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'etat 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 facade;
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 the trouble and this barricade was worthy
to figure on the very spot whence the Bastille had disappeared. 
If the ocean made dikes, it is thus that it would build. 
The fury of the flood was stamped upon this shapeless mass. 
What flood?  The crowd.  One thought one beheld hubbub petrified. 
One thought one heard humming above this barricade as though there
had been over their hive, enormous, dark bees of violent progress. 
Was it a thicket?  Was it a bacchanalia?  Was it a fortress? 
Vertigo seemed to have constructed it with blows of its wings. 
There was something of the cess-pool in that redoubt and something
Olympian in that confusion.  One there beheld in a pell-mell
full of despair, the rafters of roofs, bits of garret windows
with their figured paper, window sashes with their glass planted
there in the ruins awaiting the cannon, wrecks of chimneys,
cupboards, tables, benches, howling topsyturveydom, and those
thousand poverty-stricken things, the very refuse of the mendicant,
which contain at the same time fury and nothingness.  One would have
said that it was the tatters of a people, rags of wood, of iron,
of bronze, of stone, and that the Faubourg Saint Antoine had thrust
it there at its door, with a colossal flourish of the broom making
of its misery its barricade.  Blocks resembling headsman's blocks,
dislocated chains, pieces of woodwork with brackets having the
form of gibbets, horizontal wheels projecting from the rubbish,
amalgamated with this edifice of anarchy the sombre figure of the
old tortures endured by the people.  The barricade Saint Antoine
converted everything into a weapon; everything that civil war could
throw at the head of society proceeded thence; it was not combat,
it was a paroxysm; the carbines which defended this redoubt,
among which there were some blunderbusses, sent bits of earthenware
bones, coat-buttons, even the casters from night-stands, dangerous
projectiles on account of the brass.  This barricade was furious;
it hurled to the clouds an inexpressible clamor; at certain moments,
when provoking the army, it was covered with throngs and tempest;
a tumultuous crowd of flaming heads crowned it; a swarm filled it;
it had a thorny crest of guns, of sabres, of cudgels, of axes,
of pikes and of bayonets; a vast red flag flapped in the wind;
shouts of command, songs of attack, the roll of drums, the sobs
of women and bursts of gloomy laughter from the starving were to
be heard there.  It was huge and living, and, like the back of an
electric beast, there proceeded from it little flashes of lightning. 
The spirit of revolution covered with its cloud this summit where
rumbled that voice of the people which resembles the voice of God;
a strange majesty was emitted by this titanic basket of rubbish. 
It was a heap of filth and it was Sinai.

As we have said previously, it attacked in the name of
the revolution--what?  The revolution.  It--that barricade,
chance, hazard, disorder, terror, misunderstanding, the unknown--
had facing it the Constituent Assembly, the sovereignty
of the people, universal suffrage, the nation, the republic;
and it was the Carmagnole bidding defiance to the Marseillaise.

Immense but heroic defiance, for the old faubourg is a hero.

The faubourg and its redoubt lent each other assistance.  The faubourg
shouldered the redoubt, the redoubt took its stand under cover
of the faubourg.  The vast barricade spread out like a cliff against
which the strategy of the African generals dashed itself.  Its caverns,
its excrescences, its warts, its gibbosities, grimaced, so to speak,
and grinned beneath the smoke.  The mitraille vanished in shapelessness;
the bombs plunged into it; bullets only succeeded in making holes
in it; what was the use of cannonading chaos? and the regiments,
accustomed to the fiercest visions of war, gazed with uneasy eyes
on that species of redoubt, a wild beast in its boar-like bristling
and a mountain by its enormous size.

A quarter of a league away, from the corner of the Rue du Temple
which debouches on the boulevard near the Chateaud'Eau, if one
thrust one's head bodily beyond the point formed by the front of the
Dallemagne shop, one perceived in the distance, beyond the canal,
in the street which mounts the slopes of Belleville at the culminating
point of the rise, a strange wall reaching to the second story of
the house fronts, a sort of hyphen between the houses on the right
and the houses on the left, as though the street had folded back
on itself its loftiest wall in order to close itself abruptly. 
This wall was built of paving-stones. It was straight, correct, cold,
perpendicular, levelled with the square, laid out by rule and line. 
Cement was lacking, of course, but, as in the case of certain
Roman walls, without interfering with its rigid architecture. 
The entablature was mathematically parallel with the base. 
From distance to distance, one could distinguish on the gray surface,
almost invisible loopholes which resembled black threads. 
These loopholes were separated from each other by equal spaces. 
The street was deserted as far as the eye could reach.  All windows
and doors were closed.  In the background rose this barrier, which made
a blind thoroughfare of the street, a motionless and tranquil wall;
no one was visible, nothing was audible; not a cry, not a sound,
not a breath.  A sepulchre.

The dazzling sun of June inundated this terrible thing with light.

It was the barricade of the Faubourg of the Temple.

As soon as one arrived on the spot, and caught sight of it,
it was impossible, even for the boldest, not to become thoughtful
before this mysterious apparition.  It was adjusted, jointed,
imbricated, rectilinear, symmetrical and funereal.  Science and
gloom met there.  One felt that the chief of this barricade
was a geometrician or a spectre.  One looked at it and spoke low.

From time to time, if some soldier, an officer or representative
of the people, chanced to traverse the deserted highway, a faint,
sharp whistle was heard, and the passer-by fell dead or wounded, or,
if he escaped the bullet, sometimes a biscaien was seen to ensconce
itself in some closed shutter, in the interstice between two blocks
of stone, or in the plaster of a wall.  For the men in the barricade
had made themselves two small cannons out of two cast-iron lengths
of gas-pipe, plugged up at one end with tow and fire-clay.
There was no waste of useless powder.  Nearly every shot told. 
There were corpses here and there, and pools of blood on the pavement. 
I remember a white butterfly which went and came in the street. 
Summer does not abdicate.

In the neighborhood, the spaces beneath the portes cocheres were
encumbered with wounded.

One felt oneself aimed at by some person whom one did not see,
and one understood that guns were levelled at the whole length
of the street.

Massed behind the sort of sloping ridge which the vaulted canal
forms at the entrance to the Faubourg du Temple, the soldiers
of the attacking column, gravely and thoughtfully, watched this
dismal redoubt, this immobility, this passivity, whence sprang death. 
Some crawled flat on their faces as far as the crest of the curve
of the bridge, taking care that their shakos did not project beyond it.

The valiant Colonel Monteynard admired this barricade with a
shudder.--"How that is built!" he said to a Representative. 
"Not one paving-stone projects beyond its neighbor.  It is made
of porcelain."--At that moment, a bullet broke the cross on his breast,
and he fell.

"The cowards!" people said.  "Let them show themselves.  Let us
see them!  They dare not!  They are hiding!"

The barricade of the Faubourg du Temple, defended by eighty men,
attacked by ten thousand, held out for three days.  On the fourth,
they did as at Zaatcha, as at Constantine, they pierced the houses,
they came over the roofs, the barricade was taken.  Not one
of the eighty cowards thought of flight, all were killed there
with the exception of the leader, Barthelemy, of whom we shall
speak presently.

The Saint-Antoine barricade was the tumult of thunders; the barricade
of the Temple was silence.  The difference between these two redoubts
was the difference between the formidable and the sinister. 
One seemed a maw; the other a mask.

Admitting that the gigantic and gloomy insurrection of June was
composed of a wrath and of an enigma, one divined in the first
barricade the dragon, and behind the second the sphinx.

These two fortresses had been erected by two men named,
the one, Cournet, the other, Barthelemy.  Cournet made the
Saint-Antoine barricade; Barthelemy the barricade of the Temple. 
Each was the image of the man who had built it.

Cournet was a man of lofty stature; he had broad shoulders, a red face,
a crushing fist, a bold heart, a loyal soul, a sincere and terrible eye. 
Intrepid, energetic, irascible, stormy; the most cordial of men,
the most formidable of combatants.  War, strife, conflict, were the
very air he breathed and put him in a good humor.  He had been an
officer in the navy, and, from his gestures and his voice, one divined
that he sprang from the ocean, and that he came from the tempest;
he carried the hurricane on into battle.  With the exception
of the genius, there was in Cournet something of Danton, as, with
the exception of the divinity, there was in Danton something of Hercules.

Barthelemy, thin, feeble, pale, taciturn, was a sort of tragic
street urchin, who, having had his ears boxed by a policeman,
lay in wait for him, and killed him, and at seventeen was sent
to the galleys.  He came out and made this barricade.

Later on, fatal circumstance, in London, proscribed by all,
Barthelemy slew Cournet.  It was a funereal duel.  Some time afterwards,
caught in the gearing of one of those mysterious adventures in
which passion plays a part, a catastrophe in which French justice
sees extenuating circumstances, and in which English justice sees
only death, Barthelemy was hanged.  The sombre social construction
is so made that, thanks to material destitution, thanks to
moral obscurity, that unhappy being who possessed an intelligence,
certainly firm, possibly great, began in France with the galleys,
and ended in England with the gallows.  Barthelemy, on occasion,
flew but one flag, the black flag.



CHAPTER II

WHAT IS TO BE DONE IN THE ABYSS IF ONE DOES NOT CONVERSE


Sixteen years count in the subterranean education of insurrection,
and June, 1848, knew a great deal more about it than June, 1832. 
So the barricade of the Rue de la Chanvrerie was only an outline,
and an embryo compared to the two colossal barricades which we have
just sketched; but it was formidable for that epoch.

The insurgents under the eye of Enjolras, for Marius no longer looked
after anything, had made good use of the night.  The barricade had
been not only repaired, but augmented.  They had raised it two feet. 
Bars of iron planted in the pavement resembled lances in rest. 
All sorts of rubbish brought and added from all directions complicated
the external confusion.  The redoubt had been cleverly made over,
into a wall on the inside and a thicket on the outside.

The staircase of paving-stones which permitted one to mount it
like the wall of a citadel had been reconstructed.

The barricade had been put in order, the tap-room disencumbered,
the kitchen appropriated for the ambulance, the dressing of the
wounded completed, the powder scattered on the ground and on the
tables had been gathered up, bullets run, cartridges manufactured,
lint scraped, the fallen weapons re-distributed, the interior
of the redoubt cleaned, the rubbish swept up, corpses removed.

They laid the dead in a heap in the Mondetour lane, of which they were
still the masters.  The pavement was red for a long time at that spot. 
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 Meduse.  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 Malfilatre, particularly the prodigies of Caesar's death;
and at that word, Caesar, the conversation reverted to Brutus.

"Caesar," said Combeferre, "fell justly.  Cicero was severe towards
Caesar, and he was right.  That severity is not diatribe.  When Zoilus
insults Homer, when Maevius insults Virgil, when Vise insults Moliere,
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 Zoilus 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. 
Caesar, 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. 
Caesar 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 Cydathenaeum, Oh Myrrhinus, Oh Probalinthus, Oh graces of
the AEantides!  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 Mondetour 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.

"Besides," observed a voice in one group, "it is easy enough to talk
about leaving.  The barricade is hemmed in."

"Not on the side of the Halles," said Enjolras.  "The Rue Mondetour
is free, and through the Rue des Precheurs one can reach the Marche
des Innocents."

"And there," went on another voice, "you would be captured. 
You would fall in with some grand guard of the line or the suburbs;
they will spy a man passing in blouse and cap.  `Whence come you?' 
`Don't you belong to the barricade?'  And they will look at your hands. 
You smell of powder.  Shot."

Enjolras, without making any reply, touched Combeferre's shoulder,
and the two entered the tap-room.

They emerged thence a moment later.  Enjolras held in his
outstretched hands the four uniforms which he had laid aside. 
Combeferre followed, carrying the shoulder-belts and the shakos.

"With this uniform," said Enjolras, "you can mingle with the ranks
and escape; here is enough for four."  And he flung on the ground,
deprived of its pavement, the four uniforms.

No wavering took place in his stoical audience.  Combeferre took
the word.

"Come, said he, "you must have a little pity.  Do you know what the
question is here?  It is a question of women.  See here.  Are there
women or are there not?  Are there children or are there not? 
Are there mothers, yes or no, who rock cradles with their foot
and who have a lot of little ones around them?  Let that man of you
who has never beheld a nurse's breast raise his hand.  Ah! you
want to get yourselves killed, so do I--I, who am speaking to you;
but I do not want to feel the phantoms of women wreathing their
arms around me.  Die, if you will, but don't make others die. 
Suicides like that which is on the brink of accomplishment here
are sublime; but suicide is narrow, and does not admit of extension;
and as soon as it touches your neighbors, suicide is murder. 
Think of the little blond heads; think of the white locks. 
Listen, Enjolras has just told me that he saw at the corner of
the Rue du Cygne a lighted casement, a candle in a poor window,
on the fifth floor, and on the pane the quivering shadow of the head
of an old woman, who had the air of having spent the night in watching. 
Perhaps she is the mother of some one of you.  Well, let that man go,
and make haste, to say to his mother:  `Here I am, mother!'  Let him
feel at ease, the task here will be performed all the same. 
When one supports one's relatives by one's toil, one has not the
right to sacrifice one's self.  That is deserting one's family. 
And those who have daughters! what are you thinking of?  You get
yourselves killed, you are dead, that is well.  And tomorrow?  Young girls
without bread--that is a terrible thing.  Man begs, woman sells. 
Ah! those charming and gracious beings, so gracious and so sweet,
who have bonnets of flowers, who fill the house with purity, who sing
and prattle, who are like a living perfume, who prove the existence
of angels in heaven by the purity of virgins on earth, that Jeanne,
that Lise, that Mimi, those adorable and honest creatures who are your
blessings and your pride, ah! good God, they will suffer hunger! 
What do you want me to say to you?  There is a market for human flesh;
and it is not with your shadowy hands, shuddering around them,
that you will prevent them from entering it!  Think of the street,
think of the pavement covered with passers-by, think of the shops past
which women go and come with necks all bare, and through the mire. 
These women, too, were pure once.  Think of your sisters, those of
you who have them.  Misery, prostitution, the police, Saint-Lazare--
that is what those beautiful, delicate girls, those fragile marvels
of modesty, gentleness and loveliness, fresher than lilacs in the
month of May, will come to.  Ah! you have got yourselves killed! 
You are no longer on hand!  That is well; you have wished to release
the people from Royalty, and you deliver over your daughters to
the police.  Friends, have a care, have mercy.  Women, unhappy women,
we are not in the habit of bestowing much thought on them. 
We trust to the women not having received a man's education,
we prevent their reading, we prevent their thinking, we prevent
their occupying themselves with politics; will you prevent them from
going to the dead-house this evening, and recognizing your bodies? 
Let us see, those who have families must be tractable, and shake hands
with us and take themselves off, and leave us here alone to attend
to this affair.  I know well that courage is required to leave,
that it is hard; but the harder it is, the more meritorious. 
You say:  `I have a gun, I am at the barricade; so much the worse,
I shall remain there.'  So much the worse is easily said.  My friends,
there is a morrow; you will not be here to-morrow, but your families will;
and what sufferings!  See, here is a pretty, healthy child,
with cheeks like an apple, who babbles, prattles, chatters, who laughs,
who smells sweet beneath your kiss,--and do you know what becomes
of him when he is abandoned?  I have seen one, a very small creature,
no taller than that.  His father was dead.  Poor people had taken
him in out of charity, but they had bread only for themselves. 
The child was always hungry.  It was winter.  He did not cry. 
You could see him approach the stove, in which there was never
any fire, and whose pipe, you know, was of mastic and yellow clay. 
His breathing was hoarse, his face livid, his limbs flaccid,
his belly prominent.  He said nothing.  If you spoke to him,
he did not answer.  He is dead.  He was taken to the Necker Hospital,
where I saw him.  I was house-surgeon in that hospital.  Now, if there
are any fathers among you, fathers whose happiness it is to stroll
on Sundays holding their child's tiny hand in their robust hand,
let each one of those fathers imagine that this child is his own. 
That poor brat, I remember, and I seem to see him now, when he lay
nude on the dissecting table, how his ribs stood out on his skin
like the graves beneath the grass in a cemetery.  A sort of mud was
found in his stomach.  There were ashes in his teeth.  Come, let us
examine ourselves conscientiously and take counsel with our heart. 
Statistics show that the mortality among abandoned children is fifty-five
per cent.  I repeat, it is a question of women, it concerns mothers,
it concerns young girls, it concerns little children.  Who is talking
to you of yourselves?  We know well what you are; we know well that
you are all brave, parbleu! we know well that you all have in your
souls the joy and the glory of giving your life for the great cause;
we know well that you feel yourselves elected to die usefully
and magnificently, and that each one of you clings to his share
in the triumph.  Very well.  But you are not alone in this world. 
There are other beings of whom you must think.  You must not be
egoists."

All dropped their heads with a gloomy air.

Strange contradictions of the human heart at its most
sublime moments.  Combeferre, who spoke thus, was not an orphan. 
He recalled the mothers of other men, and forgot his own. 
He was about to get himself killed.  He was "an egoist."

Marius, fasting, fevered, having emerged in succession from all hope,
and having been stranded in grief, the most sombre of shipwrecks,
and saturated with violent emotions and conscious that the end
was near, had plunged deeper and deeper into that visionary stupor
which always precedes the fatal hour voluntarily accepted.

A physiologist might have studied in him the growing symptoms
of that febrile absorption known to, and classified by, science,
and which is to suffering what voluptuousness is to pleasure. 
Despair, also, has its ecstasy.  Marius had reached this point. 
He looked on at everything as from without; as we have said,
things which passed before him seemed far away; he made out the whole,
but did not perceive the details.  He beheld men going and coming
as through a flame.  He heard voices speaking as at the bottom
of an abyss.

But this moved him.  There was in this scene a point which
pierced and roused even him.  He had but one idea now, to die;
and he did not wish to be turned aside from it, but he reflected,
in his gloomy somnambulism, that while destroying himself,
he was not prohibited from saving some one else.

He raised his voice.

"Enjolras and Combeferre are right," said he; "no unnecessary sacrifice. 
I join them, and you must make haste.  Combeferre has said convincing
things to you.  There are some among you who have families,
mothers, sisters, wives, children.  Let such leave the ranks."

No one stirred.

"Married men and the supporters of families, step out of the ranks!"
repeated Marius.

His authority was great.  Enjolras was certainly the head
of the barricade, but Marius was its savior.

"I order it," cried Enjolras.

"I entreat you," said Marius.

Then, touched by Combeferre's words, shaken by Enjolras' order,
touched by Marius' entreaty, these heroic men began to denounce
each other.--"It is true," said one young man to a full grown man,
"you are the father of a family.  Go."--"It is your duty rather,"
retorted the man, "you have two sisters whom you maintain."--
And an unprecedented controversy broke forth.  Each struggled to
determine which should not allow himself to be placed at the door
of the tomb.

"Make haste," said Courfeyrac, "in another quarter of an hour it
will be too late."

"Citizens," pursued Enjolras, "this is the Republic, and universal
suffrage reigns.  Do you yourselves designate those who are to go."

They obeyed.  After the expiration of a few minutes, five were
unanimously selected and stepped out of the ranks.

"There are five of them!" exclaimed Marius.

There were only four uniforms.

"Well," began the five, "one must stay behind."

And then a struggle arose as to who should remain, and who should
find reasons for the others not remaining.  The generous quarrel
began afresh.

"You have a wife who loves you."--"You have your aged mother."--"
You have neither father nor mother, and what is to become of your
three little brothers?"--"You are the father of five children."--"You
have a right to live, you are only seventeen, it is too early
for you to die."

These great revolutionary barricades were assembling points for heroism. 
The improbable was simple there.  These men did not astonish each other.

"Be quick," repeated Courfeyrac.

Men shouted to Marius from the groups:

"Do you designate who is to remain."

"Yes," said the five, "choose.  We will obey you."

Marius did not believe that he was capable of another emotion. 
Still, at this idea, that of choosing a man for death, his blood
rushed back to his heart.  He would have turned pale, had it been
possible for him to become any paler.

He advanced towards the five, who smiled upon him, and each,
with his eyes full of that grand flame which one beholds in the
depths of history hovering over Thermopylae, cried to him:

"Me! me! me!"

And Marius stupidly counted them; there were still five of them! 
Then his glance dropped to the four uniforms.

At that moment, a fifth uniform fell, as if from heaven, upon the
other four.

The fifth man was saved.

Marius raised his eyes and recognized M. Fauchelevent.

Jean Valjean had just entered the barricade.

He had arrived by way of Mondetour lane, whither by dint of
inquiries made, or by instinct, or chance.  Thanks to his dress
of a National Guardsman, he had made his way without difficulty.

The sentinel stationed by the insurgents in the Rue Mondetour
had no occasion to give the alarm for a single National Guardsman,
and he had allowed the latter to entangle himself in the street,
saying to himself:  "Probably it is a reinforcement, in any case it
is a prisoner."  The moment was too grave to admit of the sentinel
abandoning his duty and his post of observation.

At the moment when Jean Valjean entered the redoubt, no one had
noticed him, all eyes being fixed on the five chosen men and the
four uniforms.  Jean Valjean also had seen and heard, and he
had silently removed his coat and flung it on the pile with the rest.

The emotion aroused was indescribable.

"Who is this man?" demanded Bossuet.

"He is a man who saves others," replied Combeferre.

Marius added in a grave voice:

"I know him."

This guarantee satisfied every one.

Enjolras turned to Jean Valjean.

"Welcome, citizen."

And he added:

"You know that we are about to die."

Jean Valjean, without replying, helped the insurgent whom he was
saving to don his uniform.



CHAPTER V

THE HORIZON WHICH ONE BEHOLDS FROM THE SUMMIT OF A BARRICADE


The situation of all in that fatal hour and that pitiless place,
had as result and culminating point Enjolras' supreme melancholy.

Enjolras bore within him the plenitude of the revolution;
he was incomplete, however, so far as the absolute can be so;
he had too much of Saint-Just about him, and not enough of
Anacharsis Cloots; still, his mind, in the society of the Friends
of the A B C, had ended by undergoing a certain polarization from
Combeferre's ideas; for some time past, he had been gradually emerging
from the narrow form of dogma, and had allowed himself to incline
to the broadening influence of progress, and he had come to accept,
as a definitive and magnificent evolution, the transformation
of the great French Republic, into the immense human republic. 
As far as the immediate means were concerned, a violent situation
being given, he wished to be violent; on that point, he never varied;
and he remained of that epic and redoubtable school which is
summed up in the words:  "Eighty-three." Enjolras was standing
erect on the staircase of paving-stones, one elbow resting on
the stock of his gun.  He was engaged in thought; he quivered,
as at the passage of prophetic breaths; places where death is
have these effects of tripods.  A sort of stifled fire darted
from his eyes, which were filled with an inward look.  All at once
he threw back his head, his blond locks fell back like those of
an angel on the sombre quadriga made of stars, they were like
the mane of a startled lion in the flaming of an halo, and Enjolras cried:

"Citizens, do you picture the future to yourselves?  The streets
of cities inundated with light, green branches on the thresholds,
nations sisters, men just, old men blessing children, the past
loving the present, thinkers entirely at liberty, believers on
terms of full equality, for religion heaven, God the direct priest,
human conscience become an altar, no more hatreds, the fraternity
of the workshop and the school, for sole penalty and recompense fame,
work for all, right for all, peace over all, no more bloodshed,
no more wars, happy mothers!  To conquer matter is the first step;
to realize the ideal is the second.  Reflect on what progress has
already accomplished.  Formerly, the first human races beheld
with terror the hydra pass before their eyes, breathing on
the waters, the dragon which vomited flame, the griffin who was
the monster of the air, and who flew with the wings of an eagle
and the talons of a tiger; fearful beasts which were above man. 
Man, nevertheless, spread his snares, consecrated by intelligence,
and finally conquered these monsters.  We have vanquished the hydra,
and it is called the locomotive; we are on the point of vanquishing
the griffin, we already grasp it, and it is called the balloon. 
On the day when this Promethean task shall be accomplished,
and when man shall have definitely harnessed to his will the triple
Chimaera of antiquity, the hydra, the dragon and the griffin,
he will be the master of water, fire, and of air, and he will be
for the rest of animated creation that which the ancient gods
formerly were to him.  Courage, and onward!  Citizens, whither are
we going?  To science made government, to the force of things
become the sole public force, to the natural law, having in itself
its sanction and its penalty and promulgating itself by evidence,
to a dawn of truth corresponding to a dawn of day.  We are advancing
to the union of peoples; we are advancing to the unity of man. 
No more fictions; no more parasites.  The real governed by the true,
that is the goal.  Civilization will hold its assizes at the
summit of Europe, and, later on, at the centre of continents,
in a grand parliament of the intelligence.  Something similar
has already been seen.  The amphictyons had two sittings a year,
one at Delphos the seat of the gods, the other at Thermopylae,
the place of heroes.  Europe will have her amphictyons; the globe
will have its amphictyons.  France bears this sublime future
in her breast.  This is the gestation of the nineteenth century. 
That which Greece sketched out is worthy of being finished by France. 
Listen to me, you, Feuilly, valiant artisan, man of the people. 
I revere you.  Yes, you clearly behold the future, yes, you are right. 
You had neither father nor mother, Feuilly; you adopted humanity
for your mother and right for your father.  You are about to die,
that is to say to triumph, here.  Citizens, whatever happens
to-day, through our defeat as well as through our victory, it is
a revolution that we are about to create.  As conflagrations light
up a whole city, so revolutions illuminate the whole human race. 
And what is the revolution that we shall cause?  I have just told you,
the Revolution of the True.  From a political point of view,
there is but a single principle; the sovereignty of man over himself. 
This sovereignty of myself over myself is called Liberty.  Where two
or three of these sovereignties are combined, the state begins. 
But in that association there is no abdication.  Each sovereignty
concedes a certain quantity of itself, for the purpose of forming
the common right.  This quantity is the same for all of us. 
This identity of concession which each makes to all, is called Equality. 
Common right is nothing else than the protection of all beaming
on the right of each.  This protection of all over each is
called Fraternity.  The point of intersection of all these assembled
sovereignties is called society.  This intersection being a junction,
this point is a knot.  Hence what is called the social bond. 
Some say social contract; which is the same thing, the word
contract being etymologically formed with the idea of a bond. 
Let us come to an understanding about equality; for, if liberty is
the summit, equality is the base.  Equality, citizens, is not wholly
a surface vegetation, a society of great blades of grass and tiny oaks;
a proximity of jealousies which render each other null and void;
legally speaking, it is all aptitudes possessed of the same opportunity;
politically, it is all votes possessed of the same weight;
religiously, it is all consciences possessed of the same right. 
Equality has an organ:  gratuitous and obligatory instruction. 
The right to the alphabet, that is where the beginning must
be made.  The primary school imposed on all, the secondary school
offered to all, that is the law.  From an identical school,
an identical society will spring.  Yes, instruction! light! light!
everything comes from light, and to it everything returns. 
Citizens, the nineteenth century is great, but the twentieth century
will be happy.  Then, there will be nothing more like the history
of old, we shall no longer, as to-day, have to fear a conquest,
an invasion, a usurpation, a rivalry of nations, arms in hand,
an interruption of civilization depending on a marriage of kings,
on a birth in hereditary tyrannies, a partition of peoples by
a congress, a dismemberment because of the failure of a dynasty,
a combat of two religions meeting face to face, like two bucks
in the dark, on the bridge of the infinite; we shall no longer have
to fear famine, farming out, prostitution arising from distress,
misery from the failure of work and the scaffold and the sword,
and battles and the ruffianism of chance in the forest of events. 
One might almost say:  There will be no more events.  We shall
be happy.  The human race will accomplish its law, as the terrestrial
globe accomplishes its law; harmony will be re-established between
the soul and the star; the soul will gravitate around the truth,
as the planet around the light.  Friends, the present hour in which I
am addressing you, is a gloomy hour; but these are terrible purchases
of the future.  A revolution is a toll.  Oh! the human race will
be delivered, raised up, consoled!  We affirm it on this barrier. 
Whence should proceed that cry of love, if not from the heights
of sacrifice?  Oh my brothers, this is the point of junction,
of those who think and of those who suffer; this barricade is
not made of paving-stones, nor of joists, nor of bits of iron;
it is made of two heaps, a heap of ideas, and a heap of woes. 
Here misery meets the ideal.  The day embraces the night,
and says to it:  `I am about to die, and thou shalt be born again
with me.'  From the embrace of all desolations faith leaps forth. 
Sufferings bring hither their agony and ideas their immortality. 
This agony and this immortality are about to join and constitute
our death.  Brothers, he who dies here dies in the radiance
of the future, and we are entering a tomb all flooded with the
dawn."

Enjolras paused rather than became silent; his lips continued to
move silently, as though he were talking to himself, which caused
them all to gaze attentively at him, in the endeavor to hear more. 
There was no applause; but they whispered together for a long time. 
Speech being a breath, the rustling of intelligences resembles the
rustling of leaves.



CHAPTER VI

MARIUS HAGGARD, JAVERT LACONIC


Let us narrate what was passing in Marius' thoughts.

Let the reader recall the state of his soul.  We have just recalled it,
everything was a vision to him now.  His judgment was disturbed. 
Marius, let us insist on this point, was under the shadow of the great,
dark wings which are spread over those in the death agony. 
He felt that he had entered the tomb, it seemed to him that he
was already on the other side of the wall, and he no longer beheld
the faces of the living except with the eyes of one dead.

How did M. Fauchelevent come there?  Why was he there?  What had
he come there to do?  Marius did not address all these questions
to himself.  Besides, since our despair has this peculiarity,
that it envelops others as well as ourselves, it seemed logical
to him that all the world should come thither to die.

Only, he thought of Cosette with a pang at his heart.

However, M. Fauchelevent did not speak to him, did not look at him,
and had not even the air of hearing him, when Marius raised his voice
to say:  "I know him."

