بخش 5 کتاب 1

PART FIVE

JEAN VALJEAN

BOOK ONE

WAR BETWEEN FOUR WALLS

THE CHARYBDIS OF THE FAUBOURG SAINT-ANTOINE AND THE SCYLLA OF THE FAUBOURG DU TEMPLE

THE TWO MOST memorable barricades that the observer of social ills might mention do not belong to the period in which the action of this book is set. These two barricades, symbols both, from two different angles, of a terrible situation, sprang up out of the ground during the fatal insurrection of June 1848,2 the biggest street war history has ever seen.

It sometimes happens that, from the depths of their anguish, their discouragement, their privation, their feverishness, their distress, their rankness, their ignorance, their darkness, that great desperado, the rabble, protests—even against principles, even against liberty, equality, and fraternity, even against universal elevation, even against the rule of all by all—and the plebs do battle with the people.

The scum attack common law; mob rule rises up against the Demos.3

Those are dolorous days; for there is always a certain amount of justice even in such madness, there is suicide in such a duel; and these words that are intended as insults, scum, rabble, mob rule, plebs, alas! register the fault of those in power more than the fault of those who suffer; the fault of the privileged more than the fault of the dispossessed.

As for us, we never utter those particular words without pain and respect, for when philosophy probes the facts to which they correspond, it often finds plenty of greatness bound up with all the misery. Athens was ruled by the mob; the scum made Holland; the plebs saved Rome more than once; and the rabble followed Jesus Christ.

There is no thinker who has not at times contemplated the splendours down below among the dregs.

No doubt Saint Jerome was thinking of this rabble, and of all the poor people, all the vagabonds, all the miserable outcasts from whom the apostles and the martyrs emerged, when he uttered those mysterious words: Fex urbis, lex orbis.4 The angry seething of the hordes who suffer and bleed, their acts of violence in contravention of the principles that are their lifeblood, their acts of assault and battery against the law, are popular coups d’état and must be put down. The man of integrity devotes himself to the task, and for very love of those same hordes, he does battle with them. But how excusable he finds them, even while standing up to them! How he reveres them, even while resisting them! This is one of those rare times when, in doing what you have to do, you feel something disconcerting that almost puts you off going any further; you persist because you have to; but your conscience, though satisfied, is sad, and doing your duty is made hard by heartache.

June 1848, we hasten to say, was a unique event and almost impossible to place within the philosophy of history. Everything we have just said has to be set aside when we consider that extraordinary riot in which you felt the sacred anxiety of labour reclaiming its rights. It had to be fought, and that was a duty, because the riot was aimed at the Republic. But what was June 1848, when it all comes down to it? A revolt of the people against themselves.

When the subject is not lost sight of, there is no digression; so hopefully the reader will bear with us for a moment as we dwell on the two absolutely unique barricades that we have just been talking about, and that typified that insurrection.

One blocked the entrance to the faubourg Saint-Antoine; the other defended the approach to the faubourg du Temple. No one who saw those frightening masterpieces of civil war rise up before them, beneath the dazzling blue June sky, will ever forget them.

The Saint-Antoine barricade was monstrous. It was three stories high and seven hundred feet wide. It barred the vast mouth of the faubourg from one corner to the other, that is, across three streets. Ravined, jagged, serrated, snarled, crenellated by an immense rip, buttressed by piles that were themselves bastions, thrusting out jutting headlands here and there, and powerfully backed by the two great promontories of the faubourg houses, it loomed like a cyclopean levee at the far end of the fearful square that witnessed July 14.5 Nineteen barricades rose up in tiers throughout the dense streets behind this mother barricade. Just to see it, you could feel that the immense suffering in the faubourg had reached that final moment of agony when distress tips over into catastrophe. What was this barricade made of? Of the rubble of three six-storey houses, torn down for the purpose, said some. Of the wonders achieved by every kind of rage, said others. It had the woeful look of all constructions built by hate: It was a ruin. You could have asked: Who built that? You could equally have asked: Who destroyed that? It was an improvisation thrown up by ferment. Hey! That door! That gate! That awning! That mantelpiece! That broken stove! That cracked pot! Hand it all over! Throw it all on! Push, roll, dig, dismantle, knock over, pull down the whole lot! It was the collaboration of the cobblestone, of rubblework, of the beam, the iron bar, the rag, the broken windowpane, the staved-in chair, the cabbage stump, the scrap, the piece of trash, and malediction. It was big and it was little. It was the bottomless pit parodied on the spot by pandemonium. Mass alongside the atom; a bit of wall torn down and a bowl smashed; a menacing fraternization of every kind of debris; Sisyphus had tossed his rock on and Job his shard of pottery.6 In a word, it was horrendous. It was the acropolis of the barefoot tramps. Overturned carts made the talus hazardous; a huge dray was piled on sideways, with the axle pointing up at the sky and looking like a scar on that tumultuous façade; an omnibus, gaily hoisted up to the very top of the pile by brute force, as though the architects of this savagery had wanted to add a bit of cheek to the horror, offered its unhitched shaft to invisible horses of the air. This gigantic jumble, the alluvial deposits of the riot, suggested an Ossa heaped upon the Pelion7 of all revolutions; ‘93 on top of ‘89, Thermidor 9 on top of August 10, Brumaire 18 on top of January 21, Vendémiaire on top of Prairial,8 1848 on top of 1830. The square was worth the trouble, and the barricade worthy of appearing on the very spot where the Bastille had disappeared. If the ocean went in for dikes, this is how it would build them. The fury of the rising tide was stamped on that amorphous clutter. What rising tide? The teeming hordes. You felt you were looking at mayhem petrified. You felt you heard buzzing above the barricade, as though the enormous dark bees of violent progress were in their hive. Was that a clump of bushes? Was it a drunken orgy? Was it a fortress? Vertigo seemed to have built the thing with the flapping of wings. There was something of the open cesspit about that redoubt and something Olympian in that tangle of junk. You could see there, in a mishmash full of despair, roof rafters, chunks of attics with their wallpaper attached, window frames with all the glass intact planted in the wreckage, waiting for the cannon, ripped-out fireplaces, wardrobes, tables, benches, all howling, topsy-turvy, and a thousand wretched things even beggars reject as detritus, containing as they do both fury and nothingness. You would have said it was the tatters of a whole populace, rags made of wood, iron, bronze, stone that the faubourg Saint-Antoine had shovelled there at its doorstep with one colossal sweep of the broom, turning its misery into a barricade. Chunks of wood like chopping blocks, broken chains, a framework with brackets in the shape of gallows, wheels poking out of the rubble horizontally—all this lumped together in one great monument to anarchy, the sombre features of the old tortures once suffered by the people. The Saint-Antoine barricade turned everything into a weapon; everything that civil war can throw at society’s head surfaced there; it was not combat, it was paroxysm; the guns that defended that redoubt, among which were a few blunderbusses, sprayed around bits of crockery, knucklebones, coat buttons, and even bedside table castors, projectiles made dangerous because of the copper. This barricade was frenzied; it threw up into the clouds a crazy clamour; at certain times, provoking the army, it was seething with teeming throngs and squalling tempests; a mob of flaming heads crowned it; a swarm filled it; its crest was thorny with guns, sabres, clubs, axes, pikes, and bayonets; a vast red flag snapped in the wind there; you could hear cries of command, songs of attack, the rolling of drums, the sobbing of women, and the dark roars of laughter of the starving. It was outrageous and alive; and, as though from the back of some electric beast, lightning crackled out of it. The spirit of revolution spread its cloud over that summit where the voice of the people rumbled like the voice of God; a strange majesty emanated from that titanic sackload of rubble. It was a heap of rubbish and it was Sinai.9 As we said above, in the name of the Revolution, it attacked … what? The Revolution. It, this barricade—chance, disorder, alarm, misunderstanding, the unknown—was faced with the Constituent Assembly, the sovereignty of the people, universal suffrage, the nation, the Republic—and it was the “Carmagnole” challenging the “Marseillaise.”10 An insane but heroic challenge, for this old faubourg is a hero.

The faubourg and its redoubt lent each other a hand. The faubourg put its shoulder to the redoubt, the redoubt leaned back on the faubourg. The vast barricade displayed itself like a cliff face where the strategy of the generals of Africa11 came to grief and was shattered. Its caves, its excrescences, its warts and humps, grimaced, so to speak, and snickered under the smoke. Grapeshot vanished there in the amorphous, shells sank into it, were swallowed up by it; cannonballs managed only to bore holes in it; what was the point of shelling chaos? And the regiments, accustomed to the most savage sights of war, looked on with anxious eyes at this wildcat of a redoubt, with its boarlike bristling and its mountainous enormity.

Less than a mile away, at the corner of the rue du Temple that debouches onto the boulevard near the Château-d’Eau, if you were game enough to poke your head out beyond the tip formed by Dallemagne’s shop front, you saw way in the distance, beyond the canal, in the street that goes up the slopes of Belleville, at the highest point of the hill, a strange wall reaching the second storey of the façades, a sort of hyphen linking the houses on the right and the houses on the left, as though the street had decided to fold its highest wall back in on itself to seal itself abruptly off. This wall was built with paving stones. It was upright, correct, cold, perpendicular, squarely levelled, straight as a die, aligned with the use of a plumb bob. No doubt it was lacking cement but, as with certain Roman walls, this did not disturb its rigid architecture. Its height gave you some idea of how thick it was. The moulding at the top was mathematically parallel to the substructure. Here and there, over the grey surface, invisible arrow slits that looked like black threads could be made out. These arrow slits were spaced apart at equal intervals. The street was deserted as far as the eye could see. All the windows and all the doors were shut. At the end of it rose this roadblock that turned the street into a cul-de-sac, a still and tranquil wall. No one could be seen, nothing could be heard; not a cry, not a sound, not a breath. A sepulchre.

The dazzling June sun flooded that terrible thing with light.

This was the barricade of the faubourg du Temple.

As soon as you arrived in the vicinity and saw it, it was impossible, even for the heartiest, not to pause for thought in the face of such a mysterious apparition. It was tightly tailored, stacked, imbricated, rectilinear, symmetrical, and deadly. There was art and darkness in it. You felt that the chief of this barricade was either a geometer or a spectre. As soon as you saw it, you dropped your voice to a whisper.

When anyone, soldier, officer, or representative of the people, ventured to cross the lonely roadway, which they did from time to time, a faint but sharp whistling would be heard and the person would fall, wounded or dead; or, if he escaped, a bullet would be seen sinking into some closed shutter, into a gap between rubble stones, into the plaster of some wall. Sometimes it was a big Biscay ball. For the men manning the barricade had turned two bits of cast-iron gas piping, each blocked at one end with oakum and fireclay, into two small cannons. No wasting gunpowder. Nearly every shot hit home. There were a few corpses here and there and pools of blood over the cobblestones. I remember a white butterfly that came and went, up and down the street. Summer does not abdicate.

In the surrounding area, portes cochères were obstructed with the wounded.

You felt there that you were in the sights of someone you could not see and you realized that the entire street was ready and aiming.

Massed behind the kind of humpback that the bridge forms at the entrance to the faubourg du Temple as it arches over the canal, the soldiers of the attacking column, grave and collected, observed the grim redoubt, the stillness, that death-delivering imperturbability. Some of them crawled on their stomachs right up to the top of the bridge, making sure their shakos did not show above it.

The valiant Colonel Monteynard admired the barricade with a shudder. “Look how it’s built!” he said to a representative. “Not one cobblestone out of line. It’s like porcelain.” At that instant a bullet shattered the cross on his breast and he fell.

“The cowards!” people said. “Just let them show their faces, why don’t they! Let us see them! They don’t dare! They’re hiding!” The faubourg du Temple barricade, defended by eighty men, attacked by ten thousand, held for three days. On the fourth day, the army did what was done at Zaatcha and Constantine:12 They bored right through the houses, they came over the rooftops, and the barricade was taken. Not one of the eighty so-called cowards thought of fleeing; every one of them was killed on the spot except for the chief, Barthélemy, of whom we will have more to say below.

The Saint-Antoine barricade was the crashing of thunder and lightning; the barricade du Temple was silence. The difference between the two redoubts was the difference between the shocking and the sinister. One looked like a great gaping maw, the other a mask.

Accepting that the gigantic and tenebrous June insurrection was triggered by a bout of rage and a riddle, the dragon was palpable in the first barricade, the sphinx in the second.

These two walls had been built by two men, one named Cournet, the other Barthélemy.13 Cournet made the barricade Saint-Antoine; Barthélemy the barricade du Temple. Each was the image of the man who built it.

Cournet was a very tall man; he had broad shoulders, a red face, powerful fists, a bold heart, a loyal soul, a sincere and terrible gaze. Fearless, energetic, irascible, stormy; the most affable of men, the most formidable of fighters. War, battle, the mêlée were the air he breathed and put him in good spirits. He had been a naval officer and from his movements and his voice, you could tell he was a sea dog who was at home on the ocean in a tempest; he brought the hurricane with him into battle. Except for genius, there was something of Danton in Cournet; except for divinity, there was something of Hercules in Danton.

Barthélemy, skinny, puny, whey-faced, taciturn, was a sort of tragic gamin who, when smacked around by some police constable, had kept an eye out for him, lay in wait for him, and killed him, and, at seventeen years of age, was thrown into jail. He came out and put up this barricade.

Later fate caught up with them both in London, where both men had gone into hiding as outlaws. Barthélemy killed Cournet, in a fateful duel. Some time after that, caught in the machinery of one of those mysterious adventures involving passion, disasters in which French justice sees extenuating circumstances and British justice sees only death, Barthélemy was hung. The sombre social edifice is so constructed that, thanks to material deprivation, thanks to moral darkness, that poor hapless being, with his undoubtedly sound, perhaps even great, intellect, started out in the galleys in France and ended up on the gallows in England. Barthélemy, whatever the occasion, flew only one flag—and it was black.

WHAT IS THERE TO DO IN A BOTTOMLESS PIT BUT TALK?

SIXTEEN YEARS COUNT in the underground education in rioting, and June 1848 knew a lot more about it than June 1830. And so the barricade in the rue de la Chanvrerie was just a rough draft, an embryo, compared to the two colossal barricades that we have briefly described; but, for the time, it was pretty impressive.

The insurgents, under the watchful eye of Enjolras, for Marius no longer watched anything, had put the night to good use. The barricade had not only been repaired but enhanced. It had been raised two feet. Iron bars planted in between the cobblestones looked like lances at rest. All kinds of rubbish had been wheeled in from all directions and thrown on, making the exterior even more tangled. The redoubt had been cleverly rebuilt as a wall inside and as a thicket outside.

They had rebuilt the stairs of paving stones that allowed it to be mounted like a citadel wall.

They had tidied the barricade up, cleared the downstairs room of the tavern, taken over the kitchen as a field hospital, finished dressing the wounds of the wounded, collected the powder scattered over the floor and on the tables, cast bullets, made cartridges, scraped lint, distributed the arms of the fallen, cleaned up the interior of the redoubt, picked up debris, carted away the bodies.

They deposited the dead in Mondétour lane, which they still controlled. The pavement was red for a long while afterwards at that spot. Among the dead there were four National Guards from the suburbs. Enjolras had their uniforms put to one side.

Enjolras had advised two hours’ sleep. Any advice from Enjolras was an order. And yet, only two or three profited by it. Feuilly put those two hours to use engraving this inscription on the wall opposite the tavern: LONG LIVE THE PEOPLE!

These four words, gouged out in the stone with a nail, could still be read on the wall in 1848.

The three women had taken advantage of the respite the night offered to vanish completely; which made the insurgents breathe easier. The women had managed to find refuge in some neighbouring house.

Most of the wounded were able and willing to fight still. But on a bed consisting of a mattress and trusses of straw, in the kitchen–cum–field hospital, there were five seriously wounded men, two of whom were National Guards. The Municipal Guards were being treated first.

There was nothing left now in the downstairs room except Mabeuf under his black cloth and Javert tied to the post.

“This is the dead room,” said Enjolras.

Inside the room, only very dimly lit by a tallow candle, at the very back, the mortuary table standing behind the post like a horizontal bar meant a sort of big cross was roughly formed by Javert standing and Mabeuf lying down.

The omnibus shaft, though truncated by the fusillade, was still standing upright enough to have a flag hung from it.

Enjolras, who had that trait of a born leader of always doing what he said he would do, lashed to this pole the torn and bloodstained coat of the old man killed.

A meal was now out of the question. There was no bread and no meat. The fifty men in the barricade had quickly exhausted the meagre provisions of the tavern over the sixteen hours they had been there. At a given moment, any barricade that holds out inevitably becomes a raft of the Medusa. They had to resign themselves to going hungry. They were in the early hours of that spartan day of June 6 when, in the Saint-Merry barricade, Jeanne, surrounded by insurgents wanting bread, answered all the combatants clamouring for “Something to eat!” with, “What for? It’s three o’clock. At four, we’ll be dead.” Since they could no longer eat, Enjolras ruled out drinking. He banned wine and rationed eau-de-vie.

Some fifteen bottles, full and hermetically sealed, had been found in the cellar. Enjolras and Combeferre went down to examine them. Combeferre said when they came back up: “It’s old stock of old man Hucheloup’s—he started out as a grocer.” “That’d have to be real wine,” observed Bossuet. “It’s a good thing Grantaire’s asleep. If he was on his feet, we’d be hard-pressed to hang on to those bottles.” In spite of the murmurs of protest, Enjolras put his veto on the fifteen bottles and, so that no one would touch them and to make them more or less sacrosanct, he had them put under the table where old father Mabeuf was lying.

At around two in the morning, they did a count. There were still thirty-seven of them.

Day was beginning to dawn. They had just snuffed out the torch, which had been put back in its socket of paving stones. The inside of the barricade, that small courtyardlike space enclosing part of the street, was drowned in darkness, and in the dim crepuscular horror, it looked like the deck of a disabled ship. The fighters came and went, moving around inside like black shapes. Above this frightening nest of shadow, the upper floors of houses stood out, livid; at the very top, the chimneys were turning white. The sky had that lovely undecided tone that might be white or might be blue. Birds were flying around letting out cries of happiness. The tall house that formed the back of the barricade, being turned toward the east, had a rose-coloured reflection over its roof. At the dormer window on the third floor, the morning breeze was riffling through the grey hair on the dead man’s head.

“I’m glad they put out the torch,” Courfeyrac was saying to Feuilly. “I was getting sick of that torch being startled by the wind. It looked as though it was frightened. The light of a torch is like the wisdom of a coward; it’s too busy trembling to shed much light.” Dawn wakes up minds just as it does birds; everyone was chattering away.

Joly saw a cat prowling around in a gutter and drew a lesson in philosophy from this.

“What is a cat?” he cried. “It is a rectification. The good Lord, having created the mouse, said: ‘Oh dear, I’ve made a boo-boo.’ And so he created the cat. The cat is the erratum of the mouse. The mouse plus the cat equals the revised and corrected proofs of Creation.” Combeferre, surrounded by students and workers, spoke of the dead, of Jean Prouvaire, of Bahorel, of Mabeuf, and even of Le Cabuc—and of Enjolras’ stern sadness. He was saying: “Harmodius and Aristogeiton, Brutus, Chereas, Stephanus, Cromwell, Charlotte Corday, Sand1—all of them had their moment of anguish after the blow they struck. Our hearts are so shaky and human life is such a mystery that, even in a public-spirited murder, even in a liberating murder, if there is such a thing, remorse at having struck a man down exceeds joy at having served the human race.” And, words tossed out meandering along the way they do, a minute later, after a detour via Jean Prouvaire’s poetry, Combeferre was comparing the translators of the Georgics2 to one another, Raux to Cournand, Cournand to Delille, pointing out the few passages translated by Malfilâtre, particularly the bit on the miracles and wonders surrounding the death of Caesar; and, at that word Caesar, the conversation swung back to Brutus.

