Les Misérables
raw recruit and this sawbones in conflict will produce in that grand
epic field where humanity is striving, will equal the shadow cast by
Megaryon, King of Lycia, tiger-filled, crushing in his embrace the
immense body of Ajax, equal to the gods.
CHAPTER XXII—FOOT TO FOOT
When there were no longer any of the leaders left alive, except
Enjolras and Marius at the two extremities of the barricade, the
centre, which had so long sustained Courfeyrac, Joly, Bossuet, Feuilly
and Combeferre, gave way. The cannon, though it had not effected a
practicable breach, had made a rather large hollow in the middle of the
redoubt; there, the summit of the wall had disappeared before the
balls, and had crumbled away; and the rubbish which had fallen, now
inside, now outside, had, as it accumulated, formed two piles in the
nature of slopes on the two sides of the barrier, one on the inside,
the other on the outside. The exterior slope presented an inclined
plane to the attack.
A final assault was there attempted, and this assault succeeded. The
mass bristling with bayonets and hurled forward at a run, came up with
irresistible force, and the serried front of battle of the attacking
column made its appearance through the smoke on the crest of the
battlements. This time, it was decisive. The group of insurgents who
were defending the centre retreated in confusion.
Then the gloomy love of life awoke once more in some of them. Many,
finding themselves under the muzzles of this forest of guns, did not
wish to die. This is a moment when the instinct of self-preservation
emits howls, when the beast reappears in men. They were hemmed in by
the lofty, six-story house which formed the background of their
redoubt. This house might prove their salvation. The building was
barricaded, and walled, as it were, from top to bottom. Before the
troops of the line had reached the interior of the redoubt, there was
time for a door to open and shut, the space of a flash of lightning was
sufficient for that, and the door of that house, suddenly opened a
crack and closed again instantly, was life for these despairing men.
Behind this house, there were streets, possible flight, space. They set
to knocking at that door with the butts of their guns, and with kicks,
shouting, calling, entreating, wringing their hands. No one opened.
From the little window on the third floor, the head of the dead man
gazed down upon them.
But Enjolras and Marius, and the seven or eight rallied about them,
sprang forward and protected them. Enjolras had shouted to the
soldiers: “Don’t advance!” and as an officer had not obeyed, Enjolras
had killed the officer. He was now in the little inner court of the
redoubt, with his back planted against the Corinthe building, a sword
in one hand, a rifle in the other, holding open the door of the
wine-shop which he barred against assailants. He shouted to the
desperate men:—“There is but one door open; this one.”—And shielding
them with his body, and facing an entire battalion alone, he made them
pass in behind him. All precipitated themselves thither. Enjolras,
executing with his rifle, which he now used like a cane, what
single-stick players call a “covered rose” round his head, levelled the
bayonets around and in front of him, and was the last to enter; and
then ensued a horrible moment, when the soldiers tried to make their
way in, and the insurgents strove to bar them out. The door was slammed
with such violence, that, as it fell back into its frame, it showed the
five fingers of a soldier who had been clinging to it, cut off and
glued to the post.
Marius remained outside. A shot had just broken his collar bone, he
felt that he was fainting and falling. At that moment, with eyes
already shut, he felt the shock of a vigorous hand seizing him, and the
swoon in which his senses vanished, hardly allowed him time for the
thought, mingled with a last memory of Cosette:—“I am taken prisoner. I
shall be shot.”
Enjolras, not seeing Marius among those who had taken refuge in the
wine-shop, had the same idea. But they had reached a moment when each
man has not the time to meditate on his own death. Enjolras fixed the
bar across the door, and bolted it, and double-locked it with key and
chain, while those outside were battering furiously at it, the soldiers
with the butts of their muskets, the sappers with their axes. The
assailants were grouped about that door. The siege of the wine-shop was
now beginning.
The soldiers, we will observe, were full of wrath.
The death of the artillery-sergeant had enraged them, and then, a still
more melancholy circumstance. During the few hours which had preceded
the attack, it had been reported among them that the insurgents were
mutilating their prisoners, and that there was the headless body of a
soldier in the wine-shop. This sort of fatal rumor is the usual
accompaniment of civil wars, and it was a false report of this kind
which, later on, produced the catastrophe of the Rue Transnonain.
When the door was barricaded, Enjolras said to the others:
“Let us sell our lives dearly.”
Then he approached the table on which lay Mabeuf and Gavroche. Beneath
the black cloth two straight and rigid forms were visible, one large,
the other small, and the two faces were vaguely outlined beneath the
cold folds of the shroud. A hand projected from beneath the winding
sheet and hung near the floor. It was that of the old man.
Enjolras bent down and kissed that venerable hand, just as he had
kissed his brow on the preceding evening.
These were the only two kisses which he had bestowed in the course of
his life.
Let us abridge the tale. The barricade had fought like a gate of
Thebes; the wine-shop fought like a house of Saragossa. These
resistances are dogged. No quarter. No flag of truce possible. Men are
willing to die, provided their opponent will kill them.
