بخش 4 کتاب 13

BOOK THIRTEEN

MARIUS STEPS INTO THE SHADOWS

FROM THE RUE PLUMET TO THE QUARTIER SAINT-DENIS

THE VOICE THAT had called Marius through the dying light to the barricade in the rue de la Chanvrerie sounded to him like the voice of destiny. He wanted to die, the occasion presented itself; he knocked at heaven’s door, a hand in the shadows held out the key to him. These dismal opportunities that open up in the darkness of despair are tempting. Marius pulled back the bolt that had let him pass through so many times, walked out of the garden, and said: “Let’s go.” Mad with pain, no longer feeling anything steady or solid in his brain, incapable of accepting anything anymore that fate had to offer after these two months spent in the intoxications of youth and of love, overwhelmed by all the visions of despair coming all at once, he had only one desire left: to end it all, fast. He started to step up his pace. It just so happened that he was armed, having Javert’s pistols on him.

The young man he thought he’d seen had vanished out of sight on the street.

Marius had come from the rue Plumet via the boulevard. He now crossed over the Esplanade and the pont des Invalides, the Champs-Élysées, the place Louis XV, and turned into the rue de Rivoli. The shops were open, the gas was burning under the arcades, women were buying up in the boutiques, people were having ice cream in the Café Laiter, they were eating little cakes in the English pastry shop. Only a few post chaises were setting out at a gallop from the Hôtel des Princes and the Hôtel Meurice.

Marius turned into the rue Saint-Honoré via the passage Delorme. The boutiques were closed, the merchants were chatting in front of their half-open doors, people were strolling around, the streetlamps were lit, all the windows were lit from the first floor up, as usual. There were cavalry on the place du Palais-Royal.

Marius followed the rue Saint-Honoré. The farther away he got from the Palais-Royal, the fewer lights there were in windows; the boutiques were completely closed, no one was chatting on their doorsteps, the street grew darker and at the same time the crowd grew denser. For the passersby were now a crowd. No one was seen to speak in this crowd, and yet a deep muffled hum was coming from it.

Near the fontaine de l’Arbre-Sec, there were “gatherings,” motionless gloomy groups, standing amid the eddying hordes like stones in the middle of a running stream.

At the mouth of the rue des Prouvaires, the crowd had stopped moving. They formed a resistant block, massive, solid, compact, almost impenetrable, of people heaped together and talking in low voices. Black coats and round hats had virtually disappeared. Smock frocks, smocks, caps, bristling heads caked with dirt.1 This mob undulated confusedly in the nocturnal fog. Its whisperings had the harsh sound of sighing. Although not one person was moving, you could hear shuffling in the mud. Beyond this dense mass, in the rue du Roule, in the rue des Prouvaires, and in the extended part of the rue Saint-Honoré, there was not a single window with a candle burning in it. In those streets, single files of solitary lanterns could be seen stretching away in thinning numbers. The lanterns of those days were like big red stars hanging from ropes and throwing shadows over the footpath in the shape of great spiders. Those streets were not deserted. You could make out stacks of muskets there, bayonets waving around, and troops bivouacking. Nobody curious stepped over that mark. There, the traffic stopped. There, the crowd ended and the army began.

Marius willed with the will of a man beyond all hope. He had been called, he had to go. He found a way of cutting through the crowd and cutting through the bivouac of troops, hiding from the patrols and avoiding the sentries. He took a detour, made it to the rue de Béthisy and headed for Les Halles. At the corner of the rue de Bourdonnais there were no more lanterns.

After cutting through the crowd belt, he passed beyond the fringe of troops and found himself in a frightening place in the middle of something terrible. Not one person walking by, not one soldier, not one light; no one. Solitude, silence, night; a mysterious chill that bit to the bone. Going into a street was like going into a cellar.

He continued on, tentatively. Someone ran right past him. Was it a man? A woman? Several people? He could not have said. It had passed and it had vanished.