“Caesar,” said Combeferre, “rightly fell. Cicero was tough on Caesar and he was right. That sort of toughness is no diatribe. When Zoïlus insults Homer, when Maevius insults Virgil, when Visé insults Molière, when Pope insults Shakespeare, when Fréron insults Voltaire,3 it is the old law of envy and hate at work; geniuses attract abuse, great men are always more or less barked at. But Zoïlus and Cicero are two different people. Cicero is a righter of wrongs through his thinking, just as Brutus is a righter of wrongs through his sword. I condemn, for my part, the latter kind of justice, the blade; but antiquity accepted it. Caesar, that rapist of the Rubicon,4 conferring as though they came from him honours that came from the people, and not being upstanding when the Senate came in, acted, as Eutropius5 says, the part of a king and almost of a tyrant, regia ac poene tyrannica. He was a great man; so much the worse, or so much the better; the lesson is more to the point. His twenty-three wounds touch me less than the gob of spit on Jesus Christ’s forehead. Caesar was stabbed by senators; Christ was slapped in the face by lackeys. We feel the god in the greater outrage.” Bossuet, lording it over the talkers from the top of a heap of paving stones, cried out, carbine in hand: “O Cydathenaeum, O Myrrhinus, O Probalinthus, O Graces of the Aeantides. Oh, who will say Homer’s verses for me like a Greek from Laurium or from Edapteon!” BRIGHTENING AND DARKENING

ENJOLRAS HAD GONE on reconnaissance. He had ducked out through Mondétour lane, winding his way along the houses.

The insurgents, we have to say, were full of hope. The way they had repelled the night attack made them almost scorn the dawn attack before the event. They waited for it, smiling. They did not doubt their success any more than they doubted their cause. Besides, help was evidently on the way. They were counting on it. With that penchant for prophetic triumphalism that is one of the strengths of the French fighter, they divided the day that was about to begin into three distinct phases: At six o’clock in the morning, a regiment that had been “worked on” would come over and join them; at midday, the insurrection of all Paris; at sundown, revolution.

They could hear the tocsin of Saint-Merry, which had not let up for a minute since the previous evening; proof that the other barricade, the main one, Jeanne’s, was still holding out.

All these hopes were communicated from one group to the next in a sort of gay and grim whispering that was like the buzz of a hive of warring bees.

Enjolras reappeared, back from his sombre eagle’s promenade in the outer darkness. He listened for a moment to all this jubilation with his arms folded, one hand over his mouth. Then, fresh and rosy in the growing whiteness of the morning, he said: “The whole Paris army is in it. A third of the army is bearing down on the barricade where you are. On top of the National Guard. I made out the shakos of the Fifth of the Line and the colours of the Sixth Legion. You will be attacked in an hour. As for the people, they were boiling over yesterday, but this morning they’re not budging. Nothing to expect, nothing to hope for. Not a single faubourg, not a single regiment. You have been abandoned.” These words fell on the buzzing groups with the effect of the first drops of a storm on a swarm of bees. No one said a word. There was a moment of utter silence in which you could have heard death taking wing.

That moment was brief. A voice, from the darkest depths, shouted to Enjolras: “So be it. Let’s raise the barricade to twenty feet and let’s all stay our ground. Citizens, let’s offer the protest of dead bodies. Let’s show them that though the people may desert the republicans, the republicans will not desert the people.” This speech released everyone’s thinking from the painful cloud of individual anguish. It was greeted by enthusiastic applause.

No one ever knew the name of the man who had spoken; it was some smock-wearer without a name, an unknown man, a forgotten man, a passing hero, that great anonymous man who is always caught up in human crises and spurts of social evolution and who, at a given moment, says the decisive word supremely well, before melting back into the darkness after having represented, in a flash of lightning that is over in a second, God’s people.

This inexorable resolution was so much in the air of June 6, 1832, that, almost at the same moment, in the barricade at Saint-Merry, the insurgents raised an uproar that has gone down in history, having been recorded at trial: “Whether they come to our aid or whether they don’t—what does it matter! Let’s get killed here to the very last man.” As we see, the two barricades, although physically isolated, were very much of one mind.

FIVE FEWER, ONE MORE

AFTER THIS AVERAGE unknown man, who decreed “the protest of dead bodies,” had spoken, expressing how they all felt, a strangely satisfied and terrible cry arose from everyone’s lips, deadly in meaning and yet triumphant in tone: “Long live death! Let’s all stay here.” “Why all?” said Enjolras.

“All! All!”

Enjolras resumed: “The position’s good, the barricade is beautiful. Thirty men are enough. Why sacrifice forty?”

They responded: “Because not one of us wants to leave.”

“Citizens,” cried Enjolras, and there was in his voice an almost angry tremor, “the Republic is not rich enough in men to incur unnecessary costs. Vainglory is squandering. If, for some of you, getting away from here is a duty, then that duty should be performed like any other.” Enjolras, the man as principle, had over his coreligionists the sort of all-powerfulness that emanates from the absolute. Yet notwithstanding this omnipotence, there was muttering.

A leader to his fingertips, Enjolras heard the muttering and put his foot down. He said haughtily: “Let those who are afraid of there only being thirty say so.” The muttering intensified.

“Anyway,” observed a voice from one huddle, “as for getting away, that’s easier said than done. The barricade’s surrounded.”

“Not on the Les Halles side,” said Enjolras. “The rue Mondétour is free and through the rue des Prêcheurs you can get to the Marché-des-Innocents.”

“And there,” another voice in the group shot back, “you’ll be caught. You’ll fall on some great guard of the line or the guard from the suburbs. They’ll see a man in a smock and a cap filing past. ‘Hey you, where’ve you come from? You wouldn’t be from the barricade by any chance, would you?’ Then they look at your hands. You reek of gunpowder. The jig’s up: You’re shot.” Without answering, Enjolras gave Combeferre a tap on the shoulder and both of them went off into the downstairs room.

They resurfaced a moment later. Enjolras held in his outstretched hands the four uniforms he had had put aside. Combeferre followed him, carrying the leather gear and the shakos.

“With this uniform,” said Enjolras, “you blend into the ranks and you can escape. There’s enough here for four, anyway.”

And he threw the four uniforms on the ground where the cobblestones had been ripped up.

No one moved a muscle in that stoical audience. Combeferre took the floor: “Listen,” he said, “show a little pity. Do you know what’s at stake here? What’s at stake here are the women. Let’s see. Do any of you have wives, yes or no? Do any of you have children, yes or no? Do any of you, yes or no, have mothers, rocking cradles with their foot, with a heap of little ones around them? Let any among you who has never seen the breast of a woman feeding her baby raise his hand. Ah, you want to get yourselves killed. Well, I do too, I who am talking to you, but I don’t want to feel the phantoms of women wringing their hands all around me. Die if you like, but don’t make others die. Suicides like the ones about to be committed here are sublime, but suicide is limited and won’t tolerate being extended; the moment suicide hurts your nearest and dearest, it’s known as murder. Think of those little blond heads, think of that old white hair. Listen, just a moment ago, Enjolras told me he saw a dismal fifth-floor window, lit up by a candle, down at the corner of the rue du Cygne, and silhouetted against the windowpane was the wobbling shadow of the head of an old woman who looked as though she’d spent the night sitting up waiting. Maybe she’s the mother of one of you. Well, then, let that man leave now, and let him hurry up and say to his mother: Mother, here I am! Let him rest assured, we’ll get the job done here just the same. When you support your nearest and dearest through your labour, you no longer have the right to sacrifice yourself. That is deserting the family, that is. And what about those who have daughters, and those who have sisters! Have you thought about that? You get yourselves killed, you’re dead, fine, and tomorrow? Young girls who have no bread—that’s a terrible thing. A man begs, a woman sells. Ah, those lovely creatures, so graceful and so sweet with their flowery bonnets, who sing and chatter and fill the house with chaste life, who are like a living perfume, who prove the existence of angels in heaven through the purity of virgins on earth, your Jeanne, your Lise, your Mimi, those adorable and decent creatures who are your blessing and your pride—my God, they’ll be going hungry! What do you want me to say? There’s a market in human flesh, and it’s not with your ghostly hands fluttering around them that you will stop them heading for it! Think of the street, think of the pavement crawling with men strutting past, think of the shops in front of which women come and go in the mud in revealing frocks. Those women, too, were once pure. Think of your sisters, those of you who have sisters. Misery, prostitution, police officers, Saint-Lazare1—that’s what those beautiful delicate girls will come to, those fragile marvels of modesty, of kindness and beauty, fresher than lilacs in the month of May. So, you’ve gone and got yourselves killed! Right! You’re not around anymore! Fine. You wanted to deliver the people from the monarchy, but you hand your girls over to the police instead. Friends, beware, have some compassion. Women, poor sorry women—we don’t usually think about them much. We rely on the fact that women haven’t received the same education as men, we prevent them from reading, we prevent them from thinking, we prevent them from getting mixed up in politics—won’t you prevent them from going to the morgue tonight to identify your bodies? Look, those who have families need to be good boys and just shake our hands and go, and let us do what has to be done here on our own. I’m well aware it takes courage to leave, it’s hard; but the harder it is, the more commendable it is. You say: I’ve got a gun, I’m at the barricade, too bad, I’m staying. Too bad is soon said. My friends, there is a day after, you won’t be there on that day after, but your families will be. All that suffering! Listen, a pretty apple-cheeked baby brimming with health, who babbles, and jabbers away, and laughs, and smells so sweet when you give them a kiss—do you know what happens to that baby when it’s abandoned? I saw one once, a little thing, knee-high to a grasshopper. His father had died. Some poor people had taken him in out of charity but they didn’t have enough bread for themselves. The child was always hungry. It was winter. He didn’t cry. They saw him go up to the stove where there was never a fire and where the pipe, you know, was puttied with yellow clay. The child picked off a bit of this clay with his little fingers and ate it. His breathing was laboured, his face livid, his legs like jelly, his stomach swollen. He said nothing. They spoke to him, he didn’t answer. He died. They took him to the Necker hospice2 to die, that’s where I saw him. I was an intern at that hospice. Now, if there are any fathers among you, fathers who have the pleasure of taking their child’s little hand in their good strong hand for a walk on Sundays, let each of these fathers imagine that this child is his own. That poor little toddler, I remember him well, it seems to me I can still see him when he was on the dissecting table naked, with his ribs poking out under his skin like graves under grass in a cemetery. They found what looked like mud in his stomach. There was ash in his teeth. Come on, let’s examine our consciences, let’s listen to our hearts. The statistics show that the mortality rate among abandoned infants is fifty-five percent. I repeat, we’re talking about women here, we’re talking about mothers, we’re talking about girls, we’re talking about little nippers. Are we talking about you here? We know very well who you are; we know very well that you are all brave men, for Christ’s sake! We know very well that your souls are full of the joy and the glory of giving your lives for the great cause; we know very well that you feel you’ve been handpicked to die usefully and magnificently and that each of you is clinging to his part in the triumph. Well and good. But you are not alone in this world. There are other beings you have to think of. You must not be selfish.” Everyone hung their heads glumly.

Ah, the strange contradictions of the human heart in its most sublime moments! Combeferre, who spoke thus, was not an orphan. He remembered the mothers of others but forgot his own. He was going to get himself killed. He was “selfish.” Marius, feverish, his stomach empty, his every hope shed, one after the other, stranded in grief, the darkest of shipwrecks, awash with violent emotions, and feeling the end near, had sunk deeper and deeper into that visionary stupor that always preludes the fatal hour when it is willed and welcomed.

A physiologist could have studied in him the growing symptoms of that febrile self-absorption, known and classified by science, which is to suffering what sensual fulfillment is to pleasure. Despair, too, has its ecstasy. Marius had reached that point. He took part in everything as though he were outside it; as we said before, things happening right in front of him seemed remote; he could make out the whole, but not the details. He saw everyone’s coming and going as through a burning glare. He heard voices talking as though at the bottom of an abyss.

But one thing unsettled him. There was one part of the picture that got through to him, causing him to snap out of his stupor. All he wanted to do now was to die and he was not about to be thrown off track; but the thought occurred to him, in his heartsick sleepwalking state, that, in disappearing yourself, you were not actually prohibited from saving someone else.

He spoke up: “Enjolras and Combeferre are right!” he said. “No pointless sacrifices. I’m with them and we need to be quick about it. Combeferre has made the most important point. There are among you those who have families—mothers, sisters, wives, children. Let those men break ranks.” No one budged.

“Married men and those supporting families, out now!” repeated Marius.

His authority was great. Enjolras was well and truly the chief of the barricade, but Marius was its saviour.

“I order you!” barked Enjolras.

“I implore you,” said Marius.

So, stirred by Combeferre’s speech, shaken by Enjolras’ command, moved by Marius’s prayer, those heroic men began to denounce each other.

“That’s right,” said a young man to an older man. “You’re the father of a family. Off you go.”

“You’re the one who should go,” replied the man. “You’ve got your two sisters to feed.”

And an incredible row broke out. Those men were fighting not to be turned away from death’s door.

“Let’s get a move on,” said Courfeyrac. “In a quarter of an hour it will all be too late.”

“Citizens,” Enjolras went on, “the Republic starts here and universal suffrage3 rules. You yourselves elect who should go.”

They did as they were told. After a few minutes, five men had been unanimously elected and broke ranks.

“There are five of you!” wailed Marius.

There were only four uniforms.

“Well, then,” the five chorused, “one of us has to stay.”

And the five of them fought to stay and to find reasons why the others should not stay. The unbelievably generous squabbling began again.

“You’ve got a wife who loves you.”

“You’ve got your poor old mother.”

“You don’t have a father or a mother anymore, so what’s going to happen to your three little brothers?”

“You’re the father of five children.”

“You have the right to live, you’re only seventeen, that’s too young.”

Those great revolutionary barricades were places where heroes came together. The implausible was natural there. Those men did not amaze one another.

“Hurry up!” Courfeyrac said again.

Someone down among the men cried out to Marius: “You choose who should stay.”

“Yes,” said the five. “We’ll do whatever you say.”

Marius did not think he could feel anything anymore, any fresh emotion, and yet at the very idea of marking a man for death his blood rushed to his heart and he would have gone a white shade of pale if that were possible.

He walked over to the five men who were all beaming at him, and each man, with his eyes full of that great flame that we see at the beginnings of history in the men of Thermopylae, cried out to him: “Me! Me! Me!” And Marius, stupidly, counted them; there were still five! Then his eyes dropped to the four uniforms. In that second, a fifth uniform fell, as though from the sky, on top of the four others. The fifth man was saved.

Marius raised his eyes and recognized Monsieur Fauchelevent. Jean Valjean had just entered the barricade.

Whether through information obtained, whether through instinct or chance, he had arrived via Mondétour lane. Thanks to his National Guard uniform, he had got through easily.

The scout placed by the insurgents in the rue Mondétour had not given the alarm over a lone National Guard. He had let him enter the street, telling himself: “It’s probably a reinforcement or, at the worst, a prisoner.” The moment was too grave for the sentinel to let himself be distracted from his duty or from his observation post.

When Jean Valjean entered the redoubt, no one noticed him, all eyes being riveted on the five chosen men and the four uniforms. Jean Valjean had himself seen and understood and had silently stripped off his coat and thrown it on the pile with the others.

The emotion was indescribable.

“Who is that man?” asked Bossuet.

“A man,” replied Combeferre, “who saves others.”

Marius added in a grave voice: “I know him.”

This assurance was enough for everyone. Enjolras turned toward Jean Valjean.

“Citizen, welcome.”

And he added: “You know we are going to die.”

Jean Valjean, without answering, helped the insurgent he had saved get into his uniform.

THE VIEW FROM THE TOP OF THE BARRICADE

EVERYONE’S SITUATION, AT that fatal hour and in that inexorable place, found its ultimate expression and pinnacle in the supreme melancholy of Enjolras.

Enjolras had the fullness of the revolution inside him; yet he was incomplete, inasmuch as the absolute can be; there was too much of Saint-Just about him and not enough Anacharsis Clootz.1 Still, his mind, in the Society of the Friends of the ABC, had ended up being galvanized to some extent by the ideas of Combeferre. Little by little, for some time, he had been moving away from strict dogma and venturing into the wider fields of progress, and he had even come to accept, as a definitive and magnificent evolution, the transformation of the great Republic of France into the vast republic of humanity. As for the immediate means, given that it was a violent situation, he wanted them to be violent; in that, he had not wavered; and he was still of that epic and formidable school that can be summed up one word: ninety-three.

Enjolras was standing on the cobblestone stairs, with his elbow on the barrel of his carbine, thinking; he was shivering, as though buffeted by gusts of wind passing over him; places where death lurks produce these effects of vibrations. From his eyes, full of an inward gaze, a kind of smouldering fire streamed. All of a sudden, he raised his head, and his blond hair fell back like the hair of the angel of peace on the sombre quadriga of stars; it was like a lion’s mane startled and flaming out into a halo, and Enjolras cried out: “Citizens, do you picture the future to yourselves? The city streets flooded with lights, green branches hanging over the doorsteps, the nations like sisters, men just, old men blessing children, the past loving the present, thinkers enjoying complete liberty, believers enjoying complete equality, for religion the sky, God a priest needing no intermediary, human conscience once more an altar, no more hatred, the fraternity of workshop and school, notoriety as penalty enough and as reward, work for all; for all, the law, over all, peace, no more bloodshed, no more wars, mothers happy! To tame matter is the first step; to realize the ideal is the second. Think what progress has already done. Once upon a time the early human races looked with terror as the hydra passed before their eyes blowing over the waters, the dragon spewed fire, and the griffin, that monster of the air, flew with the wings of an eagle and the claws of a tiger; frightening beasts that were above man. But man set his snares, the sacred snares of intelligence, and he wound up catching these monsters in them.

