THE PARISIAN of today who enters the Rue Rambuteau from the direction of Les Halles and sees on his right, facing the Rue Mondétour, a basket-maker’s shop bearing as its sign a basket shaped like the great Napoleon with the inscription, ‘Napoleon all made of osier’, can scarcely imagine the terrible events witnessed by that place a bare thirty years ago.
This was the site of the Rue de la Chanvrerie, spelt Chanverrerie in old documents, and of the celebrated tavern known as Corinthe.
The reader will recall what has been said about the barricade set up at this point, which was, however, overshadowed by the one at Saint-Merry. It is upon this Rue de la Chanverie barricade, the tale of which has now vanished from memory, that we hope to shed some light.
For the purpose of clarity we may revert to the method used in our account of the battle of Waterloo. Any person wishing to visualize with some degree of accuracy the situation of the buildings at that time standing round the Pointe Sainte-Eustache, to the northeast of Les Halles, at what is the entrance to the Rue Rambuteau, has only to imagine a letter N, with the Rue Saint-Denis at one end and Les Halles at the other, its two uprights being the Rue de la Grande-Truanderie and the Rue de la Chanvrerie, and the Rue de la Petite-Truanderie its diagonal line. The old Rue Mondétour cut sharply through all three lines, so that the relatively small rectangle between Les Halles and the Rue Saint-Denis on the one side and the Rue du Cygne and the Rue des Prêcheurs on the other, was divided into seven blocks of houses of different styles and sizes, seemingly set up at random and at all angles, and separated, like the blocks of stone in a builder’s yard, by narrow passageways.
‘Narrow passageways’ is the best idea we can give of those dark, twisting alleys, running between tenements eight storeys high. The buildings themselves were so decrepit that in the Rue de la Chanvrerie and the Rue de la Petite-Truanderie they were buttressed by wooden beams running from one house-front to the one opposite. The streets were extremely narrow and the central gutters wide, so that the pedestrian, walking along pavements that were always wet, passed shops like cellars, big, ironbound curbstones, over-large garbage heaps and doorways fortified with wrought-iron grilles. All this has now vanished to make way for the Rue Ram-buteau.
The name ‘Mondétour’ or ‘my detour’ admirably depicts that labyrinth; and a little further on it was even better represented by the Rue Pirouette, which ran into the Rue Mondétour. The pedestrian going from the Rue Saint-Denis into the Rue de la Chanvrerie found the latter narrowing ahead of him as though he had entered a funnel. At the end of the short street he found his passage barred on the side of Les Halles by a block of tall houses, and might have thought himself in a blind alley if he had not discovered dark alleyways like trenches on either side affording him a way out. This was the Rue Mondétour, running from the Rue des Prêcheurs to the Rue du Cygne and the Rue de la Petite-Truanderie. At the end of this seeming blind alley, on the corner of the right-hand trench, there was a house much lower than the rest that formed a kind of break in the street.
It is in this house, only two storeys high, that three centuries ago a renowned tavern was light-heartedly installed, sounding a note of festivity on a site of which the poet, Théophile, has recorded:
Here swings the awesome skeleton
Of a sad lover who hanged himself.
Being well located, the tavern flourished and was handed down from father to son. In the days of Mathurin Régnier it was known as the Pot-aux-Roses, and, wordplay being fashionable at the time, its sign was a wooden post, or poteau, painted pink. In the last century the estimable Charles-Joseph Natoire, one of those masters of fantasy whose works are despised by our present-day realists, adorned the pink post with a bunch of Corinth grapes in celebration of the fact that he had on numerous occasions got mellow at the table where Régnier had got drunk. The delighted tavern-keeper had accordingly changed the name of his establishment and caused the words Au Raisin de Corinthe to be painted in gold across the top of the sign. Hence the name ‘Corinth’. Nothing pleases the drinking man more than transitions of this kind, mental zig-zags appropriate to the lurching of his homeward-bound feet. The latest tavern-keeper of the dynasty, Père Hucheloup, had so far lost touch with ancient tradition as to have the post painted blue.
A ground-floor room with a bar and an upstairs room with a billiard-table, a spiral staircase through the ceiling, wine on the tables, smoke on the walls, candles in broad daylight – such was the tavern. A trapdoor in the lower room led to the cellar, and the Hucheloup apartment was on the upper storey, being reached by a flight of stairs that was more like a ladder than a stairway, its only entrance a curtained doorway in the ground-floor room. There were also two attics under the roof where the serving women were housed. The kitchen shared the ground floor with the main room.
Père Hucheloup may have been born to be a chemist; he was certainly a cook. People came to his establishment to eat as well as drink. He had invented one particular dish which was to be had nowhere else, consisting of stuffed carp, which he called carpes au gras. This was eaten by the light of a tallow candle or a lamp of the Louis XVI period on tables with nailed coverings of waxed muslin in lieu of tablecloths. People came from far and wide. Hucheloup had the notion one day of drawing the attention of the passer-by to his speciality. He dipped his brush in a pot of black paint, and, since his spelling was as original as his cooking, adorned his façade with the following striking announcement: ‘CARPES HO GRAS.’ A freak of heavy rainfall and hail one winter washed out the first S and the G, so that it read CARPE HO RAS. With the aid of wind and weather a plain gastronomic advertisement was thus transformed into the injunction of the poet Horace, ‘Carpe horas’ – profit by the hours. From which it appeared that Père Hucheloup, although ignorant of French, had been a master of Latin, and that in seeking to abolish Lent he had become a philosopher. But it was also a plain invitation to step inside.
All that has since vanished. The Mondétour labyrinth was largely done away with in 1847, and probably none of it now remains. The Rue de la Chanvrerie and Corinth have vanished under the cobbles of the Rue Rambuteau.
Corinth, as we have said, was a meeting-place, if not a rallying-point, of Courfeyrac and his circle. Grantaire had discovered it. Having been beguiled first by the ‘Carpe horas’ he had gone back for the ‘Carpes au gras’, and to eat and drink and argue with his friends. The price was modest. They paid little and sometimes not at all, but were always welcome. Père Hucheloup was a kindly man.
He was also a tavern-keeper with a moustache and a quirky nature. He had a surly look, as though to overawe his regular customers, and he scowled at all comers, seeming more ready to quarrel than to serve them with soup. And yet, we must repeat, all were made welcome. His oddities had brought renown to his establishment, so that young men said to one another, ‘Let’s go and watch the old man huff and puff.’ He had been a master-at-arms. But then suddenly he would explode with laughter; a thunderous voice and a good fellow. He was a comic spirit in gloomy guise; and his fondness for intimidating his guests was like those snuff-boxes that are shaped like pistols – the only detonation was a sneeze.
His wife, Mère Hucheloup, was bearded and extremely ugly.