As far as Marius was concerned, this attitude of M. Fauchelevent
was comforting, and, if such a word can be used for such impressions,
we should say that it pleased him.  He had always felt the absolute
impossibility of addressing that enigmatical man, who was,
in his eyes, both equivocal and imposing.  Moreover, it had been
a long time since he had seen him; and this still further augmented
the impossibility for Marius' timid and reserved nature.

The five chosen men left the barricade by way of Mondetour lane;
they bore a perfect resemblance to members of the National Guard. 
One of them wept as he took his leave.  Before setting out,
they embraced those who remained.

When the five men sent back to life had taken their departure,
Enjolras thought of the man who had been condemned to death.

He entered the tap-room. Javert, still bound to the post, was engaged
in meditation.

"Do you want anything?"  Enjolras asked him.

"Javert replied:  "When are you going to kill me?"

"Wait.  We need all our cartridges just at present."

"Then give me a drink," said Javert.

Enjolras himself offered him a glass of water, and, as Javert
was pinioned, he helped him to drink.

"Is that all?" inquired Enjolras.

"I am uncomfortable against this post," replied Javert. 
"You are not tender to have left me to pass the night here. 
Bind me as you please, but you surely might lay me out on a table
like that other man."

And with a motion of the head, he indicated the body of M. Mabeuf.

There was, as the reader will remember, a long, broad table
at the end of the room, on which they had been running bullets
and making cartridges.  All the cartridges having been made,
and all the powder used, this table was free.

At Enjolras' command, four insurgents unbound Javert from the post. 
While they were loosing him, a fifth held a bayonet against his breast.

Leaving his arms tied behind his back, they placed about his feet a
slender but stout whip-cord, as is done to men on the point of mounting
the scaffold, which allowed him to take steps about fifteen inches
in length, and made him walk to the table at the end of the room,
where they laid him down, closely bound about the middle of the body.

By way of further security, and by means of a rope fastened to his neck,
they added to the system of ligatures which rendered every attempt
at escape impossible, that sort of bond which is called in prisons
a martingale, which, starting at the neck, forks on the stomach,
and meets the hands, after passing between the legs.

While they were binding Javert, a man standing on the threshold
was surveying him with singular attention.  The shadow cast by this
man made Javert turn his head.  He raised his eyes, and recognized
Jean Valjean.  He did not even start, but dropped his lids proudly
and confined himself to the remark:  "It is perfectly simple."



CHAPTER VII

THE SITUATION BECOMES AGGRAVATED


The daylight was increasing rapidly.  Not a window was opened,
not a door stood ajar; it was the dawn but not the awaking. 
The end of the Rue de la Chanvrerie, opposite the barricade, had been
evacuated by the troops, as we have stated it seemed to be free,
and presented itself to passers-by with a sinister tranquillity. 
The Rue Saint-Denis was as dumb as the avenue of Sphinxes at Thebes. 
Not a living being in the cross-roads, which gleamed white in the light
of the sun.  Nothing is so mournful as this light in deserted streets. 
Nothing was to be seen, but there was something to be heard. 
A mysterious movement was going on at a certain distance. 
It was evident that the critical moment was approaching.  As on
the previous evening, the sentinels had come in; but this time all
had come.

The barricade was stronger than on the occasion of the first attack. 
Since the departure of the five, they had increased its height
still further.

On the advice of the sentinel who had examined the region of
the Halles, Enjolras, for fear of a surprise in the rear, came to
a serious decision.  He had the small gut of the Mondetour lane,
which had been left open up to that time, barricaded.  For this purpose,
they tore up the pavement for the length of several houses more. 
In this manner, the barricade, walled on three streets, in front
on the Rue de la Chanvrerie, to the left on the Rues du Cygne and de
la Petite Truanderie, to the right on the Rue Mondetour, was really
almost impregnable; it is true that they were fatally hemmed in there. 
It had three fronts, but no exit.--"A fortress but a rat hole too,"
said Courfeyrac with a laugh.

Enjolras had about thirty paving-stones "torn up in excess,"
said Bossuet, piled up near the door of the wine-shop.

The silence was now so profound in the quarter whence the attack must
needs come, that Enjolras had each man resume his post of battle.

An allowance of brandy was doled out to each.

Nothing is more curious than a barricade preparing for an assault. 
Each man selects his place as though at the theatre.  They jostle,
and elbow and crowd each other.  There are some who make stalls
of paving-stones. Here is a corner of the wall which is in the way,
it is removed; here is a redan which may afford protection,
they take shelter behind it.  Left-handed men are precious;
they take the places that are inconvenient to the rest.  Many arrange
to fight in a sitting posture.  They wish to be at ease to kill,
and to die comfortably.  In the sad war of June, 1848, an insurgent
who was a formidable marksman, and who was firing from the top of a
terrace upon a roof, had a reclining-chair brought there for his use;
a charge of grape-shot found him out there.

As soon as the leader has given the order to clear the decks for action,
all disorderly movements cease; there is no more pulling from
one another; there are no more coteries; no more asides, there is
no more holding aloof; everything in their spirits converges in,
and changes into, a waiting for the assailants.  A barricade before
the arrival of danger is chaos; in danger, it is discipline itself. 
Peril produces order.

As soon as Enjolras had seized his double-barrelled rifle,
and had placed himself in a sort of embrasure which he had reserved
for himself, all the rest held their peace.  A series of faint,
sharp noises resounded confusedly along the wall of paving-stones.
It was the men cocking their guns.

Moreover, their attitudes were prouder, more confident than ever;
the excess of sacrifice strengthens; they no longer cherished any hope,
but they had despair, despair,--the last weapon, which sometimes
gives victory; Virgil has said so.  Supreme resources spring from
extreme resolutions.  To embark in death is sometimes the means
of escaping a shipwreck; and the lid of the coffin becomes a plank
of safety.

As on the preceding evening, the attention of all was directed,
we might almost say leaned upon, the end of the street, now lighted
up and visible.

They had not long to wait.  A stir began distinctly in the Saint-Leu
quarter, but it did not resemble the movement of the first attack. 
A clashing of chains, the uneasy jolting of a mass, the click
of brass skipping along the pavement, a sort of solemn uproar,
announced that some sinister construction of iron was approaching. 
There arose a tremor in the bosoms of these peaceful old streets,
pierced and built for the fertile circulation of interests and ideas,
and which are not made for the horrible rumble of the wheels
of war.

The fixity of eye in all the combatants upon the extremity
of the street became ferocious.

A cannon made its appearance.

Artillery-men were pushing the piece; it was in firing trim;
the fore-carriage had been detached; two upheld the gun-carriage,
four were at the wheels; others followed with the caisson. 
They could see the smoke of the burning lint-stock.

"Fire!" shouted Enjolras.

The whole barricade fired, the report was terrible; an avalanche
of smoke covered and effaced both cannon and men; after a few seconds,
the cloud dispersed, and the cannon and men re-appeared; the gun-crew
had just finished rolling it slowly, correctly, without haste,
into position facing the barricade.  Not one of them had been struck. 
Then the captain of the piece, bearing down upon the breech in order
to raise the muzzle, began to point the cannon with the gravity
of an astronomer levelling a telescope.

"Bravo for the cannoneers!" cried Bossuet.

And the whole barricade clapped their hands.

A moment later, squarely planted in the very middle of the street,
astride of the gutter, the piece was ready for action.  A formidable
pair of jaws yawned on the barricade.

"Come, merrily now!" ejaculated Courfeyrac.  "That's the brutal
part of it.  After the fillip on the nose, the blow from the fist. 
The army is reaching out its big paw to us.  The barricade is going
to be severely shaken up.  The fusillade tries, the cannon takes."

"It is a piece of eight, new model, brass," added Combeferre. 
"Those pieces are liable to burst as soon as the proportion of ten
parts of tin to one hundred of brass is exceeded.  The excess
of tin renders them too tender.  Then it comes to pass that they
have caves and chambers when looked at from the vent hole.  In order
to obviate this danger, and to render it possible to force the charge,
it may become necessary to return to the process of the fourteenth
century, hooping, and to encircle the piece on the outside with a
series of unwelded steel bands, from the breech to the trunnions. 
In the meantime, they remedy this defect as best they may;
they manage to discover where the holes are located in the vent
of a cannon, by means of a searcher.  But there is a better method,
with Gribeauval's movable star."

"In the sixteenth century," remarked Bossuet, "they used to rifle cannon."

"Yes," replied Combeferre, "that augments the projectile force,
but diminishes the accuracy of the firing.  In firing at short range,
the trajectory is not as rigid as could be desired, the parabola
is exaggerated, the line of the projectile is no longer sufficiently
rectilinear to allow of its striking intervening objects, which is,
nevertheless, a necessity of battle, the importance of which increases
with the proximity of the enemy and the precipitation of the discharge. 
This defect of the tension of the curve of the projectile in the
rifled cannon of the sixteenth century arose from the smallness
of the charge; small charges for that sort of engine are imposed
by the ballistic necessities, such, for instance, as the preservation
of the gun-carriage. In short, that despot, the cannon, cannot do
all that it desires; force is a great weakness.  A cannon-ball only
travels six hundred leagues an hour; light travels seventy thousand
leagues a second.  Such is the superiority of Jesus Christ over Napoleon."

"Reload your guns," said Enjolras.

How was the casing of the barricade going to behave under the
cannon-balls? Would they effect a breach?  That was the question. 
While the insurgents were reloading their guns, the artillery-men
were loading the cannon.

The anxiety in the redoubt was profound.

The shot sped the report burst forth.

"Present!" shouted a joyous voice.

And Gavroche flung himself into the barricade just as the ball
dashed against it.

He came from the direction of the Rue du Cygne, and he had nimbly
climbed over the auxiliary barricade which fronted on the labyrinth
of the Rue de la Petite Truanderie.

Gavroche produced a greater sensation in the barricade than
the cannon-ball.

The ball buried itself in the mass of rubbish.  At the most there
was an omnibus wheel broken, and the old Anceau cart was demolished. 
On seeing this, the barricade burst into a laugh.

"Go on!" shouted Bossuet to the artillerists.



CHAPTER VIII

THE ARTILLERY-MEN COMPEL PEOPLE TO TAKE THEM SERIOUSLY


Thet flocked round Gavroche.  But he had no time to tell anything. 
Marius drew him aside with a shudder.

"What are you doing here?"

"Hullo!" said the child, "what are you doing here yourself?"

And he stared at Marius intently with his epic effrontery. 
His eyes grew larger with the proud light within them.

It was with an accent of severity that Marius continued:

"Who told you to come back?  Did you deliver my letter at the address?"

Gavroche was not without some compunctions in the matter of
that letter.  In his haste to return to the barricade, he had got
rid of it rather than delivered it.  He was forced to acknowledge
to himself that he had confided it rather lightly to that stranger
whose face he had not been able to make out.  It is true that
the man was bareheaded, but that was not sufficient.  In short,
he had been administering to himself little inward remonstrances
and he feared Marius' reproaches.  In order to extricate himself
from the predicament, he took the simplest course; he lied abominably.

"Citizen, I delivered the letter to the porter.  The lady was asleep. 
She will have the letter when she wakes up.

Marius had had two objects in sending that letter:  to bid farewell
to Cosette and to save Gavroche.  He was obliged to content himself
with the half of his desire.

The despatch of his letter and the presence of M. Fauchelevent
in the barricade, was a coincidence which occurred to him. 
He pointed out M. Fauchelevent to Gavroche.

"Do you know that man?"

"No," said Gavroche.

Gavroche had, in fact, as we have just mentioned, seen Jean Valjean
only at night.

The troubled and unhealthy conjectures which had outlined themselves
in Marius' mind were dissipated.  Did he know M. Fauchelevent's opinions? 
Perhaps M. Fauchelevent was a republican.  Hence his very natural
presence in this combat.

In the meanwhile, Gavroche was shouting, at the other end
of the barricade:  "My gun!"

Courfeyrac had it returned to him.

Gavroche warned "his comrades" as he called them, that the barricade
was blocked.  He had had great difficulty in reaching it. 
A battalion of the line whose arms were piled in the Rue de la Petite
Truanderie was on the watch on the side of the Rue du Cygne; on the
opposite side, the municipal guard occupied the Rue des Precheurs. 
The bulk of the army was facing them in front.

This information given, Gavroche added:

"I authorize you to hit 'em a tremendous whack."

Meanwhile, Enjolras was straining his ears and watching at his embrasure.

The assailants, dissatisfied, no doubt, with their shot, had not
repeated it.

A company of infantry of the line had come up and occupied the end
of the street behind the piece of ordnance.  The soldiers were
tearing up the pavement and constructing with the stones a small,
low wall, a sort of side-work not more than eighteen inches high,
and facing the barricade.  In the angle at the left of this epaulement,
there was visible the head of the column of a battalion from the
suburbs massed in the Rue Saint-Denis.

Enjolras, on the watch, thought he distinguished the peculiar
sound which is produced when the shells of grape-shot are drawn
from the caissons, and he saw the commander of the piece change the
elevation and incline the mouth of the cannon slightly to the left. 
Then the cannoneers began to load the piece.  The chief seized
the lint-stock himself and lowered it to the vent.

"Down with your heads, hug the wall!" shouted Enjolras, "and all
on your knees along the barricade!"

The insurgents who were straggling in front of the wine-shop,
and who had quitted their posts of combat on Gavroche's arrival,
rushed pell-mell towards the barricade; but before Enjolras'
order could be executed, the discharge took place with the terrifying
rattle of a round of grape-shot. This is what it was, in fact.

The charge had been aimed at the cut in the redoubt, and had there
rebounded from the wall; and this terrible rebound had produced
two dead and three wounded.

If this were continued, the barricade was no longer tenable. 
The grape-shot made its way in.

A murmur of consternation arose.

"Let us prevent the second discharge," said Enjolras.

And, lowering his rifle, he took aim at the captain of the gun,
who, at that moment, was bearing down on the breach of his gun
and rectifying and definitely fixing its pointing.

The captain of the piece was a handsome sergeant of artillery,
very young, blond, with a very gentle face, and the intelligent
air peculiar to that predestined and redoubtable weapon which,
by dint of perfecting itself in horror, must end in killing war.

Combeferre, who was standing beside Enjolras, scrutinized this
young man.

"What a pity!" said Combeferre.  "What hideous things these
butcheries are!  Come, when there are no more kings, there will
be no more war.  Enjolras, you are taking aim at that sergeant,
you are not looking at him.  Fancy, he is a charming young man;
he is intrepid; it is evident that he is thoughtful; those young
artillery-men are very well educated; he has a father, a mother,
a family; he is probably in love; he is not more than five and twenty
at the most; he might be your brother."

"He is," said Enjolras.

"Yes," replied Combeferre, "he is mine too.  Well, let us not
kill him."

"Let me alone.  It must be done."

And a tear trickled slowly down Enjolras' marble cheek.

At the same moment, he pressed the trigger of his rifle.  The flame
leaped forth.  The artillery-man turned round twice, his arms
extended in front of him, his head uplifted, as though for breath,
then he fell with his side on the gun, and lay there motionless. 
They could see his back, from the centre of which there flowed
directly a stream of blood.  The ball had traversed his breast
from side to side.  He was dead.

He had to be carried away and replaced by another.  Several minutes
were thus gained, in fact.



CHAPTER IX

EMPLOYMENT OF THE OLD TALENTS OF A POACHER AND THAT INFALLIBLE
MARKSMANSHIP WHICH INFLUENCED THE CONDEMNATION OF 1796


Opinions were exchanged in the barricade.  The firing from the gun
was about to begin again.  Against that grape-shot, they could not
hold out a quarter of an hour longer.  It was absolutely necessary
to deaden the blows.

Enjolras issued this command:

"We must place a mattress there."

"We have none," said Combeferre, "the wounded are lying on them."

Jean Valjean, who was seated apart on a stone post, at the corner
of the tavern, with his gun between his knees, had, up to that moment,
taken no part in anything that was going on.  He did not appear
to hear the combatants saying around him:  "Here is a gun that is
doing nothing."

At the order issued by Enjolras, he rose.

It will be remembered that, on the arrival of the rabble in the Rue
de la Chanvrerie, an old woman, foreseeing the bullets, had placed
her mattress in front of her window.  This window, an attic window,
was on the roof of a six-story house situated a little beyond
the barricade.  The mattress, placed cross-wise, supported at
the bottom on two poles for drying linen, was upheld at the top
by two ropes, which, at that distance, looked like two threads,
and which were attached to two nails planted in the window frames. 
These ropes were distinctly visible, like hairs, against the sky.

"Can some one lend me a double-barrelled rifle?" said Jean Valjean.

Enjolras, who had just re-loaded his, handed it to him.

Jean Valjean took aim at the attic window and fired.

One of the mattress ropes was cut.

The mattress now hung by one thread only.

Jean Valjean fired the second charge.  The second rope lashed
the panes of the attic window.  The mattress slipped between
the two poles and fell into the street.

The barricade applauded.

All voices cried:

"Here is a mattress!"

"Yes," said Combeferre, "but who will go and fetch it?"

The mattress had, in fact, fallen outside the barricade,
between besiegers and besieged.  Now, the death of the sergeant
of artillery having exasperated the troop, the soldiers had,
for several minutes, been lying flat on their stomachs behind
the line of paving-stones which they had erected, and, in order
to supply the forced silence of the piece, which was quiet while
its service was in course of reorganization, they had opened fire
on the barricade.  The insurgents did not reply to this musketry,
in order to spare their ammunition The fusillade broke against
the barricade; but the street, which it filled, was terrible.

Jean Valjean stepped out of the cut, entered the street,
traversed the storm of bullets, walked up to the mattress,
hoisted it upon his back, and returned to the barricade.

He placed the mattress in the cut with his own hands.  He fixed
it there against the wall in such a manner that the artillery-men
should not see it.

That done, they awaited the next discharge of grape-shot.

It was not long in coming.

The cannon vomited forth its package of buck-shot with a roar. 
But there was no rebound.  The effect which they had foreseen had
been attained.  The barricade was saved.

"Citizen," said Enjolras to Jean Valjean, "the Republic thanks you."

Bossuet admired and laughed.  He exclaimed:

"It is immoral that a mattress should have so much power. 
Triumph of that which yields over that which strikes with lightning. 
But never mind, glory to the mattress which annuls a cannon!"



CHAPTER X

DAWN


At that moment, Cosette awoke.

Her chamber was narrow, neat, unobtrusive, with a long sash-window,
facing the East on the back court-yard of the house.

Cosette knew nothing of what was going on in Paris.  She had not
been there on the preceding evening, and she had already retired
to her chamber when Toussaint had said:

"It appears that there is a row."

Cosette had slept only a few hours, but soundly.  She had had
sweet dreams, which possibly arose from the fact that her little
bed was very white.  Some one, who was Marius, had appeared to her
in the light.  She awoke with the sun in her eyes, which, at first,
produced on her the effect of being a continuation of her dream. 
Her first thought on emerging from this dream was a smiling one. 
Cosette felt herself thoroughly reassured.  Like Jean Valjean,
she had, a few hours previously, passed through that reaction
of the soul which absolutely will not hear of unhappiness. 
She began to cherish hope, with all her might, without knowing why. 
Then she felt a pang at her heart.  It was three days since she
had seen Marius.  But she said to herself that he must have received
her letter, that he knew where she was, and that he was so clever
that he would find means of reaching her.--And that certainly
to-day, and perhaps that very morning.--It was broad daylight,
but the rays of light were very horizontal; she thought that it
was very early, but that she must rise, nevertheless, in order to
receive Marius.

She felt that she could not live without Marius, and that,
consequently, that was sufficient and that Marius would come. 
No objection was valid.  All this was certain.  It was monstrous enough
already to have suffered for three days.  Marius absent three days,
this was horrible on the part of the good God.  Now, this cruel
teasing from on high had been gone through with.  Marius was about
to arrive, and he would bring good news.  Youth is made thus;
it quickly dries its eyes; it finds sorrow useless and does not
accept it.  Youth is the smile of the future in the presence of an
unknown quantity, which is itself.  It is natural to it to be happy. 
It seems as though its respiration were made of hope.

Moreover, Cosette could not remember what Marius had said to her
on the subject of this absence which was to last only one day,
and what explanation of it he had given her.  Every one has noticed
with what nimbleness a coin which one has dropped on the ground rolls
away and hides, and with what art it renders itself undiscoverable. 
There are thoughts which play us the same trick; they nestle away
in a corner of our brain; that is the end of them; they are lost;
it is impossible to lay the memory on them.  Cosette was somewhat vexed
at the useless little effort made by her memory.  She told herself,
that it was very naughty and very wicked of her, to have forgotten
the words uttered by Marius.

She sprang out of bed and accomplished the two ablutions of soul
and body, her prayers and her toilet.

One may, in a case of exigency, introduce the reader into
a nuptial chamber, not into a virginal chamber.  Verse would
hardly venture it, prose must not.

It is the interior of a flower that is not yet unfolded, it is
whiteness in the dark, it is the private cell of a closed lily,
which must not be gazed upon by man so long as the sun has not
gazed upon it.  Woman in the bud is sacred.  That innocent bud
which opens, that adorable half-nudity which is afraid of itself,
that white foot which takes refuge in a slipper, that throat
which veils itself before a mirror as though a mirror were an eye,
that chemise which makes haste to rise up and conceal the shoulder
for a creaking bit of furniture or a passing vehicle, those cords tied,
those clasps fastened, those laces drawn, those tremors, those shivers
of cold and modesty, that exquisite affright in every movement,
that almost winged uneasiness where there is no cause for alarm,
the successive phases of dressing, as charming as the clouds of dawn,--
it is not fitting that all this should be narrated, and it is too much
to have even called attention to it.

The eye of man must be more religious in the presence of the rising
of a young girl than in the presence of the rising of a star. 
The possibility of hurting should inspire an augmentation of respect. 
The down on the peach, the bloom on the plum, the radiated crystal of
the snow, the wing of the butterfly powdered with feathers, are coarse
compared to that chastity which does not even know that it is chaste. 
The young girl is only the flash of a dream, and is not yet a statue. 
Her bed-chamber is hidden in the sombre part of the ideal. 
The indiscreet touch of a glance brutalizes this vague penumbra. 
Here, contemplation is profanation.

We shall, therefore, show nothing of that sweet little flutter
of Cosette's rising.

An oriental tale relates how the rose was made white by God,
but that Adam looked upon her when she was unfolding, and she
was ashamed and turned crimson.  We are of the number who fall
speechless in the presence of young girls and flowers, since we
think them worthy of veneration.

Cosette dressed herself very hastily, combed and dressed her hair,
which was a very simple matter in those days, when women did not
swell out their curls and bands with cushions and puffs, and did
not put crinoline in their locks.  Then she opened the window
and cast her eyes around her in every direction, hoping to descry
some bit of the street, an angle of the house, an edge of pavement,
so that she might be able to watch for Marius there.  But no view
of the outside was to be had.  The back court was surrounded by
tolerably high walls, and the outlook was only on several gardens. 
Cosette pronounced these gardens hideous:  for the first time
in her life, she found flowers ugly.  The smallest scrap of the
gutter of the street would have met her wishes better.  She decided
to gaze at the sky, as though she thought that Marius might come
from that quarter.

All at once, she burst into tears.  Not that this was fickleness
of soul; but hopes cut in twain by dejection--that was her case. 
She had a confused consciousness of something horrible.  Thoughts were
rife in the air, in fact.  She told herself that she was not sure
of anything, that to withdraw herself from sight was to be lost;
and the idea that Marius could return to her from heaven appeared
to her no longer charming but mournful.

Then, as is the nature of these clouds, calm returned to her,
and hope and a sort of unconscious smile, which yet indicated trust
in God.

Every one in the house was still asleep.  A country-like silence reigned. 
Not a shutter had been opened.  The porter's lodge was closed. 
Toussaint had not risen, and Cosette, naturally, thought that her
father was asleep.  She must have suffered much, and she must have
still been suffering greatly, for she said to herself, that her
father had been unkind; but she counted on Marius.  The eclipse
of such a light was decidedly impossible.  Now and then, she heard
sharp shocks in the distance, and she said:  "It is odd that people
should be opening and shutting their carriage gates so early." 
They were the reports of the cannon battering the barricade.

A few feet below Cosette's window, in the ancient and perfectly
black cornice of the wall, there was a martin's nest; the curve
of this nest formed a little projection beyond the cornice,
so that from above it was possible to look into this little paradise. 
The mother was there, spreading her wings like a fan over her brood;
the father fluttered about, flew away, then came back, bearing in
his beak food and kisses.  The dawning day gilded this happy thing,
the great law, "Multiply," lay there smiling and august, and that sweet
mystery unfolded in the glory of the morning.  Cosette, with her hair
in the sunlight, her soul absorbed in chimeras, illuminated by love
within and by the dawn without, bent over mechanically, and almost
without daring to avow to herself that she was thinking at the same
time of Marius, began to gaze at these birds, at this family,
at that male and female, that mother and her little ones,
with the profound trouble which a nest produces on a virgin.



CHAPTER XI

THE SHOT WHICH MISSES NOTHING AND KILLS NO ONE


The assailants' fire continued.  Musketry and grape-shot alternated,
but without committing great ravages, to tell the truth.  The top
alone of the Corinthe facade suffered; the window on the first floor,
and the attic window in the roof, riddled with buck-shot and biscaiens,
were slowly losing their shape.  The combatants who had been posted
there had been obliged to withdraw.  However, this is according
to the tactics of barricades; to fire for a long while, in order
to exhaust the insurgents' ammunition, if they commit the mistake
of replying.  When it is perceived, from the slackening of their fire,
that they have no more powder and ball, the assault is made. 
Enjolras had not fallen into this trap; the barricade did not reply.

At every discharge by platoons, Gavroche puffed out his cheek
with his tongue, a sign of supreme disdain.

"Good for you," said he, "rip up the cloth.  We want some lint."

Courfeyrac called the grape-shot to order for the little effect
which it produced, and said to the cannon:

"You are growing diffuse, my good fellow."

One gets puzzled in battle, as at a ball.  It is probable that this
silence on the part of the redoubt began to render the besiegers uneasy,
and to make them fear some unexpected incident, and that they felt
the necessity of getting a clear view behind that heap of paving-stones,
and of knowing what was going on behind that impassable wall
which received blows without retorting.  The insurgents suddenly
perceived a helmet glittering in the sun on a neighboring roof. 
A fireman had placed his back against a tall chimney, and seemed to
be acting as sentinel.  His glance fell directly down into the barricade.

"There's an embarrassing watcher," said Enjolras.

Jean Valjean had returned Enjolras' rifle, but he had his own gun.

Without saying a word, he took aim at the fireman, and, a second later,
the helmet, smashed by a bullet, rattled noisily into the street. 
The terrified soldier made haste to disappear.  A second observer
took his place.  This one was an officer.  Jean Valjean, who had
re-loaded his gun, took aim at the newcomer and sent the officer's
casque to join the soldier's. The officer did not persist,
and retired speedily.  This time the warning was understood. 
No one made his appearance thereafter on that roof; and the idea
of spying on the barricade was abandoned.

"Why did you not kill the man?"  Bossuet asked Jean Valjean.

Jean Valjean made no reply.



CHAPTER XII

DISORDER A PARTISAN OF ORDER


Bossuet muttered in Combeferre's ear:

"He did not answer my question."

"He is a man who does good by gun-shots," said Combeferre.

Those who have preserved some memory of this already distant
epoch know that the National Guard from the suburbs was valiant
against insurrections.  It was particularly zealous and intrepid
in the days of June, 1832.  A certain good dram-shop keeper of
Pantin des Vertus or la Cunette, whose "establishment" had been
closed by the riots, became leonine at the sight of his deserted
dance-hall, and got himself killed to preserve the order represented
by a tea-garden. In that bourgeois and heroic time, in the presence
of ideas which had their knights, interests had their paladins. 
The prosiness of the originators detracted nothing from the
bravery of the movement.  The diminution of a pile of crowns made
bankers sing the Marseillaise.  They shed their blood lyrically
for the counting-house; and they defended the shop, that immense
diminutive of the fatherland, with Lacedaemonian enthusiasm.

At bottom, we will observe, there was nothing in all this that was
not extremely serious.  It was social elements entering into strife,
while awaiting the day when they should enter into equilibrium.

Another sign of the times was the anarchy mingled with governmentalism
[the barbarous name of the correct party]. People were for order
in combination with lack of discipline.

The drum suddenly beat capricious calls, at the command of such or such
a Colonel of the National Guard; such and such a captain went into
action through inspiration; such and such National Guardsmen fought,
"for an idea," and on their own account.  At critical moments, on "days"
they took counsel less of their leaders than of their instincts. 
There existed in the army of order, veritable guerilleros, some of
the sword, like Fannicot, others of the pen, like Henri Fonfrede.

Civilization, unfortunately, represented at this epoch rather
by an aggregation of interests than by a group of principles,
was or thought itself, in peril; it set up the cry of alarm;
each, constituting himself a centre, defended it, succored it,
and protected it with his own head; and the first comer took
it upon himself to save society.

Zeal sometimes proceeded to extermination.  A platoon of the National
Guard would constitute itself on its own authority a private council
of war, and judge and execute a captured insurgent in five minutes. 
It was an improvisation of this sort that had slain Jean Prouvaire. 
Fierce Lynch law, with which no one party had any right to reproach
the rest, for it has been applied by the Republic in America,
as well as by the monarchy in Europe.  This Lynch law was complicated
with mistakes.  On one day of rioting, a young poet, named Paul
Aime Garnier, was pursued in the Place Royale, with a bayonet at
his loins, and only escaped by taking refuge under the porte-cochere
of No. 6.  They shouted:--"There's another of those Saint-Simonians!"
and they wanted to kill him.  Now, he had under his arm a volume
of the memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon. A National Guard had read
the words Saint-Simon on the book, and had shouted:  "Death!"

