BOOK FIFTH.--THE END OF WHICH DOES NOT RESEMBLE THE BEGINNING

CHAPTER I

　　SOLITUDE AND THE BARRACKS COMBINED

　　Cosette's grief, which had been so poignant and lively four or five months previously, had, without her being conscious of the fact, entered upon its convalescence.

　　Nature, spring, youth, love for her father, the gayety of the birds and flowers, caused something almost resembling forgetfulness to filter gradually, drop by drop, into that soul, which was so virgin and so young.

　　Was the fire wholly extinct there?

　　Or was it merely that layers of ashes had formed? The truth is, that she hardly felt the painful and burning spot any longer.

　　One day she suddenly thought of Marius:

　　"Why!" said she, "I no longer think of him."

　　That same week, she noticed a very handsome officer of lancers, with a wasp-like waist, a delicious uniform, the cheeks of a young girl, a sword under his arm, waxed mustaches, and a glazed schapka, passing the gate.

　　Moreover, he had light hair, prominent blue eyes, a round face, was vain, insolent and good-looking; quite the reverse of Marius.

　　He had a cigar in his mouth.

　　Cosette thought that this officer doubtless belonged to the regiment in barracks in the Rue de Babylone.

　　On the following day, she saw him pass again.

　　She took note of the hour.

　　From that time forth, was it chance? she saw him pass nearly every day.

　　The officer's comrades perceived that there was, in that "badly kept" garden, behind that malicious rococo fence, a very pretty creature, who was almost always there when the handsome lieutenant,--who is not unknown to the reader, and whose name was Theodule Gillenormand,-- passed by.

　　"See here!" they said to him, "there's a little creature there who is making eyes at you, look."

　　"Have I the time," replied the lancer, "to look at all the girls who look at me?"

　　This was at the precise moment when Marius was descending heavily towards agony, and was saying:

　　"If I could but see her before I die!"-- Had his wish been realized, had he beheld Cosette at that moment gazing at the lancer, he would not have been able to utter a word, and he would have expired with grief.

　　Whose fault was it?

　　No one's.

　　Marius possessed one of those temperaments which bury themselves in sorrow and there abide; Cosette was one of those persons who plunge into sorrow and emerge from it again.

　　Cosette was, moreover, passing through that dangerous period, the fatal phase of feminine revery abandoned to itself, in which the isolated heart of a young girl resembles the tendrils of the vine which cling, as chance directs, to the capital of a marble column or to the post of a wine-shop: A rapid and decisive moment, critical for every orphan, be she rich or poor, for wealth does not prevent a bad choice; misalliances are made in very high circles, real misalliance is that of souls; and as many an unknown young man, without name, without birth, without fortune, is a marble column which bears up a temple of grand sentiments and grand ideas, so such and such a man of the world satisfied and opulent, who has polished boots and varnished words, if looked at not outside, but inside, a thing which is reserved for his wife, is nothing more than a block obscurely haunted by violent, unclean, and vinous passions; the post of a drinking-shop.

　　What did Cosette's soul contain?

　　Passion calmed or lulled to sleep; something limpid, brilliant, troubled to a certain depth, and gloomy lower down.

　　The image of the handsome officer was reflected in the surface.

　　Did a souvenir linger in the depths?-- Quite at the bottom?--Possibly.

　　Cosette did not know.

　　A singular incident supervened.

BOOK FIFTH.--THE END OF WHICH DOES NOT RESEMBLE THE BEGINNING

CHAPTER II

　　COSETTE'S APPREHENSIONS

　　 During the first fortnight in April, Jean Valjean took a journey. This, as the reader knows, happened from time to time, at very long intervals.

　　He remained absent a day or two days at the utmost. Where did he go?

　　No one knew, not even Cosette.

　　Once only, on the occasion of one of these departures, she had accompanied him in a hackney-coach as far as a little blind-alley at the corner of which she read:

　　Impasse de la Planchette.

　　There he alighted, and the coach took Cosette back to the Rue de Babylone.

　　It was usually when money was lacking in the house that Jean Valjean took these little trips.

　　So Jean Valjean was absent.

　　He had said:

　　"I shall return in three days."

　　That evening, Cosette was alone in the drawing-room. In order to get rid of her ennui, she had opened her piano-organ, and had begun to sing, accompanying herself the while, the chorus from Euryanthe: "Hunters astray in the wood!" which is probably the most beautiful thing in all the sphere of music.

　　When she had finished, she remained wrapped in thought.

　　All at once, it seemed to her that she heard the sound of footsteps in the garden.

　　It could not be her father, he was absent; it could not be Toussaint, she was in bed, and it was ten o'clock at night.

　　She stepped to the shutter of the drawing-room, which was closed, and laid her ear against it.

　　It seemed to her that it was the tread of a man, and that he was walking very softly.

　　She mounted rapidly to the first floor, to her own chamber, opened a small wicket in her shutter, and peeped into the garden. The moon was at the full.

　　Everything could be seen as plainly as by day.

　　There was no one there.

　　She opened the window.

　　The garden was absolutely calm, and all that was visible was that the street was deserted as usual.

　　Cosette thought that she had been mistaken.

　　She thought that she had heard a noise.

　　It was a hallucination produced by the melancholy and magnificent chorus of Weber, which lays open before the mind terrified depths, which trembles before the gaze like a dizzy forest, and in which one hears the crackling of dead branches beneath the uneasy tread of the huntsmen of whom one catches a glimpse through the twilight.

　　She thought no more about it.

　　Moreover, Cosette was not very timid by nature.

　　There flowed in her veins some of the blood of the bohemian and the adventuress who runs barefoot.

　　It will be remembered that she was more of a lark than a dove.

　　There was a foundation of wildness and bravery in her.

　　On the following day, at an earlier hour, towards nightfall, she was strolling in the garden.

　　In the midst of the confused thoughts which occupied her, she fancied that she caught for an instant a sound similar to that of the preceding evening, as though some one were walking beneath the trees in the dusk, and not very far from her; but she told herself that nothing so closely resembles a step on the grass as the friction of two branches which have moved from side to side, and she paid no heed to it.

　　Besides, she could see nothing.

　　She emerged from "the thicket"; she had still to cross a small lawn to regain the steps.

　　The moon, which had just risen behind her, cast Cosette's shadow in front of her upon this lawn, as she came out from the shrubbery.

　　Cosette halted in alarm.

　　Beside her shadow, the moon outlined distinctly upon the turf another shadow, which was particularly startling and terrible, a shadow which had a round hat.

　　It was the shadow of a man, who must have been standing on the border of the clump of shrubbery, a few paces in the rear of Cosette.

　　She stood for a moment without the power to speak, or cry, or call, or stir, or turn her head.

　　Then she summoned up all her courage, and turned round resolutely.

　　There was no one there.

　　She glanced on the ground.

　　The figure had disappeared.

　　She re-entered the thicket, searched the corners boldly, went as far as the gate, and found nothing.

　　She felt herself absolutely chilled with terror.

　　Was this another hallucination?

　　What!

　　Two days in succession! One hallucination might pass, but two hallucinations? The disquieting point about it was, that the shadow had assuredly not been a phantom.

　　Phantoms do not wear round hats.

　　On the following day Jean Valjean returned.

　　Cosette told him what she thought she had heard and seen.

　　She wanted to be reassured and to see her father shrug his shoulders and say to her: "You are a little goose."

　　Jean Valjean grew anxious.

　　"It cannot be anything," said he.

　　He left her under some pretext, and went into the garden, and she saw him examining the gate with great attention.

　　During the night she woke up; this time she was sure, and she distinctly heard some one walking close to the flight of steps beneath her window. She ran to her little wicket and opened it.

　　In point of fact, there was a man in the garden, with a large club in his hand. Just as she was about to scream, the moon lighted up the man's profile. It was her father.

　　She returned to her bed, saying to herself: "He is very uneasy!"

　　Jean Valjean passed that night and the two succeeding nights in the garden.

　　Cosette saw him through the hole in her shutter.

　　On the third night, the moon was on the wane, and had begun to rise later; at one o'clock in the morning, possibly, she heard a loud burst of laughter and her father's voice calling her:--

　　"Cosette!"

　　She jumped out of bed, threw on her dressing-gown, and opened her window.

　　Her father was standing on the grass-plot below.

　　"I have waked you for the purpose of reassuring you," said he; "look, there is your shadow with the round hat."

　　And he pointed out to her on the turf a shadow cast by the moon, and which did indeed, bear considerable resemblance to the spectre of a man wearing a round hat.

　　It was the shadow produced by a chimney-pipe of sheet iron, with a hood, which rose above a neighboring roof.

　　Cosette joined in his laughter, all her lugubrious suppositions were allayed, and the next morning, as she was at breakfast with her father, she made merry over the sinister garden haunted by the shadows of iron chimney-pots.

　　Jean Valjean became quite tranquil once more; as for Cosette, she did not pay much attention to the question whether the chimney-pot was really in the direction of the shadow which she had seen, or thought she had seen, and whether the moon had been in the same spot in the sky.

　　She did not question herself as to the peculiarity of a chimney-pot which is afraid of being caught in the act, and which retires when some one looks at its shadow, for the shadow had taken the alarm when Cosette had turned round, and Cosette had thought herself very sure of this.

　　Cosette's serenity was fully restored. The proof appeared to her to be complete, and it quite vanished from her mind, whether there could possibly be any one walking in the garden during the evening or at night.

　　A few days later, however, a fresh incident occurred.

BOOK FIFTH.--THE END OF WHICH DOES NOT RESEMBLE THE BEGINNING

CHAPTER III

　　ENRICHED WITH COMMENTARIES BY TOUSSAINT

　　 In the garden, near the railing on the street, there was a stone bench, screened from the eyes of the curious by a plantation of yoke-elms, but which could, in case of necessity, be reached by an arm from the outside, past the trees and the gate.

　　One evening during that same month of April, Jean Valjean had gone out; Cosette had seated herself on this bench after sundown. The breeze was blowing briskly in the trees, Cosette was meditating; an objectless sadness was taking possession of her little by little, that invincible sadness evoked by the evening, and which arises, perhaps, who knows, from the mystery of the tomb which is ajar at that hour.

　　Perhaps Fantine was within that shadow.

　　Cosette rose, slowly made the tour of the garden, walking on the grass drenched in dew, and saying to herself, through the species of melancholy somnambulism in which she was plunged: "Really, one needs wooden shoes for the garden at this hour. One takes cold."

　　She returned to the bench.

　　As she was about to resume her seat there, she observed on the spot which she had quitted, a tolerably large stone which had, evidently, not been there a moment before.

　　Cosette gazed at the stone, asking herself what it meant.

　　All at once the idea occurred to her that the stone had not reached the bench all by itself, that some one had placed it there, that an arm had been thrust through the railing, and this idea appeared to alarm her. This time, the fear was genuine; the stone was there.

　　No doubt was possible; she did not touch it, fled without glancing behind her, took refuge in the house, and immediately closed with shutter, bolt, and bar the door-like window opening on the flight of steps. She inquired of Toussaint:--

　　"Has my father returned yet?"

　　"Not yet, Mademoiselle."

　　[We have already noted once for all the fact that Toussaint stuttered. May we be permitted to dispense with it for the future.

　　The musical notation of an infirmity is repugnant to us.]

　　Jean Valjean, a thoughtful man, and given to nocturnal strolls, often returned quite late at night.

　　"Toussaint," went on Cosette, "are you careful to thoroughly barricade the shutters opening on the garden, at least with bars, in the evening, and to put the little iron things in the little rings that close them?"

　　"Oh! be easy on that score, Miss."

　　Toussaint did not fail in her duty, and Cosette was well aware of the fact, but she could not refrain from adding:--

　　"It is so solitary here."

　　"So far as that is concerned," said Toussaint, "it is true. We might be assassinated before we had time to say ouf! And Monsieur does not sleep in the house, to boot. But fear nothing, Miss, I fasten the shutters up like prisons. Lone women!

　　That is enough to make one shudder, I believe you! Just imagine, what if you were to see men enter your chamber at night and say:

　　`Hold your tongue!' and begin to cut your throat. It's not the dying so much; you die, for one must die, and that's all right; it's the abomination of feeling those people touch you. And then, their knives; they can't be able to cut well with them! Ah, good gracious!"

　　"Be quiet," said Cosette.

　　"Fasten everything thoroughly."

　　Cosette, terrified by the melodrama improvised by Toussaint, and possibly, also, by the recollection of the apparitions of the past week, which recurred to her memory, dared not even say to her: "Go and look at the stone which has been placed on the bench!" for fear of opening the garden gate and allowing "the men" to enter. She saw that all the doors and windows were carefully fastened, made Toussaint go all over the house from garret to cellar, locked herself up in her own chamber, bolted her door, looked under her couch, went to bed and slept badly.

　　All night long she saw that big stone, as large as a mountain and full of caverns.

　　At sunrise,--the property of the rising sun is to make us laugh at all our terrors of the past night, and our laughter is in direct proportion to our terror which they have caused,--at sunrise Cosette, when she woke, viewed her fright as a nightmare, and said to herself: "What have I been thinking of?

　　It is like the footsteps that I thought I heard a week or two ago in the garden at night! It is like the shadow of the chimney-pot! Am I becoming a coward?" The sun, which was glowing through the crevices in her shutters, and turning the damask curtains crimson, reassured her to such an extent that everything vanished from her thoughts, even the stone.

　　"There was no more a stone on the bench than there was a man in a round hat in the garden; I dreamed about the stone, as I did all the rest."

　　She dressed herself, descended to the garden, ran to the bench, and broke out in a cold perspiration.

　　The stone was there.

　　But this lasted only for a moment.

　　That which is terror by night is curiosity by day.

　　"Bah!" said she, "come, let us see what it is."

　　She lifted the stone, which was tolerably large.

　　Beneath it was something which resembled a letter.

　　It was a white envelope. Cosette seized it.

　　There was no address on one side, no seal on the other.

　　Yet the envelope, though unsealed, was not empty. Papers could be seen inside.

　　Cosette examined it.

　　It was no longer alarm, it was no longer curiosity; it was a beginning of anxiety.

　　Cosette drew from the envelope its contents, a little notebook of paper, each page of which was numbered and bore a few lines in a very fine and rather pretty handwriting, as Cosette thought.

　　Cosette looked for a name; there was none.

　　To whom was this addressed? To her, probably, since a hand had deposited the packet on her bench. From whom did it come?

　　An irresistible fascination took possession of her; she tried to turn away her eyes from the leaflets which were trembling in her hand, she gazed at the sky, the street, the acacias all bathed in light, the pigeons fluttering over a neighboring roof, and then her glance suddenly fell upon the manuscript, and she said to herself that she must know what it contained.

　　This is what she read.

BOOK FIFTH.--THE END OF WHICH DOES NOT RESEMBLE THE BEGINNING

CHAPTER IV

　　A HEART BENEATH A STONE

　　 The reduction of the universe to a single being, the expansion of a single being even to God, that is love.

　　 Love is the salutation of the angels to the stars.

　　 How sad is the soul, when it is sad through love!

　　 What a void in the absence of the being who, by herself alone fills the world!

　　Oh! how true it is that the beloved being becomes God. One could comprehend that God might be jealous of this had not God the Father of all evidently made creation for the soul, and the soul for love.

　　 The glimpse of a smile beneath a white crape bonnet with a lilac curtain is sufficient to cause the soul to enter into the palace of dreams.

　　 God is behind everything, but everything hides God.

　　Things are black, creatures are opaque.

　　To love a being is to render that being transparent.

　　 Certain thoughts are prayers.

　　There are moments when, whatever the attitude of the body may be, the soul is on its knees.

　　 Parted lovers beguile absence by a thousand chimerical devices, which possess, however, a reality of their own.

　　They are prevented from seeing each other, they cannot write to each other; they discover a multitude of mysterious means to correspond. They send each other the song of the birds, the perfume of the flowers, the smiles of children, the light of the sun, the sighings of the breeze, the rays of stars, all creation.

　　And why not? All the works of God are made to serve love.

　　Love is sufficiently potent to charge all nature with its messages.

　　Oh Spring!

　　Thou art a letter that I write to her.

　　 The future belongs to hearts even more than it does to minds. Love, that is the only thing that can occupy and fill eternity. In the infinite, the inexhaustible is requisite.

　　 Love participates of the soul itself.

　　It is of the same nature. Like it, it is the divine spark; like it, it is incorruptible, indivisible, imperishable.

　　It is a point of fire that exists within us, which is immortal and infinite, which nothing can confine, and which nothing can extinguish.

　　We feel it burning even to the very marrow of our bones, and we see it beaming in the very depths of heaven.

　　 Oh Love!

　　Adorations! voluptuousness of two minds which understand each other, of two hearts which exchange with each other, of two glances which penetrate each other!

　　You will come to me, will you not, bliss! strolls by twos in the solitudes!

　　Blessed and radiant days!

　　I have sometimes dreamed that from time to time hours detached themselves from the lives of the angels and came here below to traverse the destinies of men.

　　 God can add nothing to the happiness of those who love, except to give them endless duration.

　　After a life of love, an eternity of love is, in fact, an augmentation; but to increase in intensity even the ineffable felicity which love bestows on the soul even in this world, is impossible, even to God.

　　God is the plenitude of heaven; love is the plenitude of man.

　　 You look at a star for two reasons, because it is luminous, and because it is impenetrable.

　　You have beside you a sweeter radiance and a greater mystery, woman.

　　 All of us, whoever we may be, have our respirable beings.

　　We lack air and we stifle.

　　Then we die.

　　To die for lack of love is horrible. Suffocation of the soul.

　　 When love has fused and mingled two beings in a sacred and angelic unity, the secret of life has been discovered so far as they are concerned; they are no longer anything more than the two boundaries of the same destiny; they are no longer anything but the two wings of the same spirit.

　　Love, soar.

　　 On the day when a woman as she passes before you emits light as she walks, you are lost, you love.

　　But one thing remains for you to do: to think of her so intently that she is constrained to think of you.

　　 What love commences can be finished by God alone.

　　 True love is in despair and is enchanted over a glove lost or a handkerchief found, and eternity is required for its devotion and its hopes.

　　It is composed both of the infinitely great and the infinitely little.

　　 If you are a stone, be adamant; if you are a plant, be the sensitive plant; if you are a man, be love.

　　 Nothing suffices for love.

　　We have happiness, we desire paradise; we possess paradise, we desire heaven.

　　Oh ye who love each other, all this is contained in love. Understand how to find it there.

　　Love has contemplation as well as heaven, and more than heaven, it has voluptuousness.

　　 "Does she still come to the Luxembourg?"

　　"No, sir."

　　"This is the church where she attends mass, is it not?"

　　"She no longer comes here." "Does she still live in this house?"

　　"She has moved away." "Where has she gone to dwell?"

　　"She did not say."

　　What a melancholy thing not to know the address of one's soul!

　　Love has its childishness, other passions have their pettinesses. Shame on the passions which belittle man!

　　Honor to the one which makes a child of him!

　　 There is one strange thing, do you know it?

　　I dwell in the night. There is a being who carried off my sky when she went away.

　　 Oh! would that we were lying side by side in the same grave, hand in hand, and from time to time, in the darkness, gently caressing a finger,--that would suffice for my eternity!

　　 Ye who suffer because ye love, love yet more.

　　To die of love, is to live in it.

　　 Love.

　　A sombre and starry transfiguration is mingled with this torture. There is ecstasy in agony.

　　 Oh joy of the birds!

　　It is because they have nests that they sing.

　　 Love is a celestial respiration of the air of paradise.

　　 Deep hearts, sage minds, take life as God has made it; it is a long trial, an incomprehensible preparation for an unknown destiny. This destiny, the true one, begins for a man with the first step inside the tomb.

　　Then something appears to him, and he begins to distinguish the definitive.

　　The definitive, meditate upon that word. The living perceive the infinite; the definitive permits itself to be seen only by the dead.

　　In the meanwhile, love and suffer, hope and contemplate.

　　Woe, alas! to him who shall have loved only bodies, forms, appearances!

　　Death will deprive him of all. Try to love souls, you will find them again.

　　 I encountered in the street, a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat was worn, his elbows were in holes; water trickled through his shoes, and the stars through his soul.

　　 What a grand thing it is to be loved!

　　What a far grander thing it is to love!

　　The heart becomes heroic, by dint of passion. It is no longer composed of anything but what is pure; it no longer rests on anything that is not elevated and great.

　　An unworthy thought can no more germinate in it, than a nettle on a glacier. The serene and lofty soul, inaccessible to vulgar passions and emotions, dominating the clouds and the shades of this world, its follies, its lies, its hatreds, its vanities, its miseries, inhabits the blue of heaven, and no longer feels anything but profound and subterranean shocks of destiny, as the crests of mountains feel the shocks of earthquake.

　　 If there did not exist some one who loved, the sun would become extinct.

BOOK FIFTH.--THE END OF WHICH DOES NOT RESEMBLE THE BEGINNING

CHAPTER V

　　COSETTE AFTER THE LETTER

　　 As Cosette read, she gradually fell into thought.

　　At the very moment when she raised her eyes from the last line of the note-book, the handsome officer passed triumphantly in front of the gate,-- it was his hour; Cosette thought him hideous.

　　She resumed her contemplation of the book.

　　It was written in the most charming of chirography, thought Cosette; in the same hand, but with divers inks, sometimes very black, again whitish, as when ink has been added to the inkstand, and consequently on different days.

　　It was, then, a mind which had unfolded itself there, sigh by sigh, irregularly, without order, without choice, without object, hap-hazard. Cosette had never read anything like it. This manuscript, in which she already perceived more light than obscurity, produced upon her the effect of a half-open sanctuary. Each one of these mysterious lines shone before her eyes and inundated her heart with a strange radiance.

　　The education which she had received had always talked to her of the soul, and never of love, very much as one might talk of the firebrand and not of the flame. This manuscript of fifteen pages suddenly and sweetly revealed to her all of love, sorrow, destiny, life, eternity, the beginning, the end.

　　It was as if a hand had opened and suddenly flung upon her a handful of rays of light.

　　In these few lines she felt a passionate, ardent, generous, honest nature, a sacred will, an immense sorrow, and an immense despair, a suffering heart, an ecstasy fully expanded.

　　What was this manuscript?

　　A letter. A letter without name, without address, without date, without signature, pressing and disinterested, an enigma composed of truths, a message of love made to be brought by an angel and read by a virgin, an appointment made beyond the bounds of earth, the love-letter of a phantom to a shade.

　　It was an absent one, tranquil and dejected, who seemed ready to take refuge in death and who sent to the absent love, his lady, the secret of fate, the key of life, love.

　　This had been written with one foot in the grave and one finger in heaven. These lines, which had fallen one by one on the paper, were what might be called drops of soul.

　　Now, from whom could these pages come?

　　Who could have penned them?

　　Cosette did not hesitate a moment.

　　One man only.

　　He!

　　Day had dawned once more in her spirit; all had reappeared. She felt an unheard-of joy, and a profound anguish.

　　It was he! he who had written! he was there! it was he whose arm had been thrust through that railing!

　　While she was forgetful of him, he had found her again!

　　But had she forgotten him?

　　No, never!

　　She was foolish to have thought so for a single moment.

　　She had always loved him, always adored him.

　　The fire had been smothered, and had smouldered for a time, but she saw all plainly now; it had but made headway, and now it had burst forth afresh, and had inflamed her whole being. This note-book was like a spark which had fallen from that other soul into hers.

　　She felt the conflagration starting up once more.

　　She imbued herself thoroughly with every word of the manuscript: "Oh yes!" said she, "how perfectly I recognize all that!

　　That is what I had already read in his eyes."

　　As she was finishing it for the third time, Lieutenant Theodule passed the gate once more, and rattled his spurs upon the pavement.

　　Cosette was forced to raise her eyes.

　　She thought him insipid, silly, stupid, useless, foppish, displeasing, impertinent, and extremely ugly. The officer thought it his duty to smile at her.

　　She turned away as in shame and indignation.

　　She would gladly have thrown something at his head.

　　She fled, re-entered the house, and shut herself up in her chamber to peruse the manuscript once more, to learn it by heart, and to dream.

　　When she had thoroughly mastered it she kissed it and put it in her bosom.

　　All was over, Cosette had fallen back into deep, seraphic love. The abyss of Eden had yawned once more.

　　All day long, Cosette remained in a sort of bewilderment. She scarcely thought, her ideas were in the state of a tangled skein in her brain, she could not manage to conjecture anything, she hoped through a tremor, what? vague things.

　　She dared make herself no promises, and she did not wish to refuse herself anything. Flashes of pallor passed over her countenance, and shivers ran through her frame.

　　It seemed to her, at intervals, that she was entering the land of chimaeras; she said to herself:

　　"Is this reality?" Then she felt of the dear paper within her bosom under her gown, she pressed it to her heart, she felt its angles against her flesh; and if Jean Valjean had seen her at the moment, he would have shuddered in the presence of that luminous and unknown joy, which overflowed from beneath her eyelids.--"Oh yes!" she thought, "it is certainly he! This comes from him, and is for me!"

　　And she told herself that an intervention of the angels, a celestial chance, had given him back to her.

　　Oh transfiguration of love!

　　Oh dreams!

　　That celestial chance, that intervention of the angels, was a pellet of bread tossed by one thief to another thief, from the Charlemagne Courtyard to the Lion's Ditch, over the roofs of La Force.

BOOK FIFTH.--THE END OF WHICH DOES NOT RESEMBLE THE BEGINNING

CHAPTER VI

　　OLD PEOPLE ARE MADE TO GO OUT OPPORTUNELY

　　 When evening came, Jean Valjean went out; Cosette dressed herself. She arranged her hair in the most becoming manner, and she put on a dress whose bodice had received one snip of the scissors too much, and which, through this slope, permitted a view of the beginning of her throat, and was, as young girls say, "a trifle indecent." It was not in the least indecent, but it was prettier than usual. She made her toilet thus without knowing why she did so.

　　Did she mean to go out?

　　No.

　　Was she expecting a visitor?

　　No.

　　At dusk, she went down to the garden.

　　Toussaint was busy in her kitchen, which opened on the back yard.

　　She began to stroll about under the trees, thrusting aside the branches from time to time with her hand, because there were some which hung very low.

　　In this manner she reached the bench.

　　The stone was still there.

　　She sat down, and gently laid her white hand on this stone as though she wished to caress and thank it.

　　All at once, she experienced that indefinable impression which one undergoes when there is some one standing behind one, even when she does not see the person.

　　She turned her head and rose to her feet.

　　It was he.

　　His head was bare.

　　He appeared to have grown thin and pale. His black clothes were hardly discernible.

　　The twilight threw a wan light on his fine brow, and covered his eyes in shadows. Beneath a veil of incomparable sweetness, he had something about him that suggested death and night.

　　His face was illuminated by the light of the dying day, and by the thought of a soul that is taking flight.

　　He seemed to be not yet a ghost, and he was no longer a man.

　　He had flung away his hat in the thicket, a few paces distant.

　　Cosette, though ready to swoon, uttered no cry.

　　She retreated slowly, for she felt herself attracted.

　　He did not stir.

　　By virtue of something ineffable and melancholy which enveloped him, she felt the look in his eyes which she could not see.

　　Cosette, in her retreat, encountered a tree and leaned against it. Had it not been for this tree, she would have fallen.

　　Then she heard his voice, that voice which she had really never heard, barely rising above the rustle of the leaves, and murmuring:--

　　"Pardon me, here I am.

　　My heart is full.

　　I could not live on as I was living, and I have come.

　　Have you read what I placed there on the bench?

　　Do you recognize me at all?

　　Have no fear of me. It is a long time, you remember the day, since you looked at me at the Luxembourg, near the Gladiator.

　　And the day when you passed before me?

　　It was on the 16th of June and the 2d of July.

　　It is nearly a year ago.

　　I have not seen you for a long time.

　　I inquired of the woman who let the chairs, and she told me that she no longer saw you. You lived in the Rue de l'Ouest, on the third floor, in the front apartments of a new house,--you see that I know!

　　I followed you. What else was there for me to do?

　　And then you disappeared. I thought I saw you pass once, while I was reading the newspapers under the arcade of the Odeon.

　　I ran after you.

　　But no.

　　It was a person who had a bonnet like yours.

　　At night I came hither. Do not be afraid, no one sees me.

　　I come to gaze upon your windows near at hand.

　　I walk very softly, so that you may not hear, for you might be alarmed.

　　The other evening I was behind you, you turned round, I fled.

　　Once, I heard you singing.

　　I was happy. Did it affect you because I heard you singing through the shutters? That could not hurt you.

　　No, it is not so?

　　You see, you are my angel!

　　Let me come sometimes; I think that I am going to die. If you only knew!

　　I adore you.

　　Forgive me, I speak to you, but I do not know what I am saying; I may have displeased you; have I displeased you?"

　　"Oh! my mother!" said she.

　　And she sank down as though on the point of death.

　　He grasped her, she fell, he took her in his arms, he pressed her close, without knowing what he was doing.

　　He supported her, though he was tottering himself.

　　It was as though his brain were full of smoke; lightnings darted between his lips; his ideas vanished; it seemed to him that he was accomplishing some religious act, and that he was committing a profanation.

　　Moreover, he had not the least passion for this lovely woman whose force he felt against his breast. He was beside himself with love.

　　She took his hand and laid it on her heart.

　　He felt the paper there, he stammered:--

　　"You love me, then?"

　　She replied in a voice so low that it was no longer anything more than a barely audible breath:--

　　"Hush!

　　Thou knowest it!"

　　And she hid her blushing face on the breast of the superb and intoxicated young man.

　　He fell upon the bench, and she beside him.

　　They had no words more. The stars were beginning to gleam.

　　How did it come to pass that their lips met?

　　How comes it to pass that the birds sing, that snow melts, that the rose unfolds, that May expands, that the dawn grows white behind the black trees on the shivering crest of the hills?

　　A kiss, and that was all.

　　Both started, and gazed into the darkness with sparkling eyes.

　　They felt neither the cool night, nor the cold stone, nor the damp earth, nor the wet grass; they looked at each other, and their hearts were full of thoughts.

　　They had clasped hands unconsciously.

　　She did not ask him, she did not even wonder, how he had entered there, and how he had made his way into the garden.

　　It seemed so simple to her that he should be there!

　　From time to time, Marius' knee touched Cosette's knee, and both shivered.

　　At intervals, Cosette stammered a word.

　　Her soul fluttered on her lips like a drop of dew on a flower.

　　Little by little they began to talk to each other.

　　Effusion followed silence, which is fulness.

　　The night was serene and splendid overhead. These two beings, pure as spirits, told each other everything, their dreams, their intoxications, their ecstasies, their chimaeras, their weaknesses, how they had adored each other from afar, how they had longed for each other, their despair when they had ceased to see each other.

　　They confided to each other in an ideal intimacy, which nothing could augment, their most secret and most mysterious thoughts.

　　They related to each other, with candid faith in their illusions, all that love, youth, and the remains of childhood which still lingered about them, suggested to their minds. Their two hearts poured themselves out into each other in such wise, that at the expiration of a quarter of an hour, it was the young man who had the young girl's soul, and the young girl who had the young man's soul.

　　Each became permeated with the other, they were enchanted with each other, they dazzled each other.

　　When they had finished, when they had told each other everything, she laid her head on his shoulder and asked him:--

　　"What is your name?"

　　"My name is Marius," said he.

　　"And yours?"

　　"My name is Cosette."

BOOK SIXTH.--LITTLE GAVROCHE

CHAPTER I

　　THE MALICIOUS PLAYFULNESS OF THE WIND

　　Since 1823, when the tavern of Montfermeil was on the way to shipwreck and was being gradually engulfed, not in the abyss of a bankruptcy, but in the cesspool of petty debts, the Thenardier pair had had two other children; both males.

　　That made five; two girls and three boys.

　　Madame Thenardier had got rid of the last two, while they were still young and very small, with remarkable luck.

　　Got rid of is the word.

　　There was but a mere fragment of nature in that woman.

　　A phenomenon, by the way, of which there is more than one example extant.

　　Like the Marechale de La Mothe-Houdancourt, the Thenardier was a mother to her daughters only. There her maternity ended.

　　Her hatred of the human race began with her own sons.

　　In the direction of her sons her evil disposition was uncompromising, and her heart had a lugubrious wall in that quarter.

　　As the reader has seen, she detested the eldest; she cursed the other two.

　　Why?

　　Because.

　　The most terrible of motives, the most unanswerable of retorts--Because. "I have no need of a litter of squalling brats," said this mother.

　　Let us explain how the Thenardiers had succeeded in getting rid of their last two children; and even in drawing profit from the operation.

　　The woman Magnon, who was mentioned a few pages further back, was the same one who had succeeded in making old Gillenormand support the two children which she had had.

　　She lived on the Quai des Celestins, at the corner of this ancient street of the Petit-Musc which afforded her the opportunity of changing her evil repute into good odor. The reader will remember the great epidemic of croup which ravaged the river districts of the Seine in Paris thirty-five years ago, and of which science took advantage to make experiments on a grand scale as to the efficacy of inhalations of alum, so beneficially replaced at the present day by the external tincture of iodine. During this epidemic, the Magnon lost both her boys, who were still very young, one in the morning, the other in the evening of the same day. This was a blow.

　　These children were precious to their mother; they represented eighty francs a month.

　　These eighty francs were punctually paid in the name of M. Gillenormand, by collector of his rents, M. Barge, a retired tip-staff, in the Rue du Roi-de-Sicile. The children dead, the income was at an end.

　　The Magnon sought an expedient. In that dark free-masonry of evil of which she formed a part, everything is known, all secrets are kept, and all lend mutual aid. Magnon needed two children; the Thenardiers had two.

　　The same sex, the same age.

　　A good arrangement for the one, a good investment for the other.

　　The little Thenardiers became little Magnons. Magnon quitted the Quai des Celestins and went to live in the Rue Clocheperce.

　　In Paris, the identity which binds an individual to himself is broken between one street and another.

　　The registry office being in no way warned, raised no objections, and the substitution was effected in the most simple manner in the world.

　　Only, the Thenardier exacted for this loan of her children, ten francs a month, which Magnon promised to pay, and which she actually did pay.

　　It is unnecessary to add that M. Gillenormand continued to perform his compact.

　　He came to see the children every six months.

　　He did not perceive the change. "Monsieur," Magnon said to him, "how much they resemble you!"

　　Thenardier, to whom avatars were easy, seized this occasion to become Jondrette.

　　His two daughters and Gavroche had hardly had time to discover that they had two little brothers.

　　When a certain degree of misery is reached, one is overpowered with a sort of spectral indifference, and one regards human beings as though they were spectres.

　　Your nearest relations are often no more for you than vague shadowy forms, barely outlined against a nebulous background of life and easily confounded again with the invisible.

　　On the evening of the day when she had handed over her two little ones to Magnon, with express intention of renouncing them forever, the Thenardier had felt, or had appeared to feel, a scruple.

　　She said to her husband:

　　"But this is abandoning our children!"

　　Thenardier, masterful and phlegmatic, cauterized the scruple with this saying: "Jean Jacques Rousseau did even better!"

　　From scruples, the mother proceeded to uneasiness:

　　"But what if the police were to annoy us? Tell me, Monsieur Thenardier, is what we have done permissible?" Thenardier replied:

　　"Everything is permissible.

　　No one will see anything but true blue in it.

　　Besides, no one has any interest in looking closely after children who have not a sou."

　　Magnon was a sort of fashionable woman in the sphere of crime. She was careful about her toilet.

　　She shared her lodgings, which were furnished in an affected and wretched style, with a clever gallicized English thief.

　　This English woman, who had become a naturalized Parisienne, recommended by very wealthy relations, intimately connected with the medals in the Library and Mademoiselle Mar's diamonds, became celebrated later on in judicial accounts. She was called Mamselle Miss.

　　The two little creatures who had fallen to Magnon had no reason to complain of their lot.

　　Recommended by the eighty francs, they were well cared for, as is everything from which profit is derived; they were neither badly clothed, nor badly fed; they were treated almost like "little gentlemen,"--better by their false mother than by their real one.

　　Magnon played the lady, and talked no thieves' slang in their presence.

　　Thus passed several years.

　　Thenardier augured well from the fact. One day, he chanced to say to Magnon as she handed him his monthly stipend of ten francs:

　　"The father must give them some education."

　　All at once, these two poor children, who had up to that time been protected tolerably well, even by their evil fate, were abruptly hurled into life and forced to begin it for themselves.

　　A wholesale arrest of malefactors, like that in the Jondrette garret, necessarily complicated by investigations and subsequent incarcerations, is a veritable disaster for that hideous and occult counter-society which pursues its existence beneath public society; an adventure of this description entails all sorts of catastrophes in that sombre world. The Thenardier catastrophe involved the catastrophe of Magnon.

　　 One day, a short time after Magnon had handed to Eponine the note relating to the Rue Plumet, a sudden raid was made by the police in the Rue Clocheperce; Magnon was seized, as was also Mamselle Miss; and all the inhabitants of the house, which was of a suspicious character, were gathered into the net.

　　While this was going on, the two little boys were playing in the back yard, and saw nothing of the raid. When they tried to enter the house again, they found the door fastened and the house empty.

　　A cobbler opposite called them to him, and delivered to them a paper which "their mother" had left for them. On this paper there was an address:

　　M. Barge, collector of rents, Rue du Roi-de-Sicile, No. 8.

　　The proprietor of the stall said to them: "You cannot live here any longer.

　　Go there.

　　It is near by. The first street on the left.

　　Ask your way from this paper."

　　The children set out, the elder leading the younger, and holding in his hand the paper which was to guide them.

　　It was cold, and his benumbed little fingers could not close very firmly, and they did not keep a very good hold on the paper.

　　At the corner of the Rue Clocheperce, a gust of wind tore it from him, and as night was falling, the child was not able to find it again.

　　They began to wander aimlessly through the streets.

BOOK SIXTH.--LITTLE GAVROCHE

CHAPTER II(1)

　　IN WHICH LITTLE GAVROCHE EXTRACTS PROFIT FROM NAPOLEON THE GREAT

　　 Spring in Paris is often traversed by harsh and piercing breezes which do not precisely chill but freeze one; these north winds which sadden the most beautiful days produce exactly the effect of those puffs of cold air which enter a warm room through the cracks of a badly fitting door or window.

　　It seems as though the gloomy door of winter had remained ajar, and as though the wind were pouring through it. In the spring of 1832, the epoch when the first great epidemic of this century broke out in Europe, these north gales were more harsh and piercing than ever.

　　It was a door even more glacial than that of winter which was ajar.

　　It was the door of the sepulchre. In these winds one felt the breath of the cholera.

　　From a meteorological point of view, these cold winds possessed this peculiarity, that they did not preclude a strong electric tension. Frequent storms, accompanied by thunder and lightning, burst forth at this epoch.

　　One evening, when these gales were blowing rudely, to such a degree that January seemed to have returned and that the bourgeois had resumed their cloaks, Little Gavroche, who was always shivering gayly under his rags, was standing as though in ecstasy before a wig-maker's shop in the vicinity of the Orme-Saint-Gervais. He was adorned with a woman's woollen shawl, picked up no one knows where, and which he had converted into a neck comforter.

　　Little Gavroche appeared to be engaged in intent admiration of a wax bride, in a low-necked dress, and crowned with orange-flowers, who was revolving in the window, and displaying her smile to passers-by, between two argand lamps; but in reality, he was taking an observation of the shop, in order to discover whether he could not "prig" from the shop-front a cake of soap, which he would then proceed to sell for a sou to a "hair-dresser" in the suburbs.

　　He had often managed to breakfast off of such a roll.

　　He called his species of work, for which he possessed special aptitude, "shaving barbers."

　　While contemplating the bride, and eyeing the cake of soap, he muttered between his teeth:

　　"Tuesday.

　　It was not Tuesday. Was it Tuesday?

　　Perhaps it was Tuesday.

　　Yes, it was Tuesday."

　　No one has ever discovered to what this monologue referred.

　　Yes, perchance, this monologue had some connection with the last occasion on which he had dined, three days before, for it was now Friday.

　　The barber in his shop, which was warmed by a good stove, was shaving a customer and casting a glance from time to time at the enemy, that freezing and impudent street urchin both of whose hands were in his pockets, but whose mind was evidently unsheathed.

　　While Gavroche was scrutinizing the shop-window and the cakes of windsor soap, two children of unequal stature, very neatly dressed, and still smaller than himself, one apparently about seven years of age, the other five, timidly turned the handle and entered the shop, with a request for something or other, alms possibly, in a plaintive murmur which resembled a groan rather than a prayer. They both spoke at once, and their words were unintelligible because sobs broke the voice of the younger, and the teeth of the elder were chattering with cold.

　　The barber wheeled round with a furious look, and without abandoning his razor, thrust back the elder with his left hand and the younger with his knee, and slammed his door, saying: "The idea of coming in and freezing everybody for nothing!"

　　The two children resumed their march in tears.

　　In the meantime, a cloud had risen; it had begun to rain.

　　Little Gavroche ran after them and accosted them:--

　　"What's the matter with you, brats?"

　　"We don't know where we are to sleep," replied the elder.

　　"Is that all?" said Gavroche.

　　"A great matter, truly.

　　The idea of bawling about that.

　　They must be greenies!"

　　And adopting, in addition to his superiority, which was rather bantering, an accent of tender authority and gentle patronage:--

　　"Come along with me, young 'uns!"

　　"Yes, sir," said the elder.

　　And the two children followed him as they would have followed an archbishop.

　　They had stopped crying.

　　Gavroche led them up the Rue Saint-Antoine in the direction of the Bastille.

　　As Gavroche walked along, he cast an indignant backward glance at the barber's shop.

　　"That fellow has no heart, the whiting,"[35] he muttered. "He's an Englishman."

　　 [35] Merlan:

　　a sobriquet given to hairdressers because they are white with powder.

　　 A woman who caught sight of these three marching in a file, with Gavroche at their head, burst into noisy laughter.

　　This laugh was wanting in respect towards the group.

　　"Good day, Mamselle Omnibus," said Gavroche to her.

　　An instant later, the wig-maker occurred to his mind once more, and he added:--

　　"I am making a mistake in the beast; he's not a whiting, he's a serpent.

　　Barber, I'll go and fetch a locksmith, and I'll have a bell hung to your tail."

　　This wig-maker had rendered him aggressive.

　　As he strode over a gutter, he apostrophized a bearded portress who was worthy to meet Faust on the Brocken, and who had a broom in her hand.

　　"Madam," said he, "so you are going out with your horse?"

　　And thereupon, he spattered the polished boots of a pedestrian.

　　"You scamp!" shouted the furious pedestrian.

　　Gavroche elevated his nose above his shawl.

　　"Is Monsieur complaining?"

　　"Of you!" ejaculated the man.

　　"The office is closed," said Gavroche, "I do not receive any more complaints."

　　In the meanwhile, as he went on up the street, he perceived a beggar-girl, thirteen or fourteen years old, and clad in so short a gown that her knees were visible, lying thoroughly chilled under a porte-cochere. The little girl was getting to be too old for such a thing.

　　Growth does play these tricks.

　　The petticoat becomes short at the moment when nudity becomes indecent.

　　"Poor girl!" said Gavroche.

　　"She hasn't even trousers.

　　Hold on, take this."

　　And unwinding all the comfortable woollen which he had around his neck, he flung it on the thin and purple shoulders of the beggar-girl, where the scarf became a shawl once more.

　　The child stared at him in astonishment, and received the shawl in silence.

　　When a certain stage of distress has been reached in his misery, the poor man no longer groans over evil, no longer returns thanks for good.

　　That done:

　　"Brrr!" said Gavroche, who was shivering more than Saint Martin, for the latter retained one-half of his cloak.

　　At this brrr! the downpour of rain, redoubled in its spite, became furious.

　　The wicked skies punish good deeds.

"Ah, come now!" exclaimed Gavroche, "what's the meaning of this? It's re-raining! Good Heavens, if it goes on like this, I shall stop my subscription."

　　And he set out on the march once more.

　　"It's all right," he resumed, casting a glance at the beggar-girl, as she coiled up under the shawl, "she's got a famous peel."

　　And looking up at the clouds he exclaimed:--

　　"Caught!"

　　The two children followed close on his heels.

　　As they were passing one of these heavy grated lattices, which indicate a baker's shop, for bread is put behind bars like gold, Gavroche turned round:--

　　"Ah, by the way, brats, have we dined?"

　　"Monsieur," replied the elder, "we have had nothing to eat since this morning."

　　"So you have neither father nor mother?" resumed Gavroche majestically.

　　"Excuse us, sir, we have a papa and a mamma, but we don't know where they are."

　　"Sometimes that's better than knowing where they are," said Gavroche, who was a thinker.

　　"We have been wandering about these two hours," continued the elder, "we have hunted for things at the corners of the streets, but we have found nothing."

　　"I know," ejaculated Gavroche, "it's the dogs who eat everything."

　　He went on, after a pause:--

　　"Ah! we have lost our authors.

　　We don't know what we have done with them.

　　This should not be, gamins.

　　It's stupid to let old people stray off like that.

　　Come now! we must have a snooze all the same."

　　However, he asked them no questions.

　　What was more simple than that they should have no dwelling place!

　　The elder of the two children, who had almost entirely recovered the prompt heedlessness of childhood, uttered this exclamation:--

　　"It's queer, all the same.

　　Mamma told us that she would take us to get a blessed spray on Palm Sunday."

　　"Bosh," said Gavroche.

　　"Mamma," resumed the elder, "is a lady who lives with Mamselle Miss."

　　"Tanflute!" retorted Gavroche.

　　Meanwhile he had halted, and for the last two minutes he had been feeling and fumbling in all sorts of nooks which his rags contained.

　　At last he tossed his head with an air intended to be merely satisfied, but which was triumphant, in reality.

　　"Let us be calm, young 'uns.

　　Here's supper for three."

　　And from one of his pockets he drew forth a sou.

　　Without allowing the two urchins time for amazement, he pushed both of them before him into the baker's shop, and flung his sou on the counter, crying:--

　　"Boy! five centimes' worth of bread."

　　The baker, who was the proprietor in person, took up a loaf and a knife.

　　"In three pieces, my boy!" went on Gavroche.

　　And he added with dignity:--

　　"There are three of us."

　　And seeing that the baker, after scrutinizing the three customers, had taken down a black loaf, he thrust his finger far up his nose with an inhalation as imperious as though he had had a pinch of the great Frederick's snuff on the tip of his thumb, and hurled this indignant apostrophe full in the baker's face:--

　　"Keksekca?"

　　Those of our readers who might be tempted to espy in this interpellation of Gavroche's to the baker a Russian or a Polish word, or one of those savage cries which the Yoways and the Botocudos hurl at each other from bank to bank of a river, athwart the solitudes, are warned that it is a word which they [our readers] utter every day, and which takes the place of the phrase:

　　"Qu'est-ce que c'est que cela?"

　　The baker understood perfectly, and replied:--

　　"Well!

　　It's bread, and very good bread of the second quality."

　　"You mean larton brutal [black bread]!" retorted Gavroche, calmly and coldly disdainful.

　　"White bread, boy! white bread [larton savonne]! I'm standing treat."

　　The baker could not repress a smile, and as he cut the white bread he surveyed them in a compassionate way which shocked Gavroche.

　　"Come, now, baker's boy!" said he, "what are you taking our measure like that for?"

　　All three of them placed end to end would have hardly made a measure.

　　When the bread was cut, the baker threw the sou into his drawer, and Gavroche said to the two children:--

　　"Grub away."

　　The little boys stared at him in surprise.

　　Gavroche began to laugh.

　　"Ah! hullo, that's so! they don't understand yet, they're too small."

　　And he repeated:--

　　"Eat away."

　　At the same time, he held out a piece of bread to each of them.

　　And thinking that the elder, who seemed to him the more worthy of his conversation, deserved some special encouragement and ought to be relieved from all hesitation to satisfy his appetite, he added, as be handed him the largest share:--

　　"Ram that into your muzzle."

　　One piece was smaller than the others; he kept this for himself.

　　The poor children, including Gavroche, were famished. As they tore their bread apart in big mouthfuls, they blocked up the shop of the baker, who, now that they had paid their money, looked angrily at them.

　　"Let's go into the street again," said Gavroche.

　　They set off once more in the direction of the Bastille.

　　From time to time, as they passed the lighted shop-windows, the smallest halted to look at the time on a leaden watch which was suspended from his neck by a cord.

　　"Well, he is a very green 'un," said Gavroche.

　　Then, becoming thoughtful, he muttered between his teeth:--

　　"All the same, if I had charge of the babes I'd lock 'em up better than that."

　　Just as they were finishing their morsel of bread, and had reached the angle of that gloomy Rue des Ballets, at the other end of which the low and threatening wicket of La Force was visible:--

　　"Hullo, is that you, Gavroche?" said some one.

　　"Hullo, is that you, Montparnasse?" said Gavroche.

　　A man had just accosted the street urchin, and the man was no other than Montparnasse in disguise, with blue spectacles, but recognizable to Gavroche.

　　"The bow-wows!" went on Gavroche, "you've got a hide the color of a linseed plaster, and blue specs like a doctor.

　　You're putting on style, 'pon my word!"

　　"Hush!" ejaculated Montparnasse, "not so loud."

　　And he drew Gavroche hastily out of range of the lighted shops.

　　The two little ones followed mechanically, holding each other by the hand.

　　When they were ensconced under the arch of a portecochere, sheltered from the rain and from all eyes:--

　　"Do you know where I'm going?" demanded Montparnasse.

　　"To the Abbey of Ascend-with-Regret,"[36] replied Gavroche.

　　 [36] The scaffold.

　　 "Joker!"

　　And Montparnasse went on:--

　　"I'm going to find Babet."

　　"Ah!" exclaimed Gavroche, "so her name is Babet."

　　Montparnasse lowered his voice:--

　　"Not she, he."

　　"Ah!

　　Babet."

　　"Yes, Babet."

　　"I thought he was buckled."

　　"He has undone the buckle," replied Montparnasse.

　　And he rapidly related to the gamin how, on the morning of that very day, Babet, having been transferred to La Conciergerie, had made his escape, by turning to the left instead of to the right in "the police office."

　　Gavroche expressed his admiration for this skill.

　　"What a dentist!" he cried.

　　Montparnasse added a few details as to Babet's flight, and ended with:--

　　"Oh!

　　That's not all."

　　Gavroche, as he listened, had seized a cane that Montparnasse held in his hand, and mechanically pulled at the upper part, and the blade of a dagger made its appearance.

　　"Ah!" he exclaimed, pushing the dagger back in haste, "you have brought along your gendarme disguised as a bourgeois."

　　Montparnasse winked.

　　"The deuce!" resumed Gavroche, "so you're going to have a bout with the bobbies?"

　　"You can't tell," replied Montparnasse with an indifferent air. "It's always a good thing to have a pin about one."

　　Gavroche persisted:--

　　"What are you up to to-night?"

　　Again Montparnasse took a grave tone, and said, mouthing every syllable:

　　"Things."

　　And abruptly changing the conversation:--

　　"By the way!"

"What?"

　　"Something happened t'other day.

　　Fancy.

　　I meet a bourgeois. He makes me a present of a sermon and his purse.

　　I put it in my pocket. A minute later, I feel in my pocket.

　　There's nothing there."

　　"Except the sermon," said Gavroche.

　　"But you," went on Montparnasse, "where are you bound for now?"

　　Gavroche pointed to his two proteges, and said:--

　　"I'm going to put these infants to bed."

　　"Whereabouts is the bed?"

　　"At my house."

　　"Where's your house?"

　　"At my house."

　　"So you have a lodging?"

　　"Yes, I have."

　　"And where is your lodging?"

　　"In the elephant," said Gavroche.

　　Montparnasse, though not naturally inclined to astonishment, could not restrain an exclamation.

　　"In the elephant!"

　　"Well, yes, in the elephant!" retorted Gavroche.

　　"Kekcaa?"

　　This is another word of the language which no one writes, and which every one speaks.

　　Kekcaa signifies:

　　Quest que c'est que cela a?

　　[What's the matter with that?]

　　The urchin's profound remark recalled Montparnasse to calmness and good sense.

　　He appeared to return to better sentiments with regard to Gavroche's lodging.

　　"Of course," said he, "yes, the elephant.

　　Is it comfortable there?"

　　"Very," said Gavroche.

　　"It's really bully there.

　　There ain't any draughts, as there are under the bridges."

　　"How do you get in?"

　　"Oh, I get in."

　　"So there is a hole?" demanded Montparnasse.

　　"Parbleu!

　　I should say so.

　　But you mustn't tell.

　　It's between the fore legs.

　　The bobbies haven't seen it."

　　"And you climb up?

　　Yes, I understand."

　　"A turn of the hand, cric, crac, and it's all over, no one there."

　　After a pause, Gavroche added:--

　　"I shall have a ladder for these children."

　　Montparnasse burst out laughing:--

　　"Where the devil did you pick up those young 'uns?"

　　Gavroche replied with great simplicity:--

　　"They are some brats that a wig-maker made me a present of."

　　Meanwhile, Montparnasse had fallen to thinking:--

　　"You recognized me very readily," he muttered.

BOOK SIXTH.--LITTLE GAVROCHE

CHAPTER II(2)

　　He took from his pocket two small objects which were nothing more than two quills wrapped in cotton, and thrust one up each of his nostrils. This gave him a different nose.

　　"That changes you," remarked Gavroche, "you are less homely so, you ought to keep them on all the time."

　　Montparnasse was a handsome fellow, but Gavroche was a tease.

　　"Seriously," demanded Montparnasse, "how do you like me so?"

　　The sound of his voice was different also.

　　In a twinkling, Montparnasse had become unrecognizable.

　　"Oh!

　　Do play Porrichinelle for us!" exclaimed Gavroche.

　　The two children, who had not been listening up to this point, being occupied themselves in thrusting their fingers up their noses, drew near at this name, and stared at Montparnasse with dawning joy and admiration.

　　Unfortunately, Montparnasse was troubled.

　　He laid his hand on Gavroche's shoulder, and said to him, emphasizing his words:

　　"Listen to what I tell you, boy! if I were on the square with my dog, my knife, and my wife, and if you were to squander ten sous on me, I wouldn't refuse to work, but this isn't Shrove Tuesday."

　　This odd phrase produced a singular effect on the gamin. He wheeled round hastily, darted his little sparkling eyes about him with profound attention, and perceived a police sergeant standing with his back to them a few paces off.

　　Gavroche allowed an: "Ah! good!" to escape him, but immediately suppressed it, and shaking Montparnasse's hand:--

　　"Well, good evening," said he, "I'm going off to my elephant with my brats.

　　Supposing that you should need me some night, you can come and hunt me up there.

　　I lodge on the entresol. There is no porter.

　　You will inquire for Monsieur Gavroche."

　　"Very good," said Montparnasse.

　　And they parted, Montparnasse betaking himself in the direction of the Greve, and Gavroche towards the Bastille.

　　The little one of five, dragged along by his brother who was dragged by Gavroche, turned his head back several times to watch "Porrichinelle" as he went.

　　The ambiguous phrase by means of which Montparnasse had warned Gavroche of the presence of the policeman, contained no other talisman than the assonance dig repeated five or six times in different forms. This syllable, dig, uttered alone or artistically mingled with the words of a phrase, means:

　　"Take care, we can no longer talk freely." There was besides, in Montparnasse's sentence, a literary beauty which was lost upon Gavroche, that is mon dogue, ma dague et ma digue, a slang expression of the Temple, which signifies my dog, my knife,

and my wife, greatly in vogue among clowns and the red-tails in the great century when Moliere wrote and Callot drew.

　　Twenty years ago, there was still to be seen in the southwest corner of the Place de la Bastille, near the basin of the canal, excavated in the ancient ditch of the fortress-prison, a singular monument, which has already been effaced from the memories of Parisians, and which deserved to leave some trace, for it was the idea of a "member of the Institute, the General-in-chief of the army of Egypt."

　　We say monument, although it was only a rough model.

　　But this model itself, a marvellous sketch, the grandiose skeleton of an idea of Napoleon's, which successive gusts of wind have carried away and thrown, on each occasion, still further from us, had become historical and had acquired a certain definiteness which contrasted with its provisional aspect.

　　It was an elephant forty feet high, constructed of timber and masonry, bearing on its back a tower which resembled a house, formerly painted green by some dauber, and now painted black by heaven, the wind, and time.

　　In this deserted and unprotected corner of the place, the broad brow of the colossus, his trunk, his tusks, his tower, his enormous crupper, his four feet, like columns produced, at night, under the starry heavens, a surprising and terrible form.

　　It was a sort of symbol of popular force. It was sombre, mysterious, and immense.

　　It was some mighty, visible phantom, one knew not what, standing erect beside the invisible spectre of the Bastille.

　　Few strangers visited this edifice, no passer-by looked at it. It was falling into ruins; every season the plaster which detached itself from its sides formed hideous wounds upon it.

　　"The aediles," as the expression ran in elegant dialect, had forgotten it ever since 1814.

　　There it stood in its corner, melancholy, sick, crumbling, surrounded by a rotten palisade, soiled continually by drunken coachmen; cracks meandered athwart its belly, a lath projected from its tail, tall grass flourished between its legs; and, as the level of the place had been rising all around it for a space of thirty years, by that slow and continuous movement which insensibly elevates the soil of large towns, it stood in a hollow, and it looked as though the ground were giving way beneath it.

　　It was unclean, despised, repulsive, and superb, ugly in the eyes of the bourgeois, melancholy in the eyes of the thinker.

　　There was something about it of the dirt which is on the point of being swept out, and something of the majesty which is on the point of being decapitated. As we have said, at night, its aspect changed.

　　Night is the real element of everything that is dark.

　　As soon as twilight descended, the old elephant became transfigured; he assumed a tranquil and redoubtable appearance in the formidable serenity of the shadows. Being of the past, he belonged to night; and obscurity was in keeping with his grandeur.

　　This rough, squat, heavy, hard, austere, almost misshapen, but assuredly majestic monument, stamped with a sort of magnificent and savage gravity, has disappeared, and left to reign in peace, a sort of gigantic stove, ornamented with its pipe, which has replaced the sombre fortress with its nine towers, very much as the bourgeoisie replaces the feudal classes.

　　It is quite natural that a stove should be the symbol of an epoch in which a pot contains power. This epoch will pass away, people have already begun to understand that, if there can be force in a boiler, there can be no force except in the brain; in other words, that which leads and drags on the world, is not locomotives, but ideas.

　　Harness locomotives to ideas,-- that is well done; but do not mistake the horse for the rider.

　　At all events, to return to the Place de la Bastille, the architect of this elephant succeeded in making a grand thing out of plaster; the architect of the stove has succeeded in making a pretty thing out of bronze.

　　This stove-pipe, which has been baptized by a sonorous name, and called the column of July, this monument of a revolution that miscarried, was still enveloped in 1832, in an immense shirt of woodwork, which we regret, for our part, and by a vast plank enclosure, which completed the task of isolating the elephant.

　　It was towards this corner of the place, dimly lighted by the reflection of a distant street lamp, that the gamin guided his two "brats."

　　The reader must permit us to interrupt ourselves here and to remind him that we are dealing with simple reality, and that twenty years ago, the tribunals were called upon to judge, under the charge of vagabondage, and mutilation of a public monument, a child who had been caught asleep in this very elephant of the Bastille. This fact noted, we proceed.

　　On arriving in the vicinity of the colossus, Gavroche comprehended the effect which the infinitely great might produce on the infinitely small, and said:--

　　"Don't be scared, infants."

　　Then he entered through a gap in the fence into the elephant's enclosure and helped the young ones to clamber through the breach. The two children, somewhat frightened, followed Gavroche without uttering a word, and confided themselves to this little Providence in rags which had given them bread and had promised them a shelter.

　　There, extended along the fence, lay a ladder which by day served the laborers in the neighboring timber-yard. Gavroche raised it with remarkable vigor, and placed it against one of the elephant's forelegs.

　　Near the point where the ladder ended, a sort of black hole in the belly of the colossus could be distinguished.

　　Gavroche pointed out the ladder and the hole to his guests, and said to them:--

　　"Climb up and go in."

　　The two little boys exchanged terrified glances.

　　"You're afraid, brats!" exclaimed Gavroche.

　　And he added:--

　　"You shall see!"

　　He clasped the rough leg of the elephant, and in a twinkling, without deigning to make use of the ladder, he had reached the aperture.

　　He entered it as an adder slips through a crevice, and disappeared within, and an instant later, the two children saw his head, which looked pale, appear vaguely, on the edge of the shadowy hole, like a wan and whitish spectre.

　　"Well!" he exclaimed, "climb up, young 'uns!

　　You'll see how snug it is here!

　　Come up, you!" he said to the elder, "I'll lend you a hand."

　　The little fellows nudged each other, the gamin frightened and inspired them with confidence at one and the same time, and then, it was raining very hard.

　　The elder one undertook the risk. The younger, on seeing his brother climbing up, and himself left alone between the paws of this huge beast, felt greatly inclined to cry, but he did not dare.

　　The elder lad climbed, with uncertain steps, up the rungs of the ladder; Gavroche, in the meanwhile, encouraging him with exclamations like a fencing-master to his pupils, or a muleteer to his mules.

　　"Don't be afraid!--That's it!--Come on!--Put your feet there!-- Give us your hand here!--Boldly!"

　　And when the child was within reach, he seized him suddenly and vigorously by the arm, and pulled him towards him.

　　"Nabbed!" said he.

　　The brat had passed through the crack.

　　"Now," said Gavroche, "wait for me.

　　Be so good as to take a seat, Monsieur."

　　And making his way out of the hole as he had entered it, he slipped down the elephant's leg with the agility of a monkey, landed on his feet in the grass, grasped the child of five round the body, and planted him fairly in the middle of the ladder, then he began to climb up behind him, shouting to the elder:--

　　"I'm going to boost him, do you tug."

　　And in another instant, the small lad was pushed, dragged, pulled, thrust, stuffed into the hole, before he had time to recover himself, and Gavroche, entering behind him, and repulsing the ladder with a kick which sent it flat on the grass, began to clap his hands and to cry:--

　　"Here we are!

　　Long live General Lafayette!"

　　This explosion over, he added:--

　　"Now, young 'uns, you are in my house."

　　Gavroche was at home, in fact.

　　Oh, unforeseen utility of the useless!

　　Charity of great things! Goodness of giants!

　　This huge monument, which had embodied an idea of the Emperor's, had become the box of a street urchin. The brat had been accepted and sheltered by the colossus. The bourgeois decked out in their Sunday finery who passed the elephant of the Bastille, were fond of saying as they scanned it disdainfully with their prominent eyes:

　　"What's the good of that?" It served to save from the cold, the frost, the hail, and rain, to shelter from the winds of winter, to preserve from slumber in the mud which produces fever, and from slumber in the snow which produces death, a little being who had no father, no mother, no bread, no clothes, no refuge.

　　It served to receive the innocent whom society repulsed.

　　It served to diminish public crime. It was a lair open to one against whom all doors were shut. It seemed as though the miserable old mastodon, invaded by vermin and oblivion, covered with warts, with mould, and ulcers, tottering, worm-eaten, abandoned, condemned, a sort of mendicant colossus, asking alms in vain with a benevolent look in the midst of the cross-roads, had taken pity on that other mendicant, the poor pygmy, who roamed without shoes to his feet, without a roof over his head, blowing on his fingers, clad in rags, fed on rejected scraps. That was what the elephant of the Bastille was good for. This idea of Napoleon, disdained by men, had been taken back by God. That which had been merely illustrious, had become august. In order to realize his thought, the Emperor should have had porphyry, brass, iron, gold, marble; the old collection of planks, beams and plaster sufficed for God.

　　The Emperor had had the dream of a genius; in that Titanic elephant, armed, prodigious, with trunk uplifted, bearing its tower and scattering on all sides its merry and vivifying waters, he wished to incarnate the people.

　　God had done a grander thing with it, he had lodged a child there.

　　The hole through which Gavroche had entered was a breach which was hardly visible from the outside, being concealed, as we have stated, beneath the elephant's belly, and so narrow that it was only cats and homeless children who could pass through it.

　　"Let's begin," said Gavroche, "by telling the porter that we are not at home."

　　And plunging into the darkness with the assurance of a person who is well acquainted with his apartments, he took a plank and stopped up the aperture.

　　Again Gavroche plunged into the obscurity.

　　The children heard the crackling of the match thrust into the phosphoric bottle. The chemical match was not yet in existence; at that epoch the Fumade steel represented progress.

　　A sudden light made them blink; Gavroche had just managed to ignite one of those bits of cord dipped in resin which are called cellar rats.

　　The cellar rat, which emitted more smoke than light, rendered the interior of the elephant confusedly visible.

　　Gavroche's two guests glanced about them, and the sensation which they experienced was something like that which one would feel if shut up in the great tun of Heidelberg, or, better still, like what Jonah must have felt in the biblical belly of the whale. An entire and gigantic skeleton appeared enveloping them.

　　Above, a long brown beam, whence started at regular distances, massive, arching ribs, represented the vertebral column with its sides, stalactites of plaster depended from them like entrails, and vast spiders' webs stretching from side to side, formed dirty diaphragms. Here and there, in the corners, were visible large blackish spots which had the appearance of being alive, and which changed places rapidly with an abrupt and frightened movement.

　　Fragments which had fallen from the elephant's back into his belly had filled up the cavity, so that it was possible to walk upon it as on a floor.

　　The smaller child nestled up against his brother, and whispered to him:--

　　"It's black."

　　This remark drew an exclamation from Gavroche.

　　The petrified air of the two brats rendered some shock necessary.

　　"What's that you are gabbling about there?" he exclaimed. "Are you scoffing at me?

　　Are you turning up your noses? Do you want the tuileries?

　　Are you brutes?

　　Come, say!

　　I warn you that I don't belong to the regiment of simpletons.

　　Ah, come now, are you brats from the Pope's establishment?"

　　A little roughness is good in cases of fear.

　　It is reassuring. The two children drew close to Gavroche.

　　Gavroche, paternally touched by this confidence, passed from grave to gentle, and addressing the smaller:--

　　"Stupid," said he, accenting the insulting word, with a caressing intonation, "it's outside that it is black.

　　Outside it's raining, here it does not rain; outside it's cold, here there's not an atom of wind; outside there are heaps of people, here there's no one; outside there ain't even the moon, here there's my candle, confound it!"

　　The two children began to look upon the apartment with less terror; but Gavroche allowed them no more time for contemplation.

　　"Quick," said he.

　　And he pushed them towards what we are very glad to be able to call the end of the room.

　　There stood his bed.

　　Gavroche's bed was complete; that is to say, it had a mattress, a blanket, and an alcove with curtains.

　　The mattress was a straw mat, the blanket a rather large strip of gray woollen stuff, very warm and almost new.

　　This is what the alcove consisted of:--

　　Three rather long poles, thrust into and consolidated, with the rubbish which formed the floor, that is to say, the belly of the elephant, two in front and one behind, and united by a rope at their summits, so as to form a pyramidal bundle.

　　This cluster supported a trellis-work of brass wire which was simply placed upon it, but artistically applied, and held by fastenings of iron wire, so that it enveloped all three holes.

　　A row of very heavy stones kept this network down to the floor so that nothing could pass under it. This grating was nothing else than a piece of the brass screens with which aviaries are covered in menageries.

　　Gavroche's bed stood as in a cage, behind this net.

　　The whole resembled an Esquimaux tent.

　　This trellis-work took the place of curtains.

　　Gavroche moved aside the stones which fastened the net down in front, and the two folds of the net which lapped over each other fell apart.

　　"Down on all fours, brats!" said Gavroche.

　　He made his guests enter the cage with great precaution, then he crawled in after them, pulled the stones together, and closed the opening hermetically again.

　　All three had stretched out on the mat.

　　Gavroche still had the cellar rat in his hand.

　　"Now," said he, "go to sleep!

　　I'm going to suppress the candelabra."

　　"Monsieur," the elder of the brothers asked Gavroche, pointing to the netting, "what's that for?"

　　"That," answered Gavroche gravely, "is for the rats.

　　Go to sleep!"

　　Nevertheless, he felt obliged to add a few words of instruction for the benefit of these young creatures, and he continued:--

　　"It's a thing from the Jardin des Plantes.

　　It's used for fierce animals. There's a whole shopful of them there.

　　All you've got to do is to climb over a wall, crawl through a window, and pass through a door. You can get as much as you want."

　　As he spoke, he wrapped the younger one up bodily in a fold

of the blanket, and the little one murmured:--

　　"Oh! how good that is!

　　It's warm!"

　　Gavroche cast a pleased eye on the blanket.

　　"That's from the Jardin des Plantes, too," said he.

　　"I took that from the monkeys."

　　And, pointing out to the eldest the mat on which he was lying, a very thick and admirably made mat, he added:--

　　"That belonged to the giraffe."

　　After a pause he went on:--

　　"The beasts had all these things.

　　I took them away from them. It didn't trouble them.

　　I told them:

　　`It's for the elephant.'"

　　He paused, and then resumed:--

　　"You crawl over the walls and you don't care a straw for the government. So there now!"

　　The two children gazed with timid and stupefied respect on this intrepid and ingenious being, a vagabond like themselves, isolated like themselves, frail like themselves, who had something admirable and all-powerful about him, who seemed supernatural to them, and whose physiognomy was composed of all the grimaces of an old mountebank, mingled with the most ingenuous and charming smiles.

　　"Monsieur," ventured the elder timidly, "you are not afraid of the police, then?"

　　Gavroche contented himself with replying:--

　　"Brat!

　　Nobody says `police,' they say `bobbies.'"

　　The smaller had his eyes wide open, but he said nothing. As he was on the edge of the mat, the elder being in the middle, Gavroche tucked the blanket round him as a mother might have done, and heightened the mat under his head with old rags, in such a way as to form a pillow for the child.

　　Then he turned to the elder:--

　　"Hey!

　　We're jolly comfortable here, ain't we?"

　　"Ah, yes!" replied the elder, gazing at Gavroche with the expression of a saved angel.

　　The two poor little children who had been soaked through, began to grow warm once more.

　　"Ah, by the way," continued Gavroche, "what were you bawling about?"

　　And pointing out the little one to his brother:--

　　"A mite like that, I've nothing to say about, but the idea of a big fellow like you crying!

　　It's idiotic; you looked like a calf."

　　"Gracious, replied the child, "we have no lodging."

　　"Bother!" retorted Gavroche, "you don't say `lodgings,' you say `crib.'"

　　"And then, we were afraid of being alone like that at night."

　　"You don't say `night,' you say `darkmans.'"

　　"Thank you, sir," said the child.

　　"Listen," went on Gavroche, "you must never bawl again over anything. I'll take care of you.

　　You shall see what fun we'll have. In summer, we'll go to the Glaciere with Navet, one of my pals, we'll bathe in the Gare, we'll run stark naked in front of the rafts on the bridge at Austerlitz,--that makes the laundresses raging. They scream, they get mad, and if you only knew how ridiculous they are! We'll go and see the man-skeleton. And then I'll take you to the play. I'll take you to see Frederick Lemaitre.

　　I have tickets, I know some of the actors, I even played in a piece once.

　　There were a lot of us fellers, and we ran under a cloth, and that made the sea. I'll get you an engagement at my theatre.

　　We'll go to see the savages. They ain't real, those savages ain't. They wear pink tights that go all in wrinkles, and you can see where their elbows have been darned with white.

　　Then, we'll go to the Opera.

　　We'll get in with the hired applauders.

　　The Opera claque is well managed. I wouldn't associate with the claque on the boulevard.

　　At the Opera, just fancy! some of them pay twenty sous, but they're ninnies. They're called dishclouts.

　　And then we'll go to see the guillotine work. I'll show you the executioner.

　　He lives in the Rue des Marais. Monsieur Sanson.

　　He has a letter-box at his door.

　　Ah! we'll have famous fun!"

　　At that moment a drop of wax fell on Gavroche's finger, and recalled him to the realities of life.

　　"The deuce!" said he, "there's the wick giving out.

　　Attention! I can't spend more than a sou a month on my lighting.

　　When a body goes to bed, he must sleep.

　　We haven't the time to read M. Paul de Kock's romances.

　　And besides, the light might pass through the cracks of the porte-cochere, and all the bobbies need to do is to see it."

　　"And then," remarked the elder timidly,--he alone dared talk to Gavroche, and reply to him, "a spark might fall in the straw, and we must look out and not burn the house down."

　　"People don't say `burn the house down,'" remarked Gavroche, "they say `blaze the crib.'"

　　The storm increased in violence, and the heavy downpour beat upon the back of the colossus amid claps of thunder. "You're taken in, rain!" said Gavroche.

　　"It amuses me to hear the decanter run down the legs of the house.

　　Winter is a stupid; it wastes its merchandise, it loses its labor, it can't wet us, and that makes it kick up a row, old water-carrier that it is."

　　This allusion to the thunder, all the consequences of which Gavroche, in his character of a philosopher of the nineteenth century, accepted, was followed by a broad flash of lightning, so dazzling that a hint of it entered the belly of the elephant through the crack. Almost at the same instant, the thunder rumbled with great fury. The two little creatures uttered a shriek, and started up so eagerly that the network came near being displaced, but Gavroche turned his bold face to them, and took advantage of the clap of thunder to burst into a laugh.

　　"Calm down, children.

　　Don't topple over the edifice.

　　That's fine, first-class thunder; all right.

　　That's no slouch of a streak of lightning.

　　Bravo for the good God!

　　Deuce take it!

　　It's almost as good as it is at the Ambigu."

　　That said, he restored order in the netting, pushed the two children gently down on the bed, pressed their knees, in order to stretch them out at full length, and exclaimed:--

　　"Since the good God is lighting his candle, I can blow out mine. Now, babes, now, my young humans, you must shut your peepers. It's very bad not to sleep.

　　It'll make you swallow the strainer, or, as they say, in fashionable society, stink in the gullet. Wrap yourself up well in the hide!

　　I'm going to put out the light. Are you ready?"

　　"Yes," murmured the elder, "I'm all right.

　　I seem to have feathers under my head."

　　"People don't say `head,'" cried Gavroche, "they say `nut'."

　　The two children nestled close to each other, Gavroche finished arranging them on the mat, drew the blanket up to their very ears, then repeated, for the third time, his injunction in the hieratical tongue:--

　　"Shut your peepers!"

　　And he snuffed out his tiny light.

　　Hardly had the light been extinguished, when a peculiar trembling began to affect the netting under which the three children lay.

　　It consisted of a multitude of dull scratches which produced a metallic sound, as if claws and teeth were gnawing at the copper wire. This was accompanied by all sorts of little piercing cries.