By a roundabout way, he came to a little street that he thought must be the rue de la Poterie; about halfway along, he ran into an obstacle. He put his hands out. It was an overturned cart; his feet recognized puddles of water, potholes, scattered and piled-up cobblestones. A barricade had been started there and then abandoned. He climbed up the cobblestones and found himself on the other side of the barrier. He walked along, sticking close to the curbstones and guiding himself by the walls of houses. A little beyond the barricade, he thought he caught a glimpse of something white up ahead. He approached, it took on a shape. It turned into two white horses, the horses of the omnibus unhitched that morning by Bossuet and who had wandered about willy-nilly from street to street the whole day and had wound up stopping there, with the weary patience of brutes that don’t understand the actions of men any more than men understand the actions of Providence.

Marius left the horses behind. As he came to a street that struck him as being the rue du Contrat-Social, a gunshot, coming from who knows where and shooting across the darkness randomly, whistled past him very close; the bullet went through a copper shaving dish hanging outside a hairdresser’s shop. You could still see this shaving dish with a bullet hole in it in 1846, in the rue du Contrat-Social, at the corner where the pillars of Les Halles stand.

This gunshot meant life, still. From that moment on, though, he didn’t come across another thing.

This whole excursion was like going down dark stairs.

But that didn’t stop Marius pressing ahead.

PARIS AS THE OWL FLIES

ANYONE WHO COULD have soared over Paris at that moment with the wings of a bat or an owl would have had a grim spectacle beneath their eyes.

The whole of the old Les Halles quartier, which is like a city within a city, crossed by the rue Saint-Denis and the rue Saint-Martin, crisscrossed by a thousand little lanes, and which the insurgents had made their redoubt and their field of arms, would have appeared to them like an enormous black hole dug out in the centre of Paris. There their gaze would have fallen into an abyss. Thanks to the broken streetlamps, thanks to the windows shut tight, any beam of light, any life, any sound, any movement, ceased there. The invisible riot police were watching everywhere and maintaining order, meaning darkness. To drown the smallness of their number in one vast obscurity, to beef up each combatant through the possibilities this obscurity offers, this is the essential tactic of insurrection. At nightfall, every window where a candle burned received a bullet. The light was put out, sometimes the inhabitant killed. And so nothing stirred. There was nothing there, inside the houses, but fear, mourning, stupor; in the streets, a sort of awestruck horror. You could not even see the long rows of windows and stories, the jagged lace of the chimneys and roofs, not even the dim reflections gleaming on the muddy, wet pavement. Any eye that could have looked down from above into that jumble of shadows might perhaps have glimpsed, here and there, in places, indistinct lights bringing out the broken and bizarre lines and shapes of weird constructions, something like ghostly glimmerings coming and going among ruins; that was where the barricades were. The rest was a lake of darkness, foggy, heavy, funereal, above which rose the motionless and gloomy silhouettes of the Tour Saint-Jacques, Saint-Merry church, and two or three other of those great edifices man turns into giants and the night turns into phantoms.

All around this deserted and ominous labyrinth, in the quartiers where the Paris traffic had not been brought to a standstill and where a few rare lamplights still shone, the aerial observer would have been able to make out the metallic scintillation of sabres and bayonets, the muffled rumbling of artillery, and the swarming of silent battalions swelling in number from one minute to the next; a daunting belt that slowly tightened and closed around the riot.

The besieged quartier was now no more than a sort of monstrous cavern; everything in it seemed to be asleep or motionless and, as we have just seen, each of the streets offering access was now nothing but shadow.

A fierce shadowland, full of traps, full of unknown and fearful things, where it was frightening to go and awful to stay, where those who went in shivered in the face of what was waiting for them there, where those who waited shuddered in the face of those who were about to come. Invisible combatants entrenched at every street corner; pitfalls of the grave hidden in the thick layers of the night. It was all over. No light to hope for from now on, other than the flash of guns, no encounter, other than the sudden swift appearance of death. Where? How? When? You did not know, only that it was certain and inevitable. There, in that place marked for battle, the government and the insurrection, the National Guard and the popular clubs, the bourgeoisie and the dissidents, were about to grope their way toward each other. For both sides, the essential requirement was the same. To come out of it slain or victorious, the only possible way out from that point on. Such an extreme situation, such powerful darkness—the most timid felt filled with resolution and the most daring, with terror.