On the 6th of June, 1832, a company of the National Guards from
the suburbs, commanded by the Captain Fannicot, above mentioned,
had itself decimated in the Rue de la Chanvrerie out of caprice
and its own good pleasure.  This fact, singular though it may seem,
was proved at the judicial investigation opened in consequence
of the insurrection of 1832.  Captain Fannicot, a bold and impatient
bourgeois, a sort of condottiere of the order of those whom we have
just characterized, a fanatical and intractable governmentalist,
could not resist the temptation to fire prematurely, and the ambition
of capturing the barricade alone and unaided, that is to say,
with his company.  Exasperated by the successive apparition of
the red flag and the old coat which he took for the black flag,
he loudly blamed the generals and chiefs of the corps, who were
holding council and did not think that the moment for the decisive
assault had arrived, and who were allowing "the insurrection to fry
in its own fat," to use the 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-Poiree, 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 Maubuee, 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, manoeuvres 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 Angelique; 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 manoeuvres 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 cartridge-boxes of the National Guardsmen who had been
killed on the slope of the redoubt, into his basket.

"What are you doing there?" asked Courfeyrac.

Gavroche raised his face:--

"I'm filling my basket, citizen."

"Don't you see the grape-shot?"

Gavroche replied:

"Well, it is raining.  What then?"

Courfeyrac shouted:--"Come in!"

"Instanter," said Gavroche.

And with a single bound he plunged into the street.

It will be remembered that Fannicot's company had left behind
it a trail of bodies.  Twenty corpses lay scattered here and
there on the pavement, through the whole length of the street. 
Twenty cartouches for Gavroche meant a provision of cartridges
for the barricade.

The smoke in the street was like a fog.  Whoever has beheld a cloud
which has fallen into a mountain gorge between two peaked escarpments
can imagine this smoke rendered denser and thicker by two gloomy rows
of lofty houses.  It rose gradually and was incessantly renewed;
hence a twilight which made even the broad daylight turn pale. 
The combatants could hardly see each other from one end of the street
to the other, short as it was.

This obscurity, which had probably been desired and calculated on
by the commanders who were to direct the assault on the barricade,
was useful to Gavroche.

Beneath the folds of this veil of smoke, and thanks to his small size,
he could advance tolerably far into the street without being seen. 
He rifled the first seven or eight cartridge-boxes without
much danger.

He crawled flat on his belly, galloped on all fours, took his basket
in his teeth, twisted, glided, undulated, wound from one dead body
to another, and emptied the cartridge-box or cartouche as a monkey
opens a nut.

They did not dare to shout to him to return from the barricade,
which was quite near, for fear of attracting attention to him.

On one body, that of a corporal, he found a powder-flask.

"For thirst," said he, putting it in his pocket.

By dint of advancing, he reached a point where the fog of the
fusillade became transparent.  So that the sharpshooters of the
line ranged on the outlook behind their paving-stone dike and the
sharpshooters of the banlieue massed at the corner of the street
suddenly pointed out to each other something moving through the smoke.

At the moment when Gavroche was relieving a sergeant, who was lying
near a stone door-post, of his cartridges, a bullet struck the body.

"Fichtre!" ejaculated Gavroche.  "They are killing my dead men
for me."

A second bullet struck a spark from the pavement beside him.--
A third overturned his basket.

Gavroche looked and saw that this came from the men of the banlieue.

He sprang to his feet, stood erect, with his hair flying in the wind,
his hands on his hips, his eyes fixed on the National Guardsmen
who were firing, and sang:

      "On est laid a Nanterre,       "Men are ugly at Nanterre,
       C'est la faute a Voltaire;     'Tis the  fault of Voltaire;
       Et bete a Palaiseau,           And dull at Palaiseau,
       C'est la faute a Rousseau."    'Tis the fault of Rousseau."


Then he picked up his basket, replaced the cartridges which had
fallen from it, without missing a single one, and, advancing towards
the fusillade, set about plundering another cartridge-box. There
a fourth bullet missed him, again.  Gavroche sang:

       "Je ne suis pas notaire,      "I am not a notary,
        C'est la faute a Voltaire;    'Tis the fault of Voltaire;
        Je suis un petit oiseau,      I'm a little bird,
        C'est la faute a Rousseau."   'Tis the fault of Rousseau."

   A fifth bullet only succeeded in drawing from him a third couplet.

       "Joie est mon caractere,      "Joy is my character,
        C'est la faute a Voltaire;    'Tis the fault of Voltaire;
        Misere est mon trousseau,     Misery is my trousseau,
        C'est la faute a Rousseau."   'Tis the fault of Rousseau."


Thus it went on for some time.

It was a charming and terrible sight.  Gavroche, though shot at,
was teasing the fusillade.  He had the air of being greatly diverted. 
It was the sparrow pecking at the sportsmen.  To each discharge
he retorted with a couplet.  They aimed at him constantly,
and always missed him.  The National Guardsmen and the soldiers
laughed as they took aim at him.  He lay down, sprang to his feet,
hid in the corner of a doorway, then made a bound, disappeared,
re-appeared, scampered away, returned, replied to the grape-shot
with his thumb at his nose, and, all the while, went on pillaging
the cartouches, emptying the cartridge-boxes, and filling his basket. 
The insurgents, panting with anxiety, followed him with their eyes. 
The barricade trembled; he sang.  He was not a child, he was not a man;
he was a strange gamin-fairy. He might have been called the invulnerable
dwarf of the fray.  The bullets flew after him, he was more nimble
than they.  He played a fearful game of hide and seek with death;
every time that the flat-nosed face of the spectre approached,
the urchin administered to it a fillip.

One bullet, however, better aimed or more treacherous than the rest,
finally struck the will-o'-the-wisp of a child.  Gavroche was seen
to stagger, then he sank to the earth.  The whole barricade gave
vent to a cry; but there was something of Antaeus in that pygmy;
for the gamin to touch the pavement is the same as for the giant
to touch the earth; Gavroche had fallen only to rise again;
he remained in a sitting posture, a long thread of blood streaked
his face, he raised both arms in the air, glanced in the direction
whence the shot had come, and began to sing:


      "Je suis tombe par terre,     "I have fallen to the earth,
       C'est la faute a Voltaire;    'Tis the fault of Voltaire;
       Le nez dans le ruisseau,      With my nose in the gutter,
       C'est la faute a . . . "      'Tis the fault of . . . "


He did not finish.  A second bullet from the same marksman stopped
him short.  This time he fell face downward on the pavement,
and moved no more.  This grand little soul had taken its flight.



CHAPTER XVI

HOW FROM A BROTHER ONE BECOMES A FATHER


At that same moment, in the garden of the Luxembourg,--for the gaze
of the drama must be everywhere present,--two children were holding
each other by the hand.  One might have been seven years old,
the other five.  The rain having soaked them, they were walking along
the paths on the sunny side; the elder was leading the younger;
they were pale and ragged; they had the air of wild birds. 
The smaller of them said:  "I am very hungry."

The elder, who was already somewhat of a protector, was leading his
brother with his left hand and in his right he carried a small stick.

They were alone in the garden.  The garden was deserted, the gates had
been closed by order of the police, on account of the insurrection. 
The troops who had been bivouacking there had departed for the
exigencies of combat.

How did those children come there?  Perhaps they had escaped from
some guard-house which stood ajar; perhaps there was in the vicinity,
at the Barriere d'Enfer; or on the Esplanade de l'Observatoire,
or in the neighboring carrefour, dominated by the pediment
on which could be read:  Invenerunt parvulum pannis involutum,
some mountebank's booth from which they had fled; perhaps they had,
on the preceding evening, escaped the eye of the inspectors
of the garden at the hour of closing, and had passed the night
in some one of those sentry-boxes where people read the papers? 
The fact is, they were stray lambs and they seemed free.  To be astray
and to seem free is to be lost.  These poor little creatures were,
in fact, lost.

These two children were the same over whom Gavroche had been put to
some trouble, as the reader will recollect.  Children of the Thenardiers,
leased out to Magnon, attributed to M. Gillenormand, and now leaves
fallen from all these rootless branches, and swept over the ground
by the wind.  Their clothing, which had been clean in Magnon's day,
and which had served her as a prospectus with M. Gillenormand,
had been converted into rags.

Henceforth these beings belonged to the statistics
as "Abandoned children," whom the police
take note of, collect, mislay and find again on the pavements of Paris.

It required the disturbance of a day like that to account for these
miserable little creatures being in that garden.  If the superintendents
had caught sight of them, they would have driven such rags forth. 
Poor little things do not enter public gardens; still, people should
reflect that, as children, they have a right to flowers.

These children were there, thanks to the locked gates.  They were
there contrary to the regulations.  They had slipped into the garden
and there they remained.  Closed gates do not dismiss the inspectors,
oversight is supposed to continue, but it grows slack and reposes;
and the inspectors, moved by the public anxiety and more occupied
with the outside than the inside, no longer glanced into the garden,
and had not seen the two delinquents.

It had rained the night before, and even a little in the morning. 
But in June, showers do not count for much.  An hour after a storm,
it can hardly be seen that the beautiful blonde day has wept. 
The earth, in summer, is as quickly dried as the cheek of a child. 
At that period of the solstice, the light of full noonday is,
so to speak, poignant.  It takes everything.  It applies itself to
the earth, and superposes itself with a sort of suction.  One would
say that the sun was thirsty.  A shower is but a glass of water;
a rainstorm is instantly drunk up.  In the morning everything
was dripping, in the afternoon everything is powdered over.

Nothing is so worthy of admiration as foliage washed by the rain
and wiped by the rays of sunlight; it is warm freshness.  The gardens
and meadows, having water at their roots, and sun in their flowers,
become perfuming-pans of incense, and smoke with all their odors
at once.  Everything smiles, sings and offers itself.  One feels
gently intoxicated.  The springtime is a provisional paradise,
the sun helps man to have patience.

There are beings who demand nothing further; mortals, who, having
the azure of heaven, say:  "It is enough!" dreamers absorbed in
the wonderful, dipping into the idolatry of nature, indifferent to
good and evil, contemplators of cosmos and radiantly forgetful
of man, who do not understand how people can occupy themselves
with the hunger of these, and the thirst of those, with the nudity
of the poor in winter, with the lymphatic curvature of the little
spinal column, with the pallet, the attic, the dungeon, and the rags
of shivering young girls, when they can dream beneath the trees;
peaceful and terrible spirits they, and pitilessly satisfied. 
Strange to say, the infinite suffices them.  That great need of man,
the finite, which admits of embrace, they ignore.  The finite
which admits of progress and sublime toil, they do not think about. 
The indefinite, which is born from the human and divine combination
of the infinite and the finite, escapes them.  Provided that they are
face to face with immensity, they smile.  Joy never, ecstasy forever. 
Their life lies in surrendering their personality in contemplation. 
The history of humanity is for them only a detailed plan.  All is
not there; the true All remains without; what is the use of busying
oneself over that detail, man?  Man suffers, that is quite possible;
but look at Aldebaran rising!  The mother has no more milk,
the new-born babe is dying.  I know nothing about that, but just
look at this wonderful rosette which a slice of wood-cells of the
pine presents under the microscope!  Compare the most beautiful
Mechlin lace to that if you can!  These thinkers forget to love. 
The zodiac thrives with them to such a point that it prevents
their seeing the weeping child.  God eclipses their souls. 
This is a family of minds which are, at once, great and petty. 
Horace was one of them; so was Goethe.  La Fontaine perhaps;
magnificent egoists of the infinite, tranquil spectators of sorrow,
who do not behold Nero if the weather be fair, for whom the sun
conceals the funeral pile, who would look on at an execution by the
guillotine in the search for an effect of light, who hear neither
the cry nor the sob, nor the death rattle, nor the alarm peal,
for whom everything is well, since there is a month of May, who,
so long as there are clouds of purple and gold above their heads,
declare themselves content, and who are determined to be happy
until the radiance of the stars and the songs of the birds
are exhausted.

These are dark radiances.  They have no suspicion that they
are to be pitied.  Certainly they are so.  He who does not weep
does not see.  They are to be admired and pitied, as one would
both pity and admire a being at once night and day, without eyes
beneath his lashes but with a star on his brow.

The indifference of these thinkers, is, according to some,
a superior philosophy.  That may be; but in this superiority
there is some infirmity.  One may be immortal and yet limp: 
witness Vulcan.  One may be more than man and less than man. 
There is incomplete immensity in nature.  Who knows whether the sun
is not a blind man?

But then, what?  In whom can we trust?  Solem quis dicere falsum audeat? 
Who shall dare to say that the sun is false?  Thus certain geniuses,
themselves, certain Very-Lofty mortals, man-stars, may be mistaken? 
That which is on high at the summit, at the crest, at the zenith,
that which sends down so much light on the earth, sees but little,
sees badly, sees not at all?  Is not this a desperate state of things? 
No. But what is there, then, above the sun?  The god.

On the 6th of June, 1832, about eleven o'clock in the morning,
the Luxembourg, solitary and depopulated, was charming. 
The quincunxes and flower-beds shed forth balm and dazzling beauty
into the sunlight.  The branches, wild with the brilliant glow
of midday, seemed endeavoring to embrace.  In the sycamores there
was an uproar of linnets, sparrows triumphed, woodpeckers climbed
along the chestnut trees, administering little pecks on the bark. 
The flower-beds accepted the legitimate royalty of the lilies;
the most august of perfumes is that which emanates from whiteness. 
The peppery odor of the carnations was perceptible.  The old crows
of Marie de Medici were amorous in the tall trees.  The sun gilded,
empurpled, set fire to and lighted up the tulips, which are nothing
but all the varieties of flame made into flowers.  All around the
banks of tulips the bees, the sparks of these flame-flowers, hummed. 
All was grace and gayety, even the impending rain; this relapse,
by which the lilies of the valley and the honeysuckles were destined
to profit, had nothing disturbing about it; the swallows indulged
in the charming threat of flying low.  He who was there aspired
to happiness; life smelled good; all nature exhaled candor,
help, assistance, paternity, caress, dawn.  The thoughts which fell
from heaven were as sweet as the tiny hand of a baby when one
kisses it.

The statues under the trees, white and nude, had robes of shadow
pierced with light; these goddesses were all tattered with sunlight;
rays hung from them on all sides.  Around the great fountain,
the earth was already dried up to the point of being burnt. 
There was sufficient breeze to raise little insurrections of dust
here and there.  A few yellow leaves, left over from the autumn,
chased each other merrily, and seemed to be playing tricks on
each other.

This abundance of light had something indescribably reassuring
about it.  Life, sap, heat, odors overflowed; one was conscious,
beneath creation, of the enormous size of the source; in all these
breaths permeated with love, in this interchange of reverberations
and reflections, in this marvellous expenditure of rays, in this
infinite outpouring of liquid gold, one felt the prodigality of
the inexhaustible; and, behind this splendor as behind a curtain
of flame, one caught a glimpse of God, that millionaire of stars.

Thanks to the sand, there was not a speck of mud; thanks to the rain,
there was not a grain of ashes.  The clumps of blossoms had just
been bathed; every sort of velvet, satin, gold and varnish,
which springs from the earth in the form of flowers, was irreproachable. 
This magnificence was cleanly.  The grand silence of happy nature
filled the garden.  A celestial silence that is compatible with a
thousand sorts of music, the cooing of nests, the buzzing of swarms,
the flutterings of the breeze.  All the harmony of the season was
complete in one gracious whole; the entrances and exits of spring
took place in proper order; the lilacs ended; the jasmines began;
some flowers were tardy, some insects in advance of their time;
the van-guard of the red June butterflies fraternized with the
rear-guard of the white butterflies of May.  The plantain trees
were getting their new skins.  The breeze hollowed out undulations
in the magnificent enormity of the chestnut-trees. It was splendid. 
A veteran from the neighboring barracks, who was gazing through
the fence, said:  "Here is the Spring presenting arms and in
full uniform."

All nature was breakfasting; creation was at table; this was its hour;
the great blue cloth was spread in the sky, and the great green cloth
on earth; the sun lighted it all up brilliantly.  God was serving
the universal repast.  Each creature had his pasture or his mess. 
The ring-dove found his hemp-seed, the chaffinch found his millet,
the goldfinch found chickweed, the red-breast found worms, the green
finch found flies, the fly found infusoriae, the bee found flowers. 
They ate each other somewhat, it is true, which is the misery of evil
mixed with good; but not a beast of them all had an empty stomach.

The two little abandoned creatures had arrived in the vicinity
of the grand fountain, and, rather bewildered by all this light,
they tried to hide themselves, the instinct of the poor and the weak
in the presence of even impersonal magnificence; and they kept
behind the swans' hutch.

Here and there, at intervals, when the wind blew, shouts, clamor, a sort
of tumultuous death rattle, which was the firing, and dull blows,
which were discharges of cannon, struck the ear confusedly. 
Smoke hung over the roofs in the direction of the Halles.  A bell,
which had the air of an appeal, was ringing in the distance.

These children did not appear to notice these noises.  The little
one repeated from time to time:  "I am hungry."

Almost at the same instant with the children, another couple approached
the great basin.  They consisted of a goodman, about fifty years
of age, who was leading by the hand a little fellow of six.  No doubt,
a father and his son.  The little man of six had a big brioche.

At that epoch, certain houses abutting on the river, in the
Rues Madame and d'Enfer, had keys to the Luxembourg garden,
of which the lodgers enjoyed the use when the gates were shut,
a privilege which was suppressed later on.  This father and son
came from one of these houses, no doubt.

The two poor little creatures watched "that gentleman" approaching,
and hid themselves a little more thoroughly.

He was a bourgeois.  The same person, perhaps, whom Marius had
one day heard, through his love fever, near the same grand basin,
counselling his son "to avoid excesses."  He had an affable and haughty
air, and a mouth which was always smiling, since it did not shut. 
This mechanical smile, produced by too much jaw and too little skin,
shows the teeth rather than the soul.  The child, with his brioche,
which he had bitten into but had not finished eating, seemed satiated. 
The child was dressed as a National Guardsman, owing to the insurrection,
and the father had remained clad as a bourgeois out of prudence.

Father and son halted near the fountain where two swans were sporting. 
This bourgeois appeared to cherish a special admiration for the swans. 
He resembled them in this sense, that he walked like them.

For the moment, the swans were swimming, which is their
principal talent, and they were superb.

If the two poor little beings had listened and if they had been
of an age to understand, they might have gathered the words of this
grave man.  The father was saying to his son:

"The sage lives content with little.  Look at me, my son.  I do
not love pomp.  I am never seen in clothes decked with gold lace
and stones; I leave that false splendor to badly organized souls."

Here the deep shouts which proceeded from the direction of the
Halles burst out with fresh force of bell and uproar.

"What is that?" inquired the child.

The father replied:

"It is the Saturnalia."

All at once, he caught sight of the two little ragged boys behind
the green swan-hutch.

"There is the beginning," said he.

And, after a pause, he added:

"Anarchy is entering this garden."

In the meanwhile, his son took a bite of his brioche, spit it out,
and, suddenly burst out crying.

"What are you crying about?" demanded his father.

"I am not hungry any more," said the child.

The father's smile became more accentuated.

"One does not need to be hungry in order to eat a cake."

"My cake tires me.  It is stale."

"Don't you want any more of it?"

"No."

The father pointed to the swans.

"Throw it to those palmipeds."

The child hesitated.  A person may not want any more of his cake;
but that is no reason for giving it away.

The father went on:

"Be humane.  You must have compassion on animals."

And, taking the cake from his son, he flung it into the basin.

The cake fell very near the edge.

The swans were far away, in the centre of the basin, and busy
with some prey.  They had seen neither the bourgeois nor the brioche.

The bourgeois, feeling that the cake was in danger of being wasted,
and moved by this useless shipwreck, entered upon a telegraphic
agitation, which finally attracted the attention of the swans.

They perceived something floating, steered for the edge like ships,
as they are, and slowly directed their course toward the brioche,
with the stupid majesty which befits white creatures.

"The swans [cygnes] understand signs [signes]," said the bourgeois,
delighted to make a jest.

At that moment, the distant tumult of the city underwent another
sudden increase.  This time it was sinister.  There are some gusts
of wind which speak more distinctly than others.  The one which was
blowing at that moment brought clearly defined drum-beats, clamors,
platoon firing, and the dismal replies of the tocsin and the cannon. 
This coincided with a black cloud which suddenly veiled the sun.

The swans had not yet reached the brioche.

"Let us return home," said the father, "they are attacking
the Tuileries."

He grasped his son's hand again.  Then he continued:

"From the Tuileries to the Luxembourg, there is but the distance
which separates Royalty from the peerage; that is not far. 
Shots will soon rain down."

He glanced at the cloud.

"Perhaps it is rain itself that is about to shower down; the sky
is joining in; the younger branch is condemned.  Let us return
home quickly."

"I should like to see the swans eat the brioche," said the child.

The father replied:

"That would be imprudent."

And he led his little bourgeois away.

The son, regretting the swans, turned his head back toward the basin
until a corner of the quincunxes concealed it from him.

In the meanwhile, the two little waifs had approached the brioche
at the same time as the swans.  It was floating on the water. 
The smaller of them stared at the cake, the elder gazed after the
retreating bourgeois.

Father and son entered the labyrinth of walks which leads to the grand
flight of steps near the clump of trees on the side of the Rue Madame.

As soon as they had disappeared from view, the elder child hastily
flung himself flat on his stomach on the rounding curb of the basin,
and clinging to it with his left hand, and leaning over the water,
on the verge of falling in, he stretched out his right hand with his
stick towards the cake.  The swans, perceiving the enemy, made haste,
and in so doing, they produced an effect of their breasts which was of
service to the little fisher; the water flowed back before the swans,
and one of these gentle concentric undulations softly floated
the brioche towards the child's wand.  Just as the swans came up,
the stick touched the cake.  The child gave it a brisk rap, drew in
the brioche, frightened away the swans, seized the cake, and sprang
to his feet.  The cake was wet; but they were hungry and thirsty. 
The elder broke the cake into two portions, a large one and a small one,
took the small one for himself, gave the large one to his brother,
and said to him:

"Ram that into your muzzle."



CHAPTER XVII

MORTUUS PATER FILIUM MORITURUM EXPECTAT


Marius dashed out of the barricade, Combeferre followed him. 
But he was too late.  Gavroche was dead.  Combeferre brought back
the basket of cartridges; Marius bore the child.

"Alas!" he thought, "that which the father had done for his father,
he was requiting to the son; only, Thenardier had brought back his
father alive; he was bringing back the child dead."

When Marius re-entered the redoubt with Gavroche in his arms,
his face, like the child, was inundated with blood.

At the moment when he had stooped to lift Gavroche, a bullet had
grazed his head; he had not noticed it.

Courfeyrac untied his cravat and with it bandaged Marius' brow.

They laid Gavroche on the same table with Mabeuf, and spread over
the two corpses the black shawl.  There was enough of it for both
the old man and the child.

Combeferre distributed the cartridges from the basket which he
had brought in.

This gave each man fifteen rounds to fire.

Jean Valjean was still in the same place, motionless on his
stone post.  When Combeferre offered him his fifteen cartridges,
he shook his head.

"Here's a rare eccentric," said Combeferre in a low voice to Enjolras. 
"He finds a way of not fighting in this barricade."

"Which does not prevent him from defending it," responded Enjolras.

"Heroism has its originals," resumed Combeferre.

And Courfeyrac, who had overheard, added:

"He is another sort from Father Mabeuf."

One thing which must be noted is, that the fire which was battering
the barricade hardly disturbed the interior.  Those who have never
traversed the whirlwind of this sort of war can form no idea of the
singular moments of tranquillity mingled with these convulsions. 
Men go and come, they talk, they jest, they lounge.  Some one whom
we know heard a combatant say to him in the midst of the grape-shot:
"We are here as at a bachelor breakfast."  The redoubt of the Rue de
la Chanvrerie, we repeat, seemed very calm within.  All mutations
and all phases had been, or were about to be, exhausted.  The position,
from critical, had become menacing, and, from menacing, was probably
about to become desperate.  In proportion as the situation grew gloomy,
the glow of heroism empurpled the barricade more and more. 
Enjolras, who was grave, dominated it, in the attitude of a young
Spartan sacrificing his naked sword to the sombre genius, Epidotas.

Combeferre, wearing an apron, was dressing the wounds: 
Bossuet and Feuilly were making cartridges with the powder-flask
picked up by Gavroche on the dead corporal, and Bossuet said
to Feuilly:  "We are soon to take the diligence for another planet";
Courfeyrac was disposing and arranging on some paving-stones which
he had reserved for himself near Enjolras, a complete arsenal,
his sword-cane, his gun, two holster pistols, and a cudgel,
with the care of a young girl setting a small dunkerque in order. 
Jean Valjean stared silently at the wall opposite him.  An artisan
was fastening Mother Hucheloup's big straw hat on his head with
a string, "for fear of sun-stroke," as he said.  The young men
from the Cougourde d'Aix were chatting merrily among themselves,
as though eager to speak patois for the last time.  Joly, who had
taken Widow Hucheloup's mirror from the wall, was examining his
tongue in it.  Some combatants, having discovered a few crusts
of rather mouldy bread, in a drawer, were eagerly devouring them. 
Marius was disturbed with regard to what his father was about to say
to him.



CHAPTER XVIII

THE VULTURE BECOME PREY


We must insist upon one psychological fact peculiar to barricades. 
Nothing which is characteristic of that surprising war of the streets
should be omitted.

Whatever may have been the singular inward tranquillity which we
have just mentioned, the barricade, for those who are inside it,
remains, none the less, a vision.

There is something of the apocalypse in civil war,
all the mists of the unknown are commingled with
fierce flashes, revolutions are sphinxes, and any
one who has passed through a barricade thinks he has traversed a dream.

The feelings to which one is subject in these places we have pointed
out in the case of Marius, and we shall see the consequences;
they are both more and less than life.  On emerging from a barricade,
one no longer knows what one has seen there.  One has been terrible,
but one knows it not.  One has been surrounded with conflicting ideas
which had human faces; one's head has been in the light of the future. 
There were corpses lying prone there, and phantoms standing erect. 
The hours were colossal and seemed hours of eternity.  One has lived
in death.  Shadows have passed by.  What were they?

One has beheld hands on which there was blood; there was a
deafening horror; there was also a frightful silence; there were open
mouths which shouted, and other open mouths which held their peace;
one was in the midst of smoke, of night, perhaps.  One fancied
that one had touched the sinister ooze of unknown depths; one stares
at something red on one's finger nails.  One no longer remembers anything.

Let us return to the Rue de la Chanvrerie.

All at once, between two discharges, the distant sound of a clock
striking the hour became audible.

"It is midday," said Combeferre.

The twelve strokes had not finished striking when Enjolras sprang
to his feet, and from the summit of the barricade hurled this
thundering shout:

"Carry stones up into the houses; line the windowsills and the
roofs with them.  Half the men to their guns, the other half
to the paving-stones. There is not a minute to be lost."

A squad of sappers and miners, axe on shoulder, had just made
their appearance in battle array at the end of the street.

This could only be the head of a column; and of what column? 
The attacking column, evidently; the sappers charged with the demolition
of the barricade must always precede the soldiers who are to scale it.

They were, evidently, on the brink of that moment which
M. Clermont-Tonnerre, in 1822, called "the tug of war."

Enjolras' order was executed with the correct haste which is peculiar
to ships and barricades, the only two scenes of combat where escape
is impossible.  In less than a minute, two thirds of the stones
which Enjolras had had piled up at the door of Corinthe had been
carried up to the first floor and the attic, and before a second
minute had elapsed, these stones, artistically set one upon the other,
walled up the sash-window on the first floor and the windows
in the roof to half their height.  A few loop-holes carefully
planned by Feuilly, the principal architect, allowed of the passage
of the gun-barrels. This armament of the windows could be effected
all the more easily since the firing of grape-shot had ceased. 
The two cannons were now discharging ball against the centre
of the barrier in order to make a hole there, and, if possible,
a breach for the assault.

When the stones destined to the final defence were in place,
Enjolras had the bottles which he had set under the table where
Mabeuf lay, carried to the first floor.

"Who is to drink that?"  Bossuet asked him.

"They," replied Enjolras.

Then they barricaded the window below, and held in readiness the iron
cross-bars which served to secure the door of the wine-shop at night.

The fortress was complete.  The barricade was the rampart,
the wine-shop was the dungeon.  With the stones which remained
they stopped up the outlet.

As the defenders of a barricade are always obliged to be sparing
of their ammunition, and as the assailants know this, the assailants
combine their arrangements with a sort of irritating leisure,
expose themselves to fire prematurely, though in appearance more
than in reality, and take their ease.  The preparations for attack
are always made with a certain methodical deliberation; after which,
the lightning strikes.

This deliberation permitted Enjolras to take a review of everything
and to perfect everything.  He felt that, since such men were to die,
their death ought to be a masterpiece.

He said to Marius:  "We are the two leaders.  I will give the last
orders inside.  Do you remain outside and observe."

Marius posted himself on the lookout upon the crest of the barricade.

Enjolras had the door of the kitchen, which was the ambulance,
as the reader will remember, nailed up.

"No splashing of the wounded," he said.

He issued his final orders in the tap-room in a curt, but profoundly
tranquil tone; Feuilly listened and replied in the name of all.

"On the first floor, hold your axes in readiness to cut the staircase. 
Have you them?"

"Yes," said Feuilly.

"How many?"

"Two axes and a pole-axe."

"That is good.  There are now twenty-six combatants of us on foot. 
How many guns are there?"

"Thirty-four."

"Eight too many.  Keep those eight guns loaded like the rest and at hand. 
Swords and pistols in your belts.  Twenty men to the barricade. 
Six ambushed in the attic windows, and at the window on the first
floor to fire on the assailants through the loop-holes in the stones. 
Let not a single worker remain inactive here.  Presently, when the drum
beats the assault, let the twenty below stairs rush to the barricade. 
The first to arrive will have the best places."

These arrangements made, he turned to Javert and said:

"I am not forgetting you."

And, laying a pistol on the table, he added:

"The last man to leave this room will smash the skull of this spy."

"Here?" inquired a voice.