Père Hucheloup died in 1830, taking with him the secret of the carpes au gras. His widow, scarcely to be consoled, continued to preside over the tavern. But the cooking degenerated and became lamentable, and the wine, which had always been poor, became even worse. Nevertheless, Courfeyrac and his friends still went there – ‘From piety’, as Bossuet said.
The widow Hucheloup was short-winded and ill-shaped but she had country memories and country speech. Her manner of telling a tale added a spice to her village and springtime recollections. Her greatest delight, she declared, had been to hear ‘the redbreasts twittering in the bushes’.
The room on the upper floor housing the ‘restaurant’ was a long place cluttered with tables, benches, chairs, stools, and the ancient ricketty billiard-table. One reached it by way of the spiral staircase, which ended in a square hole in the corner, like a ship’s hatchway. Lighted by a single narrow window and a lamp that was always kept burning, it had the look of a lumber-room. Every article of furniture with four legs behaved as though it had only three. The whitewashed walls were unadorned except for the following verse, dedicated to Mère Hucheloup:
She startles at ten yards, at two you feel weak.
There’s a wart at the side of her pendulous beak:
One is always afraid that if ever she blows it,
It will come off and fall in her mouth ere she knows it.
This was inscribed in charcoal on the wall.
Mère Hucheloup, of whom this was a not unfaithful portrait, spent her days passing unconcernedly in front of this legend. Two waitresses called Matelote and Gibelotte, who had never been known by any other name, helped with laying the tables, fetching the carafes of blue-tinted wine, and dishing up the various messes served to the customers in earthenware pots. Matelote, who was fat, flabby, red-haired and strident of voice, had been the favoured handmaiden of the late Père Hucheloup. Ugly she certainly was, as repulsive as any mythological monster; but, since the servant must always give way to the lady of the house, she was less ugly than Mère Hucheloup. Gibelotte, who was long and thin, pale with a lymphatic pallor, with dark-circled eyes and drooping lids, and was afflicted with what may be termed chronic exhaustion, was always first up in the morning and last to bed at night, gently and silently waiting upon everyone, even her fellow-waitress, and smiling drowsily in her fatigue.
There was a mirror over the bar-counter.
On the door of the restaurant were the words, written in chalk by Courfeyrac: ‘Revel if you can and eat if you dare.’
Laigle de Meaux, as we know, lodged more often with Joly than elsewhere. He perched there like a bird on a branch. The two friends lived, ate, and slept together, sharing everything, even the girl Musichetta from time to time. On the morning of 5 June they breakfasted at Corinth, Joly with a cold in the head that Laigle was also beginning to share. Laigle’s clothes were the worse for wear, but Joly was neatly dressed. They entered the dining room on the first floor at about nine o’clock in the morning, to be welcomed by Matelote and Gibelotte.
‘Oysters, cheese, and ham,’ Laigle ordered as they sat down. The place was empty except for themselves, but as they were starting on their oysters a head appeared through the stairway hatch and Grantaire said:
‘I was passing outside when I caught a delicious whiff of Brie, so here I am.’
Seeing that it was Grantaire, Gibelotte brought two more bottles of wine, making three in all.
‘Are you going to drink both bottles?’ Laigle asked.
‘We’re all ingenious, but you alone are ingenuous,’ said Gran-taire. ‘Two bottles never hurt anyone.’
The others had begun by eating, but Grantaire began by drinking and one bottle was soon half empty.
‘You must have a hole in your stomach,’ said Laigle.
‘You’ve certainly got one in your elbow,’ said Grantaire, and having drained his glass he went on, ‘My dear Laigle of the funeral oration, that’s a very shabby jacket you’re wearing.’
‘I hope it is,’ said Laigle. ‘That’s why we get on so well together, my jacket and I. It matches its creases with mine, moulds itself to my deformities, adapts itself to my every movements so that I only know it’s there because it keeps me warm. Old clothes are like old friends. Have you just come from the boulevard?’
‘No, I didn’t come that way.’
‘Joly and I saw the head of the procession go past.’
‘It was a wonderful sight,’ said Joly, speaking for the first time.
‘And think how quiet this street is,’ said Laigle. ‘You’d never guess that Paris was being turned upside down. At one time, you know, it was all monasteries round here, monks of all descriptions, bearded and shaven, sandalled and barefooted, black and white, Franciscans, Capuchins, Carmelites, great, small and ancient Augustines… The place swarmed with them.’
‘Don’t talk to me about monks,’ said Grantaire. ‘The thought of those hair-shirts makes me itch.’
A moment later he uttered an exclamation of disgust.
‘I’ve just swallowed a bad oyster! My hypochondria’s starting again. Bad oysters and ugly waitresses, how I hate the human race! I came by way of the Rue Richelieu, past the big public library. The place is like a pile of oyster-shells. All those books, all that paper and ink, all those scribbled words. Somebody had to write them. Who was the idiot who said that man was a biped without a quill? And then I ran into a girl I know, a girl as lovely as a spring morning, worthy to be called April, and the little wretch was in a transport of delight because some poxed-up old banker has taken a fancy to her. The smell of money attracts women like the scent of lilac; they’re like all the other cats, they don’t care whether they’re killing mice or birds. Two months ago that wench was living virtuously in an attic, sewing metal eye-holes into corsets, sleeping on a truckle-bed and living happily with a flower-pot for company. Now she’s a banker’s doxy. It seems it happened last night, and when I met her this morning she was jubilant. And what’s so disgusting in that she’s just as pretty as ever. Not a sign of high finance on her face. Roses are better or worse than women in this respect, that you can see when the grubs have been at them. There’s no morality in this world. Look at our symbols – myrtle, the symbol of love, laurel, the symbol of war, the fatuous olive-branch, symbol of peace, the apple-tree, which nearly did for Adam with its pips, and the fig-leaf, the first forebear of the petticoat. As for right and justice, shall I tell you what they are? The Gauls wanted Clusium. Rome defended Clusium, asking what harm it had done them. Brennus replied, “The same harm that Alba did you, to say nothing of the Volscians and the Sabines. They were your neighbours; just as the Clusians are ours. Proximity means the same to us as it does to you. You seized Alba and we’re taking Clusium.” Rome would not allow it and so Brennus seized Rome, after which he cried, “Vae victis! – Woe to the conquered.” That’s right and justice for you. A world full of beasts of prey, a world full of eagles! It makes my flesh creep.’
Grantaire held out his glass to be refilled and then resumed his discourse, all three of them unconscious of the interruption.
