated the whole street and faced the rue Saint-Denis. Suddenly he shouted: “Comrades, you know what? We should shoot from that house there. When we’re up there at the windows, I’ll defy any bastard to come down the street!” “Yes, but the house is shut up,” said one of his drinking mates.

“We’ll knock!”

“They won’t open.”

“We’ll break the door down!”

Le Cabuc runs to the door, which has an absolutely massive knocker, and knocks. The door does not open. He knocks a second time. No one answers. A third knock. Same silence.

“Is anyone there?” cries Le Cabuc.

Nothing stirs.

So then he grabs a gun and begins bashing the door with the butt. It was an old alley door, arched, low, narrow, solid, all in oak, lined on the inside with sheet metal and an iron brace, a regular fortress door. The banging made the house shake but did not shift the door.

Yet it is likely that the inhabitants were roused, for a small square dormer window on the third floor was finally seen to light up and open and an old man with grey hair was seen to appear at this window with a candle, openmouthed and frightened-looking—it was the porter.

The man hammering the door stopped.

“Messieurs,” asked the porter, “what is it you want?”

“Open up!” roared Le Cabuc.

“Messieurs, that can’t be done.”

“Open up, right now.”

“Impossible, messieurs!”

Le Cabuc got his gun and took a bead on the porter’s head; but as he was below and it was very dark, the porter didn’t see him.

“Will you open up, yes or no?”

“No, messieurs!”

“No, you say?”

“I say no, my good—”

The porter did not finish his sentence. The gun went off; the bullet entered just below his chin and exited at the back of his neck after cutting straight through the jugular. The old man slumped forward in a heap without a sigh. The candle fell and went out, and nothing more could be seen except an unmoving head sitting on the windowsill and a wisp of whitish smoke curling up toward the roof.

“That’s that!” said Le Cabuc, letting the butt of his gun drop to the pavement again.

Hardly had he uttered those words than he felt a hand land on his shoulder with the weight of an eagle’s talons and he heard a voice say to him: “On your knees.” The murderer turned and saw in front of him the cold white face of Enjolras. Enjolras had a pistol in his hand.

At the explosion, he had come running. He had grabbed Le Cabuc’s collar, smock, and braces in his left hand.

“On your knees,” he repeated.

And with a sovereign movement, the frail young man of twenty pushed the stocky and robust picklock onto his knees in the mud, bending him like a reed. Le Cabuc tried to resist but it was as though he’d been seized by a superhuman fist.

Pale and wan, with his neck bare, his hair wild, his perfectly womanly face, Enjolras looked amazingly like the Themis of antiquity.1 His flaring nostrils and downcast eyes gave his implacable Greek profile that expression of fury and of chastity combined that, in the ancient world’s view, belonged to justice.

The whole barricade had come running, then all had lined up in a circle at a distance, feeling it impossible to utter a word in the face of what they were about to see.

Le Cabuc, defeated, gave up trying to fight and trembled from head to foot. Enjolras let him go and and took out his watch.

“Pull yourself together,” he said. “Pray or reflect. You’ve got one minute.”

“Mercy!” murmured the murderer. Then he hung his head and stuttered out a few inarticulate oaths.

Enjolras did not take his eyes off his watch; he let a minute pass, then he put the watch back in his fob pocket. That done, he grabbed Le Cabuc, who was curled over at his knees, howling, by the hair, and pressed the muzzle of his gun to his ear. Many of those intrepid men, who had embarked on the most frightening of adventures without turning a hair, now turned their heads away.

They heard the explosion, the assassin hit the pavement face first, and Enjolras straightened up and ran his determined eagle eye around him.

Then he pushed the dead body away with his foot and said: “Throw that outside.”

Three men lifted up the body of the poor miserable wretch, which was still juddering with the last mechanical convulsions of the life that had flown, and threw it over the small barricade into Mondétour alleyway.

Enjolras remained lost in thought. It was hard to know what imposing shadows were slowly spreading over his awsome serenity. Suddenly he raised his voice. Everyone fell silent.

“Citizens,” said Enjolras, “what that man did is horrifying and what I did is horrible. He shot someone and that is why I killed him. I had to do it, for an insurrection must be disciplined. Murder is even more of a crime here than elsewhere; we are under the eye of the revolution, we are the priests of the Republic, we are the sacramental hosts of duty and no one must be able to vilify our struggle. So I judged that man and sentenced him to death. As for myself, forced to do what I did, but abhorring it, I have judged myself as well and you will soon see what I have sentenced myself to.” Those who were listening shuddered.

“We will share your fate,” cried Combeferre.

“So be it,” Enjolras went on. “One other thing. In executing that man, I obeyed necessity. But necessity is a monster of the old world, necessity is called Fatality. Now, the law of progress has it that monsters disappear in the face of angels, and that Fatality evaporates in the face of Fraternity. This is a bad moment to utter the word love. Never mind, I utter it, and I glorify it. Love, you hold the future in your hands. Death, I use you, but I hate you. Citizens, in the future there will be no darkness, no thunderbolts, no vicious ignorance, no bloody eye for an eye, blood for blood. Since there will be no more Satan, there will be no more Michael.2 In the future no one will kill anyone, the earth will shine, the human race will love. It will come, citizens, the day when all will be peace, harmony, light, joy, and life, it will come. And it is so that it comes that we are going to die.” Enjolras was silent. His virgin lips closed; and he remained for some time standing at the spot where he had spilled blood, as still as a marble statue. His staring eyes made everyone drop their voices around him.

Jean Prouvaire and Combeferre quietly shook hands, and leaning on each other at the corner of the barricade, studied with an admiration that had a touch of compassion in it this grave young man, executioner and priest, made of light like crystal, and of rock, too.

We should say right now that later, after the action, when the bodies were taken to the morgue and searched, a police officer’s card was found on Le Cabuc. In 1848, the author of this book held in his own hands the special report on this subject made to the prefect of police in 1832.

We should add that, if we are to believe a strange but probably well-founded police tradition, Le Cabuc was Claquesous. The fact is that, after the death of Le Cabuc, nothing more was ever heard of Claquesous. Claquesous left no trace of his disappearance; he seemed to have vanished into thin air. His life had been darkness, his end was invisible night.

The whole group of insurgents was still in the grip of the emotion of this tragic trial, so quickly set up and so quickly ended, when Courfeyrac spotted in the barricade the young man who had been looking for Marius at his place that morning.

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