　　The little five-year-old boy, on hearing this hubbub overhead, and chilled with terror, jogged his brother's elbow; but the elder brother had already shut his peepers, as Gavroche had ordered. Then the little one, who could no longer control his terror, questioned Gavroche, but in a very low tone, and with bated breath:--

　　"Sir?"

　　"Hey?" said Gavroche, who had just closed his eyes.

　　"What is that?"

　　"It's the rats," replied Gavroche.

　　And he laid his head down on the mat again.

　　The rats, in fact, who swarmed by thousands in the carcass of the elephant, and who were the living black spots which we have already mentioned, had been held in awe by the flame of the candle, so long as it had been lighted; but as soon as the cavern, which was the same as their city, had returned to darkness, scenting what the good story-teller Perrault calls "fresh meat," they had hurled themselves in throngs on Gavroche's tent, had climbed to the top of it, and had begun to bite the meshes as though seeking to pierce this new-fangled trap.

　　Still the little one could not sleep.

　　"Sir?" he began again.

　　"Hey?" said Gavroche.

　　"What are rats?"

　　"They are mice."

　　This explanation reassured the child a little.

　　He had seen white mice in the course of his life, and he was not afraid of them. Nevertheless, he lifted up his voice once more.

　　"Sir?"

　　"Hey?" said Gavroche again.

　　"Why don't you have a cat?"

　　"I did have one," replied Gavroche, "I brought one here, but they ate her."

　　This second explanation undid the work of the first, and the little fellow began to tremble again.

　　The dialogue between him and Gavroche began again for the fourth time:--

　　"Monsieur?"

　　"Hey?"

　　"Who was it that was eaten?"

　　"The cat."

　　"And who ate the cat?"

　　"The rats."

　　"The mice?"

　　"Yes, the rats."

　　The child, in consternation, dismayed at the thought of mice which ate cats, pursued:--

　　"Sir, would those mice eat us?"

　　"Wouldn't they just!" ejaculated Gavroche.

　　The child's terror had reached its climax.

　　But Gavroche added:--

　　"Don't be afraid.

　　They can't get in.

　　And besides, I'm here! Here, catch hold of my hand.

　　Hold your tongue and shut your peepers!"

　　At the same time Gavroche grasped the little fellow's hand across his brother.

　　The child pressed the hand close to him, and felt reassured.

　　Courage and strength have these mysterious ways of communicating themselves.

　　Silence reigned round them once more, the sound of their voices had frightened off the rats; at the expiration of a few minutes, they came raging back, but in vain, the three little fellows were fast asleep and heard nothing more.

　　The hours of the night fled away.

　　Darkness covered the vast Place de la Bastille.

　　A wintry gale, which mingled with the rain, blew in gusts, the patrol searched all the doorways, alleys, enclosures, and obscure nooks, and in their search for nocturnal vagabonds they passed in silence before the elephant; the monster, erect, motionless, staring open-eyed into the shadows, had the appearance of dreaming happily over his good deed; and sheltered from heaven and from men the three poor sleeping children.

　　In order to understand what is about to follow, the reader must remember, that, at that epoch, the Bastille guard-house was situated at the other end of the square, and that what took place in the vicinity of the elephant could neither be seen nor heard by the sentinel.

　　Towards the end of that hour which immediately precedes the dawn, a man turned from the Rue Saint-Antoine at a run, made the circuit of the enclosure of the column of July, and glided between the palings until he was underneath the belly of the elephant. If any light had illuminated that man, it might have been divined from the thorough manner in which he was soaked that he had passed the night in the rain.

　　Arrived beneath the elephant, he uttered a peculiar cry, which did not belong to any human tongue, and which a paroquet alone could have imitated.

　　Twice he repeated this cry, of whose orthography the following barely conveys an idea:--

　　"Kirikikiou!"

　　At the second cry, a clear, young, merry voice responded from the belly of the elephant:--

　　"Yes!"

　　Almost immediately, the plank which closed the hole was drawn aside, and gave passage to a child who descended the elephant's leg, and fell briskly near the man.

　　It was Gavroche.

　　The man was Montparnasse.

　　As for his cry of Kirikikiou,--that was, doubtless, what the child had meant, when he said:--

　　"You will ask for Monsieur Gavroche."

　　On hearing it, he had waked with a start, had crawled out of his "alcove," pushing apart the netting a little, and carefully drawing it together again, then he had opened the trap, and descended.

　　The man and the child recognized each other silently amid the gloom: Montparnasse confined himself to the remark:--

　　"We need you.

　　Come, lend us a hand."

　　The lad asked for no further enlightenment.

　　"I'm with you," said he.

　　And both took their way towards the Rue Saint-Antoine, whence Montparnasse had emerged, winding rapidly through the long file of market-gardeners' carts which descend towards the markets at that hour.

　　The market-gardeners, crouching, half-asleep, in their wagons, amid the salads and vegetables, enveloped to their very eyes in their mufflers on account of the beating rain, did not even glance at these strange pedestrians.

CHAPTER III

　　THE VICISSITUDES OF FLIGHT

　　 This is what had taken place that same night at the La Force:--

　　An escape had been planned between Babet, Brujon, Guelemer, and Thenardier, although Thenardier was in close confinement. Babet had arranged the matter for his own benefit, on the same day, as the reader has seen from Montparnasse's account to Gavroche. Montparnasse was to help them from outside.

　　Brujon, after having passed a month in the punishment cell, had had time, in the first place, to weave a rope, in the second, to mature a plan.

　　In former times, those severe places where the discipline of the prison delivers the convict into his own hands, were composed of four stone walls, a stone ceiling, a flagged pavement, a camp bed, a grated window, and a door lined with iron, and were called dungeons; but the dungeon was judged to be too terrible; nowadays they are composed of an iron door, a grated window, a camp bed, a flagged pavement, four stone walls, and a stone ceiling, and are called chambers of punishment.

　　A little light penetrates towards mid-day. The inconvenient point about these chambers which, as the reader sees, are not dungeons, is that they allow the persons who should be at work to think.

　　So Brujon meditated, and he emerged from the chamber of punishment with a rope.

　　As he had the name of being very dangerous in the Charlemagne courtyard, he was placed in the New Building. The first thing he found in the New Building was Guelemer, the second was a nail; Guelemer, that is to say, crime; a nail, that is to say, liberty.

　　Brujon, of whom it is high time that the reader should have a complete idea, was, with an appearance of delicate health and a profoundly premeditated languor, a polished, intelligent sprig, and a thief, who had a caressing glance, and an atrocious smile. His glance resulted from his will, and his smile from his nature. His first studies in his art had been directed to roofs.

　　He had made great progress in the industry of the men who tear off lead, who plunder the roofs and despoil the gutters by the process called double pickings.

　　The circumstance which put the finishing touch on the moment peculiarly favorable for an attempt at escape, was that the roofers were re-laying and re-jointing, at that very moment, a portion of the slates on the prison.

　　The Saint-Bernard courtyard was no longer absolutely isolated from the Charlemagne and the Saint-Louis courts. Up above there were scaffoldings and ladders; in other words, bridges and stairs in the direction of liberty.

　　The New Building, which was the most cracked and decrepit thing to be seen anywhere in the world, was the weak point in the prison. The walls were eaten by saltpetre to such an extent that the authorities had been obliged to line the vaults of the dormitories with a sheathing of wood, because stones were in the habit of becoming detached and falling on the prisoners in their beds. In spite of this antiquity, the authorities committed the error of confining in the New Building the most troublesome prisoners, of placing there "the hard cases," as they say in prison parlance.

The New Building contained four dormitories, one above the other, and a top story which was called the Bel-Air (FineAir). A large chimney-flue, probably from some ancient kitchen of the Dukes de la Force, started from the groundfloor, traversed all four stories, cut the dormitories, where it figured as a flattened pillar, into two portions, and finally pierced the roof.

　　Guelemer and Brujon were in the same dormitory.

　　They had been placed, by way of precaution, on the lower story.

　　Chance ordained that the heads of their beds should rest against the chimney.

　　Thenardier was directly over their heads in the top story known as Fine-Air. The pedestrian who halts on the Rue Culture-Sainte-Catherine, after passing the barracks of the firemen, in front of the porte-cochere of the bathing establishment, beholds a yard full of flowers and shrubs in wooden boxes, at the extremity of which spreads out a little white rotunda with two wings, brightened up with green shutters, the bucolic dream of Jean Jacques.

　　Not more than ten years ago, there rose above that rotunda an enormous black, hideous, bare wall by which it was backed up.

　　This was the outer wall of La Force.

　　This wall, beside that rotunda, was Milton viewed through Berquin.

　　Lofty as it was, this wall was overtopped by a still blacker roof, which could be seen beyond.

　　This was the roof of the New Building. There one could descry four dormer-windows, guarded with bars; they were the windows of the Fine-Air.

　　A chimney pierced the roof; this was the chimney which traversed the dormitories.

　　The Bel-Air, that top story of the New Building, was a sort of large hall, with a Mansard roof, guarded with triple gratings and double doors of sheet iron, which were studded with enormous bolts. When one entered from the north end, one had on one's left the four dormer-windows, on one's right, facing the windows, at regular intervals, four square, tolerably vast cages, separated by narrow passages, built of masonry to about the height of the elbow, and the rest, up to the roof, of iron bars.

　　Thenardier had been in solitary confinement in one of these cages since the night of the 3d of February.

　　No one was ever able to discover how, and by what connivance, he succeeded in procuring, and secreting a bottle of wine, invented, so it is said, by Desrues, with which a narcotic is mixed, and which the band of the Endormeurs, or Sleep-compellers, rendered famous.

　　There are, in many prisons, treacherous employees, half-jailers, half-thieves, who assist in escapes, who sell to the police an unfaithful service, and who turn a penny whenever they can.

　　On that same night, then, when Little Gavroche picked up the two lost children, Brujon and Guelemer, who knew that Babet, who had escaped that morning, was waiting for them in the street as well as Montparnasse, rose softly, and with the nail which Brujon had found, began to pierce the chimney against which their beds stood. The rubbish fell on Brujon's bed, so that they were not heard. Showers mingled with thunder shook the doors on their hinges, and created in the prison a terrible and opportune uproar. Those of the prisoners who woke, pretended to fall asleep again, and left Guelemer and Brujon to their own devices.

　　Brujon was adroit; Guelemer was vigorous.

　　Before any sound had reached the watcher, who was sleeping in the grated cell which opened into the dormitory, the wall had, been pierced, the chimney scaled, the iron grating which barred the upper orifice of the flue forced, and the two redoubtable ruffians were on the roof.

　　The wind and rain redoubled, the roof was slippery.

　　"What a good night to leg it!" said Brujon.

　　An abyss six feet broad and eighty feet deep separated them from the surrounding wall.

　　At the bottom of this abyss, they could see the musket of a sentinel gleaming through the gloom. They fastened one end of the rope which Brujon had spun in his dungeon to the stumps of the iron bars which they had just wrenched off, flung the other over the outer wall, crossed the abyss at one bound, clung to the coping of the wall, got astride of it, let themselves slip, one after the other, along the rope, upon a little roof which touches the bath-house, pulled their rope after them, jumped down into the courtyard of the bath-house, traversed it, pushed open the porter's wicket, beside which hung his rope, pulled this, opened the porte-cochere, and found themselves in the street.

　　Three-quarters of an hour had not elapsed since they had risen in bed in the dark, nail in hand, and their project in their heads.

　　A few moments later they had joined Babet and Montparnasse, who were prowling about the neighborhood.

　　They had broken their rope in pulling it after them, and a bit of it remained attached to the chimney on the roof.

　　They had sustained no other damage, however, than that of scratching nearly all the skin off their hands.

　　That night, Thenardier was warned, without any one being able to explain how, and was not asleep.

　　Towards one o'clock in the morning, the night being very dark, he saw two shadows pass along the roof, in the rain and squalls, in front of the dormer-window which was opposite his cage. One halted at the window, long enough to dart in a glance. This was Brujon.

　　Thenardier recognized him, and understood.

　　This was enough.

　　Thenardier, rated as a burglar, and detained as a measure of precaution under the charge of organizing a nocturnal ambush, with armed force, was kept in sight.

　　The sentry, who was relieved every two hours, marched up and down in front of his cage with loaded musket. The Fine-Air was lighted by a skylight.

　　The prisoner had on his feet fetters weighing fifty pounds.

　　Every day, at four o'clock in the afternoon, a jailer, escorted by two dogs,--this was still in vogue at that time,--entered his cage, deposited beside his bed a loaf of black bread weighing two pounds, a jug of water, a bowl filled with rather thin bouillon, in which swam a few Mayagan beans, inspected his irons and tapped the bars.

　　This man and his dogs made two visits during the night.

　　Thenardier had obtained permission to keep a sort of iron bolt which he used to spike his bread into a crack in the wall, "in order to preserve it from the rats," as he said.

　　As Thenardier was kept in sight, no objection had been made to this spike.

　　Still, it was remembered afterwards, that one of the jailers had said: "It would be better to let him have only a wooden spike."

　　At two o'clock in the morning, the sentinel, who was an old soldier, was relieved, and replaced by a conscript.

　　A few moments later, the man with the dogs paid his visit, and went off without noticing anything, except, possibly, the excessive youth and "the rustic air" of the "raw recruit."

　　Two hours afterwards, at four o'clock, when they came to relieve the conscript, he was found asleep on the floor, lying like a log near Thenardier's cage. As for Thenardier, he was no longer there.

　　There was a hole in the ceiling of his cage, and, above it, another hole in the roof. One of the planks of his bed had been wrenched off, and probably carried away with him, as it was not found.

　　They also seized in his cell a half-empty bottle which contained the remains of the stupefying wine with which the soldier had been drugged. The soldier's bayonet had disappeared.

　　At the moment when this discovery was made, it was assumed that Thenardier was out of reach.

　　The truth is, that he was no longer in the New Building, but that he was still in great danger.

　　Thenardier, on reaching the roof of the New Building, had found the remains of Brujon's rope hanging to the bars of the upper trap of the chimney, but, as this broken fragment was much too short, he had not been able to escape by the outer wall, as Brujon and Guelemer had done.

　　When one turns from the Rue des Ballets into the Rue du Roi-de-Sicile, one almost immediately encounters a repulsive ruin. There stood on that spot, in the last century, a house of which only the back wall now remains, a regular wall of masonry, which rises to the height of the third story between the adjoining buildings. This ruin can be recognized by two large square windows which are still to be seen there; the middle one, that nearest the right gable, is barred with a worm-eaten beam adjusted like a prop.

　　Through these windows there was formerly visible a lofty and lugubrious wall, which was a fragment of the outer wall of La Force.

　　The empty space on the street left by the demolished house is half-filled by a fence of rotten boards, shored up by five stone posts. In this recess lies concealed a little shanty which leans against the portion of the ruin which has remained standing.

　　The fence has a gate, which, a few years ago, was fastened only by a latch.

　　It was the crest of this ruin that Thenardier had succeeded in reaching, a little after one o'clock in the morning.

　　How had he got there?

　　That is what no one has ever been able to explain or understand.

　　The lightning must, at the same time, have hindered and helped him.

　　Had he made use of the ladders and scaffoldings of the slaters to get from roof to roof, from enclosure to enclosure, from compartment to compartment, to the buildings of the Charlemagne court, then to the buildings of the Saint-Louis court, to the outer wall, and thence to the hut on the Rue du Roi-de-Sicile? But in that itinerary there existed breaks which seemed to render it an impossibility.

　　Had he placed the plank from his bed like a bridge from the roof of the Fine-Air to the outer wall, and crawled flat, on his belly on the coping of the outer wall the whole distance round the prison as far as the hut? But the outer wall of La Force formed a crenellated and unequal line; it mounted and descended, it dropped at the firemen's barracks, it rose towards the bath-house, it was cut in twain by buildings, it was not even of the same height on the Hotel Lamoignon as on the Rue Pavee; everywhere occurred falls and right angles; and then, the sentinels must have espied the dark form of the fugitive; hence, the route taken by Thenardier still remains rather inexplicable. In two manners, flight was impossible.

　　Had Thenardier, spurred on by that thirst for liberty which changes precipices into ditches, iron bars into wattles of osier, a legless man into an athlete, a gouty man into a bird, stupidity into instinct, instinct into intelligence, and intelligence into genius, had Thenardier invented a third mode? No one has ever found out.

　　The marvels of escape cannot always be accounted for.

　　The man who makes his escape, we repeat, is inspired; there is something of the star and of the lightning in the mysterious gleam of flight; the effort towards deliverance is no less surprising than the flight towards the sublime, and one says of the escaped thief: "How did he contrive to scale that wall?" in the same way that one says of Corneille:

　　"Where did he find the means of dying?"

　　At all events, dripping with perspiration, drenched with rain, with his clothes hanging in ribbons, his hands flayed, his elbows bleeding, his knees torn, Thenardier had reached what children, in their figurative language, call the edge of the wall of the ruin, there he had stretched himself out at full length, and there his strength had failed him.

　　A steep escarpment three stories high separated him from the pavement of the street.

　　The rope which he had was too short.

　　There he waited, pale, exhausted, desperate with all the despair which he had undergone, still hidden by the night, but telling

himself that the day was on the point of dawning, alarmed at the idea of hearing the neighboring clock of Saint-Paul strike four within a few minutes, an hour when the sentinel was relieved and when the latter would be found asleep under the pierced roof, staring in horror at a terrible depth, at the light of the street lanterns, the wet, black pavement, that pavement longed for yet frightful, which meant death, and which meant liberty.

　　He asked himself whether his three accomplices in flight had succeeded, if they had heard him, and if they would come to his assistance. He listened.

　　With the exception of the patrol, no one had passed through the street since he had been there.

　　Nearly the whole of the descent of the market-gardeners from Montreuil, from Charonne, from Vincennes, and from Bercy to the markets was accomplished through the Rue Saint-Antoine.

　　Four o'clock struck.

　　Thenardier shuddered.

　　A few moments later, that terrified and confused uproar which follows the discovery of an escape broke forth in the prison.

　　The sound of doors opening and shutting, the creaking of gratings on their hinges, a tumult in the guard-house, the hoarse shouts of the turnkeys, the shock of musket-butts on the pavement of the courts, reached his ears. Lights ascended and descended past the grated windows of the dormitories, a torch ran along the ridge-pole of the top story of the New Building, the firemen belonging in the barracks on the right had been summoned. Their helmets, which the torch lighted up in the rain, went and came along the roofs.

　　At the same time, Thenardier perceived in the direction of the Bastille a wan whiteness lighting up the edge of the sky in doleful wise.

　　He was on top of a wall ten inches wide, stretched out under the heavy rains, with two gulfs to right and left, unable to stir, subject to the giddiness of a possible fall, and to the horror of a certain arrest, and his thoughts, like the pendulum of a clock, swung from one of these ideas to the other:

　　"Dead if I fall, caught if I stay."

　　In the midst of this anguish, he suddenly saw, the street being still dark, a man who was gliding along the walls and coming from the Rue Pavee, halt in the recess above which Thenardier was, as it were, suspended.

　　Here this man was joined by a second, who walked with the same caution, then by a third, then by a fourth.

　　When these men were re-united, one of them lifted the latch of the gate in the fence, and all four entered the enclosure in which the shanty stood.

　　They halted directly under Thenardier. These men had evidently chosen this vacant space in order that they might consult without being seen by the passers-by or by the sentinel who guards the wicket of La Force a few paces distant. It must be added, that the rain kept this sentinel blocked in his box.

　　Thenardier, not being able to distinguish their visages, lent an ear to their words with the desperate attention of a wretch who feels himself lost.

　　Thenardier saw something resembling a gleam of hope flash before his eyes,--these men conversed in slang.

　　The first said in a low but distinct voice:--

　　"Let's cut.

　　What are we up to here?"

　　The second replied:

　　"It's raining hard enough to put out the very devil's fire.

　　And the bobbies will be along instanter. There's a soldier on guard yonder.

　　We shall get nabbed here."

　　These two words, icigo and icicaille, both of which mean ici, and which belong, the first to the slang of the barriers, the second to the slang of the Temple, were flashes of light for Thenardier. By the icigo he recognized Brujon, who was a prowler of the barriers, by the icicaille he knew Babet, who, among his other trades, had been an old-clothes broker at the Temple.

　　The antique slang of the great century is no longer spoken except in the Temple, and Babet was really the only person who spoke it in all its purity.

　　Had it not been for the icicaille, Thenardier would not have recognized him, for he had entirely changed his voice.

　　In the meanwhile, the third man had intervened.

　　"There's no hurry yet, let's wait a bit.

　　How do we know that he doesn't stand in need of us?"

　　By this, which was nothing but French, Thenardier recognized Montparnasse, who made it a point in his elegance to understand all slangs and to speak none of them.

　　As for the fourth, he held his peace, but his huge shoulders betrayed him.

　　Thenardier did not hesitate.

　　It was Guelemer.

　　Brujon replied almost impetuously but still in a low tone:--

　　"What are you jabbering about?

　　The tavern-keeper hasn't managed to cut his stick.

　　He don't tumble to the racket, that he don't! You have to be a pretty knowing cove to tear up your shirt, cut up your sheet to make a rope, punch holes in doors, get up false papers, make false keys, file your irons, hang out your cord, hide yourself, and disguise yourself!

　　The old fellow hasn't managed to play it, he doesn't understand how to work the business."

　　Babet added, still in that classical slang which was spoken by Poulailler and Cartouche, and which is to the bold, new, highly colored and risky argot used by Brujon what the language of Racine is to the language of Andre Chenier:--

　　"Your tavern-keeper must have been nabbed in the act.

　　You have to be knowing.

　　He's only a greenhorn.

　　He must have let himself be taken in by a bobby, perhaps even by a sheep who played it on him as his pal.

　　Listen, Montparnasse, do you hear those shouts in the prison? You have seen all those lights.

　　He's recaptured, there!

　　He'll get off with twenty years.

　　I ain't afraid, I ain't a coward, but there ain't anything more to do, or otherwise they'd lead us a dance.

　　Don't get mad, come with us, let's go drink a bottle of old wine together."

　　"One doesn't desert one's friends in a scrape," grumbled Montparnasse.

　　"I tell you he's nabbed!" retorted Brujon.

　　"At the present moment, the inn-keeper ain't worth a ha'penny. We can't do nothing for him. Let's be off.

　　Every minute I think a bobby has got me in his fist."

　　Montparnasse no longer offered more than a feeble resistance; the fact is, that these four men, with the fidelity of ruffians who never abandon each other, had prowled all night long about La Force, great as was their peril, in the hope of seeing Thenardier make his appearance on the top of some wall.

　　But the night, which was really growing too fine,--for the downpour was such as to render all the streets deserted,--the cold which was overpowering them, their soaked garments, their hole-ridden shoes, the alarming noise which had just burst forth in the prison, the hours which had elapsed, the patrol which they had encountered, the hope which was vanishing, all urged them to beat a retreat.

　　Montparnasse himself, who was, perhaps, almost Thenardier's son-in-law, yielded.

　　A moment more, and they would be gone.

　　Thenardier was panting on his wall like the shipwrecked sufferers of the Meduse on their raft when they beheld the vessel which had appeared in sight vanish on the horizon.

　　He dared not call to them; a cry might be heard and ruin everything. An idea occurred to him, a last idea, a flash of inspiration; he drew from his pocket the end of Brujon's rope, which he had detached from the chimney of the New Building, and flung it into the space enclosed by the fence.

　　This rope fell at their feet.

　　"A widow,"[37] said Babet.

　　 [37] Argot of the Temple.

　　 "My tortouse!"[38] said Brujon.

　　 [38] Argot of the barriers.

　　 "The tavern-keeper is there," said Montparnasse.

　　They raised their eyes.

　　Thenardier thrust out his head a very little.

　　"Quick!" said Montparnasse, "have you the other end of the rope, Brujon?"

　　"Yes."

　　"Knot the two pieces together, we'll fling him the rope, he can fasten it to the wall, and he'll have enough of it to get down with."

　　Thenardier ran the risk, and spoke:--

　　"I am paralyzed with cold."

　　"We'll warm you up."

　　"I can't budge."

　　"Let yourself slide, we'll catch you."

　　"My hands are benumbed."

　　"Only fasten the rope to the wall."

　　"I can't."

　　"Then one of us must climb up," said Montparnasse.

　　"Three stories!" ejaculated Brujon.

　　An ancient plaster flue, which had served for a stove that had been used in the shanty in former times, ran along the wall and mounted almost to the very spot where they could see Thenardier. This flue, then much damaged and full of cracks, has since fallen, but the marks of it are still visible.

　　It was very narrow.

　　"One might get up by the help of that," said Montparnasse.

　　"By that flue?" exclaimed Babet, "a grown-up cove, never! it would take a brat."

　　"A brat must be got," resumed Brujon.

　　"Where are we to find a young 'un?" said Guelemer.

　　"Wait," said Montparnasse.

　　"I've got the very article."

　　He opened the gate of the fence very softly, made sure that no one was passing along the street, stepped out cautiously, shut the gate behind him, and set off at a run in the direction of the Bastille.

　　Seven or eight minutes elapsed, eight thousand centuries to Thenardier; Babet, Brujon, and Guelemer did not open their lips; at last the gate opened once more, and Montparnasse appeared, breathless, and followed by Gavroche.

　　The rain still rendered the street completely deserted.

　　Little Gavroche entered the enclosure and gazed at the forms of these ruffians with a tranquil air.

　　The water was dripping from his hair. Guelemer addressed him:--

　　"Are you a man, young 'un?"

　　Gavroche shrugged his shoulders, and replied:--

　　"A young 'un like me's a man, and men like you are babes."

　　"The brat's tongue's well hung!" exclaimed Babet.

　　"The Paris brat ain't made of straw," added Brujon.

　　"What do you want?" asked Gavroche.

　　Montparnasse answered:--

　　"Climb up that flue."

　　"With this rope," said Babet.

　　"And fasten it," continued Brujon.

　　"To the top of the wall," went on Babet.

　　"To the cross-bar of the window," added Brujon.

　　"And then?" said Gavroche.

　　"There!" said Guelemer.

　　The gamin examined the rope, the flue, the wall, the windows, and made that indescribable and disdainful noise with his lips which signifies:--

　　"Is that all!"

　　"There's a man up there whom you are to save," resumed Montparnasse.

　　"Will you?" began Brujon again.

　　"Greenhorn!" replied the lad, as though the question appeared a most unprecedented one to him.

　　And he took off his shoes.

　　Guelemer seized Gavroche by one arm, set him on the roof of the shanty, whose worm-eaten planks bent beneath the urchin's weight, and handed him the rope which Brujon had knotted together during Montparnasse's absence.

　　The gamin directed his steps towards the flue, which it was easy to enter, thanks to a large crack which touched the roof.

　　At the moment when he was on the point of ascending, Thenardier, who saw life and safety approaching, bent over the edge of the wall; the first light of dawn struck white upon his brow dripping with sweat, upon his livid cheek-bones, his sharp and savage nose, his bristling gray beard, and Gavroche recognized him.

　　"Hullo! it's my father!

　　Oh, that won't hinder."

　　And taking the rope in his teeth, he resolutely began the ascent.

　　He reached the summit of the hut, bestrode the old wall as though it had been a horse.

　　and knotted the rope firmly to the upper cross-bar of the window.

　　A moment later, Thenardier was in the street.

　　As soon as he touched the pavement, as soon as he found himself out of danger, he was no longer either weary, or chilled or trembling; the terrible things from which he had escaped vanished like smoke, all that strange and ferocious mind awoke once more, and stood erect and free, ready to march onward.

　　These were this man's first words:--

　　"Now, whom are we to eat?"

　　It is useless to explain the sense of this frightfully transparent remark, which signifies both to kill, to assassinate, and to plunder. To eat, true sense:

　　to devour.

　　"Let's get well into a corner," said Brujon.

　　"Let's settle it in three words, and part at once.

　　There was an affair that promised well in the Rue Plumet, a deserted street, an isolated house, an old rotten gate on a garden, and lone women."

　　"Well! why not?" demanded Thenardier.

　　"Your girl, Eponine, went to see about the matter," replied Babet.

　　"And she brought a biscuit to Magnon," added Guelemer.

　　"Nothing to be made there."

　　"The girl's no fool," said Thenardier.

　　"Still, it must be seen to."

　　"Yes, yes," said Brujon, "it must be looked up."

　　In the meanwhile, none of the men seemed to see Gavroche, who, during this colloquy, had seated himself on one of the fence-posts; he waited a few moments, thinking that perhaps his father would turn towards him, then he put on his shoes again, and said:--

　　"Is that all?

　　You don't want any more, my men?

　　Now you're out of your scrape.

　　I'm off.

　　I must go and get my brats out of bed."

　　And off he went.

　　The five men emerged, one after another, from the enclosure.

　　When Gavroche had disappeared at the corner of the Rue des Ballets, Babet took Thenardier aside.

　　"Did you take a good look at that young 'un?" he asked.

　　"What young 'un?"

　　"The one who climbed the wall and carried you the rope."

　　"Not particularly."

　　"Well, I don't know, but it strikes me that it was your son."

　　"Bah!" said Thenardier, "do you think so?"

BOOK SEVENTH.-SLANG

CHAPTER I

　　ORIGIN

　　Pigritia is a terrible word.

　　It engenders a whole world, la pegre, for which read theft, and a hell, la pegrenne, for which read hunger.

　　Thus, idleness is the mother.

　　She has a son, theft, and a daughter, hunger.

　　Where are we at this moment?

　　In the land of slang.

　　What is slang?

　　It is at one and the same time, a nation and a dialect; it is theft in its two kinds; people and language.

　　When, four and thirty years ago, the narrator of this grave and sombre history introduced into a work written with the same aim as this[39] a thief who talked argot, there arose amazement and clamor.--"What! How!

　　Argot!

　　Why, argot is horrible! It is the language of prisons, galleys, convicts, of everything that is most abominable in society!" etc., etc.

　　 [39] The Day of a Condemned Man.

　　 We have never understood this sort of objections.

　　Since that time, two powerful romancers, one of whom is a profound observer of the human heart, the other an intrepid friend of the people, Balzac and Eugene Sue, having represented their ruffians as talking their natural language, as the author of The Day of a Condemned Man did in 1828, the same objections have been raised. People repeated:

　　"What do authors mean by that revolting dialect? Slang is odious!

　　Slang makes one shudder!"

　　Who denies that?

　　Of course it does.

　　When it is a question of probing a wound, a gulf, a society, since when has it been considered wrong to go too far? to go to the bottom?

　　We have always thought that it was sometimes a courageous act, and, at least, a simple and useful deed, worthy of the sympathetic attention which duty accepted and fulfilled merits. Why should one not explore everything, and study everything? Why should one halt on the way?

　　The halt is a matter depending on the sounding-line, and not on the leadsman.

　　Certainly, too, it is neither an attractive nor an easy task to undertake an investigation into the lowest depths of the social order, where terra firma comes to an end and where mud begins, to rummage in those vague, murky waves, to follow up, to seize and to fling, still quivering, upon the pavement that abject dialect which is dripping with filth when thus brought to the light, that pustulous vocabulary each word of which seems an unclean ring from a monster of the mire and the shadows.

　　Nothing is more lugubrious than the contemplation thus in its nudity, in the broad light of thought, of the horrible swarming of slang.

　　It seems, in fact, to be a sort of horrible beast made for the night which has just been torn from its cesspool. One thinks one beholds a frightful, living, and bristling thicket which quivers, rustles, wavers, returns to shadow, threatens and glares. One word resembles a claw, another an extinguished and bleeding eye, such and such a phrase seems to move like the claw of a crab. All this is alive with the hideous vitality of things which have been organized out of disorganization.

　　Now, when has horror ever excluded study?

　　Since when has malady banished medicine?

　　Can one imagine a naturalist refusing to study the viper, the bat, the scorpion, the centipede, the tarantula, and one who would cast them back into their darkness, saying:

　　"Oh! how ugly that is!"

　　The thinker who should turn aside from slang would resemble a surgeon who should avert his face from an ulcer or a wart. He would be like a philologist refusing to examine a fact in language, a philosopher hesitating to scrutinize a fact in humanity. For, it must be stated to those who are ignorant of the case, that argot is both a literary phenomenon and a social result. What is slang, properly speaking?

　　It is the language of wretchedness.

　　We may be stopped; the fact may be put to us in general terms, which is one way of attenuating it; we may be told, that all trades, professions, it may be added, all the accidents of the social hierarchy and all forms of intelligence, have their own slang. The merchant who says:

　　"Montpellier not active, Marseilles fine quality," the broker on 'change who says:

　　"Assets at end of current month," the gambler who says:

　　"Tiers et tout, refait de pique," the sheriff of the Norman Isles who says:

　　The holder in fee reverting to his landed estate cannot claim the fruits of that estate during the hereditary seizure of the real estate by the mortgagor," the playwright who says: "The piece was hissed," the comedian who says:

　　"I've made a hit," the philosopher who says:

　　"Phenomenal triplicity," the huntsman who says:

　　"Voileci allais, Voileci fuyant," the phrenologist who says:

　　"Amativeness, combativeness, secretiveness," the infantry soldier who says:

　　"My shooting-iron," the cavalry-man who says: "My turkey-cock," the fencing-master who says:

　　"Tierce, quarte, break," the printer who says:

　　"My shooting-stick and galley,"--all, printer, fencing-master, cavalry dragoon, infantry-man, phrenologist, huntsman, philosopher, comedian, playwright, sheriff, gambler, stock-broker, and merchant, speak slang.

　　The painter who says: "My grinder," the notary who says:

　　"My Skip-the-Gutter," the hairdresser who says:

　　"My mealyback," the cobbler who says: "My cub," talks slang.

　　Strictly speaking, if one absolutely insists on the point, all the different fashions of saying the right and the left, the sailor's port and starboard, the scene-shifter's court-side, and garden-side, the beadle's Gospel-side and Epistle-side, are slang. There is the slang of the affected lady as well as of the precieuses. The Hotel Rambouillet nearly adjoins the Cour des Miracles.

　　There is a slang of duchesses, witness this phrase contained in a love-letter from a very great lady and a very pretty woman of the Restoration: "You will find in this gossip a fultitude of reasons why I should libertize."[40] Diplomatic ciphers are slang; the pontifical chancellery by using 26 for Rome, grkztntgzyal for despatch, and abfxustgrnogrkzu tu XI.

　　for the Due de Modena, speaks slang. The physicians of the Middle Ages who, for carrot, radish, and turnip, said Opoponach, perfroschinum, reptitalmus, dracatholicum, angelorum, postmegorum, talked slang.

　　The sugar-manufacturer who says: "Loaf, clarified, lumps, bastard, common, burnt,"--this honest manufacturer talks slang.

　　A certain school of criticism twenty years ago, which used to say:

　　"Half of the works of Shakespeare consists of plays upon words and puns,"--talked slang.

　　The poet, and the artist who, with profound understanding, would designate M. de Montmorency as "a bourgeois," if he were not a judge of verses and statues, speak slang.

　　The classic Academician who calls flowers "Flora," fruits, "Pomona," the sea, "Neptune," love, "fires," beauty, "charms," a horse, "a courser," the white or tricolored cockade, "the rose of Bellona," the three-cornered hat, "Mars' triangle,"--that classical Academician talks slang.

　　Algebra, medicine, botany, have each their slang. The tongue which is employed on board ship, that wonderful language of the sea, which is so complete and so picturesque, which was spoken by Jean Bart, Duquesne, Suffren, and Duperre, which mingles with the whistling of the rigging, the sound of the speaking-trumpets, the shock of the boarding-irons, the roll of the sea, the wind, the gale, the cannon, is wholly a heroic and dazzling slang, which is to the fierce slang of the thieves what the lion is to the jackal.

　　 [40] "Vous trouverez dans ces potains-la, une foultitude de raisons pour que je me libertise."

　　 No doubt.

　　But say what we will, this manner of understanding the word slang is an extension which every one will not admit. For our part, we reserve to the word its ancient and precise, circumscribed and determined significance, and we restrict slang to slang.

　　The veritable slang and the slang that is pre-eminently slang, if the two words can be coupled thus, the slang immemorial which was a kingdom, is nothing else, we repeat, than the homely, uneasy, crafty, treacherous, venomous, cruel, equivocal, vile, profound, fatal tongue of wretchedness.

　　There exists, at the extremity of all abasement and all misfortunes, a last misery which revolts and makes up its mind to enter into conflict with the whole mass of fortunate facts and reigning rights; a fearful conflict, where, now cunning, now violent, unhealthy and ferocious at one and the same time, it attacks the social order with pin-pricks through vice, and with club-blows through crime.

　　To meet the needs of this conflict, wretchedness has invented a language of combat, which is slang.

　　To keep afloat and to rescue from oblivion, to hold above the gulf, were it but a fragment of some language which man has spoken and which would, otherwise, be lost, that is to say, one of the elements, good or bad, of which civilization is composed, or by which it is complicated, to extend the records of social observation; is to serve civilization itself.

　　This service Plautus rendered, consciously or unconsciously, by making two Carthaginian soldiers talk Phoenician; that service Moliere rendered, by making so many of his characters talk Levantine and all sorts of dialects. Here objections spring up afresh.

　　Phoenician, very good! Levantine, quite right!

　　Even dialect, let that pass!

　　They are tongues which have belonged to nations or provinces; but slang! What is the use of preserving slang?

　　What is the good of assisting slang "to survive"?

　　To this we reply in one word, only.

　　Assuredly, if the tongue which a nation or a province has spoken is worthy of interest, the language which has been spoken by a misery is still more worthy of attention and study.

　　It is the language which has been spoken, in France, for example, for more than four centuries, not only by a misery, but by every possible human misery.

　　And then, we insist upon it, the study of social deformities and infirmities, and the task of pointing them out with a view to remedy, is not a business in which choice is permitted. The historian of manners and ideas has no less austere a mission than the historian of events.

　　The latter has the surface of civilization, the conflicts of crowns, the births of princes, the marriages of kings, battles, assemblages, great public men, revolutions in the daylight, everything on the exterior; the other historian has the interior, the depths, the people who toil, suffer, wait, the oppressed woman, the agonizing child, the secret war between man and man, obscure ferocities, prejudices, plotted iniquities, the subterranean, the indistinct tremors of multitudes, the die-of-hunger, the counter-blows of the law, the secret evolution of souls, the go-bare-foot, the bare-armed, the disinherited, the orphans, the unhappy, and the infamous, all the forms which roam through the darkness.

　　He must descend with his heart full of charity, and severity at the same time, as a brother and as a judge, to those impenetrable casemates where crawl, pell-mell, those who bleed and those who deal the blow, those who weep and those who curse, those who fast and those who devour, those who endure evil and those who inflict it.

　　Have these historians of hearts and souls duties at all inferior to the historians of external facts?

　　Does any one think that Alighieri has any fewer things to say than Machiavelli? Is the under side of civilization any less important than the upper side merely because it is deeper and more sombre?

　　Do we really know the mountain well when we are not acquainted with the cavern?

　　Let us say, moreover, parenthetically, that from a few words of what precedes a marked separation might be inferred between the two classes of historians which does not exist in our mind. No one is a good historian of the patent, visible, striking, and public life of peoples, if he is not, at the same time, in a certain measure, the historian of their deep and hidden life; and no one is a good historian of the interior unless he understands how, at need, to be the historian of the exterior also. The history of manners and ideas permeates the history of events, and this is true reciprocally.

　　They constitute two different orders of facts which correspond to each other, which are always interlaced, and which often bring forth results.

　　All the lineaments which providence traces on the surface of a nation have their parallels, sombre but distinct, in their depths, and all convulsions of the depths produce ebullitions on the surface.

　　True history being a mixture of all things, the true historian mingles in everything.

　　Man is not a circle with a single centre; he is an ellipse with a double focus.

　　Facts form one of these, and ideas the other.

　　Slang is nothing but a dressing-room where the tongue having some bad action to perform, disguises itself.

　　There it clothes itself in word-masks, in metaphor-rags. In this guise it becomes horrible.

　　One finds it difficult to recognize.

　　Is it really the French tongue, the great human tongue?

　　Behold it ready to step upon the stage and to retort upon crime, and prepared for all the employments of the repertory of evil.

　　It no longer walks, it hobbles; it limps on the crutch of the Court of Miracles, a crutch metamorphosable into a club; it is called vagrancy; every sort of spectre, its dressers, have painted its face, it crawls and rears, the double gait of the reptile.

　　Henceforth, it is apt at all roles, it is made suspicious by the counterfeiter, covered with verdigris by the forger, blacked by the soot of the incendiary; and the murderer applies its rouge.

　　When one listens, by the side of honest men, at the portals of society, one overhears the dialogues of those who are on the outside. One distinguishes questions and replies.

　　One perceives, without understanding it, a hideous murmur, sounding almost like human accents, but more nearly resembling a howl than an articulate word. It is slang.

　　The words are misshapen and stamped with an indescribable and fantastic bestiality.

　　One thinks one hears hydras talking.

　　It is unintelligible in the dark.

　　It gnashes and whispers, completing the gloom with mystery.

　　It is black in misfortune, it is blacker still in crime; these two blacknesses amalgamated, compose slang.

　　Obscurity in the atmosphere, obscurity in acts, obscurity in voices.

　　Terrible, toad-like tongue which goes and comes, leaps, crawls, slobbers, and stirs about in monstrous wise in that immense gray fog composed of rain and night, of hunger, of vice, of falsehood, of injustice, of nudity, of suffocation, and of winter, the high noonday of the miserable.

　　Let us have compassion on the chastised.

　　Alas!

　　Who are we ourselves? Who am I who now address you?

　　Who are you who are listening to me? And are you very sure that we have done nothing before we were born? The earth is not devoid of resemblance to a jail.

　　Who knows whether man is not a recaptured offender against divine justice? Look closely at life.

　　It is so made, that everywhere we feel the sense of punishment.

　　Are you what is called a happy man?

　　Well! you are sad every day. Each day has its own great grief or its little care.

　　Yesterday you were trembling for a health that is dear to you, to-day you fear for your own; to-morrow it will be anxiety about money, the day after to-morrow the diatribe of a slanderer, the day after that, the misfortune of some friend; then the prevailing weather, then something that has been broken or lost, then a pleasure with which your conscience and your vertebral column reproach you; again, the course of public affairs.

　　This without reckoning in the pains of the heart. And so it goes on.

　　One cloud is dispelled, another forms. There is hardly one day out of a hundred which is wholly joyous and sunny.

　　And you belong to that small class who are happy! As for the rest of mankind, stagnating night rests upon them.

　　Thoughtful minds make but little use of the phrase:

　　the fortunate and the unfortunate.

　　In this world, evidently the vestibule of another, there are no fortunate.

　　The real human division is this:

　　the luminous and the shady. To diminish the number of the shady, to augment the number of the luminous,--that is the object.

　　That is why we cry: Education! science!

　　To teach reading, means to light the fire; every syllable spelled out sparkles.

　　However, he who says light does not, necessarily, say joy. People suffer in the light; excess burns.

　　The flame is the enemy of the wing.

　　To burn without ceasing to fly,--therein lies the marvel of genius.

　　When you shall have learned to know, and to love, you will still suffer.

　　The day is born in tears.

　　The luminous weep, if only over those in darkness.

BOOK SEVENTH.-SLANG

CHAPTER II

　　ROOTS

　　 Slang is the tongue of those who sit in darkness.

　　Thought is moved in its most sombre depths, social philosophy is bidden to its most poignant meditations, in the presence of that enigmatic dialect at once so blighted and rebellious. Therein lies chastisement made visible.

　　Every syllable has an air of being marked.

　　The words of the vulgar tongue appear therein wrinkled and shrivelled, as it were, beneath the hot iron of the executioner.

　　Some seem to be still smoking.

　　Such and such a phrase produces upon you the effect of the shoulder of a thief branded with the fleur-de-lys, which has suddenly been laid bare. Ideas almost refuse to be expressed in these substantives which are fugitives from justice.

　　Metaphor is sometimes so shameless, that one feels that it has worn the iron neck-fetter.

　　Moreover, in spite of all this, and because of all this, this strange dialect has by rights, its own compartment in that great impartial case of pigeon-holes where there is room for the rusty farthing as well as for the gold medal, and which is called literature. Slang, whether the public admit the fact or not has its syntax and its poetry.

　　It is a language.

　　Yes, by the deformity of certain terms, we recognize the fact that it was chewed by Mandrin, and by the splendor of certain metonymies, we feel that Villon spoke it.

　　That exquisite and celebrated verse--

　　Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan?

　　But where are the snows of years gone by?

　　is a verse of slang.

　　Antam--ante annum--is a word of Thunes slang, which signified the past year, and by extension, formerly. Thirty-five years ago, at the epoch of the departure of the great chain-gang, there could be read in one of the cells at Bicetre, this maxim engraved with a nail on the wall by a king of Thunes condemned to the galleys:

　　Les dabs d'antan trimaient siempre pour la pierre du Coesre.

　　This means Kings in days gone by always went and had themselves anointed.

　　In the opinion of that king, anointment meant the galleys.

　　The word decarade, which expresses the departure of heavy vehicles at a gallop, is attributed to Villon, and it is worthy of him. This word, which strikes fire with all four of its feet, sums up in a masterly onomatopoeia the whole of La Fontaine's admirable verse:--

　　Six forts chevaux tiraient un coche.

　　Six stout horses drew a coach.

　　 From a purely literary point of view, few studies would prove more curious and fruitful than the study of slang.

　　It is a whole language within a language, a sort of sickly excrescence, an unhealthy graft which has produced a vegetation, a parasite which has its roots in the old Gallic trunk, and whose sinister foliage crawls all over one side of the language.

　　This is what may be called the first, the vulgar aspect of slang.

　　But, for those who study the tongue as it should be studied, that is to say, as geologists study the earth, slang appears like a veritable alluvial deposit.

　　According as one digs a longer or shorter distance into it, one finds in slang, below the old popular French, Provencal, Spanish, Italian, Levantine, that language of the Mediterranean ports, English and German, the Romance language in its three varieties, French, Italian, and Romance Romance, Latin, and finally Basque and Celtic.

　　A profound and unique formation. A subterranean edifice erected in common by all the miserable. Each accursed race has deposited its layer, each suffering has dropped its stone there, each heart has contributed its pebble. A throng of evil, base, or irritated souls, who have traversed life and have vanished into eternity, linger there almost entirely visible still beneath the form of some monstrous word.

　　Do you want Spanish?

　　The old Gothic slang abounded in it. Here is boffete, a box on the ear, which is derived from bofeton; vantane, window (later on vanterne), which comes from vantana; gat, cat, which comes from gato; acite, oil, which comes from aceyte. Do you want Italian?

　　Here is spade, sword, which comes from spada; carvel, boat, which comes from caravella.

　　Do you want English? Here is bichot, which comes from bishop; raille, spy, which comes from rascal, rascalion; pilche, a case, which comes from pilcher, a sheath. Do you want German?

　　Here is the caleur, the waiter, kellner; the hers, the master, herzog (duke). Do you want Latin?

　　Here is frangir, to break, frangere; affurer, to steal, fur; cadene, chain, catena. There is one word which crops up in every language of the continent, with a sort of mysterious power and authority.

　　It is the word magnus; the Scotchman makes of it his mac, which designates the chief of the clan; Mac-Farlane, Mac-Callumore, the great Farlane, the great Callumore[41]; slang turns it into meck and later le meg, that is to say, God.

　　Would you like Basque?

　　Here is gahisto, the devil, which comes from gaiztoa, evil; sorgabon, good night, which comes from gabon, good evening.

　　Do you want Celtic? Here is blavin, a handkerchief, which comes from blavet, gushing water; menesse, a woman (in a bad sense), which comes from meinec, full of stones; barant, brook, from baranton, fountain; goffeur, locksmith, from goff, blacksmith; guedouze, death, which comes from guenn-du, black-white. Finally, would you like history?

　　Slang calls crowns les malteses, a souvenir of the coin in circulation on the galleys of Malta.

　　 [41] It must be observed, however, that mac in Celtic means son.

　　 In addition to the philological origins just indicated, slang possesses other and still more natural roots, which spring, so to speak, from the mind of man itself.

　　In the first place, the direct creation of words.

　　Therein lies the mystery of tongues.

　　To paint with words, which contains figures one knows not how or why, is the primitive foundation of all human languages, what may be called their granite.

　　Slang abounds in words of this description, immediate words, words created instantaneously no one knows either where or by whom, without etymology, without analogies, without derivatives, solitary, barbarous, sometimes hideous words, which at times possess a singular power of expression and which live.

　　The executioner, le taule; the forest, le sabri; fear, flight, taf; the lackey, le larbin; the mineral, the prefect, the minister, pharos; the devil, le rabouin. Nothing is stranger than these words which both mask and reveal. Some, le rabouin, for example, are at the same time grotesque and terrible, and produce on you the effect of a cyclopean grimace.

　　ln the second place, metaphor.

　　The peculiarity of a language which is desirous of saying all yet concealing all is that it is rich in figures.

　　Metaphor is an enigma, wherein the thief who is plotting a stroke, the prisoner who is arranging an escape, take refuge. No idiom is more metaphorical than slang:

　　devisser le coco (to unscrew the nut), to twist the neck; tortiller (to wriggle), to eat; etre gerbe, to be tried; a rat, a bread thief; il lansquine, it rains, a striking, ancient figure which partly bears its date about it, which assimilates long oblique lines of rain, with the dense and slanting pikes of the lancers, and which compresses into a single word the popular expression:

　　it rains halberds.

　　Sometimes, in proportion as slang progresses from the first epoch to the second, words pass from the primitive and savage sense to the metaphorical sense. The devil ceases to be le rabouin, and becomes le boulanger (the baker), who puts the bread into the oven.

　　This is more witty, but less grand, something like Racine after Corneille, like Euripides after AEschylus.

　　Certain slang phrases which participate in the two epochs and have at once the barbaric character and the metaphorical character resemble phantasmagories.

　　Les sorgueuers vont solliciter des gails a la lune--the prowlers are going to steal horses by night,-- this passes before the mind like a group of spectres.

　　One knows not what one sees.

　　In the third place, the expedient.

　　Slang lives on the language. It uses it in accordance with its fancy, it dips into it hap-hazard, and it often confines itself, when occasion arises, to alter it in a gross and summary fashion.

　　Occasionally, with the ordinary words thus deformed and complicated with words of pure slang, picturesque phrases are formed, in which there can be felt the mixture of the two preceding elements, the direct creation and the metaphor: le cab jaspine, je marronne que la roulotte de Pantin trime dans le sabri, the dog is barking, I suspect that the diligence for Paris is passing through the woods.

　　Le dab est sinve, la dabuge est merloussiere, la fee est bative, the bourgeois is stupid, the bourgeoise is cunning, the daughter is pretty.

　　Generally, to throw listeners off the track, slang confines itself to adding to all the words of the language without distinction, an ignoble tail, a termination in aille, in orgue, in iergue, or in uche.

　　Thus:

　　Vousiergue trouvaille bonorgue ce gigotmuche?

　　Do you think that leg of mutton good? A phrase addressed by Cartouche to a turnkey in order to find out whether the sum offered for his escape suited him.

　　The termination in mar has been added recently.

　　Slang, being the dialect of corruption, quickly becomes corrupted itself. Besides this, as it is always seeking concealment, as soon as it feels that it is understood, it changes its form.

　　Contrary to what happens with every other vegetation, every ray of light which falls upon it kills whatever it touches.

　　Thus slang is in constant process of decomposition and recomposition; an obscure and rapid work which never pauses.

　　It passes over more ground in ten years than a language in ten centuries.

　　Thus le larton (bread) becomes le lartif; le gail (horse) becomes le gaye; la fertanche (straw) becomes la fertille; le momignard (brat), le momacque; les fiques (duds), frusques; la chique (the church), l'egrugeoir; le colabre (neck), le colas. The devil is at first, gahisto, then le rabouin, then the baker; the priest is a ratichon, then the boar (le sanglier); the dagger is le vingt-deux (twenty-two), then le surin, then le lingre; the police are railles, then roussins, then rousses, then marchands de lacets (dealers in stay-laces), then coquers, then cognes; the executioner is le taule, then Charlot, l'atigeur, then le becquillard. In the seventeenth century, to fight was "to give each other snuff"; in the nineteenth it is "to chew each other's throats." There have been twenty different phrases between these two extremes. Cartouche's talk would have been Hebrew to Lacenaire.

　　All the words of this language are perpetually engaged in flight like the men who utter them.

　　Still, from time to time, and in consequence of this very movement, the ancient slang crops up again and becomes new once more.

　　It has its headquarters where it maintains its sway.

　　The Temple preserved the slang of the seventeenth century; Bicetre, when it was a prison, preserved the slang of Thunes.

　　There one could hear the termination in anche of the old Thuneurs.

　　Boyanches-tu (bois-tu), do you drink? But perpetual movement remains its law, nevertheless.

　　If the philosopher succeeds in fixing, for a moment, for purposes of observation, this language which is incessantly evaporating, he falls into doleful and useful meditation.

　　No study is more efficacious and more fecund in instruction.

　　There is not a metaphor, not an analogy, in slang, which does not contain a lesson. Among these men, to beat means to feign; one beats a malady; ruse is their strength.

　　For them, the idea of the man is not separated from the idea of darkness.

　　The night is called la sorgue; man, l'orgue. Man is a derivative of the night.

　　They have taken up the practice of considering society in the light of an atmosphere which kills them, of a fatal force, and they speak of their liberty as one would speak of his health. A man under arrest is a sick man; one who is condemned is a dead man.

　　The most terrible thing for the prisoner within the four walls in which he is buried, is a sort of glacial chastity, and he calls the dungeon the castus.

　　In that funereal place, life outside always presents itself under its most smiling aspect.

　　The prisoner has irons on his feet; you think, perhaps, that his thought is that it is with the feet that one walks?

　　No; he is thinking that it is with the feet that one dances; so, when he has succeeded in severing his fetters, his first idea is that now he can dance, and he calls the saw the bastringue (public-house ball).--A name is a centre; profound assimilation.--The ruffian has two heads, one of which reasons out his actions and leads him all his life long, and the other which he has upon his shoulders on the day of his death; he calls the head which counsels him in crime la sorbonne, and the head which expiates it la tronche.--When a man has no longer anything but rags upon his body and vices in his heart, when he has arrived at that double moral and material degradation which the word blackguard characterizes in its two acceptations, he is ripe for crime; he is like a well-whetted knife; he has two cutting edges, his distress and his malice; so slang does not say a blackguard, it says un reguise.--What are the galleys? A brazier of damnation, a hell.

　　The convict calls himself a fagot.-- And finally, what name do malefactors give to their prison? The college.

　　A whole penitentiary system can be evolved from that word.

　　Does the reader wish to know where the majority of the songs of the galleys, those refrains called in the special vocabulary lirlonfa, have had their birth?

　　Let him listen to what follows:--

　　There existed at the Chatelet in Paris a large and long cellar. This cellar was eight feet below the level of the Seine.

　　It had neither windows nor air-holes, its only aperture was the door; men could enter there, air could not.

　　This vault had for ceiling a vault of stone, and for floor ten inches of mud.

　　It was flagged; but the pavement had rotted and cracked under the oozing of the water. Eight feet above the floor, a long and massive beam traversed this subterranean excavation from side to side; from this beam hung, at short distances apart, chains three feet long, and at the end of these chains there were rings for the neck.

　　In this vault, men who had been condemned to the galleys were incarcerated until the day of their departure for Toulon.

　　They were thrust under this beam, where each one found his fetters swinging in the darkness and waiting for him.

　　The chains, those pendant arms, and the necklets, those open hands, caught the unhappy wretches by the throat.

　　They were rivetted and left there.

　　As the chain was too short, they could not lie down. They remained motionless in that cavern, in that night, beneath that beam, almost hanging, forced to unheard-of efforts to reach their bread, jug, or their vault overhead, mud even to mid-leg, filth flowing to their very calves, broken asunder with fatigue, with thighs and knees giving way, clinging fast to the chain with their hands in order to obtain some rest, unable to sleep except when standing erect, and awakened every moment by the strangling of the collar; some woke no more.

　　In order to eat, they pushed the bread, which was flung to them in the mud, along their leg with their heel until it reached their hand.

　　How long did they remain thus?

　　One month, two months, six months sometimes; one stayed a year.

　　It was the antechamber of the galleys. Men were put there for stealing a hare from the king.

　　In this sepulchre-hell, what did they do?

　　What man can do in a sepulchre, they went through the agonies of death, and what can man do in hell, they sang; for song lingers where there is no longer any hope. In the waters of Malta, when a galley was approaching, the song could be heard before the sound of the oars.

　　Poor Survincent, the poacher, who had gone through the prison-cellar of the Chatelet, said: "It was the rhymes that kept me up."

　　Uselessness of poetry. What is the good of rhyme?

　　It is in this cellar that nearly all the slang songs had their birth.

　　It is from the dungeon of the Grand-Chatelet of Paris that comes the melancholy refrain of the Montgomery galley: "Timaloumisaine, timaloumison."

　　The majority of these

　　 Icicaille est la theatre

　　Here is the theatre

　　 Du petit dardant.

　　 Of the little archer (Cupid).

　　 Do what you will, you cannot annihilate that eternal relic in the heart of man, love.

　　In this world of dismal deeds, people keep their secrets. The secret is the thing above all others.

　　The secret, in the eyes of these wretches, is unity which serves as a base of union. To betray a secret is to tear from each member of this fierce community something of his own personality.

　　To inform against, in the energetic slang dialect, is called:

　　"to eat the bit." As though the informer drew to himself a little of the substance of all and nourished himself on a bit of each one's flesh.

　　What does it signify to receive a box on the ear? Commonplace metaphor replies:

　　"It is to see thirty-six candles."

　　Here slang intervenes and takes it up:

　　Candle, camoufle. Thereupon, the ordinary tongue gives camouflet[42] as the synonym for soufflet.

　　Thus, by a sort of infiltration from below upwards, with the aid of metaphor, that incalculable, trajectory slang mounts from the cavern to the Academy; and Poulailler saying: "I light my camoufle," causes Voltaire to write:

　　"Langleviel La Beaumelle deserves a hundred camouflets."

　　 [42] Smoke puffed in the face of a person asleep.

　　 Researches in slang mean discoveries at every step.

　　Study and investigation of this strange idiom lead to the mysterious point of intersection of regular society with society which is accursed.

　　The thief also has his food for cannon, stealable matter, you, I, whoever passes by; le pantre.

　　(Pan, everybody.)

　　Slang is language turned convict.

　　That the thinking principle of man be thrust down ever so low, that it can be dragged and pinioned there by obscure tyrannies of fatality, that it can be bound by no one knows what fetters in that abyss, is sufficient to create consternation.

　　Oh, poor thought of miserable wretches!

　　Alas! will no one come to the succor of the human soul in that darkness? Is it her destiny there to await forever the mind, the liberator, the immense rider of Pegasi and hippo-griffs, the combatant of heroes of the dawn who shall descend from the azure between two wings, the radiant knight of the future?

　　Will she forever summon in vain to her assistance the lance of light of the ideal?

　　Is she condemned to hear the fearful approach of Evil through the density of the gulf, and to catch glimpses, nearer and nearer at hand, beneath the hideous water of that dragon's head, that maw streaked with foam, and that writhing undulation of claws, swellings, and rings? Must it remain there, without a gleam of light, without hope, given over to that terrible approach, vaguely scented out by the monster, shuddering, dishevelled, wringing its arms, forever chained to the rock of night, a sombre Andromeda white and naked amid the shadows!

BOOK SEVENTH.-SLANG

CHAPTER III

　　SLANG WHICH WEEPS AND SLANG WHICH LAUGHS

　　 As the reader perceives, slang in its entirety, slang of four hundred years ago, like the slang of to-day, is permeated with that sombre, symbolical spirit which gives to all words a mien which is now mournful, now menacing.

　　One feels in it the wild and ancient sadness of those vagrants of the Court of Miracles who played at cards with packs of their own, some of which have come down to us.

　　The eight of clubs, for instance, represented a huge tree bearing eight enormous trefoil leaves, a sort of fantastic personification of the forest. At the foot of this tree a fire was burning, over which three hares were roasting a huntsman on a spit, and behind him, on another fire, hung a steaming pot, whence emerged the head of a dog.

　　Nothing can be more melancholy than these reprisals in painting, by a pack of cards, in the presence of stakes for the roasting of smugglers and of the cauldron for the boiling of counterfeiters.

　　The diverse forms assumed by thought in the realm of slang, even song, even raillery, even menace, all partook of this powerless and dejected character. All the songs, the melodies of some of which have been collected, were humble and lamentable to the point of evoking tears. The pegre is always the poor pegre, and he is always the hare in hiding, the fugitive mouse, the flying bird.

　　He hardly complains, he contents himself with sighing; one of his moans has come down to us:

　　"I do not understand how God, the father of men, can torture his children and his grandchildren and hear them cry, without himself suffering torture."[43] The wretch, whenever he has time to think, makes himself small before the low, and frail in the presence of society; he lies down flat on his face, he entreats, he appeals to the side of compassion; we feel that he is conscious of his guilt.

　　 [43] Je n'entrave que le dail comment meck, le daron des orgues, peut atiger ses momes et ses momignards et les locher criblant sans etre agite lui-meme.

　　 Towards the middle of the last century a change took place, prison songs and thieves' ritournelles assumed, so to speak, an insolent and jovial mien.

　　The plaintive malure was replaced by the larifla. We find in the eighteenth century, in nearly all the songs of the galleys and prisons, a diabolical and enigmatical gayety. We hear this strident and lilting refrain which we should say had been lighted up by a phosphorescent gleam, and which seems to have been flung into the forest by a will-o'-the-wisp playing the fife:--

　　Miralabi suslababo

　　Mirliton ribonribette

　　Surlababi mirlababo

　　Mirliton ribonribo.

　　 This was sung in a cellar or in a nook of the forest while cutting a man's throat.

　　A serious symptom.

　　In the eighteenth century, the ancient melancholy of the dejected classes vanishes.

　　They began to laugh. They rally the grand meg and the grand dab.

　　Given Louis XV. they call the King of France "le Marquis de Pantin."

　　And behold, they are almost gay.

　　A sort of gleam proceeds from these miserable wretches, as though their consciences were not heavy within them any more.

　　These lamentable tribes of darkness have no longer merely the desperate audacity of actions, they possess the heedless audacity of mind.

　　A sign that they are losing the sense of their criminality, and that they feel, even among thinkers and dreamers, some indefinable support which the latter themselves know not of. A sign that theft and pillage are beginning to filter into doctrines and sophisms, in such a way as to lose somewhat of their ugliness, while communicating much of it to sophisms and doctrines.

　　A sign, in short, of some outbreak which is prodigious and near unless some diversion shall arise.

　　Let us pause a moment.

　　Whom are we accusing here?

　　Is it the eighteenth century?

　　Is it philosophy?

　　Certainly not.

　　The work of the eighteenth century is healthy and good and wholesome. The encyclopedists, Diderot at their head; the physiocrates, Turgot at their head; the philosophers, Voltaire at their head; the Utopians, Rousseau at their head,--these are four sacred legions. Humanity's immense advance towards the light is due to them. They are the four vanguards of the human race, marching towards the four cardinal points of progress.

　　Diderot towards the beautiful, Turgot towards the useful, Voltaire towards the true, Rousseau towards the just.

　　But by the side of and above the philosophers, there were the sophists, a venomous vegetation mingled with a healthy growth, hemlock in the virgin forest.

　　While the executioner was burning the great books of the liberators of the century on the grand staircase of the court-house, writers now forgotten were publishing, with the King's sanction, no one knows what strangely disorganizing writings, which were eagerly read by the unfortunate. Some of these publications, odd to say, which were patronized by a prince, are to be found in the Secret Library.

　　These facts, significant but unknown, were imperceptible on the surface. Sometimes, in the very obscurity of a fact lurks its danger. It is obscure because it is underhand.

　　Of all these writers, the one who probably then excavated in the masses the most unhealthy gallery was Restif de La Bretonne.

　　This work, peculiar to the whole of Europe, effected more ravages in Germany than anywhere else.

　　In Germany, during a given period, summed up by Schiller in his famous drama The Robbers, theft and pillage rose up in protest against property and labor, assimilated certain specious and false elementary ideas, which, though just in appearance, were absurd in reality, enveloped themselves in these ideas, disappeared within them, after a fashion, assumed an abstract name, passed into the state of theory, and in that shape circulated among the laborious, suffering, and honest masses, unknown even to the imprudent chemists who had prepared the mixture, unknown even to the masses who accepted it.

　　Whenever a fact of this sort presents itself, the case is grave.

　　Suffering engenders wrath; and while the prosperous classes blind themselves or fall asleep, which is the same thing as shutting one's eyes, the hatred of the unfortunate classes lights its torch at some aggrieved or ill-made spirit which dreams in a corner, and sets itself to the scrutiny of society.

　　The scrutiny of hatred is a terrible thing.

　　Hence, if the ill-fortune of the times so wills it, those fearful commotions which were formerly called jacqueries, beside which purely political agitations are the merest child's play, which are no longer the conflict of the oppressed and the oppressor, but the revolt of discomfort against comfort.

　　Then everything crumbles.

　　Jacqueries are earthquakes of the people.

　　It is this peril, possibly imminent towards the close of the eighteenth century, which the French Revolution, that immense act of probity, cut short.

　　The French Revolution, which is nothing else than the idea armed with the sword, rose erect, and, with the same abrupt movement, closed the door of ill and opened the door of good.

　　It put a stop to torture, promulgated the truth, expelled miasma, rendered the century healthy, crowned the populace.

　　It may be said of it that it created man a second time, by giving him a second soul, the right.

　　The nineteenth century has inherited and profited by its work, and to-day, the social catastrophe to which we lately alluded is simply impossible.

　　Blind is he who announces it!

　　Foolish is he who fears it!

　　Revolution is the vaccine of Jacquerie.

　　Thanks to the Revolution, social conditions have changed. Feudal and monarchical maladies no longer run in our blood. There is no more of the Middle Ages in our constitution.

　　We no longer live in the days when terrible swarms within made irruptions, when one heard beneath his feet the obscure course of a dull rumble, when indescribable elevations from mole-like tunnels appeared on the surface of civilization, where the soil cracked open, where the roofs of caverns yawned, and where one suddenly beheld monstrous heads emerging from the earth.

　　The revolutionary sense is a moral sense.

　　The sentiment of right, once developed, develops the sentiment of duty.

　　The law of all is liberty, which ends where the liberty of others begins, according to Robespierre's admirable definition.

　　Since '89, the whole people has been dilating into a sublime individual; there is not a poor man, who, possessing his right, has not his ray of sun; the die-of-hunger feels within him the honesty of France; the dignity of the citizen is an internal armor; he who is free is scrupulous; he who votes reigns.

　　Hence incorruptibility; hence the miscarriage of unhealthy lusts; hence eyes heroically lowered before temptations. The revolutionary wholesomeness is such, that on a day of deliverance, a 14th of July, a 10th of August, there is no longer any populace. The first cry of the enlightened and increasing throngs is: death to thieves!

　　Progress is an honest man; the ideal and the absolute do not filch pocket-handkerchiefs. By whom were the wagons containing the wealth of the Tuileries escorted in 1848?

　　By the rag-pickers of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. Rags mounted guard over the treasure.

　　Virtue rendered these tatterdemalions resplendent. In those wagons in chests, hardly closed, and some, even, half-open, amid a hundred dazzling caskets, was that ancient crown of France, studded with diamonds, surmounted by the carbuncle of royalty, by the Regent diamond, which was worth thirty millions.

　　Barefooted, they guarded that crown.

　　Hence, no more Jacquerie.

　　I regret it for the sake of the skilful. The old fear has produced its last effects in that quarter; and henceforth it can no longer be employed in politics.

　　The principal spring of the red spectre is broken.

　　Every one knows it now. The scare-crow scares no longer.

　　The birds take liberties with the mannikin, foul creatures alight upon it, the bourgeois laugh at it.

BOOK SEVENTH.-SLANG

CHAPTER IV

　　THE TWO DUTIES:

　　TO WATCH AND TO HOPE

　　 This being the case, is all social danger dispelled?

　　Certainly not. There is no Jacquerie; society may rest assured on that point; blood will no longer rush to its head.

　　But let society take heed to the manner in which it breathes.

　　Apoplexy is no longer to be feared, but phthisis is there.

　　Social phthisis is called misery.

　　One can perish from being undermined as well as from being struck by lightning.

　　Let us not weary of repeating, and sympathetic souls must not forget that this is the first of fraternal obligations, and selfish hearts must understand that the first of political necessities consists in thinking first of all of the disinherited and sorrowing throngs, in solacing, airing, enlightening, loving them, in enlarging their horizon to a magnificent extent, in lavishing upon them education in every form, in offering them the example of labor, never the example of idleness, in diminishing the individual burden by enlarging the notion of the universal aim, in setting a limit to poverty without setting a limit to wealth, in creating vast fields of public and popular activity, in having, like Briareus, a hundred hands to extend in all directions to the oppressed and the feeble, in employing the collective power for that grand duty of opening workshops for all arms, schools for all aptitudes, and laboratories for all degrees of intelligence, in augmenting salaries, diminishing trouble, balancing what should be and what is, that is to say, in proportioning enjoyment to effort and a glut to need; in a word, in evolving from the social apparatus more light and more comfort for the benefit of those who suffer and those who are ignorant.

　　And, let us say it, all this is but the beginning.

　　The true question is this:

　　labor cannot be a law without being a right.

　　We will not insist upon this point; this is not the proper place for that.

　　If nature calls itself Providence, society should call itself foresight.

　　Intellectual and moral growth is no less indispensable than material improvement.

　　To know is a sacrament, to think is the prime necessity, truth is nourishment as well as grain. A reason which fasts from science and wisdom grows thin.

　　Let us enter equal complaint against stomachs and minds which do not eat. If there is anything more heart-breaking than a body perishing for lack of bread, it is a soul which is dying from hunger for the light.

　　The whole of progress tends in the direction of solution. Some day we shall be amazed.

　　As the human race mounts upward, the deep layers emerge naturally from the zone of distress. The obliteration of misery will be accomplished by a simple elevation of level.

　　We should do wrong were we to doubt this blessed consummation.

　　The past is very strong, it is true, at the present moment.

　　It censures. This rejuvenation of a corpse is surprising.

　　Behold, it is walking and advancing.

　　It seems a victor; this dead body is a conqueror. He arrives with his legions, superstitions, with his sword, despotism, with his banner, ignorance; a while ago, he won ten battles. He advances, he threatens, he laughs, he is at our doors.

　　Let us not despair, on our side.

　　Let us sell the field on which Hannibal is encamped.

　　What have we to fear, we who believe?

　　No such thing as a back-flow of ideas exists any more than there exists a return of a river on its course.

　　But let those who do not desire a future reflect on this matter. When they say "no" to progress, it is not the future but themselves that they are condemning.

　　They are giving themselves a sad malady; they are inoculating themselves with the past.

　　There is but one way of rejecting To-morrow, and that is to die.

　　Now, no death, that of the body as late as possible, that of the soul never,--this is what we desire.

　　Yes, the enigma will utter its word, the sphinx will speak, the problem will be solved.

　　Yes, the people, sketched out by the eighteenth century, will be finished by the nineteenth.

　　He who doubts this is an idiot! The future blossoming, the near blossoming forth of universal well-being, is a divinely fatal phenomenon.

　　Immense combined propulsions direct human affairs and conduct them within a given time to a logical state, that is to say, to a state of equilibrium; that is to say, to equity.

　　A force composed of earth and heaven results from humanity and governs it; this force is a worker of miracles; marvellous issues are no more difficult to it than extraordinary vicissitudes.

　　Aided by science, which comes from one man, and by the event, which comes from another, it is not greatly alarmed by these contradictions in the attitude of problems, which seem impossibilities to the vulgar herd. It is no less skilful at causing a solution to spring forth from the reconciliation of ideas, than a lesson from the reconciliation of facts, and we may expect anything from that mysterious power of progress, which brought the Orient and the Occident face to face one fine day, in the depths of a sepulchre, and made the imaums converse with Bonaparte in the interior of the Great Pyramid.

　　In the meantime, let there be no halt, no hesitation, no pause in the grandiose onward march of minds.

　　Social philosophy consists essentially in science and peace.

　　Its object is, and its result must be, to dissolve wrath by the study of antagonisms.

　　It examines, it scrutinizes, it analyzes; then it puts together once more, it proceeds by means of reduction, discarding all hatred.

　　More than once, a society has been seen to give way before the wind which is let loose upon mankind; history is full of the shipwrecks of nations and empires; manners, customs, laws, religions,--and some fine day that unknown force, the hurricane, passes by and bears them all away.

　　The civilizations of India, of Chaldea, of Persia, of Syria, of Egypt, have disappeared one after the other.

　　Why?

　　We know not. What are the causes of these disasters?

　　We do not know. Could these societies have been saved?

　　Was it their fault? Did they persist in the fatal vice which destroyed them? What is the amount of suicide in these terrible deaths of a nation and a race?

　　Questions to which there exists no reply. Darkness enwraps condemned civilizations.

　　They sprung a leak, then they sank.

　　We have nothing more to say; and it is with a sort of terror that we look on, at the bottom of that sea which is called the past, behind those colossal waves, at the shipwreck of those immense vessels, Babylon, Nineveh, Tarsus, Thebes, Rome, beneath the fearful gusts which emerge from all the mouths of the shadows. But shadows are there, and light is here.

　　We are not acquainted with the maladies of these ancient civilizations, we do not know the infirmities of our own.

　　Everywhere upon it we have the right of light, we contemplate its beauties, we lay bare its defects. Where it is ill, we probe; and the sickness once diagnosed, the study of the cause leads to the discovery of the remedy. Our civilization, the work of twenty centuries, is its law and its prodigy; it is worth the trouble of saving.

　　It will be saved. It is already much to have solaced it; its enlightenment is yet another point.

　　All the labors of modern social philosophies must converge towards this point.

　　The thinker of to-day has a great duty-- to auscultate civilization.

　　We repeat, that this auscultation brings encouragement; it is by this persistence in encouragement that we wish to conclude these pages, an austere interlude in a mournful drama.

　　Beneath the social mortality, we feel human imperishableness.

　　The globe does not perish, because it has these wounds, craters, eruptions, sulphur pits, here and there, nor because of a volcano which ejects its pus. The maladies of the people do not kill man.

　　And yet, any one who follows the course of social clinics shakes his head at times.

