3.V.1.2. WHAT IS TO BE DONE IN THE ABYSS IF ONE DOES NOT CONVERSE
SIXTEEN years count in the subterranean education of
insurrection,
and June, 1848, knew a great deal more about it
than June, 1832. So the barricade of the Rue de la Chanvrerie
was only an outline, and an embryo compared to the two
colossal barricades which we have just sketched; but it was
formidable for that epoch.
The insurgents under the eye of Enjolras, for Marius no
longer looked after anything, had made good use of the night.
The barricade had been not only repaired, but augmented.
They had raised it two feet. Bars of iron planted in the
pavement resembled lances in rest. All sorts of rubbish
brought and added from all directions complicated the external
confusion. The redoubt had been cleverly made over,
into a wall on the inside and a thicket on the outside.
The staircase of paving-stones which permitted one to
mount it like the wall of a citadel had been reconstructed.
The barricade had been put in order, the tap-room
disencumbered,
the kitchen appropriated for the ambulance, the
dressing of the wounded completed, the powder scattered on
the ground and on the tables had been gathered up, bullets
run, cartridges manufactured, lint scraped, the fallen
weapons re-distributed, the interior of the redoubt cleaned,
the rubbish swept up, corpses removed.
They laid the dead in a heap in the Mondetour lane, of
which they were still the masters. The pavement was red for
a long time at that spot. Among the dead there were four
National Guardsmen of the suburbs. Enjolras had their uniforms
laid aside.
Enjolras had advised two hours of sleep. Advice from
Enjolras was a command. Still, only three or four took advantage
of it.
Feuilly employed these two hours in engraving this
inscription on the wall which faced the tavern: —
LONG LIVE THE PEOPLES!
These four words, hollowed out in the rough stone with a
nail, could be still read on the wall in 1848.
The three women had profited by the respite of the night
to vanish definitely; which allowed the insurgents to breathe
more freely.
They had found means of taking refuge in some neighboring
house.
The greater part of the wounded were able, and wished,
to fight still. On a litter of mattresses and trusses of straw
in the kitchen, which had been converted into an ambulance,
there were five men gravely wounded, two of whom were
municipal guardsmen. The municipal guardsmen were attended
to first.
In the tap-room there remained only Mabeuf under his
black cloth and Javert bound to his post.
"This is the hall of the dead," said Enjolras.
In the interior of this hall, barely lighted by a candle
at
one end, the mortuary table being behind the post like a
horizontal bar, a sort of vast, vague cross resulted from Javert
erect and Mabeuf lying prone.
The pole of the omnibus, although snapped off by the
fusillade,
was still sufficiently upright to admit of their fastening
the flag to it.
Enjolras, who possessed that quality of a leader, of
always
doing what he said, attached to this staff the bullet-ridden and
bloody coat of the old man's.
No repast had been possible. There was neither bread nor
meat. The fifty men in the barricade had speedily exhausted
the scanty provisions of the wine-shop during the sixteen
hours which they had passed there. At a given moment, every
barricade inevitably becomes the raft of la Meduse.
They
were obliged to resign themselves to hunger. They had then
reached the first hours of that Spartan day of the 6th of June
when, in the barricade Saint-Merry, Jeanne, surrounded by
the insurgents who demanded bread, replied to all combatants
crying: "Something to eat!" with: "Why? It is three o'clock;
at four we shall be dead."
As they could no longer eat, Enjolras forbade them to
drink. He interdicted wine, and portioned out the brandy.
They had found in the cellar fifteen full bottles
hermetically
sealed. Enjolras and Combeferre examined them.
Combeferre when he came up again said: — "It's the old stock
of Father Hucheloup, who began business as a grocer." — "It
must be real wine," observed Bossuet. "It's lucky that Grantaire
is asleep. If he were on foot, there would be a good deal
of difficulty in saving those bottles." — Enjolras, in spite of
all
murmurs, placed his veto on the fifteen bottles, and, in order
that no one might touch them, he had them placed under the
table on which Father Mabeuf was lying.