“We have tamed the hydra, it is now called the steamer; we have tamed the dragon, it is now called the locomotive; we are on the point of taming the griffin, we already have him in our grip, it is now called the air balloon. The day this Promethean travail is finished, when man will finally have harnessed to his will the triple chimera of antiquity—hydra, dragon, griffin—he will be master of water, fire, and air and he will be for the rest of animate creation what the ancient gods once were for him. Courage, forward march! Citizens, what are we headed for? For science made government, for the force of things become the sole public force, for the law of nature having its own sanctions and penalties within itself and being promulgated by evidence, for a dawning of truth that corresponds to the dawning of day. We are headed for the union of peoples; we are headed for the unity of mankind. No more fictions; no more parasites. The real ruled by the true—that is the goal. Civilization will hold its courts on the peaks of Europe and, later, at the centre of the continents in a great parliament of intelligence. Something of the sort has already been seen. The Amphictyons2 held two sessions a year, one in Delphi, home of the gods, the other in Thermopylae, home of the heroes. Europe will have its Amphictyons; the globe will have its Amphictyons. France bears this sublime future in its loins. This is where the gestation of the nineteenth century is happening. What Greece began is worthy of being finished by France. Listen to me, you, Feuilly, valiant worker, man of the people, man of the peoples. I venerate you. Yes, you clearly see future times; yes, you are right. You had no father and no mother of your own, Feuilly; you adopted humanity as mother, and as father you adopted justice. You are going to die here—that is, to triumph. Citizens, whatever happens today, through our defeat every bit as much as through our victory, we will bring about a revolution. Just as conflagrations light up the whole city, revolutions light up the whole human race. And what revolution are we going to bring about? I just told you: the revolution of the True. From the political standpoint, there is only one principle: the sovereignty of man over himself. This sovereignty I have over myself is known as Liberty. Wherever two or more such sovereignties gather together, the State begins. But in this gathering together, there is no abdication. Each sovereignty concedes a certain portion of itself to form the common right. This portion is the same for all. The identical nature of the concession that each makes to all is known as Equality. Common right is nothing more nor less than the protection of all shining on the right of each. This protection of all over each is known as Fraternity. The point of intersection of all these aggregate sovereignties is known as Society. This intersection being a junction, the point is a node. Hence what is known as the social bond. Some say social contract; which is the same thing, the word contract being etymologically formed by the notion of a bond. Let’s understand each other in regard to equality; for if liberty is the high point, equality is the base. Equality, citizens, is not the levelling of all the vegetation, a society of tall blades of grass and short oak trees, a community of envies leaping at each other’s throats; it is, in civic terms, all aptitudes having the same opportunity; in political terms, all votes having the same weight; in religious terms, all consciences having the same right. Equality has an organ: free and compulsory education. The right to the alphabet—that’s where we have to start. Primary school imposed on everyone, secondary school offered to everyone—that’s the rule. From the school that is identical springs the equal society. Yes, education! Light! Light! Everything comes from light and everything comes down to it. Citizens, the nineteenth century is great, but the twentieth century will be happy. Then there will be nothing left of the old history; there will be no more fear, like there is today, of conquest, invasion, usurpation, rivalry between nations by force of arms, civilization interrupted by some marriage of kings, a birth in the hereditary tyrannies, the division of nations by congress, dismemberment through the downfall of some dynasty, some battle between two religions going head to head, like two billy goats in the shadows, on the bridge of the infinite; they will not have to fear any more famine, exploitation, prostitution caused by distress, misery caused by unemployment, and the scaffold, and the blade, and battles and all the armed robberies caused by chance in the forest of events. You could almost say: There will be no more events. People will be happy. The human race will live up to its law, just as the terrestrial globe lives up to its law; harmony will be reestablished between the soul and the star. The soul will gravitate around the truth, just as the star does around the light. Friends, the moment we have reached, this moment in which I am speaking to you, is a sombre moment; but this is the terrible price the future exacts. A revolution is a tollgate. Oh, the human race will be delivered, lifted up and consoled! We swear to it on this barricade. Where will the cry of love go up from if not from the height of sacrifice? O, my brothers, this is the very spot where those who think and those who suffer come together as one; this barricade is not made of cobblestones, or wooden beams, or scrap iron; it is made of two heaps, a heap of ideas and a heap of pain. Misery meets the ideal here. The day embraces the night here and says to it: I am going to die with you and you will be born again with me. From this embracing of all sorrows springs faith. Suffering brings its agony here, and ideas their immortality. This agony and this immortality are going to mingle and compose our death. Brothers, whoever dies here dies in the radiance of the future, and we will enter a grave entirely lit up by dawn.” Enjolras broke off at this point rather than stopped; his lips moved silently as though he were continuing to talk to himself, which made the men watch him closely, straining to hear him still. There was no applause, but the whispering went on for a long time afterwards. Words being breath, the rustling of minds is like the rustling of leaves.

MARIUS HAGGARD, JAVERT LACONIC

LET US TELL you what was passing through Marius’s mind.

Remember how he was feeling. Everyone was now a dream to him. His judgment was clouded. Marius, we must insist, was standing in the shadow of those great dark wings that flap open over any soul at death’s door. He felt he had both feet in the grave; it seemed to him that he was already on the other side of the great divide and he only looked on the faces of the living, now, with the eyes of a dead man.

How did Monsieur Fauchelevent get there? Why was he there? What was he there for? Marius did not ask himself any of these questions. In any case, our despair has the peculiarity of wrapping itself around others as it does us, so it seemed only logical to him that everybody had come to die.

Only, he thought of Cosette with a wrench.

On top of that, Monsieur Fauchelevent did not speak to him, did not look at him, did not even look as though he had heard when Marius piped up and said: “I know him.” As for Marius, Monsieur Fauchelevent’s attitude relieved him and, if we could use such a word for such sensations, we would have to say it gratified him. Marius had always felt that it was absolutely unthinkable for him to say anything to this enigmatic man who was, to him, both ambiguous and imposing at once. It was also a very long while since he had clapped eyes on the man, and for someone as timid and reserved as Marius, that made it even more unthinkable.

The five chosen men left the barricade via Mondétour lane; they looked exactly like National Guards. One of them walked away in tears. Before they left, they hugged those who remained.

When the five men sent back to life had gone, Enjolras went on to the man condemned to death. He walked into the downstairs room. Javert was musing as he stood, tied to the post.

“Is there anything you need?” Enjolras asked him.

Javert merely answered: “When are you going to kill me?”

“You’ll just have to wait. We need all the cartridges we’ve got right now.”

“Then, give me a drink,” said Javert.

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

“Is that all?” Enjolras went on.

“I’m not too comfortable at this post,” replied Javert. “It wasn’t very nice of you to make me spend the night here. Tie me up however you like, but you could lay me down on a table, like that other man.” And with a toss of the head he indicated the corpse of Monsieur Mabeuf.

There was, you will recall, a great long table at the back of the room on which they had cast bullets and made cartridges. All the cartridges having been made and all the powder having been used, this table was now free.

On Enjolras’ orders, four insurgents untied Javert from the post. While he was being untied, a fifth man held a bayonet to his chest. His hands were left tied behind his back, a thin but strong whipcord was wound around his feet that allowed him to take small steps of about fifteen inches, like those of a man mounting the scaffold, and he was walked to the end of the room, where he was laid out and tightly bound around his waist.

For greater security, they added the sort of trussing known in jail as a martingale, or goat-tying, to the systems of ligatures that already made any escape impossible. In goat-tying, a rope is tied around the neck before being pulled tight down to the waist, where it is split in two, passing between the legs before coming up and joining the hands again behind the back.

While Javert was being tied up in this fashion, a man on the doorstep was eyeing him with intense attention. The shadow that the man cast made Javert turn his head. He looked up and recognized Jean Valjean. He did not even flinch. He proudly lowered his eyelids and merely said: “Only to be expected.” THE SITUATION GETS WORSE

IT WAS GETTING light fast. But not a window was opened, not a door stood ajar; it was sunrise, but no one was rising. As you know, the end of the rue de la Chanvrerie opposite the barricade had been evacuated by the troops; it seemed free and lay open to passersby with an air of sinister tranquillity. The rue Saint-Denis was as mute as the avenue of the Sphinxes in Thebes.1 There wasn’t a living soul at the junction, which was turning white in reflected sunlight. Nothing is as gloomy as bright sunshine in deserted streets.

They couldn’t see anything, but they could hear all right. Some mysterious movement was taking place a certain distance away. It was clear that the critical moment was coming. As they had done the night before, the scouts fell back; only, this time, all of them did so.

The barricade was stronger than for the first attack. Since the five had left, it had been raised even higher.

On the advice of the scout who had been keeping an eye on Les Halles, Enjolras, fearing a surprise attack from the rear, took a serious step. He had them barricade the narrow little Mondétour laneway, which had remained open till then. They pulled up the cobblestones the length of a few more houses for the purpose. The barricade, now walled in on three streets, in front on the rue de la Chanvrerie, to the left on the rue du Cygne and the rue de la Petite-Truanderie, to the right on the rue Mondétour, really was now almost impregnable; it is true that they were fatally hemmed in. It had three fronts, but no longer an exit.

“A fortress—and a mousetrap,” Courfeyrac quipped, laughing.

Enjolras got them to pile up about thirty paving stones, “ripped up for spares,” said Bossuet, next to the cabaret door.

The silence was now so profound on the side where the attack would surely come that Enjolras got everyone to take up their positions once more.

A ration of eau-de-vie was distributed all round.

Nothing is weirder than a barricade gearing up for an assault. Each man chooses his place as though at the theatre to see a show. There is a lot of leaning, leaning across, leaning on, leaning shoulder to shoulder. There are those who make stalls out of paving stones. Over there, a bit of wall is in the way, they move away from it; here is a niche that can offer protection, they take cover inside it. The left-handed are precious; they take positions unsuitable for everyone else. Many arrange themselves to fight sitting down. They want to be at ease for killing and comfortable for dying. In the dismal war of June 1848, one insurgent, an awe-inspiring shot who was fighting from the top of a roof garden, had himself brought a Voltaire armchair2 up there; a blast of grapeshot found him seated in it.

As soon as the chief orders everyone to man their stations, all chaotic movement ceases; no more skirmishing with one another; no more nattering huddles; no more private conversations; no more standing aloof; whatever is in everyone’s minds converges and turns into waiting for the assailant. A barricade before danger erupts is chaos; in danger, discipline. Peril produces order.

As soon as Enjolras had taken up his double-barrelled carbine and positioned himself at a sort of battlement he had reserved for himself, everyone shut up. Little dry crackling noises sounded all along the cobblestone wall. It was the sound of muskets being cocked.

But otherwise the insurgents’ bearing was prouder and more confident than ever; the extravagance of self-sacrifice is galvanizing; they no longer had any hope, but they had despair. Despair is a last weapon that sometimes brings victory; Virgil said so. Supreme resources emerge from extreme resolves. Hurtling headlong into death is sometimes the only way to escape going down with the ship; the coffin lid can become a lifeline.

Just like the night before, everyone’s attention was directed at, we might almost say drawn to, the end of the street, now visible in the light.

The wait was not long. Things started stirring again distinctly over by Saint-Leu but it was not like the movement involved in the first attack. A rattling of chains, the disquieting juddering of some great mass, a clanking of brass bouncing over cobblestones, a sort of solemn din, announced that some sinister scrap heap was approaching. There was a shudder in the bowels of those peaceful streets, cut out and built as they are for the fruitful circulation of interests and ideas, not made for the monstrous rumble of war.

The fixed stare all the combatants had pinned on the end of the street turned savage. A piece of cannon appeared.

Gunners were pushing the piece; the gun tube had been moved forward on the gun carriage and was now in position, ready to fire; two gunners supported the gun carriage, four were at the wheels; others followed with the caisson. You could see the lit fuse smoking.

“Fire!” cried Enjolras.

The whole barricade fired, the detonation was frightening; an avalanche of smoke covered and obliterated the gun and the men; after a few seconds, the cloud dispersed and the cannon and the men reappeared; the gun operators managed—slowly, correctly, and without haste—to roll the gun into place facing the barricade head on. Not one had been hit. Then the gun captain, pressing down on the breech ring to elevate the range of the barrel, started to point the cannon with the gravity of an astronomer training a telescope.

“Bravo, cannoneers!” shouted Bossuet.

And the whole barricade clapped. A moment later, squarely emplaced smack bang in the middle of the street, straddling the gutter, the gun was en batterie ready for action. A formidable maw was now open on the barricade.

“All right, look alive!” said Courfeyrac. “There’s the brute. The light tap is about to become a punch in the face. The army is reaching its great paw out to us. The barricade is about to be seriously rocked. The fusillade puts out feelers, the cannonade clobbers.” “It’s an eight-pounder, new model, bronze,” added Combeferre. “With guns like this one, all you have to do is exceed the ratio of ten parts tin to a hundred copper, even by a fraction, and they are liable to burst. Too much tin in cast guns makes them oversensitive. So they sometimes have hollows and chambers in the bore. To obviate the danger and be able to force out the load, we might well have to go back to the fourteenth-century process of hooping, and strengthen the cylinder from the outside with a series of unsoldered steel rings, from the breech down to the trunnions. Meanwhile, you do what you can to alleviate the defect; you can even identify where the holes and hollows in the bore of a gun tube are by using calipers. But there’s a better way and that’s Gribeauval’s ‘movable star.’” “In the sixteenth century,” observed Bossuet, “they rifled grooves in their gun tubes.”

“Yes,” replied Combeferre, “rifling increases the ballistic momentum, but decreases the accuracy of the aim. On top of that, at close range, the trajectory isn’t level enough, the parabolic curve is accentuated, the path of the projectile is not straight enough to be able to hit any intermediary objects, though that is essential in combat, and its importance only increases with the proximity of the enemy and the firing speed. The lack of tension in the curve of the projectile used in the sixteenth-century rifled cannon was due to the weakness of the charge; weak charges, for this kind of engine of siege warfare, are imposed by the necessities of ballistics, such as, for instance, preserving the gun carriages. To sum up, that despot, the cannon, can’t do all it would like to; strength is a great weakness. A cannonball does only six hundred leagues an hour; light does seventy thousand leagues a second. That is the superiority of Jesus Christ over Napoléon.” “Reload arms!” said Enjolras. How would the shell of the barricade behave under cannon fire? Would the charge breach it? That was the question. While the insurgents were reloading their fusils, the gunners were loading the cannon.

There was intense anxiety in the redoubt. The charge was fired, the detonation exploded.

“Present!” cried a jubilant voice.

And at the same time as the cannonball struck the barricade, Gavroche tumbled inside. He had come via the rue du Cygne and had nimbly hurdled the auxiliary barricade that fronted the maze of the Petite-Truanderie.

Gavroche had a greater impact on the barricade than the cannonball.

The ball lost itself in the jumble of debris. The very most it did was smash one of the wheels of the bus and polish off the old Anceau cart. Seeing which, the barricade started to laugh.

“Get on with it!” Bossuet shouted to the gunners.

THE GUNNERS GET THEMSELVES TAKEN SERIOUSLY

EVERYONE MILLED AROUND Gavroche. But he didn’t have time to relate anything. Marius, shuddering, took him aside.

“What are you doing here?”

“Hang on!” said the boy. “What about you?”

And he looked Marius in the eye with epic effrontery. His eyes grew bigger and shone with the light of the pride he felt inside. It was in a harsh tone that Marius continued: “Who told you to come back? Did you at least take my letter to the right address?” Gavroche was not entirely without remorse on the letter score. In his haste to get back to the barricade, he had palmed it off instead of delivering it. He was forced to admit to himself that he had entrusted it a tad rashly to that stranger whose face he couldn’t even see properly. It is true that the man was bareheaded, but that was not enough. In a word, he gave himself a bit of a talking to and he was afraid of what Marius would say. To avoid trouble, he took the easy way out: He lied abominably.

“Citizen, I gave the letter to the porter. The lady was sleeping. She’ll get the letter when she wakes up.” Marius had two aims in sending the letter: to say farewell to Cosette and to save Gavroche. He would have to be content with half of what he wanted.

The sending of his letter and the presence of Monsieur Fauchelevent in the barricade suddenly struck him as quite a coincidence. He pointed Monsieur Fauchelevent out to Gavroche.

“Do you know that man?”

“No,” said Gavroche.

Gavroche had, in fact, only seen Jean Valjean at night, as we know.

The morbid and unhealthy suspicions that had begun to take shape in Marius’s mind evaporated. Did he have any idea what Monsieur Fauchelevent’s political views were? Perhaps Monsieur Fauchelevent was a republican. Hence his perfectly natural presence in the fight.

Meanwhile Gavroche was already at the other end of the barricade shouting: “My gun!” Courfeyrac made them hand it over to him.

Gavroche warned “the comrades,” as he called them, that the barricade was surrounded. He had had great difficulty getting through. A battalion of the line whose stacks of arms were in the Petite-Truanderie was watching the rue du Cygne side; on the opposite side, the Municipal Guard occupied the rue des Prêcheurs. Directly facing them they had the bulk of the army.

This information delivered, Gavroche added: “I authorize you to tan their hides.”

Meanwhile Enjolras stuck to his battlement, ears pricked, eyes peeled.

The assailants, no doubt a trifle unhappy with their cannonball shot, had not repeated it.

A company of infantry of the line had come to take up the end of the street behind the gun. The soldiers were ripping up the roadway and building a little low wall with the paving stones, a kind of retaining wall, a sort of breastwork hardly more than eighteen inches high, facing the barricade. At the corner to the left of this breastwork, you could see the head of the column of a suburban battalion massed in the rue Saint-Denis.

Enjolras at his lookout thought he could make out the particular noise made when canisters of case shot are being taken out of caissons, and he saw the gun captain change the aim and swing the mouth of the cannon slightly to the left. Then the cannoneers began to load the gun. The gun captain himself grabbed the slow match and brought it to the touchhole.

“Heads down, get back to the wall!” cried Enjolras. “All of you on your knees, all the way along the barricade!” The insurgents had quit their posts when Gavroche turned up and they were scattered outside the tavern; they now ran helter-skelter toward the barricade, but before Enjolras’ order could be executed, the gun was fired with the frightening rattle of a volley of shot. Which is exactly what it was.

The charge had been directed at the opening in the redoubt, had ricocheted off the wall there and killed two men and wounded three others. If this continued the barricade was no longer tenable. It was not grapeshot-proof. There was a rumble of dismay.

“Let’s at least see that doesn’t happen twice,” said Enjolras.

And, lowering his carbine, he aimed at the gunner captain who, at that moment, was bent over the breech of the cannon, adjusting and finally setting the aim.

The gunner captain was a handsome gunnery sergeant, incredibly young, sandy-haired, with a really sweet face and an intelligent look appropriate to that fearsome predestined weapon that, in its very perfection of horror, must surely wind up killing off war.

Combeferre, standing next to Enjolras, studied the young man.

“What a shame!” said Combeferre. “What a hideous thing all this butchery is! Anyway, when there are no more kings, there will be no more war. Enjolras, you’re aiming at that sergeant, but you aren’t looking at him. You can see for yourself, he’s a dashing young man, he is fearless, you can see he’s a thinker, these young artillerymen are extremely well educated; he has a father, a mother, a family, he’s probably in love, he can’t be any more than twenty-five years old; he could be your brother.” “He is,” said Enjolras.

“Yes,” Combeferre went on, “and mine, too. So, then, let’s not kill him.”

“Leave me alone. We do what we have to.”

And a tear rolled slowly down Enjolras’ marble cheek.

At the same time, he squeezed the trigger of his carbine. The flash shot out. The artilleryman spun round a couple of times, his arms stretched out in front of him and his head raised as though to gulp in air, then he tipped over sideways on the gun and remained motionless. They could see his back, and the stream of blood gushing from a hole in the middle of it. The bullet had passed clean through his chest. He was dead.

He had to be carted away and replaced. This did actually buy them a few extra minutes.

PUTTING THAT OLD POACHER’S SKILL TO USE ALONG WITH THE INFALLIBLE SHOT THAT INFLUENCED THE 1796 CONVICTION OPINIONS FLEW PAST each other through the barricade. The gun was about to be fired again. They could not hold out for a quarter of an hour in that grapeshot. It was absolutely necessary to absorb the shock of the fire. Enjolras launched this command: “We have to get a mattress over there.” “We don’t have a spare,” said Combeferre. “The wounded have taken them.”