"No, let us not mix their corpses with our own.  The little barricade
of the Mondetour lane can be scaled.  It is only four feet high. 
The man is well pinioned.  He shall be taken thither and put
to death."

There was some one who was more impassive at that moment than Enjolras,
it was Javert.  Here Jean Valjean made his appearance.

He had been lost among the group of insurgents.  He stepped forth
and said to Enjolras:

"You are the commander?"

"Yes."

"You thanked me a while ago."

"In the name of the Republic.  The barricade has two saviors,
Marius Pontmercy and yourself."

"Do you think that I deserve a recompense?"

"Certainly."

"Well, I request one."

"What is it?"

"That I may blow that man's brains out."

Javert raised his head, saw Jean Valjean, made an almost
imperceptible movement, and said:

"That is just."

As for Enjolras, he had begun to re-load his rifle; he cut his eyes
about him:

"No objections."

And he turned to Jean Valjean:

"Take the spy."

Jean Valjean did, in fact, take possession of Javert, by seating
himself on the end of the table.  He seized the pistol, and a faint
click announced that he had cocked it.

Almost at the same moment, a blast of trumpets became audible.

"Take care!" shouted Marius from the top of the barricade.

Javert began to laugh with that noiseless laugh which was peculiar
to him, and gazing intently at the insurgents, he said to them:

"You are in no better case than I am."

"All out!" shouted Enjolras.

The insurgents poured out tumultuously, and, as they went,
received in the back,--may we be permitted the expression,--
this sally of Javert's:

"We shall meet again shortly!"



CHAPTER XIX

JEAN VALJEAN TAKES HIS REVENGE


When Jean Valjean was left alone with Javert, he untied the rope
which fastened the prisoner across the middle of the body,
and the knot of which was under the table.  After this he made
him a sign to rise.

Javert obeyed with that indefinable smile in which the supremacy
of enchained authority is condensed.

Jean Valjean took Javert by the martingale, as one would take
a beast of burden by the breast-band, and, dragging the latter
after him, emerged from the wine-shop slowly, because Javert,
with his impeded limbs, could take only very short steps.

Jean Valjean had the pistol in his hand.

In this manner they crossed the inner trapezium of the barricade. 
The insurgents, all intent on the attack, which was imminent,
had their backs turned to these two.

Marius alone, stationed on one side, at the extreme left of
the barricade, saw them pass.  This group of victim and executioner
was illuminated by the sepulchral light which he bore in his own soul.

Jean Valjean with some difficulty, but without relaxing his hold
for a single instant, made Javert, pinioned as he was, scale the
little entrenchment in the Mondetour lane.

When they had crossed this barrier, they found themselves alone
in the lane.  No one saw them.  Among the heap they could
distinguish a livid face, streaming hair, a pierced hand and
the half nude breast of a woman.  It was Eponine.  The corner
of the houses hid them from the insurgents.  The corpses carried
away from the barricade formed a terrible pile a few paces distant.

Javert gazed askance at this body, and, profoundly calm, said in
a low tone:

"It strikes me that I know that girl."

Then he turned to Jean Valjean.

Jean Valjean thrust the pistol under his arm and fixed on Javert
a look which it required no words to interpret:  "Javert, it is I."

Javert replied:

"Take your revenge."

Jean Valjean drew from his pocket a knife, and opened it.

"A clasp-knife!" exclaimed Javert, "you are right.  That suits
you better."

Jean Valjean cut the martingale which Javert had about his neck,
then he cut the cords on his wrists, then, stooping down, he cut
the cord on his feet; and, straightening himself up, he said to him:

"You are free."

Javert was not easily astonished.  Still, master of himself though
he was, he could not repress a start.  He remained open-mouthed
and motionless.

Jean Valjean continued:

"I do not think that I shall escape from this place.  But if,
by chance, I do, I live, under the name of Fauchelevent, in the Rue
de l'Homme Arme, No. 7."

Javert snarled like a tiger, which made him half open one corner
of his mouth, and he muttered between his teeth:

"Have a care."

"Go," said Jean Valjean.

Javert began again:

"Thou saidst Fauchelevent, Rue de l'Homme Arme?"

"Number 7."

Javert repeated in a low voice:--"Number 7."

He buttoned up his coat once more, resumed the military stiffness
between his shoulders, made a half turn, folded his arms and,
supporting his chin on one of his hands, he set out in the direction
of the Halles.  Jean Valjean followed him with his eyes:

A few minutes later, Javert turned round and shouted to Jean Valjean:

"You annoy me.  Kill me, rather."

Javert himself did not notice that he no longer addressed Jean
Valjean as "thou."

"Be off with you," said Jean Valjean.

Javert retreated slowly.  A moment later he turned the corner
of the Rue des Precheurs.

When Javert had disappeared, Jean Valjean fired his pistol in the air.

Then he returned to the barricade and said:

"It is done."

In the meanwhile, this is what had taken place.

Marius, more intent on the outside than on the interior, had not,
up to that time, taken a good look at the pinioned spy in the dark
background of the tap-room.

When he beheld him in broad daylight, striding over the
barricade in order to proceed to his death, he recognized him. 
Something suddenly recurred to his mind.  He recalled the inspector
of the Rue de Pontoise, and the two pistols which the latter had
handed to him and which he, Marius, had used in this very barricade,
and not only did he recall his face, but his name as well.

This recollection was misty and troubled, however, like all his ideas.

It was not an affirmation that he made, but a question which he
put to himself:

"Is not that the inspector of police who told me that his name
was Javert?"

Perhaps there was still time to intervene in behalf of that man. 
But, in the first place, he must know whether this was Javert.

Marius called to Enjolras, who had just stationed himself
at the other extremity of the barricade:

"Enjolras!"

"What?"

"What is the name of yonder man?"

"What man?"

"The police agent.  Do you know his name?"

"Of course.  He told us."

"What is it?"

"Javert."

Marius sprang to his feet.

At that moment, they heard the report of the pistol.

Jean Valjean re-appeared and cried:  "It is done."

A gloomy chill traversed Marius' heart.



CHAPTER XX

THE DEAD ARE IN THE RIGHT AND THE LIVING ARE NOT IN THE WRONG


The death agony of the barricade was about to begin.

Everything contributed to its tragic majesty at that supreme moment;
a thousand mysterious crashes in the air, the breath of armed
masses set in movement in the streets which were not visible,
the intermittent gallop of cavalry, the heavy shock of artillery
on the march, the firing by squads, and the cannonades crossing
each other in the labyrinth of Paris, the smokes of battle mounting
all gilded above the roofs, indescribable and vaguely terrible cries,
lightnings of menace everywhere, the tocsin of Saint-Merry, which now
had the accents of a sob, the mildness of the weather, the splendor
of the sky filled with sun and clouds, the beauty of the day,
and the alarming silence of the houses.

For, since the preceding evening, the two rows of houses in the Rue
de la Chanvrerie had become two walls; ferocious walls, doors closed,
windows closed, shutters closed.

In those days, so different from those in which we live, when the
hour was come, when the people wished to put an end to a situation,
which had lasted too long, with a charter granted or with a
legal country, when universal wrath was diffused in the atmosphere,
when the city consented to the tearing up of the pavements,
when insurrection made the bourgeoisie smile by whispering its
password in its ear, then the inhabitant, thoroughly penetrated
with the revolt, so to speak, was the auxiliary of the combatant,
and the house fraternized with the improvised fortress which rested
on it.  When the situation was not ripe, when the insurrection
was not decidedly admitted, when the masses disowned the movement,
all was over with the combatants, the city was changed into a desert
around the revolt, souls grew chilled, refuges were nailed up,
and the street turned into a defile to help the army to take
the barricade.

A people cannot be forced, through surprise, to walk more quickly
than it chooses.  Woe to whomsoever tries to force its hand!  A people
does not let itself go at random.  Then it abandons the insurrection
to itself.  The insurgents become noxious, infected with the plague. 
A house is an escarpment, a door is a refusal, a facade is a wall. 
This wall hears, sees and will not.  It might open and save you. 
No. This wall is a judge.  It gazes at you and condemns you. 
What dismal things are closed houses.  They seem dead, they are living. 
Life which is, as it were, suspended there, persists there. 
No one has gone out of them for four and twenty hours, but no one
is missing from them.  In the interior of that rock, people go
and come, go to bed and rise again; they are a family party there;
there they eat and drink; they are afraid, a terrible thing! 
Fear excuses this fearful lack of hospitality; terror is mixed
with it, an extenuating circumstance.  Sometimes, even, and this
has been actually seen, fear turns to passion; fright may change
into fury, as prudence does into rage; hence this wise saying: 
"The enraged moderates."  There are outbursts of supreme terror,
whence springs wrath like a mournful smoke.--"What do these people want? 
What have they come there to do?  Let them get out of the scrape. 
So much the worse for them.  It is their fault.  They are only getting
what they deserve.  It does not concern us.  Here is our poor street
all riddled with balls.  They are a pack of rascals.  Above all things,
don't open the door."--And the house assumes the air of a tomb. 
The insurgent is in the death-throes in front of that house; he sees
the grape-shot and naked swords drawing near; if he cries, he knows
that they are listening to him, and that no one will come; there stand
walls which might protect him, there are men who might save him;
and these walls have ears of flesh, and these men have bowels of
stone.

Whom shall he reproach?

No one and every one.

The incomplete times in which we live.

It is always at its own risk and peril that Utopia is converted
into revolution, and from philosophical protest becomes
an armed protest, and from Minerva turns to Pallas.

The Utopia which grows impatient and becomes revolt knows what awaits it;
it almost always comes too soon.  Then it becomes resigned, and stoically
accepts catastrophe in lieu of triumph.  It serves those who deny it
without complaint, even excusing them, and even disculpates them,
and its magnanimity consists in consenting to abandonment. 
It is indomitable in the face of obstacles and gentle towards ingratitude.

Is this ingratitude, however?

Yes, from the point of view of the human race.

No, from the point of view of the individual.

Progress is man's mode of existence.  The general life of the human
race is called Progress, the collective stride of the human race
is called Progress.  Progress advances; it makes the great human
and terrestrial journey towards the celestial and the divine; it has
its halting places where it rallies the laggard troop, it has its
stations where it meditates, in the presence of some splendid Canaan
suddenly unveiled on its horizon, it has its nights when it sleeps;
and it is one of the poignant anxieties of the thinker that he sees
the shadow resting on the human soul, and that he gropes in darkness
without being able to awaken that slumbering Progress.

"God is dead, perhaps," said Gerard de Nerval one day to the
writer of these lines, confounding progress with God, and taking
the interruption of movement for the death of Being.

He who despairs is in the wrong.  Progress infallibly awakes, and,
in short, we may say that it marches on, even when it is asleep,
for it has increased in size.  When we behold it erect once more,
we find it taller.  To be always peaceful does not depend on
progress any more than it does on the stream; erect no barriers,
cast in no boulders; obstacles make water froth and humanity boil. 
Hence arise troubles; but after these troubles, we recognize the fact
that ground has been gained.  Until order, which is nothing else than
universal peace, has been established, until harmony and unity reign,
progress will have revolutions as its halting-places.

What, then, is progress?  We have just enunciated it; the permanent
life of the peoples.

Now, it sometimes happens, that the momentary life of individuals
offers resistance to the eternal life of the human race.

Let us admit without bitterness, that the individual has his distinct
interests, and can, without forfeiture, stipulate for his interest,
and defend it; the present has its pardonable dose of egotism;
momentary life has its rights, and is not bound to sacrifice itself
constantly to the future.  The generation which is passing in its
turn over the earth, is not forced to abridge it for the sake
of the generations, its equal, after all, who will have their turn
later on.--"I exist," murmurs that some one whose name is All. 
"I am young and in love, I am old and I wish to repose, I am the
father of a family, I toil, I prosper, I am successful in business,
I have houses to lease, I have money in the government funds,
I am happy, I have a wife and children, I have all this, I desire
to live, leave me in peace."--Hence, at certain hours, a profound
cold broods over the magnanimous vanguard of the human race.

Utopia, moreover, we must admit, quits its radiant sphere when
it makes war.  It, the truth of to-morrow, borrows its mode
of procedure, battle, from the lie of yesterday.  It, the future,
behaves like the past.  It, pure idea, becomes a deed of violence. 
It complicates its heroism with a violence for which it is just that
it should be held to answer; a violence of occasion and expedient,
contrary to principle, and for which it is fatally punished. 
The Utopia, insurrection, fights with the old military code in its fist;
it shoots spies, it executes traitors; it suppresses living beings
and flings them into unknown darkness.  It makes use of death,
a serious matter.  It seems as though Utopia had no longer any faith
in radiance, its irresistible and incorruptible force.  It strikes
with the sword.  Now, no sword is simple.  Every blade has two edges;
he who wounds with the one is wounded with the other.

Having made this reservation, and made it with all severity,
it is impossible for us not to admire, whether they succeed or not,
those the glorious combatants of the future, the confessors
of Utopia.  Even when they miscarry, they are worthy of veneration;
and it is, perhaps, in failure, that they possess the most majesty. 
Victory, when it is in accord with progress, merits the applause
of the people; but a heroic defeat merits their tender compassion. 
The one is magnificent, the other sublime.  For our own part,
we prefer martyrdom to success.  John Brown is greater than Washington,
and Pisacane is greater than Garibaldi.

It certainly is necessary that some one should take the part
of the vanquished.

We are unjust towards these great men who attempt the future,
when they fail.

Revolutionists are accused of sowing fear abroad.  Every barricade
seems a crime.  Their theories are incriminated, their aim suspected,
their ulterior motive is feared, their conscience denounced. 
They are reproached with raising, erecting, and heaping up, against the
reigning social state, a mass of miseries, of griefs, of iniquities,
of wrongs, of despairs, and of tearing from the lowest depths blocks
of shadow in order therein to embattle themselves and to combat. 
People shout to them:  "You are tearing up the pavements of hell!" 
They might reply:  "That is because our barricade is made of
good intentions."

The best thing, assuredly, is the pacific solution.  In short,
let us agree that when we behold the pavement, we think of the bear,
and it is a good will which renders society uneasy.  But it depends
on society to save itself, it is to its own good will that we make
our appeal.  No violent remedy is necessary.  To study evil amiably,
to prove its existence, then to cure it.  It is to this that we
invite it.

However that may be, even when fallen, above all when fallen, these men,
who at every point of the universe, with their eyes fixed on France,
are striving for the grand work with the inflexible logic of the ideal,
are august; they give their life a free offering to progress;
they accomplish the will of providence; they perform a religious act. 
At the appointed hour, with as much disinterestedness as an actor
who answers to his cue, in obedience to the divine stage-manager,
they enter the tomb.  And this hopeless combat, this stoical
disappearance they accept in order to bring about the supreme
and universal consequences, the magnificent and irresistibly human
movement begun on the 14th of July, 1789; these soldiers are priests. 
The French revolution is an act of God.

Moreover, there are, and it is proper to add this distinction to
the distinctions already pointed out in another chapter,--there are
accepted revolutions, revolutions which are called revolutions;
there are refused revolutions, which are called riots.

An insurrection which breaks out, is an idea which is passing its
examination before the people.  If the people lets fall a black ball,
the idea is dried fruit; the insurrection is a mere skirmish.

Waging war at every summons and every time that Utopia desires it,
is not the thing for the peoples.  Nations have not always and at
every hour the temperament of heroes and martyrs.

They are positive.  A priori, insurrection is repugnant to them,
in the first place, because it often results in a catastrophe,
in the second place, because it always has an abstraction as its point
of departure.

Because, and this is a noble thing, it is always for the ideal,
and for the ideal alone, that those who sacrifice themselves do thus
sacrifice themselves.  An insurrection is an enthusiasm.  Enthusiasm may
wax wroth; hence the appeal to arms.  But every insurrection,
which aims at a government or a regime, aims higher.  Thus, for instance,
and we insist upon it, what the chiefs of the insurrection
of 1832, and, in particular, the young enthusiasts of the Rue de
la Chanvrerie were combating, was not precisely Louis Philippe. 
The majority of them, when talking freely, did justice to this king
who stood midway between monarchy and revolution; no one hated him. 
But they attacked the younger branch of the divine right in Louis
Philippe as they had attacked its elder branch in Charles X.;
and that which they wished to overturn in overturning royalty
in France, was, as we have explained, the usurpation of man
over man, and of privilege over right in the entire universe. 
Paris without a king has as result the world without despots. 
This is the manner in which they reasoned.  Their aim was distant
no doubt, vague perhaps, and it retreated in the face of their efforts;
but it was great.

Thus it is.  And we sacrifice ourselves for these visions,
which are almost always illusions for the sacrificed, but illusions
with which, after all, the whole of human certainty is mingled. 
We throw ourselves into these tragic affairs and become intoxicated
with that which we are about to do.  Who knows?  We may succeed. 
We are few in number, we have a whole army arrayed against us;
but we are defending right, the natural law, the sovereignty
of each one over himself from which no abdication is possible,
justice and truth, and in case of need, we die like the three
hundred Spartans.  We do not think of Don Quixote but of Leonidas. 
And we march straight before us, and once pledged, we do not draw back,
and we rush onwards with head held low, cherishing as our hope an
unprecedented victory, revolution completed, progress set free again,
the aggrandizement of the human race, universal deliverance;
and in the event of the worst, Thermopylae.

These passages of arms for the sake of progress often suffer shipwreck,
and we have just explained why.  The crowd is restive in the
presence of the impulses of paladins.  Heavy masses, the multitudes
which are fragile because of their very weight, fear adventures;
and there is a touch of adventure in the ideal.

Moreover, and we must not forget this, interests which are not
very friendly to the ideal and the sentimental are in the way. 
Sometimes the stomach paralyzes the heart.

The grandeur and beauty of France lies in this, that she takes
less from the stomach than other nations:  she more easily knots
the rope about her loins.  She is the first awake, the last asleep. 
She marches forwards.  She is a seeker.

This arises from the fact that she is an artist.

The ideal is nothing but the culminating point of logic,
the same as the beautiful is nothing but the summit of the true. 
Artistic peoples are also consistent peoples.  To love beauty is
to see the light.  That is why the torch of Europe, that is to say
of civilization, was first borne by Greece, who passed it on to Italy,
who handed it on to France.  Divine, illuminating nations of scouts! 
Vitaelampada tradunt.

It is an admirable thing that the poetry of a people is the element
of its progress.  The amount of civilization is measured by the
quantity of imagination.  Only, a civilizing people should remain
a manly people.  Corinth, yes; Sybaris, no.  Whoever becomes effeminate
makes himself a bastard.  He must be neither a dilettante nor
a virtuoso:  but he must be artistic.  In the matter of civilization,
he must not refine, but he must sublime.  On this condition,
one gives to the human race the pattern of the ideal.

The modern ideal has its type in art, and its means is science. 
It is through science that it will realize that august vision
of the poets, the socially beautiful.  Eden will be reconstructed
by A+B. At the point which civilization has now reached, the exact
is a necessary element of the splendid, and the artistic sentiment
is not only served, but completed by the scientific organ;
dreams must be calculated.  Art, which is the conqueror,
should have for support science, which is the walker; the solidity
of the creature which is ridden is of importance.  The modern spirit
is the genius of Greece with the genius of India as its vehicle;
Alexander on the elephant.

Races which are petrified in dogma or demoralized by lucre are unfit
to guide civilization.  Genuflection before the idol or before money
wastes away the muscles which walk and the will which advances. 
Hieratic or mercantile absorption lessens a people's power of radiance,
lowers its horizon by lowering its level, and deprives it of that
intelligence, at once both human and divine of the universal goal,
which makes missionaries of nations.  Babylon has no ideal;
Carthage has no ideal.  Athens and Rome have and keep, throughout
all the nocturnal darkness of the centuries, halos of civilization.

France is in the same quality of race as Greece and Italy. 
She is Athenian in the matter of beauty, and Roman in her greatness. 
Moreover, she is good.  She gives herself.  Oftener than is the case
with other races, is she in the humor for self-devotion and sacrifice. 
Only, this humor seizes upon her, and again abandons her. 
And therein lies the great peril for those who run when she
desires only to walk, or who walk on when she desires to halt. 
France has her relapses into materialism, and, at certain instants,
the ideas which obstruct that sublime brain have no longer anything
which recalls French greatness and are of the dimensions of a
Missouri or a South Carolina.  What is to be done in such a case? 
The giantess plays at being a dwarf; immense France has her freaks
of pettiness.  That is all.

To this there is nothing to say.  Peoples, like planets, possess the
right to an eclipse.  And all is well, provided that the light
returns and that the eclipse does not degenerate into night. 
Dawn and resurrection are synonymous.  The reappearance of the light
is identical with the persistence of the _I_.

Let us state these facts calmly.  Death on the barricade
or the tomb in exile, is an acceptable occasion for devotion. 
The real name of devotion is disinterestedness.  Let the abandoned
allow themselves to be abandoned, let the exiled allow themselves
to be exiled, and let us confine ourselves to entreating great
nations not to retreat too far, when they do retreat.  One must
not push too far in descent under pretext of a return to reason.

Matter exists, the minute exists, interest exists, the stomach exists;
but the stomach must not be the sole wisdom.  The life of the moment
has its rights, we admit, but permanent life has its rights also. 
Alas! the fact that one is mounted does not preclude a fall. 
This can be seen in history more frequently than is desirable: 
A nation is great, it tastes the ideal, then it bites the mire,
and finds it good; and if it be asked how it happens that it
has abandoned Socrates for Falstaff, it replies:  "Because I
love statesmen."

One word more before returning to our subject, the conflict.

A battle like the one which we are engaged in describing is nothing
else than a convulsion towards the ideal.  Progress trammelled
is sickly, and is subject to these tragic epilepsies.  With that malady
of progress, civil war, we have been obliged to come in contact
in our passage.  This is one of the fatal phases, at once act
and entr'acte of that drama whose pivot is a social condemnation,
and whose veritable title is Progress.

Progress!

The cry to which we frequently give utterance is our whole thought;
and, at the point of this drama which we have now reached, the idea
which it contains having still more than one trial to undergo,
it is, perhaps, permitted to us, if not to lift the veil from it,
to at least allow its light to shine through.

The book which the reader has under his eye at this moment is,
from one end to the other, as a whole and in detail, whatever may
be its intermittences, exceptions and faults, the march from evil
to good, from the unjust to the just, from night to day, from appetite
to conscience, from rottenness to life, from hell to heaven,
from nothingness to God.  Point of departure:  matter; point of arrival: 
the soul.  The hydra at the beginning, the angel at the end.



CHAPTER XXI

THE HEROES


All at once, the drum beat the charge.

The attack was a hurricane.  On the evening before, in the darkness,
the barricade had been approached silently, as by a boa.  Now, in broad
daylight, in that widening street, surprise was decidedly impossible,
rude force had, moreover, been unmasked, the cannon had begun the roar,
the army hurled itself on the barricade.  Fury now became skill. 
A powerful detachment of infantry of the line, broken at regular
intervals, by the National Guard and the Municipal Guard on foot,
and supported by serried masses which could be heard though
not seen, debauched into the street at a run, with drums beating,
trumpets braying, bayonets levelled, the sappers at their head,
and, imperturbable under the projectiles, charged straight
for the barricade with the weight of a brazen beam against a wall.

The wall held firm.

The insurgents fired impetuously.  The barricade once scaled
had a mane of lightning flashes.  The assault was so furious,
that for one moment, it was inundated with assailants; but it
shook off the soldiers as the lion shakes off the dogs, and it
was only covered with besiegers as the cliff is covered with foam,
to re-appear, a moment later, beetling, black and formidable.

The column, forced to retreat, remained massed in the street,
unprotected but terrible, and replied to the redoubt with a terrible
discharge of musketry.  Any one who has seen fireworks will recall
the sheaf formed of interlacing lightnings which is called a bouquet. 
Let the reader picture to himself this bouquet, no longer vertical
but horizontal, bearing a bullet, buck-shot or a biscaien at the
tip of each one of its jets of flame, and picking off dead men
one after another from its clusters of lightning.  The barricade
was underneath it.

On both sides, the resolution was equal.  The bravery exhibited
there was almost barbarous and was complicated with a sort of heroic
ferocity which began by the sacrifice of self.

This was the epoch when a National Guardsman fought like a Zouave. 
The troop wished to make an end of it, insurrection was desirous
of fighting.  The acceptance of the death agony in the flower
of youth and in the flush of health turns intrepidity into frenzy. 
In this fray, each one underwent the broadening growth of the death hour. 
The street was strewn with corpses.

The barricade had Enjolras at one of its extremities and Marius at
the other.  Enjolras, who carried the whole barricade in his head,
reserved and sheltered himself; three soldiers fell, one after
the other, under his embrasure, without having even seen him;
Marius fought unprotected.  He made himself a target.  He stood
with more than half his body above the breastworks.  There is no
more violent prodigal than the avaricious man who takes the bit in
his teeth; there is no man more terrible in action than a dreamer. 
Marius was formidable and pensive.  In battle he was as in a dream. 
One would have pronounced him a phantom engaged in firing a gun.

The insurgents' cartridges were giving out; but not their sarcasms. 
In this whirlwind of the sepulchre in which they stood, they laughed.

Courfeyrac was bare-headed.

"What have you done with your hat?"  Bossuet asked him.

Courfeyrac replied:

"They have finally taken it away from me with cannon-balls."

Or they uttered haughty comments.

"Can any one understand," exclaimed Feuilly bitterly, "those
men,--[and he cited names, well-known names, even celebrated names,
some belonging to the old army]--who had promised to join us,
and taken an oath to aid us, and who had pledged their honor to it,
and who are our generals, and who abandon us!"

And Combeferre restricted himself to replying with a grave smile.

"There are people who observe the rules of honor as one observes
the stars, from a great distance."

The interior of the barricade was so strewn with torn cartridges
that one would have said that there had been a snowstorm.

The assailants had numbers in their favor; the insurgents had position. 
They were at the top of a wall, and they thundered point-blank
upon the soldiers tripping over the dead and wounded and entangled
in the escarpment.  This barricade, constructed as it was and
admirably buttressed, was really one of those situations where a handful
of men hold a legion in check.  Nevertheless, the attacking column,
constantly recruited and enlarged under the shower of bullets,
drew inexorably nearer, and now, little by little, step by step,
but surely, the army closed in around the barricade as the vice
grasps the wine-press.

One assault followed another.  The horror of the situation
kept increasing.

Then there burst forth on that heap of paving-stones, in that
Rue de la Chanvrerie, a battle worthy of a wall of Troy. 
These haggard, ragged, exhausted men, who had had nothing to eat
for four and twenty hours, who had not slept, who had but a few
more rounds to fire, who were fumbling in their pockets which had
been emptied of cartridges, nearly all of whom were wounded,
with head or arm bandaged with black and blood-stained linen,
with holes in their clothes from which the blood trickled, and who
were hardly armed with poor guns and notched swords, became Titans. 
The barricade was ten times attacked, approached, assailed, scaled,
and never captured.

In order to form an idea of this struggle, it is necessary to
imagine fire set to a throng of terrible courages, and then to gaze
at the conflagration.  It was not a combat, it was the interior
of a furnace; there mouths breathed the flame; there countenances
were extraordinary.  The human form seemed impossible there,
the combatants flamed forth there, and it was formidable to behold
the going and coming in that red glow of those salamanders of the fray.

The successive and simultaneous scenes of this grand slaughter we
renounce all attempts at depicting.  The epic alone has the right
to fill twelve thousand verses with a battle.

One would have pronounced this that hell of Brahmanism,
the most redoubtable of the seventeen abysses,
which the Veda calls the Forest of Swords.

They fought hand to hand, foot to foot, with pistol shots, with blows
of the sword, with their fists, at a distance, close at hand,
from above, from below, from everywhere, from the roofs of the houses,
from the windows of the wine-shop, from the cellar windows,
whither some had crawled.  They were one against sixty.

The facade of Corinthe, half demolished, was hideous.  The window,
tattooed with grape-shot, had lost glass and frame and was nothing
now but a shapeless hole, tumultuously blocked with paving-stones.

Bossuet was killed; Feuilly was killed; Courfeyrac was killed;
Combeferre, transfixed by three blows from a bayonet in the
breast at the moment when he was lifting up a wounded soldier,
had only time to cast a glance to heaven when he expired.

Marius, still fighting, was so riddled with wounds, particularly in
the head, that his countenance disappeared beneath the blood,
and one would have said that his face was covered with a red kerchief.

Enjolras alone was not struck.  When he had no longer any weapon,
he reached out his hands to right and left and an insurgent thrust
some arm or other into his fist.  All he had left was the stumps
of four swords; one more than Francois I. at Marignan.  Homer says: 
"Diomedes cuts the throat of Axylus, son of Teuthranis, who dwelt
in happy Arisba; Euryalus, son of Mecistaeus, exterminates Dresos
and Opheltios, Esepius, and that Pedasus whom the naiad Abarbarea bore
to the blameless Bucolion; Ulysses overthrows Pidytes of Percosius;
Antilochus, Ablerus; Polypaetes, Astyalus; Polydamas, Otos, of Cyllene;
and Teucer, Aretaon.  Meganthios dies under the blows of Euripylus'
pike.  Agamemnon, king of the heroes, flings to earth Elatos,
born in the rocky city which is laved by the sounding river Satnois." 
In our old poems of exploits, Esplandian attacks the giant marquis
Swantibore with a cobbler's shoulder-stick of fire, and the latter
defends himself by stoning the hero with towers which he plucks up
by the roots.  Our ancient mural frescoes show us the two Dukes of
Bretagne and Bourbon, armed, emblazoned and crested in war-like guise,
on horseback and approaching each other, their battle-axes in hand,
masked with iron, gloved with iron, booted with iron, the one
caparisoned in ermine, the other draped in azure:  Bretagne with
his lion between the two horns of his crown, Bourbon helmeted with
a monster fleur de lys on his visor.  But, in order to be superb,
it is not necessary to wear, like Yvon, the ducal morion, to have
in the fist, like Esplandian, a living flame, or, like Phyles,
father of Polydamas, to have brought back from Ephyra a good suit of mail,
a present from the king of men, Euphetes; it suffices to give one's
life for a conviction or a loyalty.  This ingenuous little soldier,
yesterday a peasant of Bauce or Limousin, who prowls with his clasp-knife
by his side, around the children's nurses in the Luxembourg garden,
this pale young student bent over a piece of anatomy or a book,
a blond youth who shaves his beard with scissors,--take both of them,
breathe upon them with a breath of duty, place them face to face
in the Carrefour Boucherat or in the blind alley Planche-Mibray,
and let the one fight for his flag, and the other for his ideal,
and let both of them imagine that they are fighting for their country;
the struggle will be colossal; and the shadow which this 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 re-appears 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 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 Eponine 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.

