Les Misérables
at random all day from street to street, and had finally halted there,
with the weary patience of brutes who no more understand the actions of
men, than man understands the actions of Providence.
Marius left the horses behind him. As he was approaching a street which
seemed to him to be the Rue du Contrat-Social, a shot coming no one
knows whence, and traversing the darkness at random, whistled close by
him, and the bullet pierced a brass shaving-dish suspended above his
head over a hairdresser’s shop. This pierced shaving-dish was still to
be seen in 1848, in the Rue du Contrat-Social, at the corner of the
pillars of the market.
This shot still betokened life. From that instant forth he encountered
nothing more.
The whole of this itinerary resembled a descent of black steps.
Nevertheless, Marius pressed forward.
CHAPTER II—AN OWL’S VIEW OF PARIS
A being who could have hovered over Paris that night with the wing of
the bat or the owl would have had beneath his eyes a gloomy spectacle.
All that old quarter of the Halles, which is like a city within a city,
through which run the Rues Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin, where a
thousand lanes cross, and of which the insurgents had made their
redoubt and their stronghold, would have appeared to him like a dark
and enormous cavity hollowed out in the centre of Paris. There the
glance fell into an abyss. Thanks to the broken lanterns, thanks to the
closed windows, there all radiance, all life, all sound, all movement
ceased. The invisible police of the insurrection were on the watch
everywhere, and maintained order, that is to say, night. The necessary
tactics of insurrection are to drown small numbers in a vast obscurity,
to multiply every combatant by the possibilities which that obscurity
contains. At dusk, every window where a candle was burning received a
shot. The light was extinguished, sometimes the inhabitant was killed.
Hence nothing was stirring. There was nothing but fright, mourning,
stupor in the houses; and in the streets, a sort of sacred horror. Not
even the long rows of windows and stores, the indentations of the
chimneys, and the roofs, and the vague reflections which are cast back
by the wet and muddy pavements, were visible. An eye cast upward at
that mass of shadows might, perhaps, have caught a glimpse here and
there, at intervals, of indistinct gleams which brought out broken and
eccentric lines, and profiles of singular buildings, something like the
lights which go and come in ruins; it was at such points that the
barricades were situated. The rest was a lake of obscurity, foggy,
heavy, and funereal, above which, in motionless and melancholy
outlines, rose the tower of Saint-Jacques, the church of Saint-Merry,
and two or three more of those grand edifices of which man makes giants
and the night makes phantoms.
All around this deserted and disquieting labyrinth, in the quarters
where the Parisian circulation had not been annihilated, and where a
few street lanterns still burned, the aerial observer might have
distinguished the metallic gleam of swords and bayonets, the dull
rumble of artillery, and the swarming of silent battalions whose ranks
were swelling from minute to minute; a formidable girdle which was
slowly drawing in and around the insurrection.
The invested quarter was no longer anything more than a monstrous
cavern; everything there appeared to be asleep or motionless, and, as
we have just seen, any street which one might come to offered nothing
but darkness.
A wild darkness, full of traps, full of unseen and formidable shocks,
into which it was alarming to penetrate, and in which it was terrible
to remain, where those who entered shivered before those whom they
awaited, where those who waited shuddered before those who were coming.
Invisible combatants were entrenched at every corner of the street;
snares of the sepulchre concealed in the density of night. All was
over. No more light was to be hoped for, henceforth, except the
lightning of guns, no further encounter except the abrupt and rapid
apparition of death. Where? How? When? No one knew, but it was certain
and inevitable. In this place which had been marked out for the
struggle, the Government and the insurrection, the National Guard, and
popular societies, the bourgeois and the uprising, groping their way,
were about to come into contact. The necessity was the same for both.
The only possible issue thenceforth was to emerge thence killed or
conquerors. A situation so extreme, an obscurity so powerful, that the
most timid felt themselves seized with resolution, and the most daring
with terror.
Moreover, on both sides, the fury, the rage, and the determination were
equal. For the one party, to advance meant death, and no one dreamed of
retreating; for the other, to remain meant death, and no one dreamed of
flight.
It was indispensable that all should be ended on the following day,
that triumph should rest either here or there, that the insurrection
should prove itself a revolution or a skirmish. The Government
understood this as well as the parties; the most insignificant
bourgeois felt it. Hence a thought of anguish which mingled with the
impenetrable gloom of this quarter where all was at the point of being
decided; hence a redoubled anxiety around that silence whence a
catastrophe was on the point of emerging. Here only one sound was
audible, a sound as heart-rending as the death rattle, as menacing as a
malediction, the tocsin of Saint-Merry. Nothing could be more
blood-curdling than the clamor of that wild and desperate bell, wailing
amid the shadows.
As it often happens, nature seemed to have fallen into accord with what
men were about to do. Nothing disturbed the harmony of the whole
effect. The stars had disappeared, heavy clouds filled the horizon with
their melancholy folds. A black sky rested on these dead streets, as
though an immense winding-sheet were being outspread over this immense
tomb.