Jean Valjean, sitting apart on a curbstone at the corner of the tavern, his musket between his knees, had not taken part in anything that had happened up to that moment. He seemed not to hear the combatants saying around him: “There’s one gun doing nothing.” At the order given by Enjolras, he got to his feet.

You will recall that when they had rallied in the rue de la Chanvrerie, an old woman, foreseeing bullets, had stuck her mattress in front of her window. This window, a garret window, was in the roof of a six-storey house located a bit farther along from the barricade. The mattress, placed sideways and resting at the bottom on two clothes poles, was held at the top by two ropes which, from a distance, looked to be two lines tied to nails driven into the window frame of the dormer. These two ropes could clearly be seen against the sky like hairs.

“Can anyone lend me a double-barrelled carbine?” said Jean Valjean.

Enjolras, who had just reloaded his, handed it to him. Jean Valjean aimed at the dormer and fired. One of the two mattress ropes was cut. The mattress now hung only by a thread. Jean Valjean fired the second shot. The second rope whipped the dormer window. The mattress slid down between the two clothes poles and fell to the street. The barricade applauded. Every voice shouted: “There’s your mattress.” “Yes,” said Combeferre, “but who’s going to go and get it?”

The mattress had in fact fallen outside the barricade between the besieged and the besiegers. Now, the death of the gunner sergeant had stirred up the troops and the soldiers had, for some moments, been lying flat on their stomachs behind the line of paving stones they had put up, and to make up for the enforced silence of the gun that sat quietly waiting while its servicing was reorganized, they had opened fire on the barricade. The insurgents did not return fire, in order to save their ammunition. The fusillade broke against the barricade; but the street, which it filled with bullets, was horrifyingly dangerous.

Jean Valjean ducked out through the opening, stepped into the street, dashed through the hail of bullets, raced to the mattress, grabbed it, loaded it onto his back, and returned to the barricade. He himself placed the mattress in the opening, wedging it against the wall in such a way that the artillerymen could not see it.

That done, they awaited the volley of grapeshot. It was not long coming.

The cannon spewed out its bundle of buckshot with a roar. But this time there was no ricochet. The shot aborted on the mattress. The desired effect was obtained. The barricade was maintained.

“Citizen,” said Enjolras to Jean Valjean, “the Republic thanks you.”

Bossuet marvelled, laughing. He yelled: “How immoral for a mattress to have so much power. It’s the triumph of what yields over what mows down. But, never mind: Glory be to the mattress that cancels out a cannon!” DAYBREAK

AT THAT VERY moment, Cosette woke up.

Her room was small, clean, understated, with a long window facing east over the rear courtyard of the house.

Cosette had no idea what was happening in Paris. She had not been there the day before and had already gone back up to her room when Toussaint had said: “It looks like there’s a bit of a row on.” Cosette had not slept long but she had slept well. She had had sweet dreams which might have had something to do with the fact that her little bed was extremely white. Someone who was Marius had appeared to her in the light. She woke with the sun in her eyes and at first this felt like a continuation of the dream.

Her first thoughts as she came out of the dream were happy. She felt completely reassured. Just like Jean Valjean a few hours before, she was going through that spirited reaction that involves absolute rejection of unhappiness. She began to hope with all her might, without knowing why. Then she felt a pang. It was now three days since she had seen Marius. But she told herself he must have received her letter by now, he knew where she was, and that he was so clever, he would find a way of getting to her. And this would happen today at the latest, and perhaps that very morning. It was already broad daylight, but as the sun’s rays were perfectly horizontal she thought it was still early, but that she should get up anyway—to welcome Marius.

She felt that she could not live without Marius and that, consequently, this was all that was needed and that Marius would come. No objection was admissible. All this was certain. It was already monstrous enough to have suffered for three days. No Marius for three days—that was horrible of the good Lord. But now that she had survived the ordeal, which was obviously His idea of a joke, Marius would turn up and would bring good news. That’s what it is to be young; the young quickly dry their eyes; they find pain pointless and simply don’t put up with it. Youth is the smile of the future, faced with a stranger which is itself. It is natural for it to be happy. It is as though it hopes as it breathes.

Besides, Cosette could not quite remember what Marius had told her about being away, which was supposed to be only for a day, and what explanation he had given her. Everyone has noticed how swiftly a coin you drop on the ground rolls away and hides and how cleverly it makes itself unfindable. There are thoughts that play the same trick on us; they curl up in a corner of our brains and that’s that; they are lost; impossible to set memory on them again. Cosette was a bit cross with the feeble useless effort her memory was making. She told herself it was very naughty of her and perfectly reprehensible to have forgotten words uttered by Marius.

She got out of bed and performed those two ablutions of the soul and of the body: her prayers and her toilette.

It is all right, at a pinch, to take the reader into a bridal chamber, but not into a virgin’s bedroom. Poetry would hardly dare, prose should not.

It is the inside of a flower not yet opened, it is a whiteness glowing in the shade, it is the intimate cell of a closed lily, which should remain unseen by any man as long as it has not yet been seen by the sun. A budding woman is sacred. This innocent bed that throws off its bedclothes, this adorable semi-nudity that is frightened of itself, this white foot that takes refuge in a slipper, this bosom that veils itself in front of a mirror as though the mirror had eyes, this chemise that rushes back up to hide a shoulder whenever a piece of furniture creaks or a carriage goes by, these ribbons tied, these hooks and eyes fastened, these laces pulled tight, these starts and jumps, these little frissons of cold and modesty, this exquisite alarm at every movement, this very nearly flapping anxiety where there is nothing to fear, layers of clothing as lovely as clouds at dawn—it is not right or proper that all this be recounted; it is already too much to refer to it.

Man’s eye should be even more worshipful before the rising of a young girl than before the rising of a star. The possibility of reaching out and touching should only increase respect. The down on a peach, the frost on a plum, the radiate crystal of a snowflake, a butterfly’s wing powdered with feathers, are coarse things beside this chastity that does not even know it is chaste. A young girl is merely a glimmer of a dream that has not yet turned into a statue. Her alcove is hidden in the dark part of the ideal. The indiscreet touch of a gaze roughs up this dim half-light. Here, to contemplate is to profane.

And so we will show nothing of the exquisite intimate fuss involved in Cosette’s awakening.

An eastern tale has it that the rose was made white by God, but that when Adam looked at it as it was beginning to open, it was ashamed and went pink. We are among those who feel tongue-tied before young girls and flowers, finding both sacred.

Cosette got dressed pretty fast, combed and did her hair, which was a very simple business in those days when women did not puff up their curls and their coils with little cushions and tiny rolls or stick crinolines in their hair. Then she opened the window and ran her eyes all around, hoping to be able to turn up something of the street, a corner of a house, a patch of pavement, and be able to watch for Marius there. But you could not see anything of the outside. The rear courtyard was wrapped around by fairly high walls with only a few gardens beyond them for a vista. Cosette declared those gardens hideous; for the first time in her life, she found flowers ugly. The tiniest strip of gutter at the crossroads would have been more to her liking. She decided to look at the sky instead, as though she thought Marius could just as easily come that way.

Suddenly, she dissolved in tears. Not out of moodiness, but because her hopes were dashed by dejection over her current situation. She vaguely felt some nameless horror looming. These things are, indeed, in the air. She told herself she was not sure of anything, that losing sight of each other was the same as losing each other; and the idea that Marius could very well come back to her from out of the sky no longer seemed lovely, but sinister, to her.

Then, as is the way with such black clouds, calm returned, and hope, and a sort of unconscious smile expressing trust in God.

The rest of the household was still in bed. A provincial silence reigned. Not a shutter was pushed open. The porter’s lodge was shut. Toussaint was not up yet, and Cosette quite naturally thought that her father was still sleeping. She must indeed have suffered a lot and she must be suffering a lot still, for she told herself her father had been rotten; but she counted on Marius. For such a light to go out was, of course, impossible. At times she heard what sounded like dull tremors some distance away and she said to herself: “It’s funny they’re opening and shutting the portes cochères so early in the morning.” This was the cannon fire battering the barricade.

A few feet below Cosette’s window, in the old blackened cornice of the wall, there was a nest of swifts; the overhang of the nest jutted out a bit from the cornice, so that from above you could see inside this little paradise. The mother bird was there, fanning her wings over her brood; the father flapped around, then went off and came back, bringing food in his beak and kisses. The rising sun turned to gold this happy thing; the great law, Go and multiply, was there, smiling and serene, and the whole sweet mystery blossomed in the glory of the morning. Cosette, her hair in the sun, her soul in fantasyland, lit up inside by love and outside by the dawn, leaned over sort of automatically and, almost without daring to admit she was thinking of Marius at the same time, settled in to watching the birds, this family, this male and this female, this mother and these babies, in the deep turmoil a nest throws a virgin into.

THE GUNSHOT THAT MISSES NOTHING BUT KILLS NO ONE

THE ASSAILANTS’ FIRE continued. Musketry alternated with grapeshot, without actually doing too much damage, if the truth be known. Only the top of the façade of Corinthe suffered; the crossbar on the upper-storey casement and the attics in the roof, riddled with buckshot and biscayens, slowly warped. The combatants who had posted themselves up there had to leap out of the way. In any case, this is a tactic of barricade attack: keep firing away for a long time in order to exhaust the insurgents’ ammunition if they make the mistake of returning fire. When you see, by the slowing down in their firing rate, that they are running out of balls and powder, that is when you storm in. Enjolras had not fallen into the trap; the barricade did not retaliate.

At each volley, Gavroche stuck his tongue in his cheek, a sign of utmost contempt.

“That’s it,” he said, “rip up the canvas, we need lint.”

Courfeyrac scoffed at the grapeshot for its ineffectiveness and said to the cannon: “You’re losing your touch, old boy.” There is as much intrigue in battle as at a ball. The silence of the redoubt was probably beginning to worry the besiegers, causing them to fear some unexpected development, and they were probably feeling the need to see clearly through that heap of cobblestones and to know what was going on behind that impassable wall that took fire without returning it. The insurgents suddenly saw a helmet shining in the sun on top of a neighbouring roof. A sapper was backed up against a tall chimney stack and he looked to be there as a sentinel. He could see straight down into the barricade.

“Now there’s an overseer we could do without,” said Enjolras.

Jean Valjean had given Enjolras his carbine back, but he still had his musket.

Without saying a word, he aimed at the sapper, and a second later, the helmet, struck by a bullet, fell clattering to the street. The startled soldier scuttled out of sight fast.

A second observer took his place. This one was an officer. Jean Valjean, who had reloaded his gun, aimed at the newcomer and sent the officer’s helmet flying off to join the soldier’s. This time the warning was understood. Nobody appeared on the roof again and they gave up spying on the barricade.

“Why didn’t you kill the man?” Bossuet asked Jean Valjean.

Jean Valjean did not answer.

DISORDER, A SUPPORTER OF ORDER

BOSSUET MURMURED IN Combeferre’s ear:

“He didn’t answer my question.”

“He’s a man who does good with bullets,” said Combeferre.

Those who have retained any memory of that already remote time know that the National Guards from the suburbs always came down hard on insurrections. They were particularly fierce and fearless in those days of June 1832. Many a good cabaret owner from Pantin or Les Vertus or La Cunette, whose “establishment” had been put out of action by the riot, took sides and fought like lions when they saw their dance floor deserted and got themselves killed to save the order represented by the open-air dive. In those days, at once bourgeois and heroic, faced with ideas that had their knights, commercial interests had their knights-errant. The prosaic nature of the motive did not detract in any way from the bravery of the move. The fall in value of a pile of écus had bankers singing the “Marseillaise.” Blood was lyrically shed for the good of the cash register; and the shop, that vast diminutive of the homeland, was defended with Spartan gusto.

At bottom, we hasten to say, there was nothing funny about any of this. It was deadly serious. The different social elements had entered into battle, in anticipation of the day when they would enter into balance.

Another sign of the times was the way anarchy got mixed up in governmentalism (the barbarous name then given to the party of correctness). People were for order with insubordination. The drums would suddenly beat out capricious rappels at the command of some colonel or other of the National Guard; many a captain would suddenly open fire, just like that, acting on a hunch; many a National Guard fought “for the heck of it”—and for reasons best known to themselves. In critical moments, on the “big days,” people did not so much listen to leaders as to their own instincts. In the army of order there were veritable guerrillas, some brandishing the sword like Fannicot; others the pen, like Henri Fonfrède.1 Civilization, sadly represented at the time more by a conglomeration of vested interests than by any set of principles, was, or believed itself to be, in peril; it raised the cry of alarm; each and every man decided he was central to it and defended it, rushed to its aid and protected it, however he saw fit; and every man and his dog took it upon himself to save society.

The zeal sometimes went as far as extermination. Many a platoon of National Guards set themselves up, on their own private authority, as a court-martial and would then try and execute in five minutes any insurgent taken prisoner. It was a kangaroo court of the kind that had killed Jean Prouvaire. This ferocious lynch law2 is not something any party has the right to reproach others with, for it is applied by the republic in America just as much as by the monarchy in Europe. Lynch law led to terrible blunders. On one day of rioting, a young poet named Paul-Aimé Garnier3 was actually pursued through the place Royale with a bayonet at his backside and escaped only by taking refuge under the porte cochère of no. 6. They shouted: “There goes another one of those Saint-Simonians!” And they would have killed him. He happened to be carrying a volume of the duc de Saint-Simon’s memoirs under his arm. A National Guard had read the word Saint-Simon on the cover and had cried: Kill him!

On June 6, 1832, a suburban company of National Guards, commanded by the same Captain Fannicot referred to above, got themselves decimated in the rue de la Chanvrerie—on a whim and for the thrill of it. This incident, singular as it was, was recorded by the judicial investigation opened in the aftermath of the insurrection of 1832. Captain Fannicot, a bold and impatient bourgeois, a sort of condottiere4 of order, a fanatical and rebellious governmentalist of the kind described above, could not resist the impulse to open fire before it was time in his overweening ambition to take the barricade all on his own, that is, with his company. Exasperated by the appearance of the red flag, followed by the old black coat, which he took for the black flag, he blamed out loud the generals and corps leaders, who were holding council and did not consider that the decisive moment of the assault had arrived and thereby let “the insurrection stew in its own juice,” as the famous expression of one of them went. As for himself, he thought the barricade was ripe for the taking, and since what is ripe must fall, he decided to have a go.

He commanded men as resolute as he was—enragés, fanatics, in the word of one witness. His company, the very one that had shot down the poet Jean Prouvaire, was the first of the battalion posted at the corner of the street. The moment they were least expecting it, the captain launched his men against the barricade. This movement, executed with more goodwill than strategy, cost the Fannicot company dearly. Before they had got two thirds of the way down the street, they were greeted by a general discharge from the barricade. Four men, the most daring, who had run ahead, were struck down point-blank at the very foot of the redoubt, and this courageous throng of National Guards, all very brave men but with no military stamina, had to fall back after some hesitation, leaving fifteen corpses behind them on the pavement. That moment of hesitation gave the insurgents the time to reload their weapons and a second discharge, most murderous, hit the company before they could regain the corner of the street, their cover. At one point they were caught between two volleys of shot and copped the volley from the field gun en batterie which, the gunners not having any orders, had kept firing without interruption. The intrepid and imprudent Fannicot was one of those who died in this hail of grapeshot. He was killed by the cannon, that is, by order.

This attack, which was more furious than serious, angered Enjolras.

“The idiots!” he said. “They’re getting their men killed and using up our ammunition for nothing!”

Enjolras spoke like the true riot general he was. Insurrection and its repression do not fight on equal terms. Insurrection, promptly exhaustible, has only a limited number of shots to fire and only a limited number of combatants to lose. An emptied cartridge pouch, a man down, can’t be replaced. Repression, having the army, does not count men and, having Vincennes,5 does not count shots. Repression has as many regiments as the barricade has men and as many arsenals as the barricade has cartridge boxes. And so they are struggles of one against one hundred, which always end in the crushing of the barricades; unless revolution, suddenly rearing up, comes and throws its flaming archangel’s blade into the balance. This does happen. Then there is a general uprising, the streets start to boil over, popular redoubts proliferate, all Paris ripples with an intense thrill, the quid divinum6 is unleashed, an August 10 is in the air, a July 297 is in the air, a wondrous light appears, the yawning maw of force backs away and the army, that lion, sees in front of it, steady on its feet and tranquil, that prophet, France.

PASSING GLIMMERS

IN THE CHAOS of feelings and passions that go into defending a barricade, there is a bit of everything; there is bravery, youth, honour, enthusiasm, idealism, conviction, the relentlessness of the gambler, and, especially, flashes of hope.

One of these flashes, one of these faint stirrings of hope, suddenly ran through the barricade of the rue de la Chanvrerie, at the most unexpected moment.

“Listen,” Enjolras, still on the watch, suddenly cried, “it seems to me that Paris is waking up.”

It is undeniable that for an hour or two on the morning of June 6, the insurrection experienced a certain upswing. The obstinacy of the Saint-Merry tocsin rekindled a few vague urges. In the rue du Poirier and the rue des Gravilliers, barricades got under way. In front of the porte Saint-Martin a young man armed with a carbine attacked a cavalry squadron single-handedly. Out in the open, in the middle of the boulevard, he went down on one knee, raised his weapon to his shoulder, fired, killed the captain of the squadron, and turned on his heel, quipping: “There’s another one who won’t do us any more harm.” He was promptly run through with a sabre. In the rue Saint-Denis, a woman fired on the Municipal Guard from behind a lowered venetian blind. At each shot you could see the slats of the blind quivering. A fourteen-year-old boy was stopped in the rue de la Cossonnerie with his pockets full of cartridges. Several posts were attacked. At the entrance to the rue Bertin-Poirée, an extremely lively and completely unpredictable fusillade greeted a regiment of cuirassiers at the head of which marched General Cavaignac de Baragne.1 In the rue Planche-Mibray, they hurled shards of old crockery and household utensils at the troops from the rooftops. This was a bad sign and when the incident was reported to Maréchal Soult, Napoléon’s old lieutenant became dreamy, remembering Suchet’s Saragossa dictum:2 “We’re finished when the old women empty their chamber pots on our heads.” These general symptoms, presenting just when the riot was thought to be contained, this outbreak of angry fever, gaining the upper hand again, these sparks, flying around here and there above the dense masses of combustible material known as the faubourgs of Paris—all this taken together worried the top brass. They rushed to put out the fire before it spread. They delayed the attack on the Maubuée, la Chanvrerie, and Saint-Merry barricades until the crackling flames could be put out, so as to have nothing else to tackle but those three, and to be able to finish them in one go. Columns were sent out into the fermenting streets, sweeping the main ones, sounding out the small ones, right and left, sometimes slowly and cautiously, other times charging along. The troops broke down the doors of houses from which there had been firing. At the same time cavalry manoeuvres dispersed the throngs on the boulevards. This repression was not accomplished without noise, without that tumultuous racket peculiar to clashes between the army and the people. This was exactly what Enjolras had picked up, in the intervals between the cannonade and the musketry. On top of that, he had seen wounded men going past the end of the street on stretchers and he said to Courfeyrac: “Those wounded men aren’t ours.” Hope did not last long; the glimmer quickly dimmed. In less than half an hour, what was in the air had evaporated, it was like lightning without the thunder, and the insurgents again felt crushed by that sort of lead weight that the indifference of the people drops on deserted die-hards.