About two o'clock in the morning, they reckoned up their
strength. There were still thirty-seven of them.
The day began to dawn. The torch, which had been replaced
in its cavity in the pavement, had just been extinguished.
The interior of the barricade, that species of tiny
courtyard appropriated from the street, was bathed in shadows,
and resembled, athwart the vague, twilight horror, the
deck of a disabled ship. The combatants, as they went and
came, moved about there like black forms. Above that terrible
nesting-place of gloom the stories of the mute houses
were lividly outlined; at the very top, the chimneys stood
palely out. The sky was of that charming, undecided hue,
which may be white and may be blue. Birds flew about in it
with cries of joy. The lofty house which formed the back
of the barricade, being turned to the East, had upon its roof
a rosy reflection. The morning breeze ruffled the gray hair
on the head of the dead man at the third-story window.
"I am delighted that the torch has been extinguished,"
said
Courfeyrac to Feuilly. "That torch flickering in the wind
annoyed me. It had the appearance of being afraid. The
light of torches resembles the wisdom of cowards; it gives a
bad light because it trembles."
Dawn awakens minds as it does the birds; all began to
talk.
Joly, perceiving a cat prowling on a gutter, extracted
philosophy
from it.
"What is the cat?" he exclaimed. "It is a corrective.
The
good God, having made the mouse, said: 'Hullo! I have committed
a blunder.' And so he made the cat. The cat is the
erratum of the mouse. The mouse, plus the cat, is the proof
of creation revised and corrected."
Combeferre, surrounded by students and artisans, was
speaking of the dead, of Jean Prouvaire, of Bahorel, of
Mabeuf, and even of Cabuc, and of Enjolras' sad severity.
He said: —
"Harmodius and Aristogiton, Brutus, Chereas, Stephanus,
Cromwell, Charlotte Corday, Sand, have all had their moment
of agony when it was too late. Our hearts quiver so, and
human life is such a mystery that, even in the case of a
civic murder, even in a murder for liberation, if there be
such a thing, the remorse for having struck a man surpasses
the joy of having served the human race."
And, such are the windings of the exchange of speech,
that,
a moment later, by a transition brought about through Jean
Prouvaire's verses, Combeferre was comparing the translators
of the Georgics, Raux with Cournand, Cournand with Delille,
pointing out the passages translated by Malfilatre, particularly
the prodigies of Caesar's death; and at that word, Caesar,
the conversation reverted to Brutus.
"Caesar," said Combeferre, "fell justly. Cicero was
severe
towards Caesar, and he was right. That severity is not diatribe.
When Zoilus insults Homer, when Maevius insults
Virgil, when Vise insults Moliere, when Pope insults Shakspeare,
when Frederic insults Voltaire, it is an old law of envy
and hatred which is being carried out; genius attracts insult,
great men are always more or less barked at. But Zoilus and
Cicero are two different persons. Cicero is an arbiter in
thought, just as Brutus is an arbiter by the sword. For my
own part, I blame that last justice, the blade; but, antiquity
admitted it. Caesar, the violator of the Rubicon, conferring,
as though they came from him, the dignities which emanated
from the people, not rising at the entrance of the senate,
committed
the acts of a king and almost of a tyrant, regia ac pene
tyrannica. He was a great man; so much the worse, or so
much the better; the lesson is but the more exalted. His
twenty-three wounds touch me less than the spitting in the
face of Jesus Christ. Caesar is stabbed by the senators; Christ
is cuffed by lackeys. One feels the God through the greater
outrage."
Bossuet, who towered above the interlocutors from the
summit
of a heap of paving-stones, exclaimed, rifle in hand: —
"Oh Cydathenaeum, Oh Myrrhinus, Oh Probalinthus, Oh
graces of the AEantides! Oh! Who will grant me to pronounce
the verses of Homer like a Greek of Laurium or of
Edapteon?"