When Suchet says:—“Capitulate,”—Palafox replies: “After the war with
cannon, the war with knives.” Nothing was lacking in the capture by
assault of the Hucheloup wine-shop; neither paving-stones raining from
the windows and the roof on the besiegers and exasperating the soldiers
by crushing them horribly, nor shots fired from the attic-windows and
the cellar, nor the fury of attack, nor, finally, when the door
yielded, the frenzied madness of extermination. The assailants, rushing
into the wine-shop, their feet entangled in the panels of the door
which had been beaten in and flung on the ground, found not a single
combatant there. The spiral staircase, hewn asunder with the axe, lay
in the middle of the tap-room, a few wounded men were just breathing
their last, every one who was not killed was on the first floor, and
from there, through the hole in the ceiling, which had formed the
entrance of the stairs, a terrific fire burst forth. It was the last of
their cartridges. When they were exhausted, when these formidable men
on the point of death had no longer either powder or ball, each grasped
in his hands two of the bottles which Enjolras had reserved, and of
which we have spoken, and held the scaling party in check with these
frightfully fragile clubs. They were bottles of aquafortis.
We relate these gloomy incidents of carnage as they occurred. The
besieged man, alas! converts everything into a weapon. Greek fire did
not disgrace Archimedes, boiling pitch did not disgrace Bayard. All war
is a thing of terror, and there is no choice in it. The musketry of the
besiegers, though confined and embarrassed by being directed from below
upwards, was deadly. The rim of the hole in the ceiling was speedily
surrounded by heads of the slain, whence dripped long, red and smoking
streams, the uproar was indescribable; a close and burning smoke almost
produced night over this combat. Words are lacking to express horror
when it has reached this pitch. There were no longer men in this
conflict, which was now infernal. They were no longer giants matched
with colossi. It resembled Milton and Dante rather than Homer. Demons
attacked, spectres resisted.
It was heroism become monstrous.
CHAPTER XXIII—ORESTES FASTING AND PYLADES DRUNK
At length, by dint of mounting on each other’s backs, aiding themselves
with the skeleton of the staircase, climbing up the walls, clinging to
the ceiling, slashing away at the very brink of the trap-door, the last
one who offered resistance, a score of assailants, soldiers, National
Guardsmen, municipal guardsmen, in utter confusion, the majority
disfigured by wounds in the face during that redoubtable ascent,
blinded by blood, furious, rendered savage, made an irruption into the
apartment on the first floor. There they found only one man still on
his feet, Enjolras. Without cartridges, without sword, he had nothing
in his hand now but the barrel of his gun whose stock he had broken
over the head of those who were entering. He had placed the billiard
table between his assailants and himself; he had retreated into the
corner of the room, and there, with haughty eye, and head borne high,
with this stump of a weapon in his hand, he was still so alarming as to
speedily create an empty space around him. A cry arose:
“He is the leader! It was he who slew the artillery-man. It is well
that he has placed himself there. Let him remain there. Let us shoot
him down on the spot.”
“Shoot me,” said Enjolras.
And flinging away his bit of gun-barrel, and folding his arms, he
offered his breast.
The audacity of a fine death always affects men. As soon as Enjolras
folded his arms and accepted his end, the din of strife ceased in the
room, and this chaos suddenly stilled into a sort of sepulchral
solemnity. The menacing majesty of Enjolras disarmed and motionless,
appeared to oppress this tumult, and this young man, haughty, bloody,
and charming, who alone had not a wound, who was as indifferent as an
invulnerable being, seemed, by the authority of his tranquil glance, to
constrain this sinister rabble to kill him respectfully. His beauty, at
that moment augmented by his pride, was resplendent, and he was fresh
and rosy after the fearful four and twenty hours which had just
elapsed, as though he could no more be fatigued than wounded. It was of
him, possibly, that a witness spoke afterwards, before the council of
war: “There was an insurgent whom I heard called Apollo.” A National
Guardsman who had taken aim at Enjolras, lowered his gun, saying: “It
seems to me that I am about to shoot a flower.”
Twelve men formed into a squad in the corner opposite Enjolras, and
silently made ready their guns.
Then a sergeant shouted:
“Take aim!”
An officer intervened.
“Wait.”
And addressing Enjolras:
“Do you wish to have your eyes bandaged?”
“No.”
“Was it you who killed the artillery sergeant?”
“Yes.”
Grantaire had waked up a few moments before.
Grantaire, it will be remembered, had been asleep ever since the
preceding evening in the upper room of the wine-shop, seated on a chair
and leaning on the table.
He realized in its fullest sense the old metaphor of “dead drunk.” The
hideous potion of absinthe-porter and alcohol had thrown him into a
lethargy. His table being small, and not suitable for the barricade, he
had been left in possession of it. He was still in the same posture,
with his breast bent over the table, his head lying flat on his arms,
surrounded by glasses, beer-jugs and bottles. His was the overwhelming
slumber of the torpid bear and the satiated leech. Nothing had had any
effect upon it, neither the fusillade, nor the cannon-balls, nor the
grape-shot which had made its way through the window into the room
where he was. Nor the tremendous uproar of the assault. He merely
replied to the cannonade, now and then, by a snore. He seemed to be