The general movement that seemed to have been vaguely taking off had aborted; and the attention of the minister of war and the strategy of the generals could now focus on the three or four barricades still standing.

The sun rose on the horizon.

An insurgent called out to Enjolras: “We’re hungry here. Are we really going to die like this without eating?” Enjolras, still leaning on his battlement and without taking his eyes off the end of the street, nodded his head in the affirmative.

IN WHICH YOU WILL READ THE NAME OF ENJOLRAS’ MISTRESS

COURFEYRAC, SITTING ON a paving stone next to Enjolras, continued to abuse the cannon, and every time that gloomy cloud of projectiles known as grapeshot passed with its monstrous noise, he greeted it with an outburst of irony.

“You’re wearing your lungs out, you poor old brute, you worry me, you’re wasting your breath. That’s not thunder. That’s a cough.” And those around him chuckled.

Courfeyrac and Bossuet, whose valiant good humour grew with the danger, swapped jokes instead of food, like Madame Scarron,1 and, since wine was lacking, poured good cheer all round.

“I have to hand it to Enjolras,” said Bossuet. “His imperturbable temerity stuns me. He lives alone, which makes him, perhaps, a little sad. Enjolras moans about the greatness that keeps him single. The rest of us all more or less have mistresses that drive us mad, in other words, make us brave. When you’re as lovesick as a tiger, the least you can do is fight like a lion. It’s a way of getting our own back for the tricks our little grisettes play on us. Roland gets himself killed to rile Angélique.2 All our acts of heroism derive from our women. A man without a woman is like a pistol without a hammer; it’s women that get men fired up. But, well, Enjolras doesn’t have a woman. He’s not lovesick, yet he still finds a way to be intrepid. It’s unheard of—that you can be as cold as ice and as bold as fire.” Enjolras did not look as though he was listening but if anyone had been close to him, they would have heard him mutter in an undertone: Patria.

Bossuet was still laughing when Courfeyrac cried out: “Here’s something new!”

And, putting on the voice of a court crier, he added: “I’m known as Eight-Pounder.”

Indeed, a new character had just entered the stage. It was a second piece of ordnance. The gunners rapidly manoeuvered this second piece into position en batterie next to the first. This was the beginning of the end.

A few moments later the two guns, swiftly served, fired straight at the redoubt; the fire of the platoon of the line and of the suburbs supported the artillery.

Another cannonade could be heard some distance away. At the same time as the two guns were relentlessly battering the redoubt in the rue de la Chanvrerie, two other pieces of ordnance, one positioned on the rue Saint-Denis, the other on the rue Aubry-le-Boucher, were peppering the barricade Saint-Merry. The four cannons echoed each other dolefully.

The barking of those dour dogs of war was like calling and answering.

One of the two guns now battering the barricade in the rue de la Chanvrerie was firing grapeshot and the other cannonballs.

The gun firing cannonballs was pointed a little high and the angle of fire was calculated so that the cannonball struck the rim of the upper ridge of the barricade, flattened it, and scattered the shattered cobblestones over the insurgents in bursts of shot.

This process was meant to drive the combatants off the top of the redoubt and force them to huddle together inside it; in other words, it heralded the main assault.

Once the combatants were driven from the top of the barricade by the cannonballs and from the windows of the tavern by the grapeshot, the attacking columns could risk entering the street without being targeted, perhaps even without being seen, swiftly scale the redoubt, as they had done the night before, and, who knows? perhaps take it by surprise.

“We absolutely must do something about those guns,” said Enjolras, and he shouted, “Open fire on the gunners!” Everyone was ready. The barricade, which had remained silent for so long, opened fire wildly, seven or eight discharges followed each other in a fit of rage and jubilation, the street filled with blinding smoke and, after a few minutes, through this fog all streaked with flames, two thirds of the gunners could vaguely be made out lying under the wheels of the guns. Those who had remained standing continued to serve the guns with rigid composure; but the firing had slackened its pace.

“This is working well,” said Bossuet to Enjolras. “Success.”

Enjolras shook his head and replied: “Another fifteen minutes of such success and there won’t be ten cartridges left in the barricade.” It would seem that Gavroche heard this remark.

GAVROCHE OUTSIDE

COURFEYRAC SUDDENLY SAW someone at the foot of the barricade, outside, in the street, under the rain of cannonballs.

Gavroche had taken a bottle carrier from the tavern, had gone out through the exit, and was busy quietly emptying into his carrier the full cartridge pouches of the National Guards who had been killed on the talus of the redoubt.

“What are you doing out there?” said Courfeyrac.

Gavroche stuck his nose up.

“Citizen, I’m filling my carrier.”

“Can’t you see the grapeshot?”

Gavroche replied: “So, it’s raining. What of it?”

Courfeyrac yelled: “Get back!”

“Presently,” said Gavroche.

And he bounded into the street.

You will recall that, in falling back, the Fannicot company had left behind them a trail of corpses. Some twenty dead lay strewn about here and there over the pavement all the way down the street. Some twenty cartridge pouches for Gavroche. A supply of cartridges for the barricade.

The smoke was as thick as fog in the street. Anyone who has seen a cloud fall into a mountain gorge between two sheer cliff faces can imagine what the smoke was like, how compressed it was and how seemingly thickened by the two gloomy rows of tall houses. It rose slowly and was endlessly topped up; hence a gradual darkening that turned even broad daylight a dense white. The combatants could hardly see each other from one end of the street to the other, even though the street was very short.

This obscurity, probably intentional and calculated by the army chiefs who were supposed to be directing the assault on the barricade, was useful to Gavroche.

Under the folds of this veil of smoke, and thanks to his smallness, he was able to advance a fair way into the street without being seen. He robbed seven or eight cartridge pouches without much danger.

He crawled along on his stomach, galloped on all fours, holding his carrier in his teeth, twisted, slid, wriggled, snaked from one dead body to the next, and emptied each cartridge pouch or cartridge box the way a monkey opens a nut.

From the barricade, which he was still fairly close to, no one dared yell out to him to come back for fear of calling attention to him.

On one body, which was that of a corporal, he found a powder horn.

“In case of thirst,” he said, ramming it in his pocket.

Forging ever onward, he came to the point where the fog from the fusillade became transparent. So much so that the skirmishers from the suburbs, massed at the corner of the street, suddenly pointed out to each other this thing stirring in the smoke.

Just as Gavroche was divesting a sergeant lying over a curbstone of his cartridges, a bullet struck the corpse.

“Well, I never!” said Gavroche. “Now they’re killing the dead on me.”

A second bullet made the pavement next to him glitter with sparks. A third knocked over his carrier. Gavroche peered around and saw that it was coming from the suburbans at the end of the street.

He scrambled to his feet and stood erect. With his hair to the wind, his hands on his hips, and his eyes fixed on the National Guards that were shooting, he sang: They’re ugly in Nanterre,

That’s the fault of Voltaire,1

And dumb in Palaiseau,

That’s the fault of Rousseau.2

Then he picked up his carrier, put back in the cartridges that had fallen out, without losing a single one, and, advancing toward the fusillade, went and stripped another cartridge pouch. There a fourth bullet also missed him. Gavroche sang: I am not the lord mayor,

That’s the fault of Voltaire,

I’m only a sparrow,

That’s the fault of Rousseau.3

A fifth bullet only succeeded in dragging a third verse out of him:

Joy is my nature,

That’s the fault of Voltaire,

Misery is my trousseau,

That’s the fault of Rousseau.4

This went on for some little time.

The spectacle was horrifying and mesmerizing. Gavroche, shot at, was taunting the shooting. He looked like he was really enjoying himself. It was the sparrow pecking at the hunters. He responded to each discharge with a verse. They went on firing at him and they went on missing him. The National Guards and the soldiers laughed as they aimed at him. He lay down, then got up, he hid in a doorway, then leaped out, disappeared, reappeared, ran away, came back, responded to the volley of grapeshot by thumbing his nose, and meanwhile looted cartridges, emptied cartridge pouches, and filled his pannier. The insurgents, breathless with anxiety, followed him with their eyes. The barricade trembled; he sang. This was not a child, it was not a man; it was a strange fairy larrikin. You would have said the invulnerable dwarf of the mêlée. The bullets chased him, but he was nimbler than they were. Like Roger the Dodger, he was playing some frightening private game of hide-and-seek with death; every time the pug-nosed face of the spectre came close, the gamin gave him the flick.

One bullet, though, better aimed or more treacherous than the others, ended up hitting the will-o’-the-wisp child. They saw Gavroche totter, then he crumpled. The whole barricade let out a cry; but there was something of Antaeus in this pygmy. For a gamin to hit the pavement is like a giant hitting the ground; Gavroche had only fallen the better to rise again; he stayed sitting there on his haunches and, with a long trickle of blood streaking his face, he lifted up both arms in the air, turned his head to where the bullet had come from, and began singing: I fell from the air,

That’s the fault of Voltaire,

Nose in gutter, though,

That’s the fault of—5

He did not finish. A second bullet from the same sniper cut him off. This time he fell face first onto the pavement and did not stir again. That great little soul had taken wing.

HOW YOU GO FROM BEING A BROTHER TO A FATHER

AT THAT VERY moment in the Luxembourg gardens—for the eye of the drama must be everywhere at once—there were two little boys holding each other by the hand. One of them could have been seven years old, the other five. Having been soaked by the rain, they were walking along the paths on the sunny side, the older one leading the little one; they were pale and in rags and they looked like wild birds. The little one said: “I’m really hungry.” The older boy, already a bit protective, pulled his brother along by the left hand and held a stick in his right.

They were alone in the garden. The garden was empty, the gates were closed as a police measure in response to the insurrection. The troops that had bivouacked there had been called away by the requirements of combat.

How did the boys get there? Perhaps they had escaped from some unlocked guardhouse; perhaps, somewhere in the neighbourhood—at the barrière d’Enfer or on the esplanade of the Observatoire or in the neighbouring square overlooked by the pediment on which you can read: invenerunt parvulum pannis involutum1—there was some run-down booth set up by street players that they had run away from; perhaps, the night before, they had managed to evade the garden keepers at closing time and had spent the night in one of those huts where people sit around reading the newspapers. The fact is that they were wandering around like strays, apparently on their own. Wandering around like a stray apparently on your own means you are lost. These poor little boys were, in fact, lost.

The two boys were the same two boys Gavroche had gone to some trouble over and that the reader will recall. Children of the Thénardiers, rented out to mother Magnon, attributed to Monsieur Gillenormand, and now leaves dropped by all those rootless trees and tumbled along the ground by the wind.

Their clothes, clean in the days of mother Magnon—that had served her as a prospectus in regard to Monsieur Gillenormand—had turned to tatters.

These little creatures now belonged to the statistics of “abandoned children”—children that the police report, pick up, mislay, and find once more on the streets of Paris.

It took the mayhem of such a day for the two miserable little waifs to end up in the gardens. If the wardens had spotted them, they’d have chased the ragamuffins away. Poor kids are not allowed in public gardens; yet people ought to reflect that they too, like all children, have a right to flowers.

These two were there thanks to the gates being shut. They were breaking the law. They had sneaked into the gardens and stayed there. Closed gates do not mean the keepers are suddenly off-duty, surveillance is meant to continue; but it slackens off and takes a nap; and the keepers themselves, stirred up by the general public anxiety and more concerned about what was happening outside than inside, had stopped watching the garden and had not spotted the two tiny delinquents.

It had rained the night before and even a little that morning. But in June downpours are of no account. You hardly notice, an hour after a storm, that the beautiful bright day earlier shed tears. In summer the ground dries as fast as a child’s cheek.

At around the time of the summer solstice, the light at the height of noon is piercing, so to speak. It gobbles up everything. It applies itself to the ground and smothers it in a sort of suction action. It is as though the sun is thirsty. A shower is a glass of water; rain is immediately drunk. In the morning, everything was streaming, in the afternoon, everything is shining in a powdery haze.

Nothing is as wonderful as green foliage washed by the rain and dried by the sun; it is like freshness served hot. Gardens and meadows, with water in their roots and sunshine in their flowers, turn into incense burners and smoulder away, releasing all their perfumes at once. Everything laughs and sings and offers itself. You feel sweetly drunk. Spring is a taste of paradise; the sun helps human beings to bide their time.

There are those who ask for nothing more, living beings who, having bright blue skies above, say: This is enough; dreamers absorbed in wonder, drawing from nature-worship an indifference to good and bad, contemplators of the cosmos radiantly distracted from mankind who just don’t understand how anybody can worry about the hunger of some, the thirst of others, the nakedness of the poor in winter, about the lymphatic curvature of a tiny spine, about the straw pallet, about the garret, the dungeon, and the rags of shivering young girls, when a person can just dream away idly under the trees; peaceful and terrible souls, mercilessly content. The funny thing is, the infinite is enough for them. That great need of mankind’s, the finite, which allows itself to be embraced, is something they know nothing about. The finite, which allows that sublime travail, progress, is not something they ever think about. The indefinite, which is born of the half-human, half-divine combination of the infinite and the finite, escapes them. Provided they are face-to-face with immensity, they smile. Never joy, always ecstasy. To lose themselves is what they live for. For them the history of humanity is a mere cadastral survey; the All is not in it; the true All remains beyond it; what’s the point of worrying about that minor detail, man? Man suffers, that’s possible; but just look at Aldebaran2 on the rise! The mother has no more milk, the newborn baby dies, I know nothing about that, but just look at this marvellous rosette made by a slice of fir tree examined under the microscope! What’s the most beautiful Malines lace compared to that! These thinkers forget to love. The zodiac is such a big thing for them that it prevents them from seeing the child crying. God eclipses their souls. This is a family of minds, at once both small and great. Horace was one of them, Goethe was another, La Fontaine, perhaps; magnificent egoists of the infinite, unruffled onlookers of pain, who don’t see Nero if the weather’s nice, people for whom the sun hides the stake, who would gladly watch the guillotine at work in order to study some effect of light in it, who hear neither the cry, nor the sob, nor the death rattle, nor the tocsin, for whom everything is fine since the month of May exists, people who, as long as there are clouds of purple and gold above their heads, declare themselves satisfied and are determined to be happy until the stars stop shining and the birds stop singing.

These are the darkly radiant. They have no idea they are to be pitied. Of course, they are. Whoever does not weep, does not see. We have to admire them and pity them, as you would pity and admire anyone who is at once both night and day, with no eyes beneath their eyebrows but a star, instead, in the middle of their forehead.

The indifference of such thinkers is, according to some, a superior philosophy. So be it; but this brand of superiority is a little wobbly. You can be immortal and lame; witness Vulcan.3 You can be more than man and less than man. The immense incomplete exists in nature. Who knows whether the sun isn’t a blind man?

But then, heavens! Who can you trust? Solem quis dicere falsum audeat?4 So certain geniuses themselves, certain almighty human beings, star men, might actually get things wrong? That which sits up there, at the top, at the summit, at the zenith, that which pours so much light over the earth, might actually see little, see badly, see not at all? Isn’t this cause for despair? No. But what is above the sun, then? God.

On June 6, 1832, at around eleven o’clock in the morning, solitary and empty of people, the Luxembourg was lovely. The quincunxes and parterres sent each other balms and dazzling displays through the light. The branches of trees, wild in the midday brightness, seemed to be trying to embrace each other. Warblers were making a racket in the sycamores, sparrows were triumphant, woodpeckers were climbing right up the chestnut trees giving little taps of their beaks in holes in the bark. The flowerbeds accepted the legitimate royalty of the lilies; the most noble of perfumes is the perfume given off by whiteness. You breathed in the peppery smell of pinks. The old crows of Marie de Médicis5 were amorous in the great trees. The sun lit up the tulips and turned them gold and crimson, tulips being nothing more than every variety of flame made flower. All around the tulip beds the bees whirled, sparks from the flame-flowers. Everything was grace and gaiety, even the impending rain; that recidivist, which the lilies of the valley and the honeysuckles would lap up, was not at all off-putting; the swallows were flying low, sweetly menacing. Whoever was around inhaled happiness; life smelled good; all of this nature gave off candour, succour, support, fatherliness, tenderness, a golden yellow freshness of dawn. The thoughts falling from the sky were as soft as a little child’s hand when you kiss it.

The statues under the trees, naked and white, had frocks of shade riddled with light; these goddesses were all in tatters of sunshine; sunbeams hung from them on all sides. Around the great pond, the ground was already so dry again, it was almost burnt. There was enough wind to raise little riots of dust here and there. A few yellow leaves, left over from the previous autumn, merrily chased each other, like gamins playing.

The abundance of light had something indescribably reassuring about it. Life, sap, heat, fragrance, spilled over; you could feel the hugeness of the spring underlying creation; in all these puffs of air saturated with love, in this to-ing and fro-ing of reverberations and reflections, in this wildly extravagant spree of sunbeams, in this endless outpouring of liquid gold, you could feel the prodigality of the inexhaustible; and, behind this splendour, as behind a curtain of flame, you caught a glimpse of God, that millionaire in stars.

Thanks to the sand, there was not a trace of mud; thanks to the rain, there was not a speck of ash. The bouquets of flowers had just had a wash; all the velvets, all the satins, all the enamels, all the golds that come from out of the ground in the form of flowers were impeccable. This magnificence was clean. The great silence of happy nature filled the gardens. A celestial silence compatible with a thousand different melodies, the cooing of nests, the buzzing of swarms, the palpitations of the wind. All the harmony of the season came together in a gracious whole; spring’s entrances and exits were taking place in the desired order; the lilacs were nearly finished, the jasmine was starting to come out; some flowers were late, some insects early; the vanguard of the red butterflies of June were fraternizing with the rear guard of the white butterflies of May. The plane trees were getting new skins. The breeze was carving waves in the magnificent hugeness of the chestnut trees. It was splendid. A veteran of the neighbouring barracks, peering through the fence, said: “Here’s spring in full dress, shouldering arms.” All of nature was breakfasting; creation was at table; it was time; the great blue tablecloth had been laid over the sky and the great green tablecloth over the ground; the sun shone a giorno. God was serving the universal meal. Every being had its food or its fodder. The wood pigeon found hemp seed, the chaffinch found millet, the goldfinch found chickweed, the robin redbreast found worms, the bee found flowers, the fly found infusoria, the greenfinch found flies. Of course they all took a bite of each other, which is the mystery of the mixing of bad with good; but not one creature had an empty stomach.

The two little abandoned boys had almost got as far as the big pond, but they were a bit overwhelmed by all this light, and they tried to hide—an instinct of the poor and weak in the face of magnificence, even when impersonal; they ducked behind the swans’ shelter and stayed there.

Now and then, at intervals, when the wind came on, you could vaguely hear cries, a noise, a sort of tumultuous jangling, which was gunfire, and dull knocking sounds, which were cannon blasts. There was smoke over the rooftops around Les Halles. A bell, which seemed to be calling, was ringing far away in the distance.

The boys did not seem to hear these sounds. The little one repeated in a small voice from time to time: “I’m hungry.” Almost at the same moment as the boys, another pair approached the great pond. This was a burgher of about fifty, leading by the hand a burgher of about six. No doubt a father with his son. The burgher of six was holding a big brioche.