Add to this, on both sides, fury, relentlessness, equal determination. For one side, to advance meant to die, yet no one thought of turning back; for the other side, to stay meant to die, yet no one thought of running away.

It was essential that everything be over by the next day, that triumph be on one side or the other, that the insurrection be a revolution or a mere skirmish. The government understood this and so did the different parties; the least significant bourgeois felt it. Whence a feeling of anguish that melded with the impenetrable shadow of this quartier where all would be decided; whence a redoubling of anxiety around this silence from which only a catastrophe would emerge. Only one sound could be heard there, a sound as heartrending as a death rattle, as menacing as a curse, the tocsin of Saint-Merry. Nothing was as bloodcurdling as the clamour of this wild and desperate bell, wailing in the dark.

As often happens, nature seemed to have come to terms with what men were about to do. Nothing disturbed the deadly harmonies of this whole. The stars had gone out; heavy clouds filled the horizon all around with their melancholy billowing. There was a black sky over those dead streets as though an immense pall had unfurled over that immense grave.

While a battle still entirely political was brewing in that same spot that had already seen so many revolutionary events, while youth, secret societies, schools, in the name of principles, and the middle class, in the name of vested interests, approached each other to go head to head, to tear into each other and knock each other down, while each one was rushing and calling the final decisive hour of the crisis, beyond that fatal quartier, far away, in the deepest depths of the unfathomable cavities of the old desperately down-and-out Paris that is disappearing under the splendour of the happy, opulent Paris, the sombre voice of the people could be heard roaring dully.

A frightening and sacred voice combining the bellowing of the brute and the word of God, that terrifies the weak and warns the wise, coming both from below, like the voice of a lion, and from above, like the voice of thunder, at one and the same time.

THE EXTREME EDGE

MARIUS HAD REACHED Les Halles.

Everything here was even calmer, darker, and stiller than in the neighbouring streets. You would have said that the icy peace of the tomb had seeped up from the ground and spread out under the sky.

A red glare, though, carved out against this black backdrop the high rooftops of the houses that blocked off the rue de la Chanvrerie on the Saint-Eustache side. This was the reflection of the torch burning in the Corinthe barricade. Marius headed for that red glare. It brought him to the Marché-aux-Poirées, and he could just see the dark mouth of the rue des Prêcheurs. He went in. The insurgents’ scout keeping watch at the other end did not notice him. He felt himself to be very close to what he had come for and he tiptoed forward. In this way he reached the elbow of that short arm of the rue Mondétour which was, you will recall, the only connection to the outside that Enjolras had kept open. At the corner of the last house, on his left, he poked his head around and looked down this stretch of rue Mondétour.

A bit past the black corner where the little street met the rue de la Chanvrerie, which threw a broad patch of shadow in which he himself was buried, he saw a glimmer of light on the cobblestones, part of the tavern, and, behind it, a paper lantern twinkling in a sort of amorphous wall and men crouching down with guns resting on their knees. All this was only ten yards away. It was the inside of the barricade.

The houses lining the lane on the right hid from him the rest of the tavern, the main barricade, and the flag.

Marius had only one more step to take. So the unhappy young man sat down on a curbstone, folded his arms, and thought about his father.

He thought about the heroic colonel Pontmercy who had been such a proud soldier, who had defended the frontier of France under the Republic and reached the frontier of Asia under the emperor, who had seen Genoa, Alexandria, Milan, Turin, Madrid, Vienna, Dresden, Berlin, Moscow, who had left on all Europe’s fields of victory drops of that same blood that he, Marius, had in his veins, who had gone grey before his time due to the rigours of discipline and command, who had lived with his sword-belt buckled, his epaulets falling on his breast, his cockade blackened by gunpowder, his forehead creased by his helmet, in barracks, in camps, in bivouacs, in ambulances, and who, twenty years later, had come back from the great wars with his cheek scarred, a smile on his face, unaffected, at peace, admirable, as pure of heart as a child, having given his all for France and done nothing against her.

He told himself that his day had come now, too, that his hour had finally sounded, that following in his father’s footsteps, he, too, brave, fearless, bold, would run in front of bullets, offer his chest to bayonets, shed his blood, seek out his enemy, seek death, that he, in turn, would wage war and enter onto the field of battle—but that the field of battle he was about to enter was the street, and that the war he was about to wage was civil war!