　　The strongest, the tenderest, the most logical have their hours of weakness.

　　Will the future arrive?

　　It seems as though we might almost put this question, when we behold so much terrible darkness. Melancholy face-to-face encounter of selfish and wretched.

　　On the part of the selfish, the prejudices, shadows of costly education, appetite increasing through intoxication, a giddiness of prosperity which dulls, a fear of suffering which, in some, goes as far as an aversion for the suffering, an implacable satisfaction, the I so swollen that it bars the soul; on the side of the wretched covetousness, envy, hatred of seeing others enjoy, the profound impulses of the human beast towards assuaging its desires, hearts full of mist, sadness, need, fatality, impure and simple ignorance.

　　Shall we continue to raise our eyes to heaven? is the luminous point which we distinguish there one of those which vanish? The ideal is frightful to behold, thus lost in the depths, small, isolated, imperceptible, brilliant, but surrounded by those great, black menaces, monstrously heaped around it; yet no more in danger than a star in the maw of the clouds.

BOOK EIGHTH.--ENCHANTMENTS AND DESOLATIONS

CHAPTER I

　　FULL LIGHT

　　The reader has probably understood that Eponine, having recognized through the gate, the inhabitant of that Rue Plumet whither Magnon had sent her, had begun by keeping the ruffians away from the Rue Plumet, and had then conducted Marius thither, and that, after many days spent in ecstasy before that gate, Marius, drawn on by that force which draws the iron to the magnet and a lover towards the stones of which is built the house of her whom he loves, had finally entered Cosette's garden as Romeo entered the garden of Juliet.

　　This had even proved easier for him than for Romeo; Romeo was obliged to scale a wall, Marius had only to use a little force on one of the bars of the decrepit gate which vacillated in its rusty recess, after the fashion of old people's teeth. Marius was slender and readily passed through.

　　As there was never any one in the street, and as Marius never entered the garden except at night, he ran no risk of being seen.

　　Beginning with that blessed and holy hour when a kiss betrothed these two souls, Marius was there every evening.

　　If, at that period of her existence, Cosette had fallen in love with a man in the least unscrupulous or debauched, she would have been lost; for there are generous natures which yield themselves, and Cosette was one of them. One of woman's magnanimities is to yield.

　　Love, at the height where it is absolute, is complicated with some indescribably celestial blindness of modesty.

　　But what dangers you run, O noble souls! Often you give the heart, and we take the body.

　　Your heart remains with you, you gaze upon it in the gloom with a shudder.

　　Love has no middle course; it either ruins or it saves.

　　All human destiny lies in this dilemma.

　　This dilemma, ruin, or safety, is set forth no more inexorably by any fatality than by love.

　　Love is life, if it is not death.

　　Cradle; also coffin.

　　The same sentiment says "yes" and "no" in the human heart.

　　Of all the things that God has made, the human heart is the one which sheds the most light, alas! and the most darkness.

　　God willed that Cosette's love should encounter one of the loves which save.

　　Throughout the whole of the month of May of that year 1832, there were there, in every night, in that poor, neglected garden, beneath that thicket which grew thicker and more fragrant day by day, two beings composed of all chastity, all innocence, overflowing with all the felicity of heaven, nearer to the archangels than to mankind, pure, honest, intoxicated, radiant, who shone for each other amid the shadows.

　　It seemed to Cosette that Marius had a crown, and to Marius that Cosette had a nimbus.

　　They touched each other, they gazed at each other, they clasped each other's hands, they pressed close to each other; but there was a distance which they did not pass. Not that they respected it; they did not know of its existence. Marius was conscious of a barrier, Cosette's innocence; and Cosette of a support, Marius' loyalty.

　　The first kiss had also been the last.

　　Marius, since that time, had not gone further than to touch Cosette's hand, or her kerchief, or a lock of her hair, with his lips. For him, Cosette was a perfume and not a woman.

　　He inhaled her. She refused nothing, and he asked nothing.

　　Cosette was happy, and Marius was satisfied.

　　They lived in this ecstatic state which can be described as the dazzling of one soul by another soul. It was the ineffable first embrace of two maiden souls in the ideal. Two swans meeting on the Jungfrau.

　　At that hour of love, an hour when voluptuousness is absolutely mute, beneath the omnipotence of ecstasy, Marius, the pure and seraphic Marius, would rather have gone to a woman of the town than have raised Cosette's robe to the height of her ankle.

　　Once, in the moonlight, Cosette stooped to pick up something on the ground, her bodice fell apart and permitted a glimpse of the beginning of her throat. Marius turned away his eyes.

　　What took place between these two beings?

　　Nothing.

　　They adored each other.

　　At night, when they were there, that garden seemed a living and a sacred spot.

　　All flowers unfolded around them and sent them incense; and they opened their souls and scattered them over the flowers. The wanton and vigorous vegetation quivered, full of strength and intoxication, around these two innocents, and they uttered words of love which set the trees to trembling.

　　What words were these?

　　Breaths.

　　Nothing more.

　　These breaths sufficed to trouble and to touch all nature round about. Magic power which we should find it difficult to understand were we to read in a book these conversations which are made to be borne away and dispersed like smoke wreaths by the breeze beneath the leaves. Take from those murmurs of two lovers that melody which proceeds from the soul and which accompanies them like a lyre, and what remains is nothing more than a shade; you say:

　　"What! is that all!" eh! yes, childish prattle, repetitions, laughter at nothing, nonsense, everything that is deepest and most sublime in the world! The only things which are worth the trouble of saying and hearing!

　　The man who has never heard, the man who has never uttered these absurdities, these paltry remarks, is an imbecile and a malicious fellow.

　　Cosette said to Marius:--

　　"Dost thou know?--"

　　[In all this and athwart this celestial maidenliness, and without either of them being able to say how it had come about, they had begun to call each other thou.]

　　"Dost thou know?

　　My name is Euphrasie."

　　"Euphrasie?

　　Why, no, thy name is Cosette."

　　"Oh!

　　Cosette is a very ugly name that was given to me when I was a little thing.

　　But my real name is Euphrasie.

　　Dost thou like that name--Euphrasie?"

　　"Yes.

　　But Cosette is not ugly."

　　"Do you like it better than Euphrasie?"

　　"Why, yes."

　　"Then I like it better too.

　　Truly, it is pretty, Cosette. Call me Cosette."

　　And the smile that she added made of this dialogue an idyl worthy of a grove situated in heaven.

　　On another occasion she gazed intently at him and exclaimed:--

　　"Monsieur, you are handsome, you are good-looking, you are witty, you are not at all stupid, you are much more learned than I am, but I bid you defiance with this word:

　　I love you!"

　　And Marius, in the very heavens, thought he heard a strain sung by a star.

　　Or she bestowed on him a gentle tap because he coughed, and she said to him:--

　　"Don't cough, sir; I will not have people cough on my domain without my permission.

　　It's very naughty to cough and to disturb me. I want you to be well, because, in the first place, if you were not well, I should be very unhappy.

　　What should I do then?"

　　And this was simply divine.

　　Once Marius said to Cosette:--

　　"Just imagine, I thought at one time that your name was Ursule."

　　This made both of them laugh the whole evening.

　　In the middle of another conversation, he chanced to exclaim:--

　　"Oh!

　　One day, at the Luxembourg, I had a good mind to finish breaking up a veteran!"

　　But he stopped short, and went no further. He would have been obliged to speak to Cosette of her garter, and that was impossible.

　　This bordered on a strange theme, the flesh, before which that immense and innocent love recoiled with a sort of sacred fright.

　　Marius pictured life with Cosette to himself like this, without anything else; to come every evening to the Rue Plumet, to displace the old and accommodating bar of the chief-justice's gate, to sit elbow to elbow on that bench, to gaze through the trees at the scintillation of the on-coming night, to fit a fold of the knee of his trousers into the ample fall of Cosette's gown, to caress her thumb-nail, to call her thou, to smell of the same flower, one after the other, forever, indefinitely.

　　During this time, clouds passed above their heads.

　　Every time that the wind blows it bears with it more of the dreams of men than of the clouds of heaven.

　　This chaste, almost shy love was not devoid of gallantry, by any means.

　　To pay compliments to the woman whom a man loves is the first method of bestowing caresses, and he is half audacious who tries it.

　　A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil. Voluptuousness mingles there with its sweet tiny point, while it hides itself.

　　The heart draws back before voluptuousness only to love the more.

　　Marius' blandishments, all saturated with fancy, were, so to speak, of azure hue.

　　The birds when they fly up yonder, in the direction of the angels, must hear such words.

　　There were mingled with them, nevertheless, life, humanity, all the positiveness of which Marius was capable.

　　It was what is said in the bower, a prelude to what will be said in the chamber; a lyrical effusion, strophe and sonnet intermingled, pleasing hyperboles of cooing, all the refinements of adoration arranged in a bouquet and exhaling a celestial perfume, an ineffable twitter of heart to heart.

　　"Oh!" murmured Marius, "how beautiful you are!

　　I dare not look at you. It is all over with me when I contemplate you.

　　You are a grace. I know not what is the matter with me.

　　The hem of your gown, when the tip of your shoe peeps from beneath, upsets me.

　　And then, what an enchanted gleam when you open your thought even but a little! You talk astonishingly good sense.

　　It seems to me at times that you are a dream.

　　Speak, I listen, I admire.

　　Oh Cosette! how strange it is and how charming!

　　I am really beside myself. You are adorable, Mademoiselle.

　　I study your feet with the microscope and your soul with the telescope."

　　And Cosette answered:--

　　"I have been loving a little more all the time that has passed since this morning."

　　Questions and replies took care of themselves in this dialogue, which always turned with mutual consent upon love, as the little pith figures always turn on their peg.

　　Cosette's whole person was ingenuousness, ingenuity, transparency, whiteness, candor, radiance.

　　It might have been said of Cosette that she was clear.

　　She produced on those who saw her the sensation of April and dawn.

　　There was dew in her eyes. Cosette was a condensation of the auroral light in the form of a woman.

　　It was quite simple that Marius should admire her, since he adored her. But the truth is, that this little school-girl, fresh from the convent, talked with exquisite penetration and uttered, at times, all sorts of true and delicate sayings.

　　Her prattle was conversation. She never made a mistake about anything, and she saw things justly. The woman feels and speaks with the tender instinct of the heart, which is infallible.

　　No one understands so well as a woman, how to say things that are, at once, both sweet and deep.

　　Sweetness and depth, they are the whole of woman; in them lies the whole of heaven.

　　In this full felicity, tears welled up to their eyes every instant. A crushed lady-bug, a feather fallen from a nest, a branch of hawthorn broken, aroused their pity, and their ecstasy, sweetly mingled with melancholy, seemed to ask nothing better than to weep. The most sovereign symptom of love is a tenderness that is, at times, almost unbearable.

　　And, in addition to this,--all these contradictions are the lightning play of love,--they were fond of laughing, they laughed readily and with a delicious freedom, and so familiarly that they sometimes presented the air of two boys.

　　Still, though unknown to hearts intoxicated with purity, nature is always present and will not be forgotten.

　　She is there with her brutal and sublime object; and however great may be the innocence of souls, one feels in the most modest private interview, the adorable and mysterious shade which separates a couple of lovers from a pair of friends.

　　They idolized each other.

　　The permanent and the immutable are persistent.

　　People live, they smile, they laugh, they make little grimaces with the tips of their lips, they interlace their fingers, they call each other thou, and that does not prevent eternity.

　　Two lovers hide themselves in the evening, in the twilight, in the invisible, with the birds, with the roses; they fascinate each other in the darkness with their hearts which they throw into their eyes, they murmur, they whisper, and in the meantime, immense librations of the planets fill the infinite universe.

BOOK EIGHTH.--ENCHANTMENTS AND DESOLATIONS

CHAPTER II

　　THE BEWILDERMENT OF PERFECT HAPPINESS

　　 They existed vaguely, frightened at their happiness.

　　They did not notice the cholera which decimated Paris precisely during that very month. They had confided in each other as far as possible, but this had not extended much further than their names.

　　Marius had told Cosette that he was an orphan, that his name was Marius Pontmercy, that he was a lawyer, that he lived by writing things for publishers, that his father had been a colonel, that the latter had been a hero, and that he, Marius, was on bad terms with his grandfather who was rich.

　　He had also hinted at being a baron, but this had produced no effect on Cosette.

　　She did not know the meaning of the word. Marius was Marius.

　　On her side, she had confided to him that she had been brought up at the Petit-Picpus convent, that her mother, like his own, was dead, that her father's name was M. Fauchelevent, that he was very good, that he gave a great deal to the poor, but that he was poor himself, and that he denied himself everything though he denied her nothing.

　　Strange to say, in the sort of symphony which Marius had lived since he had been in the habit of seeing Cosette, the past, even the most recent past, had become so confused and distant to him, that what Cosette told him satisfied him completely. It did not even occur to him to tell her about the nocturnal adventure in the hovel, about Thenardier, about the burn, and about the strange attitude and singular flight of her father. Marius had momentarily forgotten all this; in the evening he did not even know that there had been a morning, what he had done, where he had breakfasted, nor who had spoken to him; he had songs in his ears which rendered him deaf to every other thought; he only existed at the hours when he saw Cosette.

　　Then, as he was in heaven, it was quite natural that he should forget earth. Both bore languidly the indefinable burden of immaterial pleasures. Thus lived these somnambulists who are called lovers.

　　Alas!

　　Who is there who has not felt all these things?

　　Why does there come an hour when one emerges from this azure, and why does life go on afterwards?

　　Loving almost takes the place of thinking.

　　Love is an ardent forgetfulness of all the rest.

　　Then ask logic of passion if you will. There is no more absolute logical sequence in the human heart than there is a perfect geometrical figure in the celestial mechanism. For Cosette and Marius nothing existed except Marius and Cosette. The universe around them had fallen into a hole.

　　They lived in a golden minute.

　　There was nothing before them, nothing behind. It hardly occurred to Marius that Cosette had a father.

　　His brain was dazzled and obliterated.

　　Of what did these lovers talk then? We have seen, of the flowers, and the swallows, the setting sun and the rising moon, and all sorts of important things.

　　They had told each other everything except everything.

　　The everything of lovers is nothing.

　　But the father, the realities, that lair, the ruffians, that adventure, to what purpose?

　　And was he very sure that this nightmare had actually existed?

　　They were two, and they adored each other, and beyond that there was nothing.

　　Nothing else existed. It is probable that this vanishing of hell in our rear is inherent to the arrival of paradise.

　　Have we beheld demons?

　　Are there any? Have we trembled?

　　Have we suffered?

　　We no longer know.

　　A rosy cloud hangs over it.

　　So these two beings lived in this manner, high aloft, with all that improbability which is in nature; neither at the nadir nor at the zenith, between man and seraphim, above the mire, below the ether, in the clouds; hardly flesh and blood, soul and ecstasy from head to foot; already too sublime to walk the earth, still too heavily charged with humanity to disappear in the blue, suspended like atoms which are waiting to be precipitated; apparently beyond the bounds of destiny; ignorant of that rut; yesterday, to-day, to-morrow; amazed, rapturous, floating, soaring; at times so light that they could take their flight out into the infinite; almost prepared to soar away to all eternity.

　　They slept wide-awake, thus sweetly lulled. Oh! splendid lethargy of the real overwhelmed by the ideal.

　　Sometimes, beautiful as Cosette was, Marius shut his eyes in her presence.

　　The best way to look at the soul is through closed eyes.

　　Marius and Cosette never asked themselves whither this was to lead them. They considered that they had already arrived.

　　It is a strange claim on man's part to wish that love should lead to something.

BOOK EIGHTH.--ENCHANTMENTS AND DESOLATIONS

CHAPTER III

　　THE BEGINNING OF SHADOW

　　 Jean Valjean suspected nothing.

　　Cosette, who was rather less dreamy than Marius, was gay, and that sufficed for Jean Valjean's happiness.

　　The thoughts which Cosette cherished, her tender preoccupations, Marius' image which filled her heart, took away nothing from the incomparable purity of her beautiful, chaste, and smiling brow.

　　She was at the age when the virgin bears her love as the angel his lily.

　　So Jean Valjean was at ease.

　　And then, when two lovers have come to an understanding, things always go well; the third party who might disturb their love is kept in a state of perfect blindness by a restricted number of precautions which are always the same in the case of all lovers. Thus, Cosette never objected to any of Jean Valjean's proposals. Did she want to take a walk?

　　"Yes, dear little father."

　　Did she want to stay at home?

　　Very good.

　　Did he wish to pass the evening with Cosette?

　　She was delighted.

　　As he always went to bed at ten o'clock, Marius did not come to the garden on such occasions until after that hour, when, from the street, he heard Cosette open the long glass door on the veranda.

　　Of course, no one ever met Marius in the daytime.

　　Jean Valjean never even dreamed any longer that Marius was in existence.

　　Only once, one morning, he chanced to say to Cosette:

　　"Why, you have whitewash on your back!"

　　On the previous evening, Marius, in a transport, had pushed Cosette against the wall.

　　Old Toussaint, who retired early, thought of nothing but her sleep, and was as ignorant of the whole matter as Jean Valjean.

　　Marius never set foot in the house.

　　When he was with Cosette,

they hid themselves in a recess near the steps, in order that they might neither be seen nor heard from the street, and there they sat, frequently contenting themselves, by way of conversation, with pressing each other's hands twenty times a minute as they gazed at the branches of the trees.

　　At such times, a thunderbolt might have fallen thirty paces from them, and they would not have noticed it, so deeply was the revery of the one absorbed and sunk in the revery of the other.

　　Limpid purity.

　　Hours wholly white; almost all alike.

　　This sort of love is a recollection of lily petals and the plumage of the dove.

　　The whole extent of the garden lay between them and the street. Every time that Marius entered and left, he carefully adjusted the bar of the gate in such a manner that no displacement was visible.

　　He usually went away about midnight, and returned to Courfeyrac's lodgings.

　　Courfeyrac said to Bahorel:--

　　"Would you believe it?

　　Marius comes home nowadays at one o'clock in the morning."

　　Bahorel replied:--

　　"What do you expect?

　　There's always a petard in a seminary fellow."

　　At times, Courfeyrac folded his arms, assumed a serious air, and said to Marius:--

　　"You are getting irregular in your habits, young man."

　　Courfeyrac, being a practical man, did not take in good part this reflection of an invisible paradise upon Marius; he was not much in the habit of concealed passions; it made him impatient, and now and then he called upon Marius to come back to reality.

　　One morning, he threw him this admonition:--

　　"My dear fellow, you produce upon me the effect of being located in the moon, the realm of dreams, the province of illusions, capital, soap-bubble. Come, be a good boy, what's her name?"

　　But nothing could induce Marius "to talk."

　　They might have torn out his nails before one of the two sacred syllables of which that ineffable name, Cosette, was composed.

　　True love is as luminous as the dawn and as silent as the tomb.

　　Only, Courfeyrac saw this change in Marius, that his taciturnity was of the beaming order.

　　During this sweet month of May, Marius and Cosette learned to know these immense delights.

　　To dispute and to say you for thou, simply that they might say thou the better afterwards.

　　To talk at great length with very minute details, of persons in whom they took not the slightest interest in the world; another proof that in that ravishing opera called love, the libretto counts for almost nothing;

　　For Marius, to listen to Cosette discussing finery;

　　For Cosette, to listen to Marius talk in politics;

　　To listen, knee pressed to knee, to the carriages rolling along the Rue de Babylone;

　　To gaze upon the same planet in space, or at the same glowworm gleaming in the grass;

　　To hold their peace together; a still greater delight than conversation;

　　Etc., etc.

　　In the meantime, divers complications were approaching.

　　One evening, Marius was on his way to the rendezvous, by way of the Boulevard des Invalides.

　　He habitually walked with drooping head. As he was on the point of turning the corner of the Rue Plumet, he heard some one quite close to him say:--

　　"Good evening, Monsieur Marius."

　　He raised his head and recognized Eponine.

　　This produced a singular effect upon him.

　　He had not thought of that girl a single time since the day when she had conducted him to the Rue Plumet, he had not seen her again, and she had gone completely out of his mind.

　　He had no reasons for anything but gratitude towards her, he owed her his happiness, and yet, it was embarrassing to him to meet her.

　　It is an error to think that passion, when it is pure and happy, leads man to a state of perfection; it simply leads him, as we have noted, to a state of oblivion.

　　In this situation, man forgets to be bad, but he also forgets to be good.

　　Gratitude, duty, matters essential and important to be remembered, vanish.

　　At any other time, Marius would have behaved quite differently to Eponine. Absorbed in Cosette, he had not even clearly put it to himself that this Eponine was named Eponine Thenardier, and that she bore the name inscribed in his father's will, that name, for which, but a few months before, he would have so ardently sacrificed himself. We show Marius as he was.

　　His father himself was fading out of his soul to some extent, under the splendor of his love.

　　He replied with some embarrassment:--

　　"Ah! so it's you, Eponine?"

　　"Why do you call me you?

　　Have I done anything to you?"

　　"No," he answered.

　　Certainly, he had nothing against her.

　　Far from it.

　　Only, he felt that he could not do otherwise, now that he used thou to Cosette, than say you to Eponine.

　　As he remained silent, she exclaimed:--

　　"Say--"

　　Then she paused.

　　It seemed as though words failed that creature formerly so heedless and so bold.

　　She tried to smile and could not. Then she resumed:--

　　"Well?"

　　Then she paused again, and remained with downcast eyes.

　　"Good evening, Mr. Marius," said she suddenly and abruptly; and away she went.

BOOK EIGHTH.--ENCHANTMENTS AND DESOLATIONS

CHAPTER IV

　　A CAB RUNS IN ENGLISH AND BARKS IN SLANG

　　 The following day was the 3d of June, 1832, a date which it is necessary to indicate on account of the grave events which at that epoch hung on the horizon of Paris in the state of lightning-charged clouds.

　　Marius, at nightfall, was pursuing the same road as on the preceding evening, with the same thoughts of delight in his heart, when he caught sight of Eponine approaching, through the trees of the boulevard.

　　Two days in succession-- this was too much.

　　He turned hastily aside, quitted the boulevard, changed his course and went to the Rue Plumet through the Rue Monsieur.

　　This caused Eponine to follow him to the Rue Plumet, a thing which she had not yet done.

　　Up to that time, she had contented herself with watching him on his passage along the boulevard without ever seeking to encounter him.

　　It was only on the evening before that she had attempted to address him.

　　So Eponine followed him, without his suspecting the fact. She saw him displace the bar and slip into the garden.

　　She approached the railing, felt of the bars one after the other, and readily recognized the one which Marius had moved.

　　She murmured in a low voice and in gloomy accents:--

　　"None of that, Lisette!"

　　She seated herself on the underpinning of the railing, close beside the bar, as though she were guarding it.

　　It was precisely at the point where the railing touched the neighboring wall. There was a dim nook there, in which Eponine was entirely concealed.

　　She remained thus for more than an hour, without stirring and without breathing, a prey to her thoughts.

　　Towards ten o'clock in the evening, one of the two or three persons who passed through the Rue Plumet, an old, belated bourgeois who was making haste to escape from this deserted spot of evil repute, as he skirted the garden railings and reached the angle which it made with the wall, heard a dull and threatening voice saying:--

　　"I'm no longer surprised that he comes here every evening."

　　The passer-by cast a glance around him, saw no one, dared not peer into the black niche, and was greatly alarmed.

　　He redoubled his pace.

　　This passer-by had reason to make haste, for a very few instants later, six men, who were marching separately and at some distance from each other, along the wall, and who might have been taken for a gray patrol, entered the Rue Plumet.

　　The first to arrive at the garden railing halted, and waited for the others; a second later, all six were reunited.

　　These men began to talk in a low voice.

　　"This is the place," said one of them.

　　"Is there a cab [dog] in the garden?" asked another.

　　"I don't know.

　　In any case, I have fetched a ball that we'll make him eat."

　　"Have you some putty to break the pane with?"

　　"Yes."

　　"The railing is old," interpolated a fifth, who had the voice of a ventriloquist.

　　"So much the better," said the second who had spoken.

　　"It won't screech under the saw, and it won't be hard to cut."

　　The sixth, who had not yet opened his lips, now began to inspect the gate, as Eponine had done an hour earlier, grasping each bar in succession, and shaking them cautiously.

　　Thus he came to the bar which Marius had loosened.

　　As he was on the point of grasping this bar, a hand emerged abruptly from the darkness, fell upon his arm; he felt himself vigorously thrust aside by a push in the middle of his breast, and a hoarse voice said to him, but not loudly:--

　　"There's a dog."

　　At the same moment, he perceived a pale girl standing before him.

　　The man underwent that shock which the unexpected always brings. He bristled up in hideous wise; nothing is so formidable to behold as ferocious beasts who are uneasy; their terrified air evokes terror.

　　He recoiled and stammered:--

　　"What jade is this?"

　　"Your daughter."

　　It was, in fact, Eponine, who had addressed Thenardier.

　　At the apparition of Eponine, the other five, that is to say, Claquesous, Guelemer, Babet, Brujon, and Montparnasse had noiselessly drawn near, without precipitation, without uttering a word, with the sinister slowness peculiar to these men of the night.

　　Some indescribable but hideous tools were visible in their hands. Guelemer held one of those pairs of curved pincers which prowlers call fanchons.

　　"Ah, see here, what are you about there?

　　What do you want with us? Are you crazy?" exclaimed Thenardier, as loudly as one can exclaim and still speak low; "what have you come here to hinder our work for?"

　　Eponine burst out laughing, and threw herself on his neck.

　　"I am here, little father, because I am here.

　　Isn't a person allowed to sit on the stones nowadays?

　　It's you who ought not to be here.

　　What have you come here for, since it's a biscuit? I told Magnon so.

　　There's nothing to be done here.

　　But embrace me, my good little father!

　　It's a long time since I've seen you! So you're out?"

　　Thenardier tried to disentangle himself from Eponine's arms, and grumbled:--

　　"That's good.

　　You've embraced me.

　　Yes, I'm out.

　　I'm not in. Now, get away with you."

　　But Eponine did not release her hold, and redoubled her caresses.

　　"But how did you manage it, little pa?

　　You must have been very clever to get out of that.

　　Tell me about it!

　　And my mother? Where is mother?

　　Tell me about mamma."

　　Thenardier replied:--

　　"She's well.

　　I don't know, let me alone, and be off, I tell you.

　　"I won't go, so there now," pouted Eponine like a spoiled child; "you send me off, and it's four months since I saw you, and I've hardly had time to kiss you."

　　And she caught her father round the neck again.

　　"Come, now, this is stupid!" said Babet.

　　"Make haste!" said Guelemer, "the cops may pass."

　　The ventriloquist's voice repeated his distich:--

　　 "Nous n' sommes pas le jour de l'an, "This isn't New Year's day

　　A becoter papa, maman."

　　 To peck at pa and ma."

　　 Eponine turned to the five ruffians.

　　"Why, it's Monsieur Brujon.

　　Good day, Monsieur Babet.

　　Good day, Monsieur Claquesous.

　　Don't you know me, Monsieur Guelemer? How goes it, Montparnasse?"

　　"Yes, they know you!" ejaculated Thenardier.

　　"But good day, good evening, sheer off! leave us alone!"

　　"It's the hour for foxes, not for chickens," said Montparnasse.

　　"You see the job we have on hand here," added Babet.

　　Eponine caught Montparnasse's hand.

　　"Take care," said he, "you'll cut yourself, I've a knife open."

　　"My little Montparnasse," responded Eponine very gently, "you must have confidence in people.

　　I am the daughter of my father, perhaps. Monsieur Babet, Monsieur Guelemer, I'm the person who was charged to investigate this matter."

　　It is remarkable that Eponine did not talk slang.

　　That frightful

tongue had become impossible to her since she had known Marius.

　　She pressed in her hand, small, bony, and feeble as that of a skeleton, Guelemer's huge, coarse fingers, and continued:--

　　"You know well that I'm no fool.

　　Ordinarily, I am believed. I have rendered you service on various occasions.

　　Well, I have made inquiries; you will expose yourselves to no purpose, you see. I swear to you that there is nothing in this house."

　　"There are lone women," said Guelemer.

　　"No, the persons have moved away."

　　"The candles haven't, anyway!" ejaculated Babet.

　　And he pointed out to Eponine, across the tops of the trees, a light which was wandering about in the mansard roof of the pavilion. It was Toussaint, who had stayed up to spread out some linen to dry.

　　Eponine made a final effort.

　　"Well," said she, "they're very poor folks, and it's a hovel where there isn't a sou."

　　"Go to the devil!" cried Thenardier.

　　"When we've turned the house upside down and put the cellar at the top and the attic below, we'll tell you what there is inside, and whether it's francs or sous or half-farthings."

　　And he pushed her aside with the intention of entering.

　　"My good friend, Mr. Montparnasse," said Eponine, "I entreat you, you are a good fellow, don't enter."

　　"Take care, you'll cut yourself," replied Montparnasse.

　　Thenardier resumed in his decided tone:--

　　"Decamp, my girl, and leave men to their own affairs!"

　　Eponine released Montparnasse's hand, which she had grasped again, and said:--

　　"So you mean to enter this house?"

　　"Rather!" grinned the ventriloquist.

　　Then she set her back against the gate, faced the six ruffians who were armed to the teeth, and to whom the night lent the visages of demons, and said in a firm, low voice:--

　　"Well, I don't mean that you shall."

　　They halted in amazement.

　　The ventriloquist, however, finished his grin. She went on:--

　　"Friends!

　　Listen well.

　　This is not what you want.

　　Now I'm talking. In the first place, if you enter this garden, if you lay a hand on this gate, I'll scream, I'll beat on the door, I'll rouse everybody, I'll have the whole six of you seized, I'll call the police."

　　"She'd do it, too," said Thenardier in a low tone to Brujon and the ventriloquist.

　　She shook her head and added:--

　　"Beginning with my father!"

　　Thenardier stepped nearer.

　　"Not so close, my good man!" said she.

　　He retreated, growling between his teeth:--

　　"Why, what's the matter with her?"

　　And he added:--

　　"Bitch!"

　　She began to laugh in a terrible way:--

　　"As you like, but you shall not enter here.

　　I'm not the daughter of a dog, since I'm the daughter of a wolf.

　　There are six of you, what matters that to me?

　　You are men.

　　Well, I'm a woman. You don't frighten me.

　　I tell you that you shan't enter this house, because it doesn't suit me.

　　If you approach, I'll bark.

　　I told you, I'm the dog, and I don't care a straw for you.

　　Go your way, you bore me!

　　Go where you please, but don't come here, I forbid it! You can use your knives.

　　I'll use kicks; it's all the same to me, come on!"

　　She advanced a pace nearer the ruffians, she was terrible, she burst out laughing:--

　　"Pardine!

　　I'm not afraid.

　　I shall be hungry this summer, and I shall be cold this winter.

　　Aren't they ridiculous, these ninnies of men, to think they can scare a girl!

　　What!

　　Scare?

　　Oh, yes, much! Because you have finical poppets of mistresses who hide under the bed when you put on a big voice, forsooth!

　　I ain't afraid of anything, that I ain't!"

　　She fastened her intent gaze upon Thenardier and said:--

　　"Not even of you, father!"

　　Then she continued, as she cast her blood-shot, spectre-like eyes upon the ruffians in turn:--

　　"What do I care if I'm picked up to-morrow morning on the pavement of the Rue Plumet, killed by the blows of my father's club, or whether I'm found a year from now in the nets at Saint-Cloud or the Isle of Swans in the midst of rotten old corks and drowned dogs?"

　　She was forced to pause; she was seized by a dry cough, her breath came from her weak and narrow chest like the death-rattle.

　　She resumed:--

　　"I have only to cry out, and people will come, and then slap, bang! There are six of you; I represent the whole world."

　　Thenardier made a movement towards her.

　　"Don't approach!" she cried.

　　He halted, and said gently:--

　　"Well, no; I won't approach, but don't speak so loud.

　　So you intend to hinder us in our work, my daughter?

　　But we must earn our living all the same.

　　Have you no longer any kind feeling for your father?"

　　"You bother me," said Eponine.

　　"But we must live, we must eat--"

　　"Burst!"

　　So saying, she seated herself on the underpinning of the fence and hummed:--

　　 "Mon bras si dodu,

　　"My arm so plump,

　　Ma jambe bien faite

　　 My leg well formed,

　　Et le temps perdu."

　　 And time wasted."

　　 She had set her elbow on her knee and her chin in her hand, and she swung her foot with an air of indifference.

　　Her tattered gown permitted a view of her thin shoulder-blades. The neighboring street lantern illuminated her profile and her attitude. Nothing more resolute and more surprising could be seen.

　　The six rascals, speechless and gloomy at being held in check by a girl, retreated beneath the shadow cast by the lantern, and held counsel with furious and humiliated shrugs.

　　In the meantime she stared at them with a stern but peaceful air.

　　"There's something the matter with her," said Babet.

　　"A reason. Is she in love with the dog?

　　It's a shame to miss this, anyway. Two women, an old fellow who lodges in the back-yard, and curtains that ain't so bad at the windows.

　　The old cove must be a Jew. I think the job's a good one."

　　"Well, go in, then, the rest of you," exclaimed Montparnasse. "Do the job.

　　I'll stay here with the girl, and if she fails us--"

　　He flashed the knife, which he held open in his hand, in the light of the lantern.

　　Thenardier said not a word, and seemed ready for whatever the rest pleased.

　　Brujon, who was somewhat of an oracle, and who had, as the reader knows, "put up the job," had not as yet spoken.

　　He seemed thoughtful. He had the reputation of not sticking at anything, and it was known that he had plundered a police post simply out of bravado. Besides this he made verses and songs, which gave him great authority.

　　Babet interrogated him:--

　　"You say nothing, Brujon?"

　　Brujon remained silent an instant longer, then he shook his head in various ways, and finally concluded to speak:--

　　"See here; this morning I came across two sparrows fighting, this evening I jostled a woman who was quarrelling.

　　All that's bad. Let's quit."

　　They went away.

　　As they went, Montparnasse muttered:--

　　"Never mind! if they had wanted, I'd have cut her throat."

　　Babet responded

　　"I wouldn't. I don't hit a lady."

　　At the corner of the street they halted and exchanged the following enigmatical dialogue in a low tone:--

　　"Where shall we go to sleep to-night?"

　　"Under Pantin [Paris]."

　　"Have you the key to the gate, Thenardier?"

　　"Pardi."

　　Eponine, who never took her eyes off of them, saw them retreat by the road by which they had come.

　　She rose and began to creep after them along the walls and the houses.

　　She followed them thus as far as the boulevard.

　　There they parted, and she saw these six men plunge into the gloom, where they appeared to melt away.

BOOK EIGHTH.--ENCHANTMENTS AND DESOLATIONS

CHAPTER V

　　THINGS OF THE NIGHT

　　 After the departure of the ruffians, the Rue Plumet resumed its tranquil, nocturnal aspect.

　　That which had just taken place in this street would not have astonished a forest.

　　The lofty trees, the copses, the heaths, the branches rudely interlaced, the tall grass, exist in a sombre manner; the savage swarming there catches glimpses of sudden apparitions of the invisible; that which is below man distinguishes, through the mists, that which is beyond man; and the things of which we living beings are ignorant there meet face to face in the night.

　　Nature, bristling and wild, takes alarm at certain approaches in which she fancies that she feels the supernatural.

　　The forces of the gloom know each other, and are strangely balanced by each other.

　　Teeth and claws fear what they cannot grasp.

　　Blood-drinking bestiality, voracious appetites, hunger in search of prey, the armed instincts of nails and jaws which have for source and aim the belly, glare and smell out uneasily the impassive spectral forms straying beneath a shroud, erect in its vague and shuddering robe, and which seem to them to live with a dead and terrible life.

　　These brutalities, which are only matter, entertain a confused fear of having to deal with the immense obscurity condensed into an unknown being. A black figure barring the way stops the wild beast short. That which emerges from the cemetery intimidates and disconcerts that which emerges from the cave; the ferocious fear the sinister; wolves recoil when they encounter a ghoul.

BOOK EIGHTH.--ENCHANTMENTS AND DESOLATIONS

CHAPTER VI

　　MARIUS BECOMES PRACTICAL ONCE MORE TO THE EXTENT OF GIVING COSETTE HIS ADDRESS

　　 While this sort of a dog with a human face was mounting guard over the gate, and while the six ruffians were yielding to a girl, Marius was by Cosette's side.

　　Never had the sky been more studded with stars and more charming, the trees more trembling, the odor of the grass more penetrating; never had the birds fallen asleep among the leaves with a sweeter noise; never had all the harmonies of universal serenity responded more thoroughly to the inward music of love; never had Marius been more captivated, more happy, more ecstatic.

　　But he had found Cosette sad; Cosette had been weeping.

　　Her eyes were red.

　　This was the first cloud in that wonderful dream.

　　Marius' first word had been:

　　"What is the matter?"

　　And she had replied:

　　"This."

　　Then she had seated herself on the bench near the steps, and while he tremblingly took his place beside her, she had continued:--

　　"My father told me this morning to hold myself in readiness, because he has business, and we may go away from here."

　　Marius shivered from head to foot.

　　When one is at the end of one's life, to die means to go away; when one is at the beginning of it, to go away means to die.

　　For the last six weeks, Marius had little by little, slowly, by degrees, taken possession of Cosette each day.

　　As we have already explained, in the case of first love, the soul is taken long before the body; later on, one takes the body long before the soul; sometimes one does not take the soul at all; the Faublas and the Prudhommes add: "Because there is none"; but the sarcasm is, fortunately, a blasphemy. So Marius possessed Cosette, as spirits possess, but he enveloped her with all his soul, and seized her jealously with incredible conviction. He possessed her smile, her breath, her perfume, the profound radiance of her blue eyes, the sweetness of her skin when he touched her hand, the charming mark which she had on her neck, all her thoughts. Therefore, he possessed all Cosette's dreams.

　　He incessantly gazed at, and he sometimes touched lightly with his breath, the short locks on the nape of her neck, and he declared to himself that there was not one of those short hairs which did not belong to him, Marius.

　　He gazed upon and adored the things that she wore, her knot of ribbon, her gloves, her sleeves, her shoes, her cuffs, as sacred objects of which he was the master. He dreamed that he was the lord of those pretty shell combs which she wore in her hair, and he even said to himself, in confused and suppressed stammerings of voluptuousness which did not make their way to the light, that there was not a ribbon of her gown, not a mesh in her stockings, not a fold in her bodice, which was not his.

　　Beside Cosette he felt himself beside his own property, his own thing, his own despot and his slave.

　　It seemed as though they had so intermingled their souls, that it would have been impossible to tell them apart had they wished to take them back again.--"This is mine."

　　"No, it is mine."

　　"I assure you that you are mistaken. This is my property."

　　"What you are taking as your own is myself."-- Marius was something that made a part of Cosette, and Cosette was something which made a part of Marius.

　　Marius felt Cosette within him.

　　To have Cosette, to possess Cosette, this, to him, was not to be distinguished from breathing.

　　It was in the midst of this faith, of this intoxication, of this virgin possession, unprecedented and absolute, of this sovereignty, that these words: "We are going away," fell suddenly, at a blow, and that the harsh voice of reality cried to him:

　　"Cosette is not yours!"

　　Marius awoke.

　　For six weeks Marius had been living, as we have said, outside of life; those words, going away! caused him to re-enter it harshly.

　　He found not a word to say.

　　Cosette merely felt that his hand was very cold.

　　She said to him in her turn:

　　"What is the matter?"

　　He replied in so low a tone that Cosette hardly heard him:--

　　"I did not understand what you said."

　　She began again:--

　　"This morning my father told me to settle all my little affairs and to hold myself in readiness, that he would give me his linen to put in a trunk, that he was obliged to go on a journey, that we were to go away, that it is necessary to have a large trunk for me and a small one for him, and that all is to be ready in a week from now, and that we might go to England."

　　"But this is outrageous!" exclaimed Marius.

　　It is certain, that, at that moment, no abuse of power, no violence, not one of the abominations of the worst tyrants, no action of Busiris, of Tiberius, or of Henry VIII., could have equalled this in atrocity, in the opinion of Marius; M. Fauchelevent taking his daughter off to England because he had business there.

　　He demanded in a weak voice:--

　　"And when do you start?"

　　"He did not say when."

　　"And when shall you return?"

　　"He did not say when."

　　Marius rose and said coldly:--

　　"Cosette, shall you go?"

　　Cosette turned toward him her beautiful eyes, all filled with anguish, and replied in a sort of bewilderment:--

　　"Where?"

　　"To England.

　　Shall you go?"

　　"Why do you say you to me?"

　　"I ask you whether you will go?"

　　"What do you expect me to do?" she said, clasping her hands.

　　"So, you will go?"

　　"If my father goes."

　　"So, you will go?"

　　Cosette took Marius' hand, and pressed it without replying.

　　"Very well," said Marius, "then I will go elsewhere."

　　Cosette felt rather than understood the meaning of these words. She turned so pale that her face shone white through the gloom. She stammered:--

　　"What do you mean?"

　　Marius looked at her, then raised his eyes to heaven, and answered:

　　"Nothing."

　　When his eyes fell again, he saw Cosette smiling at him. The smile of a woman whom one loves possesses a visible radiance, even at night.

　　"How silly we are!

　　Marius, I have an idea."

　　"What is it?"

　　"If we go away, do you go too!

　　I will tell you where!

　　Come and join me wherever I am."

　　Marius was now a thoroughly roused man.

　　He had fallen back into reality.

　　He cried to Cosette:--

　　"Go away with you!

　　Are you mad?

　　Why, I should have to have money, and I have none!

　　Go to England?

　　But I am in debt now, I owe, I don't know how much, more than ten louis to Courfeyrac, one of my friends with whom you are not acquainted!

　　I have an old hat which is not worth three francs, I have a coat which lacks buttons in front, my shirt is all ragged, my elbows are torn, my boots let in the water; for the last six weeks I have not thought about it, and I have not told you about it.

　　You only see me at night, and you give me your love; if you were to see me in the daytime, you would give me a sou!

　　Go to England!

　　Eh!

　　I haven't enough to pay for a passport!"

　　He threw himself against a tree which was close at hand, erect, his brow pressed close to the bark, feeling neither the wood which flayed his skin, nor the fever which was throbbing in his temples, and there he stood motionless, on the point of falling, like the statue of despair.

　　He remained a long time thus.

　　One could remain for eternity in such abysses.

　　At last he turned round.

　　He heard behind him a faint stifled noise, which was sweet yet sad.

　　It was Cosette sobbing.

　　She had been weeping for more than two hours beside Marius as he meditated.

　　He came to her, fell at her knees, and slowly prostrating himself, he took the tip of her foot which peeped out from beneath her robe, and kissed it.

　　She let him have his way in silence.

　　There are moments when a woman accepts, like a sombre and resigned goddess, the religion of love.

　　"Do not weep," he said.

　　She murmured:--

　　"Not when I may be going away, and you cannot come!"

　　He went on:--

　　"Do you love me?"

　　She replied, sobbing, by that word from paradise which is never more charming than amid tears:--

　　"I adore you!"

　　He continued in a tone which was an indescribable caress:--

　　"Do not weep.

　　Tell me, will you do this for me, and cease to weep?"

　　"Do you love me?" said she.

　　He took her hand.

　　"Cosette, I have never given my word of honor to any one, because my word of honor terrifies me.

　　I feel that my father is by my side.

　　Well, I give you my most sacred word of honor, that if you go away I shall die."

　　In the tone with which he uttered these words there lay a melancholy so solemn and so tranquil, that Cosette trembled.

　　She felt that chill which is produced by a true and gloomy thing as it passes by. The shock made her cease weeping.

　　"Now, listen," said he, "do not expect me to-morrow."

　　"Why?"

　　"Do not expect me until the day after to-morrow."

　　"Oh!

　　Why?"

　　"You will see."

　　"A day without seeing you!

　　But that is impossible!"

　　"Let us sacrifice one day in order to gain our whole lives, perhaps."

　　And Marius added in a low tone and in an aside:--

　　"He is a man who never changes his habits, and he has never received any one except in the evening."

　　"Of what man are you speaking?" asked Cosette.

　　"I?

　　I said nothing."

　　"What do you hope, then?"

　　"Wait until the day after to-morrow."

　　"You wish it?"

　　"Yes, Cosette."

　　She took his head in both her hands, raising herself on tiptoe in order to be on a level with him, and tried to read his hope in his eyes.

　　Marius resumed:--

　　"Now that I think of it, you ought to know my address: something might happen, one never knows; I live with that friend named Courfeyrac, Rue de la Verrerie, No. 16."

　　He searched in his pocket, pulled out his penknife, and with the blade he wrote on the plaster of the wall:--

　　"16 Rue de la Verrerie."

　　In the meantime, Cosette had begun to gaze into his eyes once more.

　　"Tell me your thought, Marius; you have some idea.

　　Tell it to me. Oh! tell me, so that I may pass a pleasant night."

　　"This is my idea:

　　that it is impossible that God should mean to part us.

　　Wait; expect me the day after to-morrow."

　　"What shall I do until then?" said Cosette. "You are outside, you go, and come!

　　How happy men are! I shall remain entirely alone!

　　Oh!

　　How sad I shall be!

　　What is it that you are going to do to-morrow evening? tell me."

　　"I am going to try something."

　　"Then I will pray to God and I will think of you here, so that you may be successful.

　　I will question you no further, since you do not wish it.

　　You are my master.

　　I shall pass the evening to-morrow in singing that music from Euryanthe that you love, and that you came one evening to listen to, outside my shutters. But day after to-morrow you will come early.

　　I shall expect you at dusk, at nine o'clock precisely, I warn you.

　　Mon Dieu! how sad it is that the days are so long!

　　On the stroke of nine, do you understand, I shall be in the garden."

　　"And I also."

　　And without having uttered it, moved by the same thought, impelled by those electric currents which place lovers in continual communication, both being intoxicated with delight even in their sorrow, they fell into each other's arms, without perceiving that their lips met while their uplifted eyes, overflowing with rapture and full of tears, gazed upon the stars.

　　When Marius went forth, the street was deserted.

　　This was the moment when Eponine was following the ruffians to the boulevard.

　　While Marius had been dreaming with his head pressed to the tree, an idea had crossed his mind; an idea, alas! that he himself judged to be senseless and impossible.

　　He had come to a desperate decision.

BOOK EIGHTH.--ENCHANTMENTS AND DESOLATIONS

CHAPTER VII

　　THE OLD HEART AND THE YOUNG HEART IN THE PRESENCE OF EACH OTHER

　　 At that epoch, Father Gillenormand was well past his ninety-first birthday.

　　He still lived with Mademoiselle Gillenormand in the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, No. 6, in the old house which he owned. He was, as the reader will remember, one of those antique old men who await death perfectly erect, whom age bears down without bending, and whom even sorrow cannot curve.

　　Still, his daughter had been saying for some time:

　　"My father is sinking."

　　He no longer boxed the maids' ears; he no longer thumped the landing-place so vigorously with his cane when Basque was slow in opening the door.

　　The Revolution of July had exasperated him for the space of barely six months.

　　He had viewed, almost tranquilly, that coupling of words, in the Moniteur:

　　M. Humblot-Conte, peer of France.

　　The fact is, that the old man was deeply dejected. He did not bend, he did not yield; this was no more a characteristic of his physical than of his moral nature, but he felt himself giving way internally.

　　For four years he had been waiting for Marius, with his foot firmly planted, that is the exact word, in the conviction that that good-for-nothing young scamp would ring at his door some day or other; now he had reached the point, where, at certain gloomy hours, he said to himself, that if Marius made him wait much longer--It was not death that was insupportable to him; it was the idea that perhaps he should never see Marius again. The idea of never seeing Marius again had never entered his brain until that day; now the thought began to recur to him, and it chilled him.

　　Absence, as is always the case in genuine and natural sentiments, had only served to augment the grandfather's love for the ungrateful child, who had gone off like a flash. It is during December nights, when the cold stands at ten degrees, that one thinks oftenest of the son.

　　M. Gillenormand was, or thought himself, above all things, incapable of taking a single step, he--the grandfather, towards his grandson; "I would die rather," he said to himself. He did not consider himself as the least to blame; but he thought of Marius only with profound tenderness, and the mute despair of an elderly, kindly old man who is about to vanish in the dark.

　　He began to lose his teeth, which added to his sadness.

　　M. Gillenormand, without however acknowledging it to himself, for it would have rendered him furious and ashamed, had never loved a mistress as he loved Marius.

　　He had had placed in his chamber, opposite the head of his bed, so that it should be the first thing on which his eyes fell on waking, an old portrait of his other daughter, who was dead, Madame Pontmercy, a portrait which had been taken when she was eighteen.

　　He gazed incessantly at that portrait.

　　One day, he happened to say, as he gazed upon it:--

　　"I think the likeness is strong."

　　"To my sister?" inquired Mademoiselle Gillenormand.

　　"Yes, certainly."

　　"The old man added:--

　　"And to him also."

　　Once as he sat with his knees pressed together, and his eyes almost closed, in a despondent attitude, his daughter ventured to say to him:--

　　"Father, are you as angry with him as ever?"

　　She paused, not daring to proceed further.

　　"With whom?" he demanded.

　　"With that poor Marius."

　　He raised his aged head, laid his withered and emaciated fist on the table, and exclaimed in his most irritated and vibrating tone:--

　　"Poor Marius, do you say!

　　That gentleman is a knave, a wretched scoundrel, a vain little ingrate, a heartless, soulless, haughty, and wicked man!"

　　And he turned away so that his daughter might not see the tear that stood in his eye.

　　Three days later he broke a silence which had lasted four hours, to say to his daughter point-blank:--

　　"I had the honor to ask Mademoiselle Gillenormand never to mention him to me."

　　Aunt Gillenormand renounced every effort, and pronounced this acute diagnosis:

　　"My father never cared very much for my sister after her folly.

　　It is clear that he detests Marius."

　　"After her folly" meant:

　　"after she had married the colonel."

　　However, as the reader has been able to conjecture, Mademoiselle Gillenormand had failed in her attempt to substitute her favorite, the officer of lancers, for Marius.

　　The substitute, Theodule, had not been a success.

　　M. Gillenormand had not accepted the quid pro quo.

　　A vacancy in the heart does not accommodate itself to a stop-gap. Theodule, on his side, though he scented the inheritance, was disgusted at the task of pleasing.

　　The goodman bored the lancer; and the lancer shocked the goodman.

　　Lieutenant Theodule was gay, no doubt, but a chatter-box, frivolous, but vulgar; a high liver, but a frequenter of bad company; he had mistresses, it is true, and he had a great deal to say about them, it is true also; but he talked badly.

　　All his good qualities had a defect. M. Gillenormand was worn out with hearing him tell about the love affairs that he had in the vicinity of the barracks in the Rue de Babylone.

　　And then, Lieutenant Gillenormand sometimes came in his uniform, with the tricolored cockade.

　　This rendered him downright intolerable.

　　Finally, Father Gillenormand had said to his daughter:

　　"I've had enough of that Theodule.

　　I haven't much taste for warriors in time of peace.

　　Receive him if you choose. I don't know but I prefer slashers to fellows that drag their swords. The clash of blades in battle is less dismal, after all, than the clank of the scabbard on the pavement.

　　And then, throwing out your chest like a bully and lacing yourself like a girl, with stays under your cuirass, is doubly ridiculous.

　　When one is a veritable man, one holds equally aloof from swagger and from affected airs.

　　He is neither a blusterer nor a finnicky-hearted man.

　　Keep your Theodule for yourself."

　　It was in vain that his daughter said to him:

　　"But he is your grandnephew, nevertheless,"--it turned out that M. Gillenormand, who was a grandfather to the very finger-tips, was not in the least a grand-uncle.

　　In fact, as he had good sense, and as he had compared the two, Theodule had only served to make him regret Marius all the more.

　　One evening,--it was the 24th of June, which did not prevent Father Gillenormand having a rousing fire on the hearth,--he had dismissed his daughter, who was sewing in a neighboring apartment. He was alone in his chamber, amid its pastoral scenes, with his feet propped on the andirons, half enveloped in his huge screen of coromandel lacquer, with its nine leaves, with his elbow resting on a table where burned two candles under a green shade, engulfed in his tapestry armchair, and in his hand a book which he was not reading. He was dressed, according to his wont, like an incroyable, and resembled an antique portrait by Garat.

　　This would have made people run after him in the street, had not his daughter covered him up, whenever he went out, in a vast bishop's wadded cloak, which concealed his attire.

　　At home, he never wore a dressing gown, except when he rose and retired.

　　"It gives one a look of age," said he.

　　Father Gillenormand was thinking of Marius lovingly and bitterly; and, as usual, bitterness predominated.

　　His tenderness once soured always ended by boiling and turning to indignation. He had reached the point where a man tries to make up his mind and to accept that which rends his heart.

　　He was explaining to himself that there was no longer any reason why Marius should return, that if he intended to return, he should have done it long ago, that he must renounce the idea.

　　He was trying to accustom himself to the thought that all was over, and that he should die without having beheld "that gentleman" again.

　　But his whole nature revolted; his aged paternity would not consent to this.

　　"Well!" said he,-- this was his doleful refrain,--"he will not return!"

　　His bald head had fallen upon his breast, and he fixed a melancholy and irritated gaze upon the ashes on his hearth.

　　In the very midst of his revery, his old servant Basque entered, and inquired:--

　　"Can Monsieur receive M. Marius?"

　　The old man sat up erect, pallid, and like a corpse which rises under the influence of a galvanic shock.

　　All his blood had retreated to his heart.

　　He stammered:--

　　"M. Marius what?"

　　"I don't know," replied Basque, intimidated and put out of countenance by his master's air; "I have not seen him.

　　Nicolette came in and said to me:

　　`There's a young man here; say that it is M. Marius.'"

　　Father Gillenormand stammered in a low voice:--

　　"Show him in."

　　And he remained in the same attitude, with shaking head, and his eyes fixed on the door.

　　It opened once more.

　　A young man entered. It was Marius.

　　Marius halted at the door, as though waiting to be bidden to enter.

　　His almost squalid attire was not perceptible in the obscurity caused by the shade.

　　Nothing could be seen but his calm, grave, but strangely sad face.

　　It was several minutes before Father Gillenormand, dulled with amazement and joy, could see anything except a brightness as when one is in the presence of an apparition.

　　He was on the point of swooning; he saw Marius through a dazzling light.

　　It certainly was he, it certainly was Marius.

　　At last!

　　After the lapse of four years!

　　He grasped him entire, so to speak, in a single glance.

　　He found him noble, handsome, distinguished, well-grown, a complete man, with a suitable mien and a charming air.

　　He felt a desire to open his arms, to call him, to fling himself forward; his heart melted with rapture, affectionate words swelled and overflowed his breast; at length all his tenderness came to the light and reached his lips, and, by a contrast which constituted the very foundation of his nature, what came forth was harshness.

　　He said abruptly:--

　　"What have you come here for?"

　　Marius replied with embarrassment:--

　　"Monsieur--"

　　M. Gillenormand would have liked to have Marius throw himself into his arms.

　　He was displeased with Marius and with himself. He was conscious that he was brusque, and that Marius was cold. It caused the goodman unendurable and irritating anxiety to feel so tender and forlorn within, and only to be able to be hard outside. Bitterness returned.

　　He interrupted Marius in a peevish tone:--

　　"Then why did you come?"

　　That "then" signified:

　　If you do not come to embrace me. Marius looked at his grandfather, whose pallor gave him a face of marble.

　　"Monsieur--"

　　"Have you come to beg my pardon?

　　Do you acknowledge your faults?"

　　He thought he was putting Marius on the right road, and that "the child" would yield.

　　Marius shivered; it was the denial of his father that was required of him; he dropped his eyes and replied:--

　　"No, sir."

　　"Then," exclaimed the old man impetuously, with a grief that was poignant and full of wrath, "what do you want of me?"

　　Marius clasped his hands, advanced a step, and said in a feeble and trembling voice:--

　　"Sir, have pity on me."

　　These words touched M. Gillenormand; uttered a little sooner, they would have rendered him tender, but they came too late. The grandfather rose; he supported himself with both hands on his cane; his lips were white, his brow wavered, but his lofty form towered above Marius as he bowed.

　　"Pity on you, sir!

　　It is youth demanding pity of the old man of ninety-one! You are entering into life, I am leaving it; you go to the play, to balls, to the cafe, to the billiard-hall; you have wit, you please the women, you are a handsome fellow; as for me, I spit on my brands in the heart of summer; you are rich with the only riches that are really such, I possess all the poverty of age; infirmity, isolation!

　　You have your thirty-two teeth, a good digestion, bright eyes, strength, appetite, health, gayety, a forest of black hair; I have no longer even white hair, I have lost my teeth, I am losing my legs, I am losing my memory; there are three names of streets that I confound incessantly, the Rue Charlot, the Rue du Chaume, and the Rue Saint-Claude, that is what I have come to; you have before you the whole future, full of sunshine, and I am beginning to lose my sight, so far am I advancing into the night; you are in love, that is a matter of course, I am beloved by no one in all the world; and you ask pity of me!

　　Parbleu!

　　Moliere forgot that.

　　If that is the way you jest at the courthouse, Messieurs the lawyers, I sincerely compliment you. You are droll."

　　And the octogenarian went on in a grave and angry voice:--

　　"Come, now, what do you want of me?"

　　"Sir," said Marius, "I know that my presence is displeasing to you, but I have come merely to ask one thing of you, and then I shall go away immediately."

　　"You are a fool!" said the old man.

　　"Who said that you were to go away?"

　　This was the translation of the tender words which lay at the bottom of his heart:--

　　"Ask my pardon!

　　Throw yourself on my neck!"

　　M. Gillenormand felt that Marius would leave him in a few moments, that his harsh reception had repelled the lad, that his hardness was driving him away; he said all this to himself, and it augmented his grief; and as his grief was straightway converted into wrath, it increased his harshness.

　　He would have liked to have Marius understand, and Marius did not understand, which made the goodman furious.

　　He began again:--

　　"What! you deserted me, your grandfather, you left my house to go no one knows whither, you drove your aunt to despair, you went off, it is easily guessed, to lead a bachelor life; it's more convenient, to play the dandy, to come in at all hours, to amuse yourself; you have given me no signs of life, you have contracted debts without even telling me to pay them, you have become a smasher of windows and a blusterer, and, at the end of four years, you come to me, and that is all you have to say to me!"

　　This violent fashion of driving a grandson to tenderness was productive only of silence on the part of Marius.

　　M. Gillenormand folded his arms; a gesture which with him was peculiarly imperious, and apostrophized Marius bitterly:--

　　"Let us make an end of this.

　　You have come to ask something of me, you say?

　　Well, what?

　　What is it?

　　Speak!"

　　"Sir," said Marius, with the look of a man who feels that he is falling over a precipice, "I have come to ask your permission to marry."

　　M. Gillenormand rang the bell.

　　Basque opened the door half-way.

　　"Call my daughter."

　　A second later, the door was opened once more, Mademoiselle Gillenormand did not enter, but showed herself; Marius was standing, mute, with pendant arms and the face of a criminal; M. Gillenormand was pacing back and forth in the room.

　　He turned to his daughter and said to her:--

　　"Nothing.

　　It is Monsieur Marius.

　　Say good day to him. Monsieur wishes to marry.

　　That's all.

　　Go away."

　　The curt, hoarse sound of the old man's voice announced a strange degree of excitement.

　　The aunt gazed at Marius with a frightened air, hardly appeared to recognize him, did not allow a gesture or a syllable to escape her, and disappeared at her father's breath more swiftly than a straw before the hurricane.

　　In the meantime, Father Gillenormand had returned and placed his back against the chimney-piece once more.

　　"You marry!

　　At one and twenty!

　　You have arranged that!

　　You have only a permission to ask! a formality.

　　Sit down, sir.

　　Well, you have had a revolution since I had the honor to see you last. The Jacobins got the upper hand.

　　You must have been delighted. Are you not a Republican since you are a Baron?

　　You can make that agree.

　　The Republic makes a good sauce for the barony. Are you one of those decorated by July?

　　Have you taken the Louvre at all, sir?

　　Quite near here, in the Rue Saint-Antoine, opposite the Rue des Nonamdieres, there is a cannon-ball incrusted in the wall of the third story of a house with this inscription: `July 28th, 1830.'

　　Go take a look at that.

　　It produces a good effect. Ah! those friends of yours do pretty things.

　　By the way, aren't they erecting a fountain in the place of the monument of M. le Duc de Berry? So you want to marry?

　　Whom?

　　Can one inquire without indiscretion?"

　　He paused, and, before Marius had time to answer, he added violently:--

　　"Come now, you have a profession?

　　A fortune made?

　　How much do you earn at your trade of lawyer?"

　　"Nothing," said Marius, with a sort of firmness and resolution that was almost fierce.

　　"Nothing?

　　Then all that you have to live upon is the twelve hundred livres that I allow you?"

　　Marius did not reply.

　　M. Gillenormand continued:--

　　"Then I understand the girl is rich?"

　　"As rich as I am."

　　"What!

　　No dowry?"

　　"No."

　　"Expectations?"

　　"I think not."

　　"Utterly naked!

　　What's the father?"

　　"I don't know."

　　"And what's her name?"

　　"Mademoiselle Fauchelevent."

　　"Fauchewhat?"

　　"Fauchelevent."

　　"Pttt!" ejaculated the old gentleman.

　　"Sir!" exclaimed Marius.

　　M. Gillenormand interrupted him with the tone of a man who is speaking to himself:--

　　"That's right, one and twenty years of age, no profession, twelve hundred livres a year, Madame la Baronne de Pontmercy will go and purchase a couple of sous' worth of parsley from the fruiterer."

　　"Sir," repeated Marius, in the despair at the last hope, which was vanishing, "I entreat you!

　　I conjure you in the name of Heaven, with clasped hands, sir, I throw myself at your feet, permit me to marry her!"

　　The old man burst into a shout of strident and mournful laughter, coughing and laughing at the same time.

　　"Ah! ah! ah!

　　You said to yourself:

　　`Pardine! I'll go hunt up that old blockhead, that absurd numskull!

　　What a shame that I'm not twenty-five! How I'd treat him to a nice respectful summons! How nicely I'd get along without him!

　　It's nothing to me, I'd say to him:

　　"You're only too happy to see me, you old idiot, I want to marry, I desire to wed Mamselle No-matter-whom, daughter of Monsieur No-matter-what, I have no shoes, she has no chemise, that just suits; I want to throw my career, my future, my youth, my life to the dogs; I wish to take a plunge into wretchedness with a woman around my neck, that's an idea, and you must consent to it!" and the old fossil will consent.'

　　Go, my lad, do as you like, attach your paving-stone, marry your Pousselevent, your Coupelevent-- Never, sir, never!"

　　"Father--"

　　"Never!"

　　At the tone in which that "never" was uttered, Marius lost all hope. He traversed the chamber with slow steps, with bowed head, tottering and more like a dying man than like one merely taking his departure. M. Gillenormand followed him with his eyes, and at the moment when the door opened, and Marius was on the point of going out, he advanced four paces, with the senile vivacity of impetuous and spoiled old gentlemen, seized Marius by the collar, brought him back energetically into the room, flung him into an armchair and said to him:--

　　"Tell me all about it!"

　　"It was that single word "father" which had effected this revolution.

　　Marius stared at him in bewilderment.

　　M. Gillenormand's mobile face was no longer expressive of anything but rough and ineffable good-nature. The grandsire had given way before the grandfather.

　　"Come, see here, speak, tell me about your love affairs, jabber, tell me everything!

　　Sapristi! how stupid young folks are!"

　　"Father--" repeated Marius.

　　The old man's entire countenance lighted up with indescribable radiance.

　　"Yes, that's right, call me father, and you'll see!"

　　There was now something so kind, so gentle, so openhearted, and so paternal in this brusqueness, that Marius, in the sudden transition from discouragement to hope, was stunned and intoxicated by it, as it were.

　　He was seated near the table, the light from the candles brought out the dilapidation of his costume, which Father Gillenormand regarded with amazement.

　　"Well, father--" said Marius.

　　"Ah, by the way," interrupted M. Gillenormand, "you really have not a penny then?

　　You are dressed like a pickpocket."

　　He rummaged in a drawer, drew forth a purse, which he laid on the table:

　　"Here are a hundred louis, buy yourself a hat."

　　"Father," pursued Marius, "my good father, if you only knew!

　　I love her. You cannot imagine it; the first time I saw her was at the Luxembourg, she came there; in the beginning, I did not pay much heed to her, and then, I don't know how it came about, I fell in love with her. Oh! how unhappy that made me!

　　Now, at last, I see her every day, at her own home, her father does not know it, just fancy, they are going away, it is in the garden that we meet, in the evening, her father means to take her to England, then I said to myself: `I'll go and see my grandfather and tell him all about the affair. I should go mad first, I should die, I should fall ill, I should throw myself into the water.

　　I absolutely must marry her, since I should go mad otherwise.'

　　This is the whole truth, and I do not think that I have omitted anything.

　　She lives in a garden with an iron fence, in the Rue Plumet.

　　It is in the neighborhood of the Invalides."

　　Father Gillenormand had seated himself, with a beaming countenance, beside Marius.

　　As he listened to him and drank in the sound of his voice, he enjoyed at the same time a protracted pinch of snuff. At the words "Rue Plumet" he interrupted his inhalation and allowed the remainder of his snuff to fall upon his knees.

　　"The Rue Plumet, the Rue Plumet, did you say?--Let us see!--Are there not barracks in that vicinity?--Why, yes, that's it.

　　Your cousin Theodule has spoken to me about it.

　　The lancer, the officer. A gay girl, my good friend, a gay girl!--Pardieu, yes, the Rue Plumet. It is what used to be called the Rue Blomet.--It all comes back to me now.

　　I have heard of that little girl of the iron railing in the Rue Plumet.

　　In a garden, a Pamela.

　　Your taste is not bad. She is said to be a very tidy creature.

　　Between ourselves, I think that simpleton of a lancer has been courting her a bit. I don't know where he did it.

　　However, that's not to the purpose. Besides, he is not to be believed.

　　He brags, Marius!

　　I think it quite proper that a young man like you should be in love. It's the right thing at your age.

　　I like you better as a lover than as a Jacobin.

　　I like you better in love with a petticoat, sapristi! with twenty petticoats, than with M. de Robespierre. For my part, I will do myself the justice to say, that in the line of sans-culottes, I have never loved any one but women.

　　Pretty girls are pretty girls, the deuce!

　　There's no objection to that.

　　As for the little one, she receives you without her father's knowledge. That's in the established order of things.

　　I have had adventures of that same sort myself.

　　More than one.

　　Do you know what is done then? One does not take the matter ferociously; one does not precipitate himself into the tragic; one does not make one's mind to marriage and M. le Maire with his scarf.

　　One simply behaves like a fellow of spirit.

　　One shows good sense.

　　Slip along, mortals; don't marry. You come and look up your grandfather, who is a good-natured fellow at bottom, and who always has a few rolls of louis in an old drawer; you say to him:

　　`See here, grandfather.'

　　And the grandfather says: `That's a simple matter.

　　Youth must amuse itself, and old age must wear out.

　　I have been young, you will be old.

　　Come, my boy, you shall pass it on to your grandson.

　　Here are two hundred pistoles. Amuse yourself, deuce take it!'

　　Nothing better!

　　That's the way the affair should be treated.

　　You don't marry, but that does no harm. You understand me?"

　　Marius, petrified and incapable of uttering a syllable, made a sign with his head that he did not.

　　The old man burst out laughing, winked his aged eye, gave him a slap on the knee, stared him full in the face with a mysterious and beaming air, and said to him, with the tenderest of shrugs of the shoulder:--

　　"Booby! make her your mistress."

　　Marius turned pale.

　　He had understood nothing of what his grandfather had just said.

　　This twaddle about the Rue Blomet, Pamela, the barracks, the lancer, had passed before Marius like a dissolving view. Nothing of all that could bear any reference to Cosette, who was a lily.

　　The good man was wandering in his mind.

　　But this wandering terminated in words which Marius did understand, and which were a mortal insult to Cosette.

　　Those words, "make her your mistress," entered the heart of the strict young man like a sword.

　　He rose, picked up his hat which lay on the floor, and walked to the door with a firm, assured step.

　　There he turned round, bowed deeply to his grandfather, raised his head erect again, and said:--

　　"Five years ago you insulted my father; to-day you have insulted my wife.

　　I ask nothing more of you, sir.

　　Farewell."

　　Father Gillenormand, utterly confounded, opened his mouth, extended his arms, tried to rise, and before he could utter a word, the door closed once more, and Marius had disappeared.

　　The old man remained for several minutes motionless and as though struck by lightning, without the power to speak or breathe, as though a clenched fist grasped his throat.

　　At last he tore himself from his arm-chair, ran, so far as a man can run at ninety-one, to the door, opened it, and cried:--

　　"Help!

　　Help!"

　　His daughter made her appearance, then the domestics.

　　He began again, with a pitiful rattle:

　　"Run after him!

　　Bring him back!

　　What have I done to him?

　　He is mad!

　　He is going away!

　　Ah! my God!

　　Ah! my God! This time he will not come back!"

　　He went to the window which looked out on the street, threw it open with his aged and palsied hands, leaned out more than half-way, while Basque and Nicolette held him behind, and shouted:--

　　"Marius!

　　Marius!

　　Marius!

　　Marius!"

　　But Marius could no longer hear him, for at that moment he was turning the corner of the Rue Saint-Louis.

　　The octogenarian raised his hands to his temples two or three times with an expression of anguish, recoiled tottering, and fell back into an arm-chair, pulseless, voiceless, tearless, with quivering head and lips which moved with a stupid air, with nothing in his eyes and nothing any longer in his heart except a gloomy and profound something which resembled night.

BOOK NINTH.--WHITHER ARE THEY GOING?

CHAPTER I

　　JEAN VALJEAN

　　That same day, towards four o'clock in the afternoon, Jean Valjean was sitting alone on the back side of one of the most solitary slopes in the Champ-de-Mars. Either from prudence, or from a desire to meditate, or simply in consequence of one of those insensible changes of habit which gradually introduce themselves into the existence of every one, he now rarely went out with Cosette. He had on his workman's waistcoat, and trousers of gray linen; and his long-visored cap concealed his countenance.

　　He was calm and happy now beside Cosette; that which had, for a time, alarmed and troubled him had been dissipated; but for the last week or two, anxieties of another nature had come up.

　　One day, while walking on the boulevard, he had caught sight of Thenardier; thanks to his disguise, Thenardier had not recognized him; but since that day, Jean Valjean had seen him repeatedly, and he was now certain that Thenardier was prowling about in their neighborhood.

　　This had been sufficient to make him come to a decision.

　　Moreover, Paris was not tranquil:

　　political troubles presented this inconvenient feature, for any one who had anything to conceal in his life, that the police had grown very uneasy and very suspicious, and that while seeking to ferret out a man like Pepin or Morey, they might very readily discover a man like Jean Valjean.

　　Jean Valjean had made up his mind to quit Paris, and even France, and go over to England.

　　He had warned Cosette.

　　He wished to set out before the end of the week.

　　He had seated himself on the slope in the Champ-de-Mars, turning over all sorts of thoughts in his mind,--Thenardier, the police, the journey, and the difficulty of procuring a passport.

　　He was troubled from all these points of view.

　　 of all, an inexplicable circumstance which had just attracted his attention, and from which he had not yet recovered, had added to his state of alarm.

　　On the morning of that very day, when he alone of the household was stirring, while strolling in the garden before Cosette's shutters were open, he had suddenly perceived on the wall, the following line, engraved, probably with a nail:--

　　16 Rue de la Verrerie.

　　This was perfectly fresh, the grooves in the ancient black mortar were white, a tuft of nettles at the foot of the wall was powdered with the fine, fresh plaster.

　　This had probably been written on the preceding night.

　　What was this?

　　A signal for others?

　　A warning for himself?

　　In any case, it was evident that the garden had been violated, and that strangers had made their way into it.

　　He recalled the odd incidents which had already alarmed the household.

　　His mind was now filling in this canvas.

　　He took good care not to speak to Cosette of the line written on the wall, for fear of alarming her.

　　In the midst of his preoccupations, he perceived, from a shadow cast by the sun, that some one had halted on the crest of the slope immediately behind him.

　　He was on the point of turning round, when a paper folded in four fell upon his knees as though a hand had dropped it over his head.

　　He took the paper, unfolded it, and read these words written in large characters, with a pencil:--

　　"MOVE AWAY FROM YOUR HOUSE."

　　Jean Valjean sprang hastily to his feet; there was no one on the slope; he gazed all around him and perceived a creature larger than a child, not so large as a man, clad in a gray blouse and trousers of dust-colored cotton velvet, who was jumping over the parapet and who slipped into the moat of the Champde-Mars.

　　Jean Valjean returned home at once, in a very thoughtful mood.

BOOK NINTH.--WHITHER ARE THEY GOING?

CHAPTER II

　　MARIUS

　　 Marius had left M. Gillenormand in despair.

　　He had entered the house with very little hope, and quitted it with immense despair.

　　However, and those who have observed the depths of the human heart will understand this, the officer, the lancer, the ninny, Cousin Theodule, had left no trace in his mind.

　　Not the slightest. The dramatic poet might, apparently, expect some complications from this revelation made point-blank by the grandfather to the grandson. But what the drama would gain thereby, truth would lose. Marius was at an age when one believes nothing in the line of evil; later on comes the age when one believes everything.

　　Suspicions are nothing else than wrinkles.

　　Early youth has none of them. That which overwhelmed Othello glides innocuous over Candide. Suspect Cosette!

　　There are hosts of crimes which Marius could sooner have committed.

　　He began to wander about the streets, the resource of those who suffer. He thought of nothing, so far as he could afterwards remember. At two o'clock in the morning he returned to Courfeyrac's quarters and flung himself, without undressing, on his mattress.

　　The sun was shining brightly when he sank into that frightful leaden slumber which permits ideas to go and come in the brain.

　　When he awoke, he saw Courfeyrac, Enjolras, Feuilly, and Combeferre standing in the room with their hats on and all ready to go out.

　　Courfeyrac said to him:--

　　"Are you coming to General Lamarque's funeral?"

　　It seemed to him that Courfeyrac was speaking Chinese.

　　He went out some time after them.

　　He put in his pocket the pistols which Javert had given him at the time of the adventure on the 3d of February, and which had remained in his hands.

　　These pistols were still loaded.

　　It would be difficult to say what vague thought he had in his mind when he took them with him.

