Les Misérables
Bossuet, though very drunk, preserved his equanimity.
He was seated on the sill of the open window, wetting his back in the
falling rain, and gazing at his two friends.
All at once, he heard a tumult behind him, hurried footsteps, cries of
“To arms!” He turned round and saw in the Rue Saint-Denis, at the end
of the Rue de la Chanvrerie, Enjolras passing, gun in hand, and
Gavroche with his pistol, Feuilly with his sword, Courfeyrac with his
sword, and Jean Prouvaire with his blunderbuss, Combeferre with his
gun, Bahorel with his gun, and the whole armed and stormy rabble which
was following them.
The Rue de la Chanvrerie was not more than a gunshot long. Bossuet
improvised a speaking-trumpet from his two hands placed around his
mouth, and shouted:—
“Courfeyrac! Courfeyrac! Hohée!”
Courfeyrac heard the shout, caught sight of Bossuet, and advanced a few
paces into the Rue de la Chanvrerie, shouting: “What do you want?”
which crossed a “Where are you going?”
“To make a barricade,” replied Courfeyrac.
“Well, here! This is a good place! Make it here!”
“That’s true, Aigle,” said Courfeyrac.
And at a signal from Courfeyrac, the mob flung themselves into the Rue
de la Chanvrerie.
CHAPTER III—NIGHT BEGINS TO DESCEND UPON GRANTAIRE
The spot was, in fact, admirably adapted, the entrance to the street
widened out, the other extremity narrowed together into a pocket
without exit. Corinthe created an obstacle, the Rue Mondétour was
easily barricaded on the right and the left, no attack was possible
except from the Rue Saint-Denis, that is to say, in front, and in full
sight. Bossuet had the comprehensive glance of a fasting Hannibal.
Terror had seized on the whole street at the irruption of the mob.
There was not a passer-by who did not get out of sight. In the space of
a flash of lightning, in the rear, to right and left, shops, stables,
area-doors, windows, blinds, attic skylights, shutters of every
description were closed, from the ground floor to the roof. A terrified
old woman fixed a mattress in front of her window on two clothes-poles
for drying linen, in order to deaden the effect of musketry. The
wine-shop alone remained open; and that for a very good reason, that
the mob had rushed into it.—“Ah my God! Ah my God!” sighed Mame
Hucheloup.
Bossuet had gone down to meet Courfeyrac.
Joly, who had placed himself at the window, exclaimed:—
“Courfeyrac, you ought to have brought an umbrella. You will gatch
gold.”
In the meantime, in the space of a few minutes, twenty iron bars had
been wrenched from the grated front of the wine-shop, ten fathoms of
street had been unpaved; Gavroche and Bahorel had seized in its
passage, and overturned, the dray of a lime-dealer named Anceau; this
dray contained three barrels of lime, which they placed beneath the
piles of paving-stones: Enjolras raised the cellar trap, and all the
widow Hucheloup’s empty casks were used to flank the barrels of lime;
Feuilly, with his fingers skilled in painting the delicate sticks of
fans, had backed up the barrels and the dray with two massive heaps of
blocks of rough stone. Blocks which were improvised like the rest and
procured no one knows where. The beams which served as props were torn
from the neighboring house-fronts and laid on the casks. When Bossuet
and Courfeyrac turned round, half the street was already barred with a
rampart higher than a man. There is nothing like the hand of the
populace for building everything that is built by demolishing.
Matelote and Gibelotte had mingled with the workers. Gibelotte went and
came loaded with rubbish. Her lassitude helped on the barricade. She
served the barricade as she would have served wine, with a sleepy air.
An omnibus with two white horses passed the end of the street.
Bossuet strode over the paving-stones, ran to it, stopped the driver,
made the passengers alight, offered his hand to “the ladies,” dismissed
the conductor, and returned, leading the vehicle and the horses by the
bridle.
“Omnibuses,” said he, “do not pass the Corinthe. _Non licet omnibus
adire Corinthum_.”
An instant later, the horses were unharnessed and went off at their
will, through the Rue Mondétour, and the omnibus lying on its side
completed the bar across the street.
Mame Hucheloup, quite upset, had taken refuge in the first story.
Her eyes were vague, and stared without seeing anything, and she cried
in a low tone. Her terrified shrieks did not dare to emerge from her
throat.
“The end of the world has come,” she muttered.
Joly deposited a kiss on Mame Hucheloup’s fat, red, wrinkled neck, and
said to Grantaire: “My dear fellow, I have always regarded a woman’s
neck as an infinitely delicate thing.”
But Grantaire attained to the highest regions of dithryamb. Matelote
had mounted to the first floor once more, Grantaire seized her round
her waist, and gave vent to long bursts of laughter at the window.
“Matelote is homely!” he cried: “Matelote is of a dream of ugliness!
Matelote is a chimæra. This is the secret of her birth: a Gothic
Pygmalion, who was making gargoyles for cathedrals, fell in love with
one of them, the most horrible, one fine morning. He besought Love to
give it life, and this produced Matelote. Look at her, citizens! She
has chromate-of-lead-colored hair, like Titian’s mistress, and she is a
good girl. I guarantee that she will fight well. Every good girl
contains a hero. As for Mother Hucheloup, she’s an old warrior. Look at
her moustaches! She inherited them from her husband. A hussar indeed!
She will fight too. These two alone will strike terror to the heart of
the banlieue. Comrades, we shall overthrow the government as true as
there are fifteen intermediary acids between margaric acid and formic
acid; however, that is a matter of perfect indifference to me.
