THE VOICE summoning Marius in the dusk to join the barricade on the Rue de la Chanvrerie, had sounded to him like the voice of Fate. He wished to die and here was the means; his knock on the door of the tomb was answered by a hand tendering him the key. There is a fascination in the melancholy inducements that darkness offers to the despairing. Marius parted the bars of the gate, as he had done so many times before, and leaving the garden behind him said, ‘So be it!’ Half-crazed with grief, with nothing clear or settled in his mind, unable to face the realities of life after those two intoxicated months of youthfulness and love, overwhelmed by the bewilderment of despair, his only thought was to put a rapid end to his misery. He set out at a brisk walk. As it happened, he was already armed, having Javert’s pistols on him. The youth he thought he had discerned in the shadows had vanished.
He went from the Rue Plumet to the boulevard, crossed the Esplanade, the Pont des Invalides, the Champs-Élysées, and the Place Louis XV (both before and after this the Place de la Concorde) and so came to the Rue de Rivoli. The shops were open and women were shopping under the lights of the arcade or eating ices at the Café Laiter or cakes at the English pastry-cook’s. But now and then a post-chaise set off at a gallop from the Hôtel des Princes or the Hôtel Meurice.
Marius went by way of the Passage Delorme into the Rue Saint-Honoré. Here the shops were shut. Shopkeepers were talking in their half-closed doorways, people were passing along the pavements, the street-lamps were lit and the houses were lighted as usual above the first floor. There was a detachment of cavalry in the Place du Palais-Royal.
But as he left the Palais-Royal behind him, following the Rue Saint-Honoré, Marius noted that there were fewer lighted windows. Doors were locked and there were no gossipers in the doorways. The street grew darker and the crowd more dense: for the number of people in the street had become a crowd – a crowd in which no one spoke, but from which a deep, heavy murmur arose. Around the Fontaine de l’Arbre-Sec there were ‘rallying points’, motionless groups of men detached from the ebb and flow of passers-by like rocks in a stream.
By the time it reached the end of the Rue des Prouvaires the crowd could move no more. It had become a solid, almost impenetrable mass of people talking in undertones. Scarcely any black coats and round hats were to be seen here. There were smocks and tradesmen’s jackets, caps, sallow faces and bare heads of unkempt hair. This multitude swayed confusedly in the night mist, and its low-voiced muttering resembled a shudder. Although no man was walking there was nevertheless a sound of feet stamping in the mud. Beyond this concentration, in the Rue de Roule, the Rue des Prouvaires, and the further length of the Rue Saint-Honoré, not a lighted window was to be seen. The single lines of street-lamps were seen to dwindle along the street. The lamps in those days were like red stars slung on ropes which cast a pool of light like a great spider on the pavement. But these streets were not empty. Stacked muskets were to be seen in them, bayonets moving on sentry-go and bivouacking troops. No sightseer penetrated as far as this. All traffic had stopped. Here the crowd ended and the army began.
Marius was imbued with the pertinacity of a man who has ceased to hope. He had been summoned and he must go. He contrived to pass through the crowd and the army bivouacs, dodging sentries and patrols. By means of a detour he reached the Rue de Bethisy and made for Les Halles. At the end of the Rue des Bourdonnais the street-lamps ceased. After passing first through the zone of the crowd and then through the military zone he found himself in a zone that to him seemed terrible – not a civilian or a soldier, not a light; a place of solitary darkness. A chill assailed him. To turn into any street was like entering a cellar. But he continued on his way.
There was a sound of running footsteps passing close by him, whether those of a man or woman, of one person or more than one, he could not tell. They echoed and died away.
By twists and turns he arrived at an alley which he thought must be the Rue de la Poterie. Halfway along it he bumped into something which he found to be an overturned cask. His feet discovered puddles. There were potholes in the street and piles of loose paving stones. A barricade had been started and then abandoned. Climbing over this obstacle, he moved further down the street, feeling his way along the housefronts. A little further on he saw a blur of white which, when he drew nearer to it, turned out to be the two white horses unharnessed from the omnibus that morning by Bossuet. After straying all day about the streets they had come to rest in this place with the tired patience of animals that no more understand the ways of men than men understand the ways of Providence.
Marius went past them. As he entered a street which he thought must be the Rue du Contrat-Social there was the report of a musket, and the ball, fired at random from Heaven knew where, pierced a copper shaving bowl just above his head, hanging outside a barber’s shop. That punctured shaving bowl was still to be seen in the Rue du Contrat-Social, near the pillars of Les Halles, in 1846.
It was at least a sign of life, but nothing else happened. Marius’s journey was like a descent down a pitch-dark stairway. Nevertheless, he went on.
Anyone capable at that moment of soaring over Paris on the wings of a bat or an owl would have had a dismal spectacle beneath his eyes.