In those days, certain houses near the park in the rue Madame and the rue d’Enfer had keys to the Luxembourg, which the residents used when the gates were closed, a special dispensation since done away with. This father-and-son duo no doubt came from one of those houses. The two little boys saw “the gentleman” coming and hid a bit more.

The man was a bourgeois. The same one, perhaps, that Marius in his lovesick state had heard one day advising his son “to avoid excess” at this same great pond. He had an affable and high-minded air and a mouth that, never shut, was always smiling. This mechanical smile, produced by too much jaw and too little skin, bares the teeth more than the soul. The child, with his brioche that he had mauled but not finished, looked stuffed. He was decked out as a National Guard because of the riot and the father had stayed decked out as a bourgeois because of prudence.

Father and son had stopped at the pond where the two swans were frolicking. The bourgeois seemed to have a special admiration for the swans. He resembled them in the sense that he walked just like them. For the moment, the swans were swimming, which is their principal talent, and they were superb.

If the two poor little boys had listened and been old enough to understand, they would have been able to reap the words of a grave man. The father was saying to his son: “The wise man lives content with little. Look at me, son. I don’t go in for pomp. You never see me with coats spangled with gold brocade or bedizened with precious stones. I leave such fake glamour to unruly souls.” Here the loud shouting that came from over near Les Halles burst out with a redoubling of bell and clamour.

“What’s that?” asked the child.

The father replied: “Those are saturnalia.”6

All of a sudden, he spotted the two little ragamuffins, motionless behind the little green swan house.

“That is where it starts,” he said.

After a pause he added: “Anarchy has entered the garden.”

Meanwhile the son took a bite of the brioche, spat it out again, and started to cry.

“What are you crying for?” asked the father.

“I’m not hungry anymore,” said the child.

The father’s smile grew wider.

“One doesn’t need to be hungry to eat a cake.”

“I’m sick of my cake. It’s stale.”

“Don’t you want any more?”

“No.”

The father showed him the swans.

“Throw it to these web-footed creatures.”

The child hesitated. Not wanting any more of your cake is no reason to give it away.

The father went on: “Be humane. We must have pity on animals.”

And, taking his son’s cake away from him, he threw it in the pond. The cake fell fairly close to the edge. The swans were a long way off, in the middle of the pond, and busy with some prey. They had not seen the bourgeois or the brioche.

The bourgeois, feeling that the cake was in danger of sinking, and stirred to action by such a pointless shipwreck, started jerking his arms as though sending signals and wound up attracting the swans’ attention.

They saw something floating, veered like the ships they are, and headed slowly for the brioche with the smug majesty appropriate to white creatures.

“Swans swan about,” said the bourgeois, delighted at his wit.

At that moment the distant tumult of the city was suddenly amplified again. This time, the sound was sinister. There are gusts of wind that speak more distinctly than others. The one blowing at that moment clearly brought drumrolls, uproar, platoon fire, and the lugubrious call and answer of the tocsin and the cannon. This coincided with a black cloud that promptly hid the sun.

The swans had not yet reached the brioche.

“Let’s go home,” said the father, “they’re attacking the Tuileries.”

He grabbed his son’s hand again. Then he went on: “From the Tuileries to the Luxembourg, there is only the distance that separates royalty from the peerage;7 it’s not far. It’s going to rain musket balls.” He looked at the cloud.

“And perhaps it’s even going to rain rain, too. The heavens are joining in. The younger branch is doomed.8 Let’s go home, quick.” “I wanted to see the swans eat the brioche,” wailed the child.

The father replied: “That would be imprudent.”

And he hauled away his little bourgeois. The son, regretting the swans, kept his head turned toward the pond until a flowerbed hid it from him.

Meanwhile, at the same time as the swans, the two little strays headed for the brioche. It was floating on the water. The little one watched the cake, the big one watched the bourgeois walking away.

Father and son entered the maze of pathways that leads to the great steps by the stand of trees on the rue Madame side.

As soon as they were no longer in sight, the elder boy swiftly lay flat on his stomach on the rounded lip of the pond and, clinging to this with his left hand, leaning over the water, close to falling in, he held his stick out toward the cake with his right hand. The swans, seeing the enemy, stepped up the pace and in stepping up the pace, produced a kind of breastplate effect beneficial to the little fisherman; the water in front of the swans flowed back, and one of these soft concentric ripples gently pushed the brioche toward the little boy’s stick. As the swans came up, the stick touched the cake. The boy gave it a quick shove, hooked in the brioche, scared off the swans, seized the cake, and straightened up. The cake was sopping wet; but they were hungry and thirsty. The elder boy broke the brioche into two pieces, a big one and a small one, took the small one for himself and gave the big one to his brother, telling him: “There, stick that in your cake-hole.” MORTUUS PATER FILIUM MORITURUM EXPECTAT1

MARIUS HAD FLOWN out of the barricade. Combeferre had followed hot on his heels. But it was too late. Gavroche was dead. Combeferre brought the pannier of cartridges back. Marius brought the child.

“Alas!” he thought. “What his father did for my father, I’m doing for the son. Only Thénardier brought my father back alive. I’m bringing the boy back dead.” When Marius went back into the redoubt with Gavroche in his arms, his face, like the child’s, was covered in blood. Just as he had swooped down to pick Gavroche up, a bullet had grazed his skull; he had not even noticed.

Courfeyrac took off his cravat and bandaged Marius’s forehead with it.

They laid Gavroche out on the same table as Mabeuf and spread the black shroud over the two dead bodies. It was big enough for both the old man and the child.

Combeferre distributed the cartridges from the pannier that he had brought back. That gave each man fifteen shots to fire.

Jean Valjean was still in the same place, motionless on his curbstone. When Combeferre handed him his fifteen cartridges, he shook his head.

“That’s a queer bird for you,” Combeferre whispered to Enjolras. “He’s managed to get himself into the barricade but he doesn’t want to fight.” “That doesn’t stop him from defending it,” retorted Enjolras.

“Heroism has its oddballs,” Combeferre shot back.

And Courfeyrac, who had overheard, added: “He’s a different kettle of fish from old father Mabeuf.”

It should be noted that the fire battering the barricade hardly disturbed the men inside it. Those who have never been through the whirlwind of this kind of war can’t begin to imagine the strange moments of tranquillity that are part and parcel of the convulsions. People come and go, they chat, crack jokes, sit around. Someone we know once heard a combatant say to him in the middle of a volley of grapeshot: “It’s like a bachelors’ picnic in here.” The redoubt in the rue de la Chanvrerie, we repeat, seemed incredibly calm inside. Every possible development, every possible phase of action, had come to an end—or was about to. The position had gone from critical to threatening and was doubtless about to go from threatening to desperate. The grimmer the situation became, the darker the barricade glowed with the bloodred light of heroism. Enjolras gravely ruled over it in the attitude of a young Spartan dedicating his naked blade to the dark genius Epidotas.

Combeferre, with an apron tied round his waist, was tending the wounded; Bossuet and Feuilly were making cartridges using the powder horn collected by Gavroche from the dead corporal, and Bossuet was saying to Feuilly: “We’ll soon be catching the coach for another planet”; Courfeyrac was laying out and arranging, as carefully as a young girl tidying her little workbasket, a whole arsenal of weaponry over the few cobblestones he had reserved for himself next to Enjolras: his sword stick, his musket, two horse pistols, and a handheld knuckle-duster pistol. Jean Valjean was silently staring at the wall opposite. A worker was tying a broad-brimmed straw hat of mother Hucheloup’s on his head with some string, “for fear of sunstroke,” he said. The young men of the Cougourde d’Aix were nattering away gaily among themselves as though keen to speak patois one last time. Joly, who had taken down the widow Hucheloup’s mirror, was examining his tongue. A few combatants, having stumbled on some crusts of more or less mouldy bread in a drawer, were wolfing them down. Marius was worrying about what his father was going to say to him.

THE VULTURE TURNS INTO THE PREY

THERE IS ONE psychological fact peculiar to barricades that we must underline. No characteristic of this surprising street warfare should be omitted.

Whatever the strange interior tranquillity just mentioned, the barricade, for those who remain inside it, remains no less unreal, a hallucination.

There is something of the apocalypse in civil war, with all the mists of the unknown swirling in to mingle with those savage blazes; revolutions are sphinxes and anyone who has lived through a barricade feels like they have lived through a dream.

What you feel in those places, as we have shown with Marius—and we will see the consequences—is both larger and smaller than life. Once out of a barricade, you no longer have any idea what you saw there. You did terrible things, but you don’t remember. You were surrounded by conflicting ideas that had human faces; but your head was in the light of the future. There were corpses lying prone and phantoms on their feet. The passing hours were colossal and felt like the hours of eternity. You lived in death. Shadows passed. What were they? You saw hands with blood on them; there was an unbearable deafening; there was also a terrible silence; there were open mouths shouting and other open mouths that kept quiet; you were in smoke, in the darkness perhaps. You think you felt the sinister ooze of unknown depths; you look at something red you have under your fingernails. You don’t remember anymore.

Let’s get back to the rue de la Chanvrerie. All of a sudden, between two shots, they heard the distant sound of the hour striking.

“Midday,” said Combeferre.

The twelve strokes had not finished sounding when Enjolras sprang straight to his feet and yelled from the top of the barricade in a voice of thunder: “Take cobblestones up into the house. Line the downstairs and attic windowsills with them. Half the men on the muskets, the other half on the cobblestones. Not a minute to lose.” A platoon of sappers, axes over their shoulders, had just appeared in battle order at the end of the street.

This could only be the head of a column; and what column was it? The attacking column, obviously, the sappers charged with demolishing the barricade having always to precede the soldiers charged with scaling it.

They were obviously coming to the moment that Monsieur de Clermont-Tonnerre,1 in 1822, called “the choker trick.”

Enjolras’ order was executed with the due haste peculiar to ships and barricades, the only two places of combat where escape is impossible. In less than a minute, two thirds of the cobblestones that Enjolras had had piled at the door of Corinthe had been taken up to the first floor and the attic, and before another minute had passed, these cobblestones, artistically packed one on top of the other, walled up half the height of the window on the first floor as well as the dormer windows in the roof. A few gaps, carefully arranged at intervals by Feuilly, the chief builder, would allow the muzzles of the muskets to pass through. This arming of the windows was all the easier to do as the grapeshot had ceased. The two field guns were now firing cannonballs at the middle of the roadblock to make a hole in it and, if possible, a breach, for the assault.

When the cobbles destined for the final defence were in place, Enjolras had them carry up to the first floor the bottles he had placed under the table where Mabeuf lay.

“So, who’s going to drink that?” Bossuet asked him.

“They are,” said Enjolras.

Then they barricaded the window downstairs and they held at the ready the iron crossbars that served to bar the tavern door from the inside at night. The fortress was complete. The barricade was the rampart, the tavern was the keep.

With the remaining cobblestones they blocked up the opening.

As defenders of a barricade are always obliged to stint on their ammunition, and the besiegers know this, the besiegers go about putting the finishing touches on their arrangements with a sort of irritating leisureliness, exposing themselves prematurely to fire, though more in appearance than in reality, and making themselves comfortable. Preparations for attack are always made with a certain methodical slowness; after which, all hell breaks loose.

This slow pace allowed Enjolras to review everything and perfect everything. He felt that since men like these were to die, their death should be a masterpiece.

He said to Marius: “We are the two leaders. I’m going to give the last orders inside. You, stay outside and keep watch.” Marius posted himself to keep watch on the crest of the barricade. Enjolras had the door to the kitchen, which, as you will recall, was now the field hospital, nailed up.

“So the wounded won’t get spattered,” he said.

He gave his final instructions in the downstairs room in a voice that was clipped, but profoundly calm; Feuilly listened and answered on everyone’s behalf.

“On the first floor, hold your axes ready to cut off the staircase. Have you got them?”

“Yes,” said Feuilly.

“How many?”

“Two axes and a pole-axe.”

“Good. There are twenty-six of us combatants left standing. How many muskets are there?”

“Thirty-four.”

“Eight too many. Keep the eight guns loaded like the rest and at hand. Swords and pistols at your belts. Twenty men at the barricade. Six in ambush at the attic windows and the window on the first floor to open fire on the assailants through the loopholes in the cobblestones. Let not a single useless worker remain here. Shortly, when the drum beats the charge, let the twenty from below rush the barricade. The first men in will get the best places.” These provisions made, he turned to Javert and said to him: “I haven’t forgotten you.”

And, placing a pistol on the table, he added: “The last one out of here will put a bullet in this spy’s skull.”

“Here?” asked a voice.

“No, let’s not mix his corpse up with ours. You can climb over the small barricade in Mondétour lane. It’s only four feet high. The man’s well trussed-up. You will take him there and you will execute him there.” Only one man, at that moment, was even more imperturbable than Enjolras. It was Javert. Here Jean Valjean appeared. He had been mixed up with the group of insurgents. He stepped away from them and said to Enjolras: “You are the commander?” “Yes.”

“You thanked me a moment ago.”

“In the name of the Republic. The barricade has two saviours: Marius Pontmercy and you.”

“Do you think I deserve a reward?”

“Of course.”

“All right, then, I’m asking for one.”

“What?”

“To blow that man’s brains out myself.”

Javert raised his head, saw Jean Valjean, gave an imperceptible nod and said: “That is only right.”

As for Enjolras, he had started to reload his carbine; he cast his eyes around him: “Any complaints?”

And he turned to Jean Valjean: “Take the snitch.”

Jean Valjean did, in fact, take possession of Javert by plunking himself down on the end of the table. He grabbed the pistol and a faint clicking sound announced that he had cocked it. Almost at the same moment, a bugle call was heard.

“On guard!” cried Marius from the top of the barricade.

Javert started to laugh with that noiseless laugh peculiar to him, and staring hard at the insurgents, he said to them: “You’re hardly any better off than I am.” “Everyone outside!” cried Enjolras.

The insurgents leaped outside in an uproar and, as they left, were stabbed in the back, if you’ll forgive the expression, by these words of Javert’s: “See you soon!” JEAN VALJEAN GETS HIS REVENGE

WHEN JEAN VALJEAN WAS alone with Javert, he undid the rope that held the prisoner secure around the waist, the knot of which was under the table. Then he signalled to him to get up. Javert did as he was told, but with that indefinable smile in which the supremacy of shackled authority is condensed.

Jean Valjean seized Javert by the martingale as you would grab a beast of burden by the breast strap, and, dragging him after him, walked out of the tavern slowly, for Javert, hobbled at the legs, could only take very small steps.

Jean Valjean had his pistol in his fist. They went through the trapeze formed by the inside of the barricade like this. The insurgents, all geared up for the imminent attack, had their backs turned.

Marius, alone, positioned at the left end of the roadblock, saw them go by. This pair formed by the victim and the executioner was lit up for him by the sepulchral light in his soul.

Jean Valjean made Javert climb over the small entrenchment of Mondétour lane, which he did with some difficulty, trussed up as he was, though he did not let go of him for a single instant. When they had climbed over this little roadblock, they found themselves alone together in the lane. No one could see them now. The elbow made by the houses hid them from the insurgents. The corpses removed from the barricade made a terrible mound a few feet away.

You could make out in the heap of the dead a livid face, hair flowing down, a hand shot through, and a half-bared woman’s breast. That was Éponine.

Javert looked sideways at the dead woman and, profoundly calm, said in an undertone: “It seems to me I know that girl.” Then he turned to Jean Valjean.

Jean Valjean stuck his pistol under his arm and levelled a look at Javert that needed no words to say: Javert, it’s me.

Javert answered: “Take your revenge.”

Jean Valjean pulled a knife out of his fob pocket and flicked it open.

“A pigsticker!” cried Javert. “You’re right. That’s more your style.”

Jean Valjean cut the martingale yoked around Javert’s neck, then he cut the ropes around his wrists, then, bending down, he cut the string around his feet; and, straightening up again, he said to him: “You are free.” Javert was not easily amazed. Yet, completely in control of himself as he was, he could not escape a surge of inner turmoil. He stood stock-still, mouth agape.

Jean Valjean elaborated: “I don’t think I’ll be getting out of here alive. But if, by chance, I do get out, I go by the name of Fauchelevent, rue de l’Homme-Armé, number seven.” Javert gave a tiger’s scowl that pulled up the corners of his mouth, and he snarled between clenched teeth: “Watch out.” “Off you go,” said Jean Valjean.

Javert went on: “You said Fauchelevent, rue de l’Homme-Armé?”

“Number seven.”

Javert repeated to himself: “Number seven.”

He buttoned up his overcoat again, put some military stiffness back between his shoulder blades, did a half turn, folded his arms, supporting his chin with one hand, and began to walk in the direction of Les Halles. Jean Valjean watched him go. After a few steps, Javert turned round and shouted at Jean Valjean: “I don’t like this. Kill me, instead, why don’t you.” Javert himself did not notice that he no longer addressed Jean Valjean with the familiarity of contempt.

“Keep going,” said Jean Valjean.

Javert walked very slowly away. A moment later, he turned the corner of the rue des Prêcheurs.

When Javert had disappeared, Jean Valjean fired the pistol in the air. Then he returned to the barricade and said: “Done.” Meanwhile, what had happened is this:

Marius, busier with the outside than the inside, had not till then looked too closely at the spy tied up in the dark at the back of the downstairs room.

When he saw him in broad daylight, clambering over the barricade to go to his death, he recognized him. A memory suddenly sprang to mind. He remembered the inspector of the rue de Pontoise and the two pistols he had given him, which he, Marius, had used in this very barricade; and he not only remembered the face, but he remembered the name.

This recollection, though, was hazy and confused like everything going on in his mind. It was not a statement he put to himself, but a question. “Isn’t that the inspector of police who told me his name was Javert?” Perhaps there was still time to intervene on the man’s behalf? But he had to know first of all if it really was Javert.

Marius called out to Enjolras, who had just positioned himself at the other end of the barricade.

“Enjolras!”

“What?”

“What’s the name of that man?”

“Who?”

“The police officer. Do you know his name?”

“Naturally. He told us himself.”

“So what’s his name?”

“Javert.”

Marius straightened up.

At that moment, the pistol shot was heard. Jean Valjean reappeared and cried out: “Done.”

A dark chill ran through Marius’s heart.

THE DEAD ARE RIGHT BUT THE LIVING ARE NOT WRONG

THE BARRICADE’S DEATH throes were about to begin.

Everything concurred in the tragic majesty of this supreme moment; a thousand mysterious roaring sounds in the air, the breath of the armed masses set in motion in streets that could not be seen, the intermittent galloping of cavalry, the heavy rattling of artillery on the move, platoon fire and cannon fire crossing each other in the labyrinth of Paris, the smoke from the battle rising all golden above the rooftops, unidentifiable, vaguely terrible cries in the distance, lightning flashes of menace everywhere, the tocsin of Saint-Merry that now sounded like sobbing, the sweetness of the season, the splendour of the sky full of sun and clouds, the beauty of the day, and the appalling silence of the houses.

For since the night before, the two rows of houses of the rue de la Chanvrerie had become two great walls; staunchly savage walls. Doors shut, windows shut, shutters shut.

In those days, so different from our own, when the people finally felt the time had come to have done either with a situation that had gone on too long, or with a charter granted or some piece of law, when universal anger had spread throughout the atmosphere, when the city consented to the pulling up of its pavements, when insurrection made the bourgeoisie smile by whispering its watchword in its ear, then the ordinary householder, immersed in rioting, so to speak, was the auxiliary of the combatant, and the house fraternized with the improvised fortress that leaned on it. When the situation was not ripe, when insurrection was decidedly not agreed to, when the masses disowned the movement, then that was it for the combatants, the city turned into a desert around the revolt, hearts and minds frosted over, refuges were walled off, and the street turned itself into a defile to assist the army in taking the barricade.