Gentlemen, my father always detested me because I could not understand
mathematics. I understand only love and liberty. I am Grantaire, the
good fellow. Having never had any money, I never acquired the habit of
it, and the result is that I have never lacked it; but, if I had been
rich, there would have been no more poor people! You would have seen!
Oh, if the kind hearts only had fat purses, how much better things
would go! I picture myself Jesus Christ with Rothschild’s fortune! How
much good he would do! Matelote, embrace me! You are voluptuous and
timid! You have cheeks which invite the kiss of a sister, and lips
which claim the kiss of a lover.”
“Hold your tongue, you cask!” said Courfeyrac.
Grantaire retorted:—
“I am the capitoul52 and the master of the floral games!”
Enjolras, who was standing on the crest of the barricade, gun in hand,
raised his beautiful, austere face. Enjolras, as the reader knows, had
something of the Spartan and of the Puritan in his composition. He
would have perished at Thermopylæ with Leonidas, and burned at Drogheda
with Cromwell.
“Grantaire,” he shouted, “go get rid of the fumes of your wine
somewhere else than here. This is the place for enthusiasm, not for
drunkenness. Don’t disgrace the barricade!”
This angry speech produced a singular effect on Grantaire. One would
have said that he had had a glass of cold water flung in his face. He
seemed to be rendered suddenly sober.
He sat down, put his elbows on a table near the window, looked at
Enjolras with indescribable gentleness, and said to him:—
“Let me sleep here.”
“Go and sleep somewhere else,” cried Enjolras.
But Grantaire, still keeping his tender and troubled eyes fixed on him,
replied:—
“Let me sleep here,—until I die.”
Enjolras regarded him with disdainful eyes:—
“Grantaire, you are incapable of believing, of thinking, of willing, of
living, and of dying.”
Grantaire replied in a grave tone:—
“You will see.”
He stammered a few more unintelligible words, then his head fell
heavily on the table, and, as is the usual effect of the second period
of inebriety, into which Enjolras had roughly and abruptly thrust him,
an instant later he had fallen asleep.
CHAPTER IV—AN ATTEMPT TO CONSOLE THE WIDOW HUCHELOUP
Bahorel, in ecstasies over the barricade, shouted:—
“Here’s the street in its low-necked dress! How well it looks!”
Courfeyrac, as he demolished the wine-shop to some extent, sought to
console the widowed proprietress.
“Mother Hucheloup, weren’t you complaining the other day because you
had had a notice served on you for infringing the law, because
Gibelotte shook a counterpane out of your window?”
“Yes, my good Monsieur Courfeyrac. Ah! good Heavens, are you going to
put that table of mine in your horror, too? And it was for the
counterpane, and also for a pot of flowers which fell from the attic
window into the street, that the government collected a fine of a
hundred francs. If that isn’t an abomination, what is!”
“Well, Mother Hucheloup, we are avenging you.”
Mother Hucheloup did not appear to understand very clearly the benefit
which she was to derive from these reprisals made on her account. She
was satisfied after the manner of that Arab woman, who, having received
a box on the ear from her husband, went to complain to her father, and
cried for vengeance, saying: “Father, you owe my husband affront for
affront.” The father asked: “On which cheek did you receive the blow?”
“On the left cheek.” The father slapped her right cheek and said: “Now
you are satisfied. Go tell your husband that he boxed my daughter’s
ears, and that I have accordingly boxed his wife’s.”
The rain had ceased. Recruits had arrived. Workmen had brought under
their blouses a barrel of powder, a basket containing bottles of
vitriol, two or three carnival torches, and a basket filled with
fire-pots, “left over from the King’s festival.” This festival was very
recent, having taken place on the 1st of May. It was said that these
munitions came from a grocer in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine named Pépin.
They smashed the only street lantern in the Rue de la Chanvrerie, the
lantern corresponding to one in the Rue Saint-Denis, and all the
lanterns in the surrounding streets, de Mondétour, du Cygne, des
Prêcheurs, and de la Grande and de la Petite-Truanderie.
Enjolras, Combeferre, and Courfeyrac directed everything. Two
barricades were now in process of construction at once, both of them
resting on the Corinthe house and forming a right angle; the larger
shut off the Rue de la Chanvrerie, the other closed the Rue Mondétour,
on the side of the Rue de Cygne. This last barricade, which was very
narrow, was constructed only of casks and paving-stones. There were
about fifty workers on it; thirty were armed with guns; for, on their
way, they had effected a wholesale loan from an armorer’s shop.
Nothing could be more bizarre and at the same time more motley than
this troop. One had a round-jacket, a cavalry sabre, and two
holster-pistols, another was in his shirt-sleeves, with a round hat,
and a powder-horn slung at his side, a third wore a plastron of nine
sheets of gray paper and was armed with a saddler’s awl. There was one
who was shouting: “Let us exterminate them to the last man and die at
the point of our bayonet.” This man had no bayonet. Another spread out
over his coat the cross-belt and cartridge-box of a National Guardsman,
the cover of the cartridge-box being ornamented with this inscription
in red worsted: _Public Order_. There were a great many guns bearing
the numbers of the legions, few hats, no cravats, many bare arms, some
pikes. Add to this, all ages, all sorts of faces, small, pale young
men, and bronzed longshoremen. All were in haste; and as they helped
each other, they discussed the possible chances. That they would
receive succor about three o’clock in the morning—that they were sure