Kabanata Kabanata 302 · LIGHT AND SHADOW

Enjolras had been to make a reconnaissance. He had made his way out

through Mondétour 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.