‘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.
IV
Efforts to console Mère Hucheloup
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.
V
The preparations
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.
VI
Waiting
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.
VII
The recruit from the Rue des Billettes
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 a
t 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?’
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