Statisticians have calculated that France alone makes a deposit
of half a milliard every year, in the Atlantic, through the mouths
of her rivers.  Note this:  with five hundred millions we could
pay one quarter of the expenses of our budget.  The cleverness
of man is such that he prefers to get rid of these five hundred
millions in the gutter.  It is the very substance of the people
that is carried off, here drop by drop, there wave after wave,
the wretched outpour of our sewers into the rivers, and the gigantic
collection of our rivers into the ocean.  Every hiccough of our
sewers costs us a thousand francs.  From this spring two results,
the land impoverished, and the water tainted.  Hunger arising
from the furrow, and disease from the stream.

It is notorious, for example, that at the present hour, the Thames
is poisoning London.

So far as Paris is concerned, it has become indispensable of late,
to transport the mouths of the sewers down stream, below the
last bridge.

A double tubular apparatus, provided with valves and sluices,
sucking up and driving back, a system of elementary drainage,
simple as the lungs of a man, and which is already in full working
order in many communities in England, would suffice to conduct
the pure water of the fields into our cities, and to send back
to the fields the rich water of the cities, and this easy exchange,
the simplest in the world, would retain among us the five hundred
millions now thrown away.  People are thinking of other things.

The process actually in use does evil, with the intention of doing good. 
The intention is good, the result is melancholy.  Thinking to purge
the city, the population is blanched like plants raised in cellars. 
A sewer is a mistake.  When drainage, everywhere, with its double
function, restoring what it takes, shall have replaced the sewer,
which is a simple impoverishing washing, then, this being combined
with the data of a now social economy, the product of the earth will
be increased tenfold, and the problem of misery will be singularly
lightened.  Add the suppression of parasitism, and it will be solved.

In the meanwhile, the public wealth flows away to the river,
and leakage takes place.  Leakage is the word.  Europe is being
ruined in this manner by exhaustion.

As for France, we have just cited its figures.  Now, Paris contains
one twenty-fifth of the total population of France, and Parisian
guano being the richest of all, we understate the truth when we value
the loss on the part of Paris at twenty-five millions in the half
milliard which France annually rejects.  These twenty-five millions,
employed in assistance and enjoyment, would double the splendor
of Paris.  The city spends them in sewers.  So that we may say that
Paris's great prodigality, its wonderful festival, its Beaujon folly,
its orgy, its stream of gold from full hands, its pomp, its luxury,
its magnificence, is its sewer system.

It is in this manner that, in the blindness of a poor
political economy, we drown and allow to float down
stream and to be lost in the gulfs the well-being
of all.  There should be nets at Saint-Cloud for the public fortune.

Economically considered, the matter can be summed up thus: 
Paris is a spendthrift.  Paris, that model city, that patron of
well-arranged capitals, of which every nation strives to possess a copy,
that metropolis of the ideal, that august country of the initiative,
of impulse and of effort, that centre and that dwelling of minds,
that nation-city, that hive of the future, that marvellous combination
of Babylon and Corinth, would make a peasant of the Fo-Kian shrug
his shoulders, from the point of view which we have just indicated.

Imitate Paris and you will ruin yourselves.

Moreover, and particularly in this immemorial and senseless waste,
Paris is itself an imitator.

These surprising exhibitions of stupidity are not novel;
this is no young folly.  The ancients did like the moderns. 
"The sewers of Rome," says Liebig, "have absorbed all the well-being
of the Roman peasant."  When the Campagna of Rome was ruined by
the Roman sewer, Rome exhausted Italy, and when she had put Italy
in her sewer, she poured in Sicily, then Sardinia, then Africa. 
The sewer of Rome has engulfed the world.  This cess-pool offered
its engulfment to the city and the universe.  Urbi et orbi. 
Eternal city, unfathomable sewer.

Rome sets the example for these things as well as for others.

Paris follows this example with all the stupidity peculiar
to intelligent towns.

For the requirements of the operation upon the subject of which we
have just explained our views, Paris has beneath it another Paris;
a Paris of sewers; which has its streets, its cross-roads, its squares,
its blind-alleys, its arteries, and its circulation, which is of mire
and minus the human form.

For nothing must be flattered, not even a great people; where there
is everything there is also ignominy by the side of sublimity;
and, if Paris contains Athens, the city of light, Tyre, the city
of might, Sparta, the city of virtue, Nineveh, the city of marvels,
it also contains Lutetia, the city of mud.

However, the stamp of its power is there also, and the Titanic sink
of Paris realizes, among monuments, that strange ideal realized
in humanity by some men like Macchiavelli, Bacon and Mirabeau,
grandiose vileness.

The sub-soil of Paris, if the eye could penetrate its surface,
would present the aspect of a colossal madrepore.  A sponge has no
more partitions and ducts than the mound of earth for a circuit of six
leagues round about, on which rests the great and ancient city. 
Not to mention its catacombs, which are a separate cellar,
not to mention the inextricable trellis-work of gas pipes,
without reckoning the vast tubular system for the distribution
of fresh water which ends in the pillar fountains, the sewers
alone form a tremendous, shadowy net-work under the two banks;
a labyrinth which has its slope for its guiding thread.

There appears, in the humid mist, the rat which seems the product
to which Paris has given birth.



CHAPTER II

ANCIENT HISTORY OF THE SEWER


Let the reader imagine Paris lifted off like a cover, the subterranean
net-work of sewers, from a bird's eye view, will outline on the banks
a species of large branch grafted on the river.  On the right bank,
the belt sewer will form the trunk of this branch, the secondary
ducts will form the branches, and those without exit the twigs.

This figure is but a summary one and half exact, the right angle,
which is the customary angle of this species of subterranean
ramifications, being very rare in vegetation.

A more accurate image of this strange geometrical plan can be formed
by supposing that one is viewing some eccentric oriental alphabet,
as intricate as a thicket, against a background of shadows,
and the misshapen letters should be welded one to another in
apparent confusion, and as at haphazard, now by their angles,
again by their extremities.

Sinks and sewers played a great part in the Middle Ages,
in the Lower Empire and in the Orient of old.  The masses regarded
these beds of decomposition, these monstrous cradles of death,
with a fear that was almost religious.  The vermin ditch of Benares
is no less conducive to giddiness than the lions' ditch of Babylon. 
Teglath-Phalasar, according to the rabbinical books, swore by the sink
of Nineveh.  It was from the sewer of Munster that John of Leyden
produced his false moon, and it was from the cess-pool of Kekscheb
that oriental menalchme, Mokanna, the veiled prophet of Khorassan,
caused his false sun to emerge.

The history of men is reflected in the history of sewers. 
The Germoniae[58] narrated Rome.  The sewer of Paris has been
an ancient and formidable thing.  It has been a sepulchre,
it has served as an asylum.  Crime, intelligence, social protest,
liberty of conscience, thought, theft, all that human laws persecute
or have persecuted, is hidden in that hole; the maillotins in the
fourteenth century, the tire-laine of the fifteenth, the Huguenots
in the sixteenth, Morin's illuminated in the seventeenth,
the chauffeurs [brigands] in the eighteenth.  A hundred years ago,
the nocturnal blow of the dagger emerged thence, the pickpocket in
danger slipped thither; the forest had its cave, Paris had its sewer. 
Vagrancy, that Gallic picareria, accepted the sewer as the adjunct
of the Cour des Miracles, and at evening, it returned thither,
fierce and sly, through the Maubuee outlet, as into a bed-chamber.


[58] Steps on the Aventine Hill, leading to the Tiber, to which the
bodies of executed criminals were dragged by hooks to be thrown
into the Tiber.


It was quite natural, that those who had the blind-alley Vide-Gousset,
[Empty-Pocket] or the Rue Coupe-Gorge [Cut-Throat], for the scene
of their daily labor, should have for their domicile by night
the culvert of the Chemin-Vert, or the catch basin of Hurepoix. 
Hence a throng of souvenirs.  All sorts of phantoms haunt these long,
solitary corridors; everywhere is putrescence and miasma;
here and there are breathing-holes, where Villon within converses
with Rabelais without.

The sewer in ancient Paris is the rendezvous of all exhaustions
and of all attempts.  Political economy therein spies a detritus,
social philosophy there beholds a residuum.

The sewer is the conscience of the city.  Everything there
converges and confronts everything else.  In that livid spot
there are shades, but there are no longer any secrets. 
Each thing bears its true form, or at least, its definitive form. 
The mass of filth has this in its favor, that it is not a liar. 
Ingenuousness has taken refuge there.  The mask of Basil is to be
found there, but one beholds its cardboard and its strings and the
inside as well as the outside, and it is accentuated by honest mud. 
Scapin's false nose is its next-door neighbor.  All the uncleannesses
of civilization, once past their use, fall into this trench of truth,
where the immense social sliding ends.  They are there engulfed,
but they display themselves there.  This mixture is a confession. 
There, no more false appearances, no plastering over is possible,
filth removes its shirt, absolute denudation puts to the rout all
illusions and mirages, there is nothing more except what really exists,
presenting the sinister form of that which is coming to an end. 
There, the bottom of a bottle indicates drunkenness, a basket-handle
tells a tale of domesticity; there the core of an apple which has
entertained literary opinions becomes an apple-core once more;
the effigy on the big sou becomes frankly covered with verdigris,
Caiphas' spittle meets Falstaff's puking, the louis-d'or which comes
from the gaming-house jostles the nail whence hangs the rope's end
of the suicide.  a livid foetus rolls along, enveloped in the spangles
which danced at the Opera last Shrove-Tuesday, a cap which has
pronounced judgment on men wallows beside a mass of rottenness which
was formerly Margoton's petticoat; it is more than fraternization,
it is equivalent to addressing each other as thou.  All which was
formerly rouged, is washed free.  The last veil is torn away. 
A sewer is a cynic.  It tells everything.

The sincerity of foulness pleases us, and rests the soul.  When one
has passed one's time in enduring upon earth the spectacle of the
great airs which reasons of state, the oath, political sagacity,
human justice, professional probity, the austerities of situation,
incorruptible robes all assume, it solaces one to enter a sewer
and to behold the mire which befits it.

This is instructive at the same time.  We have just said that history
passes through the sewer.  The Saint-Barthelemys filter through there,
drop by drop, between the paving-stones. Great public assassinations,
political and religious butcheries, traverse this underground
passage of civilization, and thrust their corpses there.  For the
eye of the thinker, all historic murderers are to be found there,
in that hideous penumbra, on their knees, with a scrap of their
winding-sheet for an apron, dismally sponging out their work. 
Louis XI.  is there with Tristan, Francois I. with Duprat, Charles IX. 
is there with his mother, Richelieu is there with Louis XIII.,
Louvois is there, Letellier is there, Hebert and Maillard are there,
scratching the stones, and trying to make the traces of their actions
disappear.  Beneath these vaults one hears the brooms of spectres. 
One there breathes the enormous fetidness of social catastrophes. 
One beholds reddish reflections in the corners.  There flows
a terrible stream, in which bloody hands have been washed.

The social observer should enter these shadows.  They form a part
of his laboratory.  Philosophy is the microscope of the thought. 
Everything desires to flee from it, but nothing escapes it. 
Tergiversation is useless.  What side of oneself does one display
in evasions? the shameful side.  Philosophy pursues with its glance,
probes the evil, and does not permit it to escape into nothingness. 
In the obliteration of things which disappear, in the watching
of things which vanish, it recognizes all.  It reconstructs the
purple from the rag, and the woman from the scrap of her dress. 
From the cess-pool, it re-constitutes the city; from mud,
it reconstructs manners; from the potsherd it infers the amphora
or the jug.  By the imprint of a finger-nail on a piece of parchment,
it recognizes the difference which separates the Jewry of the Judengasse
from the Jewry of the Ghetto.  It re-discovers in what remains that
which has been, good, evil, the true, the blood-stain of the palace,
the ink-blot of the cavern, the drop of sweat from the brothel,
trials undergone, temptations welcomed, orgies cast forth,
the turn which characters have taken as they became abased,
the trace of prostitution in souls of which their grossness rendered
them capable, and on the vesture of the porters of Rome the mark of
Messalina's elbowing.



CHAPTER III

BRUNESEAU


The sewer of Paris in the Middle Ages was legendary.  In the
sixteenth century, Henri II.  attempted a bore, which failed. 
Not a hundred years ago, the cess-pool, Mercier attests the fact,
was abandoned to itself, and fared as best it might.

Such was this ancient Paris, delivered over to quarrels, to indecision,
and to gropings.  It was tolerably stupid for a long time. 
Later on, '89 showed how understanding comes to cities.  But in
the good, old times, the capital had not much head.  It did not
know how to manage its own affairs either morally or materially,
and could not sweep out filth any better than it could abuses. 
Everything presented an obstacle, everything raised a question. 
The sewer, for example, was refractory to every itinerary. 
One could no more find one's bearings in the sewer than one could
understand one's position in the city; above the unintelligible,
below the inextricable; beneath the confusion of tongues there reigned
the confusion of caverns; Daedalus backed up Babel.

Sometimes the Paris sewer took a notion to overflow, as though
this misunderstood Nile were suddenly seized with a fit of rage. 
There occurred, infamous to relate, inundations of the sewer. 
At times, that stomach of civilization digested badly, the cess-pool
flowed back into the throat of the city, and Paris got an after-taste
of her own filth.  These resemblances of the sewer to remorse had
their good points; they were warnings; very badly accepted, however;
the city waxed indignant at the audacity of its mire, and did not
admit that the filth should return.  Drive it out better.

The inundation of 1802 is one of the actual memories of Parisians
of the age of eighty.  The mud spread in cross-form over the Place
des Victoires, where stands the statue of Louis XIV.; it entered the Rue
Saint-Honore by the two mouths to the sewer in the Champs-Elysees,
the Rue Saint-Florentin through the Saint-Florentin sewer,
the Rue Pierre-a-Poisson through the sewer de la Sonnerie,
the Rue Popincourt, through the sewer of the Chemin-Vert,
the Rue de la Roquette, through the sewer of the Rue de Lappe;
it covered the drain of the Rue des Champs-Elysees to the height
of thirty-five centimetres; and, to the South, through the vent of
the Seine, performing its functions in inverse sense, it penetrated
the Rue Mazarine, the Rue de l'Echaude, and the Rue des Marais,
where it stopped at a distance of one hundred and nine metres,
a few paces distant from the house in which Racine had lived,
respecting, in the seventeenth century, the poet more than the King. 
It attained its maximum depth in the Rue Saint-Pierre, where it
rose to the height of three feet above the flag-stones of the
water-spout, and its maximum length in the Rue Saint-Sabin, where it
spread out over a stretch two hundred and thirty-eight metres in length.

At the beginning of this century, the sewer of Paris was still
a mysterious place.  Mud can never enjoy a good fame; but in this
case its evil renown reached the verge of the terrible.  Paris knew,
in a confused way, that she had under her a terrible cavern. 
People talked of it as of that monstrous bed of Thebes in which
swarmed centipedes fifteen long feet in length, and which might have
served Behemoth for a bathtub.  The great boots of the sewermen
never ventured further than certain well-known points.  We were then
very near the epoch when the scavenger's carts, from the summit
of which Sainte-Foix fraternized with the Marquis de Crequi,
discharged their loads directly into the sewer.  As for cleaning out,--
that function was entrusted to the pouring rains which encumbered
rather than swept away.  Rome left some poetry to her sewer,
and called it the Gemoniae; Paris insulted hers, and entitled it
the Polypus-Hole. Science and superstition were in accord, in horror. 
The Polypus hole was no less repugnant to hygiene than to legend. 
The goblin was developed under the fetid covering of the Mouffetard sewer;
the corpses of the Marmousets had been cast into the sewer de
la Barillerie; Fagon attributed the redoubtable malignant fever of 1685
to the great hiatus of the sewer of the Marais, which remained yawning
until 1833 in the Rue Saint-Louis, almost opposite the sign of the
Gallant Messenger.  The mouth of the sewer of the Rue de la Mortellerie
was celebrated for the pestilences which had their source there;
with its grating of iron, with points simulating a row of teeth,
it was like a dragon's maw in that fatal street, breathing forth
hell upon men.  The popular imagination seasoned the sombre Parisian
sink with some indescribably hideous intermixture of the infinite. 
The sewer had no bottom.  The sewer was the lower world.  The idea
of exploring these leprous regions did not even occur to the police. 
To try that unknown thing, to cast the plummet into that shadow,
to set out on a voyage of discovery in that abyss--who would have dared? 
It was alarming.  Nevertheless, some one did present himself. 
The cess-pool had its Christopher Columbus.

One day, in 1805, during one of the rare apparitions which the
Emperor made in Paris, the Minister of the Interior, some Decres
or Cretet or other, came to the master's intimate levee. 
In the Carrousel there was audible the clanking of swords of all
those extraordinary soldiers of the great Republic, and of the
great Empire; then Napoleon's door was blocked with heroes;
men from the Rhine, from the Escaut, from the Adige, and from
the Nile; companions of Joubert, of Desaix, of Marceau, of Hoche,
of Kleber; the aerostiers of Fleurus, the grenadiers of Mayence,
the pontoon-builders of Genoa, hussars whom the Pyramids had looked
down upon, artillerists whom Junot's cannon-ball had spattered
with mud, cuirassiers who had taken by assault the fleet lying at
anchor in the Zuyderzee; some had followed Bonaparte upon the bridge
of Lodi, others had accompanied Murat in the trenches of Mantua,
others had preceded Lannes in the hollow road of Montebello. 
The whole army of that day was present there, in the court-yard of
the Tuileries, represented by a squadron or a platoon, and guarding
Napoleon in repose; and that was the splendid epoch when the grand
army had Marengo behind it and Austerlitz before it.--"Sire,"
said the Minister of the Interior to Napoleon, "yesterday I saw
the most intrepid man in your Empire."--"What man is that?"
said the Emperor brusquely, "and what has he done?"--"He wants
to do something, Sire."--"What is it?"--"To visit the sewers of Paris."

This man existed and his name was Bruneseau.



CHAPTER IV


The visit took place.  It was a formidable campaign; a nocturnal
battle against pestilence and suffocation.  It was, at the same time,
a voyage of discovery.  One of the survivors of this expedition,
an intelligent workingman, who was very young at the time, related curious
details with regard to it, several years ago, which Bruneseau thought
himself obliged to omit in his report to the prefect of police,
as unworthy of official style.  The processes of disinfection were,
at that epoch, extremely rudimentary.  Hardly had Bruneseau crossed
the first articulations of that subterranean network, when eight
laborers out of the twenty refused to go any further.  The operation
was complicated; the visit entailed the necessity of cleaning;
hence it was necessary to cleanse and at the same time, to proceed;
to note the entrances of water, to count the gratings and the vents,
to lay out in detail the branches, to indicate the currents at
the point where they parted, to define the respective bounds of the
divers basins, to sound the small sewers grafted on the principal
sewer, to measure the height under the key-stone of each drain,
and the width, at the spring of the vaults as well as at the bottom,
in order to determine the arrangements with regard to the level
of each water-entrance, either of the bottom of the arch, or on
the soil of the street.  They advanced with toil.  The lanterns
pined away in the foul atmosphere.  From time to time, a fainting
sewerman was carried out.  At certain points, there were precipices. 
The soil had given away, the pavement had crumbled, the sewer
had changed into a bottomless well; they found nothing solid;
a man disappeared suddenly; they had great difficulty in getting
him out again.  On the advice of Fourcroy, they lighted large cages
filled with tow steeped in resin, from time to time, in spots
which had been sufficiently disinfected.  In some places, the wall
was covered with misshapen fungi,--one would have said tumors;
the very stone seemed diseased within this unbreathable atmosphere.

Bruneseau, in his exploration, proceeded down hill.  At the point
of separation of the two water-conduits of the Grand-Hurleur, he
deciphered upon a projecting stone the date of 1550; this stone
indicated the limits where Philibert Delorme, charged by Henri II. 
with visiting the subterranean drains of Paris, had halted. 
This stone was the mark of the sixteenth century on the sewer;
Bruneseau found the handiwork of the seventeenth century once more
in the Ponceau drain of the old Rue Vielle-du-Temple, vaulted between
1600 and 1650; and the handiwork of the eighteenth in the western
section of the collecting canal, walled and vaulted in 1740. 
These two vaults, especially the less ancient, that of 1740,
were more cracked and decrepit than the masonry of the belt sewer,
which dated from 1412, an epoch when the brook of fresh water of
Menilmontant was elevated to the dignity of the Grand Sewer of Paris,
an advancement analogous to that of a peasant who should become first
valet de chambre to the King; something like Gros-Jean transformed
into Lebel.

Here and there, particularly beneath the Court-House, they thought
they recognized the hollows of ancient dungeons, excavated in the
very sewer itself.  Hideous in-pace. An iron neck-collar was hanging
in one of these cells.  They walled them all up.  Some of their finds
were singular; among others, the skeleton of an ourang-outan, who had
disappeared from the Jardin des Plantes in 1800, a disappearance
probably connected with the famous and indisputable apparition of the
devil in the Rue des Bernardins, in the last year of the eighteenth
century.  The poor devil had ended by drowning himself in the sewer.

Beneath this long, arched drain which terminated at the Arche-Marion,
a perfectly preserved rag-picker's basket excited the admiration
of all connoisseurs.  Everywhere, the mire, which the sewermen came
to handle with intrepidity, abounded in precious objects, jewels of
gold and silver, precious stones, coins.  If a giant had filtered
this cesspool, he would have had the riches of centuries in his lair. 
At the point where the two branches of the Rue du Temple and of the
Rue Sainte-Avoye separate, they picked up a singular Huguenot medal
in copper, bearing on one side the pig hooded with a cardinal's hat,
and on the other, a wolf with a tiara on his head.

The most surprising rencounter was at the entrance to the Grand Sewer. 
This entrance had formerly been closed by a grating of which nothing
but the hinges remained.  From one of these hinges hung a dirty
and shapeless rag which, arrested there in its passage, no doubt,
had floated there in the darkness and finished its process of being
torn apart.  Bruneseau held his lantern close to this rag and
examined it.  It was of very fine batiste, and in one of the corners,
less frayed than the rest, they made out a heraldic coronet and
embroidered above these seven letters:  LAVBESP.  The crown was the
coronet of a Marquis, and the seven letters signified Laubespine. 
They recognized the fact, that what they had before their eyes
was a morsel of the shroud of Marat.  Marat in his youth had had
amorous intrigues.  This was when he was a member of the household
of the Comte d'Artois, in the capacity of physician to the Stables. 
From these love affairs, historically proved, with a great lady,
he had retained this sheet.  As a waif or a souvenir.  At his death,
as this was the only linen of any fineness which he had in his house,
they buried him in it.  Some old women had shrouded him for the tomb
in that swaddling-band in which the tragic Friend of the people
had enjoyed voluptuousness.  Bruneseau passed on.  They left that
rag where it hung; they did not put the finishing touch to it. 
Did this arise from scorn or from respect?  Marat deserved both. 
And then, destiny was there sufficiently stamped to make them
hesitate to touch it.  Besides, the things of the sepulchre must
be left in the spot which they select.  In short, the relic was
a strange one.  A Marquise had slept in it; Marat had rotted in it;
it had traversed the Pantheon to end with the rats of the sewer. 
This chamber rag, of which Watteau would formerly have joyfully
sketched every fold, had ended in becoming worthy of the fixed gaze
of Dante.

The whole visit to the subterranean stream of filth of Paris
lasted seven years, from 1805 to 1812.  As he proceeded,
Bruneseau drew, directed, and completed considerable works;
in 1808 he lowered the arch of the Ponceau, and, everywhere creating
new lines, he pushed the sewer, in 1809, under the Rue Saint-Denis
as far as the fountain of the Innocents; in 1810, under the Rue
Froidmanteau and under the Salpetriere; in 1811 under the Rue
Neuve-des-Petits-Peres, under the Rue du Mail, under the Rue de
l'Echarpe, under the Place Royale; in 1812, under the Rue de la Paix,
and under the Chaussee d'Antin. At the same time, he had the whole
net-work disinfected and rendered healthful.  In the second year
of his work, Bruneseau engaged the assistance of his son-in-law Nargaud.

It was thus that, at the beginning of the century, ancient society
cleansed its double bottom, and performed the toilet of its sewer. 
There was that much clean, at all events.

Tortuous, cracked, unpaved, full of fissures, intersected by gullies,
jolted by eccentric elbows, mounting and descending illogically,
fetid, wild, fierce, submerged in obscurity, with cicatrices
on its pavements and scars on its walls, terrible,--such was,
retrospectively viewed, the antique sewer of Paris.  Ramifications in
every direction, crossings, of trenches, branches, goose-feet, stars,
as in military mines, coecum, blind alleys, vaults lined with saltpetre,
pestiferous pools, scabby sweats, on the walls, drops dripping
from the ceilings, darkness; nothing could equal the horror
of this old, waste crypt, the digestive apparatus of Babylon,
a cavern, ditch, gulf pierced with streets, a titanic mole-burrow,
where the mind seems to behold that enormous blind mole, the past,
prowling through the shadows, in the filth which has been splendor.

This, we repeat, was the sewer of the past.



CHAPTER V

PRESENT PROGRESS


To-day the sewer is clean, cold, straight, correct.  It almost
realizes the ideal of what is understood in England by the
word "respectable."  It is proper and grayish; laid out by rule
and line; one might almost say as though it came out of a bandbox. 
It resembles a tradesman who has become a councillor of state. 
One can almost see distinctly there.  The mire there comports
itself with decency.  At first, one might readily mistake it
for one of those subterranean corridors, which were so common
in former days, and so useful in flights of monarchs and princes,
in those good old times, "when the people loved their kings." 
The present sewer is a beautiful sewer; the pure style reigns there;
the classical rectilinear alexandrine which, driven out of poetry,
appears to have taken refuge in architecture, seems mingled
with all the stones of that long, dark and whitish vault;
each outlet is an arcade; the Rue de Rivoli serves as pattern even
in the sewer.  However, if the geometrical line is in place anywhere,
it is certainly in the drainage trench of a great city. 
There, everything should be subordinated to the shortest road. 
The sewer has, nowadays, assumed a certain official aspect. 
The very police reports, of which it sometimes forms the subject,
no longer are wanting in respect towards it.  The words which
characterize it in administrative language are sonorous and dignified. 
What used to be called a gut is now called a gallery; what used
to be called a hole is now called a surveying orifice.  Villon would
no longer meet with his ancient temporary provisional lodging. 
This net-work of cellars has its immemorial population of prowlers,
rodents, swarming in greater numbers than ever; from time to time,
an aged and veteran rat risks his head at the window of the sewer
and surveys the Parisians; but even these vermin grow tame,
so satisfied are they with their subterranean palace.  The cesspool
no longer retains anything of its primitive ferocity.  The rain,
which in former days soiled the sewer, now washes it.  Nevertheless,
do not trust yourself too much to it.  Miasmas still inhabit it. 
It is more hypocritical than irreproachable.  The prefecture
of police and the commission of health have done their best. 
But, in spite of all the processes of disinfection, it exhales,
a vague, suspicious odor like Tartuffe after confession.

Let us confess, that, taking it all in all, this sweeping is a homage
which the sewer pays to civilization, and as, from this point of view,
Tartuffe's conscience is a progress over the Augean stables,
it is certain that the sewers of Paris have been improved.

It is more than progress; it is transmutation.  Between the ancient
and the present sewer there is a revolution.  What has effected
this revolution?

The man whom all the world forgets, and whom we have mentioned, Bruneseau.



CHAPTER VI

FUTURE PROGRESS


The excavation of the sewer of Paris has been no slight task. 
The last ten centuries have toiled at it without being able to
bring it to a termination, any more than they have been able to
finish Paris.  The sewer, in fact, receives all the counter-shocks
of the growth of Paris.  Within the bosom of the earth, it is a sort
of mysterious polyp with a thousand antennae, which expands below
as the city expands above.  Every time that the city cuts a street,
the sewer stretches out an arm.  The old monarchy had constructed
only twenty-three thousand three hundred metres of sewers; that was
where Paris stood in this respect on the first of January, 1806. 
Beginning with this epoch, of which we shall shortly speak,
the work was usefully and energetically resumed and prosecuted;
Napoleon built--the figures are curious--four thousand eight
hundred and four metres; Louis XVIII., five thousand seven hundred
and nine; Charles X., ten thousand eight hundred and thirty-six;
Louis-Philippe, eighty-nine thousand and twenty; the Republic
of 1848, twenty-three thousand three hundred and eighty-one;
the present government, seventy thousand five hundred; in all,
at the present time, two hundred and twenty-six thousand six hundred
and ten metres; sixty leagues of sewers; the enormous entrails
of Paris.  An obscure ramification ever at work; a construction
which is immense and ignored.