The ancient quarter of Les Halles, intersected by the Rues Saint-Denis, Saint-Martin, and countless alleyways, which is like a town within a town, and which the insurgents had made their base and arms depot, would have looked to him like a huge patch of darkness in the centre of Paris, a black gulf. Owing to the breaking of street-lamps and the shuttering of windows, no light was to be seen there, nor was any sound of life or movement to be heard. The invisible guardian of the uprising, that is to say, darkness, was everywhere on duty and everywhere kept order. This is the necessary tactic of insurrection, to veil smallness of numbers in a vast obscurity and enhance the stature of every combatant by the possibilities which obscurity affords. At nightfall every window where a light showed had been visited by a musket-ball; the light had gone out, and sometimes the occupant had been killed. Now nothing stirred; nothing dwelt in the houses but fear, mourning, and amazement; nothing in the streets but a kind of awestruck horror. Not even the long rows of storeyed windows were visible, nor the jagged outline of house-tops and chimneys, nor the dim sheen of lights reflected on wet, muddy pavements. The eye looking from a height into that mass of shadow might have discerned here and there at remote intervals feint gleams of light throwing into relief the irregular shapes of singular constructions, like lanterns moving amid ruins; these were the barricades. The rest was a pool of utter darkness, misty and oppressive, above which rose the still, brooding outlines of the Tour Saint-Jacques, the Église Saint-Merry, and two or three others of those great edifices which man makes into giants and night turns into ghosts.
All round that silent, ominous labyrinth, in those quarters where the Paris traffic had not been brought to a standstill and where a few street-lamps still shone, the aerial observer might have perceived the metallic glitter of drawn swords and bayonets, the rumbling wheels of artillery and the silent gathering of battalions growing in numbers from one minute to the next – a formidable girdle slowly tightening around the uprising.
The besieged quarter was nothing but a sort of monstrous cavern, everything within it seeming motionless or slumbering, and the roads to it were all plunged in darkness, as we have seen.
A menacing darkness filled with traps and pitfalls, sinister to approach and more sinister still to penetrate, where those who entered trembled at the thought of those waiting to receive them, and those who waited dreaded those who must come. Invisible warriors crouched at every corner, deadly ambushes hidden in the depths of night. All uncertainty was ended. No other greeting was to be expected than the flash of a musket, no other encounter than the sudden, swift emergence of death; and no one to say whence or when it would come, only that it was certain. In that place designated for combat, the two sides were soon to come cautiously to grips – Government and insurrection, the Garde Nationale and the groups of workers, the bourgeoisie and the rebels. Each was under the same necessity, to end up dead or victorious. There was no other way. So far had things gone, so heavy was the darkness, that the most timid was filled with resolution and the boldest with fear. And for the rest, fury and fervour were equal on either side. On the one hand, to go forward was to die, but no man thought of going back; on the other, to stand fast was to the, but no man thought of flight.
It was necessary that on the next day the matter should be settled, that one side or the other should triumph, that the insurrection should become revolution or else a damp squib. The Government understood this as did the rebels; the humblest citizen knew it. Hence the feeling of anguish that pervaded the impenetrable darkness of that place where all was to be decided; the heightened tension pervading the silence from which so soon a disastrous clamour was to arise. Only one sound was to be heard, awesome as a death-rattle, sinister as a malediction, the tocsin of Saint-Merry. Nothing could have chilled the blood so surely as did the tolling of that desperate bell crying its lament into the night.
As often happens, Nature seemed to have matched herself to the undertakings of men. Nothing conflicted with the fateful harmonies of that set stage. No stars showed, and the scene was overhung with heavy cloud. A black sky brooded over the dead streets like a vast pall draping a vast tomb.
And while a battle that was still political was preparing in that place that had witnessed so many revolutionary acts; while the young people, the secret societies, and the schools, inspired by principle, and the middle-class inspired by self-interest, were advancing upon each other to clash and grapple; while each side hastened and sought the moment of crisis and decision – remote from all this and from the battlefield itself, in the deepest recesses of that ancient Paris of the poor and destitute which lay hidden beneath the brilliance of the rich and fortunate Paris, there was to be heard the sombre growling of the masses: a fearful and awe-inspiring voice in which were mingled the snarl of animals and the words of God, a terror to the faint-hearted and a warning to the wise, coming at once from the depths, like the roaring of a lion, and from the heights like the voice of thunder.
Marius had reached Les Halles. Here everything was even quieter, darker and more immobile than in the surrounding streets, as though the icy peace of the tomb had risen up from the earth to spread beneath the sky. Nevertheless a glare was visible in the darkness, lighting the roofs of the houses separating the Rue de la Chanvrerie from Saint-Eustache. It was the torch that stood burning on the Corinth barricade. Marius, making his way towards it, was guided to the Marché-aux-Poirées, whence he could see the dark mouth of the Rue des Prêcheurs. He entered it, without being seen by the rebel sentry, who was at the far end. Feeling himself to be near his destination, he walked on with extreme caution and thus came to the turning into the short stretch of the Mondétour alleyway which, as we know, Enjolras had kept open as the channel of communication with the outside world. Reaching the corner, he peered into the alleyway past the house on his left.
