Les Misérables
waiting there for a bullet which should spare him the trouble of
waking. Many corpses were strewn around him; and, at the first glance,
there was nothing to distinguish him from those profound sleepers of
death.
Noise does not rouse a drunken man; silence awakens him. The fall of
everything around him only augmented Grantaire’s prostration; the
crumbling of all things was his lullaby. The sort of halt which the
tumult underwent in the presence of Enjolras was a shock to this heavy
slumber. It had the effect of a carriage going at full speed, which
suddenly comes to a dead stop. The persons dozing within it wake up.
Grantaire rose to his feet with a start, stretched out his arms, rubbed
his eyes, stared, yawned, and understood.
A fit of drunkenness reaching its end resembles a curtain which is torn
away. One beholds, at a single glance and as a whole, all that it has
concealed. All suddenly presents itself to the memory; and the drunkard
who has known nothing of what has been taking place during the last
twenty-four hours, has no sooner opened his eyes than he is perfectly
informed. Ideas recur to him with abrupt lucidity; the obliteration of
intoxication, a sort of steam which has obscured the brain, is
dissipated, and makes way for the clear and sharply outlined
importunity of realities.
Relegated, as he was, to one corner, and sheltered behind the
billiard-table, the soldiers whose eyes were fixed on Enjolras, had not
even noticed Grantaire, and the sergeant was preparing to repeat his
order: “Take aim!” when all at once, they heard a strong voice shout
beside them:
“Long live the Republic! I’m one of them.”
Grantaire had risen. The immense gleam of the whole combat which he had
missed, and in which he had had no part, appeared in the brilliant
glance of the transfigured drunken man.
He repeated: “Long live the Republic!” crossed the room with a firm
stride and placed himself in front of the guns beside Enjolras.
“Finish both of us at one blow,” said he.
And turning gently to Enjolras, he said to him:
“Do you permit it?”
Enjolras pressed his hand with a smile.
This smile was not ended when the report resounded.
Enjolras, pierced by eight bullets, remained leaning against the wall,
as though the balls had nailed him there. Only, his head was bowed.
Grantaire fell at his feet, as though struck by a thunderbolt.
A few moments later, the soldiers dislodged the last remaining
insurgents, who had taken refuge at the top of the house. They fired
into the attic through a wooden lattice. They fought under the very
roof. They flung bodies, some of them still alive, out through the
windows. Two light-infantrymen, who tried to lift the shattered
omnibus, were slain by two shots fired from the attic. A man in a
blouse was flung down from it, with a bayonet wound in the abdomen, and
breathed his last on the ground. A soldier and an insurgent slipped
together on the sloping slates of the roof, and, as they would not
release each other, they fell, clasped in a ferocious embrace. A
similar conflict went on in the cellar. Shouts, shots, a fierce
trampling. Then silence. The barricade was captured.
The soldiers began to search the houses round about, and to pursue the
fugitives.
CHAPTER XXIV—PRISONER
Marius was, in fact, a prisoner.
The hand which had seized him from behind and whose grasp he had felt
at the moment of his fall and his loss of consciousness was that of
Jean Valjean.
Jean Valjean had taken no other part in the combat than to expose
himself in it. Had it not been for him, no one, in that supreme phase
of agony, would have thought of the wounded. Thanks to him, everywhere
present in the carnage, like a providence, those who fell were picked
up, transported to the tap-room, and cared for. In the intervals, he
reappeared on the barricade. But nothing which could resemble a blow,
an attack or even personal defence proceeded from his hands. He held
his peace and lent succor. Moreover, he had received only a few
scratches. The bullets would have none of him. If suicide formed part
of what he had meditated on coming to this sepulchre, to that spot, he
had not succeeded. But we doubt whether he had thought of suicide, an
irreligious act.
Jean Valjean, in the thick cloud of the combat, did not appear to see
Marius; the truth is, that he never took his eyes from the latter. When
a shot laid Marius low, Jean Valjean leaped forward with the agility of
a tiger, fell upon him as on his prey, and bore him off.
The whirlwind of the attack was, at that moment, so violently
concentrated upon Enjolras and upon the door of the wine-shop, that no
one saw Jean Valjean sustaining the fainting Marius in his arms,
traverse the unpaved field of the barricade and disappear behind the
angle of the Corinthe building.
The reader will recall this angle which formed a sort of cape on the
street; it afforded shelter from the bullets, the grape-shot, and all
eyes, and a few square feet of space. There is sometimes a chamber
which does not burn in the midst of a conflagration, and in the midst
of raging seas, beyond a promontory or at the extremity of a blind
alley of shoals, a tranquil nook. It was in this sort of fold in the
interior trapezium of the barricade, that Éponine had breathed her
last.
There Jean Valjean halted, let Marius slide to the ground, placed his
back against the wall, and cast his eyes about him.
The situation was alarming.