While a battle that was still wholly political was in preparation in
the same locality which had already witnessed so many revolutionary
events, while youth, the secret associations, the schools, in the name
of principles, and the middle classes, in the name of interests, were
approaching preparatory to dashing themselves together, clasping and
throwing each other, while each one hastened and invited the last and
decisive hour of the crisis, far away and quite outside of this fatal
quarter, in the most profound depths of the unfathomable cavities of
that wretched old Paris which disappears under the splendor of happy
and opulent Paris, the sombre voice of the people could be heard giving
utterance to a dull roar.
A fearful and sacred voice which is composed of the roar of the brute
and of the word of God, which terrifies the weak and which warns the
wise, which comes both from below like the voice of the lion, and from
on high like the voice of the thunder.
CHAPTER III—THE EXTREME EDGE
Marius had reached the Halles.
There everything was still calmer, more obscure and more motionless
than in the neighboring streets. One would have said that the glacial
peace of the sepulchre had sprung forth from the earth and had spread
over the heavens.
Nevertheless, a red glow brought out against this black background the
lofty roofs of the houses which barred the Rue de la Chanvrerie on the
Saint-Eustache side. It was the reflection of the torch which was
burning in the Corinthe barricade. Marius directed his steps towards
that red light. It had drawn him to the Marché-aux-Poirées, and he
caught a glimpse of the dark mouth of the Rue des Prêcheurs. He entered
it. The insurgents’ sentinel, who was guarding the other end, did not
see him. He felt that he was very close to that which he had come in
search of, and he walked on tiptoe. In this manner he reached the elbow
of that short section of the Rue Mondétour which was, as the reader
will remember, the only communication which Enjolras had preserved with
the outside world. At the corner of the last house, on his left, he
thrust his head forward, and looked into the fragment of the Rue
Mondétour.
A little beyond the angle of the lane and the Rue de la Chanvrerie
which cast a broad curtain of shadow, in which he was himself engulfed,
he perceived some light on the pavement, a bit of the wine-shop, and
beyond, a flickering lamp within a sort of shapeless wall, and men
crouching down with guns on their knees. All this was ten fathoms
distant from him. It was the interior of the barricade.
The houses which bordered the lane on the right concealed the rest of
the wine-shop, the large barricade, and the flag from him.
Marius had but a step more to take.
Then the unhappy young man seated himself on a post, folded his arms,
and fell to thinking about his father.
He thought of that heroic Colonel Pontmercy, who had been so proud a
soldier, who had guarded the frontier of France under the Republic, and
had touched the frontier of Asia under Napoleon, who had beheld Genoa,
Alexandria, Milan, Turin, Madrid, Vienna, Dresden, Berlin, Moscow, who
had left on all the victorious battle-fields of Europe drops of that
same blood, which he, Marius, had in his veins, who had grown gray
before his time in discipline and command, who had lived with his
sword-belt buckled, his epaulets falling on his breast, his cockade
blackened with powder, his brow furrowed with his helmet, in barracks,
in camp, in the bivouac, in ambulances, and who, at the expiration of
twenty years, had returned from the great wars with a scarred cheek, a
smiling countenance, tranquil, admirable, pure as a child, having done
everything for France and nothing against her.
He said to himself that his day had also come now, that his hour had
struck, that following his father, he too was about to show himself
brave, intrepid, bold, to run to meet the bullets, to offer his breast
to bayonets, to shed his blood, to seek the enemy, to seek death, that
he was about to wage war in his turn and descend to the field of
battle, and that the field of battle upon which he was to descend was
the street, and that the war in which he was about to engage was civil
war!
He beheld civil war laid open like a gulf before him, and into this he
was about to fall. Then he shuddered.
He thought of his father’s sword, which his grandfather had sold to a
second-hand dealer, and which he had so mournfully regretted. He said
to himself that that chaste and valiant sword had done well to escape
from him, and to depart in wrath into the gloom; that if it had thus
fled, it was because it was intelligent and because it had foreseen the
future; that it had had a presentiment of this rebellion, the war of
the gutters, the war of the pavements, fusillades through
cellar-windows, blows given and received in the rear; it was because,
coming from Marengo and Friedland, it did not wish to go to the Rue de
la Chanvrerie; it was because, after what it had done with the father,
it did not wish to do this for the son! He told himself that if that
sword were there, if after taking possession of it at his father’s
pillow, he had dared to take it and carry it off for this combat of
darkness between Frenchmen in the streets, it would assuredly have
scorched his hands and burst out aflame before his eyes, like the sword
of the angel! He told himself that it was fortunate that it was not
there and that it had disappeared, that that was well, that that was
just, that his grandfather had been the true guardian of his father’s
glory, and that it was far better that the colonel’s sword should be
sold at auction, sold to the old-clothes man, thrown among the old
junk, than that it should, to-day, wound the side of his country.