Les Misérables
For the last hour, that boy had been creating an uproar in that
peaceable arrondissement, the uproar of a fly in a bottle. The sergeant
of the banlieue lent an ear. He waited. He was a prudent man.
The mad rattle of the cart, filled to overflowing the possible measure
of waiting, and decided the sergeant to make a reconnaisance.
“There’s a whole band of them there!” said he, “let us proceed gently.”
It was clear that the hydra of anarchy had emerged from its box and
that it was stalking abroad through the quarter.
And the sergeant ventured out of the post with cautious tread.
All at once, Gavroche, pushing his cart in front of him, and at the
very moment when he was about to turn into the Rue des
Vieilles-Haudriettes, found himself face to face with a uniform, a
shako, a plume, and a gun.
For the second time, he stopped short.
“Hullo,” said he, “it’s him. Good day, public order.”
Gavroche’s amazement was always brief and speedily thawed.
“Where are you going, you rascal?” shouted the sergeant.
“Citizen,” retorted Gavroche, “I haven’t called you ‘bourgeois’ yet.
Why do you insult me?”
“Where are you going, you rogue?”
“Monsieur,” retorted Gavroche, “perhaps you were a man of wit
yesterday, but you have degenerated this morning.”
“I ask you where are you going, you villain?”
Gavroche replied:—
“You speak prettily. Really, no one would suppose you as old as you
are. You ought to sell all your hair at a hundred francs apiece. That
would yield you five hundred francs.”
“Where are you going? Where are you going? Where are you going,
bandit?”
Gavroche retorted again:—
“What villainous words! You must wipe your mouth better the first time
that they give you suck.”
The sergeant lowered his bayonet.
“Will you tell me where you are going, you wretch?”
“General,” said Gavroche “I’m on my way to look for a doctor for my
wife who is in labor.”
“To arms!” shouted the sergeant.
The master-stroke of strong men consists in saving themselves by the
very means that have ruined them; Gavroche took in the whole situation
at a glance. It was the cart which had told against him, it was the
cart’s place to protect him.
At the moment when the sergeant was on the point of making his descent
on Gavroche, the cart, converted into a projectile and launched with
all the latter’s might, rolled down upon him furiously, and the
sergeant, struck full in the stomach, tumbled over backwards into the
gutter while his gun went off in the air.
The men of the post had rushed out pell-mell at the sergeant’s shout;
the shot brought on a general random discharge, after which they
reloaded their weapons and began again.
This blind-man’s-buff musketry lasted for a quarter of an hour and
killed several panes of glass.
In the meanwhile, Gavroche, who had retraced his steps at full speed,
halted five or six streets distant and seated himself, panting, on the
stone post which forms the corner of the Enfants-Rouges.
He listened.
After panting for a few minutes, he turned in the direction where the
fusillade was raging, lifted his left hand to a level with his nose and
thrust it forward three times, as he slapped the back of his head with
his right hand; an imperious gesture in which Parisian street-urchindom
has condensed French irony, and which is evidently efficacious, since
it has already lasted half a century.
This gayety was troubled by one bitter reflection.
“Yes,” said he, “I’m splitting with laughter, I’m twisting with
delight, I abound in joy, but I’m losing my way, I shall have to take a
roundabout way. If I only reach the barricade in season!”
Thereupon he set out again on a run.
And as he ran:—
“Ah, by the way, where was I?” said he.
And he resumed his ditty, as he plunged rapidly through the streets,
and this is what died away in the gloom:—
“Mais il reste encore des bastilles,
Et je vais mettre le holà
Dans l’ordre public que voilà.
Où vont les belles filles,
Lon la.
“Quelqu’un veut-il jouer aux quilles?
Tout l’ancien monde s’écroula
Quand la grosse boule roula.
Où vont les belles filles,
Lon la.
“Vieux bon peuple, à coups de béquilles,
Cassons ce Louvre où s’étala
La monarchie en falbala.
Où vont les belles filles,
Lon la.
“Nous en avons forcé les grilles,
Le roi Charles-Dix ce jour-là,
Tenait mal et se décolla.
Où vont les belles filles,
Lon la.”57
The post’s recourse to arms was not without result. The cart was
conquered, the drunken man was taken prisoner. The first was put in the
pound, the second was later on somewhat harassed before the councils of
war as an accomplice. The public ministry of the day proved its
indefatigable zeal in the defence of society, in this instance.
Gavroche’s adventure, which has lingered as a tradition in the quarters
of the Temple, is one of the most terrible souvenirs of the elderly
bourgeois of the Marais, and is entitled in their memories: “The
nocturnal attack by the post of the Royal Printing Establishment.”
[THE END OF VOLUME IV “SAINT DENIS”]
VOLUME V
JEAN VALJEAN
BOOK FIRST—THE WAR BETWEEN FOUR WALLS
CHAPTER I—THE CHARYBDIS OF THE FAUBOURG SAINT ANTOINE AND THE SCYLLA OF
THE FAUBOURG DU TEMPLE
The two most memorable barricades which the observer of social maladies
can name do not belong to the period in which the action of this work
is laid. These two barricades, both of them symbols, under two
different aspects, of a redoubtable situation, sprang from the earth at
the time of the fatal insurrection of June, 1848, the greatest war of
the streets that history has ever beheld.