‘Brennus, who captured Rome, was an eagle. The banker who captures a grisette is an eagle of another kind, but one is as shameless as the other. So there is nothing for us to believe in. Drink is the only reality. It makes no odds what your opinions are – whether you’re on the side of the skinny fowl, like the Canton d’Uri, or the plump fowl, like the Canton de Glaris – drink. You were talking about the boulevard and the procession and all that. So what of it? There’s going to be another revolution. What astounds me is the clumsy means that God employs. He’s always having to grease the wheels of events. There’s a hitch, the machine isn’t working, so quick, let’s have a revolution! God’s hands are always blackened with that particular grease. If I were he I’d do things more straightforwardly. I wouldn’t be for ever tinkering with the works; I’d keep the human race in order and string the facts together so that they made sense – no ifs and buts, and no miracles. The thing you call “progress” is driven by two motors, men and events. But unfortunately it happens now and then that something exceptional is called for. Whether it’s men or events, the run-of-the-mill is not enough; you need geniuses in terms of men, and revolutions in terms of events. Huge accidents are the law, and the natural order of things can’t do without them – and when you think of comets you can’t help feeling that Heaven itself needs its star performers. God puts up a meteor when you least expect it, like a poster on a wall, or a weird star with an enormous tail attached to it for emphasis. And so Caesar dies. Brutus gives him a dagger-thrust and God sends a comet. Bingo! – And you have the aurora borealis or a revolution or a great man. You have the year ’93 in capital letters, Napoleon the star and 1811 at the top of the bill. And a very fine poster it is, midnight blue and studded with tongues of fire. “This remarkable spectacle!” But watch out, you groundlings, because suddenly the whole thing’s in ruins, the star and the drama as well. Good God, that’s too much – and still it’s not enough! These devices, snatched haphazard, they look magnificent but they’re really feeble. The fact is Providence is simply playing tricks. What does a revolution prove? – simply that God’s at his wits’ end. He brings about a coup d’état because there’s a break in continuity between the present and the future that He hasn’t known how to mend. Which only confirms my theory about the unhappy state of Jehovah’s fortunes. When I think of the unease up aloft and here below, the baseness and rascality and misery in Heaven and on earth, extending from the bird that can’t find a grain of corn to me that can’t find an income of a hundred thousand livres; when I think of human destiny, which is wearing very thin, even the destiny of kings, haunted by the rope like the hanged Prince de Condé; when I think of winter, which is nothing but a rift in the firmament through which the winds break loose, the shreds of cloud over the hilltops in the new blue of the morning – and dew-drops, those false pearls, and frost, that beauty powder, and mankind in disarray and events out of joint, and so many spots on the sun and so many craters in the moon and so much wretchedness everywhere – when I think of of all this I can’t help feeling that God is not rich. He has the appearance of riches, certainly, but I can feel his embarrassment. He gives us a revolution the way a bankrupt merchant gives a ball. We must not judge any god by appearances. I see a shoddy universe beyond the splendour of the sky. Creation itself is bankrupt, and that’s why I’m a malcontent. Today is the fifth of June and it’s almost dark; I’ve been waiting since early morning for the sun to shine. But it hasn’t shone yet, and I’ll bet you it won’t shine all day – an oversight, no doubt, on the part of some underpaid subordinate. Yes, everything is badly managed, nothing fits with anything else, this old world is in a mess and I’ve joined the opposition. Everything’s at odds, and the whole world is exasperating. It’s like with children: those that ask don’t get, and those that don’t need, do. So I’m opting out. Besides, the sight of Laigle de Meaux’s bald head afflicts me; it’s humiliating to think that I’m the same age as that shiny pate. Well, I may criticize but I don’t abuse. The world’s what it is. I’m talking without malice, simply to relieve my mind. Be assured, Eternal Father, of my distinguished sentiments. Alas, by all the saints of Olympus and all the gods in Paradise, I was not born to be a Parisian – that is to say, to hover indefinitely, like a shuttlecock bouncing between two rackets, between the lookers-on and the activists. I was born to be a Turk and spend my days watching exquisite girls perform those lubricious oriental dances that are like the dreams of virtuous men; or a well-to-do countryman; or a gentleman of Venice attended by fair ladies; or a German princeling contributing half an infantry soldier to the German Confederation and occupying his spare time with drying his socks on his hedge, that is to say, his frontier. That’s what I was really born for. I said a Turk, and I’m not gainsaying it. I don’t know why people should be so against the Turks. There was good in Muhammad. The invention of the seraglio with houris and a paradise with odalisques is deserving of our respect. Let us not abuse Muhammadanism, the only creed that includes a hen-roost. I insist on drinking to it. This earth is a great imbecility. And now it seems the fools are going to fight one another, bash one another’s heads in, in this month of high summer, when they might be out with a wench in the fields, breathing the scent of new-mown hay. Really people are too stupid. An old broken lantern that I saw the other day in an antique shop put a thought in my mind – it’s time to bring light to the human race. And that thought has made me unhappy again. What good does it do to gulp down an oyster or a revolution? Again I’m growing dismal. This hideous old world. We struggle and fall destitute, we prostitute ourselves, we kill each other – and in the end we swallow it all!’
After this prolonged fit of eloquence Grantaire subsided in a fit of coughing, not undeserved.
‘Talking about revolution,’ said Joly, struggling with his stuffed-up nose, ‘it seems that Barius – Marius – is head over heels in love.’
‘Does anyone know who with?’ asked Laigle.
‘No.’
‘Marius in love!’ cried Grantaire. ‘I can imagine Marius in a fog, and he has found himself a mist. He belongs to the tribe of poets, which is as good as saying that he’s crazy. Marius and his Marie or Maria or Mariette, whatever she’s called, they must be a rum pair of lovers. I can guess what it’s like – rarefied ecstasies with kisses all forgotten, chastity on earth and couplings in the infinite. Two sensitive spirits sleeping together amid the stars.’
Grantaire was embarking on his second bottle, and perhaps his second harangue, when a newcomer appeared in the hatchway, a boy less than ten years old, ragged, very small, sallow and pug-faced but bright-eyed, thoroughly unkempt and soaked to the skin, but looking pleased with himself. Without hesitating, although plainly he knew none of them, he addressed Laigle de Meaux.
‘Are you Monsieur Bossuet?’
‘That’s my nickname,’ said Laigle. ‘What do you want?’
‘Well, listen, a tall, fair-haired cove on the boulevard asked me if I knew Mère Hucheloup. “You mean the one in the Rue Chanvrerie, the old man’s widow?” I said. “That’s right,” he said. “I want you to go there and ask for Monsieur Bossuet. You’re to give him this message, ‘A-B-C.’” I reckon it’s a joke someone’s playing on you. He gave me ten sous.’
‘Joly, lend me ten sous,’ said Laigle. ‘And you, too, Grantaire.’
So the boy got another twenty sous.
‘What’s your name?’ asked Laigle.
‘Navet. I’m a pal of Gavroche.’
‘You’d better stay with us,’ said Laigle.
‘And have some breakfast,’ said Grantaire.
‘I can’t. I’m in the procession. I’m the one that shouts, “Down with Polignac!”’
And dragging one foot behind him, which is the most respectful of all salutations, the lad departed.