For an instant, for two or three perhaps, this bit of wall was a
shelter, but how was he to escape from this massacre? He recalled the
anguish which he had suffered in the Rue Polonceau eight years before,
and in what manner he had contrived to make his escape; it was
difficult then, to-day it was impossible. He had before him that deaf
and implacable house, six stories in height, which appeared to be
inhabited only by a dead man leaning out of his window; he had on his
right the rather low barricade, which shut off the Rue de la Petite
Truanderie; to pass this obstacle seemed easy, but beyond the crest of
the barrier a line of bayonets was visible. The troops of the line were
posted on the watch behind that barricade. It was evident, that to pass
the barricade was to go in quest of the fire of the platoon, and that
any head which should run the risk of lifting itself above the top of
that wall of stones would serve as a target for sixty shots. On his
left he had the field of battle. Death lurked round the corner of that
wall.
What was to be done?
Only a bird could have extricated itself from this predicament.
And it was necessary to decide on the instant, to devise some
expedient, to come to some decision. Fighting was going on a few paces
away; fortunately, all were raging around a single point, the door of
the wine-shop; but if it should occur to one soldier, to one single
soldier, to turn the corner of the house, or to attack him on the
flank, all was over.
Jean Valjean gazed at the house facing him, he gazed at the barricade
at one side of him, then he looked at the ground, with the violence of
the last extremity, bewildered, and as though he would have liked to
pierce a hole there with his eyes.
By dint of staring, something vaguely striking in such an agony began
to assume form and outline at his feet, as though it had been a power
of glance which made the thing desired unfold. A few paces distant he
perceived, at the base of the small barrier so pitilessly guarded and
watched on the exterior, beneath a disordered mass of paving-stones
which partly concealed it, an iron grating, placed flat and on a level
with the soil. This grating, made of stout, transverse bars, was about
two feet square. The frame of paving-stones which supported it had been
torn up, and it was, as it were, unfastened.
Through the bars a view could be had of a dark aperture, something like
the flue of a chimney, or the pipe of a cistern. Jean Valjean darted
forward. His old art of escape rose to his brain like an illumination.
To thrust aside the stones, to raise the grating, to lift Marius, who
was as inert as a dead body, upon his shoulders, to descend, with this
burden on his loins, and with the aid of his elbows and knees into that
sort of well, fortunately not very deep, to let the heavy trap, upon
which the loosened stones rolled down afresh, fall into its place
behind him, to gain his footing on a flagged surface three metres below
the surface,—all this was executed like that which one does in dreams,
with the strength of a giant and the rapidity of an eagle; this took
only a few minutes.
Jean Valjean found himself with Marius, who was still unconscious, in a
sort of long, subterranean corridor.
There reigned profound peace, absolute silence, night.
The impression which he had formerly experienced when falling from the
wall into the convent recurred to him. Only, what he was carrying
to-day was not Cosette; it was Marius. He could barely hear the
formidable tumult in the wine-shop, taken by assault, like a vague
murmur overhead.
BOOK SECOND—THE INTESTINE OF THE LEVIATHAN
CHAPTER I—THE LAND IMPOVERISHED BY THE SEA
Paris casts twenty-five millions yearly into the water. And this
without metaphor. How, and in what manner? Day and night. With what
object? With no object. With what intention? With no intention. Why?
For no reason. By means of what organ? By means of its intestine. What
is its intestine? The sewer.
Twenty-five millions is the most moderate approximative figure which
the valuations of special science have set upon it.
Science, after having long groped about, now knows that the most
fecundating and the most efficacious of fertilizers is human manure.
The Chinese, let us confess it to our shame, knew it before us. Not a
Chinese peasant—it is Eckberg who says this,—goes to town without
bringing back with him, at the two extremities of his bamboo pole, two
full buckets of what we designate as filth. Thanks to human dung, the
earth in China is still as young as in the days of Abraham. Chinese
wheat yields a hundred fold of the seed. There is no guano comparable
in fertility with the detritus of a capital. A great city is the most
mighty of dung-makers. Certain success would attend the experiment of
employing the city to manure the plain. If our gold is manure, our
manure, on the other hand, is gold.
What is done with this golden manure? It is swept into the abyss.
Fleets of vessels are despatched, at great expense, to collect the dung
of petrels and penguins at the South Pole, and the incalculable element
of opulence which we have on hand, we send to the sea. All the human
and animal manure which the world wastes, restored to the land instead
of being cast into the water, would suffice to nourish the world.
Those heaps of filth at the gate-posts, those tumbrils of mud which
jolt through the street by night, those terrible casks of the street
department, those fetid drippings of subterranean mire, which the
pavements hide from you,—do you know what they are? They are the meadow
in flower, the green grass, wild thyme, thyme and sage, they are game,
they are cattle, they are the satisfied bellows of great oxen in the
evening, they are perfumed hay, they are golden wheat, they are the
bread on your table, they are the warm blood in your veins, they are
health, they are joy, they are life. This is the will of that
mysterious creation which is transformation on earth and
transfiguration in heaven.
Restore this to the great crucible; your abundance will flow forth from
it. The nutrition of the plains furnishes the nourishment of men.
You have it in your power to lose this wealth, and to consider me
ridiculous to boot. This will form the master-piece of your ignorance.