Himself hidden in the shadow of the house, he saw, reflected on the cobbles, a faint glow coming from a small flickering light on top of what looked like a crudely constructed wall adjoining the tavern building, of which he could see a part; and, crouched in front of it, a number of men with muskets on their knees. This, within twenty yards of him, was the interior of the stronghold. The houses on his right hid the rest of the tavern, the larger barricade and the flag.
Marius had now only a step to go; whereupon the unhappy young man seated himself on a kerb-stone, folded his arms and fell to thinking about his father.
He was brooding on the heroic Colonel Pontmercy, that proud soldier who under the Republic had defended the frontiers of France and under Napoleon had reached the borders of Asia; who had seen Genoa, Alexandria, Milan, Turin, Madrid, Vienna, Dresden, Berlin, and Moscow, leaving on all the victorious battlefields of Europe drops of the same blood that flowed in Marius’s veins; whose hair had turned prematurely white in a life of discipline and command; who lived with his sword-belt buckled, epaulettes falling over his breast, cockade blackened by powder, forehead creased by the weight of his helmet, in barrack-rooms, in encampments, under canvas, and in ambulances, and who after twenty years had returned from the wars with a scarred cheek and a smiling countenance, simple, tranquil, admirable, pure-hearted as a child, having done all that he could for France and nothing against her.
Marius said to himself that now it was his turn, his hour had sounded; that following his father he too must be bold and resolute, braving the musket-balls, baring his breast to the bayonets, shedding his blood seeking out the enemy and finding death if need be; that he too was going to war – but that his battlefield would be the streets, and it was a civil war that he would be fighting. It was civil war that opened like an abyss before him; it was into that abyss that he must fall. And thinking of this he shivered.
He thought of his father’s sword, which his grandfather had sold to a secondhand dealer and which he himself so sorely regretted. He told himself that it had done well, that chaste and gallant sword, to escape from him and take indignant refuge in oblivion; that it had taken flight because it had good sense and knew what the future held; that it had had a presentiment of this uprising, this war of gutters and paving-stones – volleys fired from loopholesin cellars, stabs in the back. Having known Marengo and Friedland it had no wish to visit the Rue de la Chanvrerie, and having served honourably with the father it was not minded to degrade itself with the son. Marius said to himself that if he had it with him now, if he had retrieved it from his dying parent’s bedside to bear it with him into this dark brawl between Frenchmen and Frenchmen, the sword would have burnt his hand, flaming like a weapon of supernatural wrath. He said to himself that he was glad it was not there, that it was just and right that it had vanished, that the true guardian of his father’s fame had been his grandfather, that it was better that the sword should have been auctioned, sold to a huckster, tossed on the scrap-heap rather than be buried in their country’s flank… And Marius wept bitterly.
His plight was terrible, but what else could he do? To live without Cosette was impossible. Since she had left him, he could only die. Had he not sworn to her that he would die? She had left him knowing this; therefore his death must be agreeable to her. In any case, it was clear that she no longer loved him, since she had gone off in this fashion without a word of warning, without a letter, although she knew his address. Why go on living, what was there left for him to live for? And then, how could he now draw back, having come so far? To sniff at danger and then run away, peep into the barricade and go off trembling – ‘I’ve had a look and that’s enough. That’s all I want. It’s civil war, and I’m clearing out…!’ To desert the friends who were awaiting him, who perhaps had need of him – a handful against an army! To fail in all things, love, friendship, and his pledged word, making patriotic sentiment the excuse for cowardice! This was unthinkable. If his father’s ghost had seen him retreat he would have thrashed him with the flat of his sword crying, ‘Coward, go forward!’
Marius had been sitting with his head bowed, while the argument surged this way and that. But suddenly he straightened as a splendid thought occurred to stiffen his resolve. There is a lucidity inspired by the nearness of the grave: to be close to death is to see clearly. The course on which he was perhaps on the verge of embarking seemed to him no longer shameful but splendid. The thought of street warfare was by some process of spiritual alchemy suddenly transformed in his mind. The questions he had been asking came crowding back, but they no longer troubled him. He had an answer to each one.
Why should his father be angry? Were there no circumstances in which rebellion acquired the dignity of a duty? How could it be degrading for the son of Colonel Pontmercy to play a part in the conflict that had now begun? This was not Montmirail or Champ-aubert but another matter entirely. It was a question, not of sacred soil but of a noble idea. The country might lament, but humanity would applaud. And indeed, would the country lament? France might bleed, but the cause of liberty would prosper, and in the triumph of liberty France would forget her wounds. And furthermore, looking at the matter still more broadly, why should there be any talk of civil war?