‘That’s a specimen of urchin pure and simple,’ said Grantaire. ‘There are a lot of varieties. There’s the lawyer’s gamin, known as a saute-ruisseau, the cook’s gamin, or marmiton, the baker’s gamin, or mitron –’ he reeled off a long list, ending with ‘– royal gamin, or dauphin, and holy gamin, or bambino.’
Meanwhile Laigle was considering.
‘A-B-C… Meaning, Lamarque’s burial’
‘And I suppose the tall fair-haired cove was Enjolras sending for you,’ said Grantaire.
‘Are we going?’ asked Bossuet.
‘It’s raining,’ said Joly. ‘I swore to go through fire, but not water. I don’t want to make my cold worse.’
‘I’m staying here,’ said Grantaire. ‘Better a breakfast table than a hearse.’
‘Very well, we stay where we are,’ said Laigle. ‘We might as well have some more to drink. Anyway, we can skip the funeral without skipping the insurrection.’
‘I’m all in favour of that,’ cried Joly.
‘We’re going on where 1830 left off,’ said Laigle, rubbing his hands. ‘The people are thoroughly worked up.’
‘I care precious little about your revolution,’ said Grantaire. ‘I don’t abominate this government – the Crown made homely with a cotton cap, the Sceptre ending in an umbrella. Come to think of him, in this weather Louis-Philippe can manifest his royalty in two ways, by waving his sceptre over the people and flourishing his umbrella at the gods.’
The room was dark, with dense clouds smothering the daylight. There was no one in the tavern or in the street, everyone having gone off to witness the happenings.
‘It might be midnight,’ said Bossuet. ‘One can’t see a thing. Gibelotte, fetch a light.’
Grantaire was sadly drinking.
‘Enjolras despises me,’ he murmured. “He said to himself,” Joly’s not well and Grantaire’s sure to be drunk. I’ll send the boy to Bossuet.” If he’d come after me himself I’d have gone with him. To the devil with Enjolras, he can have his funeral.’
The matter being thus decided, the three of them stayed in the tavern. By two o’clock that afternoon their table was covered with empty bottles. Two candles were burning, one in a copper candlestick that was green all over and the other in the neck of a cracked carafe. Grantaire had tempted Joly and Bossuet to drink, and they had done something to restore his spirits.
But by midday Grantaire had gone beyond wine, that moderate source of dreaming. To the serious drinker wine is only an appetizer. In this matter of insobriety there is black as well as white magic, and wine is of the latter kind. Grantaire was an adventurous drinker. The black approach of real drunkenness, far from appalling, allured him. He had deserted the wine-bottle and gone on to the chope, the bottomless pit. Having neither opium nor hashish to hand, and wanting to befog his mind, he had had recourse to that terrible mixture of eau-de-vie, stout, and absinthe, which so utterly drugs the spirit. Those three ingredients are a dead weight on the soul, three darknesses in which the butterfly life of the mind is drowned; they create a vapour, tenuous yet with the membranous substance of a bat’s wing, in which three furies lurk – Nightmare, Night, and Death, hovering over the slumbering Psyche.
Grantaire was still far from having reached that last stage; he was uproariously gay, and Bossuet and Joly were keeping up with him. They raised their glasses in a series of toasts, and to high-flown speech Grantaire added extravagance of gesture. Seated with dignity astride a chair, with his left hand on his knee, the arm akimbo, and his right hand holding his glass, he solemnly addressed the plump waitress, Matelote:
‘Let the doors of the palace be flung wide! Let all men become members of the Académie Française and all have the right to embrace Madame Hucheloup. And let me drink!’ Then he added, addressing Madame Hucheloup, ‘Antique lady, hallowed by custom, draw near that I may gaze upon you.’
‘Matelote and Gibelotte,’ cried Joly, ‘don’t for Heaven’s sake give Grantaire anything more to drink. He spends money like water. He has squandered two francs ninety-five centimes in reckless dissipation this morning alone.’
‘Who is the person,’ Grantaire intoned, ‘who without my leave has plucked stars from the sky and set them on this table in the guise of candles?’
Bossuet, although very drunk, had remained calm. Seated on the ledge of the open window, with the rain beating on his back, he was gravely contemplating his friends.
But suddenly tumult broke out behind him, the sound of running feet and the cry of ‘To arms!’ Looking round he saw a party consisting of Enjolras, with a musket, Gavroche with his pistol, Feuilly with a sabre, Courfeyrac with a sword, Jean Prouvaire with a musketoon, Combeferre with a musket, and Bahorel with a carbine. They were proceeding along the Rue Saint-Denis, past the end of the Rue de la Chanvrerie, followed by an excited crowd.
The Rue de la Chanvrerie was short. Making a trumpet of his hands, Bossuet bellowed, ‘Courfeyrac! Courfeyrac! Hoy!’
Courfeyrac heard the call and, seeing who it was, turned and advanced a few paces into the Rue de la Chanvrerie. His ‘What do you want?’ clashed with Bossuet’s ‘Where are you going?’
‘To build a barricade,’ shouted Courfeyrac.
‘Why not here? This is a good place.’
‘You’re right, Laigle,’ said Courfeyrac.
Beckoning to the others, he led them into the Rue de la Chanvrerie.
The place was indeed particularly suitable, with the side entrance from the street rapidly narrowing to the bottleneck constituted by Corinth, the Rue de Mondétour easily blocked on either side and direct, frontal attack impossible from the Rue Saint-Denis. Bossuet drunk had had the clear vision of a Hannibal sober.
Dismay gripped the whole street when the newcomers poured in. Casual loiterers took to their heels. In the twinkling of an eye doors were bolted and windows shuttered from one end to the other and from ground-floor to attic, and an old dame had rigged a mattress across her window as a protection against musket-fire. Only the tavern remained open, for the good reason that the party made straight for it. ‘May the saints preserve us!’ moaned Mère Huche-loup.
Bossuet had run down to greet Courfeyrac while Joly shouted to him from the window:
‘Why haven’t you got your umbrella? You’ll catch cold like me.’
Within a few minutes twenty iron bars had been wrenched out of the tavern’s window-grilles and street cobbles and paving-stones had been torn up over a distance of perhaps a dozen yards. A cart containing three barrels of lime, the property of a lime-merchant named Anceau, had been overturned by Gavroche and Bahorel, and the barrels had been surrounded by piles of paving-stones and flanked by empty wine-casks which Enjolras had brought up from Mère Hucheloup’s cellar. Feuilly, with hands more accustomed to decorating the fragile blades of fans, had buttressed the whole with solid heaps of stone, procured no one knew where, and the large timbers used to prop up a near-by housefront had been laid across the casks. By the time Bossuet and Courfeyrac desisted from their labour half the street was blocked with a rampart higher than a man. Nothing can exceed the zeal of the populace when it is a matter of building up by pulling down.
