Les Misérables
Among the dead there were four National Guardsmen of the suburbs.
Enjolras had their uniforms laid aside.
Enjolras had advised two hours of sleep. Advice from Enjolras was a
command. Still, only three or four took advantage of it.
Feuilly employed these two hours in engraving this inscription on the
wall which faced the tavern:—
LONG LIVE THE PEOPLES!
These four words, hollowed out in the rough stone with a nail, could be
still read on the wall in 1848.
The three women had profited by the respite of the night to vanish
definitely; which allowed the insurgents to breathe more freely.
They had found means of taking refuge in some neighboring house.
The greater part of the wounded were able, and wished, to fight still.
On a litter of mattresses and trusses of straw in the kitchen, which
had been converted into an ambulance, there were five men gravely
wounded, two of whom were municipal guardsmen. The municipal guardsmen
were attended to first.
In the tap-room there remained only Mabeuf under his black cloth and
Javert bound to his post.
“This is the hall of the dead,” said Enjolras.
In the interior of this hall, barely lighted by a candle at one end,
the mortuary table being behind the post like a horizontal bar, a sort
of vast, vague cross resulted from Javert erect and Mabeuf lying prone.
The pole of the omnibus, although snapped off by the fusillade, was
still sufficiently upright to admit of their fastening the flag to it.
Enjolras, who possessed that quality of a leader, of always doing what
he said, attached to this staff the bullet-ridden and bloody coat of
the old man’s.
No repast had been possible. There was neither bread nor meat. The
fifty men in the barricade had speedily exhausted the scanty provisions
of the wine-shop during the sixteen hours which they had passed there.
At a given moment, every barricade inevitably becomes the raft of _la
Méduse_. They were obliged to resign themselves to hunger. They had
then reached the first hours of that Spartan day of the 6th of June
when, in the barricade Saint-Merry, Jeanne, surrounded by the
insurgents who demanded bread, replied to all combatants crying:
“Something to eat!” with: “Why? It is three o’clock; at four we shall
be dead.”
As they could no longer eat, Enjolras forbade them to drink. He
interdicted wine, and portioned out the brandy.
They had found in the cellar fifteen full bottles hermetically sealed.
Enjolras and Combeferre examined them. Combeferre when he came up again
said:—“It’s the old stock of Father Hucheloup, who began business as a
grocer.”—“It must be real wine,” observed Bossuet. “It’s lucky that
Grantaire is asleep. If he were on foot, there would be a good deal of
difficulty in saving those bottles.”—Enjolras, in spite of all murmurs,
placed his veto on the fifteen bottles, and, in order that no one might
touch them, he had them placed under the table on which Father Mabeuf
was lying.
About two o’clock in the morning, they reckoned up their strength.
There were still thirty-seven of them.
The day began to dawn. The torch, which had been replaced in its cavity
in the pavement, had just been extinguished. The interior of the
barricade, that species of tiny courtyard appropriated from the street,
was bathed in shadows, and resembled, athwart the vague, twilight
horror, the deck of a disabled ship. The combatants, as they went and
came, moved about there like black forms. Above that terrible
nesting-place of gloom the stories of the mute houses were lividly
outlined; at the very top, the chimneys stood palely out. The sky was
of that charming, undecided hue, which may be white and may be blue.
Birds flew about in it with cries of joy. The lofty house which formed
the back of the barricade, being turned to the East, had upon its roof
a rosy reflection. The morning breeze ruffled the gray hair on the head
of the dead man at the third-story window.
“I am delighted that the torch has been extinguished,” said Courfeyrac
to Feuilly. “That torch flickering in the wind annoyed me. It had the
appearance of being afraid. The light of torches resembles the wisdom
of cowards; it gives a bad light because it trembles.”
Dawn awakens minds as it does the birds; all began to talk.
Joly, perceiving a cat prowling on a gutter, extracted philosophy from
it.
“What is the cat?” he exclaimed. “It is a corrective. The good God,
having made the mouse, said: ‘Hullo! I have committed a blunder.’ And
so he made the cat. The cat is the erratum of the mouse. The mouse,
plus the cat, is the proof of creation revised and corrected.”
Combeferre, surrounded by students and artisans, was speaking of the
dead, of Jean Prouvaire, of Bahorel, of Mabeuf, and even of Cabuc, and
of Enjolras’ sad severity. He said:—
“Harmodius and Aristogiton, Brutus, Chereas, Stephanus, Cromwell,
Charlotte Corday, Sand, have all had their moment of agony when it was
too late. Our hearts quiver so, and human life is such a mystery that,
even in the case of a civic murder, even in a murder for liberation, if
there be such a thing, the remorse for having struck a man surpasses
the joy of having served the human race.”
And, such are the windings of the exchange of speech, that, a moment
later, by a transition brought about through Jean Prouvaire’s verses,
Combeferre was comparing the translators of the Georgics, Raux with
Cournand, Cournand with Delille, pointing out the passages translated
by Malfilâtre, particularly the prodigies of Cæsar’s death; and at that
word, Cæsar, the conversation reverted to Brutus.