Civil war… What did the words mean? Was there any such thing as ‘foreign war’? Was not all warfare between men warfare between brothers? Wars could only be defined by their aims. There were no ‘foreign’ or ‘civil’ wars, only wars that were just or unjust. Until the great universal concord could be arrived at, warfare, at least when it was the battle between the urgent future and the dragging past, might be unavoidable. How could such a war be condemned? War is not shameful, nor the sword-thrust a stab in the back, except when it serves to kill right and progress, reason, civilization, and truth. When this is war’s purpose it makes no difference whether it is civil or foreign war – it is a crime. Outside the sacred cause of justice, what grounds has one kind of war for denigrating another? By what right does the sword of Washington despise the pike of Camille Desmoulins? Which is the greater – Leonidas fighting the foreign enemy or Timoleon slaying the tyrant who was his brother? One was a defender, the other a liberator. Are we to condemn every resort to arms that takes place within the citadel, without concerning ourselves with its aim? Then we must condemn Brutus and Coligny. Fighting in the undergrowth or in the streets – why not? That was the warfare of Ambiorix, of Artavelde, of Marnix, of Pelage. But Ambiorix fought against Rome, Artavelde fought against France, Marnix against Spain, and Pelage against the Moors – all fought against foreigners. But monarchy is also a foreigner; oppression and divine right, both are foreigners. Despotism violates the moral frontier just as foreign invasion violates the geographical frontier. To drive out the tyrant or to drive out the English is in either case the reconquest of one’s own territory. The moment comes when protest is not enough; reason must give way to action, and force ensure what thought has conceived. The Encyclopedia enlightens minds, but 10 August sets them in motion. After Aeschylus came Thrasybulus, and after Diderot came Danton. Multitudes are inclined to accept the existing master; their very mass creates apathy. Crowds lapse readily into compliance. They have to be stirred and driven, shaken by the very benefits conferred on them by deliverance, their eyes dazzled by truth, enlightenment forced on them with blows. They need to be a little shocked by their own salvation, and this it is that arouses them. Hence the necessity of fanfares and of wars. Great fighters have to arise, to stir nations with their audacity and shake loose the pitiful humanity buried in the shadow of Divine Right and Caesarian glory, of force and fanaticism, irresponsible power and absolute monarchy – the foolish mass that gazes open-mouthed at those dark and tawdry splendours. Down with the tyrant? But to whom are you referring? To Louis-Philippe? He was no more a tyrant than Louis XVI. Both were what history is accustomed to term ‘good kings’. But principles cannot be fragmented: truth is the whole, and it does not admit of compromises. There can be no concessions, no indulgence for the man who must be removed. Louis XVI was a king by divine right. Louis-Philippe became king because he was a Bourbon: both in some degree represent the seizure of rights, and this world-wide usurpation must be contested. It is necessary, since France is for ever that which is beginning. When the ruler falls in France, he falls everywhere. In brief, what cause can be more just, what war more righteous, than that which restores social truth, restores liberty to its throne, restores their proper sovereignty to all men, displaces the purple from the head of France, reasserts the fullness of reason and equity, eliminates the seeds of antagonism by allowing each man to be himself, abolishes the hindrance to universal concord represented by monarcy and makes all mankind equal before the law? It is wars such as these that build peace. A vast citadel of prejudice, superstition, lies, exactions, abuses, violence and iniquity still looms over the world, enclosed within towers of hatred. It must be overthrown, its monstrous bulk reduced to rubble. To win Austerlitz is glorious; but to seize the Bastille is immense.
Every man has discovered in himself that the human spirit – and this is the miracle of its complex, ubiquitous unity – has the strange gift of being able to reason almost coldly in the most desperate extremity, so that in desolation and utmost despair, in the travail of our darkest meditation, we may still view our situation with detachment and weigh arguments. Logic enters our state of turmoil and the thread of syllogism runs unbroken through the tempest of our thought. This was Marius’s state of mind.
Thinking these things, utterly downcast but resolute, still hesitant, and indeed trembling at the thought of what he was about to do, his gaze travelled over the interior of the barricade. The rebels were talking in low voices, not moving, and one could feel the unreal silence which denotes the last stage of expectancy. Above their heads, at a third-floor window, Marius could make out the form of what seemed to be a spectator or a witness, who was listening with a singular attention. It was the door-keeper killed by Le Cabuc. From below, by the light of the torch on the barricade, the figure was only dimly visible. Nothing could have been more eerie, in that flickering, uncertain light, than that head of tangled hair, the livid, motionless, astonished face, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, leaning over the street in a posture of intent curiosity. It was as though the man who was dead was contemplating those about to die. A long trail of blood from the head flowed in streaks down the wall as far as the first floor, where it stopped.