The two waitresses had joined in the work, Gibelotte going to and fro with loads of rubble. Her weariness was equal to any task. She served paving-stones as she might have served bottles of wine, still looking half asleep.
An omnibus drawn by two white horses appeared at the end of the street. Climbing on the barricade, Bossuet ran after it, ordered the driver to pull up and the passengers to get out. After assisting the ladies to descend he dismissed the driver and brought the omnibus back with him, leading the horses. ‘No omnibus,’ he said, ‘is allowed to pass Corinth. Non licet omnibus adire Corintkum.’
The horses were unharnessed and turned loose along the Rue Mondétour, and the omnibus, pushed over on its side, made a useful addition to the barricade.
The distraught Mère Hucheloup had taken refuge on the upper floor, where she sat gazing wild-eyed at these proceedings and muttering about the end of the world. Joly deposited a kiss on her thick red neck and remarked to Grantaire: ‘You know, I have always considered a woman’s neck a thing of infinite delicacy.’
But Grantaire had now achieved the highest flights of dithyramb. When Matelote came upstairs he grabbed her round the waist and then bellowed with laughter out of the window.
‘Matelote is ugly!’ he shouted. ‘Matelote is a dream of ugliness, a chimera! I will tell you the secret of her birth. A gothic Pygmalion carving cathedral gargoyles fell in love with one of them. He besought the God of Love to bring the stone to life, and that was Matelote. Look at her, everyone! She has hair the colour of lead-oxide, like Titian’s mistress, and she’s a good wench. I guarantee she’ll fight well; there’s a hero in every good wench. As for Mère Hucheloup, she’s a sturdy old soul. Look at that moustache, inherited from her husband; a real hussar, she is, and she’ll fight too. These two alone will terrify the neighbourhood. Comrades, we’re going to throw out the Government and that’s the truth, as true as the fact that between margaric acid and formic acid there are fifteen intermediate acids. Not that I care a straw about that. My father always abominated me because I couldn’t understand mathematics. The only things I understand are love and liberty. I’m good old Grantaire. Never having had any money I’ve never got into the way of having it and so I’ve never missed it; but if I’d been rich, no one else would have been poor. You’d have seen! This would be a far better world if the generous hearts had the fat purses. Think of Jesus Christ with Rothschild’s fortune, the good he’d have done! Matelote, come and kiss me. You are sensual and shy. You have cheeks which call for a sister’s kiss and lips which call for a lover.’
‘Stow it, you wine-cask!’ said Courfeyrac.
‘I am High Magistrate and Master of Ceremonies!’ proclaimed Grantaire.
Enjolras, who was standing on the barricade, musket in hand looked sternly round at him. Enjolras, as we know, was a Spartan and a puritan. He would have died with Leonidas at Thermopylae or massacred the garrison of Drogheda with Cromwell.
‘Grantaire,’ he called, ‘go and sleep your wine off somewhere else. This is a place for intoxication but not for drunkenness. Don’t dishonour the barricade.’
The sharp rebuke had a remarkable effect on Grantaire, as though he had received a douche of cold water. Suddenly he was sober. He sat down with his elbows on a table by the window, and looking with great sweetness at Enjolras called back;
‘You know I believe in you.’
‘Go away.’
‘Let me sleep it off here.’
‘Go and sleep somewhere else,’ said Enjolras.
But Grantaire, still regarding him with troubled, gentle eyes, persisted:
‘Let me sleep here, and if need be, die here.’
Enjolras looked scornfully at him.
‘Grantaire, you’re incapable of believing or thinking or willing or living or dying.’
‘You’ll see,’ said Grantaire gravely. ‘You’ll see.’
He muttered a few more unintelligible words; then his head fell heavily on the table and – a not uncommon effect of the second stage of inebriety, into which Enjolras had so harshly thrust him – fell instantly asleep.
Bahorel, delighted with the barricade, exclaimed:
‘Now the street’s stripped for action. Doesn’t it look fine!’
Courfeyrac, while partly demolishing the tavern, was doing his best to comfort the proprietress.
‘Mère Hucheloup, weren’t you complaining the other day that someone brought a charge against you because Gibelotte shook a rug out of the window?’
‘That’s true, Monsieur Courfeyrac… Saints preserve us, are you going to put that table on your horrible pile as well?… It was for the rug and a flower-pot that fell out of the attic window into the street. The Government fined me a hundred francs. Don’t you think that is disgraceful?’
‘Mère Hucheloup, we will avenge you.’
Mère Hucheloup seemed doubtful of the practical value of this vengeance, in which she resembled the Arab woman who complained to her father that her husband had smacked her face. ‘You must pay him back, father – an affront for an affront’… ‘Which cheek did he smack?’… ‘The left’… The father thereupon smacked her right cheek. ‘There you are. You can tell your husband that he chastised my daughter and I have chastised his wife.’
The rain had stopped and new recruits were arriving. Workmen brought in kegs of gunpowder under their overalls, a basket containing bottles of vitriol, some carnival torches and a hamper filled with fairy-lights ‘left over from the king’s birthday’, a festival of fairly recent date, having taken place on 1 May.
These munitions were said to have come from a grocer named Pépin in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. The single street-lamp in the Rue de la Chanvrerie was smashed, as were the lamps in surrounding streets
Enjolras, Combeferre, and Courfeyrac were directing all operations. A second barricade was going up at the same time, both barricades flanked by the Corinth tavern and set at right angles. The larger of the two blocked the Rue de la Chanvrerie, while the other blocked the Rue Mondétour on the Rue de la Cygne side. This second barricade was very narrow, being constructed only of barrels and paving-stones. They were manned by about fifty workers, some thirty of whom were equipped with muskets, having raided an armourer’s shop on the way.
The rebels were an ill-assorted and motley crowd. One man, wearing a short, formal jacket, was armed with a cavalry sabre and two saddle-pistols; another, in his shirtsleeves, wore a billycock hat and had a powder-bag slung round his neck, and a third had made himself a breastplate of nine sheets of packing paper and carried a saddler’s bradawl. One man was shouting, ‘Let us die to the last man, bayonet in hand!’ – as it happened, he had no bayonet. Another, clad in a frock-coat, was equipped with the belt and ammunition-pouch of the Garde Nationale, the latter stamped with the words, ‘Public Order’. There were a good many muskets bearing regimental numbers, very few hats, no neckties, a great many bare arms and a few pikes – and their bearers were men of all ages and varieties, from pallid youths to burly, weather-beaten dock-labourers. All were working feverishly while at the same time they discussed their prospects – that help would arrive between two and three in the morning, that they could count on such-and-such a regiment, that the whole of Paris would rise – dire prediction mingled with a kind of bluff joviality. They might have been brothers, although they did not know one another’s names. It is the ennobling quality of danger that it brings to light the fraternity of strangers.