　　All day long he prowled about, without knowing where he was going; it rained at times, he did not perceive it; for his dinner, he purchased a penny roll at a baker's, put it in his pocket and forgot it. It appears that he took a bath in the Seine without being aware of it. There are moments when a man has a furnace within his skull. Marius was passing through one of those moments.

　　He no longer hoped for anything; this step he had taken since the preceding evening. He waited for night with feverish impatience, he had but one idea clearly before his mind;--this was, that at nine o'clock he should see Cosette.

　　This last happiness now constituted his whole future; after that, gloom.

　　At intervals, as he roamed through the most deserted boulevards, it seemed to him that he heard strange noises in Paris. He thrust his head out of his revery and said:

　　"Is there fighting on hand?"

　　At nightfall, at nine o'clock precisely, as he had promised Cosette, he was in the Rue Plumet.

　　When he approached the grating he forgot everything.

　　It was forty-eight hours since he had seen Cosette; he was about to behold her once more; every other thought was effaced, and he felt only a profound and unheard-of joy.

　　Those minutes in which one lives centuries always have this sovereign and wonderful property, that at the moment when they are passing they fill the heart completely.

　　Marius displaced the bar, and rushed headlong into the garden. Cosette was not at the spot where she ordinarily waited for him. He traversed the thicket, and approached the recess near the flight of steps:

　　"She is waiting for me there," said he.

　　Cosette was not there.

　　He raised his eyes, and saw that the shutters of the house were closed.

　　He made the tour of the garden, the garden was deserted. Then he returned to the house, and, rendered senseless by love, intoxicated, terrified, exasperated with grief and uneasiness, like a master who returns home at an evil hour, he tapped on the shutters.

　　He knocked and knocked again, at the risk of seeing the window open, and her father's gloomy face make its appearance, and demand:

　　"What do you want?"

　　This was nothing in comparison with what he dimly caught a glimpse of.

　　When he had rapped, he lifted up his voice and called Cosette.--"Cosette!" he cried; "Cosette!" he repeated imperiously.

　　There was no reply.

　　All was over. No one in the garden; no one in the house.

　　Marius fixed his despairing eyes on that dismal house, which was as black and as silent as a tomb and far more empty.

　　He gazed at the stone seat on which he had passed so many adorable hours with Cosette. Then he seated himself on the flight of steps, his heart filled with sweetness and resolution, he blessed his love in the depths of his thought, and he said to himself that, since Cosette was gone, all that there was left for him was to die.

　　All at once he heard a voice which seemed to proceed from the street, and which was calling to him through the trees:--

　　"Mr. Marius!"

　　He started to his feet.

　　"Hey?" said he.

　　"Mr. Marius, are you there?"

　　"Yes."

　　"Mr. Marius," went on the voice, "your friends are waiting for you at the barricade of the Rue de la Chanvrerie."

　　This voice was not wholly unfamiliar to him.

　　It resembled the hoarse, rough voice of Eponine.

　　Marius hastened to the gate, thrust aside the movable bar, passed his head through the aperture, and saw some one who appeared to him to be a young man, disappearing at a run into the gloom.

BOOK NINTH.--WHITHER ARE THEY GOING?

CHAPTER III

　　M. MABEUF

　　 Jean Valjean's purse was of no use to M. Mabeuf.

　　M. Mabeuf, in his venerable, infantile austerity, had not accepted the gift of the stars; he had not admitted that a star could coin itself into louis d'or. He had not divined that what had fallen from heaven had come from Gavroche.

　　He had taken the purse to the police commissioner of the quarter, as a lost article placed by the finder at the disposal of claimants.

　　The purse was actually lost. It is unnecessary to say that no one claimed it, and that it did not succor M. Mabeuf.

　　Moreover, M. Mabeuf had continued his downward course.

　　His experiments on indigo had been no more successful in the Jardin des Plantes than in his garden at Austerlitz.

　　The year before he had owed his housekeeper's wages; now, as we have seen, he owed three quarters of his rent.

　　The pawnshop had sold the plates of his Flora after the expiration of thirteen months. Some coppersmith had made stewpans of them.

　　His copper plates gone, and being unable to complete even the incomplete copies of his Flora which were in his possession, he had disposed of the text, at a miserable price, as waste paper, to a second-hand bookseller. Nothing now remained to him of his life's work.

　　He set to work to eat up the money for these copies.

　　When he saw that this wretched resource was becoming exhausted, he gave up his garden and allowed it to run to waste.

　　Before this, a long time before, he had given up his two eggs and the morsel of beef which he ate from time to time.

　　He dined on bread and potatoes.

　　He had sold the last of his furniture, then all duplicates of his bedding, his clothing and his blankets, then his herbariums and prints; but he still retained his most precious books, many of which were of the greatest rarity, among others, Les Quadrins Historiques de la Bible, edition of 1560; La Concordance des Bibles, by Pierre de Besse; Les Marguerites de la Marguerite, of Jean de La Haye, with a dedication to the Queen of Navarre; the book de la Charge et Dignite de l'Ambassadeur, by the Sieur de Villiers Hotman; a Florilegium Rabbinicum of 1644; a Tibullus of 1567, with this magnificent inscription:

　　Venetiis, in aedibus Manutianis; and lastly, a Diogenes Laertius, printed at Lyons in 1644, which contained the famous variant of the manuscript 411, thirteenth century, of the Vatican, and those of the two manuscripts of Venice, 393 and 394, consulted with such fruitful results by Henri Estienne, and all the passages in Doric dialect which are only found in the celebrated manuscript of the twelfth century belonging to the Naples Library.

　　M. Mabeuf never had any fire in his chamber, and went to bed at sundown, in order not to consume any candles. It seemed as though he had no longer any neighbors:

　　people avoided him when he went out; he perceived the fact.

　　The wretchedness of a child interests a mother, the wretchedness of a young man interests a young girl, the wretchedness of an old man interests no one. It is, of all distresses, the coldest.

　　Still, Father Mabeuf had not entirely lost his childlike serenity.

　　His eyes acquired some vivacity when they rested on his books, and he smiled when he gazed at the Diogenes Laertius, which was a unique copy.

　　His bookcase with glass doors was the only piece of furniture which he had kept beyond what was strictly indispensable.

　　One day, Mother Plutarque said to him:--

　　"I have no money to buy any dinner."

　　What she called dinner was a loaf of bread and four or five potatoes.

　　"On credit?" suggested M. Mabeuf.

　　"You know well that people refuse me."

　　M. Mabeuf opened his bookcase, took a long look at all his books, one after another, as a father obliged to decimate his children would gaze upon them before making a choice, then seized one hastily, put it in under his arm and went out.

　　He returned two hours later, without anything under his arm, laid thirty sous on the table, and said:--

　　"You will get something for dinner."

　　From that moment forth, Mother Plutarque saw a sombre veil, which was never more lifted, descend over the old man's candid face.

　　On the following day, on the day after, and on the day after that, it had to be done again.

　　M. Mabeuf went out with a book and returned with a coin. As the second-hand dealers perceived that he was forced to sell, they purchased of him for twenty sous that for which he had paid twenty francs, sometimes at those very shops.

　　Volume by volume, the whole library went the same road.

　　He said at times:

　　"But I am eighty;" as though he cherished some secret hope that he should arrive at the end of his days before reaching the end of his books. His melancholy increased.

　　Once, however, he had a pleasure. He had gone out with a Robert Estienne, which he had sold for thirty-five sous under the Quai Malaquais, and he returned with an Aldus which he had bought for forty sous in the Rue des Gres.--"I owe five sous," he said, beaming on Mother Plutarque.

　　That day he had no dinner.

　　He belonged to the Horticultural Society.

　　His destitution became known there.

　　The president of the society came to see him, promised to speak to the Minister of Agriculture and Commerce about him, and did so.--"Why, what!" exclaimed the Minister, "I should think so!

　　An old savant! a botanist! an inoffensive man! Something must be done for him!"

　　On the following day, M. Mabeuf received an invitation to dine with the Minister.

　　Trembling with joy, he showed the letter to Mother Plutarque.

　　"We are saved!" said he. On the day appointed, he went to the Minister's house.

　　He perceived that his ragged cravat, his long, square coat, and his waxed shoes astonished the ushers.

　　No one spoke to him, not even the Minister. About ten o'clock in the evening, while he was still waiting for a word, he heard the Minister's wife, a beautiful woman in a low-necked gown whom he had not ventured to approach, inquire: "Who is that old gentleman?"

　　He returned home on foot at midnight, in a driving rain-storm. He had sold an Elzevir to pay for a carriage in which to go thither.

　　He had acquired the habit of reading a few pages in his Diogenes Laertius every night, before he went to bed.

　　He knew enough Greek to enjoy the peculiarities of the text which he owned. He had now no other enjoyment.

　　Several weeks passed.

　　All at once, Mother Plutarque fell ill.

　　There is one thing sadder than having no money with which to buy bread at the baker's and that is having no money to purchase drugs at the apothecary's. One evening, the doctor had ordered a very expensive potion.

　　And the malady was growing worse; a nurse was required.

　　M. Mabeuf opened his bookcase; there was nothing there.

　　The last volume had taken its departure. All that was left to him was Diogenes Laertius.

　　He put this unique copy under his arm, and went out.

　　It was the 4th of June, 1832; he went to the Porte Saint-Jacques, to Royal's successor, and returned with one hundred francs.

　　He laid the pile of five-franc pieces on the old serving-woman's nightstand, and returned to his chamber without saying a word.

　　On the following morning, at dawn, he seated himself on the overturned post in his garden, and he could be seen over the top of the hedge, sitting the whole morning motionless, with drooping head, his eyes vaguely fixed on the withered flower-beds. It rained at intervals; the old man did not seem to perceive the fact.

　　In the afternoon, extraordinary noises broke out in Paris. They resembled shots and the clamors of a multitude.

　　Father Mabeuf raised his head.

　　He saw a gardener passing, and inquired:--

　　"What is it?"

　　The gardener, spade on back, replied in the most unconcerned tone:--

　　"It is the riots."

　　"What riots?"

　　"Yes, they are fighting."

　　"Why are they fighting?"

　　"Ah, good Heavens!" ejaculated the gardener.

　　"In what direction?" went on M. Mabeuf.

　　"In the neighborhood of the Arsenal."

　　Father Mabeuf went to his room, took his hat, mechanically sought for a book to place under his arm, found none, said:

　　"Ah! truly!" and went off with a bewildered air.

BOOK TENTH.--THE 5TH OF JUNE, 1832

CHAPTER I

　　THE SURFACE OF THE QUESTION

　　Of what is revolt composed?

　　Of nothing and of everything. Of an electricity disengaged, little by little, of a flame suddenly darting forth, of a wandering force, of a passing breath. This breath encounters heads which speak, brains which dream, souls which suffer, passions which burn, wretchedness which howls, and bears them away.

　　Whither?

　　At random.

　　Athwart the state, the laws, athwart prosperity and the insolence of others.

　　Irritated convictions, embittered enthusiasms, agitated indignations, instincts of war which have been repressed, youthful courage which has been exalted, generous blindness; curiosity, the taste for change, the thirst for the unexpected, the sentiment which causes one to take pleasure in reading the posters for the new play, and love, the prompter's whistle, at the theatre; the vague hatreds, rancors, disappointments, every vanity which thinks that destiny has bankrupted it; discomfort, empty dreams, ambitious that are hedged about, whoever hopes for a downfall, some outcome, in short, at the very bottom, the rabble, that mud which catches fire,-- such are the elements of revolt.

　　That which is grandest and that which is basest; the beings who prowl outside of all bounds, awaiting an occasion, bohemians, vagrants, vagabonds of the cross-roads, those who sleep at night in a desert of houses with no other roof than the cold clouds of heaven, those who, each day, demand their bread from chance and not from toil, the unknown of poverty and nothingness, the bare-armed, the bare-footed, belong to revolt.

　　Whoever cherishes in his soul a secret revolt against any deed whatever on the part of the state, of life or of fate, is ripe for riot, and, as soon as it makes its appearance, he begins to quiver, and to feel himself borne away with the whirlwind.

　　Revolt is a sort of waterspout in the social atmosphere which forms suddenly in certain conditions of temperature, and which, as it eddies about, mounts, descends, thunders, tears, razes, crushes, demolishes, uproots, bearing with it great natures and small, the strong man and the feeble mind, the tree trunk and the stalk of straw.

　　Woe to him whom it bears away as well as to him whom it strikes!

　　It breaks the one against the other.

　　It communicates to those whom it seizes an indescribable and extraordinary power.

　　It fills the first-comer with the force of events; it converts everything into projectiles. It makes a cannon-ball of a rough stone, and a general of a porter.

　　If we are to believe certain oracles of crafty political views, a little revolt is desirable from the point of view of power.

　　System: revolt strengthens those governments which it does not overthrow. It puts the army to the test; it consecrates the bourgeoisie, it draws out the muscles of the police; it demonstrates the force of the social framework.

　　It is an exercise in gymnastics; it is almost hygiene.

　　Power is in better health after a revolt, as a man is after a good rubbing down.

　　Revolt, thirty years ago, was regarded from still other points of view.

　　There is for everything a theory, which proclaims itself "good sense"; Philintus against Alcestis; mediation offered between the false and the true; explanation, admonition, rather haughty extenuation which, because it is mingled with blame and excuse, thinks itself wisdom, and is often only pedantry.

　　A whole political school called "the golden mean" has been the outcome of this.

　　As between cold water and hot water, it is the lukewarm water party.

　　This school with its false depth, all on the surface, which dissects effects without going back to first causes, chides from its height of a demi-science, the agitation of the public square.

　　If we listen to this school, "The riots which complicated the affair of 1830 deprived that great event of a portion of its purity.

　　The Revolution of July had been a fine popular gale, abruptly followed by blue sky. They made the cloudy sky reappear.

　　They caused that revolution, at first so remarkable for its unanimity, to degenerate into a quarrel. In the Revolution of July, as in all progress accomplished by fits and starts, there had been secret fractures; these riots rendered them perceptible.

　　It might have been said:

　　`Ah! this is broken.' After the Revolution of July, one was sensible only of deliverance; after the riots, one was conscious of a catastrophe.

　　"All revolt closes the shops, depresses the funds, throws the Exchange into consternation, suspends commerce, clogs business, precipitates failures; no more money, private fortunes rendered uneasy, public credit shaken, industry disconcerted, capital withdrawing, work at a discount, fear everywhere; counter-shocks in every town. Hence gulfs.

　　It has been calculated that the first day of a riot costs France twenty millions, the second day forty, the third sixty, a three days' uprising costs one hundred and twenty millions, that is to say, if only the financial result be taken into consideration, it is equivalent to a disaster, a shipwreck or a lost battle, which should annihilate a fleet of sixty ships of the line.

　　"No doubt, historically, uprisings have their beauty; the war of the pavements is no less grandiose, and no less pathetic, than the war of thickets:

　　in the one there is the soul of forests, in the other the heart of cities; the one has Jean Chouan, the other has a Jeanne. Revolts have illuminated with a red glare all the most original points of the Parisian character, generosity, devotion, stormy gayety, students proving that bravery forms part of intelligence, the National Guard invincible, bivouacs of shopkeepers, fortresses of street urchins, contempt of death on the part of passers-by. Schools and legions clashed together.

　　After all, between the combatants, there was only a difference of age; the race is the same; it is the same stoical men who died at the age of twenty for their ideas, at forty for their families.

　　The army, always a sad thing in civil wars, opposed prudence to audacity.

　　Uprisings, while proving popular intrepidity, also educated the courage of the bourgeois.

　　"This is well.

　　But is all this worth the bloodshed?

　　And to the bloodshed add the future darkness, progress compromised, uneasiness among the best men, honest liberals in despair, foreign absolutism happy in these wounds dealt to revolution by its own hand, the vanquished of 1830 triumphing and saying: `We told you so!'

　　Add Paris enlarged, possibly, but France most assuredly diminished.

　　Add, for all must needs be told, the massacres which have too often dishonored the victory of order grown ferocious over liberty gone mad.

　　To sum up all, uprisings have been disastrous."

　　Thus speaks that approximation to wisdom with which the bourgeoisie, that approximation to the people, so willingly contents itself.

　　For our parts, we reject this word uprisings as too large, and consequently as too convenient.

　　We make a distinction between one popular movement and another popular movement. We do not inquire whether an uprising costs as much as a battle. Why a battle, in the first place?

　　Here the question of war comes up. Is war less of a scourge than an uprising is of a calamity?

　　And then, are all uprisings calamities?

　　And what if the revolt of July did cost a hundred and twenty millions?

　　The establishment of Philip V. in Spain cost France two milliards.

　　Even at the same price, we should prefer the 14th of July.

　　However, we reject these figures, which appear to be reasons and which are only words.

　　An uprising being given, we examine it by itself.

　　In all that is said by the doctrinarian objection above presented, there is no question of anything but effect, we seek the cause.

　　We will be explicit.

BOOK TENTH.--THE 5TH OF JUNE, 1832

CHAPTER II

　　THE ROOT OF THE MATTER

　　 There is such a thing as an uprising, and there is such a thing as insurrection; these are two separate phases of wrath; one is in the wrong, the other is in the right.

　　In democratic states, the only ones which are founded on justice, it sometimes happens that the fraction usurps; then the whole rises and the necessary claim of its rights may proceed as far as resort to arms.

　　In all questions which result from collective sovereignty, the war of the whole against the fraction is insurrection; the attack of the fraction against the whole is revolt; according as the Tuileries contain a king or the Convention, they are justly or unjustly attacked. The same cannon, pointed against the populace, is wrong on the 10th of August, and right on the 14th of Vendemiaire.

　　Alike in appearance, fundamentally different in reality; the Swiss defend the false, Bonaparte defends the true.

　　That which universal suffrage has effected in its liberty and in its sovereignty cannot be undone by the street. It is the same in things pertaining purely to civilization; the instinct of the masses, clear-sighted to-day, may be troubled to-morrow. The same fury legitimate when directed against Terray and absurd when directed against Turgot.

　　The destruction of machines, the pillage of warehouses, the breaking of rails, the demolition of docks, the false routes of multitudes, the refusal by the people of justice to progress, Ramus assassinated by students, Rousseau driven out of Switzerland and stoned,--that is revolt.

　　Israel against Moses, Athens against Phocian, Rome against Cicero,--that is an uprising; Paris against the Bastille,--that is insurrection.

　　The soldiers against Alexander, the sailors against Christopher Columbus,-- this is the same revolt; impious revolt; why?

　　Because Alexander is doing for Asia with the sword that which Christopher Columbus is doing for America with the compass; Alexander like Columbus, is finding a world.

　　These gifts of a world to civilization are such augmentations of light, that all resistance in that case is culpable. Sometimes the populace counterfeits fidelity to itself.

　　The masses are traitors to the people.

　　Is there, for example, anything stranger than that long and bloody protest of dealers in contraband salt, a legitimate chronic revolt, which, at the decisive moment, on the day of salvation, at the very hour of popular victory, espouses the throne, turns into chouannerie, and, from having been an insurrection against, becomes an uprising for, sombre masterpieces of ignorance!

　　The contraband salt dealer escapes the royal gibbets, and with a rope's end round his neck, mounts the white cockade. "Death to the salt duties," brings forth, "Long live the King!" The assassins of Saint-Barthelemy, the cut-throats of September, the manslaughterers of Avignon, the assassins of Coligny, the assassins of Madam Lamballe, the assassins of Brune, Miquelets, Verdets, Cadenettes, the companions of Jehu, the chevaliers of Brassard,-- behold an uprising.

　　La Vendee is a grand, catholic uprising. The sound of right in movement is recognizable, it does not always proceed from the trembling of excited masses; there are mad rages, there are cracked bells, all tocsins do not give out the sound of bronze.

　　The brawl of passions and ignorances is quite another thing from the shock of progress.

　　Show me in what direction you are going.

　　Rise, if you will, but let it be that you may grow great. There is no insurrection except in a forward direction.

　　Any other sort of rising is bad; every violent step towards the rear is a revolt; to retreat is to commit a deed of violence against the human race. Insurrection is a fit of rage on the part of truth; the pavements which the uprising disturbs give forth the spark of right. These pavements bequeath to the uprising only their mud. Danton against Louis XIV.

　　is insurrection; Hebert against Danton is revolt.

　　Hence it results that if insurrection in given cases may be, as Lafayette says, the most holy of duties, an uprising may be the most fatal of crimes.

　　There is also a difference in the intensity of heat; insurrection is often a volcano, revolt is often only a fire of straw.

　　Revolt, as we have said, is sometimes found among those in power. Polignac is a rioter; Camille Desmoulins is one of the governing powers.

　　Insurrection is sometimes resurrection.

　　The solution of everything by universal suffrage being an absolutely modern fact, and all history anterior to this fact being, for the space of four thousand years, filled with violated right, and the suffering of peoples, each epoch of history brings with it that protest of which it is capable.

　　Under the Caesars, there was no insurrection, but there was Juvenal.

　　The facit indignatio replaces the Gracchi.

　　Under the Caesars, there is the exile to Syene; there is also the man of the Annales.

　　We do not speak of the immense exile of Patmos who, on his part also, overwhelms the real world with a protest in the name of the ideal world, who makes of his vision an enormous satire and casts on Rome-Nineveh, on Rome-Babylon, on Rome-Sodom, the flaming reflection of the Apocalypse.

　　John on his rock is the sphinx on its pedestal; we may understand him, he is a Jew, and it is Hebrew; but the man who writes the Annales is of the Latin race, let us rather say he is a Roman.

　　As the Neros reign in a black way, they should be painted to match. The work of the graving-tool alone would be too pale; there must be poured into the channel a concentrated prose which bites.

　　Despots count for something in the question of philosophers. A word that is chained is a terrible word.

　　The writer doubles and trebles his style when silence is imposed on a nation by its master. From this silence there arises a certain mysterious plenitude which filters into thought and there congeals into bronze. The compression of history produces conciseness in the historian. The granite solidity of such and such a celebrated prose is nothing but the accumulation effected by the tyrant.

　　Tyranny constrains the writer to conditions of diameter which are augmentations of force.

　　The Ciceronian period, which hardly sufficed for Verres, would be blunted on Caligula.

　　The less spread of sail in the phrase, the more intensity in the blow. Tacitus thinks with all his might.

　　The honesty of a great heart, condensed in justice and truth, overwhelms as with lightning.

　　Be it remarked, in passing, that Tacitus is not historically superposed upon Caesar.

　　The Tiberii were reserved for him. Caesar and Tacitus are two successive phenomena, a meeting between whom seems to be mysteriously avoided, by the One who, when He sets the centuries on the stage, regulates the entrances and the exits. Caesar is great, Tacitus is great; God spares these two greatnesses by not allowing them to clash with one another.

　　The guardian of justice, in striking Caesar, might strike too hard and be unjust. God does not will it.

　　The great wars of Africa and Spain, the pirates of Sicily destroyed, civilization introduced into Gaul, into Britanny, into Germany,--all this glory covers the Rubicon. There is here a sort of delicacy of the divine justice, hesitating to let loose upon the illustrious usurper the formidable historian, sparing Caesar Tacitus, and according extenuating circumstances to genius.

　　Certainly, despotism remains despotism, even under the despot of genius.

　　There is corruption under all illustrious tyrants, but the moral pest is still more hideous under infamous tyrants. In such reigns, nothing veils the shame; and those who make examples, Tacitus as well as Juvenal, slap this ignominy which cannot reply, in the face, more usefully in the presence of all humanity.

　　Rome smells worse under Vitellius than under Sylla.

　　Under Claudius and under Domitian, there is a deformity of baseness corresponding to the repulsiveness of the tyrant.

　　The villainy of slaves is a direct product of the despot; a miasma exhales from these cowering consciences wherein the master is reflected; public powers are unclean; hearts are small; consciences are dull, souls are like vermin; thus it is under Caracalla, thus it is under Commodus, thus it is under Heliogabalus, while, from the Roman Senate, under Caesar, there comes nothing but the odor of the dung which is peculiar to the eyries of the eagles.

　　Hence the advent, apparently tardy, of the Tacituses and the Juvenals; it is in the hour for evidence, that the demonstrator makes his appearance.

　　But Juvenal and Tacitus, like Isaiah in Biblical times, like Dante in the Middle Ages, is man; riot and insurrection are the multitude, which is sometimes right and sometimes wrong.

　　In the majority of cases, riot proceeds from a material fact; insurrection is always a moral phenomenon.

　　Riot is Masaniello; insurrection, Spartacus.

　　Insurrection borders on mind, riot on the stomach; Gaster grows irritated; but Gaster, assuredly, is not always in the wrong.

　　In questions of famine, riot, Buzancais, for example, holds a true, pathetic, and just point of departure. Nevertheless, it remains a riot.

　　Why?

　　It is because, right at bottom, it was wrong in form.

　　Shy although in the right, violent although strong, it struck at random; it walked like a blind elephant; it left behind it the corpses of old men, of women, and of children; it wished the blood of inoffensive and innocent persons without knowing why.

　　The nourishment of the people is a good object; to massacre them is a bad means.

　　All armed protests, even the most legitimate, even that of the 10th of August, even that of July 14th, begin with the same troubles. Before the right gets set free, there is foam and tumult. In the beginning, the insurrection is a riot, just as a river is a torrent.

　　Ordinarily it ends in that ocean:

　　revolution. Sometimes, however, coming from those lofty mountains which dominate the moral horizon, justice, wisdom, reason, right, formed of the pure snow of the ideal, after a long fall from rock to rock, after having reflected the sky in its transparency and increased by a hundred affluents in the majestic mien of triumph, insurrection is suddenly lost in some quagmire, as the Rhine is in a swamp.

　　All this is of the past, the future is another thing. Universal suffrage has this admirable property, that it dissolves riot in its inception, and, by giving the vote to insurrection, it deprives it of its arms.

　　The disappearance of wars, of street wars as well as of wars on the frontiers, such is the inevitable progression.

　　Whatever To-day may be, To-morrow will be peace.

　　However, insurrection, riot, and points of difference between the former and the latter,--the bourgeois, properly speaking, knows nothing of such shades.

　　In his mind, all is sedition, rebellion pure and simple, the revolt of the dog against his master, an attempt to bite whom must be punished by the chain and the kennel, barking, snapping, until such day as the head of the dog, suddenly enlarged, is outlined vaguely in the gloom face to face with the lion.

　　Then the bourgeois shouts:

　　"Long live the people!"

　　This explanation given, what does the movement of June, 1832, signify, so far as history is concerned?

　　Is it a revolt?

　　Is it an insurrection?

　　It may happen to us, in placing this formidable event on the stage, to say revolt now and then, but merely to distinguish superficial facts, and always preserving the distinction between revolt, the form, and insurrection, the foundation.

　　This movement of 1832 had, in its rapid outbreak and in its melancholy extinction, so much grandeur, that even those who see in it only an uprising, never refer to it otherwise than with respect. For them, it is like a relic of 1830.

　　Excited imaginations, say they, are not to be calmed in a day.

　　A revolution cannot be cut off short. It must needs undergo some undulations before it returns to a state of rest, like a mountain sinking into the plain.

　　There are no Alps without their Jura, nor Pyrenees without the Asturias.

　　This pathetic crisis of contemporary history which the memory of Parisians calls "the epoch of the riots," is certainly a characteristic hour amid the stormy hours of this century. A last word, before we enter on the recital.

　　The facts which we are about to relate belong to that dramatic and living reality, which the historian sometimes neglects for lack of time and space.

　　There, nevertheless, we insist upon it, is life, palpitation, human tremor.

　　Petty details, as we think we have already said, are, so to speak, the foliage of great events, and are lost in the distance of history.

　　The epoch, surnamed "of the riots," abounds in details of this nature. Judicial inquiries have not revealed, and perhaps have not sounded the depths, for another reason than history.

　　We shall therefore bring to light, among the known and published peculiarities, things which have not heretofore been known, about facts over which have passed the forgetfulness of some, and the death of others. The majority of the actors in these gigantic scenes have disappeared; beginning with the very next day they held their peace; but of what we shall relate, we shall be able to say:

　　"We have seen this." We alter a few names, for history relates and does not inform against, but the deed which we shall paint will be genuine.

　　In accordance with the conditions of the book which we are now writing, we shall show only one side and one episode, and certainly, the least known at that, of the two days, the 5th and the 6th of June, 1832, but we shall do it in such wise that the reader may catch a glimpse, beneath the gloomy veil which we are about to lift, of the real form of this frightful public adventure.

　　THE ROOT OF THE MATTER

　　 There is such a thing as an uprising, and there is such a thing as insurrection; these are two separate phases of wrath; one is in the wrong, the other is in the right.

　　In democratic states, the only ones which are founded on justice, it sometimes happens that the fraction usurps; then the whole rises and the necessary claim of its rights may proceed as far as resort to arms.

　　In all questions which result from collective sovereignty, the war of the whole against the fraction is insurrection; the attack of the fraction against the whole is revolt; according as the Tuileries contain a king or the Convention, they are justly or unjustly attacked. The same cannon, pointed against the populace, is wrong on the 10th of August, and right on the 14th of Vendemiaire.

　　Alike in appearance, fundamentally different in reality; the Swiss defend the false, Bonaparte defends the true.

　　That which universal suffrage has effected in its liberty and in its sovereignty cannot be undone by the street. It is the same in things pertaining purely to civilization; the instinct of the masses, clear-sighted to-day, may be troubled to-morrow. The same fury legitimate when directed against Terray and absurd when directed against Turgot.

　　The destruction of machines, the pillage of warehouses, the breaking of rails, the demolition of docks, the false routes of multitudes, the refusal by the people of justice to progress, Ramus assassinated by students, Rousseau driven out of Switzerland and stoned,--that is revolt.

　　Israel against Moses, Athens against Phocian, Rome against Cicero,--that is an uprising; Paris against the Bastille,--that is insurrection.

　　The soldiers against Alexander, the sailors against Christopher Columbus,-- this is the same revolt; impious revolt; why?

　　Because Alexander is doing for Asia with the sword that which Christopher Columbus is doing for America with the compass; Alexander like Columbus, is finding a world.

　　These gifts of a world to civilization are such augmentations of light, that all resistance in that case is culpable. Sometimes the populace counterfeits fidelity to itself.

　　The masses are traitors to the people.

　　Is there, for example, anything stranger than that long and bloody protest of dealers in contraband salt, a legitimate chronic revolt, which, at the decisive moment, on the day of salvation, at the very hour of popular victory, espouses the throne, turns into chouannerie, and, from having been an insurrection against, becomes an uprising for, sombre masterpieces of ignorance!

　　The contraband salt dealer escapes the royal gibbets, and with a rope's end round his neck, mounts the white cockade. "Death to the salt duties," brings forth, "Long live the King!" The assassins of Saint-Barthelemy, the cut-throats of September, the manslaughterers of Avignon, the assassins of Coligny, the assassins of Madam Lamballe, the assassins of Brune, Miquelets, Verdets, Cadenettes, the companions of Jehu, the chevaliers of Brassard,-- behold an uprising.

　　La Vendee is a grand, catholic uprising. The sound of right in movement is recognizable, it does not always proceed from the trembling of excited masses; there are mad rages, there are cracked bells, all tocsins do not give out the sound of bronze.

　　The brawl of passions and ignorances is quite another thing from the shock of progress.

　　Show me in what direction you are going.

　　Rise, if you will, but let it be that you may grow great. There is no insurrection except in a forward direction.

　　Any other sort of rising is bad; every violent step towards the rear is a revolt; to retreat is to commit a deed of violence against the human race. Insurrection is a fit of rage on the part of truth; the pavements which the uprising disturbs give forth the spark of right. These pavements bequeath to the uprising only their mud. Danton against Louis XIV.

　　is insurrection; Hebert against Danton is revolt.

　　Hence it results that if insurrection in given cases may be, as Lafayette says, the most holy of duties, an uprising may be the most fatal of crimes.

　　There is also a difference in the intensity of heat; insurrection is often a volcano, revolt is often only a fire of straw.

　　Revolt, as we have said, is sometimes found among those in power. Polignac is a rioter; Camille Desmoulins is one of the governing powers.

　　Insurrection is sometimes resurrection.

　　The solution of everything by universal suffrage being an absolutely modern fact, and all history anterior to this fact being, for the space of four thousand years, filled with violated right, and the suffering of peoples, each epoch of history brings with it that protest of which it is capable.

　　Under the Caesars, there was no insurrection, but there was Juvenal.

　　The facit indignatio replaces the Gracchi.

　　Under the Caesars, there is the exile to Syene; there is also the man of the Annales.

　　We do not speak of the immense exile of Patmos who, on his part also, overwhelms the real world with a protest in the name of the ideal world, who makes of his vision an enormous satire and casts on Rome-Nineveh, on Rome-Babylon, on Rome-Sodom, the flaming reflection of the Apocalypse.

　　John on his rock is the sphinx on its pedestal; we may understand him, he is a Jew, and it is Hebrew; but the man who writes the Annales is of the Latin race, let us rather say he is a Roman.

　　As the Neros reign in a black way, they should be painted to match. The work of the graving-tool alone would be too pale; there must be poured into the channel a concentrated prose which bites.

　　Despots count for something in the question of philosophers. A word that is chained is a terrible word.

　　The writer doubles and trebles his style when silence is imposed on a nation by its master. From this silence there arises a certain mysterious plenitude which filters into thought and there congeals into bronze. The compression of history produces conciseness in the historian. The granite solidity of such and such a celebrated prose is nothing but the accumulation effected by the tyrant.

　　Tyranny constrains the writer to conditions of diameter which are augmentations of force.

　　The Ciceronian period, which hardly sufficed for Verres, would be blunted on Caligula.

　　The less spread of sail in the phrase, the more intensity in the blow. Tacitus thinks with all his might.

　　The honesty of a great heart, condensed in justice and truth, overwhelms as with lightning.

　　Be it remarked, in passing, that Tacitus is not historically superposed upon Caesar.

　　The Tiberii were reserved for him. Caesar and Tacitus are two successive phenomena, a meeting between whom seems to be mysteriously avoided, by the One who, when He sets the centuries on the stage, regulates the entrances and the exits. Caesar is great, Tacitus is great; God spares these two greatnesses by not allowing them to clash with one another.

　　The guardian of justice, in striking Caesar, might strike too hard and be unjust. God does not will it.

　　The great wars of Africa and Spain, the pirates of Sicily destroyed, civilization introduced into Gaul, into Britanny, into Germany,--all this glory covers the Rubicon. There is here a sort of delicacy of the divine justice, hesitating to let loose upon the illustrious usurper the formidable historian, sparing Caesar Tacitus, and according extenuating circumstances to genius.

　　Certainly, despotism remains despotism, even under the despot of genius.

　　There is corruption under all illustrious tyrants, but the moral pest is still more hideous under infamous tyrants. In such reigns, nothing veils the shame; and those who make examples, Tacitus as well as Juvenal, slap this ignominy which cannot reply, in the face, more usefully in the presence of all humanity.

　　Rome smells worse under Vitellius than under Sylla.

　　Under Claudius and under Domitian, there is a deformity of baseness corresponding to the repulsiveness of the tyrant.

　　The villainy of slaves is a direct product of the despot; a miasma exhales from these cowering consciences wherein the master is reflected; public powers are unclean; hearts are small; consciences are dull, souls are like vermin; thus it is under Caracalla, thus it is under Commodus, thus it is under Heliogabalus, while, from the Roman Senate, under Caesar, there comes nothing but the odor of the dung which is peculiar to the eyries of the eagles.

　　Hence the advent, apparently tardy, of the Tacituses and the Juvenals; it is in the hour for evidence, that the demonstrator makes his appearance.

　　But Juvenal and Tacitus, like Isaiah in Biblical times, like Dante in the Middle Ages, is man; riot and insurrection are the multitude, which is sometimes right and sometimes wrong.

　　In the majority of cases, riot proceeds from a material fact; insurrection is always a moral phenomenon.

　　Riot is Masaniello; insurrection, Spartacus.

　　Insurrection borders on mind, riot on the stomach; Gaster grows irritated; but Gaster, assuredly, is not always in the wrong.

　　In questions of famine, riot, Buzancais, for example, holds a true, pathetic, and just point of departure. Nevertheless, it remains a riot.

　　Why?

　　It is because, right at bottom, it was wrong in form.

　　Shy although in the right, violent although strong, it struck at random; it walked like a blind elephant; it left behind it the corpses of old men, of women, and of children; it wished the blood of inoffensive and innocent persons without knowing why.

　　The nourishment of the people is a good object; to massacre them is a bad means.

　　All armed protests, even the most legitimate, even that of the 10th of August, even that of July 14th, begin with the same troubles. Before the right gets set free, there is foam and tumult. In the beginning, the insurrection is a riot, just as a river is a torrent.

　　Ordinarily it ends in that ocean:

　　revolution. Sometimes, however, coming from those lofty mountains which dominate the moral horizon, justice, wisdom, reason, right, formed of the pure snow of the ideal, after a long fall from rock to rock, after having reflected the sky in its transparency and increased by a hundred affluents in the majestic mien of triumph, insurrection is suddenly lost in some quagmire, as the Rhine is in a swamp.

　　All this is of the past, the future is another thing. Universal suffrage has this admirable property, that it dissolves riot in its inception, and, by giving the vote to insurrection, it deprives it of its arms.

　　The disappearance of wars, of street wars as well as of wars on the frontiers, such is the inevitable progression.

　　Whatever To-day may be, To-morrow will be peace.

　　However, insurrection, riot, and points of difference between the former and the latter,--the bourgeois, properly speaking, knows nothing of such shades.

　　In his mind, all is sedition, rebellion pure and simple, the revolt of the dog against his master, an attempt to bite whom must be punished by the chain and the kennel, barking, snapping, until such day as the head of the dog, suddenly enlarged, is outlined vaguely in the gloom face to face with the lion.

　　Then the bourgeois shouts:

　　"Long live the people!"

　　This explanation given, what does the movement of June, 1832, signify, so far as history is concerned?

　　Is it a revolt?

　　Is it an insurrection?

　　It may happen to us, in placing this formidable event on the stage, to say revolt now and then, but merely to distinguish superficial facts, and always preserving the distinction between revolt, the form, and insurrection, the foundation.

　　This movement of 1832 had, in its rapid outbreak and in its melancholy extinction, so much grandeur, that even those who see in it only an uprising, never refer to it otherwise than with respect. For them, it is like a relic of 1830.

　　Excited imaginations, say they, are not to be calmed in a day.

　　A revolution cannot be cut off short. It must needs undergo some undulations before it returns to a state of rest, like a mountain sinking into the plain.

　　There are no Alps without their Jura, nor Pyrenees without the Asturias.

　　This pathetic crisis of contemporary history which the memory of Parisians calls "the epoch of the riots," is certainly a characteristic hour amid the stormy hours of this century. A last word, before we enter on the recital.

　　The facts which we are about to relate belong to that dramatic and living reality, which the historian sometimes neglects for lack of time and space.

　　There, nevertheless, we insist upon it, is life, palpitation, human tremor.

　　Petty details, as we think we have already said, are, so to speak, the foliage of great events, and are lost in the distance of history.

　　The epoch, surnamed "of the riots," abounds in details of this nature. Judicial inquiries have not revealed, and perhaps have not sounded the depths, for another reason than history.

　　We shall therefore bring to light, among the known and published peculiarities, things which have not heretofore been known, about facts over which have passed the forgetfulness of some, and the death of others. The majority of the actors in these gigantic scenes have disappeared; beginning with the very next day they held their peace; but of what we shall relate, we shall be able to say:

　　"We have seen this." We alter a few names, for history relates and does not inform against, but the deed which we shall paint will be genuine.

　　In accordance with the conditions of the book which we are now writing, we shall show only one side and one episode, and certainly, the least known at that, of the two days, the 5th and the 6th of June, 1832, but we shall do it in such wise that the reader may catch a glimpse, beneath the gloomy veil which we are about to lift, of the real form of this frightful public adventure.

BOOK TENTH.--THE 5TH OF JUNE, 1832

CHAPTER III

　　A BURIAL; AN OCCASION TO BE BORN AGAIN

　　 In the spring of 1832, although the cholera had been chilling all minds for the last three months and had cast over their agitation an indescribable and gloomy pacification, Paris had already long been ripe for commotion.

　　As we have said, the great city resembles a piece of artillery; when it is loaded, it suffices for a spark to fall, and the shot is discharged.

　　In June, 1832, the spark was the death of General Lamarque.

　　Lamarque was a man of renown and of action.

　　He had had in succession, under the Empire and under the Restoration, the sorts of bravery requisite for the two epochs, the bravery of the battle-field and the bravery of the tribune.

　　He was as eloquent as he had been valiant; a sword was discernible in his speech.

　　Like Foy, his predecessor, after upholding the command, he upheld liberty; he sat between the left and the extreme left, beloved of the people because he accepted the chances of the future, beloved of the populace because he had served the Emperor well; he was, in company with Comtes Gerard and Drouet, one of Napoleon's marshals in petto. The treaties of 1815 removed him as a personal offence.

　　He hated Wellington with a downright hatred which pleased the multitude; and, for seventeen years, he majestically preserved the sadness of Waterloo, paying hardly any attention to intervening events. In his death agony, at his last hour, he clasped to his breast a sword which had been presented to him by the officers of the Hundred Days. Napoleon had died uttering the word army, Lamarque uttering the word country.

　　His death, which was expected, was dreaded by the people as a loss, and by the government as an occasion.

　　This death was an affliction. Like everything that is bitter, affliction may turn to revolt. This is what took place.

　　On the preceding evening, and on the morning of the 5th of June, the day appointed for Lamarque's burial, the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, which the procession was to touch at, assumed a formidable aspect. This tumultuous network of streets was filled with rumors. They armed themselves as best they might.

　　Joiners carried off door-weights of their establishment "to break down doors."

　　One of them had made himself a dagger of a stocking-weaver's hook by breaking off the hook and sharpening the stump.

　　Another, who was in a fever "to attack," slept wholly dressed for three days.

　　A carpenter named Lombier met a comrade, who asked him:

　　"Whither are you going?" "Eh! well, I have no weapons."

　　"What then?"

　　"I'm going to my timber-yard to get my compasses."

　　"What for?"

　　"I don't know," said Lombier.

　　A certain Jacqueline, an expeditious man, accosted some passing artisans:

　　"Come here, you!"

　　He treated them to ten sous' worth of wine and said:

　　"Have you work?"

　　"No." "Go to Filspierre, between the Barriere Charonne and the Barriere Montreuil, and you will find work."

　　At Filspierre's they found cartridges and arms. Certain well-known leaders were going the rounds, that is to say, running from one house to another, to collect their men. At Barthelemy's, near the Barriere du Trone, at Capel's, near the Petit-Chapeau, the drinkers accosted each other with a grave air. They were heard to say:

　　"Have you your pistol?"

　　"Under my blouse." "And you?"

　　"Under my shirt."

　　In the Rue Traversiere, in front of the Bland workshop, and in the yard of the Maison-Brulee, in front of tool-maker Bernier's, groups whispered together. Among them was observed a certain Mavot, who never remained more than a week in one shop, as the masters always discharged him "because they were obliged to dispute with him every day."

　　Mavot was killed on the following day at the barricade of the Rue Menilmontant. Pretot, who was destined to perish also in the struggle, seconded Mavot, and to the question:

　　"What is your object?" he replied:

　　"Insurrection."

　　Workmen assembled at the corner of the Rue de Bercy, waited for a certain Lemarin, the revolutionary agent for the Faubourg Saint-Marceau. Watchwords were exchanged almost publicly.

　　On the 5th of June, accordingly, a day of mingled rain and sun, General Lamarque's funeral procession traversed Paris with official military pomp, somewhat augmented through precaution.

　　Two battalions, with draped drums and reversed arms, ten thousand National Guards, with their swords at their sides, escorted the coffin. The hearse was drawn by young men.

　　The officers of the Invalides came immediately behind it, bearing laurel branches.

　　Then came an innumerable, strange, agitated multitude, the sectionaries of the Friends of the People, the Law School, the Medical School, refugees of all nationalities, and Spanish, Italian, German, and Polish flags, tricolored horizontal banners, every possible sort of banner, children waving green boughs, stone-cutters and carpenters who were on strike at the moment, printers who were recognizable by their paper caps, marching two by two, three by three, uttering cries, nearly all of them brandishing sticks, some brandishing sabres, without order and yet with a single soul, now a tumultuous rout, again a column.

　　Squads chose themselves leaders; a man armed with a pair of pistols in full view, seemed to pass the host in review, and the files separated before him.

　　On the side alleys of the boulevards, in the branches of the trees, on balconies, in windows, on the roofs, swarmed the heads of men, women, and children; all eyes were filled with anxiety.

　　An armed throng was passing, and a terrified throng looked on.

　　The Government, on its side, was taking observations.

　　It observed with its hand on its sword.

　　Four squadrons of carabineers could be seen in the Place Louis XV.

　　in their saddles, with their trumpets at their head, cartridge-boxes filled and muskets loaded, all in readiness to march; in the Latin country and at the Jardin des Plantes, the Municipal Guard echelonned from street to street; at the Halle-aux-Vins, a squadron of dragoons; at the Greve half of the 12th Light Infantry, the other half being at the Bastille; the 6th Dragoons at the Celestins; and the courtyard of the Louvre full of artillery.

　　The remainder of the troops were confined to their barracks, without reckoning the regiments of the environs of Paris.

　　Power being uneasy, held suspended over the menacing multitude twenty-four thousand soldiers in the city and thirty thousand in the banlieue.

　　Divers reports were in circulation in the cortege.

　　Legitimist tricks were hinted at; they spoke of the Duc de Reichstadt, whom God had marked out for death at that very moment when the populace were designating him for the Empire.

　　One personage, whose name has remained unknown, announced that at a given hour two overseers who had been won over, would throw open the doors of a factory of arms to the people. That which predominated on the uncovered brows of the majority of those present was enthusiasm mingled with dejection. Here and there, also, in that multitude given over to such violent but noble emotions, there were visible genuine visages of criminals and ignoble mouths which said:

　　"Let us plunder!"

　　There are certain agitations which stir up the bottoms of marshes and make clouds of mud rise through the water.

　　A phenomenon to which "well drilled" policemen are no strangers.

　　The procession proceeded, with feverish slowness, from the house of the deceased, by way of the boulevards as far as the Bastille. It rained from time to time; the rain mattered nothing to that throng. Many incidents, the coffin borne round the Vendome column, stones thrown at the Duc de Fitz-James, who was seen on a balcony with his hat on his head, the Gallic cock torn from a popular flag and dragged in the mire, a policeman wounded with a blow from a sword at the Porte Saint-Martin, an officer of the 12th Light Infantry saying aloud:

　　"I am a Republican," the Polytechnic School coming up unexpectedly against orders to remain at home, the shouts of: "Long live the Polytechnique!

　　Long live the Republic!" marked the passage of the funeral train.

　　At the Bastille, long files of curious and formidable people who descended from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, effected a junction with the procession, and a certain terrible seething began to agitate the throng.

　　One man was heard to say to another:

　　"Do you see that fellow with a red beard, he's the one who will give the word when we are to fire." It appears that this red beard was present, at another riot, the Quenisset affair, entrusted with this same function.

　　The hearse passed the Bastille, traversed the small bridge, and reached the esplanade of the bridge of Austerlitz.

　　There it halted. The crowd, surveyed at that moment with a bird'seye view, would have presented the aspect of a comet whose head was on the esplanade and whose tail spread out over the Quai Bourdon, covered the Bastille, and was prolonged on the boulevard as far as the Porte Saint-Martin. A circle was traced around the hearse.

　　The vast rout held their peace. Lafayette spoke and bade Lamarque farewell.

　　This was a touching and august instant, all heads uncovered, all hearts beat high.

　　All at once, a man on horseback, clad in black, made his appearance in the middle of the group with a red flag, others say, with a pike surmounted with a red liberty-cap. Lafayette turned aside his head. Exelmans quitted the procession.

　　This red flag raised a storm, and disappeared in the midst of it. From the Boulevard Bourdon to the bridge of Austerlitz one of those clamors which resemble billows stirred the multitude. Two prodigious shouts went up:

　　"Lamarque to the Pantheon!-- Lafayette to the Town-hall!" Some young men, amid the declamations of the throng, harnessed themselves and began to drag Lamarque in the hearse across the bridge of Austerlitz and Lafayette in a hackney-coach along the Quai Morland.

　　In the crowd which surrounded and cheered Lafayette, it was noticed that a German showed himself named Ludwig Snyder, who died a centenarian afterwards, who had also been in the war of 1776, and who had fought at Trenton under Washington, and at Brandywine under Lafayette.

　　In the meantime, the municipal cavalry on the left bank had been set in motion, and came to bar the bridge, on the right bank the dragoons emerged from the Celestins and deployed along the Quai Morland. The men who were dragging Lafayette suddenly caught sight of them at the corner of the quay and shouted:

　　"The dragoons!" The dragoons advanced at a walk, in silence, with their pistols in their holsters, their swords in their scabbards, their guns slung in their leather sockets, with an air of gloomy expectation.

　　They halted two hundred paces from the little bridge.

　　The carriage in which sat Lafayette advanced to them, their ranks opened and allowed it to pass, and then closed behind it.

　　At that moment the dragoons and the crowd touched.

　　The women fled in terror. What took place during that fatal minute?

　　No one can say. It is the dark moment when two clouds come together.

　　Some declare that a blast of trumpets sounding the charge was heard in the direction of the Arsenal others that a blow from a dagger was given by a child to a dragoon.

　　The fact is, that three shots were suddenly discharged: the first killed Cholet, chief of the squadron, the second killed an old deaf woman who was in the act of closing her window, the third singed the shoulder of an officer; a woman screamed: "They are beginning too soon!" and all at once, a squadron of dragoons which had remained in the barracks up to this time, was seen to debouch at a gallop with bared swords, through the Rue Bassompierre and the Boulevard Bourdon, sweeping all before them.

　　Then all is said, the tempest is loosed, stones rain down, a fusillade breaks forth, many precipitate themselves to the bottom of the bank, and pass the small arm of the Seine, now filled in, the timber-yards of the Isle Louviers, that vast citadel ready to hand, bristle with combatants, stakes are torn up, pistol-shots fired, a barricade begun, the young men who are thrust back pass the Austerlitz bridge with the hearse at a run, and the municipal guard, the carabineers rush up, the dragoons ply their swords, the crowd disperses in all directions, a rumor of war flies to all four quarters of Paris, men shout:

　　"To arms!" they run, tumble down, flee, resist.

　　Wrath spreads abroad the riot as wind spreads a fire.

BOOK TENTH.--THE 5TH OF JUNE, 1832

CHAPTER IV

　　THE EBULLITIONS OF FORMER DAYS

　　 Nothing is more extraordinary than the first breaking out of a riot. Everything bursts forth everywhere at once.

　　Was it foreseen? Yes.

　　Was it prepared?

　　No. Whence comes it?

　　From the pavements. Whence falls it?

　　From the clouds.

　　Here insurrection assumes the character of a plot; there of an improvisation.

　　The first comer seizes a current of the throng and leads it whither he wills. A beginning full of terror, in which is mingled a sort of formidable gayety.

　　First come clamors, the shops are closed, the displays of the merchants disappear; then come isolated shots; people flee; blows from gun-stocks beat against portes cocheres, servants can be heard laughing in the courtyards of houses and saying: "There's going to be a row!"

　　A quarter of an hour had not elapsed when this is what was taking place at twenty different spots in Paris at once.

　　In the Rue Sainte-Croix-de-la-Bretonnerie, twenty young men, bearded and with long hair, entered a dram-shop and emerged a moment later, carrying a horizontal tricolored flag covered with crape, and having at their head three men armed, one with a sword, one with a gun, and the third with a pike.

　　In the Rue des Nonaindieres, a very well-dressed bourgeois, who had a prominent belly, a sonorous voice, a bald head, a lofty brow, a black beard, and one of these stiff mustaches which will not lie flat, offered cartridges publicly to passers-by.

　　In the Rue Saint-Pierre-Montmartre, men with bare arms carried about a black flag, on which could be read in white letters this inscription: "Republic or Death!"

　　In the Rue des Jeuneurs, Rue du Cadran, Rue Montorgueil, Rue Mandar, groups appeared waving flags on which could be distinguished in gold letters, the word section with a number. One of these flags was red and blue with an almost imperceptible stripe of white between.

　　They pillaged a factory of small-arms on the Boulevard Saint-Martin, and three armorers' shops, the first in the Rue Beaubourg, the second in the Rue Michel-le-Comte, the other in the Rue du Temple. In a few minutes, the thousand hands of the crowd had seized and carried off two hundred and thirty guns, nearly all double-barrelled, sixty-four swords, and eighty-three pistols.

　　In order to provide more arms, one man took the gun, the other the bayonet.

　　Opposite the Quai de la Greve, young men armed with muskets installed themselves in the houses of some women for the purpose of firing. One of them had a flint-lock. They rang, entered, and set about making cartridges.

　　One of these women relates:

　　"I did not know what cartridges were; it was my husband who told me."

　　One cluster broke into a curiosity shop in the Rue des Vielles Haudriettes, and seized yataghans and Turkish arms.

　　The body of a mason who had been killed by a gun-shot lay in the Rue de la Perle.

　　And then on the right bank, the left bank, on the quays, on the boulevards, in the Latin country, in the quarter of the Halles, panting men, artisans, students, members of sections read proclamations and shouted:

　　"To arms!" broke street lanterns, unharnessed carriages, unpaved the streets, broke in the doors of houses, uprooted trees, rummaged cellars, rolled out hogsheads, heaped up paving-stones, rough slabs, furniture and planks, and made barricades.

　　They forced the bourgeois to assist them in this.

　　They entered the dwellings of women, they forced them to hand over the swords and guns of their absent husbands, and they wrote on the door, with whiting: "The arms have been delivered"; some signed "their names" to receipts for the guns and swords and said:

　　"Send for them to-morrow at the Mayor's office."

　　They disarmed isolated sentinels and National Guardsmen in the streets on their way to the Townhall.

　　They tore the epaulets from officers.

　　In the Rue du Cimitiere-Saint-Nicholas, an officer of the National Guard, on being pursued by a crowd armed with clubs and foils, took refuge with difficulty in a house, whence he was only able to emerge at nightfall and in disguise.

　　In the Quartier Saint-Jacques, the students swarmed out of their hotels and ascended the Rue Saint-Hyacinthe to the Cafe du Progress, or descended to the Cafe des Sept-Billards, in the Rue des Mathurins. There, in front of the door, young men mounted on the stone corner-posts, distributed arms.

　　They plundered the timber-yard in the Rue Transnonain in order to obtain material for barricades. On a single point the inhabitants resisted, at the corner of the Rue Sainte-Avoye and the Rue Simon-Le-Franc, where they destroyed the barricade with their own hands.

　　At a single point the insurgents yielded; they abandoned a barricade begun in the Rue de Temple after having fired on a detachment of the National Guard, and fled through the Rue de la Corderie.

　　The detachment picked up in the barricade a red flag, a package of cartridges, and three hundred pistol-balls. The National Guardsmen tore up the flag, and carried off its tattered remains on the points of their bayonets.

　　All that we are here relating slowly and successively took place simultaneously at all points of the city in the midst of a vast tumult, like a mass of tongues of lightning in one clap of thunder. In less than an hour, twenty-seven barricades sprang out of the earth in the quarter of the Halles alone.

　　In the centre was that famous house No. 50, which was the fortress of Jeanne and her six hundred companions, and which, flanked on the one hand by a barricade at Saint-Merry, and on the other by a barricade of the Rue Maubuee, commanded three streets, the Rue des Arcis, the Rue Saint-Martin, and the Rue Aubry-le-Boucher, which it faced.

　　The barricades at right angles fell back, the one of the Rue Montorgueil on the Grande-Truanderie, the other of the Rue Geoffroy-Langevin on the Rue Sainte-Avoye. Without reckoning innumerable barricades in twenty other quarters of Paris, in the Marais, at Mont-Sainte-Genevieve; one in the Rue Menilmontant, where was visible a porte cochere torn from its hinges; another near the little bridge of the Hotel-Dieu made with an "ecossais," which had been unharnessed and overthrown, three hundred paces from the Prefecture of Police.

　　At the barricade of the Rue des Menetriers, a well-dressed man distributed money to the workmen.

　　At the barricade of the Rue Grenetat, a horseman made his appearance and handed to the one who seemed to be the commander of the barricade what had the appearance of a roll of silver.

　　"Here," said he, "this is to pay expenses, wine, et caetera."

　　A light-haired young man, without a cravat, went from barricade to barricade, carrying pass-words. Another, with a naked sword, a blue police cap on his head, placed sentinels. In the interior, beyond the barricades, the wine-shops and porters' lodges were converted into guard-houses. Otherwise the riot was conducted after the most scientific military tactics. The narrow, uneven, sinuous streets, full of angles and turns, were admirably chosen; the neighborhood of the Halles, in particular, a network of streets more intricate than a forest.

　　The Society of the Friends of the People had, it was said, undertaken to direct the insurrection in the Quartier Sainte-Avoye. A man killed in the Rue du Ponceau who was searched had on his person a plan of Paris.

　　That which had really undertaken the direction of the uprising was a sort of strange impetuosity which was in the air. The insurrection had abruptly built barricades with one hand, and with the other seized nearly all the posts of the garrison. In less than three hours, like a train of powder catching fire, the insurgents had invaded and occupied, on the right bank, the Arsenal, the Mayoralty of the Place Royale, the whole of the Marais, the Popincourt arms manufactory, la Galiote, the Chateau-d'Eau, and all the streets near the Halles; on the left bank, the barracks of the Veterans, Sainte-Pelagie, the Place Maubert, the powder magazine of the Deux-Moulins, and all the barriers. At five o'clock in the evening, they were masters of the Bastille, of the Lingerie, of the Blancs-Manteaux; their scouts had reached the Place des Victoires, and menaced the Bank, the Petits-Peres barracks, and the Post-Office. A third of Paris was in the hands of the rioters.

　　The conflict had been begun on a gigantic scale at all points; and, as a result of the disarming domiciliary visits, and armorers' shops hastily invaded, was, that the combat which had begun with the throwing of stones was continued with gun-shots.

　　About six o'clock in the evening, the Passage du Saumon became the field of battle.

　　The uprising was at one end, the troops were at the other.

　　They fired from one gate to the other.

　　An observer, a dreamer, the author of this book, who had gone to get a near view of this volcano, found himself in the passage between the two fires. All that he had to protect him from the bullets was the swell of the two half-columns which separate the shops; he remained in this delicate situation for nearly half an hour.

　　Meanwhile the call to arms was beaten, the National Guard armed in haste, the legions emerged from the Mayoralities, the regiments from their barracks.

　　Opposite the passage de l'Ancre a drummer received a blow from a dagger.

　　Another, in the Rue du Cygne, was assailed by thirty young men who broke his instrument, and took away his sword.

　　Another was killed in the Rue Grenier-Saint-Lazare. In the Rue-Michelle-Comte, three officers fell dead one after the other.

　　Many of the Municipal Guards, on being wounded, in the Rue des Lombards, retreated.

　　In front of the Cour-Batave, a detachment of National Guards found a red flag bearing the following inscription:

　　Republican revolution, No. 127.

　　Was this a revolution, in fact?

　　The insurrection had made of the centre of Paris a sort of inextricable, tortuous, colossal citadel.

　　There was the hearth; there, evidently, was the question. All the rest was nothing but skirmishes.

　　The proof that all would be decided there lay in the fact that there was no fighting going on there as yet.

　　In some regiments, the soldiers were uncertain, which added to the fearful uncertainty of the crisis.

　　They recalled the popular ovation which had greeted the neutrality of the 53d of the Line in July, 1830.

　　Two intrepid men, tried in great wars, the Marshal Lobau and General Bugeaud, were in command, Bugeaud under Lobau. Enormous patrols, composed of battalions of the Line, enclosed in entire companies of the National Guard, and preceded by a commissary of police wearing his scarf of office, went to reconnoitre the streets in rebellion.

　　The insurgents, on their side, placed videttes at the corners of all open spaces, and audaciously sent their patrols outside the barricades.

　　Each side was watching the other. The Government, with an army in its hand, hesitated; the night was almost upon them, and the Saint-Merry tocsin began to make itself heard.

　　The Minister of War at that time, Marshal Soult, who had seen Austerlitz, regarded this with a gloomy air.

　　These old sailors, accustomed to correct manoeuvres and having as resource and guide only tactics, that compass of battles, are utterly disconcerted in the presence of that immense foam which is called public wrath.

　　The National Guards of the suburbs rushed up in haste and disorder. A battalion of the 12th Light came at a run from Saint-Denis, the 14th of the Line arrived from Courbevoie, the batteries of the Military School had taken up their position on the Carrousel; cannons were descending from Vincennes.

　　Solitude was formed around the Tuileries.

　　Louis Philippe was perfectly serene.

BOOK TENTH.--THE 5TH OF JUNE, 1832

CHAPTER V

　　ORIGINALITY OF PARIS

　　 During the last two years, as we have said, Paris had witnessed more than one insurrection.

　　Nothing is, generally, more singularly calm than the physiognomy of Paris during an uprising beyond the bounds of the rebellious quarters.

　　Paris very speedily accustoms herself to anything,--it is only a riot,--and Paris has so many affairs on hand, that she does not put herself out for so small a matter.

　　These colossal cities alone can offer such spectacles. These immense enclosures alone can contain at the same time civil war and an odd and indescribable tranquillity.

　　Ordinarily, when an insurrection commences, when the shop-keeper hears the drum, the call to arms, the general alarm, he contents himself with the remark:--

　　"There appears to be a squabble in the Rue Saint-Martin."

　　Or:--

　　"In the Faubourg Saint-Antoine."

　　Often he adds carelessly:--

　　"Or somewhere in that direction."

　　Later on, when the heart-rending and mournful hubbub of musketry and firing by platoons becomes audible, the shopkeeper says:--

　　"It's getting hot!

　　Hullo, it's getting hot!"

　　A moment later, the riot approaches and gains in force, he shuts up his shop precipitately, hastily dons his uniform, that is to say, he places his merchandise in safety and risks his own person.

　　Men fire in a square, in a passage, in a blind alley; they take and re-take the barricade; blood flows, the grape-shot riddles the fronts of the houses, the balls kill people in their beds, corpses encumber the streets.

　　A few streets away, the shock of billiard-balls can be heard in the cafes.

　　The theatres open their doors and present vaudevilles; the curious laugh and chat a couple of paces distant from these streets filled with war.

　　Hackney-carriages go their way; passers-by are going to a dinner somewhere in town.

　　Sometimes in the very quarter where the fighting is going on.

　　In 1831, a fusillade was stopped to allow a wedding party to pass.

　　At the time of the insurrection of 1839, in the Rue Saint-Martin a little, infirm old man, pushing a hand-cart surmounted by a tricolored rag, in which he had carafes filled with some sort of liquid, went and came from barricade to troops and from troops to the barricade, offering his glasses of cocoa impartially,--now to the Government, now to anarchy.

　　Nothing can be stranger; and this is the peculiar character of uprisings in Paris, which cannot be found in any other capital. To this end, two things are requisite, the size of Paris and its gayety. The city of Voltaire and Napoleon is necessary.

　　On this occasion, however, in the resort to arms of June 25th, 1832, the great city felt something which was, perhaps, stronger than itself. It was afraid.

　　Closed doors, windows, and shutters were to be seen everywhere, in the most distant and most "disinterested" quarters.

　　The courageous took to arms, the poltroons hid.

　　The busy and heedless passer-by disappeared.

　　Many streets were empty at four o'clock in the morning.

　　Alarming details were hawked about, fatal news was disseminated,-- that they were masters of the Bank;--that there were six hundred of them in the Cloister of Saint-Merry alone, entrenched and embattled in the church; that the line was not to be depended on; that Armand Carrel had been to see Marshal Clausel and that the Marshal had said: "Get a regiment first"; that Lafayette was ill, but that he had said to them, nevertheless:

　　"I am with you.

　　I will follow you wherever there is room for a chair"; that one must be on one's guard; that at night there would be people pillaging isolated dwellings in the deserted corners of Paris (there the imagination of the police, that Anne Radcliffe mixed up with the Government was recognizable); that a battery had been established in the Rue Aubry le Boucher; that Lobau and Bugeaud were putting their heads together, and that, at midnight, or at daybreak at latest, four columns would march simultaneously on the centre of the uprising, the first coming from the Bastille, the second from the Porte Saint-Martin, the third from the Greve, the fourth from the Halles; that perhaps, also, the troops would evacuate Paris and withdraw to the Champ-de-Mars; that no one knew what would happen, but that this time, it certainly was serious.

　　People busied themselves over Marshal Soult's hesitations.

　　Why did not he attack at once?

　　It is certain that he was profoundly absorbed. The old lion seemed to scent an unknown monster in that gloom.

　　Evening came, the theatres did not open; the patrols circulated with an air of irritation; passers-by were searched; suspicious persons were arrested.

　　By nine o'clock, more than eight hundred persons had been arrested, the Prefecture of Police was encumbered with them, so was the Conciergerie, so was La Force.

　　At the Conciergerie in particular, the long vault which is called the Rue de Paris was littered with trusses of straw upon which lay a heap of prisoners, whom the man of Lyons, Lagrange, harangued valiantly.

　　All that straw rustled by all these men, produced the sound of a heavy shower.

　　Elsewhere prisoners slept in the open air in the meadows, piled on top of each other.

　　Anxiety reigned everywhere, and a certain tremor which was not habitual with Paris.

　　People barricaded themselves in their houses; wives and mothers were uneasy; nothing was to be heard but this:

　　"Ah! my God! He has not come home!"

　　There was hardly even the distant rumble of a vehicle to be heard.

　　People listened on their thresholds, to the rumors, the shouts, the tumult, the dull and indistinct sounds, to the things that were said:

　　"It is cavalry," or:

　　"Those are the caissons galloping," to the trumpets, the drums, the firing, and, above all, to that lamentable alarm peal from Saint-Merry.

　　They waited for the first cannon-shot. Men sprang up at the corners of the streets and disappeared, shouting:

　　"Go home!"

　　And people made haste to bolt their doors.

　　They said:

　　"How will all this end?" From moment to moment, in proportion as the darkness descended, Paris seemed to take on a more mournful hue from the formidable flaming of the revolt.

BOOK ELEVENTH.--THE ATOM FRATERNIZES WITH THE HURRICANE

CHAPTER I

　　SOME EXPLANATIONS WITH REGARD TO THE ORIGIN OF GAVROCHE'S POETRY. THE INFLUENCE OF AN ACADEMICIAN ON THIS POETRY

　　At the instant when the insurrection, arising from the shock of the populace and the military in front of the Arsenal, started a movement in advance and towards the rear in the multitude which was following the hearse and which, through the whole length of the boulevards, weighed, so to speak, on the head of the procession, there arose a frightful ebb.

　　The rout was shaken, their ranks were broken, all ran, fled, made their escape, some with shouts of attack, others with the pallor of flight. The great river which covered the boulevards divided in a twinkling, overflowed to right and left, and spread in torrents over two hundred streets at once with the roar of a sewer that has broken loose.

　　At that moment, a ragged child who was coming down through the Rue Menilmontant, holding in his hand a branch of blossoming laburnum which he had just plucked on the heights of Belleville, caught sight of an old holster-pistol in the show-window of a bric-a-brac merchant's shop.

　　"Mother What's-your-name, I'm going to borrow your machine."

　　And off he ran with the pistol.

　　Two minutes later, a flood of frightened bourgeois who were fleeing through the Rue Amelot and the Rue Basse, encountered the lad brandishing his pistol and singing:-- La nuit on ne voit rien,

　　 Le jour on voit tres bien,

　　 D'un ecrit apocrypha

　　 Le bourgeois s'ebouriffe,

　　 Pratiquez la vertu,

　　 Tutu, chapeau pointu![44]

　　 [44] At night one sees nothing, by day one sees very well; the bourgeois gets flurried over an apocryphal scrawl, practice virtue, tutu, pointed hat!

　　 It was little Gavroche on his way to the wars.

　　On the boulevard he noticed that the pistol had no trigger.

　　Who was the author of that couplet which served to punctuate his march, and of all the other songs which he was fond of singing on occasion? We know not.

　　Who does know?

　　Himself, perhaps.

　　However, Gavroche was well up in all the popular tunes in circulation, and he mingled with them his own chirpings.

　　An observing urchin and a rogue, he made a potpourri of the voices of nature and the voices of Paris.

　　He combined the repertory of the birds with the repertory of the workshops. He was acquainted with thieves, a tribe contiguous to his own. He had, it appears, been for three months apprenticed to a printer. He had one day executed a commission for M. Baour-Lormian, one of the Forty.

　　Gavroche was a gamin of letters.

　　Moreover, Gavroche had no suspicion of the fact that when he had offered the hospitality of his elephant to two brats on that villainously rainy night, it was to his own brothers that he had played the part of Providence.

　　His brothers in the evening, his father in the morning; that is what his night had been like. On quitting the Rue des Ballets at daybreak, he had returned in haste to the elephant, had artistically extracted from it the two brats, had shared with them some sort of breakfast which he had invented, and had then gone away, confiding them to that good mother, the street, who had brought him up, almost entirely.

　　On leaving them, he had appointed to meet them at the same spot in the evening, and had left them this discourse by way of a farewell:

　　"I break a cane, otherwise expressed, I cut my stick, or, as they say at the court, I file off.

　　If you don't find papa and mamma, young 'uns, come back here this evening.

　　I'll scramble you up some supper, and I'll give you a shakedown."

　　The two children, picked up by some policeman and placed in the refuge, or stolen by some mountebank, or having simply strayed off in that immense Chinese puzzle of a Paris, did not return.

　　The lowest depths of the actual social world are full of these lost traces.

　　Gavroche did not see them again. Ten or twelve weeks had elapsed since that night.

　　More than once he had scratched the back of his head and said:

　　"Where the devil are my two children?"

　　In the meantime, he had arrived, pistol in hand, in the Rue du Pont-aux-Choux. He noticed that there was but one shop open in that street, and, a matter worthy of reflection, that was a pastry-cook's shop.

　　This presented a providential occasion to eat another apple-turnover before entering the unknown. Gavroche halted, fumbled in his fob, turned his pocket inside out, found nothing, not even a sou, and began to shout:

　　"Help!"

　　It is hard to miss the last cake.

　　Nevertheless, Gavroche pursued his way.

　　Two minutes later he was in the Rue Saint-Louis. While traversing the Rue du Parc-Royal, he felt called upon to make good the loss of the apple-turnover which had been impossible, and he indulged himself in the immense delight of tearing down the theatre posters in broad daylight.

　　A little further on, on catching sight of a group of comfortable-looking persons, who seemed to be landed proprietors, he shrugged his shoulders and spit out at random before him this mouthful of philosophical bile as they passed:

　　"How fat those moneyed men are!

　　They're drunk!

　　They just wallow in good dinners.

　　Ask 'em what they do with their money. They don't know.

　　They eat it, that's what they do!

　　As much as their bellies will hold."

BOOK ELEVENTH.--THE ATOM FRATERNIZES WITH THE HURRICANE

CHAPTER II

　　GAVROCHE ON THE MARCH

　　 The brandishing of a triggerless pistol, grasped in one's hand in the open street, is so much of a public function that Gavroche felt his fervor increasing with every moment.

　　Amid the scraps of the Marseillaise which he was singing, he shouted:--

　　"All goes well.

　　I suffer a great deal in my left paw, I'm all broken up with rheumatism, but I'm satisfied, citizens.

　　All that the bourgeois have to do is to bear themselves well, I'll sneeze them out subversive couplets.

　　What are the police spies?

　　Dogs.

　　And I'd just like to have one of them at the end of my pistol.

　　I'm just from the boulevard, my friends.

　　It's getting hot there, it's getting into a little boil, it's simmering.

　　It's time to skim the pot. Forward march, men!

　　Let an impure blood inundate the furrows! I give my days to my country, I shall never see my concubine more, Nini, finished, yes, Nini?

　　But never mind!

　　Long live joy! Let's fight, crebleu!

　　I've had enough of despotism."

　　At that moment, the horse of a lancer of the National Guard having fallen, Gavroche laid his pistol on the pavement, and picked up the man, then he assisted in raising the horse.

　　After which he picked up his pistol and resumed his way.

　　In the Rue de Thorigny, all was peace and silence.

　　This apathy, peculiar to the Marais, presented a contrast with the vast surrounding uproar.

　　Four gossips were chatting in a doorway.

　　Scotland has trios of witches, Paris has quartettes of old gossiping hags; and the "Thou shalt be King" could be quite as mournfully hurled at Bonaparte in the Carrefour Baudoyer as at Macbeth on the heath of Armuyr.

　　The croak would be almost identical.

　　The gossips of the Rue de Thorigny busied themselves only with their own concerns.

　　Three of them were portresses, and the fourth was a rag-picker with her basket on her back.

　　All four of them seemed to be standing at the four corners of old age, which are decrepitude, decay, ruin, and sadness.

　　The rag-picker was humble.

　　In this open-air society, it is the rag-picker who salutes and the portress who patronizes. This is caused by the corner for refuse, which is fat or lean, according to the will of the portresses, and after the fancy of the one who makes the heap.

　　There may be kindness in the broom.

　　This rag-picker was a grateful creature, and she smiled, with what a smile! on the three portresses.

　　Things of this nature were said:--

　　"Ah, by the way, is your cat still cross?"

　　"Good gracious, cats are naturally the enemies of dogs, you know. It's the dogs who complain."

　　"And people also."

　　"But the fleas from a cat don't go after people."

　　"That's not the trouble, dogs are dangerous.

　　I remember one year when there were so many dogs that it was necessary to put it in the newspapers.

　　That was at the time when there were at the Tuileries great sheep that drew the little carriage of the King of Rome. Do you remember the King of Rome?"

　　"I liked the Duc de Bordeau better."

　　"I knew Louis XVIII.

　　I prefer Louis XVIII."

　　"Meat is awfully dear, isn't it, Mother Patagon?"

　　"Ah! don't mention it, the butcher's shop is a horror. A horrible horror--one can't afford anything but the poor cuts nowadays."

　　Here the rag-picker interposed:--

　　"Ladies, business is dull.

　　The refuse heaps are miserable. No one throws anything away any more.

　　They eat everything."

　　"There are poorer people than you, la Vargouleme."

　　"Ah, that's true," replied the rag-picker, with deference, "I have a profession."

　　A pause succeeded, and the rag-picker, yielding to that necessity for boasting which lies at the bottom of man, added:--

　　"In the morning, on my return home, I pick over my basket, I sort my things.