As the reader sees, the subterranean labyrinth of Paris is to-day
more than ten times what it was at the beginning of the century. 
It is difficult to form any idea of all the perseverance and the efforts
which have been required to bring this cess-pool to the point of
relative perfection in which it now is.  It was with great difficulty
that the ancient monarchical provostship and, during the last ten
years of the eighteenth century, the revolutionary mayoralty,
had succeeded in perforating the five leagues of sewer which existed
previous to 1806.  All sorts of obstacles hindered this operation,
some peculiar to the soil, others inherent in the very prejudices
of the laborious population of Paris.  Paris is built upon a soil
which is singularly rebellious to the pick, the hoe, the bore,
and to human manipulation.  There is nothing more difficult to
pierce and to penetrate than the geological formation upon which
is superposed the marvellous historical formation called Paris;
as soon as work in any form whatsoever is begun and adventures
upon this stretch of alluvium, subterranean resistances abound. 
There are liquid clays, springs, hard rocks, and those soft
and deep quagmires which special science calls moutardes.[59]
The pick advances laboriously through the calcareous layers
alternating with very slender threads of clay, and schistose beds
in plates incrusted with oyster-shells, the contemporaries of the
pre-Adamite oceans.  Sometimes a rivulet suddenly bursts through
a vault that has been begun, and inundates the laborers; or a layer
of marl is laid bare, and rolls down with the fury of a cataract,
breaking the stoutest supporting beams like glass.  Quite recently,
at Villette, when it became necessary to pass the collecting sewer
under the Saint-Martin canal without interrupting navigation or
emptying the canal, a fissure appeared in the basin of the canal,
water suddenly became abundant in the subterranean tunnel, which was
beyond the power of the pumping engines; it was necessary to send
a diver to explore the fissure which had been made in the narrow
entrance of the grand basin, and it was not without great difficulty
that it was stopped up.  Elsewhere near the Seine, and even at a
considerable distance from the river, as for instance, at Belleville,
Grand-Rue and Lumiere Passage, quicksands are encountered in which
one sticks fast, and in which a man sinks visibly.  Add suffocation
by miasmas, burial by slides, and sudden crumbling of the earth. 
Add the typhus, with which the workmen become slowly impregnated. 
In our own day, after having excavated the gallery of Clichy,
with a banquette to receive the principal water-conduit of Ourcq,
a piece of work which was executed in a trench ten metres deep;
after having, in the midst of land-slides, and with the aid of
excavations often putrid, and of shoring up, vaulted the Bievre
from the Boulevard de l'Hopital, as far as the Seine; after having,
in order to deliver Paris from the floods of Montmartre and in order
to provide an outlet for that river-like pool nine hectares in extent,
which crouched near the Barriere des Martyrs, after having,
let us state, constructed the line of sewers from the Barriere Blanche
to the road of Aubervilliers, in four months, working day and night,
at a depth of eleven metres; after having--a thing heretofore unseen--
made a subterranean sewer in the Rue Barre-du-Bec, without a trench,
six metres below the surface, the superintendent, Monnot, died. 
After having vaulted three thousand metres of sewer in all quarters
of the city, from the Rue Traversiere-Saint-Antoine to the Rue de
l'Ourcine, after having freed the Carrefour Censier-Mouffetard
from inundations of rain by means of the branch of the Arbalete,
after having built the Saint-Georges sewer, on rock and concrete
in the fluid sands, after having directed the formidable lowering of
the flooring of the vault timber in the Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth branch,
Duleau the engineer died.  There are no bulletins for such acts of
bravery as these, which are more useful, nevertheless, than the brutal
slaughter of the field of battle.


[59] Mustards.


The sewers of Paris in 1832 were far from being what they are
to-day. Bruneseau had given the impulse, but the cholera was
required to bring about the vast reconstruction which took place
later on.  It is surprising to say, for example, that in 1821,
a part of the belt sewer, called the Grand Canal, as in Venice,
still stood stagnating uncovered to the sky, in the Rue des Gourdes. 
It was only in 1821 that the city of Paris found in its pocket
the two hundred and sixty-thousand eighty francs and six centimes
required for covering this mass of filth.  The three absorbing
wells, of the Combat, the Cunette, and Saint-Mande, with their
discharging mouths, their apparatus, their cesspools, and their
depuratory branches, only date from 1836.  The intestinal sewer
of Paris has been made over anew, and, as we have said, it has
been extended more than tenfold within the last quarter of a century.

Thirty years ago, at the epoch of the insurrection of the 5th and 6th
of June, it was still, in many localities, nearly the same ancient sewer. 
A very great number of streets which are now convex were then
sunken causeways.  At the end of a slope, where the tributaries
of a street or cross-roads ended, there were often to be seen large,
square gratings with heavy bars, whose iron, polished by the footsteps
of the throng, gleamed dangerous and slippery for vehicles,
and caused horses to fall.  The official language of the Roads
and Bridges gave to these gratings the expressive name of Cassis.[60]


[60] From casser, to break:  break-necks.


In 1832, in a number of streets, in the Rue de l'Etoile, the Rue
Saint-Louis, the Rue du Temple, the Rue Vielle-duTemple, the Rue
Notre-Dame de Nazareth, the Rue Folie-Mericourt, the Quai aux Fleurs,
the Rue du Petit-Muse, the Rue du Normandie, the Rue Pont-Aux-Biches,
the Rue des Marais, the Faubourg Saint-Martin, the Rue Notre Dame
des-Victoires, the Faubourg Montmartre, the Rue Grange-Bateliere,
in the Champs-Elysees, the Rue Jacob, the Rue de Tournon,
the ancient gothic sewer still cynically displayed its maw. 
It consisted of enormous voids of stone catch-basins sometimes
surrounded by stone posts, with monumental effrontery.

Paris in 1806 still had nearly the same sewers numerically as stated
in 1663; five thousand three hundred fathoms.  After Bruneseau,
on the 1st of January, 1832, it had forty thousand three hundred metres. 
Between 1806 and 1831, there had been built, on an average,
seven hundred and fifty metres annually, afterwards eight and even
ten thousand metres of galleries were constructed every year,
in masonry, of small stones, with hydraulic mortar which hardens
under water, on a cement foundation.  At two hundred francs the metre,
the sixty leagues of Paris' sewers of the present day represent
forty-eight millions.

In addition to the economic progress which we have indicated
at the beginning, grave problems of public hygiene are connected
with that immense question:  the sewers of Paris.

Paris is the centre of two sheets, a sheet of water and a sheet of air. 
The sheet of water, lying at a tolerably great depth underground,
but already sounded by two bores, is furnished by the layer of green
clay situated between the chalk and the Jurassic lime-stone; this layer
may be represented by a disk five and twenty leagues in circumference;
a multitude of rivers and brooks ooze there; one drinks the Seine,
the Marne, the Yonne, the Oise, the Aisne, the Cher, the Vienne
and the Loire in a glass of water from the well of Grenelle. 
The sheet of water is healthy, it comes from heaven in the first
place and next from the earth; the sheet of air is unhealthy,
it comes from the sewer.  All the miasms of the cess-pool are mingled
with the breath of the city; hence this bad breath.  The air taken
from above a dung-heap, as has been scientifically proved, is purer
than the air taken from above Paris.  In a given time, with the aid
of progress, mechanisms become perfected, and as light increases,
the sheet of water will be employed to purify the sheet of air;
that is to say, to wash the sewer.  The reader knows, that by "washing
the sewer" we mean:  the restitution of the filth to the earth;
the return to the soil of dung and of manure to the fields. 
Through this simple act, the entire social community will
experience a diminution of misery and an augmentation of health. 
At the present hour, the radiation of diseases from Paris extends
to fifty leagues around the Louvre, taken as the hub of this
pestilential wheel.

We might say that, for ten centuries, the cess-pool has been the disease
of Paris.  The sewer is the blemish which Paris has in her blood. 
The popular instinct has never been deceived in it.  The occupation
of sewermen was formerly almost as perilous, and almost as repugnant
to the people, as the occupation of knacker, which was so long
held in horror and handed over to the executioner.  High wages
were necessary to induce a mason to disappear in that fetid mine;
the ladder of the cess-pool cleaner hesitated to plunge into it;
it was said, in proverbial form:  "to descend into the sewer is to
enter the grave;" and all sorts of hideous legends, as we have said,
covered this colossal sink with terror; a dread sink-hole which bears
the traces of the revolutions of the globe as of the revolutions
of man, and where are to be found vestiges of all cataclysms from
the shells of the Deluge to the rag of Marat.



BOOK THIRD.--MUD BUT THE SOUL



CHAPTER I

THE SEWER AND ITS SURPRISES


It was in the sewers of Paris that Jean Valjean found himself.

Still another resemblance between Paris and the sea.  As in the ocean,
the diver may disappear there.

The transition was an unheard-of one.  In the very heart of the city,
Jean Valjean had escaped from the city, and, in the twinkling of
an eye, in the time required to lift the cover and to replace it,
he had passed from broad daylight to complete obscurity,
from midday to midnight, from tumult to silence, from the whirlwind
of thunders to the stagnation of the tomb, and, by a vicissitude
far more tremendous even than that of the Rue Polonceau,
from the most extreme peril to the most absolute obscurity.

An abrupt fall into a cavern; a disappearance into the secret
trap-door of Paris; to quit that street where death was on
every side, for that sort of sepulchre where there was life,
was a strange instant.  He remained for several seconds as
though bewildered; listening, stupefied.  The waste-trap of safety
had suddenly yawned beneath him.  Celestial goodness had, in
a manner, captured him by treachery.  Adorable ambuscades of providence!

Only, the wounded man did not stir, and Jean Valjean did not know
whether that which he was carrying in that grave was a living being
or a dead corpse.

His first sensation was one of blindness.  All of a sudden,
he could see nothing.  It seemed to him too, that, in one instant,
he had become deaf.  He no longer heard anything.  The frantic
storm of murder which had been let loose a few feet above his
head did not reach him, thanks to the thickness of the earth
which separated him from it, as we have said, otherwise than
faintly and indistinctly, and like a rumbling, in the depths. 
He felt that the ground was solid under his feet; that was all;
but that was enough.  He extended one arm and then the other,
touched the walls on both sides, and perceived that the passage
was narrow; he slipped, and thus perceived that the pavement was wet. 
He cautiously put forward one foot, fearing a hole, a sink, some gulf;
he discovered that the paving continued.  A gust of fetidness informed
him of the place in which he stood.

After the lapse of a few minutes, he was no longer blind.  A little light
fell through the man-hole through which he had descended, and his eyes
became accustomed to this cavern.  He began to distinguish something. 
The passage in which he had burrowed--no other word can better
express the situation--was walled in behind him.  It was one
of those blind alleys, which the special jargon terms branches. 
In front of him there was another wall, a wall like night. 
The light of the air-hole died out ten or twelve paces from the point
where Jean Valjean stood, and barely cast a wan pallor on a few metres
of the damp walls of the sewer.  Beyond, the opaqueness was massive;
to penetrate thither seemed horrible, an entrance into it appeared
like an engulfment.  A man could, however, plunge into that wall
of fog and it was necessary so to do.  Haste was even requisite. 
It occurred to Jean Valjean that the grating which he had caught sight
of under the flag-stones might also catch the eye of the soldiery,
and that everything hung upon this chance.  They also might descend
into that well and search it.  There was not a minute to be lost. 
He had deposited Marius on the ground, he picked him up again,--
that is the real word for it,--placed him on his shoulders once more,
and set out.  He plunged resolutely into the gloom.

The truth is, that they were less safe than Jean Valjean fancied. 
Perils of another sort and no less serious were awaiting them,
perchance.  After the lightning-charged whirlwind of the combat,
the cavern of miasmas and traps; after chaos, the sewer. 
Jean Valjean had fallen from one circle of hell into another.

When he had advanced fifty paces, he was obliged to halt.  A problem
presented itself.  The passage terminated in another gut which he
encountered across his path.  There two ways presented themselves. 
Which should he take?  Ought he to turn to the left or to the right? 
How was he to find his bearings in that black labyrinth? 
This labyrinth, to which we have already called the reader's attention,
has a clue, which is its slope.  To follow to the slope is to arrive
at the river.

This Jean Valjean instantly comprehended.

He said to himself that he was probably in the sewer des Halles;
that if he were to choose the path to the left and follow the slope,
he would arrive, in less than a quarter of an hour, at some mouth on
the Seine between the Pont au Change and the Pont-Neuf, that is to say,
he would make his appearance in broad daylight on the most densely
peopled spot in Paris.  Perhaps he would come out on some man-hole
at the intersection of streets.  Amazement of the passers-by at
beholding two bleeding men emerge from the earth at their feet. 
Arrival of the police, a call to arms of the neighboring post
of guards.  Thus they would be seized before they had even got out. 
It would be better to plunge into that labyrinth, to confide
themselves to that black gloom, and to trust to Providence for
the outcome.

He ascended the incline, and turned to the right.

When he had turned the angle of the gallery, the distant glimmer
of an air-hole disappeared, the curtain of obscurity fell upon him
once more, and he became blind again.  Nevertheless, he advanced
as rapidly as possible.  Marius' two arms were passed round
his neck, and the former's feet dragged behind him.  He held
both these arms with one hand, and groped along the wall with
the other.  Marius' cheek touched his, and clung there, bleeding. 
He felt a warm stream which came from Marius trickling down upon
him and making its way under his clothes.  But a humid warmth
near his ear, which the mouth of the wounded man touched,
indicated respiration, and consequently, life.  The passage along
which Jean Valjean was now proceeding was not so narrow as the first. 
Jean Valjean walked through it with considerable difficulty. 
The rain of the preceding day had not, as yet, entirely run off,
and it created a little torrent in the centre of the bottom, and he
was forced to hug the wall in order not to have his feet in the water.

Thus he proceeded in the gloom.  He resembled the beings of the
night groping in the invisible and lost beneath the earth in veins
of shadow.

Still, little by little, whether it was that the distant air-holes
emitted a little wavering light in this opaque gloom, or whether
his eyes had become accustomed to the obscurity, some vague vision
returned to him, and he began once more to gain a confused idea,
now of the wall which he touched, now of the vault beneath which he
was passing.  The pupil dilates in the dark, and the soul dilates
in misfortune and ends by finding God there.

It was not easy to direct his course.

The line of the sewer re-echoes, so to speak, the line of the
streets which lie above it.  There were then in Paris two thousand
two hundred streets.  Let the reader imagine himself beneath
that forest of gloomy branches which is called the sewer. 
The system of sewers existing at that epoch, placed end to end,
would have given a length of eleven leagues.  We have said above,
that the actual net-work, thanks to the special activity of the
last thirty years, was no less than sixty leagues in extent.

Jean Valjean began by committing a blunder.  He thought that he was
beneath the Rue Saint-Denis, and it was a pity that it was not so. 
Under the Rue Saint-Denis there is an old stone sewer which dates
from Louis XIII.  and which runs straight to the collecting sewer,
called the Grand Sewer, with but a single elbow, on the right,
on the elevation of the ancient Cour des Miracles, and a single branch,
the Saint-Martin sewer, whose four arms describe a cross.  But the gut
of the Petite-Truanderie the entrance to which was in the vicinity
of the Corinthe wine-shop has never communicated with the sewer
of the Rue Saint-Denis; it ended at the Montmartre sewer, and it
was in this that Jean Valjean was entangled.  There opportunities
of losing oneself abound.  The Montmartre sewer is one of the most
labyrinthine of the ancient network.  Fortunately, Jean Valjean
had left behind him the sewer of the markets whose geometrical plan
presents the appearance of a multitude of parrots' roosts piled on
top of each other; but he had before him more than one embarrassing
encounter and more than one street corner--for they are streets--
presenting itself in the gloom like an interrogation point;
first, on his left, the vast sewer of the Platriere, a sort of
Chinese puzzle, thrusting out and entangling its chaos of Ts and Zs
under the Post-Office and under the rotunda of the Wheat Market,
as far as the Seine, where it terminates in a Y; secondly,
on his right, the curving corridor of the Rue du Cadran with its
three teeth, which are also blind courts; thirdly, on his left,
the branch of the Mail, complicated, almost at its inception,
with a sort of fork, and proceeding from zig-zag to zig-zag
until it ends in the grand crypt of the outlet of the Louvre,
truncated and ramified in every direction; and lastly, the blind
alley of a passage of the Rue des Jeuneurs, without counting little
ducts here and there, before reaching the belt sewer, which alone
could conduct him to some issue sufficiently distant to be safe.

Had Jean Valjean had any idea of all that we have here pointed out,
he would speedily have perceived, merely by feeling the wall,
that he was not in the subterranean gallery of the Rue Saint-Denis.
Instead of the ancient stone, instead of the antique architecture,
haughty and royal even in the sewer, with pavement and string courses
of granite and mortar costing eight hundred livres the fathom,
he would have felt under his hand contemporary cheapness,
economical expedients, porous stone filled with mortar on a
concrete foundation, which costs two hundred francs the metre,
and the bourgeoise masonry known as a petits materiaux--small stuff;
but of all this he knew nothing.

He advanced with anxiety, but with calmness, seeing nothing,
knowing nothing, buried in chance, that is to say, engulfed in providence.

By degrees, we will admit, a certain horror seized upon him. 
The gloom which enveloped him penetrated his spirit.  He walked
in an enigma.  This aqueduct of the sewer is formidable;
it interlaces in a dizzy fashion.  It is a melancholy thing to be
caught in this Paris of shadows.  Jean Valjean was obliged to find
and even to invent his route without seeing it.  In this unknown,
every step that he risked might be his last.  How was he to get
out? should he find an issue? should he find it in time? would
that colossal subterranean sponge with its stone cavities,
allow itself to be penetrated and pierced? should he there encounter
some unexpected knot in the darkness? should he arrive at the
inextricable and the impassable? would Marius die there of hemorrhage
and he of hunger? should they end by both getting lost, and by
furnishing two skeletons in a nook of that night?  He did not know. 
He put all these questions to himself without replying to them. 
The intestines of Paris form a precipice.  Like the prophet,
he was in the belly of the monster.

All at once, he had a surprise.  At the most unforeseen moment,
and without having ceased to walk in a straight line, he perceived
that he was no longer ascending; the water of the rivulet was
beating against his heels, instead of meeting him at his toes. 
The sewer was now descending.  Why?  Was he about to arrive
suddenly at the Seine?  This danger was a great one, but the peril
of retreating was still greater.  He continued to advance.

It was not towards the Seine that he was proceeding.  The ridge
which the soil of Paris forms on its right bank empties one of its
water-sheds into the Seine and the other into the Grand Sewer. 
The crest of this ridge which determines the division of the waters
describes a very capricious line.  The culminating point, which is
the point of separation of the currents, is in the Sainte-Avoye sewer,
beyond the Rue Michelle-Comte, in the sewer of the Louvre,
near the boulevards, and in the Montmartre sewer, near the Halles. 
It was this culminating point that Jean Valjean had reached.  He was
directing his course towards the belt sewer; he was on the right path. 
But he did not know it.

Every time that he encountered a branch, he felt of its angles,
and if he found that the opening which presented itself was smaller
than the passage in which he was, he did not enter but continued
his route, rightly judging that every narrower way must needs terminate
in a blind alley, and could only lead him further from his goal,
that is to say, the outlet.  Thus he avoided the quadruple trap
which was set for him in the darkness by the four labyrinths
which we have just enumerated.

At a certain moment, he perceived that he was emerging from beneath
the Paris which was petrified by the uprising, where the barricades
had suppressed circulation, and that he was entering beneath the living
and normal Paris.  Overhead he suddenly heard a noise as of thunder,
distant but continuous.  It was the rumbling of vehicles.

He had been walking for about half an hour, at least according
to the calculation which he made in his own mind, and he had not
yet thought of rest; he had merely changed the hand with which he
was holding Marius.  The darkness was more profound than ever,
but its very depth reassured him.

All at once, he saw his shadow in front of him.  It was outlined
on a faint, almost indistinct reddish glow, which vaguely empurpled
the flooring vault underfoot, and the vault overhead, and gilded
to his right and to his left the two viscous walls of the passage. 
Stupefied, he turned round.

Behind him, in the portion of the passage which he had just
passed through, at a distance which appeared to him immense,
piercing the dense obscurity, flamed a sort of horrible star
which had the air of surveying him.

It was the gloomy star of the police which was rising in the sewer.

In the rear of that star eight or ten forms were moving about
in a confused way, black, upright, indistinct, horrible.



CHAPTER II

EXPLANATION


On the day of the sixth of June, a battue of the sewers had been ordered. 
It was feared that the vanquished might have taken to them for refuge,
and Prefect Gisquet was to search occult Paris while General
Bugeaud swept public Paris; a double and connected operation
which exacted a double strategy on the part of the public force,
represented above by the army and below by the police.  Three squads
of agents and sewermen explored the subterranean drain of Paris,
the first on the right bank, the second on the left bank, the third
in the city.  The agents of police were armed with carabines,
with bludgeons, swords and poignards.

That which was directed at Jean Valjean at that moment, was the
lantern of the patrol of the right bank.

This patrol had just visited the curving gallery and the three
blind alleys which lie beneath the Rue du Cadran.  While they were
passing their lantern through the depths of these blind alleys,
Jean Valjean had encountered on his path the entrance to the gallery,
had perceived that it was narrower than the principal passage
and had not penetrated thither.  He had passed on.  The police,
on emerging from the gallery du Cadran, had fancied that they
heard the sound of footsteps in the direction of the belt sewer. 
They were, in fact, the steps of Jean Valjean.  The sergeant in
command of the patrol had raised his lantern, and the squad had begun
to gaze into the mist in the direction whence the sound proceeded.

This was an indescribable moment for Jean Valjean.

Happily, if he saw the lantern well, the lantern saw him but ill. 
It was light and he was shadow.  He was very far off, and mingled
with the darkness of the place.  He hugged the wall and halted. 
Moreover, he did not understand what it was that was moving behind him. 
The lack of sleep and food, and his emotions had caused him also to
pass into the state of a visionary.  He beheld a gleam, and around
that gleam, forms.  What was it?  He did not comprehend.

Jean Valjean having paused, the sound ceased.

The men of the patrol listened, and heard nothing, they looked
and saw nothing.  They held a consultation.

There existed at that epoch at this point of the Montmartre
sewer a sort of cross-roads called de service, which was
afterwards suppressed, on account of the little interior lake which
formed there, swallowing up the torrent of rain in heavy storms. 
The patrol could form a cluster in this open space.  Jean Valjean
saw these spectres form a sort of circle.  These bull-dogs'
heads approached each other closely and whispered together.

The result of this council held by the watch dogs was, that they
had been mistaken, that there had been no noise, that it was useless
to get entangled in the belt sewer, that it would only be a waste
of time, but that they ought to hasten towards Saint-Merry;
that if there was anything to do, and any "bousingot" to track out,
it was in that quarter.

From time to time, parties re-sole their old insults.  In 1832,
the word bousingot formed the interim between the word jacobin,
which had become obsolete, and the word demagogue which has since
rendered such excellent service.

The sergeant gave orders to turn to the left, towards the watershed
of the Seine.

If it had occurred to them to separate into two squads, and to go
in both directions, Jean Valjean would have been captured. 
All hung on that thread.  It is probable that the instructions
of the prefecture, foreseeing a possibility of combat and
insurgents in force, had forbidden the patrol to part company. 
The patrol resumed its march, leaving Jean Valjean behind it. 
Of all this movement, Jean Valjean perceived nothing, except the
eclipse of the lantern which suddenly wheeled round.

Before taking his departure, the Sergeant, in order to acquit
his policeman's conscience, discharged his gun in the direction of
Jean Valjean.  The detonation rolled from echo to echo in the crypt,
like the rumbling of that titanic entrail.  A bit of plaster which
fell into the stream and splashed up the water a few paces away from
Jean Valjean, warned him that the ball had struck the arch over his head.

Slow and measured steps resounded for some time on the timber work,
gradually dying away as they retreated to a greater distance;
the group of black forms vanished, a glimmer of light oscillated
and floated, communicating to the vault a reddish glow which grew
fainter, then disappeared; the silence became profound once more,
the obscurity became complete, blindness and deafness resumed
possession of the shadows; and Jean Valjean, not daring to stir as yet,
remained for a long time leaning with his back against the wall,
with straining ears, and dilated pupils, watching the disappearance
of that phantom patrol.



CHAPTER III

THE "SPUN" MAN


This justice must be rendered to the police of that period,
that even in the most serious public junctures, it imperturbably
fulfilled its duties connected with the sewers and surveillance. 
A revolt was, in its eyes, no pretext for allowing malefactors
to take the bit in their own mouths, and for neglecting society
for the reason that the government was in peril.  The ordinary
service was performed correctly in company with the extraordinary
service, and was not troubled by the latter.  In the midst of an
incalculable political event already begun, under the pressure
of a possible revolution, a police agent, "spun" a thief without
allowing himself to be distracted by insurrection and barricades.

It was something precisely parallel which took place on the
afternoon of the 6th of June on the banks of the Seine, on the
slope of the right shore, a little beyond the Pont des Invalides.

There is no longer any bank there now.  The aspect of the locality
has changed.

On that bank, two men, separated by a certain distance,
seemed to be watching each other while mutually avoiding
each other.  The one who was in advance was trying to get away,
the one in the rear was trying to overtake the other.

It was like a game of checkers played at a distance and in silence. 
Neither seemed to be in any hurry, and both walked slowly, as though
each of them feared by too much haste to make his partner redouble
his pace.

One would have said that it was an appetite following its prey,
and purposely without wearing the air of doing so.  The prey was
crafty and on its guard.

The proper relations between the hunted pole-cat and the hunting dog
were observed.  The one who was seeking to escape had an insignificant
mien and not an impressive appearance; the one who was seeking
to seize him was rude of aspect, and must have been rude to encounter.

The first, conscious that he was the more feeble, avoided the second;
but he avoided him in a manner which was deeply furious; any one
who could have observed him would have discerned in his eyes the
sombre hostility of flight, and all the menace that fear contains.

The shore was deserted; there were no passers-by; not even a boatman
nor a lighter-man was in the skiffs which were moored here and there.

It was not easy to see these two men, except from the quay opposite,
and to any person who had scrutinized them at that distance,
the man who was in advance would have appeared like a bristling,
tattered, and equivocal being, who was uneasy and trembling beneath
a ragged blouse, and the other like a classic and official personage,
wearing the frock-coat of authority buttoned to the chin.

Perchance the reader might recognize these two men, if he were
to see them closer at hand.

What was the object of the second man?

Probably to succeed in clothing the first more warmly.

When a man clothed by the state pursues a man in rags, it is in order
to make of him a man who is also clothed by the state.  Only, the whole
question lies in the color.  To be dressed in blue is glorious;
to be dressed in red is disagreeable.

There is a purple from below.

It is probably some unpleasantness and some purple of this sort
which the first man is desirous of shirking.

If the other allowed him to walk on, and had not seized him as yet,
it was, judging from all appearances, in the hope of seeing him lead up
to some significant meeting-place and to some group worth catching. 
This delicate operation is called "spinning."

What renders this conjecture entirely probable is that the
buttoned-up man, on catching sight from the shore of a hackney-coach
on the quay as it was passing along empty, made a sign to the driver;
the driver understood, evidently recognized the person with whom
he had to deal, turned about and began to follow the two men
at the top of the quay, at a foot-pace. This was not observed
by the slouching and tattered personage who was in advance.

The hackney-coach rolled along the trees of the Champs-Elysees.
The bust of the driver, whip in hand, could be seen moving along
above the parapet.

One of the secret instructions of the police authorities to their
agents contains this article:  "Always have on hand a hackney-coach,
in case of emergency."

While these two men were manoeuvring, each on his own side,
with irreproachable strategy, they approached an inclined plane on
the quay which descended to the shore, and which permitted cab-drivers
arriving from Passy to come to the river and water their horses. 
This inclined plane was suppressed later on, for the sake of symmetry;
horses may die of thirst, but the eye is gratified.

It is probable that the man in the blouse had intended to ascend
this inclined plane, with a view to making his escape into the
Champs-Elysees, a place ornamented with trees, but, in return,
much infested with policemen, and where the other could easily
exercise violence.

This point on the quay is not very far distant from the house brought
to Paris from Moret in 1824, by Colonel Brack, and designated
as "the house of Francois I." A guard house is situated close at hand.

To the great surprise of his watcher, the man who was being tracked
did not mount by the inclined plane for watering.  He continued
to advance along the quay on the shore.

His position was visibly becoming critical.

What was he intending to do, if not to throw himself into the Seine?

Henceforth, there existed no means of ascending to the quay;
there was no other inclined plane, no staircase; and they were near
the spot, marked by the bend in the Seine towards the Pont de Jena,
where the bank, growing constantly narrower, ended in a slender tongue,
and was lost in the water.  There he would inevitably find himself
blocked between the perpendicular wall on his right, the river on
his left and in front of him, and the authorities on his heels.

It is true that this termination of the shore was hidden from sight
by a heap of rubbish six or seven feet in height, produced by some
demolition or other.  But did this man hope to conceal himself
effectually behind that heap of rubbish, which one need but skirt? 
The expedient would have been puerile.  He certainly was not
dreaming of such a thing.  The innocence of thieves does not extend
to that point.

The pile of rubbish formed a sort of projection at the water's edge,
which was prolonged in a promontory as far as the wall of the quay.

The man who was being followed arrived at this little mound and went
round it, so that he ceased to be seen by the other.

The latter, as he did not see, could not be seen; he took advantage
of this fact to abandon all dissimulation and to walk very rapidly. 
In a few moments, he had reached the rubbish heap and passed round it. 
There he halted in sheer amazement.  The man whom he had been pursuing
was no longer there.

Total eclipse of the man in the blouse.

The shore, beginning with the rubbish heap, was only about thirty
paces long, then it plunged into the water which beat against the
wall of the quay.  The fugitive could not have thrown himself into
the Seine without being seen by the man who was following him. 
What had become of him?

The man in the buttoned-up coat walked to the extremity of the shore,
and remained there in thought for a moment, his fists clenched,
his eyes searching.  All at once he smote his brow.  He had
just perceived, at the point where the land came to an end and the
water began, a large iron grating, low, arched, garnished with a
heavy lock and with three massive hinges.  This grating, a sort
of door pierced at the base of the quay, opened on the river
as well as on the shore.  A blackish stream passed under it. 
This stream discharged into the Seine.

