Les Misérables
celebrated expression of one of them. For his part, he thought the
barricade ripe, and as that which is ripe ought to fall, he made the
attempt.
He commanded men as resolute as himself, “raging fellows,” as a witness
said. His company, the same which had shot Jean Prouvaire the poet, was
the first of the battalion posted at the angle of the street. At the
moment when they were least expecting it, the captain launched his men
against the barricade. This movement, executed with more good will than
strategy, cost the Fannicot company dear. Before it had traversed two
thirds of the street it was received by a general discharge from the
barricade. Four, the most audacious, who were running on in front, were
mown down point-blank at the very foot of the redoubt, and this
courageous throng of National Guards, very brave men but lacking in
military tenacity, were forced to fall back, after some hesitation,
leaving fifteen corpses on the pavement. This momentary hesitation gave
the insurgents time to re-load their weapons, and a second and very
destructive discharge struck the company before it could regain the
corner of the street, its shelter. A moment more, and it was caught
between two fires, and it received the volley from the battery piece
which, not having received the order, had not discontinued its firing.
The intrepid and imprudent Fannicot was one of the dead from this
grape-shot. He was killed by the cannon, that is to say, by order.
This attack, which was more furious than serious, irritated
Enjolras.—“The fools!” said he. “They are getting their own men killed
and they are using up our ammunition for nothing.”
Enjolras spoke like the real general of insurrection which he was.
Insurrection and repression do not fight with equal weapons.
Insurrection, which is speedily exhausted, has only a certain number of
shots to fire and a certain number of combatants to expend. An empty
cartridge-box, a man killed, cannot be replaced. As repression has the
army, it does not count its men, and, as it has Vincennes, it does not
count its shots. Repression has as many regiments as the barricade has
men, and as many arsenals as the barricade has cartridge-boxes. Thus
they are struggles of one against a hundred, which always end in
crushing the barricade; unless the revolution, uprising suddenly,
flings into the balance its flaming archangel’s sword. This does happen
sometimes. Then everything rises, the pavements begin to seethe,
popular redoubts abound. Paris quivers supremely, the _quid divinum_ is
given forth, a 10th of August is in the air, a 29th of July is in the
air, a wonderful light appears, the yawning maw of force draws back,
and the army, that lion, sees before it, erect and tranquil, that
prophet, France.
CHAPTER XIII—PASSING GLEAMS
In the chaos of sentiments and passions which defend a barricade, there
is a little of everything; there is bravery, there is youth, honor,
enthusiasm, the ideal, conviction, the rage of the gambler, and, above
all, intermittences of hope.
One of these intermittences, one of these vague quivers of hope
suddenly traversed the barricade of the Rue de la Chanvrerie at the
moment when it was least expected.
“Listen,” suddenly cried Enjolras, who was still on the watch, “it
seems to me that Paris is waking up.”
It is certain that, on the morning of the 6th of June, the insurrection
broke out afresh for an hour or two, to a certain extent. The obstinacy
of the alarm peal of Saint-Merry reanimated some fancies. Barricades
were begun in the Rue du Poirier and the Rue des Gravilliers. In front
of the Porte Saint-Martin, a young man, armed with a rifle, attacked
alone a squadron of cavalry. In plain sight, on the open boulevard, he
placed one knee on the ground, shouldered his weapon, fired, killed the
commander of the squadron, and turned away, saying: “There’s another
who will do us no more harm.”
He was put to the sword. In the Rue Saint-Denis, a woman fired on the
National Guard from behind a lowered blind. The slats of the blind
could be seen to tremble at every shot. A child fourteen years of age
was arrested in the Rue de la Cossonerie, with his pockets full of
cartridges. Many posts were attacked. At the entrance to the Rue
Bertin-Poirée, a very lively and utterly unexpected fusillade welcomed
a regiment of cuirrassiers, at whose head marched Marshal General
Cavaignac de Barague. In the Rue Planche-Mibray, they threw old pieces
of pottery and household utensils down on the soldiers from the roofs;
a bad sign; and when this matter was reported to Marshal Soult,
Napoleon’s old lieutenant grew thoughtful, as he recalled Suchet’s
saying at Saragossa: “We are lost when the old women empty their pots
de chambre on our heads.”
These general symptoms which presented themselves at the moment when it
was thought that the uprising had been rendered local, this fever of
wrath, these sparks which flew hither and thither above those deep
masses of combustibles which are called the faubourgs of Paris,—all
this, taken together, disturbed the military chiefs. They made haste to
stamp out these beginnings of conflagration.
They delayed the attack on the barricades Maubuée, de la Chanvrerie and
Saint-Merry until these sparks had been extinguished, in order that
they might have to deal with the barricades only and be able to finish
them at one blow. Columns were thrown into the streets where there was
fermentation, sweeping the large, sounding the small, right and left,
now slowly and cautiously, now at full charge. The troops broke in the
doors of houses whence shots had been fired; at the same time,
manœuvres by the cavalry dispersed the groups on the boulevards. This
repression was not effected without some commotion, and without that
tumultuous uproar peculiar to collisions between the army and the
people. This was what Enjolras had caught in the intervals of the
cannonade and the musketry. Moreover, he had seen wounded men passing
the end of the street in litters, and he said to Courfeyrac:—“Those
wounded do not come from us.”
