Chapter Chapter 301 · 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 Mondétour 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

Méduse_. They were obliged to resign themselves to hunger. They had

then reached the first hours of that Spartan day of the 6th of June

when, in the barricade Saint-Merry, Jeanne, surrounded by the

insurgents who demanded bread, replied to all combatants crying:

“Something to eat!” with: “Why? It is three o’clock; at four we shall

be dead.”

As they could no longer eat, Enjolras forbade them to drink. He

interdicted wine, and portioned out the brandy.

They had found in the cellar fifteen full bottles hermetically sealed.

Enjolras and Combeferre examined them. Combeferre when he came up again

said:—“It’s the old stock of Father Hucheloup, who began business as a

grocer.”—“It must be real wine,” observed Bossuet. “It’s lucky that

Grantaire is asleep. If he were on foot, there would be a good deal of

difficulty in saving those bottles.”—Enjolras, in spite of all murmurs,

placed his veto on the fifteen bottles, and, in order that no one might

touch them, he had them placed under the table on which Father Mabeuf

was lying.

About two o’clock in the morning, they reckoned up their strength.

There were still thirty-seven of them.

The day began to dawn. The torch, which had been replaced in its cavity

in the pavement, had just been extinguished. The interior of the

barricade, that species of tiny courtyard appropriated from the street,

was bathed in shadows, and resembled, athwart the vague, twilight

horror, the deck of a disabled ship. The combatants, as they went and

came, moved about there like black forms. Above that terrible

nesting-place of gloom the stories of the mute houses were lividly

outlined; at the very top, the chimneys stood palely out. The sky was

of that charming, undecided hue, which may be white and may be blue.

Birds flew about in it with cries of joy. The lofty house which formed

the back of the barricade, being turned to the East, had upon its roof

a rosy reflection. The morning breeze ruffled the gray hair on the head

of the dead man at the third-story window.

“I am delighted that the torch has been extinguished,” said Courfeyrac

to Feuilly. “That torch flickering in the wind annoyed me. It had the

appearance of being afraid. The light of torches resembles the wisdom

of cowards; it gives a bad light because it trembles.”

Dawn awakens minds as it does the birds; all began to talk.

Joly, perceiving a cat prowling on a gutter, extracted philosophy from

it.

“What is the cat?” he exclaimed. “It is a corrective. The good God,

having made the mouse, said: ‘Hullo! I have committed a blunder.’ And

so he made the cat. The cat is the erratum of the mouse. The mouse,

plus the cat, is the proof of creation revised and corrected.”

Combeferre, surrounded by students and artisans, was speaking of the

dead, of Jean Prouvaire, of Bahorel, of Mabeuf, and even of Cabuc, and

of Enjolras’ sad severity. He said:—

“Harmodius and Aristogiton, Brutus, Chereas, Stephanus, Cromwell,

Charlotte Corday, Sand, have all had their moment of agony when it was

too late. Our hearts quiver so, and human life is such a mystery that,

even in the case of a civic murder, even in a murder for liberation, if

there be such a thing, the remorse for having struck a man surpasses

the joy of having served the human race.”

And, such are the windings of the exchange of speech, that, a moment

later, by a transition brought about through Jean Prouvaire’s verses,

Combeferre was comparing the translators of the Georgics, Raux with

Cournand, Cournand with Delille, pointing out the passages translated

by Malfilâtre, particularly the prodigies of Cæsar’s death; and at that

word, Cæsar, the conversation reverted to Brutus.

“Cæsar,” said Combeferre, “fell justly. Cicero was severe towards

Cæsar, and he was right. That severity is not diatribe. When Zoïlus

insults Homer, when Mævius insults Virgil, when Visé insults Molière,

when Pope insults Shakspeare, when Frederic insults Voltaire, it is an

old law of envy and hatred which is being carried out; genius attracts

insult, great men are always more or less barked at. But Zoïlus and

Cicero are two different persons. Cicero is an arbiter in thought, just

as Brutus is an arbiter by the sword. For my own part, I blame that

last justice, the blade; but, antiquity admitted it. Cæsar, the

violator of the Rubicon, conferring, as though they came from him, the

dignities which emanated from the people, not rising at the entrance of

the senate, committed the acts of a king and almost of a tyrant, _regia

ac pene tyrannica_. He was a great man; so much the worse, or so much

the better; the lesson is but the more exalted. His twenty-three wounds

touch me less than the spitting in the face of Jesus Christ. Cæsar is

stabbed by the senators; Christ is cuffed by lackeys. One feels the God

through the greater outrage.”

Bossuet, who towered above the interlocutors from the summit of a heap

of paving-stones, exclaimed, rifle in hand:—

“Oh Cydathenæum, Oh Myrrhinus, Oh Probalinthus, Oh graces of the

Æantides! Oh! Who will grant me to pronounce the verses of Homer like a

Greek of Laurium or of Edapteon?”