It sometimes happens that, even contrary to principles, even contrary
to liberty, equality, and fraternity, even contrary to the universal
vote, even contrary to the government, by all for all, from the depths
of its anguish, of its discouragements and its destitutions, of its
fevers, of its distresses, of its miasmas, of its ignorances, of its
darkness, that great and despairing body, the rabble, protests against,
and that the populace wages battle against, the people.
Beggars attack the common right; the ochlocracy rises against demos.
These are melancholy days; for there is always a certain amount of
night even in this madness, there is suicide in this duel, and those
words which are intended to be insults—beggars, canaille, ochlocracy,
populace—exhibit, alas! rather the fault of those who reign than the
fault of those who suffer; rather the fault of the privileged than the
fault of the disinherited.
For our own part, we never pronounce those words without pain and
without respect, for when philosophy fathoms the facts to which they
correspond, it often finds many a grandeur beside these miseries.
Athens was an ochlocracy; the beggars were the making of Holland; the
populace saved Rome more than once; and the rabble followed Jesus
Christ.
There is no thinker who has not at times contemplated the magnificences
of the lower classes.
It was of this rabble that Saint Jerome was thinking, no doubt, and of
all these poor people and all these vagabonds and all these miserable
people whence sprang the apostles and the martyrs, when he uttered this
mysterious saying: _“Fex urbis, lex orbis,”_—the dregs of the city, the
law of the earth.
The exasperations of this crowd which suffers and bleeds, its violences
contrary to all sense, directed against the principles which are its
life, its masterful deeds against the right, are its popular _coups
d’état_ and should be repressed. The man of probity sacrifices himself,
and out of his very love for this crowd, he combats it. But how
excusable he feels it even while holding out against it! How he
venerates it even while resisting it! This is one of those rare moments
when, while doing that which it is one’s duty to do, one feels
something which disconcerts one, and which would dissuade one from
proceeding further; one persists, it is necessary, but conscience,
though satisfied, is sad, and the accomplishment of duty is complicated
with a pain at the heart.
June, 1848, let us hasten to say, was an exceptional fact, and almost
impossible of classification, in the philosophy of history. All the
words which we have just uttered, must be discarded, when it becomes a
question of this extraordinary revolt, in which one feels the holy
anxiety of toil claiming its rights. It was necessary to combat it, and
this was a duty, for it attacked the republic. But what was June, 1848,
at bottom? A revolt of the people against itself.
Where the subject is not lost sight of, there is no digression; may we,
then, be permitted to arrest the reader’s attention for a moment on the
two absolutely unique barricades of which we have just spoken and which
characterized this insurrection.
One blocked the entrance to the Faubourg Saint Antoine; the other
defended the approach to the Faubourg du Temple; those before whom
these two fearful masterpieces of civil war reared themselves beneath
the brilliant blue sky of June, will never forget them.
The Saint-Antoine barricade was tremendous; it was three stories high,
and seven hundred feet wide. It barred the vast opening of the
faubourg, that is to say, three streets, from angle to angle; ravined,
jagged, cut up, divided, crenelated, with an immense rent, buttressed
with piles that were bastions in themselves throwing out capes here and
there, powerfully backed up by two great promontories of houses of the
faubourg, it reared itself like a cyclopean dike at the end of the
formidable place which had seen the 14th of July. Nineteen barricades
were ranged, one behind the other, in the depths of the streets behind
this principal barricade. At the very sight of it, one felt the
agonizing suffering in the immense faubourg, which had reached that
point of extremity when a distress may become a catastrophe. Of what
was that barricade made? Of the ruins of three six-story houses
demolished expressly, said some. Of the prodigy of all wraths, said
others. It wore the lamentable aspect of all constructions of hatred,
ruin. It might be asked: Who built this? It might also be said: Who
destroyed this? It was the improvisation of the ebullition. Hold! take
this door! this grating! this penthouse! this chimney-piece! this
broken brazier! this cracked pot! Give all! cast away all! Push this
roll, dig, dismantle, overturn, ruin everything! It was the
collaboration of the pavement, the block of stone, the beam, the bar of
iron, the rag, the scrap, the broken pane, the unseated chair, the
cabbage-stalk, the tatter, the rag, and the malediction. It was grand
and it was petty. It was the abyss parodied on the public place by
hubbub. The mass beside the atom; the strip of ruined wall and the
broken bowl,—threatening fraternization of every sort of rubbish.
Sisyphus had thrown his rock there and Job his potsherd. Terrible, in
short. It was the acropolis of the barefooted. Overturned carts broke
the uniformity of the slope; an immense dray was spread out there
crossways, its axle pointing heavenward, and seemed a scar on that
tumultuous façade; an omnibus hoisted gayly, by main force, to the very
summit of the heap, as though the architects of this bit of savagery
had wished to add a touch of the street urchin humor to their terror,
presented its horseless, unharnessed pole to no one knows what horses
of the air. This gigantic heap, the alluvium of the revolt, figured to
the mind an Ossa on Pelion of all revolutions; ’93 on ’89, the 9th of
Thermidor on the 10th of August, the 18th of Brumaire on the 11th of
January, Vendemiaire on Prairial, 1848 on 1830. The situation deserved