You can’t shock a people into going any faster than they want to go. Woe betide the man who tries to force their hand! A people won’t let themselves be pushed around. They will just abandon an insurrection to its own devices. The insurgents become lepers. A house is a cliff face, a door is rejection, a façade is a wall. The wall sees, hears, and will have none of it. It could crack open a bit and save you. But no. The wall is a judge. It looks at you and condemns you. What a grim sight these closed houses are! They look dead but they are alive. Life, which seems to be suspended there, goes on inside just the same. No one has come out for twenty-four hours, but they are all in there. On the inside of that solid rock, they come and go, go to bed, get up; they are one happy family in there; they eat in there and they drink; they are frightened in there, too, which is a terrible thing! Fear excuses such terrible inhospitality; it merges with alarm, an extenuating circumstance. Sometimes, and this has been seen, fear even becomes a passion; fright can turn to fury, just as prudence can turn to rage; hence the very profound expression, moderate extremists. There are flareups of utter terror from which rage issues like gloomy smoke. “What do these people want? They’re never satisfied. They compromise men of peace. As if we haven’t had enough revolutions as it is! What have they come here for? Let them get themselves out of it. Too bad for them. It’s their own fault. They’ve only got what they had coming to them. It’s nothing to do with us. Look at our poor street riddled with bullets. They’re a bunch of vermin. Whatever you do, don’t open the door.” And the house takes on the look of a tomb. The insurgent at the door is about to die; he sees the grapeshot and the drawn sabres coming; if he cries out, he knows that they can hear him, but that no one will come; there are walls there that could protect him, there are men there who could save him, and the walls have ears of flesh and the men have hearts of stone.

Who is to blame?

No one and everyone.

The imperfect times in which we live.

It is always at its own risk that a utopia transforms itself into an insurrection and goes from a philosophical protest to an armed protest, turning from Minerva to Pallas.1 The utopia that gets impatient and turns into a riot knows what awaits it; it almost always arrives too soon. So it resigns itself and stoically accepts disaster in place of triumph. It serves those who denounce it without complaining, even exonerating them, and its magnanimity lies in agreeing to desertion. It is indomitable in the face of any obstacle, yet easy on ingratitude.

Is it ingratitude, though?

Yes, from the standpoint of the human race.

No, from the standpoint of the individual.

Progress is mankind’s modus vivendi. Progress is the name we give to the regular life of the human race; Progress is the name we give to the collective step the human race takes. Progress marches onward; it makes the great human and earthly journey toward the heavenly and the divine; it has its halts where it rallies the flock lagging behind; it has its stops where it meditates beside some splendid Canaan that suddenly unveils its promised land; it has its nights where it sleeps; and one of the poignant preoccupations of the thinker is to see shadow over the human soul and to grope around in the dark without being able to wake dozing progress up.

“Maybe God is dead,” Gérard de Nerval2 said one day to the writer of these lines, confusing God with progress and taking the interruption in movement for the death of the Supreme Being.

Whoever despairs is wrong. Progress invariably wakes up and has always marched on, so to speak, even as it dozes, for it has grown. When we see it on its feet again, we find it taller. To be always peaceful is no more the province of progress than of a river; don’t throw up a dam there, don’t throw in a rock; any obstruction makes the water roil and makes humanity boil over. This produces turmoil; but after such turmoil, we recognize that a certain amount of ground has been covered. Until order, which is simply universal peace, is established, until harmony and unity reign, Progress will have revolutions as stopovers along the way.

So what is Progress? We just said. The continuous life of peoples.

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

Let’s admit without bitterness that the individual has his own distinct self-interest, and can without committing a crime make that interest clear and defend it; the present has its excusable dose of egotism; the life of the moment has its rights and is not bound to sacrifice itself endlessly to the future. The generation currently taking its turn on this earth is not obliged to shorten its passage for the generations to come, who are its equals, after all, and will later have their turn. “I exist,” murmurs that someone known as Everyman. “I am young and I am in love, I am old and I want to rest, I am a family man, I work, I am doing well, I am doing a roaring trade, I have houses to rent, I have money invested in the government, I am happy, I have a wife and kids, I love all that, I want to live, leave me alone …” And so, at certain times, a frigid cold shoulder is shown the magnanimous vanguards of the human race.

Utopia, in any case—let’s agree on this—quits its radiant sphere in making war. Tomorrow’s truth borrows its method—battle—from yesterday’s lie. The future acts like the past. The pure idea turns into assault and battery. It muddies its heroism with a violence that it is only right it should answer for—a casual and expedient violence that goes against principles and for which it is fatally punished. Utopia does battle as insurrection, the old military code in its fist; it shoots down spies, it executes traitors, it does away with living beings and hurls them into unknown darkness. It deals in death, which is a serious matter. It looks as though utopia no longer has faith in radiance, its irresistible and incorruptible strength. It smites with the blade. Now, no blade is simple. Every sword is double-edged; whoever wounds with one edge, wounds himself with the other.

This reservation made, and made in all severity, we can’t help but admire, whether they succeed or not, the glorious fighters for the future, utopia’s confidants. Even when they miscarry, they are venerable, and it is, perhaps, in their failure that they are most majestic. Victory, when it falls in with progress, deserves the applause of the peoples of the world; but a heroic defeat deserves their compassion. The one is magnificent, the other, sublime. For us, who prefer martyrdom to success, John Brown is greater than Washington, Pisacane is greater than Garibaldi.3 Someone has to stand up for the vanquished after all.

People are unjust toward these great assayers of the future when they miscarry.

People accuse revolutionaries of sowing fear. Every barricade seems the work of terrorists. Their theories are found incriminating, their aims are treated with suspicion, their ulterior motives are regarded with mistrust, their scruples are condemned. They are accused of raising, piling up, and packing a whole heap of miseries, sorrows, iniquities, grievances, and despairs against the reigning social order and of dredging up great blocks of darkness from out of the dregs as battlements that they can entrench themselves behind to fight. People shout at them: That pavement you’re ripping up is the road to hell. They could well answer: That is why our barricade is made of good intentions.

The best thing, of course, is the peaceful solution. To sum up, we might agree that when you see those paving stones, you think of the bear in its pit, the monster in its lair, and that is the sort of goodwill that raises society’s hackles. But it is up to society to save itself; it is to its own goodwill that we appeal. No violent remedy is necessary. Study evil amicably, note it, then cure it. That is what we urge society to do.

Whatever the case may be, even when they have fallen, especially when they have fallen, those men are honourable who, at the four corners of the globe, their eyes fixed on France, fight for the great cause with the inflexible logic of the ideal; they give their lives as a pure sacrifice for progress; they carry out the will of Providence; they commit a religious act. At the appointed hour, with as much disinterestedness as an actor who comes in on cue, following the divine script, they step into the grave. And they accept this hopeless fight and their own stoical disappearance as a means of bringing the magnificent movement of humanity irresistibly begun on July 14, 1789, to its splendid and supreme universal conclusion. The French Revolution is a move made by God.

On top of this, though, there are—and we really should add this distinction to the distinctions already mentioned in an earlier chapter—accepted insurrections that go by the name of revolutions; and rejected revolutions that go by the name of riots. An insurrection that breaks out is an idea that sits for its exam before the people. If the people don’t give it a pass, the idea withers on the vine, the insurrection is a mere brawl.

To go to war at every summons and every time utopia desires it is not the way of the peoples of the world. Nations do not always, at any given moment, have the temperament of heroes and martyrs.

They are positive. Insurrection is repugnant to them, a priori; first, because it often ends in disaster; second, because it always starts off with an abstraction.

For the beautiful thing is that it is always for the ideal, and for the ideal alone, that those who do devote themselves devote themselves. Insurrection is enthusiasm. Enthusiasm can lose its temper; hence the taking up of arms. But every insurrection that targets a government or a regime aims higher. So, for example, and we must insist on this, what the chiefs of the insurrection of 1832 were fighting against, and in particular the young enthusiasts of the rue de la Chanvrerie, was not Louis-Philippe exactly. Most of them, chatting unguardedly, did justice to the king’s good points, standing as he did with one foot in the monarchy and the other in the revolution; none of them hated him. But what they were attacking was the younger branch of divine right in Louis-Philippe, just as they had attacked the elder branch in Charles X; and what they wanted to overthrow in overthrowing royalty in France, as we explained, was the usurpation of man over man and of privilege over justice throughout the world. Paris without a king results in a world without despots. That is how they reasoned. Their goal was no doubt remote, perhaps vague, and it receded the more they strained after it; but it was grand.

That is the way it is. And people sacrifice themselves for these visions, which, for those sacrificed, are almost always illusions, but illusions in which, on the whole, all human certainty is mixed up. Insurgents wax lyrical about and gild the insurrection. They throw themselves into that tragic mess and get drunk on what they are about to do. Who knows? Maybe they will succeed. They are but few; they have a whole army arrayed against them; but they are defending right, the law of nature, justice, truth, the sovereignty of each man over himself, from which no abdication is possible; and, if need be, they will die like the three hundred Spartans. It is not Don Quixote they have in mind, but Leonidas.4 And they forge ahead and, once they are committed, there is no going back, so they rush headlong, hoping for an unheard-of victory—complete revolution, unbridled progress, the betterment of the human race, universal deliverance; and, if the worst comes to the worst, Thermopylae.

These sparring matches on behalf of progress often fail and we have just explained why. The hordes rebel against the training of the knights-errant. These ponderous masses, the multitudes, vulnerable because of their very weight, are scared of adventure; and there is something of the adventure in the ideal.

Besides, we should not forget, there are interests involved, ones not too friendly to the ideal and the romantic. Sometimes the stomach paralyzes the heart.

The greatness and beauty of France is that it develops less of a paunch than other peoples; it can tighten its belt more easily. It is the first awake, last asleep. It steams ahead out front. It is a seeker.

This is because France is an artist.

The ideal is nothing but the culmination of logic, just as the beautiful is nothing but the acme of the true. Artistic peoples are also consistent peoples. To love beauty is to seek the light. This is why the torch of Europe, that is, of civilization, was carried first by Greece, who passed it on to Italy, who passed it on to France. Divine trailblazers of peoples! Vitae lampada tradunt!5 The wonderful thing is that the poetry of a people is part and parcel of its progress. The degree of civilization is measured by the degree of imagination. Only, a civilizing people must remain a virile people. Corinth, yes; Sybaris, no.6 Those who become effeminate become degenerate. You have to be neither a dilettante nor a virtuoso; but you have to be an artist. When it comes to civilization, the thing is not to refine but to sublimate. On this condition, you can provide the human race with a model of the ideal.

The modern ideal has its classic example in art and its means in science. It is through science that we will realize that august vision of the poets: social beauty. We will remake Eden by learning what a + b equals. At this point in civilization, the exact is an essential element of the marvellous, and artistic emotion is not merely served but completed by the organ of science; dream must be able to add up. Art, which conquers, must have as its fulcrum science, which does the walking. The sturdiness of the mount is important. The modern spirit is the genius of Greece with the genius of India under it, driving; Alexander on an elephant.

Races petrified in dogma or demoralized by lucre are unfit to lead civilization. Genuflecting to idols or to gold atrophies the walking muscle and the galvanizing will. Hieratic or mercantile absorption diminishes a people’s radiance, lowers its horizon by lowering its level, and deprives it of that understanding, at once human and divine, of the universal goal, which makes nations missionaries. Babylon has no ideal. Carthage has no ideal. Athens and Rome have and keep, even through all the nocturnal depths of the centuries, the glories of civilization.

France has the same quality of people as Greece and Italy. It is Athenian in its beauty and Roman in its grandeur. On top of this, it is good. It gives itself. It is more likely than any other people to be inclined to devotion and self-sacrifice. Only, this inclination comes and goes. And that is the great danger for those who run when France wants only to walk, or who walk when France wants to stop for a breather. France has its relapses into materialism, and, at certain moments, the ideas that clog that sublime brain have nothing left in them that recalls French greatness and are the size, instead, of a Missouri or a South Carolina.7 What can you do? The giant plays the dwarf; vast France has its fantasies of being small. That’s all there is to it.

There is nothing to be said on that score. People, like stars, have the right to an eclipse. And all is well as long as the light comes back and the eclipse does not degenerate into darkness. Dawn and resurrection are synonyms. The reappearance of the light is identical to the persistence of the self.

Let’s note these facts calmly. Death at the barricade, or a grave in exile, is an acceptable possible outcome for devotion. The true name for devotion is disinterestedness. Let the deserted let themselves be deserted, let the exiled let themselves be exiled; and let us restrict ourselves to imploring the great peoples of the world not to step back too far when they step back. They must not, under pretext of some return to reason, go too far downhill.

Matter exists, the moment exists, interests exist, the stomach exists; but the stomach must not be the sole guiding light. The life of the moment has its rights, we accept that, but life everlasting has its rights, too. Alas! Having risen does not stop you from falling. We see this in history more often than we would like. A nation is illustrious; it tastes the ideal, then it gorges on muck and finds it good; and if we ask it how come it is abandoning Socrates for Falstaff, it answers: It’s just that I love statesmen.

One last word before we return to the fray.

A battle like the one we are currently describing is nothing but a convulsive lurch toward the ideal. Fettered progress is unhealthy and has epileptic fits that end in tragedy. This disease of progress, civil war, is something we have been forced to encounter on our travels. It is one of the fatal stages, at once act and interlude, in this tragedy that pivots around one of society’s damned and whose true title is: Progress.

Progress!

This cry that we often let out is the only thing we have in mind, and at the point in the tragedy that we have reached, the idea it embodies having more than one more ordeal to go through yet, we may perhaps be allowed, if not to lift the veil on it, then at least to let its light shine through clearly.

The book that the reader has before his eyes at this moment, is, from one end to the other, as a whole and in its every detail, whatever its irregularities, its exceptions or shortcomings, a step from bad to good, from the unjust to the just, from the false to the true, from night to day, from appetite to awareness, from rottenness to life; from bestiality to duty, from hell to heaven, from nothingness to God. Starting point: matter; end point: the soul. A hydra in the beginning, an angel at the end.

HEROES

ALL OF A sudden the drum beat the charge.

The attack was a tornado. The night before, in the dark, the barricade had been approached as silently as if by a boa. Now, in broad daylight, in that wide-mouthed street, surprise was decidedly impossible, the gloves were off, the cannon had begun roaring, the army was hurling itself at the barricade. Fury had now turned to skill. A powerful column of infantry of the line, interspersed at equal intervals by National Guards and Municipal Guards on foot, and supported by dense masses that could be heard but not seen, poured into the street at a run, drums beating, bugles blaring, bayonets fixed, sappers at the head, and, imperturbable under the projectiles, made it to the top of the barricade with the force of a bronze beam against a wall.

The wall held.

The insurgents fired frantically. The scaled barricade shook a mane of lightning flashes. The assault was so frenzied that for a moment the barricade was overrun with assailants; but it shook off the soldiers the way a lion shakes off dogs and was covered in besiegers the way a cliff gets covered in foam—only to reappear a second later, sheer, black, and forbidding.

Forced to fall back, the column remained massed in the street, out in the open, but it was truly frightening and it retorted to the redoubt with a terrifying volley of musketry. Anyone who has seen fireworks will recall the spray made by the crossfire of flashing explosions known as a bouquet. Picture this bouquet as horizontal rather than vertical, bearing a bullet, a ball, a piece of buckshot or a biscayan at the tip of each of its jets of fire, and scattering death in its clusters of thunderclaps. The barricade was underneath.

On both sides, equal resolution. The bravery was almost barbaric, mixed up as it was with a sort of heroic ferocity that began with self-sacrifice. Those were the days when a National Guardsman fought with the dash of a Zouave.1 The troops wanted to put an end to it all; the insurrection wanted to put up a fight. The acceptance of dying in the fullness of youth and in the fullness of health turns fearlessness into frenzy. Each and every man in the mêlée had that larger-than-life quality that comes with the final hour. The street was strewn with dead bodies.

The barricade had Enjolras at one end and Marius at the other. Enjolras, carrying as he did the whole barricade in his head, held himself in reserve, saving his strength and keeping under cover; three soldiers in a row fell beneath his battlement without even seeing him. Marius was fighting out in the open. He made himself a target. He stood with more than half his body showing above the top of the redoubt. There is no more violent profligate than a miser who takes the bit between the teeth, there is no more frightening man in action than a dreamer. Marius was both awesome and oblivious. He did battle as though he were in a dream. You would have taken him for a phantom firing a gun.

The cartridges of the men besieged were running out; not so, their acid wit. In this sepulchral whirlwind they found themselves in, they laughed.

Courfeyrac was bareheaded.

“What happened to your hat?” Bossuet asked him.

Courfeyrac replied: “They finally got rid of it for me with cannon fire.”

When not making wisecracks, they spoke of higher things.

“Does anyone,” cried Feuilly bitterly, “understand these men”—and he rattled off names, well-known names, even famous names, some from the old army2—“who promised to come and join us, who swore they would help us, and who were bound to do so in all honour, these men who were to have been our generals and who have deserted us!” And Combeferre merely replied, with a grave smile: “There are people who observe rules of honour the way you and I observe the stars—from afar.”

There were so many ripped cartridges strewn about the interior of the barricade, it looked as if it had snowed.

The assailants had the numbers; the insurgents had the position. They were at the top of a high wall, and they shot down point-blank any soldiers stumbling around among the dead and the wounded or tangled up in the steep slope of the barricade itself. Built as it was and wonderfully well shored up, the barricade truly was one of those places where a handful of men hold a whole legion in check. Yet, constantly reinforced and swelling under the rain of balls, the attacking column was getting inexorably nearer and, now, little by little, step by step, but beyond the shadow of a doubt, the army was tightening round the barricade like the screw on a winepress.

There was assault after assault. The horror got worse and worse.

At that point, on those heaps of cobblestones in the rue de la Chanvrerie, a fight worthy of a Trojan wall broke out. These men, wild-eyed, in tatters, exhausted, who had not eaten for twenty-four hours, who had not slept, who had only a few shots left to fire, who fumbled in their empty pockets for cartridges, almost all of them wounded, head or arm bandaged with a dirty bit of rust-coloured cloth, who had holes in their coats through which the blood ran, who were barely armed with shoddy flintlock muskets and old chipped sabres, these men turned into Titans. The barricade was approached, assailed, and scaled ten times and yet not taken.

To get any idea of this struggle, you need to imagine a pile of terrible courages set alight, and that you are watching blaze. It was not a fight, it was the inside of a furnace; mouths breathed flames there; faces were extraordinary, the human form seemed transmuted, the combatants flashing flames, and it was amazing to see these salamanders of the fray moving around in all that red smoke. We decline to describe the successive and simultaneous scenes in this grandiose slaughter. Only an epic has the right to fill twelve hundred lines with one battle.

You could be forgiven for thinking it was the hell the Brahmins talk about, the most fearsome of the seventeen abysses, which the Veda3 calls the Forest of Swords.

