Les Miserables (abridged) (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (105 page)

“An omnibus,” said he, “doesn’t pass by Corinth.
Non licet omnibus adire Corinthum.”

A moment later the horses were unhitched and going off at will through the Rue Mondétour, and the omnibus, lying on its side, completed the barring of the street.

Ma‘am Hucheloup, completely upset, had taken refuge in the second story.

Her eyes were wandering, and she looked without seeing, crying in a whisper. Her cries were dismayed and dared not come out of her throat.

“It is the end of the world,” she murmured.

Joly deposited a kiss upon Ma‘am Hucheloup’s coarse, red, and wrinkled neck, and said to Grantaire: “My dear fellow, I have always considered a woman’s neck an infinitely delicate thing.”

But Grantaire was attaining the highest regions of dithyramb. Chowder having come up to the second floor, Grantaire seized her by the waist and pulled her towards the window with long bursts of laughter.

“Chowder is ugly!” cried he; “Chowder is the dream of ugliness! Chowder is a chimera. Listen to the secret of her birth: a Gothic Pygmalion who was making cathedral waterspouts, fell in love with one of them one fine morning, the most horrible of all. He implored Love to animate her, and that made Chowder. Behold her, citizens! her hair is the colour of chromate of lead, like that of Titian’s mistress, and she is a good girl. I warrant you that she will fight well. Every good girl contains a hero. As for Mother Hucheloup, she is an old soldier. Look at her moustaches! she inherited them from her husband. A hussaress, indeed, she will fight too. They two by themselves will frighten the banlieue. Comrades, we will overturn the government, as true as there are fifteen acids intermediate between margaric acid and formic acid; besides, I don’t care. Messieurs, my father always detested me because I could not understand mathematics. I only understand love and liberty. I am Grantaire, a good boy. Never having had any money, I have never got used to it, and by that means I have never felt the need of it, but if I had been rich, there would have been no more poor! you should have seen. Oh! if the good hearts had the fat purses, how much better everything would go! I imagine Jesus Christ with Rothschild’s fortune! How much good he would have done! Chowder, embrace me! you are voluptuous and timid! you have cheeks which call for the kiss of a sister, and lips which demand the kiss of a lover.”

“Be still, wine-cask!” said Courfeyrac.

Grantaire answered:

“I am Capitoul and Master of Floral Games!”

Enjolras, who was standing on the crest of the barricade, musket in hand, raised his fine austere face. Enjolras, we know, had something of the Spartan and of the Puritan. He would have died at Thermopylæ with Leonidas, and would have burned Drogheda with Cromwell.

“Grantaire,” cried he, “go sleep yourself sober away from here. This is the place for intoxication and not for drunkenness. Do not dishonour the barricade!”

This angry speech produced upon Grantaire a singular effect. One would have said that he had received a glass of cold water in his face. He appeared suddenly sobered. He sat down, leaned upon a table near the window, looked at Enjolras with an inexpressible gentleness, and said to him:

“Let me sleep here.”

“Go sleep elsewhere,” cried Enjolras.

But Grantaire, keeping his tender and troubled eyes fixed upon him, answered:

“Let me sleep here—until I die here.”

Enjolras regarded him with a disdainful eye:

“Grantaire, you are incapable of belief, of thought, of will, of life, and of death.”

Grantaire answered gravely: “You’ll see.”

He stammered out a few more unintelligible words, then his head fell heavily upon the table, and, a common effect of the second stage of inebri ety into which Enjolras had roughly and suddenly pushed him, a moment later he was asleep.

ATTEMPT TO CONSOLE THE WIDOW HUCHELOUP

BAHOREL, in ecstasies over the barricade, cried:

“There is the street in a low neck, how well it looks!”

Courfeyrac, even while helping to demolish the tavern, sought to console the widowed landlady.

“Mother Hucheloup, were you not complaining the other day that you had been summoned and fined because Fricassee had shaken a rug out of your window?”

“Yes, my good Monsieur Courfeyrac. Oh! my God! are you going to put that table also into your horror? And besides that, for the rug, and also for a flower-pot which fell from the attic into the street, the government fined me a hundred francs. If that isn’t an abomination!”