Beyond the heavy, rusty iron bars, a sort of dark and vaulted
corridor could be descried.  The man folded his arms and stared
at the grating with an air of reproach.

As this gaze did not suffice, he tried to thrust it aside; he shook it,
it resisted solidly.  It is probable that it had just been opened,
although no sound had been heard, a singular circumstance in so
rusty a grating; but it is certain that it had been closed again. 
This indicated that the man before whom that door had just opened
had not a hook but a key.

This evidence suddenly burst upon the mind of the man who was trying
to move the grating, and evoked from him this indignant ejaculation:

"That is too much!  A government key!"

Then, immediately regaining his composure, he expressed a whole
world of interior ideas by this outburst of monosyllables accented
almost ironically:  "Come!  Come!  Come!  Come!"

That said, and in the hope of something or other, either that he
should see the man emerge or other men enter, he posted himself on
the watch behind a heap of rubbish, with the patient rage of a pointer.

The hackney-coach, which regulated all its movements on his, had,
in its turn, halted on the quay above him, close to the parapet. 
The coachman, foreseeing a prolonged wait, encased his horses'
muzzles in the bag of oats which is damp at the bottom, and which
is so familiar to Parisians, to whom, be it said in parenthesis,
the Government sometimes applies it.  The rare passers-by on the Pont
de Jena turned their heads, before they pursued their way, to take
a momentary glance at these two motionless items in the landscape,
the man on the shore, the carriage on the quay.



CHAPTER IV

HE ALSO BEARS HIS CROSS


Jean Valjean had resumed his march and had not again paused.

This march became more and more laborious.  The level of
these vaults varies; the average height is about five feet,
six inches, and has been calculated for the stature of a man;
Jean Valjean was forced to bend over, in order not to strike Marius
against the vault; at every step he had to bend, then to rise,
and to feel incessantly of the wall.  The moisture of the stones,
and the viscous nature of the timber framework furnished but poor
supports to which to cling, either for hand or foot.  He stumbled
along in the hideous dung-heap of the city.  The intermittent gleams
from the air-holes only appeared at very long intervals, and were
so wan that the full sunlight seemed like the light of the moon;
all the rest was mist, miasma, opaqueness, blackness.  Jean Valjean
was both hungry and thirsty; especially thirsty; and this, like the sea,
was a place full of water where a man cannot drink.  His strength,
which was prodigious, as the reader knows, and which had been
but little decreased by age, thanks to his chaste and sober life,
began to give way, nevertheless.  Fatigue began to gain on him;
and as his strength decreased, it made the weight of his burden
increase.  Marius, who was, perhaps, dead, weighed him down as inert
bodies weigh.  Jean Valjean held him in such a manner that his chest
was not oppressed, and so that respiration could proceed as well
as possible.  Between his legs he felt the rapid gliding of the rats. 
One of them was frightened to such a degree that he bit him. 
From time to time, a breath of fresh air reached him through
the vent-holes of the mouths of the sewer, and re-animated him.

It might have been three hours past midday when he reached the belt-sewer.

He was, at first, astonished at this sudden widening.  He found himself,
all at once, in a gallery where his outstretched hands could not reach
the two walls, and beneath a vault which his head did not touch. 
The Grand Sewer is, in fact, eight feet wide and seven feet high.

At the point where the Montmartre sewer joins the Grand Sewer,
two other subterranean galleries, that of the Rue de Provence,
and that of the Abattoir, form a square.  Between these four ways,
a less sagacious man would have remained undecided.  Jean Valjean
selected the broadest, that is to say, the belt-sewer. But
here the question again came up--should he descend or ascend? 
He thought that the situation required haste, and that he must
now gain the Seine at any risk.  In other terms, he must descend. 
He turned to the left.

It was well that he did so, for it is an error to suppose that the
belt-sewer has two outlets, the one in the direction of Bercy,
the other towards Passy, and that it is, as its name indicates,
the subterranean girdle of the Paris on the right bank.  The Grand Sewer,
which is, it must be remembered, nothing else than the old brook
of Menilmontant, terminates, if one ascends it, in a blind sack,
that is to say, at its ancient point of departure which was its source,
at the foot of the knoll of Menilmontant.  There is no direct
communication with the branch which collects the waters of Paris
beginning with the Quartier Popincourt, and which falls into the
Seine through the Amelot sewer above the ancient Isle Louviers. 
This branch, which completes the collecting sewer, is separated
from it, under the Rue Menilmontant itself, by a pile which marks
the dividing point of the waters, between upstream and downstream. 
If Jean Valjean had ascended the gallery he would have arrived,
after a thousand efforts, and broken down with fatigue, and in
an expiring condition, in the gloom, at a wall.  He would have
been lost.

In case of necessity, by retracing his steps a little way, and entering
the passage of the Filles-du-Calvaire, on condition that he did not
hesitate at the subterranean crossing of the Carrefour Boucherat, and by
taking the corridor Saint-Louis, then the Saint-Gilles gut on the left,
then turning to the right and avoiding the Saint-Sebastian gallery,
he might have reached the Amelot sewer, and thence, provided that he
did not go astray in the sort of F which lies under the Bastille,
he might have attained the outlet on the Seine near the Arsenal. 
But in order to do this, he must have been thoroughly familiar
with the enormous madrepore of the sewer in all its ramifications
and in all its openings.  Now, we must again insist that he
knew nothing of that frightful drain which he was traversing;
and had any one asked him in what he was, he would have answered: 
"In the night."

His instinct served him well.  To descend was, in fact, possible safety.

He left on his right the two narrow passages which branch out in
the form of a claw under the Rue Laffitte and the Rue Saint-Georges
and the long, bifurcated corridor of the Chaussee d'Antin.

A little beyond an affluent, which was, probably, the Madeleine branch,
he halted.  He was extremely weary.  A passably large air-hole, probably
the man-hole in the Rue d'Anjou, furnished a light that was almost vivid. 
Jean Valjean, with the gentleness of movement which a brother would
exercise towards his wounded brother, deposited Marius on the banquette
of the sewer.  Marius' blood-stained face appeared under the wan
light of the air-hole like the ashes at the bottom of a tomb. 
His eyes were closed, his hair was plastered down on his temples
like a painter's brushes dried in red wash; his hands hung limp
and dead.  A clot of blood had collected in the knot of his cravat;
his limbs were cold, and blood was clotted at the corners of
his mouth; his shirt had thrust itself into his wounds, the cloth
of his coat was chafing the yawning gashes in the living flesh. 
Jean Valjean, pushing aside the garments with the tips of his fingers,
laid his hand upon Marius' breast; his heart was still beating. 
Jean Valjean tore up his shirt, bandaged the young man's wounds
as well as he was able and stopped the flowing blood; then bending
over Marius, who still lay unconscious and almost without breathing,
in that half light, he gazed at him with inexpressible hatred.

On disarranging Marius' garments, he had found two things in his pockets,
the roll which had been forgotten there on the preceding evening,
and Marius' pocketbook.  He ate the roll and opened the pocketbook. 
On the first page he found the four lines written by Marius. 
The reader will recall them:

"My name is Marius Pontmercy.  Carry my body to my grandfather,
M. Gillenormand, Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, No. 6, in the Marais."

Jean Valjean read these four lines by the light of the air-hole,
and remained for a moment as though absorbed in thought,
repeating in a low tone:  "Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, number 6,
Monsieur Gillenormand."  He replaced the pocketbook in Marius'
pocket.  He had eaten, his strength had returned to him; he took
Marius up once more upon his back, placed the latter's head
carefully on his right shoulder, and resumed his descent of the sewer.

The Grand Sewer, directed according to the course of the valley
of Menilmontant, is about two leagues long.  It is paved throughout
a notable portion of its extent.

This torch of the names of the streets of Paris, with which we
are illuminating for the reader Jean Valjean's subterranean march,
Jean Valjean himself did not possess.  Nothing told him what
zone of the city he was traversing, nor what way he had made. 
Only the growing pallor of the pools of light which he encountered
from time to time indicated to him that the sun was withdrawing from
the pavement, and that the day would soon be over; and the rolling
of vehicles overhead, having become intermittent instead of continuous,
then having almost ceased, he concluded that he was no longer under
central Paris, and that he was approaching some solitary region,
in the vicinity of the outer boulevards, or the extreme outer quays. 
Where there are fewer houses and streets, the sewer has fewer air-holes.
The gloom deepened around Jean Valjean.  Nevertheless, he continued
to advance, groping his way in the dark.

Suddenly this darkness became terrible.



CHAPTER V

IN THE CASE OF SAND AS IN THAT OF WOMAN, THERE IS A FINENESS WHICH
IS TREACHEROUS


He felt that he was entering the water, and that he no longer
had a pavement under his feet, but only mud.

It sometimes happens, that on certain shores of Bretagne or Scotland
a man, either a traveller or a fisherman, while walking at low
tide on the beach far from shore, suddenly notices that for
several minutes past, he has been walking with some difficulty. 
The beach under foot is like pitch; his soles stick fast to it;
it is no longer sand, it is bird-lime. The strand is perfectly dry,
but at every step that he takes, as soon as the foot is raised,
the print is filled with water.  The eye, however, has perceived
no change; the immense beach is smooth and tranquil, all the sand
has the same aspect, nothing distinguishes the soil that is solid
from that which is not solid; the joyous little cloud of sand-lice
continues to leap tumultuously under the feet of the passer-by.

The man pursues his way, he walks on, turns towards the land,
endeavors to approach the shore.  He is not uneasy.  Uneasy about what? 
Only he is conscious that the heaviness of his feet seems to be
increasing at every step that he takes.  All at once he sinks in. 
He sinks in two or three inches.  Decidedly, he is not on the right road;
he halts to get his bearings.  Suddenly he glances at his feet;
his feet have disappeared.  The sand has covered them.  He draws his
feet out of the sand, he tries to retrace his steps, he turns back,
he sinks in more deeply than before.  The sand is up to his ankles,
he tears himself free from it and flings himself to the left,
the sand reaches to mid-leg, he flings himself to the right,
the sand comes up to his knees.  Then, with indescribable terror,
he recognizes the fact that he is caught in a quicksand, and that he
has beneath him that frightful medium in which neither man can walk
nor fish can swim.  He flings away his burden, if he have one,
he lightens himself, like a ship in distress; it is too late,
the sand is above his knees.

He shouts, he waves his hat, or his handkerchief, the sand
continually gains on him; if the beach is deserted, if the land is
too far away, if the bank of sand is too ill-famed, there is no hero
in the neighborhood, all is over, he is condemned to be engulfed. 
He is condemned to that terrible interment, long, infallible, implacable,
which it is impossible to either retard or hasten, which lasts
for hours, which will not come to an end, which seizes you erect,
free, in the flush of health, which drags you down by the feet, which,
at every effort that you attempt, at every shout that you utter,
draws you a little lower, which has the air of punishing you for your
resistance by a redoubled grasp, which forces a man to return slowly
to earth, while leaving him time to survey the horizon, the trees,
the verdant country, the smoke of the villages on the plain,
the sails of the ships on the sea, the birds which fly and sing,
the sun and the sky.  This engulfment is the sepulchre which assumes
a tide, and which mounts from the depths of the earth towards
a living man.  Each minute is an inexorable layer-out of the dead. 
The wretched man tries to sit down, to lie down, to climb;
every movement that he makes buries him deeper; he straightens
himself up, he sinks; he feels that he is being swallowed up;
he shrieks, implores, cries to the clouds, wrings his hands,
grows desperate.  Behold him in the sand up to his belly, the sand
reaches to his breast, he is only a bust now.  He uplifts his hands,
utters furious groans, clenches his nails on the beach, tries to
cling fast to that ashes, supports himself on his elbows in order
to raise himself from that soft sheath, and sobs frantically;
the sand mounts higher.  The sand has reached his shoulders, the sand
reaches to his throat; only his face is visible now.  His mouth
cries aloud, the sand fills it; silence.  His eyes still gaze forth,
the sand closes them, night.  Then his brow decreases, a little
hair quivers above the sand; a hand projects, pierces the surface
of the beach, waves and disappears.  Sinister obliteration of a man.

Sometimes a rider is engulfed with his horse; sometimes the carter
is swallowed up with his cart; all founders in that strand. 
It is shipwreck elsewhere than in the water.  It is the earth drowning
a man.  The earth, permeated with the ocean, becomes a pitfall. 
It presents itself in the guise of a plain, and it yawns like a wave. 
The abyss is subject to these treacheries.

This melancholy fate, always possible on certain sea beaches,
was also possible, thirty years ago, in the sewers of Paris.

Before the important works, undertaken in 1833, the subterranean
drain of Paris was subject to these sudden slides.

The water filtered into certain subjacent strata, which were
particularly friable; the foot-way, which was of flag-stones,
as in the ancient sewers, or of cement on concrete, as in the
new galleries, having no longer an underpinning, gave way. 
A fold in a flooring of this sort means a crack, means crumbling. 
The framework crumbled away for a certain length.  This crevice,
the hiatus of a gulf of mire, was called a fontis, in the special tongue. 
What is a fontis?  It is the quicksands of the seashore suddenly
encountered under the surface of the earth; it is the beach of Mont
Saint-Michel in a sewer.  The soaked soil is in a state of fusion,
as it were; all its molecules are in suspension in soft medium;
it is not earth and it is not water.  The depth is sometimes
very great.  Nothing can be more formidable than such an encounter. 
If the water predominates, death is prompt, the man is swallowed up;
if earth predominates, death is slow.

Can any one picture to himself such a death?  If being swallowed
by the earth is terrible on the seashore, what is it in a cess-pool?
Instead of the open air, the broad daylight, the clear horizon,
those vast sounds, those free clouds whence rains life, instead of
those barks descried in the distance, of that hope under all sorts
of forms, of probable passers-by, of succor possible up to the very
last moment,--instead of all this, deafness, blindness, a black vault,
the inside of a tomb already prepared, death in the mire beneath
a cover! slow suffocation by filth, a stone box where asphyxia
opens its claw in the mire and clutches you by the throat;
fetidness mingled with the death-rattle; slime instead of the strand,
sulfuretted hydrogen in place of the hurricane, dung in place
of the ocean!  And to shout, to gnash one's teeth, and to writhe,
and to struggle, and to agonize, with that enormous city which
knows nothing of it all, over one's head!

Inexpressible is the horror of dying thus!  Death sometimes redeems
his atrocity by a certain terrible dignity.  On the funeral pile,
in shipwreck, one can be great; in the flames as in the foam, a superb
attitude is possible; one there becomes transfigured as one perishes. 
But not here.  Death is filthy.  It is humiliating to expire. 
The supreme floating visions are abject.  Mud is synonymous with shame. 
It is petty, ugly, infamous.  To die in a butt of Malvoisie,
like Clarence, is permissible; in the ditch of a scavenger,
like Escoubleau, is horrible.  To struggle therein is hideous;
at the same time that one is going through the death agony,
one is floundering about.  There are shadows enough for hell,
and mire enough to render it nothing but a slough, and the dying
man knows not whether he is on the point of becoming a spectre or
a frog.

Everywhere else the sepulchre is sinister; here it is deformed.

The depth of the fontis varied, as well as their length and their density,
according to the more or less bad quality of the sub-soil. Sometimes
a fontis was three or four feet deep, sometimes eight or ten;
sometimes the bottom was unfathomable.  Here the mire was almost solid,
there almost liquid.  In the Luniere fontis, it would have taken
a man a day to disappear, while he would have been devoured in five
minutes by the Philippeaux slough.  The mire bears up more or less,
according to its density.  A child can escape where a man will perish. 
The first law of safety is to get rid of every sort of load. 
Every sewerman who felt the ground giving way beneath him began
by flinging away his sack of tools, or his back-basket, or his hod.

The fontis were due to different causes:  the friability of the soil;
some landslip at a depth beyond the reach of man; the violent
summer rains; the incessant flooding of winter; long, drizzling showers. 
Sometimes the weight of the surrounding houses on a marly or sandy
soil forced out the vaults of the subterranean galleries and caused
them to bend aside, or it chanced that a flooring vault burst
and split under this crushing thrust.  In this manner, the heaping
up of the Parthenon, obliterated, a century ago, a portion of the
vaults of Saint-Genevieve hill.  When a sewer was broken in under
the pressure of the houses, the mischief was sometimes betrayed
in the street above by a sort of space, like the teeth of a saw,
between the paving-stones; this crevice was developed in an undulating
line throughout the entire length of the cracked vault, and then,
the evil being visible, the remedy could be promptly applied. 
It also frequently happened, that the interior ravages were not
revealed by any external scar, and in that case, woe to the sewermen. 
When they entered without precaution into the sewer, they were liable
to be lost.  Ancient registers make mention of several scavengers
who were buried in fontis in this manner.  They give many names;
among others, that of the sewerman who was swallowed up in a quagmire
under the man-hole of the Rue Careme-Prenant, a certain Blaise Poutrain;
this Blaise Poutrain was the brother of Nicholas Poutrain,
who was the last grave-digger of the cemetery called the Charnier
des Innocents, in 1785, the epoch when that cemetery expired.

There was also that young and charming Vicomte d'Escoubleau, of whom we
have just spoken, one of the heroes of the siege of Lerida, where they
delivered the assault in silk stockings, with violins at their head. 
D'Escoubleau, surprised one night at his cousin's, the Duchess de
Sourdis', was drowned in a quagmire of the Beautreillis sewer,
in which he had taken refuge in order to escape from the Duke. 
Madame de Sourdis, when informed of his death, demanded her
smelling-bottle, and forgot to weep, through sniffling at her salts. 
In such cases, there is no love which holds fast; the sewer
extinguishes it.  Hero refuses to wash the body of Leander. 
Thisbe stops her nose in the presence of Pyramus and says:  "Phew!"



CHAPTER VI

THE FONTIS


Jean Valjean found himself in the presence of a fontis.

This sort of quagmire was common at that period in the subsoil
of the Champs-Elysees, difficult to handle in the hydraulic
works and a bad preservative of the subterranean constructions,
on account of its excessive fluidity.  This fluidity exceeds even
the inconsistency of the sands of the Quartier Saint-Georges,
which could only be conquered by a stone construction on a
concrete foundation, and the clayey strata, infected with gas,
of the Quartier des Martyrs, which are so liquid that the only way
in which a passage was effected under the gallery des Martyrs was
by means of a cast-iron pipe.  When, in 1836, the old stone sewer
beneath the Faubourg Saint-Honore, in which we now see Jean Valjean,
was demolished for the purpose of reconstructing it, the quicksand,
which forms the subsoil of the Champs-Elysees as far as the Seine,
presented such an obstacle, that the operation lasted nearly
six months, to the great clamor of the dwellers on the riverside,
particularly those who had hotels and carriages.  The work was
more than unhealthy; it was dangerous.  It is true that they
had four months and a half of rain, and three floods of the Seine.

The fontis which Jean Valjean had encountered was caused by the
downpour of the preceding day.  The pavement, badly sustained
by the subjacent sand, had given way and had produced a stoppage
of the water.  Infiltration had taken place, a slip had followed. 
The dislocated bottom had sunk into the ooze.  To what extent? 
Impossible to say.  The obscurity was more dense there than elsewhere. 
It was a pit of mire in a cavern of night.

Jean Valjean felt the pavement vanishing beneath his feet. 
He entered this slime.  There was water on the surface, slime at
the bottom.  He must pass it.  To retrace his steps was impossible. 
Marius was dying, and Jean Valjean exhausted.  Besides, where was
he to go?  Jean Valjean advanced.  Moreover, the pit seemed,
for the first few steps, not to be very deep.  But in proportion
as he advanced, his feet plunged deeper.  Soon he had the slime
up to his calves and water above his knees.  He walked on,
raising Marius in his arms, as far above the water as he could. 
The mire now reached to his knees, and the water to his waist. 
He could no longer retreat.  This mud, dense enough for one man,
could not, obviously, uphold two.  Marius and Jean Valjean would
have stood a chance of extricating themselves singly.  Jean Valjean
continued to advance, supporting the dying man, who was, perhaps,
a corpse.

The water came up to his arm-pits; he felt that he was sinking;
it was only with difficulty that he could move in the depth of ooze
which he had now reached.  The density, which was his support,
was also an obstacle.  He still held Marius on high, and with an
unheard-of expenditure of force, he advanced still; but he was sinking. 
He had only his head above the water now and his two arms holding
up Marius.  In the old paintings of the deluge there is a mother
holding her child thus.

He sank still deeper, he turned his face to the rear, to escape
the water, and in order that he might be able to breathe;
anyone who had seen him in that gloom would have thought that what
he beheld was a mask floating on the shadows; he caught a faint
glimpse above him of the drooping head and livid face of Marius;
he made a desperate effort and launched his foot forward; his foot
struck something solid; a point of support.  It was high time.

He straightened himself up, and rooted himself upon that point
of support with a sort of fury.  This produced upon him the effect
of the first step in a staircase leading back to life.

The point of support, thus encountered in the mire at the supreme
moment, was the beginning of the other water-shed of the pavement,
which had bent but had not given way, and which had curved under
the water like a plank and in a single piece.  Well built pavements
form a vault and possess this sort of firmness.  This fragment
of the vaulting, partly submerged, but solid, was a veritable
inclined plane, and, once on this plane, he was safe.  Jean Valjean
mounted this inclined plane and reached the other side of the quagmire.

As he emerged from the water, he came in contact with a stone
and fell upon his knees.  He reflected that this was but just,
and he remained there for some time, with his soul absorbed in words
addressed to God.

He rose to his feet, shivering, chilled, foul-smelling, bowed
beneath the dying man whom he was dragging after him, all dripping
with slime, and his soul filled with a strange light.



CHAPTER VII

ONE SOMETIMES RUNS AGROUND WHEN ONE FANCIES THAT ONE IS DISEMBARKING


He set out on his way once more.

However, although he had not left his life in the fontis, he seemed
to have left his strength behind him there.  That supreme effort
had exhausted him.  His lassitude was now such that he was obliged
to pause for breath every three or four steps, and lean against
the wall.  Once he was forced to seat himself on the banquette in
order to alter Marius' position, and he thought that he should have
to remain there.  But if his vigor was dead, his energy was not. 
He rose again.

He walked on desperately, almost fast, proceeded thus for a
hundred paces, almost without drawing breath, and suddenly came
in contact with the wall.  He had reached an elbow of the sewer, and,
arriving at the turn with head bent down, he had struck the wall. 
He raised his eyes, and at the extremity of the vault, far, very far
away in front of him, he perceived a light.  This time it was not
that terrible light; it was good, white light.  It was daylight. 
Jean Valjean saw the outlet.

A damned soul, who, in the midst of the furnace, should suddenly perceive
the outlet of Gehenna, would experience what Jean Valjean felt. 
It would fly wildly with the stumps of its burned wings towards that
radiant portal.  Jean Valjean was no longer conscious of fatigue,
he no longer felt Marius' weight, he found his legs once more
of steel, he ran rather than walked.  As he approached, the outlet
became more and more distinctly defined.  It was a pointed arch,
lower than the vault, which gradually narrowed, and narrower
than the gallery, which closed in as the vault grew lower. 
The tunnel ended like the interior of a funnel; a faulty construction,
imitated from the wickets of penitentiaries, logical in a prison,
illogical in a sewer, and which has since been corrected.

Jean Valjean reached the outlet.

There he halted.

It certainly was the outlet, but he could not get out.

The arch was closed by a heavy grating, and the grating, which,
to all appearance, rarely swung on its rusty hinges, was clamped
to its stone jamb by a thick lock, which, red with rust, seemed like
an enormous brick.  The keyhole could be seen, and the robust latch,
deeply sunk in the iron staple.  The door was plainly double-locked.
It was one of those prison locks which old Paris was so fond of lavishing.

Beyond the grating was the open air, the river, the daylight,
the shore, very narrow but sufficient for escape.  The distant
quays, Paris, that gulf in which one so easily hides oneself,
the broad horizon, liberty.  On the right, down stream, the bridge
of Jena was discernible, on the left, upstream, the bridge
of the Invalides; the place would have been a propitious one in
which to await the night and to escape.  It was one of the most
solitary points in Paris; the shore which faces the Grand-Caillou.
Flies were entering and emerging through the bars of the grating.

It might have been half-past eight o'clock in the evening. 
The day was declining.

Jean Valjean laid Marius down along the wall, on the dry portion
of the vaulting, then he went to the grating and clenched both
fists round the bars; the shock which he gave it was frenzied,
but it did not move.  The grating did not stir.  Jean Valjean seized
the bars one after the other, in the hope that he might be able
to tear away the least solid, and to make of it a lever wherewith
to raise the door or to break the lock.  Not a bar stirred. 
The teeth of a tiger are not more firmly fixed in their sockets. 
No lever; no prying possible.  The obstacle was invincible. 
There was no means of opening the gate.

Must he then stop there?  What was he to do?  What was to become
of him?  He had not the strength to retrace his steps, to recommence
the journey which he had already taken.  Besides, how was he
to again traverse that quagmire whence he had only extricated
himself as by a miracle?  And after the quagmire, was there not
the police patrol, which assuredly could not be twice avoided? 
And then, whither was he to go?  What direction should he pursue? 
To follow the incline would not conduct him to his goal.  If he
were to reach another outlet, he would find it obstructed by a plug
or a grating.  Every outlet was, undoubtedly, closed in that manner. 
Chance had unsealed the grating through which he had entered,
but it was evident that all the other sewer mouths were barred. 
He had only succeeded in escaping into a prison.

All was over.  Everything that Jean Valjean had done was useless. 
Exhaustion had ended in failure.

They were both caught in the immense and gloomy web of death, and Jean
Valjean felt the terrible spider running along those black strands
and quivering in the shadows.  He turned his back to the grating,
and fell upon the pavement, hurled to earth rather than seated,
close to Marius, who still made no movement, and with his head bent
between his knees.  This was the last drop of anguish.

Of what was he thinking during this profound depression? 
Neither of himself nor of Marius.  He was thinking of Cosette.



CHAPTER VIII

THE TORN COAT-TAIL


In the midst of this prostration, a hand was laid on his shoulder,
and a low voice said to him:

"Half shares."

Some person in that gloom?  Nothing so closely resembles a
dream as despair.  Jean Valjean thought that he was dreaming. 
He had heard no footsteps.  Was it possible?  He raised his eyes.

A man stood before him.

This man was clad in a blouse; his feet were bare; he held his shoes
in his left hand; he had evidently removed them in order to reach
Jean Valjean, without allowing his steps to be heard.

Jean Valjean did not hesitate for an instant.  Unexpected as was
this encounter, this man was known to him.  The man was Thenardier.

Although awakened, so to speak, with a start, Jean Valjean,
accustomed to alarms, and steeled to unforeseen shocks that must
be promptly parried, instantly regained possession of his presence
of mind.  Moreover, the situation could not be made worse,
a certain degree of distress is no longer capable of a crescendo,
and Thenardier himself could add nothing to this blackness of this night.

A momentary pause ensued.

Thenardier, raising his right hand to a level with his forehead,
formed with it a shade, then he brought his eyelashes together,
by screwing up his eyes, a motion which, in connection with a slight
contraction of the mouth, characterizes the sagacious attention of a man
who is endeavoring to recognize another man.  He did not succeed. 
Jean Valjean, as we have just stated, had his back turned to the light,
and he was, moreover, so disfigured, so bemired, so bleeding that he
would have been unrecognizable in full noonday.  On the contrary,
illuminated by the light from the grating, a cellar light,
it is true, livid, yet precise in its lividness, Thenardier, as the
energetic popular metaphor expresses it, immediately "leaped into"
Jean Valjean's eyes.  This inequality of conditions sufficed
to assure some advantage to Jean Valjean in that mysterious duel
which was on the point of beginning between the two situations and
the two men.  The encounter took place between Jean Valjean veiled
and Thenardier unmasked.

Jean Valjean immediately perceived that Thenardier did not recognize him.

They surveyed each other for a moment in that half-gloom, as though
taking each other's measure.  Thenardier was the first to break
the silence.

"How are you going to manage to get out?"

Jean Valjean made no reply.  Thenardier continued:

"It's impossible to pick the lock of that gate.  But still you must
get out of this."

"That is true," said Jean Valjean.

"Well, half shares then."

"What do you mean by that?"

"You have killed that man; that's all right.  I have the key."

Thenardier pointed to Marius.  He went on:

"I don't know you, but I want to help you.  You must be a friend."

Jean Valjean began to comprehend.  Thenardier took him for an assassin.

Thenardier resumed:

"Listen, comrade.  You didn't kill that man without looking to see
what he had in his pockets.  Give me my half.  I'll open the door
for you."

And half drawing from beneath his tattered blouse a huge key,
he added:

"Do you want to see how a key to liberty is made?  Look here."

Jean Valjean "remained stupid"--the expression belongs to the
elder Corneille--to such a degree that he doubted whether what he
beheld was real.  It was providence appearing in horrible guise,
and his good angel springing from the earth in the form of Thenardier.

Thenardier thrust his fist into a large pocket concealed under
his blouse, drew out a rope and offered it to Jean Valjean.

"Hold on," said he, "I'll give you the rope to boot."

"What is the rope for?"

"You will need a stone also, but you can find one outside. 
There's a heap of rubbish."

"What am I to do with a stone?"

"Idiot, you'll want to sling that stiff into the river, you'll need
a stone and a rope, otherwise it would float on the water."

Jean Valjean took the rope.  There is no one who does not occasionally
accept in this mechanical way.

Thenardier snapped his fingers as though an idea had suddenly
occurred to him.

"Ah, see here, comrade, how did you contrive to get out of that
slough yonder?  I haven't dared to risk myself in it.  Phew! you
don't smell good."

After a pause he added:

"I'm asking you questions, but you're perfectly right not to answer. 
It's an apprenticeship against that cursed quarter of an hour before
the examining magistrate.  And then, when you don't talk at all,
you run no risk of talking too loud.  That's no matter, as I can't
see your face and as I don't know your name, you are wrong in
supposing that I don't know who you are and what you want.  I twig. 
You've broken up that gentleman a bit; now you want to tuck him
away somewhere.  The river, that great hider of folly, is what you want. 
I'll get you out of your scrape.  Helping a good fellow in a pinch
is what suits me to a hair."