　　This makes heaps in my room.

　　I put the rags in a basket, the cores and stalks in a bucket, the linen in my cupboard, the woollen stuff in my commode, the old papers in the corner of the window, the things that are good to eat in my bowl, the bits of glass in my fireplace, the old shoes behind my door, and the bones under my bed."

　　Gavroche had stopped behind her and was listening.

　　"Old ladies," said he, "what do you mean by talking politics?"

　　He was assailed by a broadside, composed of a quadruple howl.

　　"Here's another rascal."

　　"What's that he's got in his paddle?

　　A pistol?"

　　"Well, I'd like to know what sort of a beggar's brat this is?"

　　"That sort of animal is never easy unless he's overturning the authorities."

　　Gavroche disdainfully contented himself, by way of reprisal, with elevating the tip of his nose with his thumb and opening his hand wide.

　　The rag-picker cried:--

　　"You malicious, bare-pawed little wretch!"

　　The one who answered to the name of Patagon clapped her hands together in horror.

　　"There's going to be evil doings, that's certain.

　　The errand-boy next door has a little pointed beard, I have seen him pass every day with a young person in a pink bonnet on his arm; to-day I saw him pass, and he had a gun on his arm.

　　Mame Bacheux says, that last week there was a revolution at--at--at--where's the calf!--at Pontoise. And then, there you see him, that horrid scamp, with his pistol! It seems that the Celestins are full of pistols.

　　What do you suppose the Government can do with good-for-nothings who don't know how to do anything but contrive ways of upsetting the world, when we had just begun to get a little quiet after all the misfortunes that have happened, good Lord! to that poor queen whom I saw pass in the tumbril! And all this is going to make tobacco dearer.

　　It's infamous! And I shall certainly go to see him beheaded on the guillotine, the wretch!"

　　"You've got the sniffles, old lady," said Gavroche. "Blow your promontory."

　　And he passed on.

　　When he was in the Rue Pavee, the rag-picker occurred to his mind, and he indulged in this soliloquy:--

　　"You're in the wrong to insult the revolutionists, Mother Dust-Heap-Corner. This pistol is in your interests. It's so that you may have more good things to eat in your basket."

　　All at once, he heard a shout behind him; it was the portress Patagon who had followed him, and who was shaking her fist at him in the distance and crying:--

　　"You're nothing but a bastard."

　　"Oh!

　　Come now," said Gavroche, "I don't care a brass farthing for that!"

　　Shortly afterwards, he passed the Hotel Lamoignon.

　　There he uttered this appeal:--

　　"Forward march to the battle!"

　　And he was seized with a fit of melancholy.

　　He gazed at his pistol with an air of reproach which seemed an attempt to appease it:--

　　"I'm going off," said he, "but you won't go off!"

　　One dog may distract the attention from another dog.[45] A very gaunt poodle came along at the moment.

　　Gavroche felt compassion for him.

　　 [45] Chien, dog, trigger.

　　 "My poor doggy," said he, "you must have gone and swallowed a cask, for all the hoops are visible."

　　Then he directed his course towards l'Orme-Saint-Gervais.

BOOK ELEVENTH.--THE ATOM FRATERNIZES WITH THE HURRICANE

CHAPTER III

　　JUST INDIGNATION OF A HAIR-DRESSER

　　 The worthy hair-dresser who had chased from his shop the two little fellows to whom Gavroche had opened the paternal interior of the elephant was at that moment in his shop engaged in shaving an old soldier of the legion who had served under the Empire. They were talking.

　　The hair-dresser had, naturally, spoken to the veteran of the riot, then of General Lamarque, and from Lamarque they had passed to the Emperor.

　　Thence sprang up a conversation between barber and soldier which Prudhomme, had he been present, would have enriched with arabesques, and which he would have entitled: "Dialogue between the razor and the sword."

　　"How did the Emperor ride, sir?" said the barber.

　　"Badly.

　　He did not know how to fall--so he never fell."

　　"Did he have fine horses?

　　He must have had fine horses!"

　　"On the day when he gave me my cross, I noticed his beast. It was a racing mare, perfectly white.

　　Her ears were very wide apart, her saddle deep, a fine head marked with a black star, a very long neck, strongly articulated knees, prominent ribs, oblique shoulders and a powerful crupper.

　　A little more than fifteen hands in height."

　　"A pretty horse," remarked the hair-dresser.

　　"It was His Majesty's beast."

　　The hair-dresser felt, that after this observation, a short silence would be fitting, so he conformed himself to it, and then went on:--

　　"The Emperor was never wounded but once, was he, sir?"

　　The old soldier replied with the calm and sovereign tone of a man who had been there:--

　　"In the heel.

　　At Ratisbon.

　　I never saw him so well dressed as on that day.

　　He was as neat as a new sou."

　　"And you, Mr. Veteran, you must have been often wounded?"

　　"I?" said the soldier, "ah! not to amount to anything.

　　At Marengo, I received two sabre-blows on the back of my neck, a bullet in the right arm at Austerlitz, another in the left hip at Jena. At Friedland, a thrust from a bayonet, there,--at the Moskowa seven or eight lance-thrusts, no matter where, at Lutzen a splinter of a shell crushed one of my fingers.

　　Ah! and then at Waterloo, a ball from a biscaien in the thigh, that's all."

　　"How fine that is!" exclaimed the hair-dresser, in Pindaric accents, "to die on the field of battle!

　　On my word of honor, rather than die in bed, of an illness, slowly, a bit by bit each day, with drugs, cataplasms, syringes, medicines, I should prefer to receive a cannon-ball in my belly!"

　　"You're not over fastidious," said the soldier.

　　He had hardly spoken when a fearful crash shook the shop. The show-window had suddenly been fractured.

　　The wig-maker turned pale.

　　"Ah, good God!" he exclaimed, "it's one of them!"

　　"What?"

　　"A cannon-ball."

　　"Here it is," said the soldier.

　　And he picked up something that was rolling about the floor. It was a pebble.

　　The hair-dresser ran to the broken window and beheld Gavroche fleeing at the full speed, towards the Marche Saint-Jean. As he passed the hair-dresser's shop Gavroche, who had the two brats still in his mind, had not been able to resist the impulse to say good day to him, and had flung a stone through his panes.

　　"You see!" shrieked the hair-dresser, who from white had turned blue, "that fellow returns and does mischief for the pure pleasure of it. What has any one done to that gamin?"

BOOK ELEVENTH.--THE ATOM FRATERNIZES WITH THE HURRICANE

CHAPTER IV

　　 In the meantime, in the Marche Saint-Jean, where the post had already been disarmed, Gavroche had just "effected a junction" with a band led by Enjolras, Courfeyrac, Combeferre, and Feuilly. They were armed after a fashion.

　　Bahorel and Jean Prouvaire had found them and swelled the group.

　　Enjolras had a double-barrelled hunting-gun, Combeferre the gun of a National Guard bearing the number of his legion, and in his belt, two pistols which his unbuttoned coat allowed to be seen, Jean Prouvaire an old cavalry musket, Bahorel a rifle; Courfeyrac was brandishing an unsheathed sword-cane. Feuilly, with a naked sword in his hand, marched at their head shouting: "Long live Poland!"

　　They reached the Quai Morland.

　　Cravatless, hatless, breathless, soaked by the rain, with lightning in their eyes.

　　Gavroche accosted them calmly:--

　　"Where are we going?"

　　"Come along," said Courfeyrac.

　　Behind Feuilly marched, or rather bounded, Bahorel, who was like a fish in water in a riot.

　　He wore a scarlet waistcoat, and indulged in the sort of words which break everything. His waistcoat astounded a passer-by, who cried in bewilderment:--

　　"Here are the reds!"

　　"The reds, the reds!" retorted Bahorel.

　　"A queer kind of fear, bourgeois.

　　For my part I don't tremble before a poppy, the little red hat inspires me with no alarm.

　　Take my advice, bourgeois, let's leave fear of the red to horned cattle."

　　He caught sight of a corner of the wall on which was placarded the most peaceable sheet of paper in the world, a permission to eat eggs, a Lenten admonition addressed by the Archbishop of Paris to his "flock."

　　Bahorel exclaimed:--

　　"`Flock'; a polite way of saying geese."

　　And he tore the charge from the nail.

　　This conquered Gavroche. From that instant Gavroche set himself to study Bahorel.

　　"Bahorel," observed Enjolras, "you are wrong.

　　You should have let that charge alone, he is not the person with whom we have to deal, you are wasting your wrath to no purpose.

　　Take care of your supply. One does not fire out of the ranks with the soul any more than with a gun."

　　"Each one in his own fashion, Enjolras," retorted Bahorel. "This bishop's prose shocks me; I want to eat eggs without being permitted.

　　Your style is the hot and cold; I am amusing myself.

　　Besides, I'm not wasting myself, I'm getting a start; and if I tore down that charge, Hercle! 'twas only to whet my appetite."

　　This word, Hercle, struck Gavroche.

　　He sought all occasions for learning, and that tearer-down of posters possessed his esteem. He inquired of him:--

　　"What does Hercle mean?"

　　Bahorel answered:--

　　"It means cursed name of a dog, in Latin."

　　Here Bahorel recognized at a window a pale young man with a black beard who was watching them as they passed, probably a Friend of the A B C. He shouted to him:--

　　"Quick, cartridges, para bellum."

　　"A fine man! that's true," said Gavroche, who now understood Latin.

　　A tumultuous retinue accompanied them,--students, artists, young men affiliated to the Cougourde of Aix, artisans, longshoremen, armed with clubs and bayonets; some, like Combeferre, with pistols thrust into their trousers.

　　An old man, who appeared to be extremely aged, was walking in the band.

　　He had no arms, and he made great haste, so that he might not be left behind, although he had a thoughtful air.

　　Gavroche caught sight of him:--

　　"Keksekca?" said he to Courfeyrac.

　　"He's an old duffer."

　　It was M. Mabeuf.

BOOK ELEVENTH.--THE ATOM FRATERNIZES WITH THE HURRICANE

CHAPTER V

　　THE OLD MAN

　　 Let us recount what had taken place.

　　Enjolras and his friends had been on the Boulevard Bourdon, near the public storehouses, at the moment when the dragoons had made their charge.

　　Enjolras, Courfeyrac, and Combeferre were among those who had taken to the Rue Bassompierre, shouting:

　　"To the barricades!" In the Rue Lesdiguieres they had met an old man walking along. What had attracted their attention was that the goodman was walking in a zig-zag, as though he were intoxicated.

　　Moreover, he had his hat in his hand, although it had been raining all the morning, and was raining pretty briskly at the very time.

　　Courfeyrac had recognized Father Mabeuf.

　　He knew him through having many times accompanied Marius as far as his door.

　　As he was acquainted with the peaceful and more than timid habits of the old beadle-book-collector, and was amazed at the sight of him in the midst of that uproar, a couple of paces from the cavalry charges, almost in the midst of a fusillade, hatless in the rain, and strolling about among the bullets, he had accosted him, and the following dialogue had been exchanged between the rioter of fire and the octogenarian:--

　　"M. Mabeuf, go to your home."

　　"Why?"

　　"There's going to be a row."

　　"That's well."

　　"Thrusts with the sword and firing, M. Mabeuf."

　　"That is well."

　　"Firing from cannon."

　　"That is good.

　　Where are the rest of you going?"

　　"We are going to fling the government to the earth."

　　"That is good."

　　And he had set out to follow them.

　　From that moment forth he had not uttered a word.

　　His step had suddenly become firm; artisans had offered him their arms; he had refused with a sign of the head.

　　He advanced nearly to the front rank of the column, with the movement of a man who is marching and the countenance of a man who is sleeping.

　　"What a fierce old fellow!" muttered the students.

　　The rumor spread through the troop that he was a former member of the Convention,-- an old regicide.

　　The mob had turned in through the Rue de la Verrerie.

　　Little Gavroche marched in front with that deafening song which made of him a sort of trumpet.

He sang:

"Voici la lune qui paratt,

Quand irons-nous dans la foret?

Demandait Charlot a Charlotte.

Tou tou tou

Pour Chatou.

Je n'ai qu'un Dieu, qu'un roi, qu'un liard, et qu'une botte.

"Pour avoir bu de grand matin

La rosee a meme le thym,

Deux moineaux etaient en ribotte.

Zi zi zi

Pour Passy.

Je n'ai qu'un Dieu, qu'un roi, qu'un liard, et qu'une botte.

"Et ces deux pauvres petits loups,

Comme deux grives estaient souls;

Une tigre en riait dans sa grotte.

Don don don

Pour Meudon.

Je n'ai qu'un Dieu, qu'un roi, qu'un liard, et qu'une botte.

"L'un jurait et l'autre sacrait.

Quand irons nous dans la foret?

Demandait Charlot a Charlotte.

Tin tin tin

Pour Pantin.

Je n'ai qu'un Dieu, qu'un roi, qu'un liard, et qu'une botte."[46]

　　They directed their course towards Saint-Merry.

　　 [46] Here is the morn appearing.

　　When shall we go to the forest, Charlot asked Charlotte.

　　Tou, tou, tou, for Chatou, I have but one God, one King, one half-farthing, and one boot.

　　And these two poor little wolves were as tipsy as sparrows from having drunk dew and thyme very early in the morning.

　　And these two poor little things were as drunk as thrushes in a vineyard; a tiger laughed at them in his cave. The one cursed, the other swore.

　　When shall we go to the forest? Charlot asked Charlotte.

BOOK ELEVENTH.--THE ATOM FRATERNIZES WITH THE HURRICANE

CHAPTER VI

　　RECRUITS

　　 The band augmented every moment.

　　Near the Rue des Billettes, a man of lofty stature, whose hair was turning gray, and whose bold and daring mien was remarked by Courfeyrac, Enjolras, and Combeferre, but whom none of them knew, joined them.

　　Gavroche, who was occupied in singing, whistling, humming, running on ahead and pounding on the shutters of the shops with the butt of his triggerless pistol; paid no attention to this man.

　　It chanced that in the Rue de la Verrerie, they passed in front of Courfeyrac's door.

　　"This happens just right," said Courfeyrac, "I have forgotten my purse, and I have lost my hat."

　　He quitted the mob and ran up to his quarters at full speed. He seized an old hat and his purse.

　　He also seized a large square coffer, of the dimensions of a large valise, which was concealed under his soiled linen.

　　As he descended again at a run, the portress hailed him:--

　　"Monsieur de Courfeyrac!"

　　"What's your name, portress?"

　　The portress stood bewildered.

　　"Why, you know perfectly well, I'm the concierge; my name is Mother Veuvain."

　　"Well, if you call me Monsieur de Courfeyrac again, I shall call you Mother de Veuvain.

　　Now speak, what's the matter?

　　What do you want?"

　　"There is some one who wants to speak with you."

　　"Who is it?"

　　"I don't know."

　　"Where is he?"

　　"In my lodge."

　　"The devil!" ejaculated Courfeyrac.

　　"But the person has been waiting your return for over an hour," said the portress.

　　At the same time, a sort of pale, thin, small, freckled, and youthful artisan, clad in a tattered blouse and patched trousers of ribbed velvet, and who had rather the air of a girl accoutred as a man than of a man, emerged from the lodge and said to Courfeyrac in a voice which was not the least in the world like a woman's voice:--

　　"Monsieur Marius, if you please."

　　"He is not here."

　　"Will he return this evening?"

　　"I know nothing about it."

　　And Courfeyrac added:--

　　"For my part, I shall not return."

　　The young man gazed steadily at him and said:--

　　"Why not?"

　　"Because."

　　"Where are you going, then?"

　　"What business is that of yours?"

　　"Would you like to have me carry your coffer for you?"

　　"I am going to the barricades."

　　"Would you like to have me go with you?"

　　"If you like!" replied Courfeyrac.

　　"The street is free, the pavements belong to every one."

　　And he made his escape at a run to join his friends.

　　When he had rejoined them, he gave the coffer to one of them to carry. It was only a quarter of an hour after this that he saw the young man, who had actually followed them.

　　A mob does not go precisely where it intends.

　　We have explained that a gust of wind carries it away.

　　They overshot Saint-Merry and found themselves, without precisely knowing how, in the Rue Saint-Denis.

BOOK TWELFTH.--CORINTHE

CHAPTER I

　　HISTORY OF CORINTHE FROM ITS FOUNDATION

　　The Parisians who nowadays on entering on the Rue Rambuteau at the end near the Halles, notice on their right, opposite the Rue Mondetour, a basket-maker's shop having for its sign a basket in the form of Napoleon the Great with this inscription:--

　　NAPOLEON IS MADE WHOLLY OF WILLOW,

　　have no suspicion of the terrible scenes which this very spot witnessed hardly thirty years ago.

　　It was there that lay the Rue de la Chanvrerie, which ancient deeds spell Chanverrerie, and the celebrated public-house called Corinthe.

　　The reader will remember all that has been said about the barricade effected at this point, and eclipsed, by the way, by the barricade Saint-Merry. It was on this famous barricade of the Rue de la Chanvrerie, now fallen into profound obscurity, that we are about to shed a little light.

　　May we be permitted to recur, for the sake of clearness in the recital, to the simple means which we have already employed in the case of Waterloo.

　　Persons who wish to picture to themselves in a tolerably exact manner the constitution of the houses which stood at that epoch near the Pointe Saint-Eustache, at the northeast angle of the Halles of Paris, where to-day lies the embouchure of the Rue Rambuteau, have only to imagine an N touching the Rue Saint-Denis with its summit and the Halles with its base, and whose two vertical bars should form the Rue de la Grande-Truanderie, and the Rue de la Chanvrerie, and whose transverse bar should be formed by the Rue de la Petite-Truanderie. The old Rue Mondetour cut the three strokes of the N at the most crooked angles. So that the labyrinthine confusion of these four streets sufficed to form, on a space three fathoms square, between the Halles and the Rue Saint-Denis on the one hand, and between the Rue du Cygne and the Rue des Precheurs on the other, seven islands of houses, oddly cut up, of varying sizes, placed crosswise and hap-hazard, and barely separated, like the blocks of stone in a dock, by narrow crannies.

　　We say narrow crannies, and we can give no more just idea of those dark, contracted, many-angled alleys, lined with eight-story buildings. These buildings were so decrepit that, in the Rue de la Chanvrerie and the Rue de la Petite-Truanderie, the fronts were shored up with beams running from one house to another.

　　The street was narrow and the gutter broad, the pedestrian there walked on a pavement that was always wet, skirting little stalls resembling cellars, big posts encircled with iron hoops, excessive heaps of refuse, and gates armed with enormous, century-old gratings.

　　The Rue Rambuteau has devastated all that.

　　The name of Mondetour paints marvellously well the sinuosities of that whole set of streets.

　　A little further on, they are found still better expressed by the Rue Pirouette, which ran into the Rue Mondetour.

　　The passer-by who got entangled from the Rue Saint-Denis in the Rue de la Chanvrerie beheld it gradually close in before him as though he had entered an elongated funnel.

　　At the end of this street, which was very short, he found further passage barred in the direction of the Halles by a tall row of houses, and he would have thought himself in a blind alley, had he not perceived on the right and left two dark cuts through which he could make his escape.

　　This was the Rue Mondetour, which on one side ran into the Rue de Precheurs, and on the other into the Rue du Cygne and the Petite-Truanderie. At the bottom of this sort of cul-de-sac, at the angle of the cutting on the right, there was to be seen a house which was not so tall as the rest, and which formed a sort of cape in the street. It is in this house, of two stories only, that an illustrious wine-shop had been merrily installed three hundred years before. This tavern created a joyous noise in the very spot which old Theophilus described in the following couplet:-- La branle le squelette horrible

　　 D'un pauvre amant qui se pendit.[47]

　　[47] There swings the horrible skeleton of a poor lover who hung himself.

　　The situation was good, and tavern-keepers succeeded each other there, from father to son.

　　In the time of Mathurin Regnier, this cabaret was called the Pot-aux-Roses, and as the rebus was then in fashion, it had for its sign-board, a post (poteau) painted rose-color. In the last century, the worthy Natoire, one of the fantastic masters nowadays despised by the stiff school, having got drunk many times in this wine-shop at the very table where Regnier had drunk his fill, had painted, by way of gratitude, a bunch of Corinth grapes on the pink post. The keeper of the cabaret, in his joy, had changed his device and had caused to be placed in gilt letters beneath the bunch these words: "At the Bunch of Corinth Grapes" ("Au Raisin de Corinthe"). Hence the name of Corinthe.

　　Nothing is more natural to drunken men than ellipses. The ellipsis is the zig-zag of the phrase.

　　Corinthe gradually dethroned the Pot-aux-Roses. The last proprietor of the dynasty, Father Hucheloup, no longer acquainted even with the tradition, had the post painted blue.

　　A room on the ground floor, where the bar was situated, one on the first floor containing a billiard-table, a wooden spiral staircase piercing the ceiling, wine on the tables, smoke on the walls, candles in broad daylight,--this was the style of this cabaret. A staircase with a trap-door in the lower room led to the cellar. On the second floor were the lodgings of the Hucheloup family. They were reached by a staircase which was a ladder rather than a staircase, and had for their entrance only a private door in the large room on the first floor.

　　Under the roof, in two mansard attics, were the nests for the servants.

　　The kitchen shared the ground-floor with the tap-room.

　　Father Hucheloup had, possibly, been born a chemist, but the fact is that he was a cook; people did not confine themselves to drinking alone in his wine-shop, they also ate there.

　　Hucheloup had invented a capital thing which could be eaten nowhere but in his house, stuffed carps, which he called carpes au gras.

　　These were eaten by the light of a tallow candle or of a lamp of the time of Louis XVI., on tables to which were nailed waxed cloths in lieu of table-cloths. People came thither from a distance.

　　Hucheloup, one fine morning, had seen fit to notify passers-by of this "specialty"; he had dipped a brush in a pot of black paint, and as he was an orthographer on his own account, as well as a cook after his own fashion, he had improvised on his wall this remarkable inscription:--

　　CARPES HO GRAS.

　　One winter, the rain-storms and the showers had taken a fancy to obliterate the S which terminated the first word, and the G which began the third; this is what remained:--CARPE HO RAS.

　　Time and rain assisting, a humble gastronomical announcement had become a profound piece of advice.

　　In this way it came about, that though he knew no French, Father Hucheloup understood Latin, that he had evoked philosophy from his kitchen, and that, desirous simply of effacing Lent, he had equalled Horace. And the striking thing about it was, that that also meant: "Enter my wine-shop."

　　Nothing of all this is in existence now.

　　The Mondetour labyrinth was disembowelled and widely opened in 1847, and probably no longer exists at the present moment.

　　The Rue de la Chanvrerie and Corinthe have disappeared beneath the pavement of the Rue Rambuteau.

　　As we have already said, Corinthe was the meeting-place if not the rallying-point, of Courfeyrac and his friends.

　　It was Grantaire who had discovered Corinthe.

　　He had entered it on account of the Carpe horas, and had returned thither on account of the Carpes au gras.

　　There they drank, there they ate, there they shouted; they did not pay much, they paid badly, they did not pay at all, but they were always welcome.

　　Father Hucheloup was a jovial host.

　　Hucheloup, that amiable man, as was just said, was a wine-shop-keeper with a mustache; an amusing variety.

　　He always had an ill-tempered air, seemed to wish to intimidate his customers, grumbled at the people who entered his establishment, and had rather the mien of seeking a quarrel with them than of serving them with soup.

　　And yet, we insist upon the word, people were always welcome there.

　　This oddity had attracted customers to his shop, and brought him young men, who said to each other:

　　"Come hear Father Hucheloup growl."

　　He had been a fencing-master. All of a sudden, he would burst out laughing. A big voice, a good fellow.

　　He had a comic foundation under a tragic exterior, he asked nothing better than to frighten you, very much like those snuff-boxes which are in the shape of a pistol. The detonation makes one sneeze.

　　Mother Hucheloup, his wife, was a bearded and a very homely creature.

　　About 1830, Father Hucheloup died.

　　With him disappeared the secret of stuffed carps.

　　His inconsolable widow continued to keep the wine-shop. But the cooking deteriorated, and became execrable; the wine, which had always been bad, became fearfully bad. Nevertheless, Courfeyrac and his friends continued to go to Corinthe,-- out of pity, as Bossuet said.

　　The Widow Hucheloup was breathless and misshapen and given to rustic recollections.

　　She deprived them of their flatness by her pronunciation.

　　She had a way of her own of saying things, which spiced her reminiscences of the village and of her springtime. It had formerly been her delight, so she affirmed, to hear the loups-de-gorge (rouges-gorges) chanter dans les ogrepines (aubepines)--to hear the redbreasts sing in the hawthorn-trees.

　　The hall on the first floor, where "the restaurant" was situated, was a large and long apartment encumbered with stools, chairs, benches, and tables, and with a crippled, lame, old billiard-table. It was reached by a spiral staircase which terminated in the corner of the room at a square hole like the hatchway of a ship.

　　This room, lighted by a single narrow window, and by a lamp that was always burning, had the air of a garret.

　　All the four-footed furniture comported itself as though it had but three legs-- the whitewashed walls had for their only ornament the following quatrain in honor of Mame Hucheloup:--Elle etonne a dix pas, elle epouvente a deux,

　　Une verrue habite en son nez hasardeux;

　　On tremble a chaque instant qu'elle ne vous la mouche

　　Et qu'un beau jour son nez ne tombe dans sa bouche.[48]

　　[48] She astounds at ten paces, she frightens at two, a wart inhabits her hazardous nose; you tremble every instant lest she should blow it at you, and lest, some fine day, her nose should tumble into her mouth.

　　This was scrawled in charcoal on the wall.

　　Mame Hucheloup, a good likeness, went and came from morning till night before this quatrain with the most perfect tranquillity. Two serving-maids, named Matelote and Gibelotte,[49] and who had never been known by any other names, helped Mame Hucheloup to set on the tables the jugs of poor wine, and the various broths which were served to the hungry patrons in earthenware bowls. Matelote, large, plump, redhaired, and noisy, the favorite ex-sultana of the defunct Hucheloup, was homelier than any mythological monster, be it what it may; still, as it becomes the servant to always keep in the rear of the mistress, she was less homely than Mame Hucheloup.

　　Gibelotte, tall, delicate, white with a lymphatic pallor, with circles round her eyes, and drooping lids, always languid and weary, afflicted with what may be called chronic lassitude, the first up in the house and the last in bed, waited on every one, even the other maid, silently and gently, smiling through her fatigue with a vague and sleepy smile.

　　[49] Matelote:

　　a culinary preparation of various fishes. Gibelotte:

　　stewed rabbits.

　　Before entering the restaurant room, the visitor read on the door the following line written there in chalk by Courfeyrac:--Regale si tu peux et mange si tu l'oses.[50]

　　[50] Treat if you can, and eat if you dare.

BOOK TWELFTH.--CORINTHE

CHAPTER II

　　PRELIMINARY GAYETIES

　　Laigle de Meaux, as the reader knows, lived more with Joly than elsewhere.

　　He had a lodging, as a bird has one on a branch. The two friends lived together, ate together, slept together. They had everything in common, even Musichetta, to some extent. They were, what the subordinate monks who accompany monks are called, bini.

　　On the morning of the 5th of June, they went to Corinthe to breakfast.

　　Joly, who was all stuffed up, had a catarrh which Laigle was beginning to share.

　　Laigle's coat was threadbare, but Joly was well dressed.

　　It was about nine o'clock in the morning, when they opened the door of Corinthe.

　　They ascended to the first floor.

　　Matelote and Gibelotte received them.

　　"Oysters, cheese, and ham," said Laigle.

　　And they seated themselves at a table.

　　The wine-shop was empty; there was no one there but themselves.

　　Gibelotte, knowing Joly and Laigle, set a bottle of wine on the table.

　　While they were busy with their first oysters, a head appeared at the hatchway of the staircase, and a voice said:--

　　"I am passing by.

　　I smell from the street a delicious odor of Brie cheese.

　　I enter."

　　It was Grantaire.

　　Grantaire took a stool and drew up to the table.

　　At the sight of Grantaire, Gibelotte placed two bottles of wine on the table.

　　That made three.

　　"Are you going to drink those two bottles?"

　　Laigle inquired of Grantaire.

　　Grantaire replied:--

　　"All are ingenious, thou alone art ingenuous.

　　Two bottles never yet astonished a man."

　　The others had begun by eating, Grantaire began by drinking. Half a bottle was rapidly gulped down.

　　"So you have a hole in your stomach?" began Laigle again.

　　"You have one in your elbow," said Grantaire.

　　And after having emptied his glass, he added:--

　　"Ah, by the way, Laigle of the funeral oration, your coat is old."

　　"I should hope so," retorted Laigle.

　　"That's why we get on well together, my coat and I. It has acquired all my folds, it does not bind me anywhere, it is moulded on my deformities, it falls in with all my movements, I am only conscious of it because it keeps me warm.

　　Old coats are just like old friends."

　　"That's true," ejaculated Joly, striking into the dialogue, "an old goat is an old abi" (ami, friend).

　　"Especially in the mouth of a man whose head is stuffed up," said Grantaire.

　　"Grantaire," demanded Laigle, "have you just come from the boulevard?"

　　"No."

　　"We have just seen the head of the procession pass, Joly and I."

　　"It's a marvellous sight," said Joly.

　　"How quiet this street is!" exclaimed Laigle.

　　"Who would suspect that Paris was turned upside down?

　　How plainly it is to be seen that in former days there were nothing but convents here! In this neighborhood!

　　Du Breul and Sauval give a list of them, and so does the Abbe Lebeuf.

　　They were all round here, they fairly swarmed, booted and barefooted, shaven, bearded, gray, black, white, Franciscans, Minims, Capuchins, Carmelites, Little Augustines, Great Augustines, old Augustines--there was no end of them."

　　"Don't let's talk of monks," interrupted Grantaire, "it makes one want to scratch one's self."

　　Then he exclaimed:--

　　"Bouh!

　　I've just swallowed a bad oyster.

　　Now hypochondria is taking possession of me again.

　　The oysters are spoiled, the servants are ugly. I hate the human race.

　　I just passed through the Rue Richelieu, in front of the big public library.

　　That pile of oyster-shells which is called a library is disgusting even to think of.

　　What paper! What ink!

　　What scrawling!

　　And all that has been written!

　　What rascal was it who said that man was a featherless biped?[51] And then, I met a pretty girl of my acquaintance, who is as beautiful as the spring, worthy to be called Floreal, and who is delighted, enraptured, as happy as the angels, because a wretch yesterday, a frightful banker all spotted with small-pox, deigned to take a fancy to her! Alas! woman keeps on the watch for a protector as much as for a lover; cats chase mice as well as birds.

　　Two months ago that young woman was virtuous in an attic, she adjusted little brass rings in the eyelet-holes of corsets, what do you call it?

　　She sewed, she had a camp bed, she dwelt beside a pot of flowers, she was contented. Now here she is a bankeress.

　　This transformation took place last night. I met the victim this morning in high spirits.

　　The hideous point about it is, that the jade is as pretty to-day as she was yesterday. Her financier did not show in her face.

　　Roses have this advantage or disadvantage over women, that the traces left upon them by caterpillars are visible.

　　Ah! there is no morality on earth. I call to witness the myrtle, the symbol of love, the laurel, the symbol of air, the olive, that ninny, the symbol of peace, the apple-tree which came nearest rangling Adam with its pips, and the fig-tree, the grandfather of petticoats.

　　As for right, do you know what right is?

　　The Gauls covet Clusium, Rome protects Clusium, and demands what wrong Clusium has done to them.

　　Brennus answers: `The wrong that Alba did to you, the wrong that Fidenae did to you, the wrong that the Eques, the Volsci, and the Sabines have done to you.

　　They were your neighbors.

　　The Clusians are ours. We understand neighborliness just as you do.

　　You have stolen Alba, we shall take Clusium.'

　　Rome said:

　　`You shall not take Clusium.' Brennus took Rome.

　　Then he cried:

　　`Vae victis!'

　　That is what right is. Ah! what beasts of prey there are in this world!

　　What eagles! It makes my flesh creep."

　　[51] Bipede sans plume:

　　biped without feathers--pen.

　　He held out his glass to Joly, who filled it, then he drank and went on, having hardly been interrupted by this glass of wine, of which no one, not even himself, had taken any notice:--

　　"Brennus, who takes Rome, is an eagle; the banker who takes the grisette is an eagle.

　　There is no more modesty in the one case than in the other.

　　So we believe in nothing.

　　There is but one reality:

　　drink.

　　Whatever your opinion may be in favor of the lean cock, like the Canton of Uri, or in favor of the fat cock, like the Canton of Glaris, it matters little, drink.

　　You talk to me of the boulevard, of that procession, et caetera, et caetera. Come now, is there going to be another revolution?

　　This poverty of means on the part of the good God astounds me.

　　He has to keep greasing the groove of events every moment.

　　There is a hitch, it won't work.

　　Quick, a revolution!

　　The good God has his hands perpetually black with that cart-grease. If I were in his place, I'd be perfectly simple about it, I would not wind up my mechanism every minute, I'd lead the human race in a straightforward way, I'd weave matters mesh by mesh, without breaking the thread, I would have no provisional arrangements, I would have no extraordinary repertory.

　　What the rest of you call progress advances by means of two motors, men and events.

　　But, sad to say, from time to time, the exceptional becomes necessary.

　　The ordinary troupe suffices neither for event nor for men:

　　among men geniuses are required, among events revolutions.

　　Great accidents are the law; the order of things cannot do without them; and, judging from the apparition of comets, one would be tempted to think that Heaven itself finds actors needed for its performance.

　　At the moment when one expects it the least, God placards a meteor on the wall of the firmament. Some queer star turns up, underlined by an enormous tail. And that causes the death of Caesar.

　　Brutus deals him a blow with a knife, and God a blow with a comet.

　　Crac, and behold an aurora borealis, behold a revolution, behold a great man; '93 in big letters, Napoleon on guard, the comet of 1811 at the head of the poster.

　　Ah! what a beautiful blue theatre all studded with unexpected flashes!

　　Boum!

　　Boum! extraordinary show! Raise your eyes, boobies.

　　Everything is in disorder, the star as well as the drama.

　　Good God, it is too much and not enough. These resources, gathered from exception, seem magnificence and poverty. My friends, Providence has come down to expedients.

　　What does a revolution prove?

　　That God is in a quandry.

　　He effects a coup d'etat because he, God, has not been able to make both ends meet. In fact, this confirms me in my conjectures as to Jehovah's fortune; and when I see so much distress in heaven and on earth, from the bird who has not a grain of millet to myself without a hundred thousand livres of income, when I see human destiny, which is very badly worn, and even royal destiny, which is threadbare, witness the Prince de Conde hung, when I see winter, which is nothing but a rent in the zenith through which the wind blows, when I see so many rags even in the perfectly new purple of the morning on the crests of hills, when I see the drops of dew, those mock pearls, when I see the frost, that paste, when I see humanity ripped apart and events patched up, and so many spots on the sun and so many holes in the moon, when I see so much misery everywhere, I suspect that God is not rich. The appearance exists, it is true, but I feel that he is hard up. He gives a revolution as a tradesman whose money-box is empty gives a ball.

　　God must not be judged from appearances. Beneath the gilding of heaven I perceive a poverty-stricken universe. Creation is bankrupt.

　　That is why I am discontented.

　　Here it is the 4th of June, it is almost night; ever since this morning I have been waiting for daylight to come; it has not come, and I bet that it won't come all day.

　　This is the inexactness of an ill-paid clerk.

　　Yes, everything is badly arranged, nothing fits anything else, this old world is all warped, I take my stand on the opposition, everything goes awry; the universe is a tease. It's like children, those who want them have none, and those who don't want them have them.

　　Total:

　　I'm vexed.

　　Besides, Laigle de Meaux, that bald-head, offends my sight.

　　It humiliates me to think that I am of the same age as that baldy.

　　However, I criticise, but I do not insult.

　　The universe is what it is.

　　I speak here without evil intent and to ease my conscience.

　　Receive, Eternal Father, the assurance of my distinguished consideration.

　　Ah! by all the saints of Olympus and by all the gods of paradise, I was not intended to be a Parisian, that is to say, to rebound forever, like a shuttlecock between two battledores, from the group of the loungers to the group of the roysterers.

　　I was made to be a Turk, watching oriental houris all day long, executing those exquisite Egyptian dances, as sensuous as the dream of a chaste man, or a Beauceron peasant, or a Venetian gentleman surrounded by gentlewoman, or a petty German prince, furnishing the half of a foot-soldier to the Germanic confederation, and occupying his leisure with drying his breeches on his hedge, that is to say, his frontier. Those are the positions for which I was born!

　　Yes, I have said a Turk, and I will not retract.

　　I do not understand how people can habitually take Turks in bad part; Mohammed had his good points; respect for the inventor of seraglios with houris and paradises with odalisques!

　　Let us not insult Mohammedanism, the only religion which is ornamented with a hen-roost! Now, I insist on a drink. The earth is a great piece of stupidity.

　　And it appears that they are going to fight, all those imbeciles, and to break each other's profiles and to massacre each other in the heart of summer, in the month of June, when they might go off with a creature on their arm, to breathe the immense heaps of new-mown hay in the meadows! Really, people do commit altogether too many follies.

　　An old broken lantern which I have just seen at a bric-a-brac merchant's suggests a reflection to my mind; it is time to enlighten the human race. Yes, behold me sad again.

　　That's what comes of swallowing an oyster and a revolution the wrong way!

　　I am growing melancholy once more.

　　Oh! frightful old world.

　　People strive, turn each other out, prostitute themselves, kill each other, and get used to it!"

　　And Grantaire, after this fit of eloquence, had a fit of coughing, which was well earned.

　　"A propos of revolution," said Joly, "it is decidedly abberent that Barius is in lub."

　　"Does any one know with whom?" demanded Laigle.

　　"Do."

　　"No?"

　　"Do!

　　I tell you."

　　"Marius' love affairs!" exclaimed Grantaire.

　　"I can imagine it. Marius is a fog, and he must have found a vapor.

　　Marius is of the race of poets.

　　He who says poet, says fool, madman, Tymbraeus Apollo. Marius and his Marie, or his Marion, or his Maria, or his Mariette. They must make a queer pair of lovers.

　　I know just what it is like. Ecstasies in which they forget to kiss.

　　Pure on earth, but joined in heaven.

　　They are souls possessed of senses.

　　They lie among the stars."

　　Grantaire was attacking his second bottle and, possibly, his second harangue, when a new personage emerged from the square aperture of the stairs.

　　It was a boy less than ten years of age, ragged, very small, yellow, with an odd phiz, a vivacious eye, an enormous amount of hair drenched with rain, and wearing a contented air.

　　The child unhesitatingly making his choice among the three, addressed himself to Laigle de Meaux.

　　"Are you Monsieur Bossuet?"

　　"That is my nickname," replied Laigle.

　　"What do you want with me?"

　　"This.

　　A tall blonde fellow on the boulevard said to me: `Do you know Mother Hucheloup?'

　　I said:

　　`Yes, Rue Chanvrerie, the old man's widow;' he said to me:

　　`Go there.

　　There you will find M. Bossuet.

　　Tell him from me:

　　"A B C".' It's a joke that they're playing on you, isn't it.

　　He gave me ten sous."

　　"Joly, lend me ten sous," said Laigle; and, turning to Grantaire: "Grantaire, lend me ten sous."

　　This made twenty sous, which Laigle handed to the lad.

　　"Thank you, sir," said the urchin.

　　"What is your name?" inquired Laigle.

　　"Navet, Gavroche's friend."

　　"Stay with us," said Laigle.

　　"Breakfast with us," said Grantaire,

　　The child replied:--

　　"I can't, I belong in the procession, I'm the one to shout `Down with Polignac!'"

　　And executing a prolonged scrape of his foot behind him, which is the most respectful of all possible salutes, he took his departure.

　　The child gone, Grantaire took the word:--

　　"That is the pure-bred gamin.

　　There are a great many varieties of the gamin species.

　　The notary's gamin is called Skip-the-Gutter, the cook's gamin is called a scullion, the baker's gamin is called a mitron, the lackey's gamin is called a groom, the marine gamin is called the cabin-boy, the soldier's gamin is called the drummer-boy, the painter's gamin is called paint-grinder, the tradesman's gamin is called an errand-boy, the courtesan gamin is called the minion, the kingly gamin is called the dauphin, the god gamin is called the bambino."

　　In the meantime, Laigle was engaged in reflection; he said half aloud:--

　　"A B C, that is to say:

　　the burial of Lamarque."

　　"The tall blonde," remarked Grantaire, "is Enjolras, who is sending you a warning."

　　"Shall we go?" ejaculated Bossuet.

　　"It's raiding," said Joly.

　　"I have sworn to go through fire, but not through water.

　　I don't wand to ged a gold."

　　"I shall stay here," said Grantaire.

　　"I prefer a breakfast to a hearse."

　　"Conclusion:

　　we remain," said Laigle.

　　"Well, then, let us drink. Besides, we might miss the funeral without missing the riot."

　　"Ah! the riot, I am with you!" cried Joly.

　　Laigle rubbed his hands.

　　"Now we're going to touch up the revolution of 1830.

　　As a matter of fact, it does hurt the people along the seams."

　　"I don't think much of your revolution," said Grantaire.

　　"I don't execrate this Government.

　　It is the crown tempered by the cotton night-cap. It is a sceptre ending in an umbrella.

　　In fact, I think that to-day, with the present weather, Louis Philippe might utilize his royalty in two directions, he might extend the tip of the sceptre end against the people, and open the umbrella end against heaven."

　　The room was dark, large clouds had just finished the extinction of daylight.

　　There was no one in the wine-shop, or in the street, every one having gone off "to watch events."

　　"Is it mid-day or midnight?" cried Bossuet.

　　"You can't see your hand before your face.

　　Gibelotte, fetch a light."

　　Grantaire was drinking in a melancholy way.

　　"Enjolras disdains me," he muttered.

　　"Enjolras said:

　　`Joly is ill, Grantaire is drunk.'

　　It was to Bossuet that he sent Navet. If he had come for me, I would have followed him.

　　So much the worse for Enjolras!

　　I won't go to his funeral."

　　This resolution once arrived at, Bossuet, Joly, and Grantaire did not stir from the wine-shop. By two o'clock in the afternoon, the table at which they sat was covered with empty bottles. Two candles were burning on it, one in a flat copper candlestick which was perfectly green, the other in the neck of a cracked carafe. Grantaire had seduced Joly and Bossuet to wine; Bossuet and Joly had conducted Grantaire back towards cheerfulness.

　　As for Grantaire, he had got beyond wine, that merely moderate inspirer of dreams, ever since mid-day. Wine enjoys only a conventional popularity with serious drinkers.

　　There is, in fact, in the matter of inebriety, white magic and black magic; wine is only white magic. Grantaire was a daring drinker of dreams.

　　The blackness of a terrible fit of drunkenness yawning before him, far from arresting him, attracted him.

　　He had abandoned the bottle and taken to the beerglass. The beer-glass is the abyss.

　　Having neither opium nor hashish on hand, and being desirous of filling his brain with twilight, he had had recourse to that fearful mixture of brandy, stout, absinthe, which produces the most terrible of lethargies.

　　It is of these three vapors, beer, brandy, and absinthe, that the lead of the soul is composed.

　　They are three grooms; the celestial butterfly is drowned in them; and there are formed there in a membranous smoke, vaguely condensed into the wing of the bat, three mute furies, Nightmare, Night, and Death, which hover about the slumbering Psyche.

　　Grantaire had not yet reached that lamentable phase; far from it. He was tremendously gay, and Bossuet and Joly retorted. They clinked glasses.

　　Grantaire added to the eccentric accentuation of words and ideas, a peculiarity of gesture; he rested his left fist on his knee with dignity, his arm forming a right angle, and, with cravat untied, seated astride a stool, his full glass in his right hand, he hurled solemn words at the big maid-servant Matelote:--

　　"Let the doors of the palace be thrown open!

　　Let every one be a member of the French Academy and have the right to embrace Madame Hucheloup. Let us drink."

　　And turning to Madame Hucheloup, he added:--

　　"Woman ancient and consecrated by use, draw near that I may contemplate thee!"

　　And Joly exclaimed:--

　　"Matelote and Gibelotte, dod't gib Grantaire anything more to drink. He has already devoured, since this bording, in wild prodigality, two francs and ninety-five centibes."

　　And Grantaire began again:--

　　"Who has been unhooking the stars without my permission, and putting them on the table in the guise of candles?"

　　Bossuet, though very drunk, preserved his equanimity.

　　He was seated on the sill of the open window, wetting his back in the falling rain, and gazing at his two friends.

　　All at once, he heard a tumult behind him, hurried footsteps, cries of "To arms!"

　　He turned round and saw in the Rue Saint-Denis, at the end of the Rue de la Chanvrerie, Enjolras passing, gun in hand, and Gavroche with his pistol, Feuilly with his sword, Courfeyrac with his sword, and Jean Prouvaire with his blunderbuss, Combeferre with his gun, Bahorel with his gun, and the whole armed and stormy rabble which was following them.

　　The Rue de la Chanvrerie was not more than a gunshot long. Bossuet improvised a speaking-trumpet from his two hands placed around his mouth, and shouted:--

　　"Courfeyrac!

　　Courfeyrac!

　　Hohee!"

　　Courfeyrac heard the shout, caught sight of Bossuet, and advanced a few paces into the Rue de la Chanvrerie, shouting:

　　"What do you want?" which crossed a "Where are you going?"

　　"To make a barricade," replied Courfeyrac.

　　"Well, here!

　　This is a good place!

　　Make it here!"

　　"That's true, Aigle," said Courfeyrac.

　　And at a signal from Courfeyrac, the mob flung themselves into the Rue de la Chanvrerie.

BOOK TWELFTH.--CORINTHE

CHAPTER III

　　NIGHT BEGINS TO DESCEND UPON GRANTAIRE

　　The spot was, in fact, admirably adapted, the entrance to the street widened out, the other extremity narrowed together into a pocket without exit.

　　Corinthe created an obstacle, the Rue Mondetour was easily barricaded on the right and the left, no attack was possible except from the Rue Saint-Denis, that is to say, in front, and in full sight.

　　Bossuet had the comprehensive glance of a fasting Hannibal.

　　Terror had seized on the whole street at the irruption of the mob. There was not a passer-by who did not get out of sight.

　　In the space of a flash of lightning, in the rear, to right and left, shops, stables, area-doors, windows, blinds, attic skylights, shutters of every description were closed, from the ground floor to the roof.

　　A terrified old woman fixed a mattress in front of her window on two clothes-poles for drying linen, in order to deaden the effect of musketry.

　　The wine-shop alone remained open; and that for a very good reason, that the mob had rushed into it.--"Ah my God!

　　Ah my God!" sighed Mame Hucheloup.

　　Bossuet had gone down to meet Courfeyrac.

　　Joly, who had placed himself at the window, exclaimed:--

　　"Courfeyrac, you ought to have brought an umbrella.

　　You will gatch gold."

　　In the meantime, in the space of a few minutes, twenty iron bars had been wrenched from the grated front of the wine-shop, ten fathoms of street had been unpaved; Gavroche and Bahorel had seized in its passage, and overturned, the dray of a lime-dealer named Anceau; this dray contained three barrels of lime, which they placed beneath the piles of paving-stones: Enjolras raised the cellar trap, and all the widow Hucheloup's empty casks were used to flank the barrels of lime; Feuilly, with his fingers skilled in painting the delicate sticks of fans, had backed up the barrels and the dray with two massive heaps of blocks of rough stone.

　　Blocks which were improvised like the rest and procured no one knows where. The beams which served as props were torn from the neighboring house-fronts and laid on the casks.

　　When Bossuet and Courfeyrac turned round, half the street was already barred with a rampart higher than a man.

　　There is nothing like the hand of the populace for building everything that is built by demolishing.

　　Matelote and Gibelotte had mingled with the workers.

　　Gibelotte went and came loaded with rubbish.

　　Her lassitude helped on the barricade. She served the barricade as she would have served wine, with a sleepy air.

　　An omnibus with two white horses passed the end of the street.

　　Bossuet strode over the paving-stones, ran to it, stopped the driver, made the passengers alight, offered his hand to "the ladies,"

dismissed the conductor, and returned, leading the vehicle and the horses by the bridle.

　　"Omnibuses," said he, "do not pass the Corinthe.

　　Non licet omnibus adire Corinthum."

　　An instant later, the horses were unharnessed and went off at their will, through the Rue Mondetour, and the omnibus lying on its side completed the bar across the street.

　　Mame Hucheloup, quite upset, had taken refuge in the first story.

　　Her eyes were vague, and stared without seeing anything, and she cried in a low tone.

　　Her terrified shrieks did not dare to emerge from her throat.

　　"The end of the world has come," she muttered.

　　Joly deposited a kiss on Mame Hucheloup's fat, red, wrinkled neck, and said to Grantaire:

　　"My dear fellow, I have always regarded a woman's neck as an infinitely delicate thing."

　　But Grantaire attained to the highest regions of dithryamb. Matelote had mounted to the first floor once more, Grantaire seized her round her waist, and gave vent to long bursts of laughter at the window.

　　"Matelote is homely!" he cried:

　　"Matelote is of a dream of ugliness! Matelote is a chimaera.

　　This is the secret of her birth: a Gothic Pygmalion, who was making gargoyles for cathedrals, fell in love with one of them, the most horrible, one fine morning. He besought Love to give it life, and this produced Matelote. Look at her, citizens!

　　She has chromate-of-lead-colored hair, like Titian's mistress, and she is a good girl.

　　I guarantee that she will fight well.

　　Every good girl contains a hero.

　　As for Mother Hucheloup, she's an old warrior.

　　Look at her moustaches! She inherited them from her husband.

　　A hussar indeed!

　　She will fight too.

　　These two alone will strike terror to the heart of the banlieue.

　　Comrades, we shall overthrow the government as true as there are fifteen intermediary acids between margaric acid and formic acid; however, that is a matter of perfect indifference to me.

　　Gentlemen, my father always detested me because I could not understand mathematics.

　　I understand only love and liberty. I am Grantaire, the good fellow.

　　Having never had any money, I never acquired the habit of it, and the result is that I have never lacked it; but, if I had been rich, there would have been no more poor people!

　　You would have seen!

　　Oh, if the kind hearts only had fat purses, how much better things would go!

　　I picture myself Jesus Christ with Rothschild's fortune!

　　How much good he would do!

　　Matelote, embrace me!

　　You are voluptuous and timid! You have cheeks which invite the kiss of a sister, and lips which claim the kiss of a lover."

　　"Hold your tongue, you cask!" said Courfeyrac.

　　Grantaire retorted:--

　　"I am the capitoul[52] and the master of the floral games!"

　　[52] Municipal officer of Toulouse.

　　Enjolras, who was standing on the crest of the barricade, gun in hand, raised his beautiful, austere face.

　　Enjolras, as the reader knows, had something of the Spartan and of the Puritan in his composition. He would have perished at Thermopylae with Leonidas, and burned at Drogheda with Cromwell.

　　"Grantaire," he shouted, "go get rid of the fumes of your wine somewhere else than here.

　　This is the place for enthusiasm, not for drunkenness.

　　Don't disgrace the barricade!"

　　This angry speech produced a singular effect on Grantaire.

　　One would have said that he had had a glass of cold water flung in his face. He seemed to be rendered suddenly sober.

　　He sat down, put his elbows on a table near the window, looked at Enjolras with indescribable gentleness, and said to him:--

　　"Let me sleep here."

　　"Go and sleep somewhere else," cried Enjolras.

　　But Grantaire, still keeping his tender and troubled eyes fixed on him, replied:--

　　"Let me sleep here,--until I die."

　　Enjolras regarded him with disdainful eyes:--

　　"Grantaire, you are incapable of believing, of thinking, of willing, of living, and of dying."

　　Grantaire replied in a grave tone:--

　　"You will see."

　　He stammered a few more unintelligible words, then his head fell heavily on the table, and, as is the usual effect of the second period of inebriety, into which Enjolras had roughly and abruptly thrust him, an instant later he had fallen asleep.

BOOK TWELFTH.--CORINTHE

CHAPTER IV

　　AN ATTEMPT TO CONSOLE THE WIDOW HUCHELOUP

　　Bahorel, in ecstasies over the barricade, shouted:--

　　"Here's the street in its low-necked dress!

　　How well it looks!"

　　Courfeyrac, as he demolished the wine-shop to some extent, sought to console the widowed proprietress.

　　"Mother Hucheloup, weren't you complaining the other day because you had had a notice served on you for infringing the law, because Gibelotte shook a counterpane out of your window?"

　　"Yes, my good Monsieur Courfeyrac.

　　Ah! good Heavens, are you going to put that table of mine in your horror, too?

　　And it was for the counterpane, and also for a pot of flowers which fell from the attic window into the street, that the government collected a fine of a hundred francs.

　　If that isn't an abomination, what is!"

　　"Well, Mother Hucheloup, we are avenging you."

　　Mother Hucheloup did not appear to understand very clearly the benefit which she was to derive from these reprisals made on her account.

　　She was satisfied after the manner of that Arab woman, who, having received a box on the ear from her husband, went to complain to her father, and cried for vengeance, saying: "Father, you owe my husband affront for affront."

　　The father asked: "On which cheek did you receive the blow?"

　　"On the left cheek." The father slapped her right cheek and said:

　　"Now you are satisfied. Go tell your husband that he boxed my daughter's ears, and that I have accordingly boxed his wife's."

　　The rain had ceased.

　　Recruits had arrived.

　　Workmen had brought under their blouses a barrel of powder, a basket containing bottles of vitriol, two or three carnival torches, and a basket filled with fire-pots, "left over from the King's festival." This festival was very recent, having taken place on the 1st of May. It was said that these munitions came from a grocer in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine named Pepin.

　　They smashed the only street lantern in the Rue de la Chanvrerie, the lantern corresponding to one in the Rue Saint-Denis, and all the lanterns in the surrounding streets, de Mondetour, du Cygne, des Precheurs, and de la Grande and de la Petite-Truanderie.

　　Enjolras, Combeferre, and Courfeyrac directed everything.

　　Two barricades were now in process of construction at once, both of them resting on the Corinthe house and forming a right angle; the larger shut off the Rue de la Chanvrerie, the other closed the Rue Mondetour, on the side of the Rue de Cygne.

　　This last barricade, which was very narrow, was constructed only of casks and paving-stones. There were about fifty workers on it; thirty were armed with guns; for, on their way, they had effected a wholesale loan from an armorer's shop.

　　Nothing could be more bizarre and at the same time more motley than this troop.

　　One had a round-jacket, a cavalry sabre, and two holster-pistols, another was in his shirt-sleeves, with a round hat, and a powder-horn slung at his side, a third wore a plastron of nine sheets of gray paper and was armed with a saddler's awl. There was one who was shouting:

　　"Let us exterminate them to the last man and die at the point of our bayonet."

　　This man had no bayonet. Another spread out over his coat the cross-belt and cartridge-box of a National Guardsman, the cover of the cartridge-box being ornamented with this inscription in red worsted:

　　Public Order. There were a great many guns bearing the numbers of the legions, few hats, no cravats, many bare arms, some pikes.

　　Add to this, all ages, all sorts of faces, small, pale young men, and bronzed longshoremen.

　　All were in haste; and as they helped each other, they discussed the possible chances.

　　That they would receive

succor about three o'clock in the morning--that they were sure of one regiment, that Paris would rise.

　　Terrible sayings with which was mingled a sort of cordial joviality.

　　One would have pronounced them brothers, but they did not know each other's names. Great perils have this fine characteristic, that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers.

　　A fire had been lighted in the kitchen, and there they were engaged in moulding into bullets, pewter mugs, spoons, forks, and all the brass table-ware of the establishment. In the midst of it all, they drank.

　　Caps and buckshot were mixed pell-mell on the tables with glasses of wine.

　　In the billiard-hall, Mame Hucheloup, Matelote, and Gibelotte, variously modified by terror, which had stupefied one, rendered another breathless, and roused the third, were tearing up old dish-cloths and making lint; three insurgents were assisting them, three bushy-haired, jolly blades with beards and moustaches, who plucked away at the linen with the fingers of seamstresses and who made them tremble.

　　The man of lofty stature whom Courfeyrac, Combeferre, and Enjolras had observed at the moment when he joined the mob at the corner of the Rue des Billettes, was at work on the smaller barricade and was making himself useful there.

　　Gavroche was working on the larger one.

　　As for the young man who had been waiting for Courfeyrac at his lodgings, and who had inquired for M. Marius, he had disappeared at about the time when the omnibus had been overturned.

　　Gavroche, completely carried away and radiant, had undertaken to get everything in readiness.

　　He went, came, mounted, descended, re-mounted, whistled, and sparkled.

　　He seemed to be there for the encouragement of all.

　　Had he any incentive?

　　Yes, certainly, his poverty; had he wings? yes, certainly, his joy.

　　Gavroche was a whirlwind.

　　He was constantly visible, he was incessantly audible. He filled the air, as he was everywhere at once.

　　He was a sort of almost irritating ubiquity; no halt was possible with him. The enormous barricade felt him on its haunches.

　　He troubled the loungers, he excited the idle, he reanimated the weary, he grew impatient over the thoughtful, he inspired gayety in some, and breath in others, wrath in others, movement in all, now pricking a student, now biting an artisan; he alighted, paused, flew off again, hovered over the tumult, and the effort, sprang from one party to another, murmuring and humming, and harassed the whole company; a fly on the immense revolutionary coach.

　　Perpetual motion was in his little arms and perpetual clamor in his little lungs.

　　"Courage! more paving-stones! more casks! more machines! Where are you now?

　　A hod of plaster for me to stop this hole with! Your barricade is very small.

　　It must be carried up.

　　Put everything on it, fling everything there, stick it all in.

　　Break down the house. A barricade is Mother Gibou's tea.

　　Hullo, here's a glass door."

　　This elicited an exclamation from the workers.

　　"A glass door? what do you expect us to do with a glass door, tubercle?"

　　"Hercules yourselves!" retorted Gavroche.

　　"A glass door is an excellent thing in a barricade.

　　It does not prevent an attack, but it prevents the enemy taking it.

　　So you've never prigged apples over a wall where there were broken bottles?

　　A glass door cuts the corns of the National Guard when they try to mount on the barricade. Pardi! glass is a treacherous thing.

　　Well, you haven't a very wildly lively imagination, comrades."

　　However, he was furious over his triggerless pistol.

　　He went from one to another, demanding:

　　"A gun, I want a gun!

　　Why don't you give me a gun?"

　　"Give you a gun!" said Combeferre.

　　"Come now!" said Gavroche, "why not?

　　I had one in 1830 when we had a dispute with Charles X."

　　Enjolras shrugged his shoulders.

　　"When there are enough for the men, we will give some to the children."

　　Gavroche wheeled round haughtily, and answered:--

　　"If you are killed before me, I shall take yours."

　　"Gamin!" said Enjolras.

　　"Greenhorn!" said Gavroche.

　　A dandy who had lost his way and who lounged past the end of the street created a diversion!

　　Gavroche shouted to him:--

　　"Come with us, young fellow! well now, don't we do anything for this old country of ours?"

　　The dandy fled.

BOOK TWELFTH.--CORINTHE

CHAPTER V

　　PREPARATIONS

　　The journals of the day which said that that nearly impregnable structure, of the barricade of the Rue de la Chanvrerie, as they call it, reached to the level of the first floor, 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 their will, either disappear behind it or dominate the barrier and even scale its crest by means of a quadruple row of paving-stones placed on top of each other and arranged as steps in the interior.

　　On the outside, the front of the barricade, composed of piles of paving-stones and casks bound together by beams and planks, which were entangled in the wheels of Anceau's dray and of the overturned omnibus, had a bristling and inextricable aspect.

　　An aperture large enough to allow a man to pass through had been made between the wall of the houses and the extremity of the barricade which was furthest from the wine-shop, so that an exit was possible at this point.

　　The pole of the omnibus was placed upright and held up with ropes, and a red flag, fastened to this pole, floated over the barricade.

　　The little Mondetour barricade, hidden behind the wine-shop building, was not visible.

　　The two barricades united formed a veritable redoubt. Enjolras and Courfeyrac had not thought fit to barricade the other fragment of the Rue Mondetour which opens through the Rue des Precheurs an issue into the Halles, wishing, no doubt, to preserve a possible communication with the outside, and not entertaining much fear of an attack through the dangerous and difficult street of the Rue des Precheurs.

　　With the exception of this issue which was left free, and which constituted what Folard in his strategical style would have termed a branch and taking into account, also, the narrow cutting arranged on the Rue de la Chanvrerie, the interior of the barricade, where the wine-shop formed a salient angle, presented an irregular square, closed on all sides.

　　There existed an interval of twenty paces between the grand barrier and the lofty houses which formed the background of the street, so that one might say that the barricade rested on these houses, all inhabited, but closed from top to bottom.

　　All this work was performed without any hindrance, in less than an hour, and without this handful of bold men seeing a single bear-skin cap or a single bayonet make their appearance. The very bourgeois who still ventured at this hour of riot to enter the Rue Saint-Denis cast a glance at the Rue de la Chanvrerie, caught sight of the barricade, and redoubled their pace.

　　The two barricades being finished, and the flag run up, a table was dragged out of the wine-shop; and Courfeyrac mounted on the table. Enjolras brought the square coffer, and Courfeyrac opened it. This coffer was filled with cartridges.

　　When the mob saw the cartridges, a tremor ran through the bravest, and a momentary silence ensued.

　　Courfeyrac distributed them with a smile.

　　Each one received thirty cartridges.

　　Many had powder, and set about making others with the bullets which they had run. As for the barrel of powder, it stood on a table on one side, near the door, and was held in reserve.

　　The alarm beat which ran through all Paris, did not cease, but it had finally come to be nothing more than a monotonous noise to which they no longer paid any attention.

　　This noise retreated at times, and again drew near, with melancholy undulations.

　　They loaded the guns and carbines, all together, without haste, with solemn gravity.

　　Enjolras went and stationed three sentinels outside the barricades, one in the Rue de la Chanvrerie, the second in the Rue des Precheurs, the third at the corner of the Rue de la Petite Truanderie.

　　Then, the barricades having been built, the posts assigned, the guns loaded, the sentinels stationed, they waited, alone in those redoubtable streets through which no one passed any longer, surrounded by those dumb houses which seemed dead and in which no human movement palpitated, enveloped in the deepening shades of twilight which was drawing on, in the midst of that silence through which something could be felt advancing, and which had about it something tragic and terrifying, isolated, armed, determined, and tranquil.

　　PREPARATIONS

　　The journals of the day which said that that nearly impregnable structure, of the barricade of the Rue de la Chanvrerie, as they call it, reached to the level of the first floor, 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 their will, either disappear behind it or dominate the barrier and even scale its crest by means of a quadruple row of paving-stones placed on top of each other and arranged as steps in the interior.

　　On the outside, the front of the barricade, composed of piles of paving-stones and casks bound together by beams and planks, which were entangled in the wheels of Anceau's dray and of the overturned omnibus, had a bristling and inextricable aspect.

　　An aperture large enough to allow a man to pass through had been made between the wall of the houses and the extremity of the barricade which was furthest from the wine-shop, so that an exit was possible at this point.

　　The pole of the omnibus was placed upright and held up with ropes, and a red flag, fastened to this pole, floated over the barricade.

　　The little Mondetour barricade, hidden behind the wine-shop building, was not visible.

　　The two barricades united formed a veritable redoubt. Enjolras and Courfeyrac had not thought fit to barricade the other fragment of the Rue Mondetour which opens through the Rue des Precheurs an issue into the Halles, wishing, no doubt, to preserve a possible communication with the outside, and not entertaining much fear of an attack through the dangerous and difficult street of the Rue des Precheurs.

　　With the exception of this issue which was left free, and which constituted what Folard in his strategical style would have termed a branch and taking into account, also, the narrow cutting arranged on the Rue de la Chanvrerie, the interior of the barricade, where the wine-shop formed a salient angle, presented an irregular square, closed on all sides.

　　There existed an interval of twenty paces between the grand barrier and the lofty houses which formed the background of the street, so that one might say that the barricade rested on these houses, all inhabited, but closed from top to bottom.

　　All this work was performed without any hindrance, in less than an hour, and without this handful of bold men seeing a single bear-skin cap or a single bayonet make their appearance. The very bourgeois who still ventured at this hour of riot to enter the Rue Saint-Denis cast a glance at the Rue de la Chanvrerie, caught sight of the barricade, and redoubled their pace.

　　The two barricades being finished, and the flag run up, a table was dragged out of the wine-shop; and Courfeyrac mounted on the table. Enjolras brought the square coffer, and Courfeyrac opened it. This coffer was filled with cartridges.

　　When the mob saw the cartridges, a tremor ran through the bravest, and a momentary silence ensued.

　　Courfeyrac distributed them with a smile.

　　Each one received thirty cartridges.

　　Many had powder, and set about making others with the bullets which they had run. As for the barrel of powder, it stood on a table on one side, near the door, and was held in reserve.

　　The alarm beat which ran through all Paris, did not cease, but it had finally come to be nothing more than a monotonous noise to which they no longer paid any attention.

　　This noise retreated at times, and again drew near, with melancholy undulations.

　　They loaded the guns and carbines, all together, without haste, with solemn gravity.

　　Enjolras went and stationed three sentinels outside the barricades, one in the Rue de la Chanvrerie, the second in the Rue des Precheurs, the third at the corner of the Rue de la Petite Truanderie.

　　Then, the barricades having been built, the posts assigned, the guns loaded, the sentinels stationed, they waited, alone in those redoubtable streets through which no one passed any longer, surrounded by those dumb houses which seemed dead and in which no human movement palpitated, enveloped in the deepening shades of twilight which was drawing on, in the midst of that silence through which something could be felt advancing, and which had about it something tragic and terrifying, isolated, armed, determined, and tranquil.

BOOK TWELFTH.--CORINTHE

CHAPTER VI

　　WAITING

　　During those hours of waiting, what did they do?

　　WAITING

　　During those hours of waiting, what did they do?

　　We must needs tell, since this is a matter of history.

　　While the men made bullets and the women lint, while a large saucepan of melted brass and lead, destined to the bullet-mould smoked over a glowing brazier, while the sentinels watched, weapon in hand, on the barricade, while Enjolras, whom it was impossible to divert, kept an eye on the sentinels, Combeferre, Courfeyrac, Jean Prouvaire, Feuilly, Bossuet, Joly, Bahorel, and some others, sought each other out and united as in the most peaceful days of their conversations in their student life, and, in one corner of this wine-shop which had been converted into a casement, a couple of paces distant from the redoubt which they had built, with their carbines loaded and primed resting against the backs of their chairs, these fine young fellows, so close to a supreme hour, began to recite love verses.

　　What verses?

Vous rappelez-vous notre douce vie,

Lorsque nous etions si jeunes tous deux,

Et que nous n'avions au coeur d'autre envie

Que d'etre bien mis et d'etre amoureux,

Lorsqu'en ajoutant votre age a mon age,

Nous ne comptions pas a deux quarante ans,

Et que, dans notre humble et petit menage,

Tout, meme l'hiver, nous etait printemps?

Beaux jours! Manuel etait fier et sage,

Paris s'asseyait a de saints banquets,

Foy lancait la foudre, et votre corsage

Avait une epingle ou je me piquais.

Tout vous contemplait. Avocat sans causes,

Quand je vous menais au Prado diner,

Vous etiez jolie au point que les roses

Me faisaient l'effet de se retourner.

Je les entendais dire: Est elle belle!

Comme elle sent bon! Quels cheveux a flots!

Sous son mantelet elle cache une aile,

Son bonnet charmant est a peine eclos.

J'errais avec toi, pressant ton bras souple.

Les passants crovaient que l'amour charme

Avait marie, dans notre heureux couple,

Le doux mois d'avril au beau mois de mai.

Nous vivions caches, contents, porte close,

Devorant l'amour, bon fruit defendu,

Ma bouche n'avait pas dit une chose

Que deja ton coeur avait repondu.

La Sorbonne etait l'endroit bucolique

Ou je t'adorais du soir au matin.

C'est ainsi qu'une ame amoureuse applique

La carte du Tendre au pays Latin.

O place Maubert! o place Dauphine!

Quand, dans le taudis frais et printanier,

Tu tirais ton bas sur ton jambe fine,

Je voyais un astre au fond du grenier.

J'ai fort lu Platon, mais rien ne m'en reste;

Mieux que Malebranche et que Lamennais,

Tu me demontrais la bonte celeste

Avec une fleur que tu me donnais.

Je t'obeissais, tu m' etais soumise;

O grenier dore! te lacer! te voir

Aller et venir des l'aube en chemise,

Mirant ton jeune front a ton vieux miroir.

Et qui done pourrait perde la memoire

De ces temps d'aurore et de firmament,

De rubans, de fleurs, de gaze et de moire,

Ou l'amour begaye un argot charmant?

Nos jardins etaient un pot de tulipe;

Tu masquais la vitre avec un jupon;

Je prenais le bol de terre de pipe,

Et je te donnais le tasse en japon.

Et ces grands malheurs qui nous faisaient rire!

Ton manchon brule, ton boa perdu!

Et ce cher portrait du divin Shakespeare

Qu'un soir pour souper nons avons vendu!

J'etais mendiant et toi charitable.

Je baisais au vol tes bras frais et ronds.

Dante in folio nous servait de table

Pour manger gaiment un cent de marrons.

La premiere fois qu'en mon joyeux bouge

Je pris un baiser a ton levre en feu,

Quand tu t'en allais decoiffee et rouge,

Je restai tout pale et je crus en Dieu!

Te rappelles-tu nos bonheurs sans nombre,

Et tous ces fichus changes en chiffons?

Oh que de soupirs, de nos coeurs pleins d'ombre,

Se sont envoles dans les cieux profonds![53]

　　[53] Do you remember our sweet life, when we were both so young, and when we had no other desire in our hearts than to be well dressed and in love?

　　When, by adding your age to my age, we could not count forty years between us, and when, in our humble and tiny household, everything was spring to us even in winter. Fair days!

　　Manuel was proud and wise, Paris sat at sacred banquets, Foy launched thunderbolts, and your corsage had a pin on which I pricked myself.

　　Everything gazed upon you.

　　A briefless lawyer, when I took you to the Prado to dine, you were so beautiful that the roses seemed to me to turn round, and I heard them say: Is she not beautiful!

　　How good she smells!

　　What billowing hair! Beneath her mantle she hides a wing.

　　Her charming bonnet is hardly unfolded.

　　I wandered with thee, pressing thy supple arm. The passers-by thought that love bewitched had wedded, in our happy couple, the gentle month of April to the fair month of May. We lived concealed, content, with closed doors, devouring love, that sweet forbidden fruit.

　　My mouth had not uttered a thing when thy heart had already responded.

　　The Sorbonne was the bucolic spot where I adored thee from eve till morn.

　　'Tis thus that an amorous soul applies the chart of the Tender to the Latin country. O Place Maubert!

　　O Place Dauphine!

　　When in the fresh spring-like hut thou didst draw thy stocking on thy delicate leg, I saw a star in the depths of the garret.

　　I have read a great deal of Plato, but nothing of it remains by me; better than Malebranche and then Lamennais thou didst demonstrate to me celestial goodness with a flower which thou gavest to me, I obeyed thee, thou didst submit to me; oh gilded garret! to lace thee! to behold thee going and coming from dawn in thy chemise, gazing at thy young brow in thine ancient mirror! And who, then, would forego the memory of those days of aurora and the firmament, of flowers, of gauze and of moire, when love stammers a charming slang?

　　Our gardens consisted of a pot of tulips; thou didst mask the window with thy petticoat; I took the earthenware bowl and I gave thee the Japanese cup.

　　And those great misfortunes which made us laugh!

　　Thy cuff scorched, thy boa lost!

　　And that dear portrait of the divine Shakespeare which we sold one evening that we might sup!

　　I was a beggar and thou wert charitable. I kissed thy fresh round arms in haste.

　　A folio Dante served us as a table on which to eat merrily a centime's worth of chestnuts. The first time that, in my joyous den, I snatched a kiss from thy fiery lip, when thou wentest forth, dishevelled and blushing, I turned deathly pale and I believed in God.

　　Dost thou recall our innumerable joys, and all those fichus changed to rags?

　　Oh! what sighs from our hearts full of gloom fluttered forth to the heavenly depths!

　　The hour, the spot, these souvenirs of youth recalled, a few stars which began to twinkle in the sky, the funeral repose of those deserted streets, the imminence of the inexorable adventure, which was in preparation, gave a pathetic charm to these verses murmured in a low tone in the dusk by Jean Prouvaire, who, as we have said, was a gentle poet.

　　In the meantime, a lamp had been lighted in the small barricade, and in the large one, one of those wax torches such as are to be met with on Shrove-Tuesday in front of vehicles loaded with masks, on their way to la Courtille.

　　These torches, as the reader has seen, came from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.

　　The torch had been placed in a sort of cage of paving-stones closed on three sides to shelter it from the wind, and disposed in such a fashion that all the light fell on the flag.

　　The street and the barricade remained sunk in gloom, and nothing was to be seen except the red flag formidably illuminated as by an enormous dark-lantern.

　　This light enhanced the scarlet of the flag, with an indescribable and terrible purple.

BOOK TWELFTH.--CORINTHE

CHAPTER VII

　　THE MAN RECRUITED IN THE RUE DES BILLETTES

　　Night was fully come, nothing made its appearance.

　　All that they heard was confused noises, and at intervals, fusillades; but these were rare, badly sustained and distant.

　　This respite, which was thus prolonged, was a sign that the Government was taking its time, and collecting its forces.

　　These fifty men were waiting for sixty thousand.

　　Enjolras felt attacked by that impatience which seizes on strong souls on the threshold of redoubtable events.

　　He went in search of Gavroche, who had set to making cartridges in the tap-room, by the dubious light of two candles placed on the counter by way of precaution, on account of the powder which was scattered on the tables. These two candles cast no gleam outside.

　　The insurgents had, moreover, taken pains not to have any light in the upper stories.

　　Gavroche was deeply preoccupied at that moment, but not precisely with his cartridges.

　　The man of the Rue des Billettes had just entered the tap-room and had seated himself at the table which was the least lighted.

　　A musket of large model had fallen to his share, and he held it between his legs.

　　Gavroche, who had been, up to that moment, distracted by a hundred "amusing" things, had not even seen this man.

　　When he entered, Gavroche followed him mechanically with his eyes, admiring his gun; then, all at once, when the man was seated, the street urchin sprang to his feet.