He saw civil war yawning open like an abyss before him and he knew that it was there that he would fall. And a shiver ran down his spine.

He thought about his father’s sword that his grandfather had sold to a secondhand dealer and that he himself had so sorely missed. He told himself that it had done the right thing, that chaste and valiant sword, in escaping from his clutches and going off in anger into the dark; that if it had fled like that, it was because it was smart and could foresee the future; it was because it had a foreboding of the riot, the war of the gutters, the war of the cobblestones, the fusillades through cellar windows, all the stabbing in the back; it was because, coming from Marengo and Friedland, it did not want to go to the rue de la Chanvrerie, it was because all that it had done with the father, it would not do with the son! He told himself that if he had collected that particular sword from his dead father’s bedside and dared to bring it with him for this struggle between French compatriots, on a street corner, under cover of night, it would most certainly have burned his hands and burst into flame in front of him like the sword of the angel! He told himself that he was happy that it was not there, that it had disappeared, that this was good, that this was only right, that his grandfather had been the true keeper of his father’s flame and that it was better that the colonel’s sword had been sold to the highest bidder, sold to a junk dealer, tossed among old scrap iron, rather than to cause the flank of his homeland to bleed today.

And then he began to cry bitter tears.

It was horrible. But what could he do? Live without Cosette he could not. Since she had gone away, there was nothing left for him to do but die. Had he not given her his word of honour that he would die? She had gone away knowing that, which meant she liked the idea of his dying. And anyway, it was clear she no longer loved him, since she had gone away like that, without a word of warning, without a letter, even though she knew his address! What was the good of living, what was there to live for now? And anyway, for God’s sake! How could he come this far, only to turn back! How could he come so close to danger, only to run away! How could he come to stare into the barricade, only to slink off all atremble saying: Actually, I’ve had enough of this, I’ve seen it, that’s enough, it’s civil war, I’ll be on my way! How abandon his friends who were waiting for him! who perhaps needed him! who were a mere handful against an entire army! How drop everything at once, love, friendship, his word! To give his cowardice the excuse of patriotism! But this was impossible, and if his father’s ghost were there in the shadows and saw him recoil, he would whip his backside with the flat of his sword and shout at him: On you go, coward!

In the grip of his seesawing thoughts, he hung his head.

All of a sudden, he lifted it again. A sort of dazzling adjustment had just been effected in his mind. The mind expands when you are close to the grave; to be close to death makes you see things as they really are. The vision of action that he perhaps felt he was about to throw himself into appeared to him no longer woeful, but superb. The street war was suddenly transfigured, by some unknowable interior labour of the soul, before the eye of his mind. All the tumultuous question marks of his reverie came thronging back to him, but without troubling him in the slightest. He did not leave one of them unanswered.

Let’s see, why would his father be outraged? Aren’t there any cases where insurrection achieves the dignity of duty? What would be demeaning, then, for the son of Colonel Pontmercy, in the impending fight? It was no longer Montmirail or Champaubert,1 it was something else. It was no longer a matter of sacred ground, but of a holy idea. The country was groaning, true; but humanity was applauding. Besides, was it true that the country was groaning? France was bleeding, but liberty was smiling; and before the smile of liberty, France forgot her wounds. And then, to see things from an even higher perspective, what was all the talk of civil war about?