While expressing his approval of Jean Valjean's silence, he endeavored to
force him to talk.  He jostled his shoulder in an attempt to catch a sight
of his profile, and he exclaimed, without, however, raising his tone:

"Apropos of that quagmire, you're a hearty animal.  Why didn't you
toss the man in there?"

Jean Valjean preserved silence.

Thenardier resumed, pushing the rag which served him as a cravat
to the level of his Adam's apple, a gesture which completes
the capable air of a serious man:

"After all, you acted wisely.  The workmen, when they come to-morrow to
stop up that hole, would certainly have found the stiff abandoned there,
and it might have been possible, thread by thread, straw by straw,
to pick up the scent and reach you.  Some one has passed through
the sewer.  Who?  Where did he get out?  Was he seen to come out? 
The police are full of cleverness.  The sewer is treacherous and
tells tales of you.  Such a find is a rarity, it attracts attention,
very few people make use of the sewers for their affairs,
while the river belongs to everybody.  The river is the true grave. 
At the end of a month they fish up your man in the nets at
Saint-Cloud. Well, what does one care for that?  It's carrion! 
Who killed that man?  Paris.  And justice makes no inquiries. 
You have done well."

The more loquacious Thenardier became, the more mute was Jean Valjean.

Again Thenardier shook him by the shoulder.

"Now let's settle this business.  Let's go shares.  You have seen
my key, show me your money."

Thenardier was haggard, fierce, suspicious, rather menacing,
yet amicable.

There was one singular circumstance; Thenardier's manners were
not simple; he had not the air of being wholly at his ease;
while affecting an air of mystery, he spoke low; from time to time
he laid his finger on his mouth, and muttered, "hush!"  It was
difficult to divine why.  There was no one there except themselves. 
Jean Valjean thought that other ruffians might possibly be concealed
in some nook, not very far off, and that Thenardier did not care
to share with them.

Thenardier resumed:

"Let's settle up.  How much did the stiff have in his bags?"

Jean Valjean searched his pockets.

It was his habit, as the reader will remember, to always have some
money about him.  The mournful life of expedients to which he had
been condemned imposed this as a law upon him.  On this occasion,
however, he had been caught unprepared.  When donning his uniform
of a National Guardsman on the preceding evening, he had forgotten,
dolefully absorbed as he was, to take his pocket-book. He had
only some small change in his fob.  He turned out his pocket,
all soaked with ooze, and spread out on the banquette of the vault
one louis d'or, two five-franc pieces, and five or six large sous.

Thenardier thrust out his lower lip with a significant twist
of the neck.

"You knocked him over cheap," said he.

He set to feeling the pockets of Jean Valjean and Marius,
with the greatest familiarity.  Jean Valjean, who was chiefly
concerned in keeping his back to the light, let him have his way.

While handling Marius' coat, Thenardier, with the skill of a pickpocket,
and without being noticed by Jean Valjean, tore off a strip which he
concealed under his blouse, probably thinking that this morsel
of stuff might serve, later on, to identify the assassinated man
and the assassin.  However, he found no more than the thirty francs.

"That's true," said he, "both of you together have no more than that."

And, forgetting his motto:  "half shares," he took all.

He hesitated a little over the large sous.  After due reflection,
he took them also, muttering:

"Never mind!  You cut folks' throats too cheap altogether."

That done, he once more drew the big key from under his blouse.

"Now, my friend, you must leave.  It's like the fair here, you pay
when you go out.  You have paid, now clear out."

And he began to laugh.

Had he, in lending to this stranger the aid of his key, and in
making some other man than himself emerge from that portal,
the pure and disinterested intention of rescuing an assassin? 
We may be permitted to doubt this.

Thenardier helped Jean Valjean to replace Marius on his shoulders,
then he betook himself to the grating on tiptoe, and barefooted,
making Jean Valjean a sign to follow him, looked out, laid his finger
on his mouth, and remained for several seconds, as though in suspense;
his inspection finished, he placed the key in the lock.  The bolt
slipped back and the gate swung open.  It neither grated nor squeaked. 
It moved very softly.

It was obvious that this gate and those hinges, carefully oiled,
were in the habit of opening more frequently than was supposed. 
This softness was suspicious; it hinted at furtive goings and comings,
silent entrances and exits of nocturnal men, and the wolf-like tread
of crime.

The sewer was evidently an accomplice of some mysterious band. 
This taciturn grating was a receiver of stolen goods.

Thenardier opened the gate a little way, allowing just sufficient
space for Jean Valjean to pass out, closed the grating again,
gave the key a double turn in the lock and plunged back into
the darkness, without making any more noise than a breath. 
He seemed to walk with the velvet paws of a tiger.

A moment later, that hideous providence had retreated into
the invisibility.

Jean Valjean found himself in the open air.



CHAPTER IX

MARIUS PRODUCES ON SOME ONE WHO IS A JUDGE OF THE MATTER, THE EFFECT
OF BEING DEAD


He allowed Marius to slide down upon the shore.

They were in the open air!

The miasmas, darkness, horror lay behind him.  The pure, healthful,
living, joyous air that was easy to breathe inundated him. 
Everywhere around him reigned silence, but that charming silence when
the sun has set in an unclouded azure sky.  Twilight had descended;
night was drawing on, the great deliverer, the friend of all those
who need a mantle of darkness that they may escape from an anguish. 
The sky presented itself in all directions like an enormous calm. 
The river flowed to his feet with the sound of a kiss.  The aerial
dialogue of the nests bidding each other good night in the elms
of the Champs-Elysees was audible.  A few stars, daintily piercing
the pale blue of the zenith, and visible to revery alone,
formed imperceptible little splendors amid the immensity.  Evening was
unfolding over the head of Jean Valjean all the sweetness of the infinite.

It was that exquisite and undecided hour which says neither yes nor no. 
Night was already sufficiently advanced to render it possible
to lose oneself at a little distance and yet there was sufficient
daylight to permit of recognition at close quarters.

For several seconds, Jean Valjean was irresistibly overcome by that
august and caressing serenity; such moments of oblivion do come
to men; suffering refrains from harassing the unhappy wretch;
everything is eclipsed in the thoughts; peace broods over the dreamer
like night; and, beneath the twilight which beams and in imitation
of the sky which is illuminated, the soul becomes studded with stars. 
Jean Valjean could not refrain from contemplating that vast,
clear shadow which rested over him; thoughtfully he bathed in the sea
of ecstasy and prayer in the majestic silence of the eternal heavens. 
Then he bent down swiftly to Marius, as though the sentiment
of duty had returned to him, and, dipping up water in the hollow
of his hand, he gently sprinkled a few drops on the latter's face. 
Marius' eyelids did not open; but his half-open mouth still breathed.

Jean Valjean was on the point of dipping his hand in the river once more,
when, all at once, he experienced an indescribable embarrassment, such
as a person feels when there is some one behind him whom he does not see.

We have already alluded to this impression, with which everyone
is familiar.

He turned round.

Some one was, in fact, behind him, as there had been a short
while before.

A man of lofty stature, enveloped in a long coat, with folded arms,
and bearing in his right fist a bludgeon of which the leaden head
was visible, stood a few paces in the rear of the spot where Jean
Valjean was crouching over Marius.

With the aid of the darkness, it seemed a sort of apparition. 
An ordinary man would have been alarmed because of the twilight,
a thoughtful man on account of the bludgeon.  Jean Valjean
recognized Javert.

The reader has divined, no doubt, that Thenardier's pursuer was
no other than Javert.  Javert, after his unlooked-for escape from
the barricade, had betaken himself to the prefecture of police,
had rendered a verbal account to the Prefect in person in a brief
audience, had then immediately gone on duty again, which implied--
the note, the reader will recollect, which had been captured on
his person--a certain surveillance of the shore on the right bank
of the Seine near the Champs-Elysees, which had, for some time past,
aroused the attention of the police.  There he had caught sight
of Thenardier and had followed him.  The reader knows the rest.

Thus it will be easily understood that that grating, so obligingly
opened to Jean Valjean, was a bit of cleverness on Thenardier's part. 
Thenardier intuitively felt that Javert was still there;
the man spied upon has a scent which never deceives him; it was
necessary to fling a bone to that sleuth-hound. An assassin,
what a godsend!  Such an opportunity must never be allowed
to slip.  Thenardier, by putting Jean Valjean outside in his stead,
provided a prey for the police, forced them to relinquish his scent,
made them forget him in a bigger adventure, repaid Javert for
his waiting, which always flatters a spy, earned thirty francs,
and counted with certainty, so far as he himself was concerned,
on escaping with the aid of this diversion.

Jean Valjean had fallen from one danger upon another.

These two encounters, this falling one after the other,
from Thenardier upon Javert, was a rude shock.

Javert did not recognize Jean Valjean, who, as we have stated,
no longer looked like himself.  He did not unfold his arms, he made
sure of his bludgeon in his fist, by an imperceptible movement,
and said in a curt, calm voice:

"Who are you?"

"I."

"Who is `I'?"

"Jean Valjean."

Javert thrust his bludgeon between his teeth, bent his knees,
inclined his body, laid his two powerful hands on the shoulders of
Jean Valjean, which were clamped within them as in a couple of vices,
scrutinized him, and recognized him.  Their faces almost touched. 
Javert's look was terrible.

Jean Valjean remained inert beneath Javert's grasp, like a lion
submitting to the claws of a lynx.

"Inspector Javert," said he, "you have me in your power.  Moreover,
I have regarded myself as your prisoner ever since this morning. 
I did not give you my address with any intention of escaping from you. 
Take me.  Only grant me one favor."

Javert did not appear to hear him.  He kept his eyes riveted on
Jean Valjean.  His chin being contracted, thrust his lips upwards
towards his nose, a sign of savage revery.  At length he released
Jean Valjean, straightened himself stiffly up without bending,
grasped his bludgeon again firmly, and, as though in a dream,
he murmured rather than uttered this question:

"What are you doing here?  And who is this man?"

He still abstained from addressing Jean Valjean as thou.

Jean Valjean replied, and the sound of his voice appeared to rouse Javert:

"It is with regard to him that I desire to speak to you. 
Dispose of me as you see fit; but first help me to carry him home. 
That is all that I ask of you."

Javert's face contracted as was always the case when any one seemed
to think him capable of making a concession.  Nevertheless, he did
not say "no."

Again he bent over, drew from his pocket a handkerchief which he
moistened in the water and with which he then wiped Marius'
blood-stained brow.

"This man was at the barricade," said he in a low voice and as
though speaking to himself.  "He is the one they called Marius."

A spy of the first quality, who had observed everything,
listened to everything, and taken in everything, even when he thought
that he was to die; who had played the spy even in his agony,
and who, with his elbows leaning on the first step of the sepulchre,
had taken notes.

He seized Marius' hand and felt his pulse.

"He is wounded," said Jean Valjean.

"He is a dead man," said Javert.

Jean Valjean replied:

"No. Not yet."

"So you have brought him thither from the barricade?" remarked Javert.

His preoccupation must indeed have been very profound for him not
to insist on this alarming rescue through the sewer, and for him
not to even notice Jean Valjean's silence after his question.

Jean Valjean, on his side, seemed to have but one thought. 
He resumed:

"He lives in the Marais, Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, with
his grandfather.  I do not recollect his name."

Jean Valjean fumbled in Marius' coat, pulled out his pocket-book,
opened it at the page which Marius had pencilled, and held it
out to Javert.

There was still sufficient light to admit of reading.  Besides this,
Javert possessed in his eye the feline phosphorescence of night birds. 
He deciphered the few lines written by Marius, and muttered: 
"Gillenormand, Rue des Filles-duCalvaire, No. 6."

Then he exclaimed:  "Coachman!"

The reader will remember that the hackney-coach was waiting in case
of need.

Javert kept Marius' pocket-book.

A moment later, the carriage, which had descended by the inclined
plane of the watering-place, was on the shore.  Marius was laid
upon the back seat, and Javert seated himself on the front seat
beside Jean Valjean.

The door slammed, and the carriage drove rapidly away, ascending the
quays in the direction of the Bastille.

They quitted the quays and entered the streets.  The coachman,
a black form on his box, whipped up his thin horses.  A glacial
silence reigned in the carriage.  Marius, motionless, with his
body resting in the corner, and his head drooping on his breast,
his arms hanging, his legs stiff, seemed to be awaiting only a coffin;
Jean Valjean seemed made of shadow, and Javert of stone, and in that
vehicle full of night, whose interior, every time that it passed
in front of a street lantern, appeared to be turned lividly wan,
as by an intermittent flash of lightning, chance had united and seemed
to be bringing face to face the three forms of tragic immobility,
the corpse, the spectre, and the statue.



CHAPTER X

RETURN OF THE SON WHO WAS PRODIGAL OF HIS LIFE


At every jolt over the pavement, a drop of blood trickled
from Marius' hair.

Night had fully closed in when the carriage arrived at No. 6,
Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire.

Javert was the first to alight; he made sure with one glance
of the number on the carriage gate, and, raising the heavy knocker
of beaten iron, embellished in the old style, with a male goat
and a satyr confronting each other, he gave a violent peal. 
The gate opened a little way and Javert gave it a push.  The porter
half made his appearance yawning, vaguely awake, and with a candle
in his hand.

Everyone in the house was asleep.  People go to bed betimes in
the Marais, especially on days when there is a revolt.  This good,
old quarter, terrified at the Revolution, takes refuge in slumber,
as children, when they hear the Bugaboo coming, hide their heads
hastily under their coverlet.

In the meantime Jean Valjean and the coachman had taken Marius
out of the carriage, Jean Valjean supporting him under the armpits,
and the coachman under the knees.

As they thus bore Marius, Jean Valjean slipped his hand under
the latter's clothes, which were broadly rent, felt his breast,
and assured himself that his heart was still beating.  It was even
beating a little less feebly, as though the movement of the carriage
had brought about a certain fresh access of life.

Javert addressed the porter in a tone befitting the government,
and the presence of the porter of a factious person.

"Some person whose name is Gillenormand?"

"Here.  What do you want with him?"

"His son is brought back."

"His son?" said the porter stupidly.

"He is dead."

Jean Valjean, who, soiled and tattered, stood behind Javert,
and whom the porter was surveying with some horror, made a sign
to him with his head that this was not so.

The porter did not appear to understand either Javert's words
or Jean Valjean's sign.

Javert continued:

"He went to the barricade, and here he is."

"To the barricade?" ejaculated the porter.

"He has got himself killed.  Go waken his father."

The porter did not stir.

"Go along with you!" repeated Javert.

And he added:

"There will be a funeral here to-morrow."

For Javert, the usual incidents of the public highway were categorically
classed, which is the beginning of foresight and surveillance,
and each contingency had its own compartment; all possible facts were
arranged in drawers, as it were, whence they emerged on occasion, in
variable quantities; in the street, uproar, revolt, carnival, and funeral.

The porter contented himself with waking Basque.  Basque woke Nicolette;
Nicolette roused great-aunt Gillenormand.

As for the grandfather, they let him sleep on, thinking that he
would hear about the matter early enough in any case.

Marius was carried up to the first floor, without any one in the
other parts of the house being aware of the fact, and deposited
on an old sofa in M. Gillenormand's antechamber; and while Basque
went in search of a physician, and while Nicolette opened the
linen-presses, Jean Valjean felt Javert touch him on the shoulder. 
He understood and descended the stairs, having behind him the step
of Javert who was following him.

The porter watched them take their departure as he had watched
their arrival, in terrified somnolence.

They entered the carriage once more, and the coachman mounted
his box.

"Inspector Javert," said Jean, "grant me yet another favor."

"What is it?" demanded Javert roughly.

"Let me go home for one instant.  Then you shall do whatever you
like with me."

Javert remained silent for a few moments, with his chin drawn
back into the collar of his great-coat, then he lowered the glass
and front:

"Driver," said he, "Rue de l'Homme Arme, No. 7."



CHAPTER XI

CONCUSSION IN THE ABSOLUTE


They did not open their lips again during the whole space of their ride.

What did Jean Valjean want?  To finish what he had begun; to warn Cosette,
to tell her where Marius was, to give her, possibly, some other
useful information, to take, if he could, certain final measures. 
As for himself, so far as he was personally concerned, all was over;
he had been seized by Javert and had not resisted; any other man
than himself in like situation would, perhaps, have had some vague
thoughts connected with the rope which Thenardier had given him,
and of the bars of the first cell that he should enter; but, let us
impress it upon the reader, after the Bishop, there had existed in
Jean Valjean a profound hesitation in the presence of any violence,
even when directed against himself.

Suicide, that mysterious act of violence against the unknown which
may contain, in a measure, the death of the soul, was impossible
to Jean Valjean.

At the entrance to the Rue de l'Homme Arme, the carriage halted,
the way being too narrow to admit of the entrance of vehicles. 
Javert and Jean Valjean alighted.

The coachman humbly represented to "monsieur l'Inspecteur,"
that the Utrecht velvet of his carriage was all spotted with the blood
of the assassinated man, and with mire from the assassin.  That is
the way he understood it.  He added that an indemnity was due him. 
At the same time, drawing his certificate book from his pocket,
he begged the inspector to have the goodness to write him "a bit
of an attestation."

Javert thrust aside the book which the coachman held out to him,
and said:

"How much do you want, including your time of waiting and the drive?"

"It comes to seven hours and a quarter," replied the man, "and my
velvet was perfectly new.  Eighty francs, Mr. Inspector."

Javert drew four napoleons from his pocket and dismissed the carriage.

Jean Valjean fancied that it was Javert's intention to conduct
him on foot to the post of the Blancs-Manteaux or to the post
of the Archives, both of which are close at hand.

They entered the street.  It was deserted as usual.  Javert followed
Jean Valjean.  They reached No. 7.  Jean Valjean knocked. 
The door opened.

"It is well," said Javert.  "Go up stairs."

He added with a strange expression, and as though he were exerting
an effort in speaking in this manner:

"I will wait for you here."

Jean Valjean looked at Javert.  This mode of procedure was but
little in accord with Javert's habits.  However, he could not be
greatly surprised that Javert should now have a sort of haughty
confidence in him, the confidence of the cat which grants the mouse
liberty to the length of its claws, seeing that Jean Valjean had
made up his mind to surrender himself and to make an end of it. 
He pushed open the door, entered the house, called to the porter
who was in bed and who had pulled the cord from his couch:  "It is I!"
and ascended the stairs.

On arriving at the first floor, he paused.  All sorrowful roads
have their stations.  The window on the landing-place, which was
a sash-window, was open.  As in many ancient houses, the staircase
got its light from without and had a view on the street. 
The street-lantern, situated directly opposite, cast some light
on the stairs, and thus effected some economy in illumination.

Jean Valjean, either for the sake of getting the air, or mechanically,
thrust his head out of this window.  He leaned out over the street. 
It is short, and the lantern lighted it from end to end. 
Jean Valjean was overwhelmed with amazement; there was no longer
any one there.

Javert had taken his departure.



CHAPTER XII

THE GRANDFATHER


Basque and the porter had carried Marius into the drawing-room,
as he still lay stretched out, motionless, on the sofa upon
which he had been placed on his arrival.  The doctor who had
been sent for had hastened thither.  Aunt Gillenormand had risen.

Aunt Gillenormand went and came, in affright, wringing her hands and
incapable of doing anything but saying:  "Heavens! is it possible?" 
At times she added:  "Everything will be covered with blood." 
When her first horror had passed off, a certain philosophy of the
situation penetrated her mind, and took form in the exclamation: 
"It was bound to end in this way!"  She did not go so far as: 
"I told you so!" which is customary on this sort of occasion. 
At the physician's orders, a camp bed had been prepared beside the sofa. 
The doctor examined Marius, and after having found that his pulse
was still beating, that the wounded man had no very deep wound on
his breast, and that the blood on the corners of his lips proceeded
from his nostrils, he had him placed flat on the bed, without a pillow,
with his head on the same level as his body, and even a trifle lower,
and with his bust bare in order to facilitate respiration. 
Mademoiselle Gillenormand, on perceiving that they were undressing
Marius, withdrew.  She set herself to telling her beads in her
own chamber.

The trunk had not suffered any internal injury; a bullet,
deadened by the pocket-book, had turned aside and made the tour
of his ribs with a hideous laceration, which was of no great depth,
and consequently, not dangerous.  The long, underground journey had
completed the dislocation of the broken collar-bone, and the disorder
there was serious.  The arms had been slashed with sabre cuts. 
Not a single scar disfigured his face; but his head was fairly covered
with cuts; what would be the result of these wounds on the head? 
Would they stop short at the hairy cuticle, or would they attack
the brain?  As yet, this could not be decided.  A grave symptom was
that they had caused a swoon, and that people do not always recover
from such swoons.  Moreover, the wounded man had been exhausted
by hemorrhage.  From the waist down, the barricade had protected
the lower part of the body from injury.

Basque and Nicolette tore up linen and prepared bandages; Nicolette
sewed them, Basque rolled them.  As lint was lacking, the doctor,
for the time being, arrested the bleeding with layers of wadding. 
Beside the bed, three candles burned on a table where the case
of surgical instruments lay spread out.  The doctor bathed Marius'
face and hair with cold water.  A full pail was reddened in an instant. 
The porter, candle in hand, lighted them.

The doctor seemed to be pondering sadly.  From time to time,
he made a negative sign with his head, as though replying to some
question which he had inwardly addressed to himself.

A bad sign for the sick man are these mysterious dialogues
of the doctor with himself.

At the moment when the doctor was wiping Marius' face, and lightly
touching his still closed eyes with his finger, a door opened
at the end of the drawing-room, and a long, pallid figure made
its appearance.

This was the grandfather.

The revolt had, for the past two days, deeply agitated, enraged and
engrossed the mind of M. Gillenormand.  He had not been able to sleep
on the previous night, and he had been in a fever all day long. 
In the evening, he had gone to bed very early, recommending that
everything in the house should be well barred, and he had fallen
into a doze through sheer fatigue.

Old men sleep lightly; M. Gillenormand's chamber adjoined
the drawing-room, and in spite of all the precautions that had
been taken, the noise had awakened him.  Surprised at the rift
of light which he saw under his door, he had risen from his bed,
and had groped his way thither.

He stood astonished on the threshold, one hand on the handle of the
half-open door, with his head bent a little forward and quivering,
his body wrapped in a white dressing-gown, which was straight
and as destitute of folds as a winding-sheet; and he had the air
of a phantom who is gazing into a tomb.

He saw the bed, and on the mattress that young man, bleeding,
white with a waxen whiteness, with closed eyes and gaping mouth,
and pallid lips, stripped to the waist, slashed all over with
crimson wounds, motionless and brilliantly lighted up.

The grandfather trembled from head to foot as powerfully as ossified
limbs can tremble, his eyes, whose corneae were yellow on account
of his great age, were veiled in a sort of vitreous glitter,
his whole face assumed in an instant the earthy angles of a skull,
his arms fell pendent, as though a spring had broken, and his
amazement was betrayed by the outspreading of the fingers of his
two aged hands, which quivered all over, his knees formed an angle
in front, allowing, through the opening in his dressing-gown,
a view of his poor bare legs, all bristling with white hairs,
and he murmured:

"Marius!"

"Sir," said Basque, "Monsieur has just been brought back. 
He went to the barricade, and . . ."

"He is dead!" cried the old man in a terrible voice.  "Ah!  The rascal!"

Then a sort of sepulchral transformation straightened up this
centenarian as erect as a young man.

"Sir," said he, "you are the doctor.  Begin by telling me one thing. 
He is dead, is he not?"

The doctor, who was at the highest pitch of anxiety, remained silent.

M. Gillenormand wrung his hands with an outburst of terrible laughter.

"He is dead!  He is dead!  He is dead!  He has got himself
killed on the barricades!  Out of hatred to me!  He did that to
spite me!  Ah!  You blood-drinker! This is the way he returns to me! 
Misery of my life, he is dead!"

He went to the window, threw it wide open as though he were stifling,
and, erect before the darkness, he began to talk into the street,
to the night:

"Pierced, sabred, exterminated, slashed, hacked in pieces!  Just look
at that, the villain!  He knew well that I was waiting for him,
and that I had had his room arranged, and that I had placed at
the head of my bed his portrait taken when he was a little child! 
He knew well that he had only to come back, and that I had been
recalling him for years, and that I remained by my fireside,
with my hands on my knees, not knowing what to do, and that I was mad
over it!  You knew well, that you had but to return and to say: 
`It is I,' and you would have been the master of the house, and that I
should have obeyed you, and that you could have done whatever you
pleased with your old numskull of a grandfather! you knew that well,
and you said:

"No, he is a Royalist, I will not go!  And you went to the barricades,
and you got yourself killed out of malice!  To revenge yourself
for what I said to you about Monsieur le Duc de Berry. 
It is infamous!  Go to bed then and sleep tranquilly! he is dead,
and this is my awakening."

The doctor, who was beginning to be uneasy in both quarters,
quitted Marius for a moment, went to M. Gillenormand, and took his arm. 
The grandfather turned round, gazed at him with eyes which seemed
exaggerated in size and bloodshot, and said to him calmly:

"I thank you, sir.  I am composed, I am a man, I witnessed the death
of Louis XVI., I know how to bear events.  One thing is terrible and
that is to think that it is your newspapers which do all the mischief. 
You will have scribblers, chatterers, lawyers, orators, tribunes,
discussions, progress, enlightenment, the rights of man, the liberty
of the press, and this is the way that your children will be brought
home to you.  Ah!  Marius!  It is abominable!  Killed!  Dead before me! 
A barricade!  Ah, the scamp!  Doctor, you live in this quarter,
I believe?  Oh!  I know you well.  I see your cabriolet pass
my window.  I am going to tell you.  You are wrong to think that I
am angry.  One does not fly into a rage against a dead man. 
That would be stupid.  This is a child whom I have reared. 
I was already old while he was very young.  He played in the
Tuileries garden with his little shovel and his little chair,
and in order that the inspectors might not grumble, I stopped up
the holes that he made in the earth with his shovel, with my cane. 
One day he exclaimed:  Down with Louis XVIII.! and off he went. 
It was no fault of mine.  He was all rosy and blond.  His mother
is dead.  Have you ever noticed that all little children are blond? 
Why is it so?  He is the son of one of those brigands of the Loire,
but children are innocent of their fathers' crimes.  I remember when he
was no higher than that.  He could not manage to pronounce his Ds. 
He had a way of talking that was so sweet and indistinct that you
would have thought it was a bird chirping.  I remember that once,
in front of the Hercules Farnese, people formed a circle to admire
him and marvel at him, he was so handsome, was that child! 
He had a head such as you see in pictures.  I talked in a deep voice,
and I frightened him with my cane, but he knew very well that it
was only to make him laugh.  In the morning, when he entered my room,
I grumbled, but he was like the sunlight to me, all the same. 
One cannot defend oneself against those brats.  They take hold of you,
they hold you fast, they never let you go again.  The truth is,
that there never was a cupid like that child.  Now, what can you say
for your Lafayettes, your Benjamin Constants, and your Tirecuir de
Corcelles who have killed him?  This cannot be allowed to pass in
this fashion."

He approached Marius, who still lay livid and motionless, and to
whom the physician had returned, and began once more to wring
his hands.  The old man's pallid lips moved as though mechanically,
and permitted the passage of words that were barely audible,
like breaths in the death agony:

"Ah! heartless lad!  Ah! clubbist!  Ah! wretch!  Ah!  Septembrist!"

Reproaches in the low voice of an agonizing man, addressed to a corpse.

Little by little, as it is always indispensable that internal
eruptions should come to the light, the sequence of words returned,
but the grandfather appeared no longer to have the strength
to utter them, his voice was so weak, and extinct, that it seemed
to come from the other side of an abyss:

"It is all the same to me, I am going to die too, that I am. 
And to think that there is not a hussy in Paris who would not have
been delighted to make this wretch happy!  A scamp who, instead of
amusing himself and enjoying life, went off to fight and get himself
shot down like a brute!  And for whom?  Why?  For the Republic! 
Instead of going to dance at the Chaumiere, as it is the duty of young
folks to do!  What's the use of being twenty years old?  The Republic,
a cursed pretty folly!  Poor mothers, beget fine boys, do!  Come, he
is dead.  That will make two funerals under the same carriage gate. 
So you have got yourself arranged like this for the sake of General
Lamarque's handsome eyes!  What had that General Lamarque done to you? 
A slasher!  A chatter-box! To get oneself killed for a dead man! 
If that isn't enough to drive any one mad!  Just think of it! 
At twenty!  And without so much as turning his head to see whether
he was not leaving something behind him!  That's the way poor,
good old fellows are forced to die alone, now-adays. Perish in
your corner, owl!  Well, after all, so much the better, that is
what I was hoping for, this will kill me on the spot.  I am too old,
I am a hundred years old, I am a hundred thousand years old, I ought,
by rights, to have been dead long ago.  This blow puts an end to it. 
So all is over, what happiness!  What is the good of making him
inhale ammonia and all that parcel of drugs?  You are wasting
your trouble, you fool of a doctor!  Come, he's dead, completely dead. 
I know all about it, I am dead myself too.  He hasn't done things
by half.  Yes, this age is infamous, infamous and that's what I
think of you, of your ideas, of your systems, of your masters,
of your oracles, of your doctors, of your scape-graces of writers,
of your rascally philosophers, and of all the revolutions which,
for the last sixty years, have been frightening the flocks of crows
in the Tuileries!  But you were pitiless in getting yourself killed
like this, I shall not even grieve over your death, do you understand,
you assassin?"

At that moment, Marius slowly opened his eyes, and his glance,
still dimmed by lethargic wonder, rested on M. Gillenormand.

"Marius!" cried the old man.  "Marius!  My little Marius! my
child! my well-beloved son!  You open your eyes, you gaze upon me,
you are alive, thanks!"

And he fell fainting.