　　Any one who had spied upon that man up to that moment, would have seen that he was observing everything in the barricade and in the band of insurgents, with singular attention; but, from the moment when he had entered this room, he had fallen into a sort of brown study, and no longer seemed to see anything that was going on.

　　The gamin approached this pensive personage, and began to step around him on tiptoe, as one walks in the vicinity of a person whom one is afraid of waking. At the same time, over his childish countenance which was, at once so impudent and so serious, so giddy and so profound, so gay and so heart-breaking, passed all those grimaces of an old man which signify: Ah bah! impossible!

　　My sight is bad!

　　I am dreaming! can this be? no, it is not! but yes! why, no! etc.

　　Gavroche balanced on his heels, clenched both fists in his pockets, moved his neck around like a bird, expended in a gigantic pout all the sagacity of his lower lip. He was astounded, uncertain, incredulous, convinced, dazzled. He had the mien of the chief of the eunuchs in the slave mart, discovering a Venus among the blowsy females, and the air of an amateur recognizing a Raphael in a heap of daubs.

　　His whole being was at work, the instinct which scents out, and the intelligence which combines.

　　It was evident that a great event had happened in Gavroche's life.

　　It was at the most intense point of this preoccupation that Enjolras accosted him.

　　"You are small," said Enjolras, "you will not be seen.

　　Go out of the barricade, slip along close to the houses, skirmish about a bit in the streets, and come back and tell me what is going on."

　　Gavroche raised himself on his haunches.

　　"So the little chaps are good for something! that's very lucky! I'll go!

　　In the meanwhile, trust to the little fellows, and distrust the big ones."

　　And Gavroche, raising his head and lowering his voice, added, as he indicated the man of the Rue des Billettes: "Do you see that big fellow there?"

　　"Well?"

　　"He's a police spy."

　　"Are you sure of it?"

　　"It isn't two weeks since he pulled me off the cornice of the Port Royal, where I was taking the air, by my ear."

　　Enjolras hastily quitted the urchin and murmured a few words in a very low tone to a longshoreman from the winedocks who chanced to be at hand.

　　The man left the room, and returned almost immediately, accompanied by three others.

　　The four men, four porters with broad shoulders, went and placed themselves without doing anything to attract his attention, behind the table on which the man of the Rue des Billettes was leaning with his elbows. They were evidently ready to hurl themselves upon him.

　　Then Enjolras approached the man and demanded of him:--

　　"Who are you?"

　　At this abrupt query, the man started.

　　He plunged his gaze deep into Enjolras' clear eyes and appeared to grasp the latter's meaning. He smiled with a smile than which nothing more disdainful, more energetic, and more resolute could be seen in the world, and replied with haughty gravity:--

　　"I see what it is.

　　Well, yes!"

　　"You are a police spy?"

　　"I am an agent of the authorities."

　　"And your name?"

　　"Javert."

　　Enjolras made a sign to the four men.

　　In the twinkling of an eye, before Javert had time to turn round, he was collared, thrown down, pinioned and searched.

　　They found on him a little round card pasted between two pieces of glass, and bearing on one side the arms of France, engraved, and with this motto:

　　Supervision and vigilance, and on the other this note: "JAVERT, inspector of police, aged fifty-two," and the signature of the Prefect of Police of that day, M. Gisquet.

　　Besides this, he had his watch and his purse, which contained several gold pieces.

　　They left him his purse and his watch.

　　Under the watch, at the bottom of his fob, they felt and seized a paper in an envelope, which Enjolras unfolded, and on which he read these five lines, written in the very hand of the Prefect of Police:--

　　"As soon as his political mission is accomplished, Inspector Javert will make sure, by special supervision, whether it is true that the malefactors have instituted intrigues on the right bank of the Seine, near the Jena bridge."

　　The search ended, they lifted Javert to his feet, bound his arms behind his back, and fastened him to that celebrated post in the middle of the room which had formerly given the wine-shop its name.

　　Gavroche, who had looked on at the whole of this scene and had approved of everything with a silent toss of his head, stepped up to Javert and said to him:--

　　"It's the mouse who has caught the cat."

　　All this was so rapidly executed, that it was all over when those about the wine-shop noticed it.

　　Javert had not uttered a single cry.

　　At the sight of Javert bound to the post, Courfeyrac, Bossuet, Joly, Combeferre, and the men scattered over the two barricades came running up.

　　Javert, with his back to the post, and so surrounded with ropes that he could not make a movement, raised his head with the intrepid serenity of the man who has never lied.

　　"He is a police spy," said Enjolras.

　　And turning to Javert:

　　"You will be shot ten minutes before the barricade is taken."

　　Javert replied in his most imperious tone:--

　　"Why not at once?"

　　"We are saving our powder."

　　"Then finish the business with a blow from a knife."

　　"Spy," said the handsome Enjolras, "we are judges and not assassins."

　　Then he called Gavroche:--

　　"Here you! go about your business!

　　Do what I told you!"

　　"I'm going!" cried Gavroche.

　　And halting as he was on the point of setting out:--

　　"By the way, you will give me his gun!" and he added:

　　"I leave you the musician, but I want the clarionet."

　　The gamin made the military salute and passed gayly through the opening in the large barricade.

BOOK TWELFTH.--CORINTHE

CHAPTER VIII

　　MANY INTERROGATION POINTS WITH REGARD TO A CERTAIN LE CABUC WHOSE NAME MAY NOT HAVE BEEN LE CABUC

　　The tragic picture which we have undertaken would not be complete, the reader would not see those grand moments of social birth-pangs in a revolutionary birth, which contain convulsion mingled with effort, in their exact and real relief, were we to omit, in the sketch here outlined, an incident full of epic and savage horror which occurred almost immediately after Gavroche's departure.

　　Mobs, as the reader knows, are like a snowball, and collect as they roll along, a throng of tumultuous men.

　　These men do not ask each other whence they come.

　　Among the passers-by who had joined the rabble led by Enjolras, Combeferre, and Courfeyrac, there had been a person wearing the jacket of a street porter, which was very threadbare on the shoulders, who gesticulated and vociferated, and who had the look of a drunken savage.

　　This man, whose name or nickname was Le Cabuc, and who was, moreover, an utter stranger to those who pretended to know him, was very drunk, or assumed the appearance of being so, and had seated himself with several others at a table which they had dragged outside of the wine-shop. This Cabuc, while making those who vied with him drunk seemed to be examining with a thoughtful air the large house at the extremity of the barricade, whose five stories commanded the whole street and faced the Rue Saint-Denis. All at once he exclaimed:--

　　"Do you know, comrades, it is from that house yonder that we must fire. When we are at the windows, the deuce is in it if any one can advance into the street!"

　　"Yes, but the house is closed," said one of the drinkers.

　　"Let us knock!"

　　"They will not open."

　　"Let us break in the door!"

　　Le Cabuc runs to the door, which had a very massive knocker, and knocks. The door opens not.

　　He strikes a second blow.

　　No one answers. A third stroke.

　　The same silence.

　　"Is there any one here?" shouts Cabuc.

　　Nothing stirs.

　　Then he seizes a gun and begins to batter the door with the butt end.

　　It was an ancient alley door, low, vaulted, narrow, solid, entirely of oak, lined on the inside with a sheet of iron and iron stays, a genuine prison postern.

　　The blows from the butt end of the gun made the house tremble, but did not shake the door.

　　Nevertheless, it is probable that the inhabitants were disturbed, for a tiny, square window was finally seen to open on the third story, and at this aperture appeared the reverend and terrified face of a gray-haired old man, who was the porter, and who held a candle.

　　The man who was knocking paused.

　　"Gentlemen," said the porter, "what do you want?"

　　"Open!" said Cabuc.

　　"That cannot be, gentlemen."

　　"Open, nevertheless."

　　"Impossible, gentlemen."

　　Le Cabuc took his gun and aimed at the porter; but as he was below, and as it was very dark, the porter did not see him.

　　"Will you open, yes or no?"

　　"No, gentlemen."

　　"Do you say no?"

　　"I say no, my goo--"

　　The porter did not finish.

　　The shot was fired; the ball entered under his chin and came out at the nape of his neck, after traversing the jugular vein.

　　The old man fell back without a sigh.

　　The candle fell and was extinguished, and nothing more was to be seen except a motionless head lying on the sill of the small window, and a little whitish smoke which floated off towards the roof.

　　"There!" said Le Cabuc, dropping the butt end of his gun to the pavement.

　　He had hardly uttered this word, when he felt a hand laid on his shoulder with the weight of an eagle's talon, and he heard a voice saying to him:--

　　"On your knees."

　　The murderer turned round and saw before him Enjolras' cold, white face.

　　Enjolras held a pistol in his hand.

　　He had hastened up at the sound of the discharge.

　　He had seized Cabuc's collar, blouse, shirt, and suspender with his left hand.

　　"On your knees!" he repeated.

　　And, with an imperious motion, the frail young man of twenty years bent the thickset and sturdy porter like a reed, and brought him to his knees in the mire.

　　Le Cabuc attempted to resist, but he seemed to have been seized by a superhuman hand.

　　Enjolras, pale, with bare neck and dishevelled hair, and his woman's face, had about him at that moment something of the antique Themis. His dilated nostrils, his downcast eyes, gave to his implacable Greek profile that expression of wrath and that expression of Chastity which, as the ancient world viewed the matter, befit Justice.

　　The whole barricade hastened up, then all ranged themselves in a circle at a distance, feeling that it was impossible to utter a word in the presence of the thing which they were about to behold.

　　Le Cabuc, vanquished, no longer tried to struggle, and trembled in every limb.

　　Enjolras released him and drew out his watch.

　　"Collect yourself," said he.

　　"Think or pray.

　　You have one minute."

　　"Mercy!" murmured the murderer; then he dropped his head and stammered a few inarticulate oaths.

　　Enjolras never took his eyes off of him:

　　he allowed a minute to pass, then he replaced his watch in his fob.

　　That done, he grasped Le Cabuc by the hair, as the latter coiled himself into a ball at his knees and shrieked, and placed the muzzle of the pistol to his ear. Many of those intrepid men, who had so tranquilly entered upon the most terrible of adventures, turned aside their heads.

　　An explosion was heard, the assassin fell to the pavement face downwards.

　　Enjolras straightened himself up, and cast a convinced and severe glance around him.

　　Then he spurned the corpse with his foot and said:--

　　"Throw that outside."

　　Three men raised the body of the unhappy wretch, which was still agitated by the last mechanical convulsions of the life that had fled, and flung it over the little barricade into the Rue Mondetour.

　　Enjolras was thoughtful.

　　It is impossible to say what grandiose shadows slowly spread over his redoubtable serenity.

　　All at once he raised his voice.

　　A silence fell upon them.

　　"Citizens," said Enjolras, "what that man did is frightful, what I have done is horrible.

　　He killed, therefore I killed him. I had to do it, because insurrection must have its discipline. Assassination is even more of a crime here than elsewhere; we are under the eyes of the Revolution, we are the priests of the Republic, we are the victims of duty, and must not be possible to slander our combat. I have, therefore, tried that man, and condemned him to death. As for myself, constrained as I am to do what I have done, and yet abhorring it, I have judged myself also, and you shall soon see to what I have condemned myself."

　　Those who listened to him shuddered.

　　"We will share thy fate," cried Combeferre.

　　"So be it," replied Enjolras.

　　"One word more.

　　In executing this man, I have obeyed necessity; but necessity is a monster of the old world, necessity's name is Fatality.

　　Now, the law of progress is, that monsters shall disappear before the angels, and that Fatality shall vanish before Fraternity.

　　It is a bad moment to pronounce the word love.

　　No matter, I do pronounce it. And I glorify it.

　　Love, the future is thine.

　　Death, I make use of thee, but I hate thee.

　　Citizens, in the future there will be neither darkness nor thunderbolts; neither ferocious ignorance, nor bloody retaliation.

　　As there will be no more Satan, there will be no more Michael.

　　In the future no one will kill any one else, the earth will beam with radiance, the human race will love. The day will come, citizens, when all will be concord, harmony, light, joy and life; it will come, and it is in order that it may come that we are about to die."

　　Enjolras ceased.

　　His virgin lips closed; and he remained for some time standing on the spot where he had shed blood, in marble immobility. His staring eye caused those about him to speak in low tones.

　　Jean Prouvaire and Combeferre pressed each other's hands silently, and, leaning against each other in an angle of the barricade, they watched with an admiration in which there was some compassion, that grave young man, executioner and priest, composed of light, like crystal, and also of rock.

　　Let us say at once that later on, after the action, when the bodies were taken to the morgue and searched, a police agent's card was found on Le Cabuc.

　　The author of this book had in his hands, in 1848, the special report on this subject made to the Prefect of Police in 1832.

　　We will add, that if we are to believe a tradition of the police, which is strange but probably well founded, Le Cabuc was Claquesous. The fact is, that dating from the death of Le Cabuc, there was no longer any question of Claquesous.

　　Claquesous had nowhere left any trace of his disappearance; he would seem to have amalgamated himself with the invisible.

　　His life had been all shadows, his end was night.

　　The whole insurgent group was still under the influence of the emotion of that tragic case which had been so quickly tried and so quickly terminated, when Courfeyrac again beheld on the barricade, the small young man who had inquired of him that morning for Marius.

　　This lad, who had a bold and reckless air, had come by night to join the insurgents.

BOOK THIRTEENTH.--MARIUS ENTERS THE SHADOW

CHAPTER I

　　FROM THE RUE PLUMET TO THE QUARTIER SAINT-DENIS

　　The voice which had summoned Marius through the twilight to the barricade of the Rue de la Chanvrerie, had produced on him the effect of the voice of destiny.

　　He wished to die; the opportunity presented itself; he knocked at the door of the tomb, a hand in the darkness offered him the key.

　　These melancholy openings which take place in the gloom before despair, are tempting. Marius thrust aside the bar which had so often allowed him to pass, emerged from the garden, and said:

　　"I will go."

　　Mad with grief, no longer conscious of anything fixed or solid in his brain, incapable of accepting anything thenceforth of fate after those two months passed in the intoxication of youth and love, overwhelmed at once by all the reveries of despair, he had but one desire remaining, to make a speedy end of all.

　　He set out at rapid pace.

　　He found himself most opportunely armed, as he had Javert's pistols with him.

　　The young man of whom he thought that he had caught a glimpse, had vanished from his sight in the street.

　　Marius, who had emerged from the Rue Plumet by the boulevard, traversed the Esplanade and the bridge of the Invalides, the Champs Elysees, the Place Louis XV., and reached the Rue de Rivoli. The shops were open there, the gas was burning under the arcades, women were making their purchases in the stalls, people were eating ices in the Cafe Laiter, and nibbling small cakes at the English pastry-cook's shop.

　　Only a few posting-chaises were setting out at a gallop from the Hotel des Princes and the Hotel Meurice.

　　Marius entered the Rue Saint-Honore through the Passage Delorme. There the shops were closed, the merchants were chatting in front of their half-open doors, people were walking about, the street lanterns were lighted, beginning with the first floor, all the windows were lighted as usual.

　　There was cavalry on the Place du Palais-Royal.

　　Marius followed the Rue Saint-Honore. In proportion as he left the Palais-Royal behind him, there were fewer lighted windows, the shops were fast shut, no one was chatting on the thresholds, the street grew sombre, and, at the same time, the crowd increased in density.

　　For the passers-by now amounted to a crowd.

　　No one could be seen to speak in this throng, and yet there arose from it a dull, deep murmur.

　　Near the fountain of the Arbre-Sec, there were "assemblages", motionless and gloomy groups which were to those who went and came as stones in the midst of running water.

　　At the entrance to the Rue des Prouvaires, the crowd no longer walked. It formed a resisting, massive, solid, compact, almost impenetrable block of people who were huddled together, and conversing in low tones.

　　There were hardly any black coats or round hats now, but smock frocks, blouses, caps, and bristling and cadaverous heads. This multitude undulated confusedly in the nocturnal gloom. Its whisperings had the hoarse accent of a vibration.

　　Although not one of them was walking, a dull trampling was audible in the mire. Beyond this dense portion of the throng, in the Rue du Roule, in the Rue des Prouvaires, and in the extension of the Rue Saint-Honore, there was no longer a single window in which a candle was burning. Only the solitary and diminishing rows of lanterns could be seen vanishing into the street in the distance.

　　The lanterns of that date resembled large red stars, hanging to ropes, and shed upon the pavement a shadow which had the form of a huge spider. These streets were not deserted.

　　There could be descried piles of guns, moving bayonets, and troops bivouacking.

　　No curious observer passed that limit.

　　There circulation ceased.

　　There the rabble ended and the army began.

　　Marius willed with the will of a man who hopes no more.

　　He had been summoned, he must go.

　　He found a means to traverse the throng and to pass the bivouac of the troops, he shunned the patrols, he avoided the sentinels.

　　He made a circuit, reached the Rue de Bethisy, and directed his course towards the Halles.

　　At the corner of the Rue des Bourdonnais, there were no longer any lanterns.

　　After having passed the zone of the crowd, he had passed the limits of the troops; he found himself in something startling.

　　There was no longer a passer-by, no longer a soldier, no longer a light, there was no one; solitude, silence, night, I know not what chill which seized hold upon one.

　　Entering a street was like entering a cellar.

　　He continued to advance.

　　He took a few steps.

　　Some one passed close to him at a run.

　　Was it a man?

　　Or a woman?

　　Were there many of them? he could not have told. It had passed and vanished.

　　Proceeding from circuit to circuit, he reached a lane which he judged to be the Rue de la Poterie; near the middle of this street, he came in contact with an obstacle.

　　He extended his hands. It was an overturned wagon; his foot recognized pools of water, gullies, and paving-stones scattered and piled up. A barricade had been begun there and abandoned.

　　He climbed over the stones and found himself on the other side of the barrier. He walked very near the street-posts, and guided himself along the walls of the houses.

　　A little beyond the barricade, it seemed to him that he could make out something white in front of him. He approached, it took on a form.

　　It was two white horses; the horses of the omnibus harnessed by Bossuet in the morning, who had been straying at random all day from street to street, and had finally halted there, with the weary patience of brutes who no more understand the actions of men, than man understands the actions of Providence.

　　Marius left the horses behind him.

　　As he was approaching a street which seemed to him to be the Rue du Contrat-Social, a shot coming no one knows whence, and traversing the darkness at random, whistled close by him, and the bullet pierced a brass shaving-dish suspended above his head over a hairdresser's shop. This pierced shaving-dish was still to be seen in 1848, in the Rue du Contrat-Social, at the corner of the pillars of the market.

　　This shot still betokened life.

　　From that instant forth he encountered nothing more.

　　The whole of this itinerary resembled a descent of black steps.

　　Nevertheless, Marius pressed forward.

BOOK THIRTEENTH.--MARIUS ENTERS THE SHADOW

CHAPTER II

　　AN OWL'S VIEW OF PARIS

　　 A being who could have hovered over Paris that night with the wing of the bat or the owl would have had beneath his eyes a gloomy spectacle.

　　All that old quarter of the Halles, which is like a city within a city, through which run the Rues Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin, where a thousand lanes cross, and of which the insurgents had made their redoubt and their stronghold, would have appeared to him like a dark and enormous cavity hollowed out in the centre of Paris. There the glance fell into an abyss.

　　Thanks to the broken lanterns, thanks to the closed windows, there all radiance, all life, all sound, all movement ceased.

　　The invisible police of the insurrection were on the watch everywhere, and maintained order, that is to say, night.

　　The necessary tactics of insurrection are to drown small numbers in a vast obscurity, to multiply every combatant by the possibilities which that obscurity contains. At dusk, every window where a candle was burning received a shot. The light was extinguished, sometimes the inhabitant was killed. Hence nothing was stirring.

　　There was nothing but fright, mourning, stupor in the houses; and in the streets, a sort of sacred horror. Not even the long rows of windows and stores, the indentations of the chimneys, and the roofs, and the vague reflections which are cast back by the wet and muddy pavements, were visible. An eye cast upward at that mass of shadows might, perhaps, have caught a glimpse here and there, at intervals, of indistinct gleams which brought out broken and eccentric lines, and profiles of singular buildings, something like the lights which go and come in ruins; it was at such points that the barricades were situated. The rest was a lake of obscurity, foggy, heavy, and funereal, above which, in motionless and melancholy outlines, rose the tower of Saint-Jacques, the church of Saint-Merry, and two or three more of those grand edifices of which man makes giants and the night makes phantoms.

　　All around this deserted and disquieting labyrinth, in the quarters where the Parisian circulation had not been annihilated, and where a few street lanterns still burned, the aerial observer might have distinguished the metallic gleam of swords and bayonets, the dull rumble of artillery, and the swarming of silent battalions whose ranks were swelling from minute to minute; a formidable girdle which was slowly drawing in and around the insurrection.

　　The invested quarter was no longer anything more than a monstrous cavern; everything there appeared to be asleep or motionless, and, as we have just seen, any street which one might come to offered nothing but darkness.

　　A wild darkness, full of traps, full of unseen and formidable shocks, into which it was alarming to penetrate, and in which it was terrible to remain, where those who entered shivered before those whom they awaited, where those who waited shuddered before those who were coming. Invisible combatants were entrenched at every corner of the street; snares of the sepulchre concealed in the density of night. All was over.

　　No more light was to be hoped for, henceforth, except the lightning of guns, no further encounter except the abrupt and rapid apparition of death.

　　Where?

　　How?

　　When?

　　No one knew, but it was certain and inevitable.

　　In this place which had been marked out for the struggle, the Government and the insurrection, the National Guard, and popular societies, the bourgeois and the uprising, groping their way, were about to come into contact. The necessity was the same for both.

　　The only possible issue thenceforth was to emerge thence killed or conquerors.

　　A situation so extreme, an obscurity so powerful, that the most timid felt themselves seized with resolution, and the most daring with terror.

　　Moreover, on both sides, the fury, the rage, and the determination were equal.

　　For the one party, to advance meant death, and no one dreamed of retreating; for the other, to remain meant death, and no one dreamed of flight.

　　It was indispensable that all should be ended on the following day, that triumph should rest either here or there, that the insurrection should prove itself a revolution or a skirmish.

　　The Government understood this as well as the parties; the most insignificant bourgeois felt it. Hence a thought of anguish which mingled with the impenetrable gloom of this quarter where all was at the point of being decided; hence a redoubled anxiety around that silence whence a catastrophe was on the point of emerging.

　　Here only one sound was audible, a sound as heart-rending as the death rattle, as menacing as a malediction, the tocsin of Saint-Merry. Nothing could be more blood-curdling than the clamor of that wild and desperate bell, wailing amid the shadows.

　　As it often happens, nature seemed to have fallen into accord with what men were about to do.

　　Nothing disturbed the harmony of the whole effect.

　　The stars had disappeared, heavy clouds filled the horizon with their melancholy folds.

　　A black sky rested on these dead streets, as though an immense winding-sheet were being outspread over this immense tomb.

　　While a battle that was still wholly political was in preparation in the same locality which had already witnessed so many revolutionary events, while youth, the secret associations, the schools, in the name of principles, and the middle classes, in the name of interests, were approaching preparatory to dashing themselves together, clasping and throwing each other, while each one hastened and invited the last and decisive hour of the crisis, far away and quite outside of this fatal quarter, in the most profound depths of the unfathomable cavities of that wretched old Paris which disappears under the splendor of happy and opulent Paris, the sombre voice of the people could be heard giving utterance to a dull roar.

　　A fearful and sacred voice which is composed of the roar of the brute and of the word of God, which terrifies the weak and which warns the wise, which comes both from below like the voice of the lion, and from on high like the voice of the thunder.

BOOK THIRTEENTH.--MARIUS ENTERS THE SHADOW

CHAPTER III

　　THE EXTREME EDGE

　　 Marius had reached the Halles.

　　There everything was still calmer, more obscure and more motionless than in the neighboring streets.

　　One would have said that the glacial peace of the sepulchre had sprung forth from the earth and had spread over the heavens.

　　Nevertheless, a red glow brought out against this black background the lofty roofs of the houses which barred the Rue de la Chanvrerie on the Saint-Eustache side.

　　It was the reflection of the torch which was burning in the Corinthe barricade.

　　Marius directed his steps towards that red light.

　　It had drawn him to the Marche-aux-Poirees, and he caught a glimpse of the dark mouth of the Rue des Precheurs. He entered it.

　　The insurgents' sentinel, who was guarding the other end, did not see him.

　　He felt that he was very close to that which he had come in search of, and he walked on tiptoe. In this manner he reached the elbow of that short section of the Rue Mondetour which was, as the reader will remember, the only communication which Enjolras had preserved with the outside world. At the corner of the last house, on his left, he thrust his head forward, and looked into the fragment of the Rue Mondetour.

　　A little beyond the angle of the lane and the Rue de la Chanvrerie which cast a broad curtain of shadow, in which he was himself engulfed, he perceived some light on the pavement, a bit of the wine-shop, and beyond, a flickering lamp within a sort of shapeless wall, and men crouching down with guns on their knees.

　　All this was ten fathoms distant from him.

　　It was the interior of the barricade.

　　The houses which bordered the lane on the right concealed the rest of the wine-shop, the large barricade, and the flag from him.

　　Marius had but a step more to take.

　　Then the unhappy young man seated himself on a post, folded his arms, and fell to thinking about his father.

　　He thought of that heroic Colonel Pontmercy, who had been so proud a soldier, who had guarded the frontier of France under the Republic, and had touched the frontier of Asia under Napoleon, who had beheld Genoa, Alexandria, Milan, Turin, Madrid, Vienna, Dresden, Berlin, Moscow, who had left on all the victorious battle-fields of Europe drops of that same blood, which he, Marius, had in his veins, who had grown gray before his time in discipline and command, who had lived with his sword-belt buckled, his epaulets falling on his breast, his cockade blackened with powder, his brow furrowed with his helmet, in barracks, in camp, in the bivouac, in ambulances, and who, at the expiration of twenty years, had returned from the great wars with a scarred cheek, a smiling countenance, tranquil, admirable, pure as a child, having done everything for France and nothing against her.

　　He said to himself that his day had also come now, that his hour had struck, that following his father, he too was about to show himself brave, intrepid, bold, to run to meet the bullets, to offer his breast to bayonets, to shed his blood, to seek the enemy, to seek death, that he was about to wage war in his turn and descend to the field of battle, and that the field of battle upon which he was to descend was the street, and that the war in which he was about to engage was civil war!

　　He beheld civil war laid open like a gulf before him, and into this he was about to fall.

　　Then he shuddered.

　　He thought of his father's sword, which his grandfather had sold to a second-hand dealer, and which he had so mournfully regretted. He said to himself that that chaste and valiant sword had done well to escape from him, and to depart in wrath into the gloom; that if it had thus fled, it was because it was intelligent and because it had foreseen the future; that it had had a presentiment of this rebellion, the war of the gutters, the war of the pavements, fusillades through cellar-windows, blows given and received in the rear; it was because, coming from Marengo and Friedland, it did not wish to go to the Rue de la Chanvrerie; it was because, after what it had done with the father, it did not wish to do this for the son! He told himself that if that sword were there, if after taking possession of it at his father's pillow, he had dared to take it and carry it off for this combat of darkness between Frenchmen in the streets, it would assuredly have scorched his hands and burst out aflame before his eyes, like the sword of the angel! He told himself that it was fortunate that it was not there and that it had disappeared, that that was well, that that was just, that his grandfather had been the true guardian of his father's glory, and that it was far better that the colonel's sword should be sold at auction, sold to the old-clothes man, thrown among the old junk, than that it should, to-day, wound the side of his country.

　　And then he fell to weeping bitterly.

　　This was horrible.

　　But what was he to do?

　　Live without Cosette he could not.

　　Since she was gone, he must needs die.

　　Had he not given her his word of honor that he would die?

　　She had gone knowing that; this meant that it pleased her that Marius should die.

　　And then, it was clear that she no longer loved him, since she had departed thus without warning, without a word, without a letter, although she knew his address!

　　What was the good of living, and why should he live now? And then, what! should he retreat after going so far? should he flee from danger after having approached it? should he slip away after having come and peeped into the barricade? slip away, all in a tremble, saying:

　　"After all, I have had enough of it as it is. I have seen it, that suffices, this is civil war, and I shall take my leave!"

　　Should he abandon his friends who were expecting him? Who were in need of him possibly! who were a mere handful against an army!

　　Should he be untrue at once to his love, to country, to his word?

　　Should he give to his cowardice the pretext of patriotism? But this was impossible, and if the phantom of his father was there in the gloom, and beheld him retreating, he would beat him on the loins with the flat of his sword, and shout to him:

　　"March on, you poltroon!"

　　Thus a prey to the conflicting movements of his thoughts, he dropped his head.

　　All at once he raised it.

　　A sort of splendid rectification had just been effected in his mind.

　　There is a widening of the sphere of thought which is peculiar to the vicinity of the grave; it makes one see clearly to be near death.

　　The vision of the action into which he felt that he was, perhaps, on the point of entering, appeared to him no more as lamentable, but as superb.

　　The war of the street was suddenly transfigured by some unfathomable inward working of his soul, before the eye of his thought. All the tumultuous interrogation points of revery recurred to him in throngs, but without troubling him.

　　He left none of them unanswered.

　　Let us see, why should his father be indignant?

　　Are there not cases where insurrection rises to the dignity of duty? What was there that was degrading for the son of Colonel Pontmercy in the combat which was about to begin?

　　It is no longer Montmirail nor Champaubert; it is something quite different.

　　The question is no longer one of sacred territory,--but of a holy idea. The country wails, that may be, but humanity applauds.

　　But is it true that the country does wail?

　　France bleeds, but liberty smiles; and in the presence of liberty's smile, France forgets her wound. And then if we look at things from a still more lofty point of view, why do we speak of civil war?

　　Civil war--what does that mean?

　　Is there a foreign war? Is not all war between men war between brothers?

　　War is qualified only by its object.

　　There is no such thing as foreign or civil war; there is only just and unjust war.

　　Until that day when the grand human agreement is concluded, war, that at least which is the effort of the future, which is hastening on against the past, which is lagging in the rear, may be necessary.

　　What have we to reproach that war with?

　　War does not become a disgrace, the sword does not become a disgrace, except when it is used for assassinating the right, progress, reason, civilization, truth.

　　Then war, whether foreign or civil, is iniquitous; it is called crime. Outside the pale of that holy thing, justice, by what right does one form of man despise another?

　　By what right should the sword of Washington disown the pike of Camille Desmoulins?

　　Leonidas against the stranger, Timoleon against the tyrant, which is the greater? the one is the defender, the other the liberator.

　　Shall we brand every appeal to arms within a city's limits without taking the object into a consideration?

　　Then note the infamy of Brutus, Marcel, Arnould von Blankenheim, Coligny, Hedgerow war?

　　War of the streets? Why not?

　　That was the war of Ambiorix, of Artevelde, of Marnix, of Pelagius.

　　But Ambiorix fought against Rome, Artevelde against France, Marnix against Spain, Pelagius against the Moors; all against the foreigner.

　　Well, the monarchy is a foreigner; oppression is a stranger; the right divine is a stranger.

　　Despotism violates the moral frontier, an invasion violates the geographical frontier. Driving out the tyrant or driving out the English, in both cases, regaining possession of one's own territory.

　　There comes an hour when protestation no longer suffices; after philosophy, action is required; live force finishes what the idea has sketched out; Prometheus chained begins, Arostogeiton ends; the encyclopedia enlightens souls, the 10th of August electrifies them.

　　After AEschylus, Thrasybulus; after Diderot, Danton.

　　Multitudes have a tendency to accept the master. Their mass bears witness to apathy.

　　A crowd is easily led as a whole to obedience.

　　Men must be stirred up, pushed on, treated roughly by the very benefit of their deliverance, their eyes must be wounded by the true, light must be hurled at them in terrible handfuls. They must be a little thunderstruck themselves at their own well-being; this dazzling awakens them.

　　Hence the necessity of tocsins and wars. Great combatants must rise, must enlighten nations with audacity, and shake up that sad humanity which is covered with gloom by the right divine, Caesarian glory, force, fanaticism, irresponsible power, and absolute majesty; a rabble stupidly occupied in the contemplation, in their twilight splendor, of these sombre triumphs of the night. Down with the tyrant!

　　Of whom are you speaking?

　　Do you call Louis Philippe the tyrant?

　　No; no more than Louis XVI. Both of them are what history is in the habit of calling good kings; but principles are not to be parcelled out, the logic of the true is rectilinear, the peculiarity of truth is that it lacks complaisance; no concessions, then; all encroachments on man should be repressed. There is a divine right in Louis XVI., there is because a Bourbon in Louis Philippe; both represent in a certain measure the confiscation of right, and, in order to clear away universal insurrection, they must be combated; it must be done, France being always the one to begin. When the master falls in France, he falls everywhere.

　　In short, what cause is more just, and consequently, what war is greater, than that which re-establishes social truth, restores her throne to liberty, restores the people to the people, restores sovereignty to man, replaces the purple on the head of France, restores equity and reason in their plenitude, suppresses every germ of antagonism by restoring each one to himself, annihilates the obstacle which royalty presents to the whole immense universal concord, and places the human race once more on a level with the right?

　　These wars build up peace. An enormous fortress of prejudices, privileges, superstitions, lies, exactions, abuses, violences, iniquities, and darkness still stands erect in this world, with its towers of hatred. It must be cast down.

　　This monstrous mass must be made to crumble. To conquer at Austerlitz is grand; to take the Bastille is immense.

　　There is no one who has not noticed it in his own case--the soul,-- and therein lies the marvel of its unity complicated with ubiquity, has a strange aptitude for reasoning almost coldly in the most violent extremities, and it often happens that heartbroken passion and profound despair in the very agony of their blackest monologues, treat subjects and discuss theses.

　　Logic is mingled with convulsion, and the thread of the syllogism floats, without breaking, in the mournful storm of thought.

　　This was the situation of Marius' mind.

　　As he meditated thus, dejected but resolute, hesitating in every direction, and, in short, shuddering at what he was about to do, his glance strayed to the interior of the barricade. The insurgents were here conversing in a low voice, without moving, and there was perceptible that quasi-silence which marks the last stage of expectation.

　　Overhead, at the small window in the third story Marius descried a sort of spectator who appeared to him to be singularly attentive.

　　This was the porter who had been killed by Le Cabuc.

　　Below, by the lights of the torch, which was thrust between the paving-stones, this head could be vaguely distinguished. Nothing could be stranger, in that sombre and uncertain gleam, than that livid, motionless, astonished face, with its bristling hair, its eyes fixed and staring, and its yawning mouth, bent over the street in an attitude of curiosity.

　　One would have said that the man who was dead was surveying those who were about to die. A long trail of blood which had flowed from that head, descended in reddish threads from the window to the height of the first floor, where it stopped.

BOOK FOURTEENTH.--THE GRANDEURS OF DESPAIR

CHAPTER I

　　THE FLAG: ACT FIRST

　　As yet, nothing had come.

　　Ten o'clock had sounded from Saint-Merry. Enjolras and Combeferre had gone and seated themselves, carbines in hand, near the outlet of the grand barricade. They no longer addressed each other, they listened, seeking to catch even the faintest and most distant sound of marching.

　　Suddenly, in the midst of the dismal calm, a clear, gay, young voice, which seemed to come from the Rue Saint-Denis, rose and began to sing distinctly, to the old popular air of "By the Light of the Moon," this bit of poetry, terminated by a cry like the crow of a cock:--

Mon nez est en larmes,

Mon ami Bugeaud,

Prete moi tes gendarmes

Pour leur dire un mot.

En capote bleue,

La poule au shako,

Voici la banlieue!

Co-cocorico![54]

　　 [54] My nose is in tears, my friend Bugeaud, lend me thy gendarmes that I may say a word to them.

　　With a blue capote and a chicken in his shako, here's the banlieue, co-cocorico.

　　 They pressed each other's hands.

　　"That is Gavroche," said Enjolras.

　　"He is warning us," said Combeferre.

　　A hasty rush troubled the deserted street; they beheld a being more agile than a clown climb over the omnibus, and Gavroche bounded into the barricade, all breathless, saying:--

　　"My gun!

　　Here they are!"

　　An electric quiver shot through the whole barricade, and the sound of hands seeking their guns became audible.

　　"Would you like my carbine?" said Enjolras to the lad.

　　"I want a big gun," replied Gavroche.

　　And he seized Javert's gun.

　　Two sentinels had fallen back, and had come in almost at the same moment as Gavroche.

　　They were the sentinels from the end of the street, and the vidette of the Rue de la Petite-Truanderie. The vidette of the Lane des Precheurs had remained at his post, which indicated that nothing was approaching from the direction of the bridges and Halles.

　　The Rue de la Chanvrerie, of which a few paving-stones alone were dimly visible in the reflection of the light projected on the flag, offered to the insurgents the aspect of a vast black door vaguely opened into a smoke.

　　Each man had taken up his position for the conflict.

　　Forty-three insurgents, among whom were Enjolras, Combeferre, Courfeyrac, Bossuet, Joly, Bahorel, and Gavroche, were kneeling inside the large barricade, with their heads on a level with the crest of the barrier, the barrels of their guns and carbines aimed on the stones as though at loop-holes, attentive, mute, ready to fire.

　　Six, commanded by Feuilly, had installed themselves, with their guns levelled at their shoulders, at the windows of the two stories of Corinthe.

　　Several minutes passed thus, then a sound of footsteps, measured, heavy, and numerous, became distinctly audible in the direction of Saint-Leu. This sound, faint at first, then precise, then heavy and sonorous, approached slowly, without halt, without intermission, with a tranquil and terrible continuity. Nothing was to be heard but this.

　　It was that combined silence and sound, of the statue of the commander, but this stony step had something indescribably enormous and multiple about it which awakened the idea of a throng, and, at the same time, the idea of a spectre. One thought one heard the terrible statue Legion marching onward. This tread drew near; it drew still nearer, and stopped.

　　It seemed as though the breathing of many men could be heard at the end of the street.

　　Nothing was to be seen, however, but at the bottom of that dense obscurity there could be distinguished a multitude of metallic threads, as fine as needles and almost imperceptible, which moved about like those indescribable phosphoric networks which one sees beneath one's closed eyelids, in the first mists of slumber at the moment when one is dropping off to sleep.

　　These were bayonets and gun-barrels confusedly illuminated by the distant reflection of the torch.

　　A pause ensued, as though both sides were waiting.

　　All at once, from the depths of this darkness, a voice, which was all the more sinister, since no one was visible, and which appeared to be the gloom itself speaking, shouted:--

　　"Who goes there?"

　　At the same time, the click of guns, as they were lowered into position, was heard.

　　Enjolras replied in a haughty and vibrating tone:--

　　"The French Revolution!"

　　"Fire!" shouted the voice.

　　A flash empurpled all the facades in the street as though the door of a furnace had been flung open, and hastily closed again.

　　A fearful detonation burst forth on the barricade.

　　The red flag fell. The discharge had been so violent and so dense that it had cut the staff, that is to say, the very tip of the omnibus pole.

　　Bullets which had rebounded from the cornices of the houses penetrated the barricade and wounded several men.

　　The impression produced by this first discharge was freezing. The attack had been rough, and of a nature to inspire reflection in the boldest.

　　It was evident that they had to deal with an entire regiment at the very least.

　　"Comrades!" shouted Courfeyrac, "let us not waste our powder. Let us wait until they are in the street before replying."

　　"And, above all," said Enjolras, "let us raise the flag again."

　　He picked up the flag, which had fallen precisely at his feet.

　　Outside, the clatter of the ramrods in the guns could be heard; the troops were re-loading their arms.

　　Enjolras went on:--

　　"Who is there here with a bold heart?

　　Who will plant the flag on the barricade again?"

　　Not a man responded.

　　To mount on the barricade at the very moment when, without any doubt, it was again the object of their aim, was simply death.

　　The bravest hesitated to pronounce his own condemnation.

　　Enjolras himself felt a thrill.

　　He repeated:--

　　"Does no one volunteer?"

BOOK FOURTEENTH.--THE GRANDEURS OF DESPAIR

CHAPTER II

　　THE FLAG: ACT SECOND

　　 Since they had arrived at Corinthe, and had begun the construction of the barricade, no attention had been paid to Father Mabeuf. M. Mabeuf had not quitted the mob, however; he had entered the ground-floor of the wine-shop and had seated himself behind the counter.

　　There he had, so to speak, retreated into himself. He no longer seemed to look or to think.

　　Courfeyrac and others had accosted him two or three times, warning him of his peril, beseeching him to withdraw, but he did not hear them.

　　When they were not speaking to him, his mouth moved as though he were replying to some one, and as soon as he was addressed, his lips became motionless and his eyes no longer had the appearance of being alive.

　　Several hours before the barricade was attacked, he had assumed an attitude which he did not afterwards abandon, with both fists planted on his knees and his head thrust forward as though he were gazing over a precipice.

　　Nothing had been able to move him from this attitude; it did not seem as though his mind were in the barricade. When each had gone to take up his position for the combat, there remained in the tap-room where Javert was bound to the post, only a single insurgent with a naked sword, watching over Javert, and himself, Mabeuf.

　　At the moment of the attack, at the detonation, the physical shock had reached him and had, as it were, awakened him; he started up abruptly, crossed the room, and at the instant when Enjolras repeated his appeal:

　　"Does no one volunteer?" the old man was seen to make his appearance on the threshold of the wine-shop. His presence produced a sort of commotion in the different groups. A shout went up:--

　　"It is the voter!

　　It is the member of the Convention! It is the representative of the people!"

　　It is probable that he did not hear them.

　　He strode straight up to Enjolras, the insurgents withdrawing before him with a religious fear; he tore the flag from Enjolras, who recoiled in amazement and then, since no one dared to stop or to assist him, this old man of eighty, with shaking head but firm foot, began slowly to ascend the staircase of paving-stones arranged in the barricade.

　　This was so melancholy and so grand that all around him cried:

　　"Off with your hats!"

　　At every step that he mounted, it was a frightful spectacle; his white locks, his decrepit face, his lofty, bald, and wrinkled brow, his amazed and open mouth, his aged arm upholding the red banner, rose through the gloom and were enlarged in the bloody light of the torch, and the bystanders thought that they beheld the spectre of '93 emerging from the earth, with the flag of terror in his hand.

　　When he had reached the last step, when this trembling and terrible phantom, erect on that pile of rubbish in the presence of twelve hundred invisible guns, drew himself up in the face of death and as though he were more powerful than it, the whole barricade assumed amid the darkness, a supernatural and colossal form.

　　There ensued one of those silences which occur only in the presence of prodigies.

　　In the midst of this silence, the old man waved the red flag and shouted:--

　　"Long live the Revolution!

　　Long live the Republic!

　　Fraternity! Equality! and Death!"

　　Those in the barricade heard a low and rapid whisper, like the murmur of a priest who is despatching a prayer in haste. It was probably the commissary of police who was making the legal summons at the other end of the street.

　　Then the same piercing voice which had shouted:

　　"Who goes there?" shouted:--

　　"Retire!"

　　M. Mabeuf, pale, haggard, his eyes lighted up with the mournful flame of aberration, raised the flag above his head and repeated:--

　　"Long live the Republic!"

　　"Fire!" said the voice.

　　A second discharge, similar to the first, rained down upon the barricade.

　　The old man fell on his knees, then rose again, dropped the flag and fell backwards on the pavement, like a log, at full length, with outstretched arms.

　　Rivulets of blood flowed beneath him.

　　His aged head, pale and sad, seemed to be gazing at the sky.

　　One of those emotions which are superior to man, which make him forget even to defend himself, seized upon the insurgents, and they approached the body with respectful awe.

　　"What men these regicides were!" said Enjolras.

　　Courfeyrac bent down to Enjolras' ear:--

　　"This is for yourself alone, I do not wish to dampen the enthusiasm. But this man was anything rather than a regicide.

　　I knew him. His name was Father Mabeuf.

　　I do not know what was the matter with him to-day. But he was a brave blockhead.

　　Just look at his head."

　　"The head of a blockhead and the heart of a Brutus," replied Enjolras.

　　Then he raised his voice:--

　　"Citizens!

　　This is the example which the old give to the young. We hesitated, he came!

　　We were drawing back, he advanced!

　　This is what those who are trembling with age teach to those who tremble with fear!

　　This aged man is august in the eyes of his country. He has had a long life and a magnificent death!

　　Now, let us place the body under cover, that each one of us may defend this old man dead as he would his father living, and may his presence in our midst render the barricade impregnable!"

　　A murmur of gloomy and energetic assent followed these words.

　　Enjolras bent down, raised the old man's head, and fierce as he was, he kissed him on the brow, then, throwing wide his arms, and handling this dead man with tender precaution, as though he feared to hurt it, he removed his coat, showed the bloody holes in it to all, and said:--

　　"This is our flag now."

BOOK FOURTEENTH.--THE GRANDEURS OF DESPAIR

CHAPTER III

　　GAVROCHE WOULD HAVE DONE BETTER TO ACCEPT ENJOLRAS' CARBINE

　　 They threw a long black shawl of Widow Hucheloup's over Father Mabeuf. Six men made a litter of their guns; on this they laid the body, and bore it, with bared heads, with solemn slowness, to the large table in the tap-room.

　　These men, wholly absorbed in the grave and sacred task in which they were engaged, thought no more of the perilous situation in which they stood.

　　When the corpse passed near Javert, who was still impassive, Enjolras said to the spy:--

　　"It will be your turn presently!"

　　During all this time, Little Gavroche, who alone had not quitted his post, but had remained on guard, thought he espied some men stealthily approaching the barricade.

　　All at once he shouted:--

　　"Look out!"

　　Courfeyrac, Enjolras, Jean Prouvaire, Combeferre, Joly, Bahorel, Bossuet, and all the rest ran tumultuously from the wine-shop. It was almost too late.

　　They saw a glistening density of bayonets undulating above the barricade.

　　Municipal guards of lofty stature were making their way in, some striding over the omnibus, others through the cut, thrusting before them the urchin, who retreated, but did not flee.

　　The moment was critical.

　　It was that first, redoubtable moment of inundation, when the stream rises to the level of the levee and when the water begins to filter through the fissures of dike. A second more and the barricade would have been taken.

　　Bahorel dashed upon the first municipal guard who was entering, and killed him on the spot with a blow from his gun; the second killed Bahorel with a blow from his bayonet.

　　Another had already overthrown Courfeyrac, who was shouting:

　　"Follow me!"

　　The largest of all, a sort of colossus, marched on Gavroche with his bayonet fixed. The urchin took in his arms Javert's immense gun, levelled it resolutely at the giant, and fired.

　　No discharge followed. Javert's gun was not loaded.

　　The municipal guard burst into a laugh and raised his bayonet at the child.

　　Before the bayonet had touched Gavroche, the gun slipped from the soldier's grasp, a bullet had struck the municipal guardsman in the centre of the forehead, and he fell over on his back. A second bullet struck the other guard, who had assaulted Courfeyrac in the breast, and laid him low on the pavement.

　　This was the work of Marius, who had just entered the barricade.

BOOK FOURTEENTH.--THE GRANDEURS OF DESPAIR

CHAPTER IV

　　THE BARREL OF POWDER

　　 Marius, still concealed in the turn of the Rue Mondetour, had witnessed, shuddering and irresolute, the first phase of the combat.

　　But he had not long been able to resist that mysterious and sovereign vertigo which may be designated as the call of the abyss.

　　In the presence of the imminence of the peril, in the presence of the death of M. Mabeuf, that melancholy enigma, in the presence of Bahorel killed, and Courfeyrac shouting:

　　"Follow me!" of that child threatened, of his friends to succor or to avenge, all hesitation had vanished, and he had flung himself into the conflict, his two pistols in hand. With his first shot he had saved Gavroche, and with the second delivered Courfeyrac.

　　Amid the sound of the shots, amid the cries of the assaulted guards, the assailants had climbed the entrenchment, on whose summit Municipal Guards, soldiers of the line and National Guards from the suburbs could now be seen, gun in hand, rearing themselves to more than half the height of their bodies.

　　They already covered more than two-thirds of the barrier, but they did not leap into the enclosure, as though wavering in the fear of some trap.

　　They gazed into the dark barricade as one would gaze into a lion's den.

　　The light of the torch illuminated only their bayonets, their bear-skin caps, and the upper part of their uneasy and angry faces.

　　Marius had no longer any weapons; he had flung away his discharged pistols after firing them; but he had caught sight of the barrel of powder in the tap-room, near the door.

　　As he turned half round, gazing in that direction, a soldier took aim at him.

　　At the moment when the soldier was sighting Marius, a hand was laid on the muzzle of the gun and obstructed it. This was done by some one who had darted forward,--the young workman in velvet trousers.

　　The shot sped, traversed the hand and possibly, also, the workman, since he fell, but the ball did not strike Marius. All this, which was rather to be apprehended than seen through the smoke, Marius, who was entering the tap-room, hardly noticed. Still, he had, in a confused way, perceived that gun-barrel aimed at him, and the hand which had blocked it, and he had heard the discharge. But in moments like this, the things which one sees vacillate and are precipitated, and one pauses for nothing.

　　One feels obscurely impelled towards more darkness still, and all is cloud.

　　The insurgents, surprised but not terrified, had rallied. Enjolras had shouted:

　　"Wait!

　　Don't fire at random!" In the first confusion, they might, in fact, wound each other. The majority of them had ascended to the window on the first story and to the attic windows, whence they commanded the assailants.

　　The most determined, with Enjolras, Courfeyrac, Jean Prouvaire, and Combeferre, had proudly placed themselves with their backs against the houses at the rear, unsheltered and facing the ranks of soldiers and guards who crowned the barricade.

　　All this was accomplished without haste, with that strange and threatening gravity which precedes engagements.

　　They took aim, point blank, on both sides:

　　they were so close that they could talk together without raising their voices.

　　When they had reached this point where the spark is on the brink of darting forth, an officer in a gorget extended his sword and said:--

　　"Lay down your arms!"

　　"Fire!" replied Enjolras.

　　The two discharges took place at the same moment, and all disappeared in smoke.

　　An acrid and stifling smoke in which dying and wounded lay with weak, dull groans.

　　When the smoke cleared away, the combatants on both sides could be seen to be thinned out, but still in the same positions, reloading in silence.

　　All at once, a thundering voice was heard, shouting:--

　　"Be off with you, or I'll blow up the barricade!"

　　All turned in the direction whence the voice proceeded.

　　Marius had entered the tap-room, and had seized the barrel of powder, then he had taken advantage of the smoke, and the sort of obscure mist which filled the entrenched enclosure, to glide along the barricade as far as that cage of paving-stones where the torch was fixed. To tear it from the torch, to replace it by the barrel of powder, to thrust the pile of stones under the barrel, which was instantly staved in, with a sort of horrible obedience,--all this had cost Marius but the time necessary to stoop and rise again; and now all, National Guards, Municipal Guards, officers, soldiers, huddled at the other extremity of the barricade, gazed stupidly at him, as he stood with his foot on the stones, his torch in his hand, his haughty face illuminated by a fatal resolution, drooping the flame of the torch towards that redoubtable pile where they could make out the broken barrel of powder, and giving vent to that startling cry:--

　　"Be off with you, or I'll blow up the barricade!"

　　Marius on that barricade after the octogenarian was the vision of the young revolution after the apparition of the old.

　　"Blow up the barricade!" said a sergeant, "and yourself with it!"

　　Marius retorted:

　　"And myself also."

　　And he dropped the torch towards the barrel of powder.

　　But there was no longer any one on the barrier.

　　The assailants, abandoning their dead and wounded, flowed back pell-mell and in disorder towards the extremity of the street, and there were again lost in the night.

　　It was a headlong flight.

　　The barricade was free.

BOOK FOURTEENTH.--THE GRANDEURS OF DESPAIR

CHAPTER V

　　END OF THE VERSES OF JEAN PROUVAIRE

　　 All flocked around Marius.

　　Courfeyrac flung himself on his neck.

　　"Here you are!"

　　"What luck!" said Combeferre.

　　"You came in opportunely!" ejaculated Bossuet.

　　"If it had not been for you, I should have been dead!" began Courfeyrac again.

　　"If it had not been for you, I should have been gobbled up!" added Gavroche.

　　Marius asked:--

　　"Where is the chief?"

　　"You are he!" said Enjolras.

　　Marius had had a furnace in his brain all day long; now it was a whirlwind.

　　This whirlwind which was within him, produced on him the effect of being outside of him and of bearing him away. It seemed to him that he was already at an immense distance from life. His two luminous months of joy and love, ending abruptly at that frightful precipice, Cosette lost to him, that barricade, M. Mabeuf getting himself killed for the Republic, himself the leader of the insurgents,-- all these things appeared to him like a tremendous nightmare. He was obliged to make a mental effort to recall the fact that all that surrounded him was real.

　　Marius had already seen too much of life not to know that nothing is more imminent than the impossible, and that what it is always necessary to foresee is the unforeseen.

　　He had looked on at his own drama as a piece which one does not understand.

　　In the mists which enveloped his thoughts, he did not recognize Javert, who, bound to his post, had not so much as moved his head during the whole of the attack on the barricade, and who had gazed on the revolt seething around him with the resignation of a martyr and the majesty of a judge.

　　Marius had not even seen him.

　　In the meanwhile, the assailants did not stir, they could be heard marching and swarming through at the end of the street but they did not venture into it, either because they were awaiting orders or because they were awaiting reinforcements before hurling themselves afresh on this impregnable redoubt.

　　The insurgents had posted sentinels, and some of them, who were medical students, set about caring for the wounded.

　　They had thrown the tables out of the wine-shop, with the exception of the two tables reserved for lint and cartridges, and of the one on which lay Father Mabeuf; they had added them to the barricade, and had replaced them in the tap-room with mattresses from the bed of the widow Hucheloup and her servants.

　　On these mattresses they had laid the wounded.

　　As for the three poor creatures who inhabited Corinthe, no one knew what had become of them. They were finally found, however, hidden in the cellar.

　　A poignant emotion clouded the joy of the disencumbered barricade.

　　The roll was called.

　　One of the insurgents was missing.

　　And who was it? One of the dearest.

　　One of the most valiant.

　　Jean Prouvaire. He was sought among the wounded, he was not there.

　　He was sought among the dead, he was not there.

　　He was evidently a prisoner. Combeferre said to Enjolras:--

　　"They have our friend; we have their agent.

　　Are you set on the death of that spy?"

　　"Yes," replied Enjolras; "but less so than on the life of Jean Prouvaire."

　　This took place in the tap-room near Javert's post.

　　"Well," resumed Combeferre, "I am going to fasten my handkerchief to my cane, and go as a flag of truce, to offer to exchange our man for theirs."

　　"Listen," said Enjolras, laying his hand on Combeferre's arm.

　　At the end of the street there was a significant clash of arms.

　　They heard a manly voice shout:--

　　"Vive la France!

　　Long live France!

　　Long live the future!"

　　They recognized the voice of Prouvaire.

　　A flash passed, a report rang out.

　　Silence fell again.

　　"They have killed him," exclaimed Combeferre.

　　Enjolras glanced at Javert, and said to him:--

　　"Your friends have just shot you."

BOOK FOURTEENTH.--THE GRANDEURS OF DESPAIR

CHAPTER VI

　　THE AGONY OF DEATH AFTER THE AGONY OF LIFE

　　 A peculiarity of this species of war is, that the attack of the barricades is almost always made from the front, and that the assailants generally abstain from turning the position, either because they fear ambushes, or because they are afraid of getting entangled in the tortuous streets.

　　The insurgents' whole attention had been directed, therefore, to the grand barricade, which was, evidently, the spot always menaced, and there the struggle would infallibly recommence. But Marius thought of the little barricade, and went thither. It was deserted and guarded only by the fire-pot which trembled between the paving-stones. Moreover, the Mondetour alley, and the branches of the Rue de la Petite Truanderie and the Rue du Cygne were profoundly calm.

　　As Marius was withdrawing, after concluding his inspection, he heard his name pronounced feebly in the darkness.

　　"Monsieur Marius!"

　　He started, for he recognized the voice which had called to him two hours before through the gate in the Rue Plumet.

　　Only, the voice now seemed to be nothing more than a breath.

　　He looked about him, but saw no one.

　　Marius thought he had been mistaken, that it was an illusion added by his mind to the extraordinary realities which were clashing around him.

　　He advanced a step, in order to quit the distant recess where the barricade lay.

　　"Monsieur Marius!" repeated the voice.

　　This time he could not doubt that he had heard it distinctly; he looked and saw nothing.

　　"At your feet," said the voice.

　　He bent down, and saw in the darkness a form which was dragging itself towards him.

　　It was crawling along the pavement.

　　It was this that had spoken to him.

　　The fire-pot allowed him to distinguish a blouse, torn trousers of coarse velvet, bare feet, and something which resembled a pool of blood.

　　Marius indistinctly made out a pale head which was lifted towards him and which was saying to him:--

　　"You do not recognize me?"

　　"No."

　　"Eponine."

　　Marius bent hastily down.

　　It was, in fact, that unhappy child. She was dressed in men's clothes.

　　"How come you here?

　　What are you doing here?"

　　"I am dying," said she.

　　There are words and incidents which arouse dejected beings. Marius cried out with a start:--

　　"You are wounded!

　　Wait, I will carry you into the room!

　　They will attend to you there.

　　Is it serious?

　　How must I take hold of you in order not to hurt you?

　　Where do you suffer?

　　Help!

　　My God! But why did you come hither?"

　　And he tried to pass his arm under her, in order to raise her.

　　She uttered a feeble cry.

　　"Have I hurt you?" asked Marius.

　　"A little."

　　"But I only touched your hand."

　　She raised her hand to Marius, and in the middle of that hand Marius saw a black hole.

　　"What is the matter with your hand?" said he.

　　"It is pierced."

　　"Pierced?"

　　"Yes."

　　"What with?"

　　"A bullet."

　　"How?"

　　"Did you see a gun aimed at you?"

　　"Yes, and a hand stopping it."

　　"It was mine."

　　Marius was seized with a shudder.

　　"What madness!

　　Poor child!

　　But so much the better, if that is all, it is nothing, let me carry you to a bed.

　　They will dress your wound; one does not die of a pierced hand."

　　She murmured:--

　　"The bullet traversed my hand, but it came out through my back. It is useless to remove me from this spot.

　　I will tell you how you can care for me better than any surgeon.

　　Sit down near me on this stone."

　　He obeyed; she laid her head on Marius' knees, and, without looking at him, she said:--

　　"Oh!

　　How good this is!

　　How comfortable this is!

　　There; I no longer suffer."

　　She remained silent for a moment, then she turned her face with an effort, and looked at Marius.

　　"Do you know what, Monsieur Marius?

　　It puzzled me because you entered that garden; it was stupid, because it was I who showed you that house; and then, I ought to have said to myself that a young man like you--"

　　She paused, and overstepping the sombre transitions that undoubtedly existed in her mind, she resumed with a heartrending smile:--

　　"You thought me ugly, didn't you?"

　　She continued:--

　　"You see, you are lost!

　　Now, no one can get out of the barricade. It was I who led you here, by the way!

　　You are going to die, I count upon that.

　　And yet, when I saw them taking aim at you, I put my hand on the muzzle of the gun.

　　How queer it is!

　　But it was because I wanted to die before you.

　　When I received that bullet, I dragged myself here, no one saw me, no one picked me up, I was waiting for you, I said:

　　`So he is not coming!'

　　Oh, if you only knew.

　　I bit my blouse, I suffered so!

　　Now I am well. Do you remember the day I entered your chamber and when I looked at myself in your mirror, and the day when I came to you on the boulevard near the washerwomen?

　　How the birds sang!

　　That was a long time ago.

　　You gave me a hundred sous, and I said to you: `I don't want your money.'

　　I hope you picked up your coin? You are not rich.

　　I did not think to tell you to pick it up. The sun was shining bright, and it was not cold.

　　Do you remember, Monsieur Marius?

　　Oh!

　　How happy I am!

　　Every one is going to die."

　　She had a mad, grave, and heart-breaking air.

　　Her torn blouse disclosed her bare throat.

　　As she talked, she pressed her pierced hand to her breast, where there was another hole, and whence there spurted from moment to moment a stream of blood, like a jet of wine from an open bung-hole.

　　Marius gazed at this unfortunate creature with profound compassion.

　　"Oh!" she resumed, "it is coming again, I am stifling!"

　　She caught up her blouse and bit it, and her limbs stiffened on the pavement.

　　At that moment the young cock's crow executed by little Gavroche resounded through the barricade.

　　The child had mounted a table to load his gun, and was singing gayly the song then so popular:--

　　 "En voyant Lafayette, "On beholding Lafayette, Le gendarme repete:-- The gendarme repeats:-- Sauvons nous! sauvons nous!

　　 Let us flee! let us flee!

　　 sauvons nous!" let us flee!

　　 Eponine raised herself and listened; then she murmured:--

　　"It is he."

　　And turning to Marius:--

　　"My brother is here.

　　He must not see me.

　　He would scold me."

　　"Your brother?" inquired Marius, who was meditating in the most bitter and sorrowful depths of his heart on the duties to the Thenardiers which his father had bequeathed to him; "who is your brother?"

　　"That little fellow."

　　"The one who is singing?"

　　"Yes."

　　Marius made a movement.

　　"Oh! don't go away," said she, "it will not be long now."

　　She was sitting almost upright, but her voice was very low and broken by hiccoughs.

　　At intervals, the death rattle interrupted her.

　　She put her face as near that of Marius as possible.

　　She added with a strange expression:--

　　"Listen, I do not wish to play you a trick.

　　I have a letter in my pocket for you.

　　I was told to put it in the post.

　　I kept it. I did not want to have it reach you.

　　But perhaps you will be angry with me for it when we meet again presently?

　　Take your letter."

　　She grasped Marius' hand convulsively with her pierced hand, but she no longer seemed to feel her sufferings.

　　She put Marius' hand in the pocket of her blouse.

　　There, in fact, Marius felt a paper.

　　"Take it," said she.

　　Marius took the letter.

　　She made a sign of satisfaction and contentment.

　　"Now, for my trouble, promise me--"

　　And she stopped.

　　"What?" asked Marius.

　　"Promise me!"

　　"I promise."

　　"Promise to give me a kiss on my brow when I am dead.--I shall feel it."

　　She dropped her head again on Marius' knees, and her eyelids closed. He thought the poor soul had departed.

　　Eponine remained motionless. All at once, at the very moment when Marius fancied her asleep forever, she slowly opened her eyes in which appeared the sombre profundity of death, and said to him in a tone whose sweetness seemed already to proceed from another world:--

　　"And by the way, Monsieur Marius, I believe that I was a little bit in love with you."

　　She tried to smile once more and expired.

BOOK FOURTEENTH.--THE GRANDEURS OF DESPAIR

CHAPTER VII

　　GAVROCHE AS A PROFOUND CALCULATOR OF DISTANCES

　　 Marius kept his promise.

　　He dropped a kiss on that livid brow, where the icy perspiration stood in beads.

　　This was no infidelity to Cosette; it was a gentle and pensive farewell to an unhappy soul.

　　It was not without a tremor that he had taken the letter which Eponine had given him.

　　He had immediately felt that it was an event of weight.

　　He was impatient to read it. The heart of man is so constituted that the unhappy child had hardly closed her eyes when Marius began to think of unfolding this paper.

　　He laid her gently on the ground, and went away.

　　Something told him that he could not peruse that letter in the presence of that body.

　　He drew near to a candle in the tap-room. It was a small note, folded and sealed with a woman's elegant care.

　　The address was in a woman's hand and ran:--

　　"To Monsieur, Monsieur Marius Pontmercy, at M. Courfeyrac's, Rue de la Verrerie, No. 16."

　　He broke the seal and read:--

　　"My dearest, alas! my father insists on our setting out immediately. We shall be this evening in the Rue de l'Homme Arme, No. 7. In a week we shall be in England.

　　COSETTE.

　　June 4th."

　　Such was the innocence of their love that Marius was not even acquainted with Cosette's handwriting.

　　What had taken place may be related in a few words.

　　Eponine had been the cause of everything.

　　After the evening of the 3d of June she had cherished a double idea, to defeat the projects of her father and the ruffians on the house of the Rue Plumet, and to separate Marius and Cosette.

　　She had exchanged rags with the first young scamp she came across who had thought it amusing to dress like a woman, while Eponine disguised herself like a man. It was she who had conveyed to Jean Valjean in the Champ de Mars the expressive warning:

　　"Leave your house."

　　Jean Valjean had, in fact, returned home, and had said to Cosette:

　　"We set out this evening and we go to the Rue de l'Homme Arme with Toussaint. Next week, we shall be in London."

　　Cosette, utterly overwhelmed by this unexpected blow, had hastily penned a couple of lines to Marius.

　　But how was she to get the letter to the post? She never went out alone, and Toussaint, surprised at such a commission, would certainly show the letter to M. Fauchelevent. In this dilemma, Cosette had caught sight through the fence of Eponine in man's clothes, who now prowled incessantly around the garden. Cosette had called to "this young workman" and had handed him five francs and the letter, saying:

　　"Carry this letter immediately to its address."

　　Eponine had put the letter in her pocket.

　　The next day, on the 5th of June, she went to Courfeyrac's quarters to inquire for Marius, not for the purpose of delivering the letter, but,--a thing which every jealous and loving soul will comprehend,--"to see." There she had waited for Marius, or at least for Courfeyrac, still for the purpose of seeing.

　　When Courfeyrac had told her: "We are going to the barricades," an idea flashed through her mind, to fling herself into that death, as she would have done into any other, and to thrust Marius into it also.

　　She had followed Courfeyrac, had made sure of the locality where the barricade was in process of construction; and, quite certain, since Marius had received no warning, and since she had intercepted the letter, that he would go at dusk to his trysting place for every evening, she had betaken herself to the Rue Plumet, had there awaited Marius, and had sent him, in the name of his friends, the appeal which would, she thought, lead him to the barricade.

　　She reckoned on Marius' despair when he should fail to find Cosette; she was not mistaken. She had returned to the Rue de la Chanvrerie herself.

　　What she did there the reader has just seen.

　　She died with the tragic joy of jealous hearts who drag the beloved being into their own death, and who say: "No one shall have him!"

　　Marius covered Cosette's letter with kisses.

　　So she loved him! For one moment the idea occurred to him that he ought not to die now. Then he said to himself:

　　"She is going away.

　　Her father is taking her to England, and my grandfather refuses his consent to the marriage. Nothing is changed in our fates."

　　Dreamers like Marius are subject to supreme attacks of dejection, and desperate resolves are the result. The fatigue of living is insupportable; death is sooner over with. Then he reflected that he had still two duties to fulfil:

　　to inform Cosette of his death and send her a final farewell, and to save from the impending catastrophe which was in preparation, that poor child, Eponine's brother and Thenardier's son.

　　He had a pocket-book about him; the same one which had contained the note-book in which he had inscribed so many thoughts of love for Cosette.

　　He tore out a leaf and wrote on it a few lines in pencil:--

　　"Our marriage was impossible.

　　I asked my grandfather, he refused; I have no fortune, neither hast thou.

　　I hastened to thee, thou wert no longer there.

　　Thou knowest the promise that I gave thee, I shall keep it.

　　I die.

　　I love thee.

　　When thou readest this, my soul will be near thee, and thou wilt smile."

　　Having nothing wherewith to seal this letter, he contented himself with folding the paper in four, and added the address:--

　　"To Mademoiselle Cosette Fauchelevent, at M. Fauchelevent's, Rue de l'Homme Arme, No. 7."

　　Having folded the letter, he stood in thought for a moment, drew out his pocket-book again, opened it, and wrote, with the same pencil, these four lines on the first page:--

　　"My name is Marius Pontmercy.

　　Carry my body to my grandfather, M. Gillenormand, Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, No. 6, in the Marais."

　　He put his pocketbook back in his pocket, then he called Gavroche.

　　The gamin, at the sound of Marius' voice, ran up to him with his merry and devoted air.

　　"Will you do something for me?"

　　"Anything," said Gavroche.

　　"Good God! if it had not been for you, I should have been done for."

　　"Do you see this letter?"

　　"Yes."

　　"Take it.

　　Leave the barricade instantly" (Gavroche began to scratch his ear uneasily) "and to-morrow morning, you will deliver it at its address to Mademoiselle Cosette, at M. Fauchelevent's, Rue de l'Homme Arme, No. 7."

　　The heroic child replied

　　"Well, but! in the meanwhile the barricade will be taken, and I shall not be there."

　　"The barricade will not be attacked until daybreak, according to all appearances, and will not be taken before to-morrow noon."

　　The fresh respite which the assailants were granting to the barricade had, in fact, been prolonged.

　　It was one of those intermissions which frequently occur in nocturnal combats, which are always followed by an increase of rage.

　　"Well," said Gavroche, "what if I were to go and carry your letter to-morrow?"

　　"It will be too late.

　　The barricade will probably be blockaded, all the streets will be guarded, and you will not be able to get out. Go at once."

　　Gavroche could think of no reply to this, and stood there in indecision, scratching his ear sadly.

　　All at once, he took the letter with one of those birdlike movements which were common with him.

　　"All right," said he.

　　And he started off at a run through Mondetour lane.

　　An idea had occurred to Gavroche which had brought him to a decision, but he had not mentioned it for fear that Marius might offer some objection to it.

　　This was the idea:--

　　"It is barely midnight, the Rue de l'Homme Arme is not far off; I will go and deliver the letter at once, and I shall get back in time."

BOOK FIFTEENTH.--THE RUE DE L'HOMME ARME

CHAPTER I

　　A DRINKER IS A BABBLER

　　What are the convulsions of a city in comparison with the insurrections of the soul?

　　Man is a depth still greater than the people. Jean Valjean at that very moment was the prey of a terrible upheaval. Every sort of gulf had opened again within him.

　　He also was trembling, like Paris, on the brink of an obscure and formidable revolution. A few hours had sufficed to bring this about.

　　His destiny and his conscience had suddenly been covered with gloom.

　　Of him also, as well as of Paris, it might have been said:

　　"Two principles are face to face.

　　The white angel and the black angel are about to seize each other on the bridge of the abyss.

　　Which of the two will hurl the other over?

　　Who will carry the day?"

　　On the evening preceding this same 5th of June, Jean Valjean, accompanied by Cosette and Toussaint had installed himself in the Rue de l'Homme Arme.

　　A change awaited him there.

　　Cosette had not quitted the Rue Plumet without making an effort at resistance.

　　For the first time since they had lived side by side, Cosette's will and the will of Jean Valjean had proved to be distinct, and had been in opposition, at least, if they had not clashed. There had been objections on one side and inflexibility on the other. The abrupt advice:

　　"Leave your house," hurled at Jean Valjean by a stranger, had alarmed him to the extent of rendering him peremptory. He thought that he had been traced and followed.

　　Cosette had been obliged to give way.

　　Both had arrived in the Rue de l'Homme Arme without opening their lips, and without uttering a word, each being absorbed in his own personal preoccupation; Jean Valjean so uneasy that he did not notice Cosette's sadness, Cosette so sad that she did not notice Jean Valjean's uneasiness.

　　Jean Valjean had taken Toussaint with him, a thing which he had never done in his previous absences.

　　He perceived the possibility of not returning to the Rue Plumet, and he could neither leave Toussaint behind nor confide his secret to her.

　　Besides, he felt that she was devoted and trustworthy.

　　Treachery between master and servant begins in curiosity.

　　Now Toussaint, as though she had been destined to be Jean Valjean's servant, was not curious. She stammered in her peasant dialect of Barneville:

　　"I am made so; I do my work; the rest is no affair of mine."

　　In this departure from the Rue Plumet, which had been almost a flight, Jean Valjean had carried away nothing but the little embalmed valise, baptized by Cosette "the inseparable." Full trunks would have required porters, and porters are witnesses. A fiacre had been summoned to the door on the Rue de Babylone, and they had taken their departure.

　　It was with difficulty that Toussaint had obtained permission to pack up a little linen and clothes and a few toilet articles. Cosette had taken only her portfolio and her blotting-book.

　　Jean Valjean, with a view to augmenting the solitude and the mystery of this departure, had arranged to quit the pavilion of the Rue Plumet only at dusk, which had allowed Cosette time to write her note to Marius. They had arrived in the Rue de l'Homme Arme after night had fully fallen.

　　They had gone to bed in silence.

　　The lodgings in the Rue de l'Homme Arme were situated on a back court, on the second floor, and were composed of two sleeping-rooms, a dining-room and a kitchen adjoining the dining-room, with a garret where there was a folding-bed, and which fell to Toussaint's share. The dining-room was an antechamber as well, and separated the two bedrooms.

　　The apartment was provided with all necessary utensils.

　　People re-acquire confidence as foolishly as they lose it; human nature is so constituted.

　　Hardly had Jean Valjean reached the Rue de l'Homme Arme when his anxiety was lightened and by degrees dissipated. There are soothing spots which act in some sort mechanically on the mind.

　　An obscure street, peaceable inhabitants.

　　Jean Valjean experienced an indescribable contagion of tranquillity in that alley of ancient Paris, which is so narrow that it is barred against carriages by a transverse beam placed on two posts, which is deaf and dumb in the midst of the clamorous city, dimly lighted at mid-day, and is, so to speak, incapable of emotions between two rows of lofty houses centuries old, which hold their peace like ancients as they are. There was a touch of stagnant oblivion in that street.

　　Jean Valjean drew his breath once more there.

　　How could he be found there?

　　His first care was to place the inseparable beside him.

　　He slept well.

　　Night brings wisdom; we may add, night soothes. On the following morning he awoke in a mood that was almost gay. He thought the dining-room charming, though it was hideous, furnished with an old round table, a long sideboard surmounted by a slanting mirror, a dilapidated arm-chair, and several plain chairs which were encumbered with Toussaint's packages.

　　In one of these packages Jean Valjean's uniform of a National Guard was visible through a rent.

　　As for Cosette, she had had Toussaint take some broth to her room, and did not make her appearance until evening.

　　About five o'clock, Toussaint, who was going and coming and busying herself with the tiny establishment, set on the table a cold chicken, which Cosette, out of deference to her father, consented to glance at.

　　That done, Cosette, under the pretext of an obstinate sick headache, had bade Jean Valjean good night and had shut herself up in her chamber. Jean Valjean had eaten a wing of the chicken with a good appetite, and with his elbows on the table, having gradually recovered his serenity, had regained possession of his sense of security.

　　While he was discussing this modest dinner, he had, twice or thrice, noticed in a confused way, Toussaint's stammering words as she said to him:

　　"Monsieur, there is something going on, they are fighting in Paris."