A fire had been lighted in the kitchen, and pitchers, spoons, and forks, in short all the metal-ware in the establishment, were being melted down for casting into bullets. Drink was circulating everywhere. Percussion caps and small-shot were scattered amid wine glasses over the tables. In the upstairs room Mère Hucheloup, Matelote, and Gibelotte, variously affected by their state of alarm, the first dazed, the second breathless and the third, at last, wide awake, were tearing up old rags for dressings assisted by three of the rebels, three hairy and bearded stalwarts who worked with uncommon deftness and quite over-awed them.
The tall man whom Courfeyrac, Combeferre, and Enjolras had noticed when, uninvited, he joined their party at the corner of the Rue des Billettes, was doing useful work on the larger barricade. Gavroche was working on the smaller. As for the youth who had called at Courfeyrac’s lodging asking for Marius, he had disappeared at about the time when the omnibus was overturned.
Gavroche, radiantly in his element, seemed to have constituted himself overseer. He bustled to and fro, pushing, pulling, laughing, and chattering as though it was his function to keep up everyone’s spirits. What spurred him on, no doubt, was his state of homeless poverty; but what lent him wings was sheer delight. He was like a whirlwind, constantly to be seen and always to be heard, filling the air with the sound of his excited voice. His seeming ubiquity acted as a kind of goad; there was no pausing when he was by. The whole working-party felt him on its back. He disconcerted the dawdlers, roused the idlers, stimulated the weary, and exasperated the more thoughtful, amusing some and enraging others, exchanging banter with the students and epithets with the working-men; he was here, there, and everywhere, a gadfly buzzing about the lumbering revolutionary coach.
‘Come on now, we want more paving-stones, more barrels, more of everything. Let’s have a basket of rubble to stuff up that hole. This barricade’s still not big enough, it’s got to be higher. Shove everything on it, break up the house if necessary. Hullo, there’s a glass-paned door!’
‘So what are we going to do with a glass-paned door, my young lummox?’ a workman demanded.
‘Lummox yourself. A glass-paned door is a very good thing to have on a barricade – easy to attack, but not so easy to get past. Haven’t you ever tried stealing apples over a wall with broken glass on top? Nothing like a bit of glass for cutting the soldiers’ arms. The trouble is, you’ve no imagination, you lot.’
But what really worried Gavroche was his hammerless pistol. He went about exclaiming: ‘A musket! I must have a musket! Why will no one give me a musket?’
‘A musket at your age?’ said Combeferre.
‘And why not? I had one in 1830, when we kicked out Charles X.’
‘When there are enough for all the men we’ll start handing them out to the children,’ said Enjolras, shrugging his shoulders.
Gavroche turned upon him and said with dignity:
‘If you’re killed before me I shall take yours.’
‘Urchin!’ said Enjolras.
‘Greenhorn!’ said Gavroche.
The sight of a dandified young man straying in bewilderment past the end of the street created a diversion. Gavroche shouted:
‘Come and join us, mate! Aren’t you ready to do a turn for your poor old country?’
The young man fled.
The newspapers of the day, which reported that the ‘almost unassailable’ barricade in the Rue de la Chanvrerie reached the level of the second storey, were in error. The fact is that it was nowhere more than six or seven feet high, and so constructed that the defenders could shelter behind it or peer over it or climb on top of it by means of four piles of superimposed paving stones arranged to form a broad flight of steps. The outer side of the barricade, consisting of paving-stones and barrels reinforced by wooden beams and planks interlaced in the wheels of the cart and the overturned omnibus, had a bristling, unassailable appearance. A gap wide enough for a man to pass through had been left at the end furthest from the tavern to afford a means of exit. The shaft of the omnibus had been set upright and was held in position with ropes. It had a red flag affixed to it which fluttered over the barricade.
The small Mondétour barricade was not visible from that side, being concealed behind the tavern. Between them the two barricades constituted a formidable stronghold. Enjolras and Coufeyrac had not seen fit to barricade the other section of the Rue Mondétour, affording an outlet to Les Halles by way of the Rue des Prêcheurs, no doubt because they wished to preserve a means of communication with the outside world and considered that an attack by way of that tortuous alleyway was unlikely.
With the exception of this outlet, which might be technically termed a boyau, or communicating trench, and the narrow gap in the Rue de la Chanvrerie, the area enclosed by the two barricades, with the tavern forming a salient between them, was in the shape of an irregular quadrilateral, sealed on all sides. The distance between the main barricade and the tall houses behind it, facing the street, was about twenty yards, so that it could be said that the barricade was backed on to those houses, all of which were occupied but bolted and shuttered from top to bottom.
All this work was completed without interruption in less than an hour, and without the handful of intrepid defenders catching sight of a bearskin or bayonet. The few citizens who at that stage of the uprising ventured into the Rue Saint-Denis after glancing along the Rue de la Chanvrerie and seeing the barricade, went hurriedly on their way.
When both barricades were completed and the flag had been hoisted, a table was brought out of the tavern and Courfeyrac climbed on to it. Enjolras brought out the square box and Courfeyrac opened it. It was filled with cartridges, and at the sight of these even the stoutest hearts quivered and there was a momentary silence. Courfeyrac, smiling, proceeded to pass them out.
Every man was issued with thirty cartridges. Those who had brought powder with them set about making more, using the bullets that were being cast in the tavern. As for the barrel of powder, this was placed handy to the door and kept in reserve.
The roll of drums calling the forces of law and order to arms was sounding throughout Paris, but by now it had become a monotonous background noise to which no one paid any attention. It rose and fell, drawing nearer and receding, with a dismal regularity.
Together and without haste, with a solemn gravity, they charged muskets and carbines. Enjolras posted three sentinels outside the stronghold, in the Rue de la Chanvrerie, the Rue des Prêcheurs, and the Rue de la Petite-Truanderie. Then, with the work done, the weapons loaded and the orders given, alone in those gloomy, narrow streets where now there were no strollers, surrounded by silent houses in which there was no stir of human life, plunged in the gathering shadows of the dusk, amid a silence in which the approach of tragic and terrible events could be felt, isolated, armed, resolute and calm, they waited.
What did they do during those hours of waiting? We must tell of this, since this, too, is history.
While the men were busy making cartridges and the women busy with their bandages, while the lead for musket-balls was bubbling in a large cooking-pot on the stove, while armed look-outs kept guard on the barricades and Enjolras, whom nothing could distract, inspected his dispositions, Combeferre, Courfeyrac, Jean Prouvaire, Feuilly, Bossuet, Joly, Bahorel, and a few others gathered together as though this were the most peaceful of student occasions, and, seated within a few feet of the defences they had built, with their loaded weapons leaning against their chairs, in a corner of the tavern which they had transformed into a fortress, these gallant young men, brothers in this supreme moment of their lives, recited love-poems.
