3.V.1.22. FOOT TO FOOT
WHEN there were no longer any of the leaders left alive,
except Enjolras and Marius at the two extremities of the
barricade,
the centre, which had so long sustained Courfeyrac,
Joly, Bossuet, Feuilly and Combeferre, gave way. The cannon,
though it had not effected a practicable breach, had made
a rather large hollow in the middle of the redoubt; there, the
summit of the wall had disappeared before the balls, and had
crumbled away; and the rubbish which had fallen, now inside,
now outside, had, as it accumulated, formed two piles in
the nature of slopes on the two sides of the barrier, one on the
inside, the other on the outside. The exterior slope presented
an inclined plane to the attack.
A final assault was there attempted, and this assault
succeeded.
The mass bristling with bayonets and hurled forward
at a run, came up with irresistible force, and the serried front
of battle of the attacking column made its appearance through
the smoke on the crest of the battlements. This time, it was
decisive. The group of insurgents who were defending the
centre retreated in confusion.
Then the gloomy love of life awoke once more in some of
them. Many, finding themselves under the muzzles of this
forest of guns, did not wish to die. This is a moment when
the instinct of self-preservation emits howls, when the beast
re-appears in men. They were hemmed in by the lofty, six-story
house which formed the background of their redoubt.
This house might prove their salvation. The building was
barricaded, and walled, as it were, from top to bottom. Before
the troops of the line had reached the interior of the
redoubt, there was time for a door to open and shut, the space
of a flash of lightning was sufficient for that, and the door of
that house, suddenly opened a crack and closed again instantly,
was life for these despairing men. Behind this house, there
were streets, possible flight, space. They set to knocking at
that door with the butts of their guns, and with kicks, shouting,
calling, entreating, wringing their hands. No one
opened. From the little window on the third floor, the head
of the dead man gazed down upon them.
But Enjolras and Marius, and the seven or eight rallied
about them, sprang forward and protected them. Enjolras
had shouted to the soldiers: "Don't advance!" and as an
officer had not obeyed, Enjolras had killed the officer. He was
now in the little inner court of the redoubt, with his back
planted against the Corinthe building, a sword in one hand,
a rifle in the other, holding open the door of the wine-shop
which he barred against assailants. He shouted to the desperate
men: — "There is but one door open; this one." — And
shielding them with his body, and facing an entire battalion
alone, he made them pass in behind him. All precipitated
themselves thither. Enjolras, executing with his rifle, which
he now used like a cane, what single-stick players call a
"covered
rose" round his head, levelled the bayonets around and
in front of him, and was the last to enter; and then ensued a
horrible moment, when the soldiers tried to make their way
in, and the insurgents strove to bar them out. The door was
slammed with such violence, that, as it fell back into its frame,
it showed the five fingers of a soldier who had been clinging
to it, cut off and glued to the post.
Marius remained outside. A shot had just broken his
collar
bone, he felt that he was fainting and falling. At that
moment, with eyes already shut, he felt the shock of a vigorous
hand seizing him, and the swoon in which his senses
vanished, hardly allowed him time for the thought, mingled
with a last memory of Cosette: — "I am taken prisoner. I
shall be shot."
Enjolras, not seeing Marius among those who had taken
refuge in the wine-shop, had the same idea. But they had
reached a moment when each man has not the time to meditate
on his own death. Enjolras fixed the bar across the door,
and bolted it, and double-locked it with key and chain, while
those outside were battering furiously at it, the soldiers with
the butts of their muskets, the sappers with their axes. The
assailants were grouped about that door. The siege of the
wine-shop was now beginning.
The soldiers, we will observe, were full of wrath.
The death of the artillery-sergeant had enraged them, and
then, a still more melancholy circumstance. during the few
hours which had preceded the attack, it had been reported
among them that the insurgents were mutilating their prisoners,
and that there was the headless body of a soldier in
the wine-shop. This sort of fatal rumor is the usual
accompaniment
of civil wars, and it was a false report of this kind
which, later on, produced the catastrophe of the Rue Transnonain.
When the door was barricaded, Enjolras said to the others:
"Let us sell our lives dearly."
Then he approached the table on which lay Mabeuf and
Gavroche. Beneath the black cloth two straight and rigid
forms were visible, one large, the other small, and the two
faces were vaguely outlined beneath the cold folds of the
shroud. A hand projected from beneath the winding sheet
and hung near the floor. It was that of the old man.
Enjolras bent down and kissed that venerable hand, just as
he had kissed his brow on the preceding evening.
These were the only two kisses which he had bestowed in
the course of his life.
Let us abridge the tale. The barricade had fought like a
gate of Thebes; the wine-shop fought like a house of Saragossa.
These resistances are dogged. No quarter. No flag
of truce possible. Men are willing to die, provided their
opponent will kill them.
When Suchet says: — "Capitulate," — Palafox replies:
"After
the war with cannon, the war with knives." Nothing
was lacking in the capture by assault of the Hucheloup wine-shop;
neither paving-stones raining from the windows and
the roof on the besiegers and exasperating the soldiers by
crushing them horribly, nor shots fired from the attic-windows
and the cellar, nor the fury of attack, nor, finally, when
the door yielded, the frenzied madness of extermination.
The assailants, rushing into the wine-shop, their feet entangled
in the panels of the door which had been beaten in
and flung on the ground, found not a single combatant there.
The spiral staircase, hewn asunder with the axe, lay in the
middle of the tap-room, a few wounded men were just breathing
their last, every one who was not killed was on the first
floor, and from there, through the hole in the ceiling, which
had formed the entrance of the stairs, a terrific fire burst
forth. It was the last of their cartridges. When they were
exhausted, when these formidable men on the point of death
had no longer either powder or ball, each grasped in his hands
two of the bottles which Enjolras had reserved, and of which
we have spoken, and held the scaling party in check with these
frightfully fragile clubs. They were bottles of aqua-fortis.
We relate these gloomy incidents of carnage as they
occurred. The besieged man, alas! converts everything into a
weapon. Greek fire did not disgrace Archimedes, boiling
pitch did not disgrace Bayard. All war is a thing of terror,
and there is no choice in it. The musketry of the besiegers,
though confined and embarrassed by being directed from below
upwards, was deadly. The rim of the hole in the ceiling was
speedily surrounded by heads of the slain, whence dripped
long, red and smoking streams, the uproar was indescribable;
a close and burning smoke almost produced night over
this combat. Words are lacking to express horror when it
has reached this pitch. There were no longer men in this
conflict, which was now infernal. They were no longer giants
matched with colossi. It resembled Milton and Dante rather
than Homer. Demons attacked, spectres resisted.
It was heroism become monstrous.