“Well, Mother Hucheloup, we are avenging you.”

Mother Hucheloup, in this reparation which they were making her, did not seem to understand her advantage very well. She was satisfied after the manner of that Arab woman who, having received a blow from her husband, went to complain to her father, crying for vengeance and saying: “Father, you owe my husband affront for affront.” The father asked: “Upon which cheek did you receive the blow?” “Upon the left cheek.” The father struck the right cheek, and said: “Now you are satisfied. Go and tell your husband that he has struck my daughter, but that I have struck his wife.”

The rain had ceased. Recruits had arrived. Some working-men had brought under their smocks a keg of powder, a hamper containing bottles of vitriol, two or three carnival torches, and a basket full of lamps, “relics of the king’s fête,” which fête was quite recent, having taken place the 1st of May. It was said that these supplies came from a grocer of the Faubourg Saint Antoine, named Pépin. They broke the only lamp in the Rue de la Chanvrerie, the lamp opposite the Rue Saint-Denis, and all the lamps in the surrounding streets, Mondétour, du Cygne, des Prêcheurs, and de la Grande and de la Petite Truanderie.

Enjolras, Combeferre, and Courfeyrac, directed everything. Two barricades were now building at the same time, both resting on the house of Corinth and making a right angle; the larger one closed the Rue de la Chanvrerie, the other closed the Rue Mondétour in the direction of the Rue du Cygne. This last barricade, very narrow, was constructed only of casks and paving-stones. There were about fifty labourers there, some thirty armed with muskets, for, on their way, they had taken out a wholesale loan from an armourer’s shop.

Nothing could be more fantastic and more motley than this band. One had a short jacket, a cavalry sabre, and two horse-pistols; another was in shirt sleeves, with a round hat, and a powder-horn hung at his side; a third had a breast-plate of nine sheets of brown paper, and was armed with a saddler’s awl. There was one of them who cried:
“Let us exterminate to the last man, and die on the point of our bayonets!”
This man had no bayonet. Another displayed over his coat a cross-belt and cartridge-box of the National Guard, with the box cover adorned with this inscription in red cloth: Public Order. Many muskets bearing the numbers of their legions, few hats, no cravats, many bare arms, some pikes. Add to this all ages, all faces, small pale young men, bronzed longshoremen. All were hurrying, and, while helping each other, they talked about the possible chances—that they would have help by three o‘clock in the morning—that they were sure of one regiment—that Paris would rise. Terrible subjects, with which were mingled a sort of cordial joviality. One would have said they were brothers, they did not know each other’s names. Great perils have this beauty, that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers.

A fire had been kindled in the kitchen, and they were melting pitchers, dishes, forks, all the pewter ware of the tavern into bullets. They drank through it all. Percussion-caps and buck-shot rolled pell-mell upon the tables with glasses of wine. In the billiard-room, Ma‘am Hucheloup, Chowder, and Fricassee, variously modified by terror, one being stupefied, another breathless, the third alert, were tearing up old linen and making lint; three insurgents assisted them, three long-haired, bearded, and mous tached wags who tore up the cloth with the fingers of a laundress, and who made them tremble.

The man of tall stature whom Courfeyrac, Combeferre, and Enjolras had noticed, at the moment he joined the company at the corner of the Rue des Billettes, was working on the little barricade, and making himself useful there. Gavroche worked on the large one. As for the young man who had waited for Courfeyrac at his house, and had asked him for Monsieur Marius, he had disappeared very nearly at the moment the omnibus was overturned.

Gavroche, completely carried away and radiant, had charged himself with making all ready. He went, came, mounted, descended, remounted, bustled, sparkled. He seemed to be there for the encouragement of all. Had he a spur? yes, certainly, his misery; had he wings? yes, certainly, his joy. Gavroche was a whirlwind. They saw him incessantly, they heard him constantly. He filled the air, being everywhere at once. He was a kind of stimulating ubiquity; no stop possible with him. The enormous barricade felt him on its back. He vexed the loungers, he urged on the idle, he reanimated the weary, he provoked the thoughtful, kept some in cheerfulness, others in breath, others in anger, all in motion, piqued a student, was biting to a working-man; took position, stopped, started on, flitted above the tumult and the effort, leaped from these to those, murmured, hummed, and stirred up the whole train; the fly of the revolutionary coach.
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Perpetual motion was in his little arms, and perpetual clamour in his little lungs.