Do you recall how life was kind
When youth and hope still filled our breast,
And we’d no other thought in mind
Than to be lovers and well-dressed?When your age added in with mine
Made forty by our reckoning;
And, paupers, we did not repine,
For every winter’s day was spring.Brave days of modesty and pride,
When Paris was a lover’s feast!
I brought you flowers at Eastertide,
And pricked my finger on your breast.And men’s eyes watched you with desire
When in the crowded streets we strolled.
Your beauty was a living fire
That had no thought of growing old;No thought of strife and angry men,
Heads bowed beneath the tyrant’s rod…
When first I kissed you, it was then,
Ah, then, that! believed in God…
The time and place, the youthful recollections, the first stars showing in the sky, the funereal quiet of those deserted streets and the inexorable approach of desperate adventure, all this lent a touching pathos to the verses, and there were many of them, recited low-voiced in the dusk by Jean Prouvaire, who, as we know, was a poet.
Meanwhile, a fairy-light had been set on the small barricade, and on the larger one a wax torch of the kind that one sees on Mardi-Gras preceding carriages bearing masked revellers on their way to the ball. These torches, we may recall, had come from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. The torch had been placed in a kind of enclosure made of paving-stones, which sheltered it on three sides from the wind, but left the fourth side open so that its light fell on the red flag. The street and the barricade remained in darkness, with nothing visible except that flag, lighted as though by a dark lantern, the rays of which lent to the crimson of the flag an ominous purple tinge.
Night fell, but nothing happened. Only a confused, distant murmur was to be heard, broken occasionally by bursts of musket-fire, but these were rare, meagre, and remote. The prolonged pause was a sign that the Government was taking its time and assembling its forces. Those fifty men were awaiting the onslaught of sixty thousand.
Enjolras was seized with the impatience that afflicts strong characters on the threshold of great events. He went to look for Gavroche, who was now making cartridges in the downstairs room by the uncertain light of two candles set from precaution on the bar-counter because of the powder scattered over the tables. Their light was not visible from outside, and the rebels had also been at pains to ensure that there was no light on the upper floors.
Gavroche was very much preoccupied at that moment, but not precisely with cartridges. The man who had joined them in the Rue des Billettes had come into the downstairs room and seated himself at a table in the darkest corner. He had been issued with a large-bore musket, which was now propped between his knees. Until that moment Gavroche, his attention distracted by a thousand fascinating matters, had not so much as looked at him. He did so automatically when he entered the room, admiring the musket; but then, as the man sat down, he got to his feet. Anyone who had been watching the man until that moment might have noticed that he was observing everything around him, everything to do with the barricades and the rebel band, with a singular intentness; but from the moment when he entered the room he seemed to withdraw into himself and to take no further interest in what was going on. Gavroche, drawing nearer, walked round the detached and brooding figure with extreme caution, going on tiptoe like someone anxious not to awaken a sleeper. At the same time a series of expressions passed over his youthful countenance that was at once so impudent and so eager, so volatile and so profound, so gay and so heartrending, a series of grimaces like those of an aged man communing with himself – ‘Rubbish!… It’s not possible… I’m seeing things. I’m dreaming… Could it possibly be…? No, it can’t be!’ And Gavroche, rocking on his feet with his fists clenched in his pockets, head and neck wagging like the neck of a bird, expressed in an exaggerated pout all the sagacity of his lower lip. He was at once astounded, sceptical, convinced, and amazed; he had the look of a Chief Eunuch at the slave-market discovering a Venus among the offerings, or an art-lover coming upon a Raphael in a pile of discarded canvases. Every faculty was at work, the instinct that scents and the wits that contrive. Clearly something tremendous had happened to Gavroche.
And it was at this moment that Enjolras came up to him.
‘You’re small enough,’ Enjolras said. ‘You won’t be noticed. I want you to slip out along the housefronts, out into the streets, and come back and tell me what’s going on.’
Gavroche flung back his head.
‘So we’re good for something after all, us little ’uns. Well, that’s fine. I’ll do it. You trust the little ‘uns, guv’nor, but keep an eye on the big ’uns. For instance, that one there.’ He had lowered his voice as he nodded towards the man from the Rue des Billettes.
‘What about him?’
‘He’s a police spy, a copper’s nark.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘He picked me up less than a fortnight ago by the Pont Royal, where I was having a stroll.’
Enjolras hurriedly left him and said a word in the ear of a dock-labourer who happened to be near. The man left the room and returned almost instantly with three others. The four men, four burly stevedores, grouped themselves unobtrusively round the table at which the man from the Rue des Billettes was seated, evidently ready to fling themselves upon him. Enjolras then went up to him and asked:
‘Who are you?’
The abrupt question caused the man to start. Looking hard into Enjolras’s eyes, he seemed to discern exactly what was in his mind, and smiling the most disdainful, unabashed, and resolute of smiles he answered:
‘I see how it is… Yes, I am.’
‘You’re a police informer?’
‘I’m a representative of the law.’
‘And your name?’
‘Javert.’
Enjolras nodded to the four men. Before Javert had time to move he was seized, overpowered, bound, and searched. A small round card was found on him, enclosed between two pieces of glass and bearing on one side the words ‘Surveillance et Vigilance’, and on the other the following particulars: ‘Javert, Inspector of Police, aged 52’ signed by the Prefect of Police of the time, M. Henri-Joseph Gisquet.
He also had a watch on him and a purse containing a few gold pieces. These were restored to him. But at the bottom of his watch-pocket was a scrap of paper in an envelope on which were his orders, written in the Prefect’s own hand:
‘Having fulfilled his political mission Inspector Javert will endeavour to confirm the truth of the report that the miscreants have places of resort on the right bank of the Seine, near the Pont d’Iéna.’
After being searched Javert was stood upright with his hands tied behind his back and bound to the wooden pillar in the centre of the room that had given the tavern its original name.
Gavroche, who had intently followed the proceedings, nodding his head in approval, now addressed Javert:
‘So the mouse has caught the cat!’
Everything had happened so swiftly that it was all over before the news became known. Javert had not uttered a sound. Hearing what had happened, Courfeyrac, Bossuet, Joly, Combeferre, and some of the men on the barricades came trooping in. Javert, so securely lashed to the post that he could not move, contronted them with the cool serenity of a man who has never in his life told a lie.
‘He’s a police spy,’ said Enjolras. And to Javert he said: ‘You will be shot two minutes before the barricade falls.’
‘Why not now?’ Javert inquired with the utmost composure.
‘We don’t want to waste ammunition.’
‘You could use a knife.’
‘Policeman,’ said the high-minded Enjolras, ‘we are judges, not murderers.’ He gestured to Gavroche. ‘You! Get started. Do what I told you.’
‘I’m off,’ said Gavroche.
But at the door he paused.
‘Anyway, let me have his musket. I’m leaving you the musician, but I’d like to have his trumpet.’
He made them a military salute and slipped happily through the gap in the large barricade.