　　But absorbed in a throng of inward calculations, he had paid no heed to it.

　　To tell the truth, he had not heard her. He rose and began to pace from the door to the window and from the window to the door, growing ever more serene.

　　With this calm, Cosette, his sole anxiety, recurred to his thoughts. Not that he was troubled by this headache, a little nervous crisis, a young girl's fit of sulks, the cloud of a moment, there would be nothing left of it in a day or two; but he meditated on the future, and, as was his habit, he thought of it with pleasure.

　　After all, he saw no obstacle to their happy life resuming its course. At certain hours, everything seems impossible, at others everything appears easy; Jean Valjean was in the midst of one of these good hours. They generally succeed the bad ones, as day follows night, by virtue of that law of succession and of contrast which lies at the very foundation of nature, and which superficial minds call antithesis. In this peaceful street where he had taken refuge, Jean Valjean got rid of all that had been troubling him for some time past. This very fact, that he had seen many shadows, made him begin to perceive a little azure.

　　To have quitted the Rue Plumet without complications or incidents was one good step already accomplished. Perhaps it would be wise to go abroad, if only for a few months, and to set out for London.

　　Well, they would go.

　　What difference did it make to him whether he was in France or in England, provided he had Cosette beside him?

　　Cosette was his nation.

　　Cosette sufficed for his happiness; the idea that he, perhaps, did not suffice for Cosette's happiness, that idea which had formerly been the cause of his fever and sleeplessness, did not even present itself to his mind. He was in a state of collapse from all his past sufferings, and he was fully entered on optimism.

　　Cosette was by his side, she seemed to be his; an optical illusion which every one has experienced. He arranged in his own mind, with all sorts of felicitous devices, his departure for England with Cosette, and he beheld his felicity reconstituted wherever he pleased, in the perspective of his revery.

　　As he paced to and fro with long strides, his glance suddenly encountered something strange.

　　In the inclined mirror facing him which surmounted the sideboard, he saw the four lines which follow:--

　　"My dearest, alas! my father insists on our setting out immediately. We shall be this evening in the Rue de l'Homme Arme, No. 7. In a week we shall be in England.

　　COSETTE.

　　June 4th."

　　Jean Valjean halted, perfectly haggard.

　　Cosette on her arrival had placed her blotting-book on the sideboard in front of the mirror, and, utterly absorbed in her agony of grief, had forgotten it and left it there, without even observing that she had left it wide open, and open at precisely the page on which she had laid to dry the four lines which she had penned, and which she had given in charge of the young workman in the Rue Plumet. The writing had been printed off on the blotter.

　　The mirror reflected the writing.

　　The result was, what is called in geometry, the symmetrical image; so that the writing, reversed on the blotter, was righted in the mirror and presented its natural appearance; and Jean Valjean had beneath his eyes the letter written by Cosette to Marius on the preceding evening.

　　It was simple and withering.

　　Jean Valjean stepped up to the mirror.

　　He read the four lines again, but he did not believe them.

　　They produced on him the effect of appearing in a flash of lightning.

　　It was a hallucination, it was impossible.

　　It was not so.

　　Little by little, his perceptions became more precise; he looked at Cosette's blotting-book, and the consciousness of the reality returned to him.

　　He caught up the blotter and said:

　　"It comes from there."

　　He feverishly examined the four lines imprinted on the blotter, the reversal of the letters converted into an odd scrawl, and he saw no sense in it.

　　Then he said to himself: "But this signifies nothing; there is nothing written here." And he drew a long breath with inexpressible relief.

　　Who has not experienced those foolish joys in horrible instants?

　　The soul does not surrender to despair until it has exhausted all illusions.

　　He held the blotter in his hand and contemplated it in stupid delight, almost ready to laugh at the hallucination of which he had been the dupe.

　　All at once his eyes fell upon the mirror again, and again he beheld the vision.

　　There were the four lines outlined with inexorable clearness.

　　This time it was no mirage. The recurrence of a vision is a reality; it was palpable, it was the writing restored in the mirror.

　　He understood.

　　Jean Valjean tottered, dropped the blotter, and fell into the old arm-chair beside the buffet, with drooping head, and glassy eyes, in utter bewilderment.

　　He told himself that it was plain, that the light of the world had been eclipsed forever, and that Cosette had written that to some one.

　　Then he heard his soul, which had become terrible once more, give vent to a dull roar in the gloom. Try then the effect of taking from the lion the dog which he has in his cage!

　　Strange and sad to say, at that very moment, Marius had not yet received Cosette's letter; chance had treacherously carried it

to Jean Valjean before delivering it to Marius.

　　Up to that day, Jean Valjean had not been vanquished by trial.

　　He had been subjected to fearful proofs; no violence of bad fortune had been spared him; the ferocity of fate, armed with all vindictiveness and all social scorn, had taken him for her prey and had raged against him. He had accepted every extremity when it had been necessary; he had sacrificed his inviolability as a reformed man, had yielded up his liberty, risked his head, lost everything, suffered everything, and he had remained disinterested and stoical to such a point that he might have been thought to be absent from himself like a martyr. His conscience inured to every assault of destiny, might have appeared to be forever impregnable.

　　Well, any one who had beheld his spiritual self would have been obliged to concede that it weakened at that moment.

　　It was because, of all the tortures which he had undergone in the course of this long inquisition to which destiny had doomed him, this was the most terrible.

　　Never had such pincers seized him hitherto.

　　He felt the mysterious stirring of all his latent sensibilities.

　　He felt the plucking at the strange chord. Alas! the supreme trial, let us say rather, the only trial, is the loss of the beloved being.

　　Poor old Jean Valjean certainly did not love Cosette otherwise than as a father; but we have already remarked, above, that into this paternity the widowhood of his life had introduced all the shades of love; he loved Cosette as his daughter, and he loved her as his mother, and he loved her as his sister; and, as he had never had either a woman to love or a wife, as nature is a creditor who accepts no protest, that sentiment also, the most impossible to lose, was mingled with the rest, vague, ignorant, pure with the purity of blindness, unconscious, celestial, angelic, divine; less like a sentiment than like an instinct, less like an instinct than like an imperceptible and invisible but real attraction; and love, properly speaking, was, in his immense tenderness for Cosette, like the thread of gold in the mountain, concealed and virgin.

　　Let the reader recall the situation of heart which we have already indicated.

　　No marriage was possible between them; not even that of souls; and yet, it is certain that their destinies were wedded.

　　With the exception of Cosette, that is to say, with the exception of a childhood, Jean Valjean had never, in the whole of his long life, known anything of that which may be loved. The passions and loves which succeed each other had not produced in him those successive green growths, tender green or dark green, which can be seen in foliage which passes through the winter and in men who pass fifty.

　　In short, and we have insisted on it more than once, all this interior fusion, all this whole, of which the sum total was a lofty virtue, ended in rendering Jean Valjean a father to Cosette. A strange father, forged from the grandfather, the son, the brother, and the husband, that existed in Jean Valjean; a father in whom there was included even a mother; a father who loved Cosette and adored her, and who held that child as his light, his home, his family, his country, his paradise.

　　Thus when he saw that the end had absolutely come, that she was escaping from him, that she was slipping from his hands, that she was gliding from him, like a cloud, like water, when he had before his eyes this crushing proof:

　　"another is the goal of her heart, another is the wish of her life; there is a dearest one, I am no longer anything but her father, I no longer exist"; when he could no longer doubt, when he said to himself:

　　"She is going away from me!" the grief which he felt surpassed the bounds of possibility. To have done all that he had done for the purpose of ending like this! And the very idea of being nothing!

　　Then, as we have just said, a quiver of revolt ran through him from head to foot.

　　He felt, even in the very roots of his hair, the immense reawakening of egotism, and the _I_ in this man's abyss howled.

　　There is such a thing as the sudden giving way of the inward subsoil. A despairing certainty does not make its way into a man without thrusting aside and breaking certain profound elements which, in some cases, are the very man himself.

　　Grief, when it attains this shape, is a headlong flight of all the forces of the conscience. These are fatal crises.

　　Few among us emerge from them still like ourselves and firm in duty.

　　When the limit of endurance is overstepped, the most imperturbable virtue is disconcerted. Jean Valjean took the blotter again, and convinced himself afresh; he remained bowed and as though petrified and with staring eyes, over those four unobjectionable lines; and there arose within him such a cloud that one might have thought that everything in this soul was crumbling away.

　　He examined this revelation, athwart the exaggerations of revery, with an apparent and terrifying calmness, for it is a fearful thing when a man's calmness reaches the coldness of the statue.

　　He measured the terrible step which his destiny had taken without his having a suspicion of the fact; he recalled his fears of the preceding summer, so foolishly dissipated; he recognized the precipice, it was still the same; only, Jean Valjean was no longer on the brink, he was at the bottom of it.

　　The unprecedented and heart-rending thing about it was that he had fallen without perceiving it.

　　All the light of his life had departed, while he still fancied that he beheld the sun.

　　His instinct did not hesitate.

　　He put together certain circumstances, certain dates, certain blushes and certain pallors on Cosette's part, and he said to himself:

　　"It is he."

　　The divination of despair is a sort of mysterious bow which never misses its aim.

　　He struck Marius with his first conjecture. He did not know the name, but he found the man instantly. He distinctly perceived, in the background of the implacable conjuration of his memories, the unknown prowler of the Luxembourg, that wretched seeker of love adventures, that idler of romance, that idiot, that coward, for it is cowardly to come and make eyes at young girls who have beside them a father who loves them.

　　After he had thoroughly verified the fact that this young man was at the bottom of this situation, and that everything proceeded from that quarter, he, Jean Valjean, the regenerated man, the man who had so labored over his soul, the man who had made so many efforts to resolve all life, all misery, and all unhappiness into love, looked into his own breast and there beheld a spectre, Hate.

　　Great griefs contain something of dejection.

　　They discourage one with existence.

　　The man into whom they enter feels something within him withdraw from him.

　　In his youth, their visits are lugubrious; later on they are sinister.

　　Alas, if despair is a fearful thing when the blood is hot, when the hair is black, when the head is erect on the body like the flame on the torch, when the roll of destiny still retains its full thickness, when the heart, full of desirable love, still possesses beats which can be returned to it, when one has time for redress, when all women and all smiles and all the future and all the horizon are before one, when the force of life is complete, what is it in old age, when the years hasten on, growing ever paler, to that twilight hour when one begins to behold the stars of the tomb?

　　While he was meditating, Toussaint entered.

　　Jean Valjean rose and asked her:--

　　"In what quarter is it?

　　Do you know?"

　　Toussaint was struck dumb, and could only answer him:--

　　"What is it, sir?"

　　Jean Valjean began again:

　　"Did you not tell me that just now that there is fighting going on?"

　　"Ah! yes, sir," replied Toussaint.

　　"It is in the direction of Saint-Merry."

　　There is a mechanical movement which comes to us, unconsciously, from the most profound depths of our thought.

　　It was, no doubt, under the impulse of a movement of this sort, and of which he was hardly conscious, that Jean Valjean, five minutes later, found himself in the street.

　　Bareheaded, he sat upon the stone post at the door of his house. He seemed to be listening.

　　Night had come.

BOOK FIFTEENTH.--THE RUE DE L'HOMME ARME

CHAPTER II

　　THE STREET URCHIN AN ENEMY OF LIGHT

　　 How long did he remain thus?

　　What was the ebb and flow of this tragic meditation?

　　Did he straighten up?

　　Did he remain bowed? Had he been bent to breaking?

　　Could he still rise and regain his footing in his conscience upon something solid?

　　He probably would not have been able to tell himself.

　　The street was deserted.

　　A few uneasy bourgeois, who were rapidly returning home, hardly saw him.

　　Each one for himself in times of peril.

　　The lamp-lighter came as usual to light the lantern which was situated precisely opposite the door of No. 7, and then went away.

　　Jean Valjean would not have appeared like a living man to any one who had examined him in that shadow. He sat there on the post of his door, motionless as a form of ice. There is congealment in despair.

　　The alarm bells and a vague and stormy uproar were audible.

　　In the midst of all these convulsions of the bell mingled with the revolt, the clock of Saint-Paul struck eleven, gravely and without haste; for the tocsin is man; the hour is God.

　　The passage of the hour produced no effect on Jean Valjean; Jean Valjean did not stir.

　　Still, at about that moment, a brusque report burst forth in the direction of the Halles, a second yet more violent followed; it was probably that attack on the barricade in the Rue de la Chanvrerie which we have just seen repulsed by Marius.

　　At this double discharge, whose fury seemed augmented by the stupor of the night, Jean Valjean started; he rose, turning towards the quarter whence the noise proceeded; then he fell back upon the post again, folded his arms, and his head slowly sank on his bosom again.

　　He resumed his gloomy dialogue with himself.

　　All at once, he raised his eyes; some one was walking in the street, he heard steps near him.

　　He looked, and by the light of the lanterns, in the direction of the street which ran into the Rue-aux-Archives, he perceived a young, livid, and beaming face.

　　Gavroche had just arrived in the Rue l'Homme Arme.

　　Gavroche was staring into the air, apparently in search of something. He saw Jean Valjean perfectly well but he took no notice of him.

　　Gavroche after staring into the air, stared below; he raised himself on tiptoe, and felt of the doors and windows of the ground floor; they were all shut, bolted, and padlocked.

　　After having authenticated the fronts of five or six barricaded houses in this manner, the urchin shrugged his shoulders, and took himself to task in these terms:--

　　"Pardi!"

　　Then he began to stare into the air again.

　　Jean Valjean, who, an instant previously, in his then state of mind, would not have spoken to or even answered any one, felt irresistibly impelled to accost that child.

　　"What is the matter with you, my little fellow?" he said.

　　"The matter with me is that I am hungry," replied Gavroche frankly. And he added:

　　"Little fellow yourself."

　　Jean Valjean fumbled in his fob and pulled out a five-franc piece.

　　But Gavroche, who was of the wagtail species, and who skipped vivaciously from one gesture to another, had just picked up a stone. He had caught sight of the lantern.

　　"See here," said he, "you still have your lanterns here. You are disobeying the regulations, my friend.

　　This is disorderly. Smash that for me."

　　And he flung the stone at the lantern, whose broken glass fell with such a clatter that the bourgeois in hiding behind their curtains in the opposite house cried:

　　"There is `Ninety-three' come again."

　　The lantern oscillated violently, and went out.

　　The street had suddenly become black.

　　"That's right, old street," ejaculated Gavroche, "put on your night-cap."

　　And turning to Jean Valjean:--

　　"What do you call that gigantic monument that you have there at the end of the street?

　　It's the Archives, isn't it?

　　I must crumble up those big stupids of pillars a bit and make a nice barricade out of them."

　　Jean Valjean stepped up to Gavroche.

　　"Poor creature," he said in a low tone, and speaking to himself, "he is hungry."

　　And he laid the hundred-sou piece in his hand.

　　Gavroche raised his face, astonished at the size of this sou; he stared at it in the darkness, and the whiteness of the big sou dazzled him.

　　He knew five-franc pieces by hearsay; their reputation was agreeable to him; he was delighted to see one close to. He said:--

　　"Let us contemplate the tiger."

　　He gazed at it for several minutes in ecstasy; then, turning to Jean Valjean, he held out the coin to him, and said majestically to him:--

　　"Bourgeois, I prefer to smash lanterns.

　　Take back your ferocious beast. You can't bribe me.

　　That has got five claws; but it doesn't scratch me."

　　"Have you a mother?" asked Jean Valjean.

　　Gavroche replied:--

　　"More than you have, perhaps."

　　"Well," returned Jean Valjean, "keep the money for your mother!"

　　Gavroche was touched.

　　Moreover, he had just noticed that the man who was addressing him had no hat, and this inspired him with confidence.

　　"Truly," said he, "so it wasn't to keep me from breaking the lanterns?"

　　"Break whatever you please."

　　"You're a fine man," said Gavroche.

　　And he put the five-franc piece into one of his pockets.

　　His confidence having increased, he added:--

　　"Do you belong in this street?"

　　"Yes, why?"

　　"Can you tell me where No. 7 is?"

　　"What do you want with No. 7?"

　　Here the child paused, he feared that he had said too much; he thrust his nails energetically into his hair and contented himself with replying:--

　　"Ah!

　　Here it is."

　　An idea flashed through Jean Valjean's mind.

　　Anguish does have these gleams.

　　He said to the lad:--

　　"Are you the person who is bringing a letter that I am expecting?"

　　"You?" said Gavroche.

　　"You are not a woman."

　　"The letter is for Mademoiselle Cosette, is it not?"

　　"Cosette," muttered Gavroche.

　　"Yes, I believe that is the queer name."

　　"Well," resumed Jean Valjean, "I am the person to whom you are to deliver the letter.

　　Give it here."

　　"In that case, you must know that I was sent from the barricade."

　　"Of course," said Jean Valjean.

　　Gavroche engulfed his hand in another of his pockets and drew out a paper folded in four.

　　Then he made the military salute.

　　"Respect for despatches," said he.

　　"It comes from the Provisional Government."

　　"Give it to me," said Jean Valjean.

　　Gavroche held the paper elevated above his head.

　　"Don't go and fancy it's a love letter.

　　It is for a woman, but it's for the people.

　　We men fight and we respect the fair sex. We are not as they are in fine society, where there are lions who send chickens[55] to camels."

　　 [55] Love letters.

　　 "Give it to me."

　　"After all," continued Gavroche, "you have the air of an honest man."

　　"Give it to me quick."

　　"Catch hold of it."

　　And he handed the paper to Jean Valjean.

　　"And make haste, Monsieur What's-your-name, for Mamselle Cosette is waiting."

　　Gavroche was satisfied with himself for having produced this remark.

　　Jean Valjean began again:--

　　"Is it to Saint-Merry that the answer is to be sent?"

　　"There you are making some of those bits of pastry vulgarly called brioches [blunders]. This letter comes from the barricade of the Rue de la Chanvrerie, and I'm going back there.

　　Good evening, citizen."

　　That said, Gavroche took himself off, or, to describe it more exactly, fluttered away in the direction whence he had come with a flight like that of an escaped bird.

　　He plunged back into the gloom as though he made a hole in it, with the rigid rapidity of a projectile; the alley of l'Homme Arme became silent and solitary once more; in a twinkling, that strange child, who had about him something of the shadow and of the dream, had buried himself in the mists of the rows of black houses, and was lost there, like smoke in the dark; and one might have thought that he had dissipated and vanished, had there not taken place, a few minutes after his disappearance, a startling shiver of glass, and had not the magnificent crash of a lantern rattling down on the pavement once more abruptly awakened the indignant bourgeois.

　　It was Gavroche upon his way through the Rue du Chaume.

BOOK FIFTEENTH.--THE RUE DE L'HOMME ARME

CHAPTER III

　　WHILE COSETTE AND TOUSSAINT ARE ASLEEP

　　 Jean Valjean went into the house with Marius' letter.

　　He groped his way up the stairs, as pleased with the darkness as an owl who grips his prey, opened and shut his door softly, listened to see whether he could hear any noise,--made sure that, to all appearances, Cosette and Toussaint were asleep, and plunged three or four matches into the bottle of the Fumade lighter before he could evoke a spark, so greatly did his hand tremble. What he had just done smacked of theft.

　　At last the candle was lighted; he leaned his elbows on the table, unfolded the paper, and read.

　　In violent emotions, one does not read, one flings to the earth, so to speak, the paper which one holds, one clutches it like a victim, one crushes it, one digs into it the nails of one's wrath, or of one's joy; one hastens to the end, one leaps to the beginning; attention is at fever heat; it takes up in the gross, as it were, the essential points; it seizes on one point, and the rest disappears. In Marius' note to Cosette, Jean Valjean saw only these words:--

　　"I die.

　　When thou readest this, my soul will be near thee."

　　In the presence of these two lines, he was horribly dazzled; he remained for a moment, crushed, as it were, by the change of emotion which was taking place within him, he stared at Marius' note with a sort of intoxicated amazement, he had before his eyes that splendor, the death of a hated individual.

　　He uttered a frightful cry of inward joy.

　　So it was all over. The catastrophe had arrived sooner than he had dared to hope. The being who obstructed his destiny was disappearing.

　　That man had taken himself off of his own accord, freely, willingly.

　　This man was going to his death, and he, Jean Valjean, had had no hand in the matter, and it was through no fault of his.

　　Perhaps, even, he is already dead.

　　Here his fever entered into calculations. No, he is not dead yet.

　　The letter had evidently been intended for Cosette to read on the following morning; after the two discharges that were heard between eleven o'clock and midnight, nothing more has taken place; the barricade will not be attacked seriously until daybreak; but that makes no difference, from the moment when "that man" is concerned in this war, he is lost; he is caught in the gearing.

　　Jean Valjean felt himself delivered. So he was about to find himself alone with Cosette once more. The rivalry would cease; the future was beginning again.

　　He had but to keep this note in his pocket.

　　Cosette would never know what had become of that man.

　　All that there requires to be done is to let things take their own course.

　　This man cannot escape. If he is not already dead, it is certain that he is about to die. What good fortune!

　　Having said all this to himself, he became gloomy.

　　Then he went down stairs and woke up the porter.

　　About an hour later, Jean Valjean went out in the complete costume of a National Guard, and with his arms.

　　The porter had easily found in the neighborhood the wherewithal to complete his equipment. He had a loaded gun and a cartridge-box filled with cartridges.

　　He strode off in the direction of the markets.

BOOK FIFTEENTH.--THE RUE DE L'HOMME ARME

CHAPTER IV

　　GAVROCHE'S EXCESS OF ZEAL

　　 In the meantime, Gavroche had had an adventure.

　　Gavroche, after having conscientiously stoned the lantern in the Rue du Chaume, entered the Rue des Vielles-Haudriettes, and not seeing "even a cat" there, he thought the opportunity a good one to strike up all the song of which he was capable.

　　His march, far from being retarded by his singing, was accelerated by it.

　　He began to sow along the sleeping or terrified houses these incendiary couplets:--

"L'oiseau medit dans les charmilles,

Et pretend qu'hier Atala

Avec un Russe s'en alla.

Ou vont les belles filles,

Lon la.

"Mon ami Pierrot, tu babilles,

Parce que l'autre jour Mila

Cogna sa vitre et m'appela,

Ou vont les belles filles,

Lon la.

"Les drolesses sont fort gentilles,

Leur poison qui m'ensorcela

Griserait Monsieur Orfila.

Ou vont les belles filles,

Lon la.

"J'aime l'amour et les bisbilles,

J'aime Agnes, j'aime Pamela,

Lisa en m'allumant se brula.

Ou vont les belles filles,

Lon la.

"Jadis, quand je vis les mantilles

De Suzette et de Zeila,

Mon ame aleurs plis se mela,

Ou vont les belles filles,

Lon la.

"Amour, quand dans l'ombre ou tu brilles,

Tu coiffes de roses Lola,

Je me damnerais pour cela.

Ou vont les belles filles,

Lon la.

"Jeanne a ton miroir tu t'habilles!

Mon coeur un beau jour s'envola.

Je crois que c'est Jeanne qui l'a.

Ou vont les belles filles,

Lon la.

"Le soir, en sortant des quadrilles,

Je montre aux etoiles Stella,

Et je leur dis: 'Regardez-la.'

Ou vont les belles filles,

Lon la."[56]

[56]"The bird slanders in the elms,

And pretends that yesterday, Atala

Went off with a Russian,

Where fair maids go.

Lon la.

　　 My friend Pierrot, thou pratest, because Mila knocked at her pane the other day and called me.

　　The jades are very charming, their poison which bewitched me would intoxicate Monsieur Orfila. I'm fond of love and its bickerings, I love Agnes, I love Pamela, Lise burned herself in setting me aflame.

　　In former days when I saw the mantillas of Suzette and of Zeila, my soul mingled with their folds.

　　Love, when thou gleamest in the dark thou crownest Lola with roses, I would lose my soul for that.

　　Jeanne, at thy mirror thou deckest thyself!

　　One fine day, my heart flew forth. I think that it is Jeanne who has it.

　　At night, when I come from the quadrilles, I show Stella to the stars, and I say to them: "Behold her."

　　Where fair maids go, lon la.

　　 Gavroche, as he sang, was lavish of his pantomime.

　　Gesture is the strong point of the refrain.

　　His face, an inexhaustible repertory of masks, produced grimaces more convulsing and more fantastic than the rents of a cloth torn in a high gale.

　　Unfortunately, as he was alone, and as it was night, this was neither seen nor even visible. Such wastes of riches do occur.

　　All at once, he stopped short.

　　"Let us interrupt the romance," said he.

　　His feline eye had just descried, in the recess of a carriage door, what is called in painting, an ensemble, that is to say, a person and a thing; the thing was a hand-cart, the person was a man from Auvergene who was sleeping therein.

　　The shafts of the cart rested on the pavement, and the Auvergnat's head was supported against the front of the cart.

　　His body was coiled up on this inclined plane and his feet touched the ground.

　　Gavroche, with his experience of the things of this world, recognized a drunken man.

　　He was some corner errand-man who had drunk too much and was sleeping too much.

　　"There now," thought Gavroche, "that's what the summer nights are good for.

　　We'll take the cart for the Republic, and leave the Auvergnat for the Monarchy."

　　His mind had just been illuminated by this flash of light:--

　　"How bully that cart would look on our barricade!"

　　The Auvergnat was snoring.

　　Gavroche gently tugged at the cart from behind, and at the Auvergnat from the front, that is to say, by the feet, and at the expiration of another minute the imperturbable Auvergnat was reposing flat on the pavement.

　　The cart was free.

　　Gavroche, habituated to facing the unexpected in all quarters, had everything about him.

　　He fumbled in one of his pockets, and pulled from it a scrap of paper and a bit of red pencil filched from some carpenter.

　　He wrote:--

　　 "French Republic."

　　 "Received thy cart."

　　And he signed it:

　　"GAVROCHE."

　　That done, he put the paper in the pocket of the still snoring Auvergnat's velvet vest, seized the cart shafts in both hands, and set off in the direction of the Halles, pushing the cart before him at a hard gallop with a glorious and triumphant uproar.

　　This was perilous.

　　There was a post at the Royal Printing Establishment. Gavroche did not think of this.

　　This post was occupied by the National Guards of the suburbs.

　　The squad began to wake up, and heads were raised from camp beds.

　　Two street lanterns broken in succession, that ditty sung at the top of the lungs. This was a great deal for those cowardly streets, which desire to go to sleep at sunset, and which put the extinguisher on their candles at such an early hour.

　　For the last hour, that boy had been creating an uproar in that peaceable arrondissement, the uproar of a fly in a bottle.

　　The sergeant of the banlieue lent an ear. He waited.

　　He was a prudent man.

　　The mad rattle of the cart, filled to overflowing the possible measure of waiting, and decided the sergeant to make a reconnaisance.

　　"There's a whole band of them there!" said he, "let us proceed gently."

　　It was clear that the hydra of anarchy had emerged from its box and that it was stalking abroad through the quarter.

　　And the sergeant ventured out of the post with cautious tread.

　　All at once, Gavroche, pushing his cart in front of him, and at the very moment when he was about to turn into the Rue des Vielles-Haudriettes, found himself face to face with a uniform, a shako, a plume, and a gun.

　　For the second time, he stopped short.

　　"Hullo," said he, "it's him.

　　Good day, public order."

　　Gavroche's amazement was always brief and speedily thawed.

　　"Where are you going, you rascal?" shouted the sergeant.

　　"Citizen," retorted Gavroche, "I haven't called you `bourgeois' yet. Why do you insult me?"

　　"Where are you going, you rogue?"

　　"Monsieur," retorted Gavroche, "perhaps you were a man of wit yesterday, but you have degenerated this morning."

　　"I ask you where are you going, you villain?"

　　Gavroche replied:--

　　"You speak prettily.

　　Really, no one would suppose you as old as you are.

　　You ought to sell all your hair at a hundred francs apiece. That would yield you five hundred francs."

　　"Where are you going?

　　Where are you going?

　　Where are you going, bandit?"

　　Gavroche retorted again:--

　　"What villainous words!

　　You must wipe your mouth better the first time that they give you suck."

　　The sergeant lowered his bayonet.

　　"Will you tell me where you are going, you wretch?"

　　"General," said Gavroche "I'm on my way to look for a doctor for my wife who is in labor."

　　"To arms!" shouted the sergeant.

　　The master-stroke of strong men consists in saving themselves by the very means that have ruined them; Gavroche took in the whole situation at a glance.

　　It was the cart which had told against him, it was the cart's place to protect him.

　　At the moment when the sergeant was on the point of making his descent on Gavroche, the cart, converted into a projectile and launched with all the latter's might, rolled down upon him furiously, and the sergeant, struck full in the stomach, tumbled over backwards into the gutter while his gun went off in the air.

　　The men of the post had rushed out pell-mell at the sergeant's shout; the shot brought on a general random discharge, after which they reloaded their weapons and began again.

　　This blind-man's-buff musketry lasted for a quarter of an hour and killed several panes of glass.

　　In the meanwhile, Gavroche, who had retraced his steps at full speed, halted five or six streets distant and seated himself, panting, on the stone post which forms the corner of the Enfants-Rouges.

　　He listened.

　　After panting for a few minutes, he turned in the direction where the fusillade was raging, lifted his left hand to a level with his nose and thrust it forward three times, as he slapped the back of his head with his right hand; an imperious gesture in which Parisian street-urchindom has condensed French irony, and which is evidently efficacious, since it has already lasted half a century.

　　This gayety was troubled by one bitter reflection.

　　"Yes," said he, "I'm splitting with laughter, I'm twisting with delight, I abound in joy, but I'm losing my way, I shall have to take a roundabout way.

　　If I only reach the barricade in season!"

　　Thereupon he set out again on a run.

　　And as he ran:--

　　"Ah, by the way, where was I?" said he.

　　And he resumed his ditty, as he plunged rapidly through the streets, and this is what died away in the gloom:--

"Mais il reste encore des bastilles,

Et je vais mettre le hola

Dans l'orde public que voila.

Ou vont les belles filles,

Lon la.

"Quelqu'un veut-il jouer aux quilles?

Tout l'ancien monde s'ecroula

Quand la grosse boule roula.

Ou vont les belles filles,

Lon la.

"Vieux bon peuple, a coups de bequilles,

Cassons ce Louvre ou s'etala

La monarchie en falbala.

Ou vont les belles filles,

Lon la.

"Nous en avons force les grilles,

Le roi Charles-Dix ce jour la,

Tenait mal et se decolla.

Ou vont les belles filles,

Lon la."[57]

　　 [57] But some prisons still remain, and I am going to put a stop to this sort of public order.

　　Does any one wish to play at skittles? The whole ancient world fell in ruin, when the big ball rolled. Good old folks, let us smash with our crutches that Louvre where the monarchy displayed itself in furbelows.

　　We have forced its gates. On that day, King Charles X. did not stick well and came unglued.

　　 The post's recourse to arms was not without result.

　　The cart was conquered, the drunken man was taken prisoner.

　　The first was put in the pound, the second was later on somewhat harassed before the councils of war as an accomplice.

　　The public ministry of the day proved its indefatigable zeal in the defence of society, in this instance.

　　Gavroche's adventure, which has lingered as a tradition in the quarters of the Temple, is one of the most terrible souvenirs of the elderly bourgeois of the Marais, and is entitled in their memories: "The nocturnal attack by the post of the Royal Printing Establishment."

　　[The end of Volume IV. "Saint Denis"]

BOOK FIRST.--THE WAR BETWEEN FOUR WALLS

CHAPTER I

　　THE CHARYBDIS OF THE FAUBOURG SAINT ANTOINE AND THE SCYLLA OF THE FAUBOURG DU TEMPLE

　　The two most memorable barricades which the observer of social maladies can name do not belong to the period in which the action of this work is laid.

　　These two barricades, both of them symbols, under two different aspects, of a redoubtable situation, sprang from the earth at the time of the fatal insurrection of June, 1848, the greatest war of the streets that history has ever beheld.

　　It sometimes happens that, even contrary to principles, even contrary to liberty, equality, and fraternity, even contrary to the universal vote, even contrary to the government, by all for all, from the depths of its anguish, of its discouragements and its destitutions, of its fevers, of its distresses, of its miasmas, of its ignorances, of its darkness, that great and despairing body, the rabble, protests against, and that the populace wages battle against, the people.

　　Beggars attack the common right; the ochlocracy rises against demos.

　　These are melancholy days; for there is always a certain amount of night even in this madness, there is suicide in this duel, and those words which are intended to be insults-- beggars, canaille, ochlocracy, populace--exhibit, alas! rather the fault of those who reign than the fault of those who suffer; rather the fault of the privileged than the fault of the disinherited.

　　For our own part, we never pronounce those words without pain and without respect, for when philosophy fathoms the facts to which they correspond, it often finds many a grandeur beside these miseries. Athens was an ochlocracy; the beggars were the making of Holland; the populace saved Rome more than once; and the rabble followed Jesus Christ.

　　There is no thinker who has not at times contemplated the magnificences of the lower classes.

　　It was of this rabble that Saint Jerome was thinking, no doubt, and of all these poor people and all these vagabonds and all these miserable people whence sprang the apostles and the martyrs, when he uttered this mysterious saying:

　　"Fex urbis, lex orbis,"-- the dregs of the city, the law of the earth.

　　The exasperations of this crowd which suffers and bleeds, its violences contrary to all sense, directed against the principles which are its life, its masterful deeds against the right, are its popular coups d'etat and should be repressed.

　　The man of probity sacrifices himself, and out of his very love for this crowd, he combats it.

　　But how excusable he feels it even while holding out against it!

　　How he venerates it even while resisting it! This is one of those rare moments when, while doing that which it is one's duty to do, one feels something which disconcerts one, and which would dissuade one from proceeding further; one persists, it is necessary, but conscience, though satisfied, is sad, and the accomplishment of duty is complicated with a pain at the heart.

　　June, 1848, let us hasten to say, was an exceptional fact, and almost impossible of classification, in the philosophy of history. All the words which we have just uttered, must be discarded, when it becomes a question of this extraordinary revolt, in which one feels the holy anxiety of toil claiming its rights.

　　It was necessary to combat it, and this was a duty, for it attacked the republic. But what was June, 1848, at bottom?

　　A revolt of the people against itself.

　　Where the subject is not lost sight of, there is no digression; may we, then, be permitted to arrest the reader's attention for a moment on the two absolutely unique barricades of which we have just spoken and which characterized this insurrection.

　　One blocked the entrance to the Faubourg Saint Antoine; the other defended the approach to the Faubourg du Temple; those before whom these two fearful masterpieces of civil war reared themselves beneath the brilliant blue sky of June, will never forget them.

　　The Saint-Antoine barricade was tremendous; it was three stories high, and seven hundred feet wide.

　　It barred the vast opening of the faubourg, that is to say, three streets, from angle to angle; ravined, jagged, cut up, divided, crenelated, with an immense rent, buttressed with piles that were bastions in themselves throwing out capes here and there, powerfully backed up by two great promontories of houses of the faubourg, it reared itself like a cyclopean dike at the end of the formidable place which had seen the 14th of July. Nineteen barricades were ranged, one behind the other, in the depths of the streets behind this principal barricade.

　　At the very sight of it, one felt the agonizing suffering in the immense faubourg, which had reached that point of extremity when a distress may become a catastrophe.

　　Of what was that barricade made?

　　Of the ruins of three six-story houses demolished expressly, said some. Of the prodigy of all wraths, said others.

　　It wore the lamentable aspect of all constructions of hatred, ruin.

　　It might be asked: Who built this?

　　It might also be said:

　　Who destroyed this? It was the improvisation of the ebullition.

　　Hold! take this door! this grating! this penthouse! this chimney-piece! this broken brazier! this cracked pot!

　　Give all! cast away all! Push this roll, dig, dismantle, overturn, ruin everything! It was the collaboration of the pavement, the block of stone, the beam, the bar of iron, the rag, the scrap, the broken pane, the unseated chair, the cabbage-stalk, the tatter, the rag, and the malediction.

　　It was grand and it was petty.

　　It was the abyss parodied on the public place by hubbub.

　　The mass beside the atom; the strip of ruined wall and the broken bowl,--threatening fraternization of every sort of rubbish.

　　Sisyphus had thrown his rock there and Job his potsherd.

　　Terrible, in short.

　　It was the acropolis of the barefooted.

　　Overturned carts broke the uniformity of the slope; an immense dray was spread out there crossways, its axle pointing heavenward, and seemed a scar on that tumultuous facade; an omnibus hoisted gayly, by main force, to the very summit of the heap, as though the architects of this bit of savagery had wished to add a touch of the street urchin humor to their terror, presented its horseless, unharnessed pole to no one knows what horses of the air.

　　This gigantic heap, the alluvium of the revolt, figured to the mind an Ossa on Pelion of all revolutions; '93 on '89, the 9th of Thermidor on the 10th of August, the 18th of Brumaire on the 11th of January, Vendemiaire on Prairial, 1848 on 1830. The situation deserved the trouble and this barricade was worthy to figure on the very spot whence the Bastille had disappeared. If the ocean made dikes, it is thus that it would build. The fury of the flood was stamped upon this shapeless mass. What flood?

　　The crowd.

　　One thought one beheld hubbub petrified. One thought one heard humming above this barricade as though there had been over their hive, enormous, dark bees of violent progress. Was it a thicket?

　　Was it a bacchanalia?

　　Was it a fortress? Vertigo seemed to have constructed it with blows of its wings. There was something of the cess-pool in that redoubt and something Olympian in that confusion.

　　One there beheld in a pell-mell full of despair, the rafters of roofs, bits of garret windows with their figured paper, window sashes with their glass planted there in the ruins awaiting the cannon, wrecks of chimneys, cupboards, tables, benches, howling topsyturveydom, and those thousand poverty-stricken things, the very refuse of the mendicant, which contain at the same time fury and nothingness.

　　One would have said that it was the tatters of a people, rags of wood, of iron, of bronze, of stone, and that the Faubourg Saint Antoine had thrust it there at its door, with a colossal flourish of the broom making of its misery its barricade.

　　Blocks resembling headsman's blocks, dislocated chains, pieces of woodwork with brackets having the form of gibbets, horizontal wheels projecting from the rubbish, amalgamated with this edifice of anarchy the sombre figure of the old tortures endured by the people.

　　The barricade Saint Antoine converted everything into a weapon; everything that civil war could throw at the head of society proceeded thence; it was not combat, it was a paroxysm; the carbines which defended this redoubt, among which there were some blunderbusses, sent bits of earthenware bones, coat-buttons, even the casters from night-stands, dangerous projectiles on account of the brass.

　　This barricade was furious; it hurled to the clouds an inexpressible clamor; at certain moments, when provoking the army, it was covered with throngs and tempest; a tumultuous crowd of flaming heads crowned it; a swarm filled it; it had a thorny crest of guns, of sabres, of cudgels, of axes, of pikes and of bayonets; a vast red flag flapped in the wind; shouts of command, songs of attack, the roll of drums, the sobs of women and bursts of gloomy laughter from the starving were to be heard there.

　　It was huge and living, and, like the back of an electric beast, there proceeded from it little flashes of lightning. The spirit of revolution covered with its cloud this summit where rumbled that voice of the people which resembles the voice of God; a strange majesty was emitted by this titanic basket of rubbish. It was a heap of filth and it was Sinai.

　　As we have said previously, it attacked in the name of the revolution--what?

　　The revolution.

　　It--that barricade, chance, hazard, disorder, terror, misunderstanding, the unknown-- had facing it the Constituent Assembly, the sovereignty of the people, universal suffrage, the nation, the republic; and it was the Carmagnole bidding defiance to the Marseillaise.

　　Immense but heroic defiance, for the old faubourg is a hero.

　　The faubourg and its redoubt lent each other assistance.

　　The faubourg shouldered the redoubt, the redoubt took its stand under cover of the faubourg.

　　The vast barricade spread out like a cliff against which the strategy of the African generals dashed itself.

　　Its caverns, its excrescences, its warts, its gibbosities, grimaced, so to speak, and grinned beneath the smoke.

　　The mitraille vanished in shapelessness; the bombs plunged into it; bullets only succeeded in making holes in it; what was the use of cannonading chaos? and the regiments, accustomed to the fiercest visions of war, gazed with uneasy eyes on that species of redoubt, a wild beast in its boar-like bristling and a mountain by its enormous size.

　　A quarter of a league away, from the corner of the Rue du Temple which debouches on the boulevard near the Chateaud'Eau, if one thrust one's head bodily beyond the point formed by the front of the Dallemagne shop, one perceived in the distance, beyond the canal, in the street which mounts the slopes of Belleville at the culminating point of the rise, a strange wall reaching to the second story of the house fronts, a sort of hyphen between the houses on the right and the houses on the left, as though the street had folded back on itself its loftiest wall in order to close itself abruptly. This wall was built of paving-stones. It was straight, correct, cold, perpendicular, levelled with the square, laid out by rule and line. Cement was lacking, of course, but, as in the case of certain Roman walls, without interfering with its rigid architecture. The entablature was mathematically parallel with the base. From distance to distance, one could distinguish on the gray surface, almost invisible loopholes which resembled black threads. These loopholes were separated from each other by equal spaces. The street was deserted as far as the eye could reach.

　　All windows and doors were closed.

　　In the background rose this barrier, which made a blind thoroughfare of the street, a motionless and tranquil wall; no one was visible, nothing was audible; not a cry, not a sound, not a breath.

　　A sepulchre.

　　The dazzling sun of June inundated this terrible thing with light.

　　It was the barricade of the Faubourg of the Temple.

　　As soon as one arrived on the spot, and caught sight of it, it was impossible, even for the boldest, not to become thoughtful before this mysterious apparition.

　　It was adjusted, jointed, imbricated, rectilinear, symmetrical and funereal.

　　Science and gloom met there.

　　One felt that the chief of this barricade was a geometrician or a spectre.

　　One looked at it and spoke low.

　　From time to time, if some soldier, an officer or representative of the people, chanced to traverse the deserted highway, a faint, sharp whistle was heard, and the passer-by fell dead or wounded, or, if he escaped the bullet, sometimes a biscaien was seen to ensconce itself in some closed shutter, in the interstice between two blocks of stone, or in the plaster of a wall.

　　For the men in the barricade had made themselves two small cannons out of two cast-iron lengths of gas-pipe, plugged up at one end with tow and fire-clay. There was no waste of useless powder.

　　Nearly every shot told. There were corpses here and there, and pools of blood on the pavement. I remember a white butterfly which went and came in the street. Summer does not abdicate.

　　In the neighborhood, the spaces beneath the portes cocheres were encumbered with wounded.

　　One felt oneself aimed at by some person whom one did not see, and one understood that guns were levelled at the whole length of the street.

　　Massed behind the sort of sloping ridge which the vaulted canal forms at the entrance to the Faubourg du Temple, the soldiers of the attacking column, gravely and thoughtfully, watched this dismal redoubt, this immobility, this passivity, whence sprang death. Some crawled flat on their faces as far as the crest of the curve of the bridge, taking care that their shakos did not project beyond it.

　　The valiant Colonel Monteynard admired this barricade with a shudder.--"How that is built!" he said to a Representative. "Not one paving-stone projects beyond its neighbor.

　　It is made of porcelain."--At that moment, a bullet broke the cross on his breast, and he fell.

　　"The cowards!" people said.

　　"Let them show themselves.

　　Let us see them!

　　They dare not!

　　They are hiding!"

　　The barricade of the Faubourg du Temple, defended by eighty men, attacked by ten thousand, held out for three days.

　　On the fourth, they did as at Zaatcha, as at Constantine, they pierced the houses, they came over the roofs, the barricade was taken.

　　Not one of the eighty cowards thought of flight, all were killed there with the exception of the leader, Barthelemy, of whom we shall speak presently.

　　The Saint-Antoine barricade was the tumult of thunders; the barricade of the Temple was silence.

　　The difference between these two redoubts was the difference between the formidable and the sinister. One seemed a maw; the other a mask.

　　Admitting that the gigantic and gloomy insurrection of June was composed of a wrath and of an enigma, one divined in the first barricade the dragon, and behind the second the sphinx.

　　These two fortresses had been erected by two men named, the one, Cournet, the other, Barthelemy.

　　Cournet made the Saint-Antoine barricade; Barthelemy the barricade of the Temple. Each was the image of the man who had built it.

　　Cournet was a man of lofty stature; he had broad shoulders, a red face, a crushing fist, a bold heart, a loyal soul, a sincere and terrible eye. Intrepid, energetic, irascible, stormy; the most cordial of men, the most formidable of combatants.

　　War, strife, conflict, were the very air he breathed and put him in a good humor.

　　He had been an officer in the navy, and, from his gestures and his voice, one divined that he sprang from the ocean, and that he came from the tempest; he carried the hurricane on into battle.

　　With the exception of the genius, there was in Cournet something of Danton, as, with the exception of the divinity, there was in Danton something of Hercules.

　　Barthelemy, thin, feeble, pale, taciturn, was a sort of tragic street urchin, who, having had his ears boxed by a policeman, lay in wait for him, and killed him, and at seventeen was sent to the galleys.

　　He came out and made this barricade.

　　Later on, fatal circumstance, in London, proscribed by all, Barthelemy slew Cournet.

　　It was a funereal duel.

　　Some time afterwards, caught in the gearing of one of those mysterious adventures in which passion plays a part, a catastrophe in which French justice sees extenuating circumstances, and in which English justice sees only death, Barthelemy was hanged.

　　The sombre social construction is so made that, thanks to material destitution, thanks to moral obscurity, that unhappy being who possessed an intelligence, certainly firm, possibly great, began in France with the galleys, and ended in England with the gallows.

　　Barthelemy, on occasion, flew but one flag, the black flag.

BOOK FIRST.--THE WAR BETWEEN FOUR WALLS

CHAPTER II

　　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?"

BOOK FIRST.--THE WAR BETWEEN FOUR WALLS

CHAPTER III

　　LIGHT AND SHADOW

　　 Enjolras had been to make a reconnaissance.

　　He had made his way out through Mondetour lane, gliding along close to the houses.

　　The insurgents, we will remark, were full of hope.

　　The manner in which they had repulsed the attack of the preceding night had caused them to almost disdain in advance the attack at dawn.

　　They waited for it with a smile.

　　They had no more doubt as to their success than as to their cause.

　　Moreover, succor was, evidently, on the way to them. They reckoned on it.

　　With that facility of triumphant prophecy which is one of the sources of strength in the French combatant, they divided the day which was at hand into three distinct phases. At six o'clock in the morning a regiment "which had been labored with," would turn; at noon, the insurrection of all Paris; at sunset, revolution.

　　They heard the alarm bell of Saint-Merry, which had not been silent for an instant since the night before; a proof that the other barricade, the great one, Jeanne's, still held out.

　　All these hopes were exchanged between the different groups in a sort of gay and formidable whisper which resembled the warlike hum of a hive of bees.

　　Enjolras reappeared.

　　He returned from his sombre eagle flight into outer darkness.

　　He listened for a moment to all this joy with folded arms, and one hand on his mouth.

　　Then, fresh and rosy in the growing whiteness of the dawn, he said:

　　"The whole army of Paris is to strike.

　　A third of the army is bearing down upon the barricades in which you now are.

　　There is the National Guard in addition.

　　I have picked out the shakos of the fifth of the line, and the standard-bearers of the sixth legion.

　　In one hour you will be attacked.

　　As for the populace, it was seething yesterday, to-day it is not stirring.

　　There is nothing to expect; nothing to hope for. Neither from a faubourg nor from a regiment.

　　You are abandoned."

　　These words fell upon the buzzing of the groups, and produced on them the effect caused on a swarm of bees by the first drops of a storm. A moment of indescribable silence ensued, in which death might have been heard flitting by.

　　This moment was brief.

　　A voice from the obscurest depths of the groups shouted to Enjolras:

　　"So be it.

　　Let us raise the barricade to a height of twenty feet, and let us all remain in it.

　　Citizens, let us offer the protests of corpses.

　　Let us show that, if the people abandon the republicans, the republicans do not abandon the people."

　　These words freed the thought of all from the painful cloud of individual anxieties.

　　It was hailed with an enthusiastic acclamation.

　　No one ever has known the name of the man who spoke thus; he was some unknown blouse-wearer, a stranger, a man forgotten, a passing hero, that great anonymous, always mingled in human crises and in social geneses who, at a given moment, utters in a supreme fashion the decisive word, and who vanishes into the shadows after having represented for a minute, in a lightning flash, the people and God.

　　This inexorable resolution so thoroughly impregnated the air of the 6th of June, 1832, that, almost at the very same hour, on the barricade Saint-Merry, the insurgents were raising that clamor which has become a matter of history and which has been consigned to the documents in the case:--"What matters it whether they come to our assistance or not?

　　Let us get ourselves killed here, to the very last man."

　　As the reader sees, the two barricades, though materially isolated, were in communication with each other.

BOOK FIRST.--THE WAR BETWEEN FOUR WALLS

CHAPTER IV

　　MINUS FIVE, PLUS ONE

　　 After the man who decreed the "protest of corpses" had spoken, and had given this formula of their common soul, there issued from all mouths a strangely satisfied and terrible cry, funereal in sense and triumphant in tone:

　　"Long live death!

　　Let us all remain here!"

　　"Why all?" said Enjolras.

　　"All!

　　All!"

　　Enjolras resumed:

　　"The position is good; the barricade is fine.

　　Thirty men are enough. Why sacrifice forty?"

　　They replied:

　　"Because not one will go away."

　　"Citizens," cried Enjolras, and there was an almost irritated vibration in his voice, "this republic is not rich enough in men to indulge in useless expenditure of them.

　　Vain-glory is waste. If the duty of some is to depart, that duty should be fulfilled like any other."

　　Enjolras, the man-principle, had over his co-religionists that sort of omnipotent power which emanates from the absolute.

　　Still, great as was this omnipotence, a murmur arose.

　　A leader to the very finger-tips, Enjolras, seeing that they murmured, insisted.

　　He resumed haughtily:

　　"Let those who are afraid of not numbering more than thirty say so."

　　The murmurs redoubled.

　　"Besides," observed a voice in one group, "it is easy enough to talk about leaving.

　　The barricade is hemmed in."

　　"Not on the side of the Halles," said Enjolras.

　　"The Rue Mondetour is free, and through the Rue des Precheurs one can reach the Marche des Innocents."

　　"And there," went on another voice, "you would be captured. You would fall in with some grand guard of the line or the suburbs; they will spy a man passing in blouse and cap.

　　`Whence come you?' `Don't you belong to the barricade?'

　　And they will look at your hands. You smell of powder.

　　Shot."

　　Enjolras, without making any reply, touched Combeferre's shoulder, and the two entered the tap-room.

　　They emerged thence a moment later.

　　Enjolras held in his outstretched hands the four uniforms which he had laid aside. Combeferre followed, carrying the shoulder-belts and the shakos.

　　"With this uniform," said Enjolras, "you can mingle with the ranks and escape; here is enough for four."

　　And he flung on the ground, deprived of its pavement, the four uniforms.

　　No wavering took place in his stoical audience.

　　Combeferre took the word.

　　"Come, said he, "you must have a little pity.

　　Do you know what the question is here?

　　It is a question of women.

　　See here.

　　Are there women or are there not?

　　Are there children or are there not? Are there mothers, yes or no, who rock cradles with their foot and who have a lot of little ones around them?

　　Let that man of you who has never beheld a nurse's breast raise his hand.

　　Ah! you want to get yourselves killed, so do I--I, who am speaking to you; but I do not want to feel the phantoms of women wreathing their arms around me.

　　Die, if you will, but don't make others die. Suicides like that which is on the brink of accomplishment here are sublime; but suicide is narrow, and does not admit of extension; and as soon as it touches your neighbors, suicide is murder. Think of the little blond heads; think of the white locks. Listen, Enjolras has just told me that he saw at the corner of the Rue du Cygne a lighted casement, a candle in a poor window, on the fifth floor, and on the pane the quivering shadow of the head of an old woman, who had the air of having spent the night in watching. Perhaps she is the mother of some one of you.

　　Well, let that man go, and make haste, to say to his mother:

　　`Here I am, mother!'

　　Let him feel at ease, the task here will be performed all the same. When one supports one's relatives by one's toil, one has not the right to sacrifice one's self.

　　That is deserting one's family. And those who have daughters! what are you thinking of?

　　You get yourselves killed, you are dead, that is well.

　　And tomorrow?

　　Young girls without bread--that is a terrible thing.

　　Man begs, woman sells. Ah! those charming and gracious beings, so gracious and so sweet, who have bonnets of flowers, who fill the house with purity, who sing and prattle, who are like a living perfume, who prove the existence of angels in heaven by the purity of virgins on earth, that Jeanne, that Lise, that Mimi, those adorable and honest creatures who are your blessings and your pride, ah! good God, they will suffer hunger! What do you want me to say to you?

　　There is a market for human flesh; and it is not with your shadowy hands, shuddering around them, that you will prevent them from entering it!

　　Think of the street, think of the pavement covered with passers-by, think of the shops past which women go and come with necks all bare, and through the mire. These women, too, were pure once.

　　Think of your sisters, those of you who have them.

　　Misery, prostitution, the police, Saint-Lazare-- that is what those beautiful, delicate girls, those fragile marvels of modesty, gentleness and loveliness, fresher than lilacs in the month of May, will come to.

　　Ah! you have got yourselves killed! You are no longer on hand!

　　That is well; you have wished to release the people from Royalty, and you deliver over your daughters to the police.

　　Friends, have a care, have mercy.

　　Women, unhappy women, we are not in the habit of bestowing much thought on them. We trust to the women not having received a man's education, we prevent their reading, we prevent their thinking, we prevent their occupying themselves with politics; will you prevent them from going to the dead-house this evening, and recognizing your bodies? Let us see, those who have families must be tractable, and shake hands with us and take themselves off, and leave us here alone to attend to this affair.

　　I know well that courage is required to leave, that it is hard; but the harder it is, the more meritorious. You say:

　　`I have a gun, I am at the barricade; so much the worse, I shall remain there.'

　　So much the worse is easily said.

　　My friends, there is a morrow; you will not be here to-morrow, but your families will; and what sufferings!

　　See, here is a pretty, healthy child, with cheeks like an apple, who babbles, prattles, chatters, who laughs, who smells sweet beneath your kiss,--and do you know what becomes of him when he is abandoned?

　　I have seen one, a very small creature, no taller than that.

　　His father was dead.

　　Poor people had taken him in out of charity, but they had bread only for themselves. The child was always hungry.

　　It was winter.

　　He did not cry. You could see him approach the stove, in which there was never any fire, and whose pipe, you know, was of mastic and yellow clay. His breathing was hoarse, his face livid, his limbs flaccid, his belly prominent.

　　He said nothing.

　　If you spoke to him, he did not answer.

　　He is dead.

　　He was taken to the Necker Hospital, where I saw him.

　　I was house-surgeon in that hospital.

　　Now, if there are any fathers among you, fathers whose happiness it is to stroll on Sundays holding their child's tiny hand in their robust hand, let each one of those fathers imagine that this child is his own. That poor brat, I remember, and I seem to see him now, when he lay nude on the dissecting table, how his ribs stood out on his skin like the graves beneath the grass in a cemetery.

　　A sort of mud was found in his stomach.

　　There were ashes in his teeth.

　　Come, let us examine ourselves conscientiously and take counsel with our heart. Statistics show that the mortality among abandoned children is fifty-five per cent.

　　I repeat, it is a question of women, it concerns mothers, it concerns young girls, it concerns little children.

　　Who is talking to you of yourselves?

　　We know well what you are; we know well that you are all brave, parbleu! we know well that you all have in your souls the joy and the glory of giving your life for the great cause; we know well that you feel yourselves elected to die usefully and magnificently, and that each one of you clings to his share in the triumph.

　　Very well.

　　But you are not alone in this world. There are other beings of whom you must think.

　　You must not be egoists."

　　All dropped their heads with a gloomy air.

　　Strange contradictions of the human heart at its most sublime moments.

　　Combeferre, who spoke thus, was not an orphan. He recalled the mothers of other men, and forgot his own. He was about to get himself killed.

　　He was "an egoist."

　　Marius, fasting, fevered, having emerged in succession from all hope, and having been stranded in grief, the most sombre of shipwrecks, and saturated with violent emotions and conscious that the end was near, had plunged deeper and deeper into that visionary stupor which always precedes the fatal hour voluntarily accepted.

　　A physiologist might have studied in him the growing symptoms of that febrile absorption known to, and classified by, science, and which is to suffering what voluptuousness is to pleasure. Despair, also, has its ecstasy.

　　Marius had reached this point. He looked on at everything as from without; as we have said, things which passed before him seemed far away; he made out the whole, but did not perceive the details.

　　He beheld men going and coming as through a flame.

　　He heard voices speaking as at the bottom of an abyss.

　　But this moved him.

　　There was in this scene a point which pierced and roused even him.

　　He had but one idea now, to die; and he did not wish to be turned aside from it, but he reflected, in his gloomy somnambulism, that while destroying himself, he was not prohibited from saving some one else.

　　He raised his voice.

　　"Enjolras and Combeferre are right," said he; "no unnecessary sacrifice. I join them, and you must make haste.

　　Combeferre has said convincing things to you.

　　There are some among you who have families, mothers, sisters, wives, children.

　　Let such leave the ranks."

　　No one stirred.

　　"Married men and the supporters of families, step out of the ranks!" repeated Marius.

　　His authority was great.

　　Enjolras was certainly the head of the barricade, but Marius was its savior.

　　"I order it," cried Enjolras.

　　"I entreat you," said Marius.

　　Then, touched by Combeferre's words, shaken by Enjolras' order, touched by Marius' entreaty, these heroic men began to denounce each other.--"It is true," said one young man to a full grown man, "you are the father of a family.

　　Go."--"It is your duty rather," retorted the man, "you have two sisters whom you maintain."-- And an unprecedented controversy broke forth.

　　Each struggled to determine which should not allow himself to be placed at the door of the tomb.

　　"Make haste," said Courfeyrac, "in another quarter of an hour it will be too late."

　　"Citizens," pursued Enjolras, "this is the Republic, and universal suffrage reigns.

　　Do you yourselves designate those who are to go."

　　They obeyed.

　　After the expiration of a few minutes, five were unanimously selected and stepped out of the ranks.

　　"There are five of them!" exclaimed Marius.

　　There were only four uniforms.

　　"Well," began the five, "one must stay behind."

　　And then a struggle arose as to who should remain, and who should find reasons for the others not remaining.

　　The generous quarrel began afresh.

　　"You have a wife who loves you."--"You have your aged mother."--" You have neither father nor mother, and what is to become of your three little brothers?"--"You are the father of five children."--"You have a right to live, you are only seventeen, it is too early for you to die."

　　These great revolutionary barricades were assembling points for heroism. The improbable was simple there.

　　These men did not astonish each other.

　　"Be quick," repeated Courfeyrac.

　　Men shouted to Marius from the groups:

　　"Do you designate who is to remain."

　　"Yes," said the five, "choose.

　　We will obey you."

　　Marius did not believe that he was capable of another emotion. Still, at this idea, that of choosing a man for death, his blood rushed back to his heart.

　　He would have turned pale, had it been possible for him to become any paler.

　　He advanced towards the five, who smiled upon him, and each, with his eyes full of that grand flame which one beholds in the depths of history hovering over Thermopylae, cried to him:

　　"Me! me! me!"

　　And Marius stupidly counted them; there were still five of them! Then his glance dropped to the four uniforms.

　　At that moment, a fifth uniform fell, as if from heaven, upon the other four.

　　The fifth man was saved.

　　Marius raised his eyes and recognized M. Fauchelevent.

　　Jean Valjean had just entered the barricade.

　　He had arrived by way of Mondetour lane, whither by dint of inquiries made, or by instinct, or chance.

　　Thanks to his dress of a National Guardsman, he had made his way without difficulty.

　　The sentinel stationed by the insurgents in the Rue Mondetour had no occasion to give the alarm for a single National Guardsman, and he had allowed the latter to entangle himself in the street, saying to himself:

　　"Probably it is a reinforcement, in any case it is a prisoner."

　　The moment was too grave to admit of the sentinel abandoning his duty and his post of observation.

　　At the moment when Jean Valjean entered the redoubt, no one had noticed him, all eyes being fixed on the five chosen men and the four uniforms.

　　Jean Valjean also had seen and heard, and he had silently removed his coat and flung it on the pile with the rest.

　　The emotion aroused was indescribable.

　　"Who is this man?" demanded Bossuet.

　　"He is a man who saves others," replied Combeferre.

　　Marius added in a grave voice:

　　"I know him."

　　This guarantee satisfied every one.

　　Enjolras turned to Jean Valjean.

　　"Welcome, citizen."

　　And he added:

　　"You know that we are about to die."

　　Jean Valjean, without replying, helped the insurgent whom he was saving to don his uniform.

BOOK FIRST.--THE WAR BETWEEN FOUR WALLS

CHAPTER V

　　THE HORIZON WHICH ONE BEHOLDS FROM THE SUMMIT OF A BARRICADE

　　 The situation of all in that fatal hour and that pitiless place, had as result and culminating point Enjolras' supreme melancholy.

　　Enjolras bore within him the plenitude of the revolution; he was incomplete, however, so far as the absolute can be so; he had too much of Saint-Just about him, and not enough of Anacharsis Cloots; still, his mind, in the society of the Friends of the A B C, had ended by undergoing a certain polarization from Combeferre's ideas; for some time past, he had been gradually emerging from the narrow form of dogma, and had allowed himself to incline to the broadening influence of progress, and he had come to accept, as a definitive and magnificent evolution, the transformation of the great French Republic, into the immense human republic. As far as the immediate means were concerned, a violent situation being given, he wished to be violent; on that point, he never varied; and he remained of that epic and redoubtable school which is summed up in the words:

　　"Eighty-three." Enjolras was standing erect on the staircase of paving-stones, one elbow resting on the stock of his gun.

　　He was engaged in thought; he quivered, as at the passage of prophetic breaths; places where death is have these effects of tripods.

　　A sort of stifled fire darted from his eyes, which were filled with an inward look.

　　All at once he threw back his head, his blond locks fell back like those of an angel on the sombre quadriga made of stars, they were like the mane of a startled lion in the flaming of an halo, and Enjolras cried:

　　"Citizens, do you picture the future to yourselves?

　　The streets of cities inundated with light, green branches on the thresholds, nations sisters, men just, old men blessing children, the past loving the present, thinkers entirely at liberty, believers on terms of full equality, for religion heaven, God the direct priest, human conscience become an altar, no more hatreds, the fraternity of the workshop and the school, for sole penalty and recompense fame, work for all, right for all, peace over all, no more bloodshed, no more wars, happy mothers!

　　To conquer matter is the first step; to realize the ideal is the second.

　　Reflect on what progress has already accomplished.

　　Formerly, the first human races beheld with terror the hydra pass before their eyes, breathing on the waters, the dragon which vomited flame, the griffin who was the monster of the air, and who flew with the wings of an eagle and the talons of a tiger; fearful beasts which were above man. Man, nevertheless, spread his snares, consecrated by intelligence, and finally conquered these monsters.

　　We have vanquished the hydra, and it is called the locomotive; we are on the point of vanquishing the griffin, we already grasp it, and it is called the balloon. On the day when this Promethean task shall be accomplished, and when man shall have definitely harnessed to his will the triple Chimaera of antiquity, the hydra, the dragon and the griffin, he will be the master of water, fire, and of air, and he will be for the rest of animated creation that which the ancient gods formerly were to him.

　　Courage, and onward!

　　Citizens, whither are we going?

　　To science made government, to the force of things become the sole public force, to the natural law, having in itself its sanction and its penalty and promulgating itself by evidence, to a dawn of truth corresponding to a dawn of day.

　　We are advancing to the union of peoples; we are advancing to the unity of man. No more fictions; no more parasites.

　　The real governed by the true, that is the goal.

　　Civilization will hold its assizes at the summit of Europe, and, later on, at the centre of continents, in a grand parliament of the intelligence.

　　Something similar has already been seen.

　　The amphictyons had two sittings a year, one at Delphos the seat of the gods, the other at Thermopylae, the place of heroes.

　　Europe will have her amphictyons; the globe will have its amphictyons.

　　France bears this sublime future in her breast.

　　This is the gestation of the nineteenth century. That which Greece sketched out is worthy of being finished by France. Listen to me, you, Feuilly, valiant artisan, man of the people. I revere you.

　　Yes, you clearly behold the future, yes, you are right. You had neither father nor mother, Feuilly; you adopted humanity for your mother and right for your father.

　　You are about to die, that is to say to triumph, here.

　　Citizens, whatever happens to-day, through our defeat as well as through our victory, it is a revolution that we are about to create.

　　As conflagrations light up a whole city, so revolutions illuminate the whole human race. And what is the revolution that we shall cause?

　　I have just told you, the Revolution of the True.

　　From a political point of view, there is but a single principle; the sovereignty of man over himself. This sovereignty of myself over myself is called Liberty.

　　Where two or three of these sovereignties are combined, the state begins. But in that association there is no abdication.

　　Each sovereignty concedes a certain quantity of itself, for the purpose of forming the common right.

　　This quantity is the same for all of us. This identity of concession which each makes to all, is called Equality. Common right is nothing else than the protection of all beaming on the right of each.

　　This protection of all over each is called Fraternity.

　　The point of intersection of all these assembled sovereignties is called society.

　　This intersection being a junction, this point is a knot.

　　Hence what is called the social bond. Some say social contract; which is the same thing, the word contract being etymologically formed with the idea of a bond. Let us come to an understanding about equality; for, if liberty is the summit, equality is the base.

　　Equality, citizens, is not wholly a surface vegetation, a society of great blades of grass and tiny oaks; a proximity of jealousies which render each other null and void; legally speaking, it is all aptitudes possessed of the same opportunity; politically, it is all votes possessed of the same weight; religiously, it is all consciences possessed of the same right. Equality has an organ:

　　gratuitous and obligatory instruction. The right to the alphabet, that is where the beginning must be made.

　　The primary school imposed on all, the secondary school offered to all, that is the law.

　　From an identical school, an identical society will spring.

　　Yes, instruction! light! light! everything comes from light, and to it everything returns. Citizens, the nineteenth century is great, but the twentieth century will be happy.

　　Then, there will be nothing more like the history of old, we shall no longer, as to-day, have to fear a conquest, an invasion, a usurpation, a rivalry of nations, arms in hand, an interruption of civilization depending on a marriage of kings, on a birth in hereditary tyrannies, a partition of peoples by a congress, a dismemberment because of the failure of a dynasty, a combat of two religions meeting face to face, like two bucks in the dark, on the bridge of the infinite; we shall no longer have to fear famine, farming out, prostitution arising from distress, misery from the failure of work and the scaffold and the sword, and battles and the ruffianism of chance in the forest of events. One might almost say:

　　There will be no more events.

　　We shall be happy.

　　The human race will accomplish its law, as the terrestrial globe accomplishes its law; harmony will be re-established between the soul and the star; the soul will gravitate around the truth, as the planet around the light.

　　Friends, the present hour in which I am addressing you, is a gloomy hour; but these are terrible purchases of the future.

　　A revolution is a toll.

　　Oh! the human race will be delivered, raised up, consoled!

　　We affirm it on this barrier. Whence should proceed that cry of love, if not from the heights of sacrifice?

　　Oh my brothers, this is the point of junction, of those who think and of those who suffer; this barricade is not made of paving-stones, nor of joists, nor of bits of iron; it is made of two heaps, a heap of ideas, and a heap of woes. Here misery meets the ideal.

　　The day embraces the night, and says to it:

　　`I am about to die, and thou shalt be born again with me.'

　　From the embrace of all desolations faith leaps forth. Sufferings bring hither their agony and ideas their immortality. This agony and this immortality are about to join and constitute our death.

　　Brothers, he who dies here dies in the radiance of the future, and we are entering a tomb all flooded with the dawn."

　　Enjolras paused rather than became silent; his lips continued to move silently, as though he were talking to himself, which caused them all to gaze attentively at him, in the endeavor to hear more. There was no applause; but they whispered together for a long time. Speech being a breath, the rustling of intelligences resembles the rustling of leaves.

BOOK FIRST.--THE WAR BETWEEN FOUR WALLS

CHAPTER VI

　　MARIUS HAGGARD, JAVERT LACONIC

　　 Let us narrate what was passing in Marius' thoughts.

　　Let the reader recall the state of his soul.

　　We have just recalled it, everything was a vision to him now.

　　His judgment was disturbed. Marius, let us insist on this point, was under the shadow of the great, dark wings which are spread over those in the death agony. He felt that he had entered the tomb, it seemed to him that he was already on the other side of the wall, and he no longer beheld the faces of the living except with the eyes of one dead.

　　How did M. Fauchelevent come there?

　　Why was he there?

　　What had he come there to do?

　　Marius did not address all these questions to himself.

　　Besides, since our despair has this peculiarity, that it envelops others as well as ourselves, it seemed logical to him that all the world should come thither to die.

　　Only, he thought of Cosette with a pang at his heart.

　　However, M. Fauchelevent did not speak to him, did not look at him, and had not even the air of hearing him, when Marius raised his voice to say:

　　"I know him."

　　As far as Marius was concerned, this attitude of M. Fauchelevent was comforting, and, if such a word can be used for such impressions, we should say that it pleased him.

　　He had always felt the absolute impossibility of addressing that enigmatical man, who was, in his eyes, both equivocal and imposing.

　　Moreover, it had been a long time since he had seen him; and this still further augmented the impossibility for Marius' timid and reserved nature.

　　The five chosen men left the barricade by way of Mondetour lane; they bore a perfect resemblance to members of the National Guard. One of them wept as he took his leave.

　　Before setting out, they embraced those who remained.

　　When the five men sent back to life had taken their departure, Enjolras thought of the man who had been condemned to death.

　　He entered the tap-room. Javert, still bound to the post, was engaged in meditation.

　　"Do you want anything?"

　　Enjolras asked him.

　　"Javert replied:

　　"When are you going to kill me?"

　　"Wait.

　　We need all our cartridges just at present."

　　"Then give me a drink," said Javert.

　　Enjolras himself offered him a glass of water, and, as Javert was pinioned, he helped him to drink.

　　"Is that all?" inquired Enjolras.

　　"I am uncomfortable against this post," replied Javert. "You are not tender to have left me to pass the night here. Bind me as you please, but you surely might lay me out on a table like that other man."

　　And with a motion of the head, he indicated the body of M. Mabeuf.

　　There was, as the reader will remember, a long, broad table at the end of the room, on which they had been running bullets and making cartridges.

　　All the cartridges having been made, and all the powder used, this table was free.

　　At Enjolras' command, four insurgents unbound Javert from the post. While they were loosing him, a fifth held a bayonet against his breast.

　　Leaving his arms tied behind his back, they placed about his feet a slender but stout whip-cord, as is done to men on the point of mounting the scaffold, which allowed him to take steps about fifteen inches in length, and made him walk to the table at the end of the room, where they laid him down, closely bound about the middle of the body.

　　By way of further security, and by means of a rope fastened to his neck, they added to the system of ligatures which rendered every attempt at escape impossible, that sort of bond which is called in prisons a martingale, which, starting at the neck, forks on the stomach, and meets the hands, after passing between the legs.

　　While they were binding Javert, a man standing on the threshold was surveying him with singular attention.

　　The shadow cast by this man made Javert turn his head.

　　He raised his eyes, and recognized Jean Valjean.

　　He did not even start, but dropped his lids proudly and confined himself to the remark:

　　"It is perfectly simple."

BOOK FIRST.--THE WAR BETWEEN FOUR WALLS

CHAPTER VII

　　THE SITUATION BECOMES AGGRAVATED

　　 The daylight was increasing rapidly.

　　Not a window was opened, not a door stood ajar; it was the dawn but not the awaking. The end of the Rue de la Chanvrerie, opposite the barricade, had been evacuated by the troops, as we have stated it seemed to be free, and presented itself to passers-by with a sinister tranquillity. The Rue Saint-Denis was as dumb as the avenue of Sphinxes at Thebes. Not a living being in the cross-roads, which gleamed white in the light of the sun.

　　Nothing is so mournful as this light in deserted streets. Nothing was to be seen, but there was something to be heard. A mysterious movement was going on at a certain distance. It was evident that the critical moment was approaching.

　　As on the previous evening, the sentinels had come in; but this time all had come.

　　The barricade was stronger than on the occasion of the first attack. Since the departure of the five, they had increased its height still further.

　　On the advice of the sentinel who had examined the region of the Halles, Enjolras, for fear of a surprise in the rear, came to a serious decision.

　　He had the small gut of the Mondetour lane, which had been left open up to that time, barricaded.

　　For this purpose, they tore up the pavement for the length of several houses more. In this manner, the barricade, walled on three streets, in front on the Rue de la Chanvrerie, to the left on the Rues du Cygne and de la Petite Truanderie, to the right on the Rue Mondetour, was really almost impregnable; it is true that they were fatally hemmed in there. It had three fronts, but no exit.--"A fortress but a rat hole too," said Courfeyrac with a laugh.

　　Enjolras had about thirty paving-stones "torn up in excess," said Bossuet, piled up near the door of the wine-shop.

　　The silence was now so profound in the quarter whence the attack must needs come, that Enjolras had each man resume his post of battle.

　　An allowance of brandy was doled out to each.

　　Nothing is more curious than a barricade preparing for an assault. Each man selects his place as though at the theatre.

　　They jostle, and elbow and crowd each other.

　　There are some who make stalls of paving-stones. Here is a corner of the wall which is in the way, it is removed; here is a redan which may afford protection, they take shelter behind it.

　　Left-handed men are precious; they take the places that are inconvenient to the rest.

　　Many arrange to fight in a sitting posture.

　　They wish to be at ease to kill, and to die comfortably.

　　In the sad war of June, 1848, an insurgent who was a formidable marksman, and who was firing from the top of a terrace upon a roof, had a reclining-chair brought there for his use; a charge of grape-shot found him out there.

　　As soon as the leader has given the order to clear the decks for action, all disorderly movements cease; there is no more pulling from one another; there are no more coteries; no more asides, there is no more holding aloof; everything in their spirits converges in, and changes into, a waiting for the assailants.

　　A barricade before the arrival of danger is chaos; in danger, it is discipline itself. Peril produces order.

　　As soon as Enjolras had seized his double-barrelled rifle, and had placed himself in a sort of embrasure which he had reserved for himself, all the rest held their peace.

　　A series of faint, sharp noises resounded confusedly along the wall of paving-stones. It was the men cocking their guns.