Civil war? What did that mean? Is there such a thing as a foreign war? Isn’t every war between men a war between brothers? War can only be described by its aim. There is neither foreign war nor civil war; there is only unjust war and just war. Until the day the great human concordat should be concluded, war, the kind of war, at least, that is the striving of the future’s headlong rush against the past’s dragging the chain, may well be necessary. What was there to attack in such a war? War only becomes shameful, the sword only becomes a dagger, when it kills right, progress, reason, civilization, truth. Then, civil war or foreign war, it is iniquitous; its name is crime. Outside that sacred thing, justice, by what right does one form of war scorn another? By what right does Washington’s sword disown Camille Desmoulins’ pike? Leonidas versus the foreigner, Timoleon versus the tyrant2—who is the greater? One is a defender, the other a liberator. Are we to condemn, without bothering about its aim, any show of arms within the city? Then mark down as infamous Brutus, Marcel, Arnold of Blankenheim, Coligny.3 Scrub warfare? Street warfare? Why not? That was the war waged by Ambiorix, by Artevelde, by Marnix, by Pelagius.4 But Ambiorix fought against Rome, Artevelde against France, Marnix against Spain, Pelagius against the Moors; all of them against the foreigner. Well, then, the monarchy is the foreigner, here; oppression is the foreigner; divine right is the foreigner. Despotism violates the moral frontier just as invasion violates the geographic frontier. To drive out the tyrant or drive out the Englishman5 is, in either case, to take back your territory. There comes a time when protest is no longer enough; philosophizing must be followed by action; the strong hand finishes what the idea has started; Prometheus Bound begins, Aristogeiton ends;6 the Encyclopaedia enlightens souls, August 10 electrifies them. After Aeschylus, Thrasybulus;7 after Diderot, Danton. The multitudes have a tendency to accept whoever is master. Their very mass weighs them down with apathy. A mob easily adds up to obedience. You have to stir them up, push them, treat the men rough using the very advantage of their deliverance, hurt their eyes with the truth, throw light at them in terrible handfuls. They must themselves be rocked a bit by their own salvation; this dazzlement wakes them up. Hence the necessity of tocsins and wars. Great combatants must rise up, illuminate nations by their audacity, and shake up this sad humanity that is covered in darkness by divine right, Caesar-style glory, force, fanaticism, irresponsible power, and absolute majesty; a throng busy gazing idiotically at these dismal triumphs of the night in all their crepuscular splendour. Down with the tyrant! But wait a minute! Who are you talking about? Are you calling Louis-Philippe a tyrant? No, he’s no more a tyrant than Louis XVI. Both men are what history is accustomed to calling good kings; but principles can’t be broken up, the logic of truth is a straight line, the peculiarity of truth is to lack complacency; so no concessions, then; any encroaching on mankind must be put down; there is divine right in Louis XVI, there is the element of “because he is a Bourbon”8 in Louis-Philippe; both represent a confiscation of rights to a certain extent, and in order to get rid of this universal usurpation, we must fight them; we French must, for France always takes the initiative. When the master falls in France, he falls everywhere. In short, reestablish social truth, give liberty back its throne, give the people back to the people, give man back his sovereignty, remove the purple from the head of France, restore reason and equity in all their fullness, suppress all forms of antagonism by restoring each person to themself, do away with the obstacle that royalty constitutes to vast universal harmony, put the human race on equal footing with the law—what cause could be more just and, consequently, what war greater? Such wars as these build peace. An enormous fortress of prejudices, privileges, superstitions, lies, of exactions, abuses, acts of violence, of iniquities, of darkness, is still standing over the world with its towers of hate. It must be thrown down. This monstrous pile must be toppled. To conquer at Austerlitz is a great thing, to storm the Bastille is immeasurable.

There is not a person who hasn’t noticed for themself that the soul—and this is what is so wonderful about its complex, ubiquitous unity—has the strange ability to reason almost coldly in the most desperate extremities, and it often happens that passionate sorrow and profound despair, in the very agony of their blackest monologues, address issues and develop arguments. Logic joins in the turmoil and the thread of a syllogism floats without breaking in the mournful storm of thought. This was Marius’s state of mind.

While he was thinking along these lines, devastated but resolute, hesitant, though, and, in a word, shuddering in the face of what he was about to do, his gaze wandered about the interior of the barricade. The insurgents were chatting there in low voices, without stirring, and you could feel that half-silence there that marks the final phase of waiting. Above them, at a third-floor window, Marius could make out a sort of spectator or witness who seemed to him peculiarly attentive. It was the porter killed by Le Cabuc. From below you could dimly make out the head in the reflection from the torch stuck in the cobbles. Nothing could be stranger, in that dim and uncertain light, than this livid face, still, stunned, hair standing on end, eyes open and staring, mouth gaping, leaning over the street in an attitude of curiosity. You would have said that the man who had died was studying those who were about to die. A long trail of blood that had flowed from the head ran in reddish trickles from the dormer window down to the first floor, where it stopped.