“Go to it! more paving stones! more barrels! more gizmos! where are they? A basket of plaster, to stop that hole. It is too small, your barricade. It must go higher. Pile on everything, brace it with everything. Break up the house. A barricade is Mother Gibou’s tea-party. Hold on, there is a glass-door.”

This made the labourers exclaim:

“A glass-door? what do you want us to do with a glass-door, you little wart?”

“Wart yourselves,” retorted Gavroche. “A glass-door in a barricade is excellent. It doesn’t prevent attacking it, but it bothers them in taking it. Then you have never snitched apples over a wall with broken bottles on it? A glass-door will cut the corns of the National Guards, when they try to climb over the barricade. Golly! glass is the devil. Ah, now, you haven’t an unbridled imagination, my comrades.”

Still, he was furious at his pistol without a hammer. He went from one to another, demanding: “A musket? I want a musket! Why don’t you give me a musket?”

“A musket for you?” said Combeferre.

“Well?” replied Gavroche, “why not? I had one in 1830, when we had a disagreement with Charles X.”

Enjolras shrugged his shoulders.

“When there are enough for the men, we will give them to the children.”

Gavroche turned fiercely, and answered him:

“If you are killed before me, I will take yours.”

“Gamin!”
said Enjolras.

“Novice!” said Gavroche.

A stray dandy who was lounging at the end of the street made a diversion.

Gavroche cried to him:

“Come with us, young man? Well, this poor old country, you won’t do anything for her then?”

The dandy fled.

THE JOURNALS OF THE TIME which said that the barricade of the Rue de la Chanvrerie, that
almost inexpugnable construction,
as they call it, attained the level of a second story, were mistaken. The fact is, that it did not exceed an average height of six or seven feet. It was built in such a manner that the combatants could, at will, either disappear behind the wall, or look over it, and even scale the crest of it by means of a quadruple range of paving-stones superposed and arranged like steps on the inner side. The front of the barricade on the outside, composed of piles of paving-stones and of barrels bound together by timbers and boards which were interlocked in the wheels of the Anceau cart and the overturned omnibus, had a bristling and inextricable aspect.

An opening sufficient for a man to pass through had been left between the wall of the houses and the extremity of the barricade furthest from the tavern; so that a sortie was possible. The pole of the omnibus was turned directly up and held with ropes, and a red flag fixed to this pole floated over the barricade.

The little Mondétour barricade, hidden behind the tavern, was not visible. The two barricades united formed a staunch redoubt. Enjolras and Courfeyrac had not thought proper to barricade the other end of the Rue Mondétour which opens a passage to the markets through the Rue des Precheurs, wishing doubtless to preserve a possible communication with the outside, and having little dread of being attacked from the dangerous and difficult alley des Precheurs.

Except this passage remaining free, which constituted what Folard, in his strategic style, would have called a branch-trench, and bearing in mind also the narrow opening arranged on the Rue de la Chanvrerie, the interior of the barricade, where the tavern made a salient angle, presented an irregular quadrilateral closed on all sides. There was an interval of about twenty yards between the great barricade and the tall houses which formed the end of the street, so that we might say that the barricade leaned against these houses all inhabited, but closed from top to bottom.

All this labour was accomplished without hindrance in less than an hour, and without this handful of bold men seeing a bearskin-cap or a bayonet arise. The few bourgeois who still ventured at that period of the émeute into the Rue Saint-Denis cast a glance down the Rue de la Chanvrerie, perceived the barricade, and redoubled their pace.

The two barricades finished, the flag run up, a table was dragged out of the tavern; and Courfeyrac mounted upon the table. Enjolras brought the square box and Courfeyrac opened it. This box was filled with cartridges. When they saw the cartridges, there was a shudder among the bravest, and a moment of silence.

Courfeyrac distributed them with a smile.

Each one received thirty cartridges. Many had powder and set about making others with the balls which they were moulding. As for the keg of powder, it was on a table by itself near the door, and it was reserved.