They fought hand to hand, foot to foot, with pistols, with sabres, with fists, from a distance, from close up, from above, below, everywhere at once, from the roofs of the houses, from the windows of the tavern, from the basement windows of the cellars that some of them had slipped down into. It was one against sixty. The façade of Corinthe, half-demolished, was hideous to behold. The window, speckled with shot, had lost both glass and frame, and was just a shapeless hole, crazily stopped up with cobbles. Bossuet was killed; Feuilly was killed; Courfeyrac was killed; Joly was killed; Combeferre, run through with three thrusts of a bayonet to the chest just as he was lifting up a wounded soldier, only had time to look up at the sky before he breathed his last.

Marius, still fighting, was so peppered with wounds, particularly to the head, that his face was lost in blood and looked for all the world as though it was covered in a red handkerchief.

Enjolras alone was unscathed. Whenever he had no more weapon, he swung his hand to left and right and an insurgent stuck some kind of blade in his fist. All he had left out of four swords—one more than François I had at Marignano4—was a stump.

Homer says: “Then Diomed cut the throat of Axylus, son of Teuthranis, who lived in happy Arisbe; Euryalus, son of Mecisteus, wiped out Dresos and Opheltios, then turned and went for Aesepus and Pedasus, twins the naiad Abarbarea bore the lofty Bucolion; Ulysses overthrows Pidytes of Percote; Antilochus, Ablerus; Polypaetes, Astyalus; Polydamas, Otus of Cyllend; and Teucer, Aretaon. Meganthis dies under the thrust of Euripylus’s spear. Agamemnon, king of heroes, brings down Elatos, born in the high hill town bathed in the sound of the River Satnois.”5 In our old poems of high deeds, Esplandian attacks the giant Marquis Swantibore with a flaming mortise axe, and the latter defends himself by stoning the knight with towers he uproots.6 Our ancient frescoes show us the two ducs7 de Bretagne and de Bourbon, armed, emblazoned, and accoutred for war, on horseback and approaching each other, battle-axe in hand, masked in iron, booted in iron, gloved in iron, the one caparisoned in ermine, the other draped in azure; Bretagne, with his lion between the two horns of his crown, Bourbon, helmeted in a monstrous fleur-de-lis with a visor. But to be superb, you don’t have to wear the ducal morion, black quartz, like Yvon,8 or hold a living flame in your fist, like Esplandian, or, like Phyles, father of Polydamas, to have brought back from Ephyrae good solid armour, a gift from Euphetes,9 king of men; it is enough to give your life out of some conviction or sense of loyalty. This naïve little soldier, yesterday a peasant from the Beauce or the Limousin, who prowls around the nannies in the Luxembourg with his cabbage-cutter at his side, that pale young student bending over a bit of anatomy or a book, a blond adolescent who trims his beard with scissors—take them both, breathe a bit of a sense of duty into them, set them opposite each other in Boucherat square or in the cul-de-sac Planche-Mibray, and let the one fight for his flag and let the other fight for his ideal; and let them both imagine that they are fighting for their homeland. The fight will be colossal; and the shadow cast, in that great epic field where humanity thrashes about, by this footslogger and this jumped-up bonesetter as they battle it out, will equal the shadow cast by Megaryon, king of Lycia, land of tigers, wrestling gigantic Ajax, equal of the gods.

INCH BY INCH

WHEN THERE WERE no more chiefs left alive except Enjolras and Marius at the two ends of the barricade, the centre, which Courfeyrac, Joly, Bossuet, Feuilly, and Combeferre had held for so long, folded. The cannon, without making a passable breach, had put a real dent in the middle of the redoubt; there, the top of the wall had been hit by cannonballs and had crumbled; and the rubble that had fallen, inside and outside, had piled up to create two sorts of taluses on either side of the roadblock, one inside, the other outside. The outside talus offered an inclined plane for the assailants to walk up.

A final assault was now attempted there and this assault was successful. The mass bristling with bayonets hurled themselves forward like gymnasts, irresistibly, and the dense battlefront of the attacking column appeared through the smoke at the top of the steep slope. This time the jig was up. The group of insurgents defending the centre withdrew willy-nilly.

At that point a grim love of life flared up in some. Targeted by that forest of fusils, several did not want to die. This is a moment when the instinct of self-preservation lets out its howl and the beast rears its head again in the man. They were driven back to the tall six-storey house that formed the back of the redoubt. This house might mean salvation. The house was barricaded and as though walled off from top to bottom. Before the troops of the line got inside the redoubt, there was time for a door to open and shut, it could happen in a flash, and the door of the house, suddenly cracked open and shut again at once, meant life for these desperate men. At the back of the house, there were streets, possible flight, open space. They started hammering on the door with the butts of their guns and with their feet, calling out, yelling, begging, pleading with their hands clasped together in entreaty. Nobody opened. From the dormer window on the third floor, the death’s head watched them steadily.

But Enjolras and Marius and seven or eight others who had rallied around them lunged forward and covered them. Enjolras had shouted at the soldiers: “Stay back!” When one officer had failed to obey, Enjolras had killed the officer. Enjolras was now in the tiny inner courtyard, with his back to the house of Corinthe, sword in one hand, carbine in the other, holding open the tavern door, which he barred to the assailants. He cried to the desperate men: “There’s only one door open—this is it.” And, covering them with his body, alone facing an entire battalion, he got them through behind him. They all rushed inside. Enjolras, executing with his carbine, which he was now wielding like a cane, the manoeuvre that practioners of the martial art of cane fencing know as la rose couverte, hoed into the bayonets around him and in front of him and stepped inside last. There was one awful moment when the soldiers were trying to get in and the insurgents were trying to shut the door on them. The door was finally shut with such violence that when it slammed back into its frame, the five severed fingers of a soldier who had clung on were revealed, jammed in the doorway.

Marius had remained outside. A bullet had just shattered his collarbone; he felt himself fainting and falling. At that moment, with his eyes already closed, he was jolted by the shock of a vigorous hand grabbing him, and in the moment before he lost consciousness, he barely had time to think this thought, which merged with one last memory of Cosette: “I’ve been taken prisoner. I’ll be shot.” Enjolras, not seeing Marius among those who had taken refuge in the cabaret, had the same idea. But they were at that point where each man has only enough time to think of his own death. Enjolras secured the bar on the door and locked and bolted it with a double turn of the key and the padlock, while the soldiers outside banged furiously on the other side of the door with the butts of their muskets, the sappers with their axes. The assailants had converged on the door. The cabaret siege had begun.

The soldiers, we have to say, were full of rage.

The death of the gunner sergeant had whipped them into a fury and then, something even more disastrous during the few hours that preceded the attack, the rumour spread among them that the insurgents mutilated prisoners and that in the cabaret lay the corpse of a soldier with his head cut off. This kind of deadly rumour is the normal accompaniment to civil wars and it was a bogus report of the sort that later brought about the catastrophe of the rue Transnonain.

When the door was barricaded, Enjolras said to the others: “Let’s make them pay through the nose for us.”

Then he went over to the table where Mabeuf and Gavroche were laid out. You could see two straight stiff shapes under the black cloth, one big, the other little, and the two faces were vaguely outlined beneath the cold folds of the shroud. A hand emerged from below the pall, dangling toward the floor. It was the old man’s.

Enjolras bent down and kissed that venerable hand, just as he had kissed the man’s forehead the night before. These were the only two kisses he had ever given in his life.

To cut a long story short, the barricade had fought like a gate to Thebes, and the cabaret now fought like a house in Saragossa. Such resistance is tough going. There is no mercy. No possible negotiation. People are willing to die as long as they get to kill. When Suchet says, “Capitulate,” Palafox replies, “After the war of cannon, the war of knives.” Nothing was lacking in the storming of the cabaret Hucheloup: neither the cobblestones raining down from the window and the roof on the besiegers and aggravating the soldiers by horribly mangling them, nor the shots from the cellars and the garrets, nor the fury of the attack, nor the rage of the defence, nor, in the end, when the door gave way, the frenetic madness of the extermination. The assailants, hurtling into the cabaret, their feet tangled up and tripping over the panels of the door which had been battered in and thrown on the floor, found not one combatant inside. The spiral staircase had been hacked away with an axe and was lying, prone, in the middle of the downstairs room, where a few wounded men were breathing their last; anyone who had not been killed was up on the first floor, and there, through the hole in the ceiling, which had been the entry for the staircase, a terrifying volley of shots burst out. This was the last of the cartridges. When they had all burned out, when the fearsome men at death’s door had no more powder and no more bullets, each one grabbed two of the bottles Enjolras had put aside, and they stood and faced the escalade with those appallingly fragile clubs. The bottles contained aqua fortis—concentrated nitric acid. We do no more than tell it like it was when we describe the awful carnage. The besieged, alas, uses anything he can as a weapon. Greek fire did not dishonour Archimedes; boiling pitch did not dishonour Bayard.1 All war is horrifying, and there is absolutely nothing to choose from in any of it. The besiegers’ musketry, although hampered and directed upward from below, was murderous. The rim of the hole in the ceiling was soon surrounded by the heads of the dead from which long lines of blood streamed, red and fuming. The racket was indescribable; trapped and burning smoke almost blanketed the fight in total darkness. No words can express horror at that pitch. There were no men left in that now infernal struggle. It was no longer a matter of giants versus colossi. It was more like something out of Milton and Dante than Homer.2 Fiends attacked, spectres resisted.

It was the heroism of monsters.

ORESTES ON A FAST AND PYLADES1 DRUNK

AT LAST, GIVING each other a leg up, enlisting the support of the skeleton of the staircase, climbing up the walls, clinging to the ceiling, tearing to pieces the last to resist, at the very edge of the hatch, twenty or so besiegers, soldiers, National Guards, Municipal Guards, most of them disfigured by wounds to the face in the awful ascent, blinded by blood, furious, wild as savages, burst into the room on the upper floor, in a whirl. There was only one man left standing there—Enjolras. Cartridgeless, swordless, all he had left in his hands was the barrel of his carbine, whose butt he had smashed on the heads of those scrambling in. He had put the billiard table between the assailants and himself; had backed into a corner of the room and there, eyes proud, head held high, that stump of a weapon in his fist, he was still frightening enough for no one to come near him. A cry went up: “That’s the chief. He’s the one who killed the gun captain. Since he’s placed himself here, this is the place for him. Let him stay here. We’ll shoot him on the spot.” “Go ahead!” said Enjolras.

And, throwing down the stump of his carbine and folding his arms, he offered his chest.

Daring to die well always moves other men. As soon as Enjolras folded his arms, accepting the end, the deafening clamour of the struggle died down in the room, and the chaos suddenly abated in a sort of sepulchral solemnity. It was as if the threatening majesty of Enjolras, disarmed and motionless, weighed on the tumult, and that, if only by the authority of his tranquil gaze, this young man, who alone had no wound, superb, cruel, dashing, indifferent as though invulnerable, was forcing that sinister mob to kill him with respect. His beauty, at that moment enhanced by his dignity, was resplendent, and, as though he could no more feel than be wounded after the terrible twenty-four hours that had just elapsed, he was fresh and rosy. It was, perhaps, about him that a witness was speaking when he said later before the ensuing court-martial: “There was one insurgent I heard them call Apollo.” A National Guard who was aiming at Enjolras lowered his weapon, saying: “I feel like I’m about to shoot a flower.” Twelve men formed a platoon in the corner opposite Enjolras and readied their muskets in silence.

Then a sergeant shouted: “Take aim!”

An officer intervened.

“Wait.”

And addressing Enjolras: “Would you like us to put a blindfold over your eyes?”

“No.”

“Was it really you who killed the gunner sergeant?”

“Yes.”

Grantaire had just woken up a few seconds ago.

Grantaire had been sleeping, as you will recall, since the day before in the room at the top of the cabaret, sitting on a chair, slumped over a table.

He had staged, as convincingly as possible, that old metaphor: dead drunk. The ghastly poison consisting of absinthe, stout, and spirits had thrown him into a lethargic state. His table being small and of no use in the barricade, they had left him to it. He was still in the same position, his chest doubled over the table, his head lying flat on his arms, surrounded by glasses, tankards, and bottles. He slept the shattering sleep of the sluggish bear and the satiated leech. Nothing had got through, neither the shooting, nor the cannonballs, nor the volleys of shot that found their way through the casement window into the room where he was, nor the almighty racket of the assault. Only, he responded occasionally to the cannon with a snore. He seemed to be waiting for a bullet to come and save him the trouble of waking up. Several dead bodies were lying around him; and, at first glance, nothing distinguished him from death’s heavy sleepers.

Noise does not wake up a drunk, it is silence that rouses him. This peculiarity has been observed more than once. The fall of everything, all around him, only accentuated Grantaire’s annihilation; collapse rocked him like a cradle. The sort of break in the tumult provoked by Enjolras jolted him out of his heavy sleep. It is the effect of a galloping carriage that suddenly comes to a halt. Anyone sleeping inside wakes up. Grantaire shot to his feet with a start, stretched his arms, rubbed his eyes, looked around, yawned, and understood.

Drunkenness coming to an end is like a curtain ripped down. You see, all at once and altogether, all that it was hiding. Everything suddenly crams back into your memory, and the drunk, who doesn’t have a clue what has happened in the last twenty-four hours, no sooner opens his eyes than he is up to speed. Things come rushing back with abrupt lucidity, the annihilation caused by drunkenness, a sort of condensation steaming up over the brain and blinding it, evaporates and gives way to a clear and clean grasp of reality.

Relegated as he was to a corner and more or less protected behind the billiard table, Enjolras had the eyes of the soldiers riveted on him. They had not even spotted Grantaire and the sergeant was getting ready to repeat the order: “Take aim!” when, all of a sudden, they heard a powerful voice shouting right next to them: “Long live the Republic! I’m with them.” Grantaire had risen to his feet.

The immense blazing light of the fight which he had completely missed, had not taken part in, appeared in the startling gaze of the drunk, transfigured.

He repeated: “Long live the Republic!” Then he crossed the room with steady tread and went and planted himself beside Enjolras in front of the raised guns.

“You might as well kill two birds with the one stone,” he said.

And, turning to Enjolras gently, he said to him: “All right with you?”

Enjolras shook his hand with a smile. He was still smiling when the explosion ripped through the silence. Enjolras was riddled with eight shots, but remained with his back against the wall as though the bullets had nailed him to it. Only, he dropped his head. Grantaire, mowed down, crashed to his feet.

A few moments later, the soldiers dislodged the last insurgents who had taken refuge at the top of the house. They fired through a wooden trellis in the attic. They fought inside the roof. They threw bodies out the windows, some of them still alive. Two light infantrymen, who were trying to right the smashed bus, were killed by two carbine shots fired from the attic. A man in a smock was hurled headlong out of there with a bayonet stuck in his guts, and was moaning in agony on the ground. A soldier and an insurgent slid down the tiled roof slope together and would not let go of each other, and fell, locked together in a ferocious embrace. Similar struggle in the cellar. Cries, shots, savage shuffling. Then silence. The barricade was taken.

The soldiers began searching the surrounding houses and going after the fugitives.

PRISONER

MARIUS WAS INDEED a prisoner. A prisoner of Jean Valjean.

The hand that had gripped him from behind just as he was about to fall and which he had felt as he lost consciousness was Jean Valjean’s.

Jean Valjean had taken no part in the fight except to expose himself to danger. Without him, at that ultimate stage of the battle to the death, no one would have spared a thought for the wounded. Thanks to him, everywhere at once as he was in the carnage like some angel of salvation, those who fell were lifted up, carried into the downstairs room, and patched up. In the intervals in between, he repaired the barricade. But nothing bearing any resemblance to a blow or an attack, not even some kind of self-defence, came from his hands. He stayed silent and gave succour. And the amazing thing is, he had only a few scratches. Bullets would have nothing to do with him. If suicide had any part in what he had dreamed of when he came into this sepulchre, on that score he had not succeeded. But we doubt he had been thinking of suicide, which is an irreligious act.

In the thick fog of combat, Jean Valjean did not appear to see Marius; the fact is he did not take his eyes off him. When a shot brought Marius down, Jean Valjean sprang with the agility of a tiger, fell upon him as upon some prey, and carried him off.

The whirlwind of the attack was so violently centred on Enjolras and on the cabaret door at that particular moment that nobody saw Jean Valjean holding Marius senseless in his arms as he crossed the now unpaved field of the barricade and disappeared behind the corner of the house of Corinthe.

You will recall that this corner formed a sort of headland on the street; it protected a few square feet of terrain from balls and shot and from eyes, too. In fires, similarly, there is sometimes a room that does not burn, and in the wildest seas, a calm spot in the lee of a promontory or at the end of a cul-de-sac of reefs. It was in this recess in the inner trapezium of the barricade that Éponine had lain dying.

There Jean Valjean stopped; he let Marius slide to the ground, leaned back against the wall and cast his eyes about him. The situation was appalling.

For the moment, for maybe two or three minutes, this bit of wall was a refuge; but how could they get out of this massacre? He remembered the anguish he had felt in the rue Polonceau eight years before, and how he had managed to escape; that was hard then, today it was impossible. He had in front of him that implacable and mute six-storey house that seemed to be inhabited only by the dead man leaning out of his window; on his right, he had the fairly low barricade that closed off the rue de la Petite-Truanderie; getting over that obstacle looked easy, but beyond the crest of the roadblock you could see the tips of a row of bayonets. These were the troops of the line, posted on the far side of that barricade and on the lookout. It was obvious that getting over the barricade meant going looking for platoon fire and that any head that risked poking out over the top of the wall of cobblestones would serve as a target for sixty musket shots. On his left, he had the field of combat. Death lurked around the corner of the wall.

What was to be done? Only a bird could have got away from the place.

And he had to decide swiftly, find an expedient, make a decision. They were fighting a few feet away from him; happily everyone was fiercely intent on hammering away at a single point, the door of the tavern; but if one soldier, just one, got the idea of going around the house, or attacking its flank, it would all be over.

Jean Valjean looked at the house in front of him, he looked at the barricade beside him, then he looked at the ground, with the violence of ultimate extremity, in desperation, as though he could drill a hole with his eyes.

He looked so hard, something vaguely plausible occurred to him in the midst of his agony and took shape at his feet, as though causing the thing required to sprout was one of the powers of looking. He saw, a few feet away, at the base of the small roadblock so mercilessly guarded and watched from outside, under a collapsed heap of cobblestones that partly hid it, an iron grate lying down flat, level with the ground. This grate, made of sturdy crossbars, was about two feet square. The cobblestone frame that held it in place had been ripped out and it was, so to speak, unsealed. Through the bars you could see an obscure opening, something like the flue of a chimney or the cylinder of a cistern. Jean Valjean dashed forward. The art of escape he’d once mastered rushed back to his brain like a flash of light. He cleared away the stones, lifted out the grate, loaded Marius, inert as a corpse, onto his shoulders, and with this burden on his back, he dropped down into this sort of luckily fairly shallow well, using his elbows and his knees, let the heavy iron trapdoor fall shut over his head and the stones roll back over it again, and found his footing on the flagstone surface ten feet below ground. And all this was done the way you do things when you are delirious, with the strength of a giant and the speed of an eagle; it hardly took a few minutes.

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

There, profound peace, absolute silence, night.

The impression that he had earlier had falling from the street into the convent came back to him. Only, what he was carrying with him today was not Cosette anymore, but Marius.

He could only dimly now hear above him, like a faint murmur, the awful tumult of the tavern being stormed.