Les Misérables, v. 5/5: Jean Valjean

by Victor Hugo

  CHAPTER XXII.

  STEP BY STEP.

  When there were no chiefs left but Enjolras and Marius at the twoends of the barricade, the centre, which had so long been supportedby Courfeyrac, Bossuet, Joly, Feuilly, and Combeferre, yielded. Thecannon, without making a practicable breach, had severely injured thecentre of the redoubt, then the crest of the wall had disappearedunder the balls and fallen down, and the fragments which had collectedboth inside and out had in the end formed two slopes, the outer one ofwhich offered an inclined plane by which to attack. A final assault wasattempted thus, and this assault was successful; the bristling mass ofbayonets, hurled forward at a run, came up irresistibly, and the denseline of the attacking column appeared in the smoke on the top of thescarp. This time it was all over, and the band of insurgents defendingthe centre recoiled pell-mell.

  Then the gloomy love of life was rekindled in some; covered by thisforest of muskets, several did not wish to die. It is the moment whenthe spirit of self-preservation utters yells, and when the beastreappears in man. They were drawn up against the six-storied house atthe back of the barricade, and this house might be their salvation.This house was barricaded, as it were walled up from top to bottom, butbefore the troops reached the interior of the redoubt, a door wouldhave time to open and shut, and it would be life for these desperatemen; for at the back of this house were streets, possible flight, andspace. They began kicking and knocking at the door, while calling,crying, imploring, and clasping their hands. But no one opened. Thedead head looked down on them from the third-floor window. But Mariusand Enjolras, and seven or eight men who rallied round them, had rushedforward to protect them. Enjolras shouted to the soldiers, "Do notadvance," and as an officer declined to obey he killed the officer. Hewas in the inner yard of the redoubt, close to Corinth, with his swordin one hand and carbine in the other, holding open the door of thewine-shop, which he barred against the assailants. He shouted to thedesperate men, "There is only one door open, and it is this one;" andcovering them with his person, and alone facing a battalion, he madethem pass behind him. All rushed in, and Enjolras, whirling his musketround his head, drove back the bayonets and entered the last, and therewas a frightful moment, during which the troops tried to enter and theinsurgents to bar the door. The latter was closed with such violencethat the five fingers of a soldier who had caught hold of a doorpostwere cut off clean, and remained in the crevice. Marius remainedoutside; a bullet broke his collar-bone, and he felt himself faintingand falling. At this moment, when his eyes were already closed, he feltthe shock of a powerful hand seizing him, and his fainting-fit scarceleft him time for this thought, blended with the supreme recollectionof Cosette, "I am made prisoner and shall be shot."

  Enjolras, not seeing Marius among those who had sought shelter in thehouse, had the same idea, but they had reached that moment when eachcould only think of his own death. Enjolras put the bar on the door,bolted and locked it, while the soldiers beat it with musket-butts, andthe sappers attacked it with their axes outside. The assailants weregrouped round this door, and the siege of the wine-shop now began. Thesoldiers, let us add, were full of fury; the death of the sergeant ofartillery had irritated them, and then, more mournful still, during thefew hours that preceded the attack a whisper ran along the ranks thatthe insurgents were mutilating their prisoners, and that there was theheadless body of a soldier in the cellar. This species of fatal rumoris the general accompaniment of civil wars, and it was a false reportof the same nature which at a later date produced the catastrophe ofthe Rue Transnonain. When the door was secured, Enjolras said to theothers,--

  "Let us sell our lives dearly."

  Then he went up to the table on which Mabœuf and Gavroche werelying; under the black cloth two forms could be seen straight andlivid, one tall, the other short, and the two faces were vaguelydesigned under the cold folds of the winding-sheet. A hand emergedfrom under it, and hung toward the ground; it was that of the old man.Enjolras bent down and kissed this venerable hand, in the same way ashe had done the forehead on the previous evening. They were the onlytwo kisses he had ever given in his life.

  Let us abridge. The barricade had resisted like a gate of Thebes, andthe wine-shop resisted like a house of Saragossa. Such resistances areviolent, and there is no quarter, and a flag of truce is impossible;people are willing to die provided that they can kill. When Suchet says"capitulate," Palafox answers, "After the war with cannon, the warwith the knife." Nothing was wanting in the attack on the Hucheloupwine-shop: neither paving-stone showering from the window and roof onthe assailants, and exasperating the troops by the frightful damagethey committed, nor shots from the attics and cellar, nor the fury ofthe attack, nor the rage of the defence, nor, finally, when the doorgave way, the frenzied mania of extermination. When the assailantsrushed into the wine-shop, their feet entangled in the panels ofthe broken door which lay on the ground, they did not find a singlecombatant. The winding staircase, cut away with axes, lay in the middleof the ground-floor room, a few wounded men were on the point of dying,all who were not killed were on the first-floor, and a terrific firewas discharged thence through the hole in the ceiling which had beenthe entrance to the restaurant. These were the last cartridges, andwhen they were expended and nobody had any powder or balls left, eachman took up two of the bottles reserved by Enjolras, and defended thestairs with these frightfully fragile weapons. They were bottles ofaquafortis. We describe the gloomy things of carnage exactly as theyare: the besieged, alas! makes a weapon of everything. Greek fire didnot dishonor Archimedes, boiling pitch did not dishonor Bayard; everywar is a horror, and there is no choice. The musketry-fire of theassailants, though impeded and discharged from below, was murderous;and the brink of the hole was soon lined with dead heads, whencedripped long red and steaming jets. The noise was indescribable, and acompressed burning smoke almost threw night over the combat. Words failto describe horror when it has reached this stage. There were no longermen in this now infernal struggle, no longer giants contending againstTitans. It resembled Milton and Dante more than Homer, for demonsattacked and spectres resisted. It was a monster heroism.