Bab Bab 287 · AN OWL’S VIEW OF PARIS

A being who could have hovered over Paris that night with the wing of

the bat or the owl would have had beneath his eyes a gloomy spectacle.

All that old quarter of the Halles, which is like a city within a city,

through which run the Rues Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin, where a

thousand lanes cross, and of which the insurgents had made their

redoubt and their stronghold, would have appeared to him like a dark

and enormous cavity hollowed out in the centre of Paris. There the

glance fell into an abyss. Thanks to the broken lanterns, thanks to the

closed windows, there all radiance, all life, all sound, all movement

ceased. The invisible police of the insurrection were on the watch

everywhere, and maintained order, that is to say, night. The necessary

tactics of insurrection are to drown small numbers in a vast obscurity,

to multiply every combatant by the possibilities which that obscurity

contains. At dusk, every window where a candle was burning received a

shot. The light was extinguished, sometimes the inhabitant was killed.

Hence nothing was stirring. There was nothing but fright, mourning,

stupor in the houses; and in the streets, a sort of sacred horror. Not

even the long rows of windows and stores, the indentations of the

chimneys, and the roofs, and the vague reflections which are cast back

by the wet and muddy pavements, were visible. An eye cast upward at

that mass of shadows might, perhaps, have caught a glimpse here and

there, at intervals, of indistinct gleams which brought out broken and

eccentric lines, and profiles of singular buildings, something like the

lights which go and come in ruins; it was at such points that the

barricades were situated. The rest was a lake of obscurity, foggy,

heavy, and funereal, above which, in motionless and melancholy

outlines, rose the tower of Saint-Jacques, the church of Saint-Merry,

and two or three more of those grand edifices of which man makes giants

and the night makes phantoms.

All around this deserted and disquieting labyrinth, in the quarters

where the Parisian circulation had not been annihilated, and where a

few street lanterns still burned, the aerial observer might have

distinguished the metallic gleam of swords and bayonets, the dull

rumble of artillery, and the swarming of silent battalions whose ranks

were swelling from minute to minute; a formidable girdle which was

slowly drawing in and around the insurrection.

The invested quarter was no longer anything more than a monstrous

cavern; everything there appeared to be asleep or motionless, and, as

we have just seen, any street which one might come to offered nothing

but darkness.

A wild darkness, full of traps, full of unseen and formidable shocks,

into which it was alarming to penetrate, and in which it was terrible

to remain, where those who entered shivered before those whom they

awaited, where those who waited shuddered before those who were coming.

Invisible combatants were entrenched at every corner of the street;

snares of the sepulchre concealed in the density of night. All was

over. No more light was to be hoped for, henceforth, except the

lightning of guns, no further encounter except the abrupt and rapid

apparition of death. Where? How? When? No one knew, but it was certain

and inevitable. In this place which had been marked out for the

struggle, the Government and the insurrection, the National Guard, and

popular societies, the bourgeois and the uprising, groping their way,

were about to come into contact. The necessity was the same for both.

The only possible issue thenceforth was to emerge thence killed or

conquerors. A situation so extreme, an obscurity so powerful, that the

most timid felt themselves seized with resolution, and the most daring

with terror.

Moreover, on both sides, the fury, the rage, and the determination were

equal. For the one party, to advance meant death, and no one dreamed of

retreating; for the other, to remain meant death, and no one dreamed of

flight.

It was indispensable that all should be ended on the following day,

that triumph should rest either here or there, that the insurrection

should prove itself a revolution or a skirmish. The Government

understood this as well as the parties; the most insignificant

bourgeois felt it. Hence a thought of anguish which mingled with the

impenetrable gloom of this quarter where all was at the point of being

decided; hence a redoubled anxiety around that silence whence a

catastrophe was on the point of emerging. Here only one sound was

audible, a sound as heart-rending as the death rattle, as menacing as a

malediction, the tocsin of Saint-Merry. Nothing could be more

blood-curdling than the clamor of that wild and desperate bell, wailing

amid the shadows.

As it often happens, nature seemed to have fallen into accord with what

men were about to do. Nothing disturbed the harmony of the whole

effect. The stars had disappeared, heavy clouds filled the horizon with

their melancholy folds. A black sky rested on these dead streets, as

though an immense winding-sheet were being outspread over this immense

tomb.

While a battle that was still wholly political was in preparation in

the same locality which had already witnessed so many revolutionary

events, while youth, the secret associations, the schools, in the name

of principles, and the middle classes, in the name of interests, were

approaching preparatory to dashing themselves together, clasping and

throwing each other, while each one hastened and invited the last and

decisive hour of the crisis, far away and quite outside of this fatal

quarter, in the most profound depths of the unfathomable cavities of

that wretched old Paris which disappears under the splendor of happy

and opulent Paris, the sombre voice of the people could be heard giving

utterance to a dull roar.

A fearful and sacred voice which is composed of the roar of the brute

and of the word of God, which terrifies the weak and which warns the

wise, which comes both from below like the voice of the lion, and from

on high like the voice of the thunder.