The tragic picture we are printing would be incomplete, the reader would not see in their true proportions those momentous hours of civic travail and revolutionary birth wherein confusion was mingled with noble striving, were we to omit from this summary account the incident of epic and savage horror which took place almost immediately after the departure of Gavroche.
Crowds gather and then, as we know, grow like rolling snow balls, attracting violent men who do not ask each other where they come from. Among those who joined the contingent led by Enjolras and the others, there was a man in worn labourer’s clothes whose wild shouts and gestures were those of an uncontrolled drunkard. This man, who went by the name of Le Cabuc, but who was in reality quite unknown to the people who pretended to recognize him and who was either very drunk or pretending to be, had seated himself with several others at a table which they had dragged out of the tavern. While encouraging his companions to drink he seemed to be surveying the house at the back of the barricade, a five-storey house, looking along the street to the Rue Saint-Denis. Suddenly he cried:
‘You know what, comrades? That house is the place to shoot from. With marksmen at all the windows, devil a soul could come along the street!’
‘But the house is shut.’
‘We can knock, can’t we?’
‘They won’t open.’
‘Then we’ll break down the door.’
The door had a massive knocker. Le Cabuc went and hammered on it, without result. He knocked a second and a third time, but there was still no response.
‘Is anyone in?’ shouted Le Cabuc.
Silence.
So then he picked up a musket and hammered on the door with the butt. It was an old-fashioned arched doorway, low and narrow, the door made solidly of oak, lined with sheet metal and reinforced with iron bands, a real fortress door. The blows of the musket-butt shook the house but left the door unshattered. However, they had evidently alarmed the inmates, because eventually a light showed and a small window on the third floor opened to disclose the grey head of a man who was presumably the doorkeeper.
‘Messieurs,’ he asked, ‘What do you want?’
‘Open the door!’ shouted Le Cabuc.
‘I’m not allowed to, Monsieur.’
‘Do it all the same.’
‘Out of the question.’
Le Cabuc levelled his musket, aiming at the man’s head; but since he was standing in the street, and it was very dark, the doorkeeper did not see him.
‘Are you going to open, or aren’t you?’
‘No, Monsieur.’
‘You refuse?’
‘I do, my good –’
The sentence was cut short by the report of the musket. The ball took the old man under the chin and travelled through his neck, severing the jugular vein. He sank forward without a sound, and the candle he had been holding fell from his hand and went out. Nothing was now to be seen but a motionless head resting on the window-ledge and a rising wisp of smoke.
‘There you are!’ said Le Cabuc, grounding his musket on the cobbles.
Scarcely had he uttered the words than a hand fell on his shoulder, gripping it as tightly as an eagle’s talon, and a voice said:
‘On your knees!’
He turned to confront the white, cold face of Enjolras, who had a pistol in his other hand. He had been brought out at the sound of the shot.
‘On your knees,’ he repeated; and with an imperious gesture the slender youth of twenty, compelling the muscular broad-shouldered dock-worker to bend like a reed before him, forced him to kneel in the mud. Le Cabuc tried to resist, but seemed to be in the grip of a superhuman power. Enjolras, with his girlish face, his bare neck and untidy hair, had at that moment something of the look of an antique god. The dilated nostrils and glaring eyes conferred upon his implacable Greek countenance that expression of chaste and righteous anger which in the ancient world was the face of justice.
The men on the barricades had come hurrying to the scene and now stood silently a short distance away, finding it impossible to utter any word of protest at what was about to take place.
Le Cabuc, wholly subdued, made no further attempt to struggle. He was now trembling in every limb. Enjolras released his hold on him and got out his watch.
‘Pull yourself together,’ he said. ‘Pray or ponder. You have one minute.’
‘Mercy!’ the murderer gasped, and then, with his head bowed, fell to muttering inarticulate profanities.
Enjolras did not take his eyes off his watch, and when the minute had passed he returned it to his pocket. He gripped Le Cabuc by the hair, and as the man knelt screaming pressed the muzzle of the pistol to his ear. Many of those hot-blooded men, who had so lightly engaged upon a desperate enterprise, turned away their heads.
The shot rang out, the murderer fell face down on the cobbles, and Enjolras, straightening, gazed sternly and assuredly about him. He thrust aside the body with his foot and said:
‘Get rid of that.’
Three men picked it up, still twitching in its last death-throes, and flung it over the smaller barricade into the Rue Mondétour.
Enjolras stayed deep in thought, and who shall say what fearful shadows were massing behind his outward calm. Suddenly he raised his voice, and there was silence.
‘Citizens,’ said Enjolras, ‘what that man did was abominable and what I have done is horrible. He killed, and that is why I killed. I was obliged to do it, for this rebellion must be disciplined. Murder is an even greater crime here than elsewhere. We are under the eyes of the revolution, priests of the republic, the tokens of a cause, and our actions must not be subject to calumny. Therefore I judged this man and condemned him to death. But at the same time, compelled to do what I did but also abhorring it, I have passed judgement on myself, and you will learn in due course what my sentence is.’
A quiver ran through his audience.
‘We will share your fate,’ cried Combeferre.
‘It may be,’ said Enjolras. ‘I have more to say. In executing that man I bowed to necessity. But the necessity was a monster conceived in the old world, and its name is fatality. By the law of progress, this fatality must give way to fraternity. This is a bad moment for speaking the word “love”; nevertheless I do speak it, and glory in it. Love is the future. I have had resort to death, but I hate it. In the future, citizens, there will be no darkness or lightnings, no savage ignorance or blood-feuds. Since there will be no Satan there will be no Michael. No man will kill his fellow, the earth will be radiant, mankind will be moved by love. That time will come, citizens, the time of peace, light, and harmony, of joy and life. It will come. And the purpose of our death is to hasten its coming.’
Enjolras fell silent. His virgin lips closed, and he remained for some moments standing like a statue on the spot where he had shed blood, while his steadfast gaze subdued the murmur of voices about him. Jean Prouvaire and Combeferre silently clasped hands and, standing together at the corner of the barricade, gazed in admiration mingled with compassion at the stern-faced young man who was at once priest and executioner, shining like a crystal but unshakeable as a rock.
We may say here that when, after the business was over, the bodies were taken to the morgue and searched, a police-card was found on Le Cabuc. In 1848 the author of this work saw the special report on this episode delivered to the Prefect of Police in 1832.
It may be added that, according to a police surmise which seems to have been not without substance, Le Cabuc was Claquesous. The fact is that after the death of Le Cabuc nothing more was heard of Claquesous. He vanished without trace, seeming to have faded into invisibility. His life had been lived in shadow, his end was total darkness.
The band of rebels was still oppressed by that tragic trial, so rapidly conducted and so summarily concluded, when Courfeyrac caught sight of the slim young man who that morning had come to his lodging in search of Marius. This youth, who had a bold and heedless air, had come to rejoin them.