Their hope did not last long; the gleam was quickly eclipsed. In less
than half an hour, what was in the air vanished, it was a flash of
lightning unaccompanied by thunder, and the insurgents felt that sort
of leaden cope, which the indifference of the people casts over
obstinate and deserted men, fall over them once more.
The general movement, which seemed to have assumed a vague outline, had
miscarried; and the attention of the minister of war and the strategy
of the generals could now be concentrated on the three or four
barricades which still remained standing.
The sun was mounting above the horizon.
An insurgent hailed Enjolras.
“We are hungry here. Are we really going to die like this, without
anything to eat?”
Enjolras, who was still leaning on his elbows at his embrasure, made an
affirmative sign with his head, but without taking his eyes from the
end of the street.
CHAPTER XIV—WHEREIN WILL APPEAR THE NAME OF ENJOLRAS’ MISTRESS
Courfeyrac, seated on a paving-stone beside Enjolras, continued to
insult the cannon, and each time that that gloomy cloud of projectiles
which is called grape-shot passed overhead with its terrible sound he
assailed it with a burst of irony.
“You are wearing out your lungs, poor, brutal, old fellow, you pain me,
you are wasting your row. That’s not thunder, it’s a cough.”
And the bystanders laughed.
Courfeyrac and Bossuet, whose brave good humor increased with the
peril, like Madame Scarron, replaced nourishment with pleasantry, and,
as wine was lacking, they poured out gayety to all.
“I admire Enjolras,” said Bossuet. “His impassive temerity astounds me.
He lives alone, which renders him a little sad, perhaps; Enjolras
complains of his greatness, which binds him to widowhood. The rest of
us have mistresses, more or less, who make us crazy, that is to say,
brave. When a man is as much in love as a tiger, the least that he can
do is to fight like a lion. That is one way of taking our revenge for
the capers that mesdames our grisettes play on us. Roland gets himself
killed for Angélique; all our heroism comes from our women. A man
without a woman is a pistol without a trigger; it is the woman that
sets the man off. Well, Enjolras has no woman. He is not in love, and
yet he manages to be intrepid. It is a thing unheard of that a man
should be as cold as ice and as bold as fire.”
Enjolras did not appear to be listening, but had any one been near him,
that person would have heard him mutter in a low voice: “Patria.”
Bossuet was still laughing when Courfeyrac exclaimed:
“News!”
And assuming the tone of an usher making an announcement, he added:
“My name is Eight-Pounder.”
In fact, a new personage had entered on the scene. This was a second
piece of ordnance.
The artillery-men rapidly performed their manœuvres in force and placed
this second piece in line with the first.
This outlined the catastrophe.
A few minutes later, the two pieces, rapidly served, were firing
point-blank at the redoubt; the platoon firing of the line and of the
soldiers from the suburbs sustained the artillery.
Another cannonade was audible at some distance. At the same time that
the two guns were furiously attacking the redoubt from the Rue de la
Chanvrerie, two other cannons, trained one from the Rue Saint-Denis,
the other from the Rue Aubry-le-Boucher, were riddling the Saint-Merry
barricade. The four cannons echoed each other mournfully.
The barking of these sombre dogs of war replied to each other.
One of the two pieces which was now battering the barricade on the Rue
de la Chanvrerie was firing grape-shot, the other balls.
The piece which was firing balls was pointed a little high, and the aim
was calculated so that the ball struck the extreme edge of the upper
crest of the barricade, and crumbled the stone down upon the
insurgents, mingled with bursts of grape-shot.
The object of this mode of firing was to drive the insurgents from the
summit of the redoubt, and to compel them to gather close in the
interior, that is to say, this announced the assault.
The combatants once driven from the crest of the barricade by balls,
and from the windows of the cabaret by grape-shot, the attacking
columns could venture into the street without being picked off,
perhaps, even, without being seen, could briskly and suddenly scale the
redoubt, as on the preceding evening, and, who knows? take it by
surprise.
“It is absolutely necessary that the inconvenience of those guns should
be diminished,” said Enjolras, and he shouted: “Fire on the
artillery-men!”
All were ready. The barricade, which had long been silent, poured forth
a desperate fire; seven or eight discharges followed, with a sort of
rage and joy; the street was filled with blinding smoke, and, at the
end of a few minutes, athwart this mist all streaked with flame, two
thirds of the gunners could be distinguished lying beneath the wheels
of the cannons. Those who were left standing continued to serve the
pieces with severe tranquillity, but the fire had slackened.
“Things are going well now,” said Bossuet to Enjolras. “Success.”
Enjolras shook his head and replied:
“Another quarter of an hour of this success, and there will not be any
cartridges left in the barricade.”
It appears that Gavroche overheard this remark.
CHAPTER XV—GAVROCHE OUTSIDE
Courfeyrac suddenly caught sight of some one at the base of the
barricade, outside in the street, amid the bullets.
Gavroche had taken a bottle basket from the wine-shop, had made his way
out through the cut, and was quietly engaged in emptying the full