“Cæsar,” said Combeferre, “fell justly. Cicero was severe towards
Cæsar, and he was right. That severity is not diatribe. When Zoïlus
insults Homer, when Mævius insults Virgil, when Visé insults Molière,
when Pope insults Shakspeare, when Frederic insults Voltaire, it is an
old law of envy and hatred which is being carried out; genius attracts
insult, great men are always more or less barked at. But Zoïlus and
Cicero are two different persons. Cicero is an arbiter in thought, just
as Brutus is an arbiter by the sword. For my own part, I blame that
last justice, the blade; but, antiquity admitted it. Cæsar, the
violator of the Rubicon, conferring, as though they came from him, the
dignities which emanated from the people, not rising at the entrance of
the senate, committed the acts of a king and almost of a tyrant, _regia
ac pene tyrannica_. He was a great man; so much the worse, or so much
the better; the lesson is but the more exalted. His twenty-three wounds
touch me less than the spitting in the face of Jesus Christ. Cæsar is
stabbed by the senators; Christ is cuffed by lackeys. One feels the God
through the greater outrage.”
Bossuet, who towered above the interlocutors from the summit of a heap
of paving-stones, exclaimed, rifle in hand:—
“Oh Cydathenæum, Oh Myrrhinus, Oh Probalinthus, Oh graces of the
Æantides! Oh! Who will grant me to pronounce the verses of Homer like a
Greek of Laurium or of Edapteon?”
CHAPTER III—LIGHT AND SHADOW
Enjolras had been to make a reconnaissance. He had made his way out
through Mondétour lane, gliding along close to the houses.
The insurgents, we will remark, were full of hope. The manner in which
they had repulsed the attack of the preceding night had caused them to
almost disdain in advance the attack at dawn. They waited for it with a
smile. They had no more doubt as to their success than as to their
cause. Moreover, succor was, evidently, on the way to them. They
reckoned on it. With that facility of triumphant prophecy which is one
of the sources of strength in the French combatant, they divided the
day which was at hand into three distinct phases. At six o’clock in the
morning a regiment “which had been labored with,” would turn; at noon,
the insurrection of all Paris; at sunset, revolution.
They heard the alarm bell of Saint-Merry, which had not been silent for
an instant since the night before; a proof that the other barricade,
the great one, Jeanne’s, still held out.
All these hopes were exchanged between the different groups in a sort
of gay and formidable whisper which resembled the warlike hum of a hive
of bees.
Enjolras reappeared. He returned from his sombre eagle flight into
outer darkness. He listened for a moment to all this joy with folded
arms, and one hand on his mouth. Then, fresh and rosy in the growing
whiteness of the dawn, he said:
“The whole army of Paris is to strike. A third of the army is bearing
down upon the barricades in which you now are. There is the National
Guard in addition. I have picked out the shakos of the fifth of the
line, and the standard-bearers of the sixth legion. In one hour you
will be attacked. As for the populace, it was seething yesterday,
to-day it is not stirring. There is nothing to expect; nothing to hope
for. Neither from a faubourg nor from a regiment. You are abandoned.”
These words fell upon the buzzing of the groups, and produced on them
the effect caused on a swarm of bees by the first drops of a storm. A
moment of indescribable silence ensued, in which death might have been
heard flitting by.
This moment was brief.
A voice from the obscurest depths of the groups shouted to Enjolras:
“So be it. Let us raise the barricade to a height of twenty feet, and
let us all remain in it. Citizens, let us offer the protests of
corpses. Let us show that, if the people abandon the republicans, the
republicans do not abandon the people.”
These words freed the thought of all from the painful cloud of
individual anxieties. It was hailed with an enthusiastic acclamation.
No one ever has known the name of the man who spoke thus; he was some
unknown blouse-wearer, a stranger, a man forgotten, a passing hero,
that great anonymous, always mingled in human crises and in social
geneses who, at a given moment, utters in a supreme fashion the
decisive word, and who vanishes into the shadows after having
represented for a minute, in a lightning flash, the people and God.
This inexorable resolution so thoroughly impregnated the air of the 6th
of June, 1832, that, almost at the very same hour, on the barricade
Saint-Merry, the insurgents were raising that clamor which has become a
matter of history and which has been consigned to the documents in the
case:—“What matters it whether they come to our assistance or not? Let
us get ourselves killed here, to the very last man.”
As the reader sees, the two barricades, though materially isolated,
were in communication with each other.
CHAPTER IV—MINUS FIVE, PLUS ONE
After the man who decreed the “protest of corpses” had spoken, and had
given this formula of their common soul, there issued from all mouths a
strangely satisfied and terrible cry, funereal in sense and triumphant
in tone:
“Long live death! Let us all remain here!”
“Why all?” said Enjolras.
“All! All!”
Enjolras resumed:
“The position is good; the barricade is fine. Thirty men are enough.
Why sacrifice forty?”
They replied:
“Because not one will go away.”
“Citizens,” cried Enjolras, and there was an almost irritated vibration
in his voice, “this republic is not rich enough in men to indulge in
useless expenditure of them. Vain-glory is waste. If the duty of some
is to depart, that duty should be fulfilled like any other.”
Enjolras, the man-principle, had over his co-religionists that sort of
omnipotent power which emanates from the absolute. Still, great as was
this omnipotence, a murmur arose. A leader to the very finger-tips,
Enjolras, seeing that they murmured, insisted. He resumed haughtily:
“Let those who are afraid of not numbering more than thirty say so.”
The murmurs redoubled.