　　Moreover, their attitudes were prouder, more confident than ever; the excess of sacrifice strengthens; they no longer cherished any hope, but they had despair, despair,--the last weapon, which sometimes gives victory; Virgil has said so.

　　Supreme resources spring from extreme resolutions.

　　To embark in death is sometimes the means of escaping a shipwreck; and the lid of the coffin becomes a plank of safety.

　　As on the preceding evening, the attention of all was directed, we might almost say leaned upon, the end of the street, now lighted up and visible.

　　They had not long to wait.

　　A stir began distinctly in the Saint-Leu quarter, but it did not resemble the movement of the first attack. A clashing of chains, the uneasy jolting of a mass, the click of brass skipping along the pavement, a sort of solemn uproar, announced that some sinister construction of iron was approaching. There arose a tremor in the bosoms of these peaceful old streets, pierced and built for the fertile circulation of interests and ideas, and which are not made for the horrible rumble of the wheels of war.

　　The fixity of eye in all the combatants upon the extremity of the street became ferocious.

　　A cannon made its appearance.

　　Artillery-men were pushing the piece; it was in firing trim; the fore-carriage had been detached; two upheld the gun-carriage, four were at the wheels; others followed with the caisson. They could see the smoke of the burning lint-stock.

　　"Fire!" shouted Enjolras.

　　The whole barricade fired, the report was terrible; an avalanche of smoke covered and effaced both cannon and men; after a few seconds, the cloud dispersed, and the cannon and men re-appeared; the gun-crew had just finished rolling it slowly, correctly, without haste, into position facing the barricade.

　　Not one of them had been struck. Then the captain of the piece, bearing down upon the breech in order to raise the muzzle, began to point the cannon with the gravity of an astronomer levelling a telescope.

　　"Bravo for the cannoneers!" cried Bossuet.

　　And the whole barricade clapped their hands.

　　A moment later, squarely planted in the very middle of the street, astride of the gutter, the piece was ready for action.

　　A formidable pair of jaws yawned on the barricade.

　　"Come, merrily now!" ejaculated Courfeyrac.

　　"That's the brutal part of it.

　　After the fillip on the nose, the blow from the fist. The army is reaching out its big paw to us.

　　The barricade is going to be severely shaken up.

　　The fusillade tries, the cannon takes."

　　"It is a piece of eight, new model, brass," added Combeferre. "Those pieces are liable to burst as soon as the proportion of ten parts of tin to one hundred of brass is exceeded.

　　The excess of tin renders them too tender.

　　Then it comes to pass that they have caves and chambers when looked at from the vent hole.

　　In order to obviate this danger, and to render it possible to force the charge, it may become necessary to return to the process of the fourteenth century, hooping, and to encircle the piece on the outside with a series of unwelded steel bands, from the breech to the trunnions. In the meantime, they remedy this defect as best they may; they manage to discover where the holes are located in the vent of a cannon, by means of a searcher.

　　But there is a better method, with Gribeauval's movable star."

　　"In the sixteenth century," remarked Bossuet, "they used to rifle cannon."

　　"Yes," replied Combeferre, "that augments the projectile force, but diminishes the accuracy of the firing.

　　In firing at short range, the trajectory is not as rigid as could be desired, the parabola is exaggerated, the line of the projectile is no longer sufficiently rectilinear to allow of its striking intervening objects, which is, nevertheless, a necessity of battle, the importance of which increases with the proximity of the enemy and the precipitation of the discharge. This defect of the tension of the curve of the projectile in the rifled cannon of the sixteenth century arose from the smallness of the charge; small charges for that sort of engine are imposed by the ballistic necessities, such, for instance, as the preservation of the gun-carriage. In short, that despot, the cannon, cannot do all that it desires; force is a great weakness.

　　A cannon-ball only travels six hundred leagues an hour; light travels seventy thousand leagues a second.

　　Such is the superiority of Jesus Christ over Napoleon."

　　"Reload your guns," said Enjolras.

　　How was the casing of the barricade going to behave under the cannon-balls? Would they effect a breach?

　　That was the question. While the insurgents were reloading their guns, the artillery-men were loading the cannon.

　　The anxiety in the redoubt was profound.

　　The shot sped the report burst forth.

　　"Present!" shouted a joyous voice.

　　And Gavroche flung himself into the barricade just as the ball dashed against it.

　　He came from the direction of the Rue du Cygne, and he had nimbly climbed over the auxiliary barricade which fronted on the labyrinth of the Rue de la Petite Truanderie.

　　Gavroche produced a greater sensation in the barricade than the cannon-ball.

　　The ball buried itself in the mass of rubbish.

　　At the most there was an omnibus wheel broken, and the old Anceau cart was demolished. On seeing this, the barricade burst into a laugh.

　　"Go on!" shouted Bossuet to the artillerists.

BOOK FIRST.--THE WAR BETWEEN FOUR WALLS

CHAPTER VIII

　　THE ARTILLERY-MEN COMPEL PEOPLE TO TAKE THEM SERIOUSLY

　　 Thet flocked round Gavroche.

　　But he had no time to tell anything. Marius drew him aside with a shudder.

　　"What are you doing here?"

　　"Hullo!" said the child, "what are you doing here yourself?"

　　And he stared at Marius intently with his epic effrontery. His eyes grew larger with the proud light within them.

　　It was with an accent of severity that Marius continued:

　　"Who told you to come back?

　　Did you deliver my letter at the address?"

　　Gavroche was not without some compunctions in the matter of that letter.

　　In his haste to return to the barricade, he had got rid of it rather than delivered it.

　　He was forced to acknowledge to himself that he had confided it rather lightly to that stranger whose face he had not been able to make out.

　　It is true that the man was bareheaded, but that was not sufficient.

　　In short, he had been administering to himself little inward remonstrances and he feared Marius' reproaches.

　　In order to extricate himself from the predicament, he took the simplest course; he lied abominably.

　　"Citizen, I delivered the letter to the porter.

　　The lady was asleep. She will have the letter when she wakes up.

　　Marius had had two objects in sending that letter:

　　to bid farewell to Cosette and to save Gavroche.

　　He was obliged to content himself with the half of his desire.

　　The despatch of his letter and the presence of M. Fauchelevent in the barricade, was a coincidence which occurred to him. He pointed out M. Fauchelevent to Gavroche.

　　"Do you know that man?"

　　"No," said Gavroche.

　　Gavroche had, in fact, as we have just mentioned, seen Jean Valjean only at night.

　　The troubled and unhealthy conjectures which had outlined themselves in Marius' mind were dissipated.

　　Did he know M. Fauchelevent's opinions? Perhaps M. Fauchelevent was a republican.

　　Hence his very natural presence in this combat.

　　In the meanwhile, Gavroche was shouting, at the other end of the barricade:

　　"My gun!"

　　Courfeyrac had it returned to him.

　　Gavroche warned "his comrades" as he called them, that the barricade was blocked.

　　He had had great difficulty in reaching it. A battalion of the line whose arms were piled in the Rue de la Petite Truanderie was on the watch on the side of the Rue du Cygne; on the opposite side, the municipal guard occupied the Rue des Precheurs. The bulk of the army was facing them in front.

　　This information given, Gavroche added:

　　"I authorize you to hit 'em a tremendous whack."

　　Meanwhile, Enjolras was straining his ears and watching at his embrasure.

　　The assailants, dissatisfied, no doubt, with their shot, had not repeated it.

　　A company of infantry of the line had come up and occupied the end of the street behind the piece of ordnance.

　　The soldiers were tearing up the pavement and constructing with the stones a small, low wall, a sort of side-work not more than eighteen inches high, and facing the barricade.

　　In the angle at the left of this epaulement, there was visible the head of the column of a battalion from the suburbs massed in the Rue Saint-Denis.

　　Enjolras, on the watch, thought he distinguished the peculiar sound which is produced when the shells of grape-shot are drawn from the caissons, and he saw the commander of the piece change the elevation and incline the mouth of the cannon slightly to the left. Then the cannoneers began to load the piece.

　　The chief seized the lint-stock himself and lowered it to the vent.

　　"Down with your heads, hug the wall!" shouted Enjolras, "and all on your knees along the barricade!"

　　The insurgents who were straggling in front of the wine-shop, and who had quitted their posts of combat on Gavroche's arrival, rushed pell-mell towards the barricade; but before Enjolras' order could be executed, the discharge took place with the terrifying rattle of a round of grape-shot. This is what it was, in fact.

　　The charge had been aimed at the cut in the redoubt, and had there rebounded from the wall; and this terrible rebound had produced two dead and three wounded.

　　If this were continued, the barricade was no longer tenable. The grape-shot made its way in.

　　A murmur of consternation arose.

　　"Let us prevent the second discharge," said Enjolras.

　　And, lowering his rifle, he took aim at the captain of the gun, who, at that moment, was bearing down on the breach of his gun and rectifying and definitely fixing its pointing.

　　The captain of the piece was a handsome sergeant of artillery, very young, blond, with a very gentle face, and the intelligent air peculiar to that predestined and redoubtable weapon which, by dint of perfecting itself in horror, must end in killing war.

　　Combeferre, who was standing beside Enjolras, scrutinized this young man.

　　"What a pity!" said Combeferre.

　　"What hideous things these butcheries are!

　　Come, when there are no more kings, there will be no more war.

　　Enjolras, you are taking aim at that sergeant, you are not looking at him.

　　Fancy, he is a charming young man; he is intrepid; it is evident that he is thoughtful; those young artillery-men are very well educated; he has a father, a mother, a family; he is probably in love; he is not more than five and twenty at the most; he might be your brother."

　　"He is," said Enjolras.

　　"Yes," replied Combeferre, "he is mine too.

　　Well, let us not kill him."

　　"Let me alone.

　　It must be done."

　　And a tear trickled slowly down Enjolras' marble cheek.

　　At the same moment, he pressed the trigger of his rifle.

　　The flame leaped forth.

　　The artillery-man turned round twice, his arms extended in front of him, his head uplifted, as though for breath, then he fell with his side on the gun, and lay there motionless. They could see his back, from the centre of which there flowed directly a stream of blood.

　　The ball had traversed his breast from side to side.

　　He was dead.

　　He had to be carried away and replaced by another.

　　Several minutes were thus gained, in fact.

BOOK FIRST.--THE WAR BETWEEN FOUR WALLS

CHAPTER IX

　　EMPLOYMENT OF THE OLD TALENTS OF A POACHER AND THAT INFALLIBLEMARKSMANSHIP WHICH INFLUENCED THE CONDEMNATION OF 1796

　　Opinions were exchanged in the barricade. The firing from the gunwas about to begin again. Against that grape-shot, they could nothold out a quarter of an hour longer. It was absolutely necessaryto deaden the blows.

　　Enjolras issued this command:

　　"We must place a mattress there."

　　"We have none," said Combeferre, "the wounded are lying on them."

　　Jean Valjean, who was seated apart on a stone post, at the cornerof the tavern, with his gun between his knees, had, up to that moment,taken no part in anything that was going on. He did not appearto hear the combatants saying around him: "Here is a gun that isdoing nothing."

　　At the order issued by Enjolras, he rose.

　　It will be remembered that, on the arrival of the rabble in the Ruede la Chanvrerie, an old woman, foreseeing the bullets, had placedher mattress in front of her window. This window, an attic window,was on the roof of a six-story house situated a little beyondthe barricade. The mattress, placed cross-wise, supported atthe bottom on two poles for drying linen, was upheld at the topby two ropes, which, at that distance, looked like two threads,and which were attached to two nails planted in the window frames. These ropes were distinctly visible, like hairs, against the sky.

　　"Can some one lend me a double-barrelled rifle?" said Jean Valjean.

　　Enjolras, who had just re-loaded his, handed it to him.

　　Jean Valjean took aim at the attic window and fired.

　　One of the mattress ropes was cut.

　　The mattress now hung by one thread only.

　　Jean Valjean fired the second charge. The second rope lashedthe panes of the attic window. The mattress slipped betweenthe two poles and fell into the street.

　　The barricade applauded.

　　All voices cried:

　　"Here is a mattress!"

　　"Yes," said Combeferre, "but who will go and fetch it?"

　　The mattress had, in fact, fallen outside the barricade,between besiegers and besieged. Now, the death of the sergeantof artillery having exasperated the troop, the soldiers had,for several minutes, been lying flat on their stomachs behindthe line of paving-stones which they had erected, and, in orderto supply the forced silence of the piece, which was quiet whileits service was in course of reorganization, they had opened fireon the barricade. The insurgents did not reply to this musketry,in order to spare their ammunition The fusillade broke againstthe barricade; but the street, which it filled, was terrible.

　　Jean Valjean stepped out of the cut, entered the street,traversed the storm of bullets, walked up to the mattress,hoisted it upon his back, and returned to the barricade.

　　He placed the mattress in the cut with his own hands. He fixedit there against the wall in such a manner that the artillery-menshould not see it.

　　That done, they awaited the next discharge of grape-shot.

　　It was not long in coming.

　　The cannon vomited forth its package of buck-shot with a roar. But there was no rebound. The effect which they had foreseen hadbeen attained. The barricade was saved.

　　"Citizen," said Enjolras to Jean Valjean, "the Republic thanks you."

　　Bossuet admired and laughed. He exclaimed:

　　"It is immoral that a mattress should have so much power. Triumph of that which yields over that which strikes with lightning. But never mind, glory to the mattress which annuls a cannon!"

　　CHAPTER X

　　DAWN

　　At that moment, Cosette awoke.

　　Her chamber was narrow, neat, unobtrusive, with a long sash-window,facing the East on the back court-yard of the house.

　　Cosette knew nothing of what was going on in Paris. She had notbeen there on the preceding evening, and she had already retiredto her chamber when Toussaint had said:

　　"It appears that there is a row."

　　Cosette had slept only a few hours, but soundly. She had hadsweet dreams, which possibly arose from the fact that her littlebed was very white. Some one, who was Marius, had appeared to herin the light. She awoke with the sun in her eyes, which, at first,produced on her the effect of being a continuation of her dream. Her first thought on emerging from this dream was a smiling one. Cosette felt herself thoroughly reassured. Like Jean Valjean,she had, a few hours previously, passed through that reactionof the soul which absolutely will not hear of unhappiness. She began to cherish hope, with all her might, without knowing why. Then she felt a pang at her heart. It was three days since shehad seen Marius. But she said to herself that he must have receivedher letter, that he knew where she was, and that he was so cleverthat he would find means of reaching her.--And that certainlyto-day, and perhaps that very morning.--It was broad daylight,but the rays of light were very horizontal; she thought that itwas very early, but that she must rise, nevertheless, in order toreceive Marius.

　　She felt that she could not live without Marius, and that,consequently, that was sufficient and that Marius would come. No objection was valid. All this was certain. It was monstrous enoughalready to have suffered for three days. Marius absent three days,this was horrible on the part of the good God. Now, this cruelteasing from on high had been gone through with. Marius was aboutto arrive, and he would bring good news. Youth is made thus;it quickly dries its eyes; it finds sorrow useless and does notaccept it. Youth is the smile of the future in the presence of anunknown quantity, which is itself. It is natural to it to be happy. It seems as though its respiration were made of hope.

　　Moreover, Cosette could not remember what Marius had said to heron the subject of this absence which was to last only one day,and what explanation of it he had given her. Every one has noticedwith what nimbleness a coin which one has dropped on the ground rollsaway and hides, and with what art it renders itself undiscoverable. There are thoughts which play us the same trick; they nestle awayin a corner of our brain; that is the end of them; they are lost;it is impossible to lay the memory on them. Cosette was somewhat vexedat the useless little effort made by her memory. She told herself,that it was very naughty and very wicked of her, to have forgottenthe words uttered by Marius.

　　She sprang out of bed and accomplished the two ablutions of souland body, her prayers and her toilet.

　　One may, in a case of exigency, introduce the reader intoa nuptial chamber, not into a virginal chamber. Verse wouldhardly venture it, prose must not.

　　It is the interior of a flower that is not yet unfolded, it iswhiteness in the dark, it is the private cell of a closed lily,which must not be gazed upon by man so long as the sun has notgazed upon it. Woman in the bud is sacred. That innocent budwhich opens, that adorable half-nudity which is afraid of itself,that white foot which takes refuge in a slipper, that throatwhich veils itself before a mirror as though a mirror were an eye,that chemise which makes haste to rise up and conceal the shoulderfor a creaking bit of furniture or a passing vehicle, those cords tied,those clasps fastened, those laces drawn, those tremors, those shiversof cold and modesty, that exquisite affright in every movement,that almost winged uneasiness where there is no cause for alarm,the successive phases of dressing, as charming as the clouds of dawn,--it is not fitting that all this should be narrated, and it is too muchto have even called attention to it.

　　The eye of man must be more religious in the presence of the risingof a young girl than in the presence of the rising of a star. The possibility of hurting should inspire an augmentation of respect. The down on the peach, the bloom on the plum, the radiated crystal ofthe snow, the wing of the butterfly powdered with feathers, are coarsecompared to that chastity which does not even know that it is chaste. The young girl is only the flash of a dream, and is not yet a statue. Her bed-chamber is hidden in the sombre part of the ideal. The indiscreet touch of a glance brutalizes this vague penumbra. Here, contemplation is profanation.

　　We shall, therefore, show nothing of that sweet little flutterof Cosette's rising.

　　An oriental tale relates how the rose was made white by God,but that Adam looked upon her when she was unfolding, and shewas ashamed and turned crimson. We are of the number who fallspeechless in the presence of young girls and flowers, since wethink them worthy of veneration.

　　Cosette dressed herself very hastily, combed and dressed her hair,which was a very simple matter in those days, when women did notswell out their curls and bands with cushions and puffs, and didnot put crinoline in their locks. Then she opened the windowand cast her eyes around her in every direction, hoping to descrysome bit of the street, an angle of the house, an edge of pavement,so that she might be able to watch for Marius there. But no viewof the outside was to be had. The back court was surrounded bytolerably high walls, and the outlook was only on several gardens. Cosette pronounced these gardens hideous: for the first timein her life, she found flowers ugly. The smallest scrap of thegutter of the street would have met her wishes better. She decidedto gaze at the sky, as though she thought that Marius might comefrom that quarter.

　　All at once, she burst into tears. Not that this was ficklenessof soul; but hopes cut in twain by dejection--that was her case. She had a confused consciousness of something horrible. Thoughts wererife in the air, in fact. She told herself that she was not sureof anything, that to withdraw herself from sight was to be lost;and the idea that Marius could return to her from heaven appearedto her no longer charming but mournful.

　　Then, as is the nature of these clouds, calm returned to her,and hope and a sort of unconscious smile, which yet indicated trustin God.

　　Every one in the house was still asleep. A country-like silence reigned. Not a shutter had been opened. The porter's lodge was closed. Toussaint had not risen, and Cosette, naturally, thought that herfather was asleep. She must have suffered much, and she must havestill been suffering greatly, for she said to herself, that herfather had been unkind; but she counted on Marius. The eclipseof such a light was decidedly impossible. Now and then, she heardsharp shocks in the distance, and she said: "It is odd that peopleshould be opening and shutting their carriage gates so early." They were the reports of the cannon battering the barricade.

　　A few feet below Cosette's window, in the ancient and perfectlyblack cornice of the wall, there was a martin's nest; the curveof this nest formed a little projection beyond the cornice,so that from above it was possible to look into this little paradise. The mother was there, spreading her wings like a fan over her brood;the father fluttered about, flew away, then came back, bearing inhis beak food and kisses. The dawning day gilded this happy thing,the great law, "Multiply," lay there smiling and august, and that sweetmystery unfolded in the glory of the morning. Cosette, with her hairin the sunlight, her soul absorbed in chimeras, illuminated by lovewithin and by the dawn without, bent over mechanically, and almostwithout daring to avow to herself that she was thinking at the sametime of Marius, began to gaze at these birds, at this family,at that male and female, that mother and her little ones,with the profound trouble which a nest produces on a virgin.

BOOK FIRST.--THE WAR BETWEEN FOUR WALLS

CHAPTER X

　　DAWN

　　 At that moment, Cosette awoke.

　　Her chamber was narrow, neat, unobtrusive, with a long sash-window, facing the East on the back court-yard of the house.

　　Cosette knew nothing of what was going on in Paris.

　　She had not been there on the preceding evening, and she had already retired to her chamber when Toussaint had said:

　　"It appears that there is a row."

　　Cosette had slept only a few hours, but soundly.

　　She had had sweet dreams, which possibly arose from the fact that her little bed was very white.

　　Some one, who was Marius, had appeared to her in the light.

　　She awoke with the sun in her eyes, which, at first, produced on her the effect of being a continuation of her dream. Her first thought on emerging from this dream was a smiling one. Cosette felt herself thoroughly reassured.

　　Like Jean Valjean, she had, a few hours previously, passed through that reaction of the soul which absolutely will not hear of unhappiness. She began to cherish hope, with all her might, without knowing why. Then she felt a pang at her heart.

　　It was three days since she had seen Marius.

　　But she said to herself that he must have received her letter, that he knew where she was, and that he was so clever that he would find means of reaching her.--And that certainly to-day, and perhaps that very morning.--It was broad daylight, but the rays of light were very horizontal; she thought that it was very early, but that she must rise, nevertheless, in order to receive Marius.

　　She felt that she could not live without Marius, and that, consequently, that was sufficient and that Marius would come. No objection was valid.

　　All this was certain.

　　It was monstrous enough already to have suffered for three days.

　　Marius absent three days, this was horrible on the part of the good God.

　　Now, this cruel teasing from on high had been gone through with.

　　Marius was about to arrive, and he would bring good news.

　　Youth is made thus; it quickly dries its eyes; it finds sorrow useless and does not accept it.

　　Youth is the smile of the future in the presence of an unknown quantity, which is itself.

　　It is natural to it to be happy. It seems as though its respiration were made of hope.

　　Moreover, Cosette could not remember what Marius had said to her on the subject of this absence which was to last only one day, and what explanation of it he had given her.

　　Every one has noticed with what nimbleness a coin which one has dropped on the ground rolls away and hides, and with what art it renders itself undiscoverable. There are thoughts which play us the same trick; they nestle away in a corner of our brain; that is the end of them; they are lost; it is impossible to lay the memory on them.

　　Cosette was somewhat vexed at the useless little effort made by her memory.

　　She told herself, that it was very naughty and very wicked of her, to have forgotten the words uttered by Marius.

　　She sprang out of bed and accomplished the two ablutions of soul and body, her prayers and her toilet.

　　One may, in a case of exigency, introduce the reader into a nuptial chamber, not into a virginal chamber.

　　Verse would hardly venture it, prose must not.

　　It is the interior of a flower that is not yet unfolded, it is whiteness in the dark, it is the private cell of a closed lily, which must not be gazed upon by man so long as the sun has not gazed upon it.

　　Woman in the bud is sacred.

　　That innocent bud which opens, that adorable half-nudity which is afraid of itself, that white foot which takes refuge in a slipper, that throat which veils itself before a mirror as though a mirror were an eye, that chemise which makes haste to rise up and conceal the shoulder for a creaking bit of furniture or a passing vehicle, those cords tied, those clasps fastened, those laces drawn, those tremors, those shivers of cold and modesty, that exquisite affright in every movement, that almost winged uneasiness where there is no cause for alarm, the successive phases of dressing, as charming as the clouds of dawn,-- it is not fitting that all this should be narrated, and it is too much to have even called attention to it.

　　The eye of man must be more religious in the presence of the rising of a young girl than in the presence of the rising of a star. The possibility of hurting should inspire an augmentation of respect. The down on the peach, the bloom on the plum, the radiated crystal of

the snow, the wing of the butterfly powdered with feathers, are coarse compared to that chastity which does not even know that it is chaste. The young girl is only the flash of a dream, and is not yet a statue. Her bed-chamber is hidden in the sombre part of the ideal. The indiscreet touch of a glance brutalizes this vague penumbra. Here, contemplation is profanation.

　　We shall, therefore, show nothing of that sweet little flutter of Cosette's rising.

　　An oriental tale relates how the rose was made white by God, but that Adam looked upon her when she was unfolding, and she was ashamed and turned crimson.

　　We are of the number who fall speechless in the presence of young girls and flowers, since we think them worthy of veneration.

　　Cosette dressed herself very hastily, combed and dressed her hair, which was a very simple matter in those days, when women did not swell out their curls and bands with cushions and puffs, and did not put crinoline in their locks.

　　Then she opened the window and cast her eyes around her in every direction, hoping to descry some bit of the street, an angle of the house, an edge of pavement, so that she might be able to watch for Marius there.

　　But no view of the outside was to be had.

　　The back court was surrounded by tolerably high walls, and the outlook was only on several gardens. Cosette pronounced these gardens hideous:

　　for the first time in her life, she found flowers ugly.

　　The smallest scrap of the gutter of the street would have met her wishes better.

　　She decided to gaze at the sky, as though she thought that Marius might come from that quarter.

　　All at once, she burst into tears.

　　Not that this was fickleness of soul; but hopes cut in twain by dejection--that was her case. She had a confused consciousness of something horrible.

　　Thoughts were rife in the air, in fact.

　　She told herself that she was not sure of anything, that to withdraw herself from sight was to be lost; and the idea that Marius could return to her from heaven appeared to her no longer charming but mournful.

　　Then, as is the nature of these clouds, calm returned to her, and hope and a sort of unconscious smile, which yet indicated trust in God.

　　Every one in the house was still asleep.

　　A country-like silence reigned. Not a shutter had been opened.

　　The porter's lodge was closed. Toussaint had not risen, and Cosette, naturally, thought that her father was asleep.

　　She must have suffered much, and she must have still been suffering greatly, for she said to herself, that her father had been unkind; but she counted on Marius.

　　The eclipse of such a light was decidedly impossible.

　　Now and then, she heard sharp shocks in the distance, and she said:

　　"It is odd that people should be opening and shutting their carriage gates so early." They were the reports of the cannon battering the barricade.

　　A few feet below Cosette's window, in the ancient and perfectly black cornice of the wall, there was a martin's nest; the curve of this nest formed a little projection beyond the cornice, so that from above it was possible to look into this little paradise. The mother was there, spreading her wings like a fan over her brood; the father fluttered about, flew away, then came back, bearing in his beak food and kisses.

　　The dawning day gilded this happy thing, the great law, "Multiply," lay there smiling and august, and that sweet mystery unfolded in the glory of the morning.

　　Cosette, with her hair in the sunlight, her soul absorbed in chimeras, illuminated by love within and by the dawn without, bent over mechanically, and almost without daring to avow to herself that she was thinking at the same time of Marius, began to gaze at these birds, at this family, at that male and female, that mother and her little ones, with the profound trouble which a nest produces on a virgin.

BOOK FIRST.--THE WAR BETWEEN FOUR WALLS

CHAPTER XI

　　THE SHOT WHICH MISSES NOTHING AND KILLS NO ONE

　　 The assailants' fire continued.

　　Musketry and grape-shot alternated, but without committing great ravages, to tell the truth.

　　The top alone of the Corinthe facade suffered; the window on the first floor, and the attic window in the roof, riddled with buck-shot and biscaiens, were slowly losing their shape.

　　The combatants who had been posted there had been obliged to withdraw.

　　However, this is according to the tactics of barricades; to fire for a long while, in order to exhaust the insurgents' ammunition, if they commit the mistake of replying.

　　When it is perceived, from the slackening of their fire, that they have no more powder and ball, the assault is made. Enjolras had not fallen into this trap; the barricade did not reply.

　　At every discharge by platoons, Gavroche puffed out his cheek with his tongue, a sign of supreme disdain.

　　"Good for you," said he, "rip up the cloth.

　　We want some lint."

　　Courfeyrac called the grape-shot to order for the little effect which it produced, and said to the cannon:

　　"You are growing diffuse, my good fellow."

　　One gets puzzled in battle, as at a ball.

　　It is probable that this silence on the part of the redoubt began to render the besiegers uneasy, and to make them fear some unexpected incident, and that they felt the necessity of getting a clear view behind that heap of paving-stones, and of knowing what was going on behind that impassable wall which received blows without retorting.

　　The insurgents suddenly perceived a helmet glittering in the sun on a neighboring roof. A fireman had placed his back against a tall chimney, and seemed to be acting as sentinel.

　　His glance fell directly down into the barricade.

　　"There's an embarrassing watcher," said Enjolras.

　　Jean Valjean had returned Enjolras' rifle, but he had his own gun.

　　Without saying a word, he took aim at the fireman, and, a second later, the helmet, smashed by a bullet, rattled noisily into the street. The terrified soldier made haste to disappear.

　　A second observer took his place.

　　This one was an officer.

　　Jean Valjean, who had re-loaded his gun, took aim at the newcomer and sent the officer's casque to join the soldier's. The officer did not persist, and retired speedily.

　　This time the warning was understood. No one made his appearance thereafter on that roof; and the idea of spying on the barricade was abandoned.

　　"Why did you not kill the man?"

　　Bossuet asked Jean Valjean.

　　Jean Valjean made no reply.

BOOK FIRST.--THE WAR BETWEEN FOUR WALLS

CHAPTER XII

　　DISORDER A PARTISAN OF ORDER

　　 Bossuet muttered in Combeferre's ear:

　　"He did not answer my question."

　　"He is a man who does good by gun-shots," said Combeferre.

　　Those who have preserved some memory of this already distant epoch know that the National Guard from the suburbs was valiant against insurrections.

　　It was particularly zealous and intrepid in the days of June, 1832.

　　A certain good dram-shop keeper of Pantin des Vertus or la Cunette, whose "establishment" had been closed by the riots, became leonine at the sight of his deserted dance-hall, and got himself killed to preserve the order represented by a tea-garden. In that bourgeois and heroic time, in the presence of ideas which had their knights, interests had their paladins. The prosiness of the originators detracted nothing from the bravery of the movement.

　　The diminution of a pile of crowns made bankers sing the Marseillaise.

　　They shed their blood lyrically for the counting-house; and they defended the shop, that immense diminutive of the fatherland, with Lacedaemonian enthusiasm.

　　At bottom, we will observe, there was nothing in all this that was not extremely serious.

　　It was social elements entering into strife, while awaiting the day when they should enter into equilibrium.

　　Another sign of the times was the anarchy mingled with governmentalism [the barbarous name of the correct party]. People were for order in combination with lack of discipline.

　　The drum suddenly beat capricious calls, at the command of such or such a Colonel of the National Guard; such and such a captain went into action through inspiration; such and such National Guardsmen fought, "for an idea," and on their own account.

　　At critical moments, on "days" they took counsel less of their leaders than of their instincts. There existed in the army of order, veritable guerilleros, some of the sword, like Fannicot, others of the pen, like Henri Fonfrede.

　　Civilization, unfortunately, represented at this epoch rather by an aggregation of interests than by a group of principles, was or thought itself, in peril; it set up the cry of alarm; each, constituting himself a centre, defended it, succored it, and protected it with his own head; and the first comer took it upon himself to save society.

　　Zeal sometimes proceeded to extermination.

　　A platoon of the National Guard would constitute itself on its own authority a private council of war, and judge and execute a captured insurgent in five minutes. It was an improvisation of this sort that had slain Jean Prouvaire. Fierce Lynch law, with which no one party had any right to reproach the rest, for it has been applied by the Republic in America, as well as by the monarchy in Europe.

　　This Lynch law was complicated with mistakes.

　　On one day of rioting, a young poet, named Paul Aime Garnier, was pursued in the Place Royale, with a bayonet at his loins, and only escaped by taking refuge under the porte-cochere of No. 6.

　　They shouted:--"There's another of those Saint-Simonians!" and they wanted to kill him.

　　Now, he had under his arm a volume of the memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon. A National Guard had read the words Saint-Simon on the book, and had shouted:

　　"Death!"

　　On the 6th of June, 1832, a company of the National Guards from the suburbs, commanded by the Captain Fannicot, above mentioned, had itself decimated in the Rue de la Chanvrerie out of caprice and its own good pleasure.

　　This fact, singular though it may seem, was proved at the judicial investigation opened in consequence of the insurrection of 1832.

　　Captain Fannicot, a bold and impatient bourgeois, a sort of condottiere of the order of those whom we have just characterized, a fanatical and intractable governmentalist, could not resist the temptation to fire prematurely, and the ambition of capturing the barricade alone and unaided, that is to say, with his company.

　　Exasperated by the successive apparition of the red flag and the old coat which he took for the black flag, he loudly blamed the generals and chiefs of the corps, who were holding council and did not think that the moment for the decisive assault had arrived, and who were allowing "the insurrection to fry in its own fat," to use the celebrated expression of one of them. For his part, he thought the barricade ripe, and as that which is ripe ought to fall, he made the attempt.

　　He commanded men as resolute as himself, "raging fellows," as a witness said.

　　His company, the same which had shot Jean Prouvaire the poet, was the first of the battalion posted at the angle of the street. At the moment when they were least expecting it, the captain launched his men against the barricade.

　　This movement, executed with more good will than strategy, cost the Fannicot company dear. Before it had traversed two thirds of the street it was received by a general discharge from the barricade.

　　Four, the most audacious, who were running on in front, were mown down point-blank at the very foot of the redoubt, and this courageous throng of National Guards, very brave men but lacking in military tenacity, were forced to fall back, after some hesitation, leaving fifteen corpses on the pavement. This momentary hesitation gave the insurgents time to re-load their weapons, and a second and very destructive discharge struck the company before it could regain the corner of the street, its shelter.

　　A moment more, and it was caught between two fires, and it received the volley from the battery piece which, not having received the order, had not discontinued its firing.

　　The intrepid and imprudent Fannicot was one of the dead from this grape-shot. He was killed by the cannon, that is to say, by order.

　　This attack, which was more furious than serious, irritated Enjolras.--"The fools!" said he.

　　"They are getting their own men killed and they are using up our ammunition for nothing."

　　Enjolras spoke like the real general of insurrection which he was. Insurrection and repression do not fight with equal weapons. Insurrection, which is speedily exhausted, has only a certain number of shots to fire and a certain number of combatants to expend. An empty cartridge-box, a man killed, cannot be replaced.

　　As repression has the army, it does not count its men, and, as it has Vincennes, it does not count its shots.

　　Repression has as many regiments as the barricade has men, and as many arsenals as the barricade has cartridge-boxes. Thus they are struggles of one against a hundred, which always end in crushing the barricade; unless the revolution, uprising suddenly, flings into the balance its flaming archangel's sword. This does happen sometimes.

　　Then everything rises, the pavements begin to seethe, popular redoubts abound.

　　Paris quivers supremely, the quid divinum is given forth, a 10th of August is in the air, a 29th of July is in the air, a wonderful light appears, the yawning maw of force draws back, and the army, that lion, sees before it, erect and tranquil, that prophet, France.

BOOK FIRST.--THE WAR BETWEEN FOUR WALLS

CHAPTER XIII

　　 In the chaos of sentiments and passions which defend a barricade, there is a little of everything; there is bravery, there is youth, honor, enthusiasm, the ideal, conviction, the rage of the gambler, and, above all, intermittences of hope.

　　One of these intermittences, one of these vague quivers of hope suddenly traversed the barricade of the Rue de la Chanvrerie at the moment when it was least expected.

　　"Listen," suddenly cried Enjolras, who was still on the watch, "it seems to me that Paris is waking up."

　　It is certain that, on the morning of the 6th of June, the insurrection broke out afresh for an hour or two, to a certain extent. The obstinacy of the alarm peal of Saint-Merry reanimated some fancies.

　　Barricades were begun in the Rue du Poirier and the Rue des Gravilliers.

　　In front of the Porte Saint-Martin, a young man, armed with a rifle, attacked alone a squadron of cavalry. In plain sight, on the open boulevard, he placed one knee on the ground, shouldered his weapon, fired, killed the commander of the squadron, and turned away, saying:

　　"There's another who will do us no more harm."

　　He was put to the sword.

　　In the Rue Saint-Denis, a woman fired on the National Guard from behind a lowered blind.

　　The slats of the blind could be seen to tremble at every shot.

　　A child fourteen years of age was arrested in the Rue de la Cossonerie, with his pockets full of cartridges.

　　Many posts were attacked. At the entrance to the Rue Bertin-Poiree, a very lively and utterly unexpected fusillade welcomed a regiment of cuirrassiers, at whose head marched Marshal General Cavaignac de Barague. In the Rue Planche-Mibray, they threw old pieces of pottery and household utensils down on the soldiers from the roofs; a bad sign; and when this matter was reported to Marshal Soult, Napoleon's old lieutenant grew thoughtful, as he recalled Suchet's saying at Saragossa: "We are lost when the old women empty their pots de chambre on our heads."

　　These general symptoms which presented themselves at the moment when it was thought that the uprising had been rendered local, this fever of wrath, these sparks which flew hither and thither above those deep masses of combustibles which are called the faubourgs of Paris,--all this, taken together, disturbed the military chiefs. They made haste to stamp out these beginnings of conflagration.

　　They delayed the attack on the barricades Maubuee, de la Chanvrerie and Saint-Merry until these sparks had been extinguished, in order that they might have to deal with the barricades only and be able to finish them at one blow.

　　Columns were thrown into the streets where there was fermentation, sweeping the large, sounding the small, right and left, now slowly and cautiously, now at full charge. The troops broke in the doors of houses whence shots had been fired; at the same time, manoeuvres by the cavalry dispersed the groups on the boulevards.

　　This repression was not effected without some commotion, and without that tumultuous uproar peculiar to collisions between the army and the people.

　　This was what Enjolras had caught in the intervals of the cannonade and the musketry. Moreover, he had seen wounded men passing the end of the street in litters, and he said to Courfeyrac:--"Those wounded do not come from us."

　　Their hope did not last long; the gleam was quickly eclipsed. In less than half an hour, what was in the air vanished, it was a flash of lightning unaccompanied by thunder, and the insurgents felt that sort of leaden cope, which the indifference of the people casts over obstinate and deserted men, fall over them once more.

　　The general movement, which seemed to have assumed a vague outline, had miscarried; and the attention of the minister of war and the strategy of the generals could now be concentrated on the three or four barricades which still remained standing.

　　The sun was mounting above the horizon.

　　An insurgent hailed Enjolras.

　　"We are hungry here.

　　Are we really going to die like this, without anything to eat?"

　　Enjolras, who was still leaning on his elbows at his embrasure, made an affirmative sign with his head, but without taking his eyes from the end of the street.

BOOK FIRST.--THE WAR BETWEEN FOUR WALLS

CHAPTER XIV

　　WHEREIN WILL APPEAR THE NAME OF ENJOLRAS' MISTRESS

　　 Courfeyrac, seated on a paving-stone beside Enjolras, continued to insult the cannon, and each time that that gloomy cloud of projectiles which is called grape-shot passed overhead with its terrible sound he assailed it with a burst of irony.

　　"You are wearing out your lungs, poor, brutal, old fellow, you pain me, you are wasting your row.

　　That's not thunder, it's a cough."

　　And the bystanders laughed.

　　Courfeyrac and Bossuet, whose brave good humor increased with the peril, like Madame Scarron, replaced nourishment with pleasantry, and, as wine was lacking, they poured out gayety to all.

　　"I admire Enjolras," said Bossuet.

　　"His impassive temerity astounds me.

　　He lives alone, which renders him a little sad, perhaps; Enjolras complains of his greatness, which binds him to widowhood. The rest of us have mistresses, more or less, who make us crazy, that is to say, brave.

　　When a man is as much in love as a tiger, the least that he can do is to fight like a lion.

　　That is one way of taking our revenge for the capers that mesdames our grisettes play on us.

　　Roland gets himself killed for Angelique; all our heroism comes from our women.

　　A man without a woman is a pistol without a trigger; it is the woman that sets the man off.

　　Well, Enjolras has no woman.

　　He is not in love, and yet he manages to be intrepid. It is a thing unheard of that a man should be as cold as ice and as bold as fire."

　　Enjolras did not appear to be listening, but had any one been near him, that person would have heard him mutter in a low voice:

　　"Patria."

　　Bossuet was still laughing when Courfeyrac exclaimed:

　　"News!"

　　And assuming the tone of an usher making an announcement, he added:

　　"My name is Eight-Pounder."

　　In fact, a new personage had entered on the scene.

　　This was a second piece of ordnance.

　　The artillery-men rapidly performed their manoeuvres in force and placed this second piece in line with the first.

　　This outlined the catastrophe.

　　A few minutes later, the two pieces, rapidly served, were firing point-blank at the redoubt; the platoon firing of the line and of the soldiers from the suburbs sustained the artillery.

　　Another cannonade was audible at some distance.

　　At the same time that the two guns were furiously attacking the redoubt from the Rue de la Chanvrerie, two other cannons, trained one from the Rue Saint-Denis, the other from the Rue Aubry-le-Boucher, were riddling the Saint-Merry barricade.

　　The four cannons echoed each other mournfully.

　　The barking of these sombre dogs of war replied to each other.

　　One of the two pieces which was now battering the barricade on the Rue de la Chanvrerie was firing grape-shot, the other balls.

　　The piece which was firing balls was pointed a little high, and the aim was calculated so that the ball struck the extreme edge of the upper crest of the barricade, and crumbled the stone down upon the insurgents, mingled with bursts of grape-shot.

　　The object of this mode of firing was to drive the insurgents from the summit of the redoubt, and to compel them to gather close in the interior, that is to say, this announced the assault.

　　The combatants once driven from the crest of the barricade by balls, and from the windows of the cabaret by grape-shot, the attacking columns could venture into the street without being picked off, perhaps, even, without being seen, could briskly and suddenly scale the redoubt, as on the preceding evening, and, who knows? take it by surprise.

　　"It is absolutely necessary that the inconvenience of those guns should be diminished," said Enjolras, and he shouted:

　　"Fire on the artillery-men!"

　　All were ready.

　　The barricade, which had long been silent, poured forth a desperate fire; seven or eight discharges followed, with a sort of rage and joy; the street was filled with blinding smoke, and, at the end of a few minutes, athwart this mist all streaked with flame, two thirds of the gunners could be distinguished lying beneath the wheels of the cannons.

　　Those who were left standing continued to serve the pieces with severe tranquillity, but the fire had slackened.

　　"Things are going well now," said Bossuet to Enjolras.

　　"Success."

　　Enjolras shook his head and replied:

　　"Another quarter of an hour of this success, and there will not be any cartridges left in the barricade."

　　It appears that Gavroche overheard this remark.

BOOK FIRST.--THE WAR BETWEEN FOUR WALLS

CHAPTER XV

　　GAVROCHE OUTSIDE

　　 Courfeyrac suddenly caught sight of some one at the base of the barricade, outside in the street, amid the bullets.

　　Gavroche had taken a bottle basket from the wine-shop, had made his way out through the cut, and was quietly engaged in emptying the full cartridge-boxes of the National Guardsmen who had been killed on the slope of the redoubt, into his basket.

　　"What are you doing there?" asked Courfeyrac.

　　Gavroche raised his face:--

　　"I'm filling my basket, citizen."

　　"Don't you see the grape-shot?"

　　Gavroche replied:

　　"Well, it is raining.

　　What then?"

　　Courfeyrac shouted:--"Come in!"

　　"Instanter," said Gavroche.

　　And with a single bound he plunged into the street.

　　It will be remembered that Fannicot's company had left behind it a trail of bodies.

　　Twenty corpses lay scattered here and there on the pavement, through the whole length of the street. Twenty cartouches for Gavroche meant a provision of cartridges for the barricade.

　　The smoke in the street was like a fog.

　　Whoever has beheld a cloud which has fallen into a mountain gorge between two peaked escarpments can imagine this smoke rendered denser and thicker by two gloomy rows of lofty houses.

　　It rose gradually and was incessantly renewed; hence a twilight which made even the broad daylight turn pale. The combatants could hardly see each other from one end of the street to the other, short as it was.

　　This obscurity, which had probably been desired and calculated on by the commanders who were to direct the assault on the barricade, was useful to Gavroche.

　　Beneath the folds of this veil of smoke, and thanks to his small size, he could advance tolerably far into the street without being seen. He rifled the first seven or eight cartridge-boxes without much danger.

　　He crawled flat on his belly, galloped on all fours, took his basket in his teeth, twisted, glided, undulated, wound from one dead body to another, and emptied the cartridge-box or cartouche as a monkey opens a nut.

　　They did not dare to shout to him to return from the barricade, which was quite near, for fear of attracting attention to him.

　　On one body, that of a corporal, he found a powder-flask.

　　"For thirst," said he, putting it in his pocket.

　　By dint of advancing, he reached a point where the fog of the fusillade became transparent.

　　So that the sharpshooters of the line ranged on the outlook behind their paving-stone dike and the sharpshooters of the banlieue massed at the corner of the street suddenly pointed out to each other something moving through the smoke.

　　At the moment when Gavroche was relieving a sergeant, who was lying near a stone door-post, of his cartridges, a bullet struck the body.

　　"Fichtre!" ejaculated Gavroche.

　　"They are killing my dead men for me."

　　A second bullet struck a spark from the pavement beside him.-- A third overturned his basket.

　　Gavroche looked and saw that this came from the men of the banlieue.

　　He sprang to his feet, stood erect, with his hair flying in the wind, his hands on his hips, his eyes fixed on the National Guardsmen who were firing, and sang:"On est laid a Nanterre,

　　 "Men are ugly at Nanterre,

　　 C'est la faute a Voltaire; 'Tis the

　　fault of Voltaire;

　　 Et bete a Palaiseau,

　　 And dull at Palaiseau,

　　 C'est la faute a Rousseau."'Tis the fault of Rousseau."

　　 Then he picked up his basket, replaced the cartridges which had fallen from it, without missing a single one, and, advancing towards the fusillade, set about plundering another cartridge-box. There a fourth bullet missed him, again.

　　Gavroche sang: "Je ne suis pas notaire,

　　"I am not a notary, C'est la faute a Voltaire;'Tis the fault of Voltaire; Je suis un petit oiseau,

　　I'm a little bird, C'est la faute a Rousseau."

　　 'Tis the fault of Rousseau." A fifth bullet only succeeded in drawing from him a third couplet. "Joie est mon caractere,

　　"Joy is my character, C'est la faute a Voltaire;'Tis the fault of Voltaire; Misere est mon trousseau, Misery is my trousseau, C'est la faute a Rousseau."

　　 'Tis the fault of Rousseau."

　　 Thus it went on for some time.

　　It was a charming and terrible sight.

　　Gavroche, though shot at, was teasing the fusillade.

　　He had the air of being greatly diverted. It was the sparrow pecking at the sportsmen.

　　To each discharge he retorted with a couplet.

　　They aimed at him constantly, and always missed him.

　　The National Guardsmen and the soldiers laughed as they took aim at him.

　　He lay down, sprang to his feet, hid in the corner of a doorway, then made a bound, disappeared, re-appeared, scampered away, returned, replied to the grape-shot with his thumb at his nose, and, all the while, went on pillaging the cartouches, emptying the cartridge-boxes, and filling his basket. The insurgents, panting with anxiety, followed him with their eyes. The barricade trembled; he sang.

　　He was not a child, he was not a man; he was a strange gamin-fairy. He might have been called the invulnerable dwarf of the fray.

　　The bullets flew after him, he was more nimble than they.

　　He played a fearful game of hide and seek with death; every time that the flat-nosed face of the spectre approached, the urchin administered to it a fillip.

　　One bullet, however, better aimed or more treacherous than the rest, finally struck the will-o'-the-wisp of a child.

　　Gavroche was seen

to stagger, then he sank to the earth.

　　The whole barricade gave vent to a cry; but there was something of Antaeus in that pygmy; for the gamin to touch the pavement is the same as for the giant to touch the earth; Gavroche had fallen only to rise again; he remained in a sitting posture, a long thread of blood streaked his face, he raised both arms in the air, glanced in the direction whence the shot had come, and began to sing:

　　"Je suis tombe par terre, "I have fallen to the earth,

　　 C'est la faute a Voltaire;'Tis the fault of Voltaire;

　　 Le nez dans le ruisseau,

　　With my nose in the gutter,

　　 C'est la faute a . . . "

　　'Tis the fault of . . . "

　　 He did not finish.

　　A second bullet from the same marksman stopped him short.

　　This time he fell face downward on the pavement, and moved no more.

　　This grand little soul had taken its flight.

BOOK FIRST.--THE WAR BETWEEN FOUR WALLS

CHAPTER XVI

　　HOW FROM A BROTHER ONE BECOMES A FATHER

　　 At that same moment, in the garden of the Luxembourg,--for the gaze of the drama must be everywhere present,--two children were holding each other by the hand.

　　One might have been seven years old, the other five.

　　The rain having soaked them, they were walking along the paths on the sunny side; the elder was leading the younger; they were pale and ragged; they had the air of wild birds. The smaller of them said:

　　"I am very hungry."

　　The elder, who was already somewhat of a protector, was leading his brother with his left hand and in his right he carried a small stick.

　　They were alone in the garden.

　　The garden was deserted, the gates had been closed by order of the police, on account of the insurrection. The troops who had been bivouacking there had departed for the exigencies of combat.

　　How did those children come there?

　　Perhaps they had escaped from some guard-house which stood ajar; perhaps there was in the vicinity, at the Barriere d'Enfer; or on the Esplanade de l'Observatoire, or in the neighboring carrefour, dominated by the pediment on which could be read:

　　Invenerunt parvulum pannis involutum, some mountebank's booth from which they had fled; perhaps they had, on the preceding evening, escaped the eye of the inspectors of the garden at the hour of closing, and had passed the night in some one of those sentry-boxes where people read the papers? The fact is, they were stray lambs and they seemed free.

　　To be astray and to seem free is to be lost.

　　These poor little creatures were, in fact, lost.

　　These two children were the same over whom Gavroche had been put to some trouble, as the reader will recollect.

　　Children of the Thenardiers, leased out to Magnon, attributed to M. Gillenormand, and now leaves fallen from all these rootless branches, and swept over the ground by the wind.

　　Their clothing, which had been clean in Magnon's day, and which had served her as a prospectus with M. Gillenormand, had been converted into rags.

　　Henceforth these beings belonged to the statistics as "Abandoned children," whom the police take note of, collect, mislay and find again on the pavements of Paris.

　　It required the disturbance of a day like that to account for these miserable little creatures being in that garden.

　　If the superintendents had caught sight of them, they would have driven such rags forth. Poor little things do not enter public gardens; still, people should reflect that, as children, they have a right to flowers.

　　These children were there, thanks to the locked gates.

　　They were there contrary to the regulations.

　　They had slipped into the garden and there they remained.

　　Closed gates do not dismiss the inspectors, oversight is supposed to continue, but it grows slack and reposes; and the inspectors, moved by the public anxiety and more occupied with the outside than the inside, no longer glanced into the garden, and had not seen the two delinquents.

　　It had rained the night before, and even a little in the morning. But in June, showers do not count for much.

　　An hour after a storm, it can hardly be seen that the beautiful blonde day has wept. The earth, in summer, is as quickly dried as the cheek of a child. At that period of the solstice, the light of full noonday is, so to speak, poignant.

　　It takes everything.

　　It applies itself to the earth, and superposes itself with a sort of suction.

　　One would say that the sun was thirsty.

　　A shower is but a glass of water; a rainstorm is instantly drunk up.

　　In the morning everything was dripping, in the afternoon everything is powdered over.

　　Nothing is so worthy of admiration as foliage washed by the rain and wiped by the rays of sunlight; it is warm freshness.

　　The gardens and meadows, having water at their roots, and sun in their flowers, become perfuming-pans of incense, and smoke with all their odors at once.

　　Everything smiles, sings and offers itself.

　　One feels gently intoxicated.

　　The springtime is a provisional paradise, the sun helps man to have patience.

　　There are beings who demand nothing further; mortals, who, having the azure of heaven, say:

　　"It is enough!" dreamers absorbed in the wonderful, dipping into the idolatry of nature, indifferent to good and evil, contemplators of cosmos and radiantly forgetful of man, who do not understand how people can occupy themselves with the hunger of these, and the thirst of those, with the nudity of the poor in winter, with the lymphatic curvature of the little spinal column, with the pallet, the attic, the dungeon, and the rags of shivering young girls, when they can dream beneath the trees; peaceful and terrible spirits they, and pitilessly satisfied. Strange to say, the infinite suffices them.

　　That great need of man, the finite, which admits of embrace, they ignore.

　　The finite which admits of progress and sublime toil, they do not think about. The indefinite, which is born from the human and divine combination of the infinite and the finite, escapes them.

　　Provided that they are face to face with immensity, they smile.

　　Joy never, ecstasy forever. Their life lies in surrendering their personality in contemplation. The history of humanity is for them only a detailed plan.

　　All is not there; the true All remains without; what is the use of busying oneself over that detail, man?

　　Man suffers, that is quite possible; but look at Aldebaran rising!

　　The mother has no more milk, the new-born babe is dying.

　　I know nothing about that, but just look at this wonderful rosette which a slice of wood-cells of the pine presents under the microscope!

　　Compare the most beautiful Mechlin lace to that if you can!

　　These thinkers forget to love. The zodiac thrives with them to such a point that it prevents their seeing the weeping child.

　　God eclipses their souls. This is a family of minds which are, at once, great and petty. Horace was one of them; so was Goethe.

　　La Fontaine perhaps; magnificent egoists of the infinite, tranquil spectators of sorrow, who do not behold Nero if the weather be fair, for whom the sun conceals the funeral pile, who would look on at an execution by the guillotine in the search for an effect of light, who hear neither the cry nor the sob, nor the death rattle, nor the alarm peal, for whom everything is well, since there is a month of May, who, so long as there are clouds of purple and gold above their heads, declare themselves content, and who are determined to be happy until the radiance of the stars and the songs of the birds are exhausted.

　　These are dark radiances.

　　They have no suspicion that they are to be pitied.

　　Certainly they are so.

　　He who does not weep does not see.

　　They are to be admired and pitied, as one would both pity and admire a being at once night and day, without eyes beneath his lashes but with a star on his brow.

　　The indifference of these thinkers, is, according to some, a superior philosophy.

　　That may be; but in this superiority there is some infirmity.

　　One may be immortal and yet limp: witness Vulcan.

　　One may be more than man and less than man. There is incomplete immensity in nature.

　　Who knows whether the sun is not a blind man?

　　But then, what?

　　In whom can we trust?

　　Solem quis dicere falsum audeat? Who shall dare to say that the sun is false?

　　Thus certain geniuses, themselves, certain Very-Lofty mortals, man-stars, may be mistaken? That which is on high at the summit, at the crest, at the zenith, that which sends down so much light on the earth, sees but little, sees badly, sees not at all?

　　Is not this a desperate state of things? No. But what is there, then, above the sun?

　　The god.

　　On the 6th of June, 1832, about eleven o'clock in the morning, the Luxembourg, solitary and depopulated, was charming. The quincunxes and flower-beds shed forth balm and dazzling beauty into the sunlight.

　　The branches, wild with the brilliant glow of midday, seemed endeavoring to embrace.

　　In the sycamores there was an uproar of linnets, sparrows triumphed, woodpeckers climbed along the chestnut trees, administering little pecks on the bark. The flower-beds accepted the legitimate royalty of the lilies; the most august of perfumes is that which emanates from whiteness. The peppery odor of the carnations was perceptible.

　　The old crows of Marie de Medici were amorous in the tall trees.

　　The sun gilded, empurpled, set fire to and lighted up the tulips, which are nothing but all the varieties of flame made into flowers.

　　All around the banks of tulips the bees, the sparks of these flame-flowers, hummed. All was grace and gayety, even the impending rain; this relapse, by which the lilies of the valley and the honeysuckles were destined to profit, had nothing disturbing about it; the swallows indulged in the charming threat of flying low.

　　He who was there aspired to happiness; life smelled good; all nature exhaled candor, help, assistance, paternity, caress, dawn.

　　The thoughts which fell from heaven were as sweet as the tiny hand of a baby when one kisses it.

　　The statues under the trees, white and nude, had robes of shadow pierced with light; these goddesses were all tattered with sunlight; rays hung from them on all sides.

　　Around the great fountain, the earth was already dried up to the point of being burnt. There was sufficient breeze to raise little insurrections of dust here and there.

　　A few yellow leaves, left over from the autumn, chased each other merrily, and seemed to be playing tricks on each other.

　　This abundance of light had something indescribably reassuring about it.

　　Life, sap, heat, odors overflowed; one was conscious, beneath creation, of the enormous size of the source; in all these breaths permeated with love, in this interchange of reverberations and reflections, in this marvellous expenditure of rays, in this infinite outpouring of liquid gold, one felt the prodigality of the inexhaustible; and, behind this splendor as behind a curtain of flame, one caught a glimpse of God, that millionaire of stars.

　　Thanks to the sand, there was not a speck of mud; thanks to the rain, there was not a grain of ashes.

　　The clumps of blossoms had just been bathed; every sort of velvet, satin, gold and varnish, which springs from the earth in the form of flowers, was irreproachable. This magnificence was cleanly.

　　The grand silence of happy nature filled the garden.

　　A celestial silence that is compatible with a thousand sorts of music, the cooing of nests, the buzzing of swarms, the flutterings of the breeze.

　　All the harmony of the season was complete in one gracious whole; the entrances and exits of spring took place in proper order; the lilacs ended; the jasmines began; some flowers were tardy, some insects in advance of their time; the van-guard of the red June butterflies fraternized with the rear-guard of the white butterflies of May.

　　The plantain trees were getting their new skins.

　　The breeze hollowed out undulations in the magnificent enormity of the chestnut-trees. It was splendid. A veteran from the neighboring barracks, who was gazing through the fence, said:

　　"Here is the Spring presenting arms and in full uniform."

　　All nature was breakfasting; creation was at table; this was its hour; the great blue cloth was spread in the sky, and the great green cloth on earth; the sun lighted it all up brilliantly.

　　God was serving the universal repast.

　　Each creature had his pasture or his mess. The ring-dove found his hemp-seed, the chaffinch found his millet, the goldfinch found chickweed, the red-breast found worms, the green finch found flies, the fly found infusoriae, the bee found flowers. They ate each other somewhat, it is true, which is the misery of evil mixed with good; but not a beast of them all had an empty stomach.

　　The two little abandoned creatures had arrived in the vicinity of the grand fountain, and, rather bewildered by all this light, they tried to hide themselves, the instinct of the poor and the weak in the presence of even impersonal magnificence; and they kept behind the swans' hutch.

　　Here and there, at intervals, when the wind blew, shouts, clamor, a sort of tumultuous death rattle, which was the firing, and dull blows, which were discharges of cannon, struck the ear confusedly. Smoke hung over the roofs in the direction of the Halles.

　　A bell, which had the air of an appeal, was ringing in the distance.

　　These children did not appear to notice these noises.

　　The little one repeated from time to time:

　　"I am hungry."

　　Almost at the same instant with the children, another couple approached the great basin.

　　They consisted of a goodman, about fifty years of age, who was leading by the hand a little fellow of six.

　　No doubt, a father and his son.

　　The little man of six had a big brioche.

　　At that epoch, certain houses abutting on the river, in the Rues Madame and d'Enfer, had keys to the Luxembourg garden, of which the lodgers enjoyed the use when the gates were shut, a privilege which was suppressed later on.

　　This father and son came from one of these houses, no doubt.

　　The two poor little creatures watched "that gentleman" approaching, and hid themselves a little more thoroughly.

　　He was a bourgeois.

　　The same person, perhaps, whom Marius had one day heard, through his love fever, near the same grand basin, counselling his son "to avoid excesses."

　　He had an affable and haughty air, and a mouth which was always smiling, since it did not shut. This mechanical smile, produced by too much jaw and too little skin, shows the teeth rather than the soul.

　　The child, with his brioche, which he had bitten into but had not finished eating, seemed satiated. The child was dressed as a National Guardsman, owing to the insurrection, and the father had remained clad as a bourgeois out of prudence.

　　Father and son halted near the fountain where two swans were sporting. This bourgeois appeared to cherish a special admiration for the swans. He resembled them in this sense, that he walked like them.

　　For the moment, the swans were swimming, which is their principal talent, and they were superb.

　　If the two poor little beings had listened and if they had been of an age to understand, they might have gathered the words of this grave man.

　　The father was saying to his son:

　　"The sage lives content with little.

　　Look at me, my son.

　　I do not love pomp.

　　I am never seen in clothes decked with gold lace and stones; I leave that false splendor to badly organized souls."

　　Here the deep shouts which proceeded from the direction of the Halles burst out with fresh force of bell and uproar.

　　"What is that?" inquired the child.

　　The father replied:

　　"It is the Saturnalia."

　　All at once, he caught sight of the two little ragged boys behind the green swan-hutch.

　　"There is the beginning," said he.

　　And, after a pause, he added:

　　"Anarchy is entering this garden."

　　In the meanwhile, his son took a bite of his brioche, spit it out, and, suddenly burst out crying.

　　"What are you crying about?" demanded his father.

　　"I am not hungry any more," said the child.

　　The father's smile became more accentuated.

　　"One does not need to be hungry in order to eat a cake."

　　"My cake tires me.

　　It is stale."

　　"Don't you want any more of it?"

　　"No."

　　The father pointed to the swans.

　　"Throw it to those palmipeds."

　　The child hesitated.

　　A person may not want any more of his cake; but that is no reason for giving it away.

　　The father went on:

　　"Be humane.

　　You must have compassion on animals."

　　And, taking the cake from his son, he flung it into the basin.

　　The cake fell very near the edge.

　　The swans were far away, in the centre of the basin, and busy with some prey.

　　They had seen neither the bourgeois nor the brioche.

　　The bourgeois, feeling that the cake was in danger of being wasted, and moved by this useless shipwreck, entered upon a telegraphic agitation, which finally attracted the attention of the swans.

　　They perceived something floating, steered for the edge like ships, as they are, and slowly directed their course toward the brioche, with the stupid majesty which befits white creatures.

　　"The swans [cygnes] understand signs [signes]," said the bourgeois, delighted to make a jest.

　　At that moment, the distant tumult of the city underwent another sudden increase.

　　This time it was sinister.

　　There are some gusts of wind which speak more distinctly than others.

　　The one which was blowing at that moment brought clearly defined drum-beats, clamors, platoon firing, and the dismal replies of the tocsin and the cannon. This coincided with a black cloud which suddenly veiled the sun.

　　The swans had not yet reached the brioche.

　　"Let us return home," said the father, "they are attacking the Tuileries."

　　He grasped his son's hand again.

　　Then he continued:

　　"From the Tuileries to the Luxembourg, there is but the distance which separates Royalty from the peerage; that is not far. Shots will soon rain down."

　　He glanced at the cloud.

　　"Perhaps it is rain itself that is about to shower down; the sky is joining in; the younger branch is condemned.

　　Let us return home quickly."

　　"I should like to see the swans eat the brioche," said the child.

　　The father replied:

　　"That would be imprudent."

　　And he led his little bourgeois away.

　　The son, regretting the swans, turned his head back toward the basin until a corner of the quincunxes concealed it from him.

　　In the meanwhile, the two little waifs had approached the brioche at the same time as the swans.

　　It was floating on the water. The smaller of them stared at the cake, the elder gazed after the retreating bourgeois.

　　Father and son entered the labyrinth of walks which leads to the grand flight of steps near the clump of trees on the side of the Rue Madame.

　　As soon as they had disappeared from view, the elder child hastily flung himself flat on his stomach on the rounding curb of the basin, and clinging to it with his left hand, and leaning over the water, on the verge of falling in, he stretched out his right hand with his stick towards the cake.

　　The swans, perceiving the enemy, made haste, and in so doing, they produced an effect of their breasts which was of service to the little fisher; the water flowed back before the swans, and one of these gentle concentric undulations softly floated the brioche towards the child's wand.

　　Just as the swans came up, the stick touched the cake.

　　The child gave it a brisk rap, drew in the brioche, frightened away the swans, seized the cake, and sprang to his feet.

　　The cake was wet; but they were hungry and thirsty. The elder broke the cake into two portions, a large one and a small one, took the small one for himself, gave the large one to his brother, and said to him:

　　"Ram that into your muzzle."

BOOK FIRST.--THE WAR BETWEEN FOUR WALLS

CHAPTER XVII

　　MORTUUS PATER FILIUM MORITURUM EXPECTAT

　　 Marius dashed out of the barricade, Combeferre followed him. But he was too late.

　　Gavroche was dead.

　　Combeferre brought back the basket of cartridges; Marius bore the child.

　　"Alas!" he thought, "that which the father had done for his father, he was requiting to the son; only, Thenardier had brought back his father alive; he was bringing back the child dead."

　　When Marius re-entered the redoubt with Gavroche in his arms, his face, like the child, was inundated with blood.

　　At the moment when he had stooped to lift Gavroche, a bullet had grazed his head; he had not noticed it.

　　Courfeyrac untied his cravat and with it bandaged Marius' brow.

　　They laid Gavroche on the same table with Mabeuf, and spread over the two corpses the black shawl.

　　There was enough of it for both the old man and the child.

　　Combeferre distributed the cartridges from the basket which he had brought in.

　　This gave each man fifteen rounds to fire.

　　Jean Valjean was still in the same place, motionless on his stone post.

　　When Combeferre offered him his fifteen cartridges, he shook his head.

　　"Here's a rare eccentric," said Combeferre in a low voice to Enjolras. "He finds a way of not fighting in this barricade."

　　"Which does not prevent him from defending it," responded Enjolras.

　　"Heroism has its originals," resumed Combeferre.

　　And Courfeyrac, who had overheard, added:

　　"He is another sort from Father Mabeuf."

　　One thing which must be noted is, that the fire which was battering the barricade hardly disturbed the interior.

　　Those who have never traversed the whirlwind of this sort of war can form no idea of the singular moments of tranquillity mingled with these convulsions. Men go and come, they talk, they jest, they lounge.

　　Some one whom we know heard a combatant say to him in the midst of the grape-shot: "We are here as at a bachelor breakfast."

　　The redoubt of the Rue de la Chanvrerie, we repeat, seemed very calm within.

　　All mutations and all phases had been, or were about to be, exhausted.

　　The position, from critical, had become menacing, and, from menacing, was probably about to become desperate.

　　In proportion as the situation grew gloomy, the glow of heroism empurpled the barricade more and more. Enjolras, who was grave, dominated it, in the attitude of a young Spartan sacrificing his naked sword to the sombre genius, Epidotas.

　　Combeferre, wearing an apron, was dressing the wounds: Bossuet and Feuilly were making cartridges with the powder-flask picked up by Gavroche on the dead corporal, and Bossuet said to Feuilly:

　　"We are soon to take the diligence for another planet"; Courfeyrac was disposing and arranging on some paving-stones which he had reserved for himself near Enjolras, a complete arsenal, his sword-cane, his gun, two holster pistols, and a cudgel, with the care of a young girl setting a small dunkerque in order. Jean Valjean stared silently at the wall opposite him.

　　An artisan was fastening Mother Hucheloup's big straw hat on his head with a string, "for fear of sun-stroke," as he said.

　　The young men from the Cougourde d'Aix were chatting merrily among themselves, as though eager to speak patois for the last time.

　　Joly, who had taken Widow Hucheloup's mirror from the wall, was examining his tongue in it.

　　Some combatants, having discovered a few crusts of rather mouldy bread, in a drawer, were eagerly devouring them. Marius was disturbed with regard to what his father was about to say to him.

BOOK FIRST.--THE WAR BETWEEN FOUR WALLS

CHAPTER XVIII

　　THE VULTURE BECOME PREY

　　 We must insist upon one psychological fact peculiar to barricades. Nothing which is characteristic of that surprising war of the streets should be omitted.

　　Whatever may have been the singular inward tranquillity which we have just mentioned, the barricade, for those who are inside it, remains, none the less, a vision.

　　There is something of the apocalypse in civil war, all the mists of the unknown are commingled with fierce flashes, revolutions are sphinxes, and any one who has passed through a barricade thinks he has traversed a dream.

　　The feelings to which one is subject in these places we have pointed out in the case of Marius, and we shall see the consequences; they are both more and less than life.

　　On emerging from a barricade, one no longer knows what one has seen there.

　　One has been terrible, but one knows it not.

　　One has been surrounded with conflicting ideas which had human faces; one's head has been in the light of the future. There were corpses lying prone there, and phantoms standing erect. The hours were colossal and seemed hours of eternity.

　　One has lived in death.

　　Shadows have passed by.

　　What were they?

　　One has beheld hands on which there was blood; there was a deafening horror; there was also a frightful silence; there were open mouths which shouted, and other open mouths which held their peace; one was in the midst of smoke, of night, perhaps.

　　One fancied that one had touched the sinister ooze of unknown depths; one stares at something red on one's finger nails.

　　One no longer remembers anything.

　　Let us return to the Rue de la Chanvrerie.

　　All at once, between two discharges, the distant sound of a clock striking the hour became audible.

　　"It is midday," said Combeferre.

　　The twelve strokes had not finished striking when Enjolras sprang to his feet, and from the summit of the barricade hurled this thundering shout:

　　"Carry stones up into the houses; line the windowsills and the roofs with them.

　　Half the men to their guns, the other half to the paving-stones. There is not a minute to be lost."

　　A squad of sappers and miners, axe on shoulder, had just made their appearance in battle array at the end of the street.

　　This could only be the head of a column; and of what column? The attacking column, evidently; the sappers charged with the demolition of the barricade must always precede the soldiers who are to scale it.

　　They were, evidently, on the brink of that moment which M. Clermont-Tonnerre, in 1822, called "the tug of war."

　　Enjolras' order was executed with the correct haste which is peculiar to ships and barricades, the only two scenes of combat where escape is impossible.

　　In less than a minute, two thirds of the stones which Enjolras had had piled up at the door of Corinthe had been carried up to the first floor and the attic, and before a second minute had elapsed, these stones, artistically set one upon the other, walled up the sash-window on the first floor and the windows in the roof to half their height.

　　A few loop-holes carefully planned by Feuilly, the principal architect, allowed of the passage of the gun-barrels. This armament of the windows could be effected all the more easily since the firing of grape-shot had ceased. The two cannons were now discharging ball against the centre of the barrier in order to make a hole there, and, if possible, a breach for the assault.

　　When the stones destined to the final defence were in place, Enjolras had the bottles which he had set under the table where Mabeuf lay, carried to the first floor.

　　"Who is to drink that?"

　　Bossuet asked him.

　　"They," replied Enjolras.

　　Then they barricaded the window below, and held in readiness the iron cross-bars which served to secure the door of the wine-shop at night.

　　The fortress was complete.

　　The barricade was the rampart, the wine-shop was the dungeon.

　　With the stones which remained they stopped up the outlet.

　　As the defenders of a barricade are always obliged to be sparing of their ammunition, and as the assailants know this, the assailants combine their arrangements with a sort of irritating leisure, expose themselves to fire prematurely, though in appearance more than in reality, and take their ease.

　　The preparations for attack are always made with a certain methodical deliberation; after which, the lightning strikes.

　　This deliberation permitted Enjolras to take a review of everything and to perfect everything.

　　He felt that, since such men were to die, their death ought to be a masterpiece.

　　He said to Marius:

　　"We are the two leaders.

　　I will give the last orders inside.

　　Do you remain outside and observe."

　　Marius posted himself on the lookout upon the crest of the barricade.

　　Enjolras had the door of the kitchen, which was the ambulance, as the reader will remember, nailed up.

　　"No splashing of the wounded," he said.

　　He issued his final orders in the tap-room in a curt, but profoundly tranquil tone; Feuilly listened and replied in the name of all.

　　"On the first floor, hold your axes in readiness to cut the staircase. Have you them?"

　　"Yes," said Feuilly.

　　"How many?"

　　"Two axes and a pole-axe."

　　"That is good.

　　There are now twenty-six combatants of us on foot. How many guns are there?"

　　"Thirty-four."

　　"Eight too many.

　　Keep those eight guns loaded like the rest and at hand. Swords and pistols in your belts.

　　Twenty men to the barricade. Six ambushed in the attic windows, and at the window on the first floor to fire on the assailants through the loop-holes in the stones. Let not a single worker remain inactive here.

　　Presently, when the drum beats the assault, let the twenty below stairs rush to the barricade. The first to arrive will have the best places."

　　These arrangements made, he turned to Javert and said:

　　"I am not forgetting you."

　　And, laying a pistol on the table, he added:

　　"The last man to leave this room will smash the skull of this spy."

　　"Here?" inquired a voice.

　　"No, let us not mix their corpses with our own.

　　The little barricade of the Mondetour lane can be scaled.

　　It is only four feet high. The man is well pinioned.

　　He shall be taken thither and put to death."

　　There was some one who was more impassive at that moment than Enjolras, it was Javert.

　　Here Jean Valjean made his appearance.

　　He had been lost among the group of insurgents.

　　He stepped forth and said to Enjolras:

　　"You are the commander?"

　　"Yes."

　　"You thanked me a while ago."

　　"In the name of the Republic.

　　The barricade has two saviors, Marius Pontmercy and yourself."

　　"Do you think that I deserve a recompense?"

　　"Certainly."

　　"Well, I request one."

　　"What is it?"

　　"That I may blow that man's brains out."

　　Javert raised his head, saw Jean Valjean, made an almost imperceptible movement, and said:

　　"That is just."

　　As for Enjolras, he had begun to re-load his rifle; he cut his eyes about him:

　　"No objections."

　　And he turned to Jean Valjean:

　　"Take the spy."

　　Jean Valjean did, in fact, take possession of Javert, by seating himself on the end of the table.

　　He seized the pistol, and a faint click announced that he had cocked it.

　　Almost at the same moment, a blast of trumpets became audible.

　　"Take care!" shouted Marius from the top of the barricade.

　　Javert began to laugh with that noiseless laugh which was peculiar to him, and gazing intently at the insurgents, he said to them:

　　"You are in no better case than I am."

　　"All out!" shouted Enjolras.

　　The insurgents poured out tumultuously, and, as they went, received in the back,--may we be permitted the expression,-- this sally of Javert's:

　　"We shall meet again shortly!"

BOOK FIRST.--THE WAR BETWEEN FOUR WALLS

CHAPTER XIX

　　JEAN VALJEAN TAKES HIS REVENGE

　　 When Jean Valjean was left alone with Javert, he untied the rope which fastened the prisoner across the middle of the body, and the knot of which was under the table.

　　After this he made him a sign to rise.

　　Javert obeyed with that indefinable smile in which the supremacy of enchained authority is condensed.

　　Jean Valjean took Javert by the martingale, as one would take a beast of burden by the breast-band, and, dragging the latter after him, emerged from the wine-shop slowly, because Javert, with his impeded limbs, could take only very short steps.

　　Jean Valjean had the pistol in his hand.

　　In this manner they crossed the inner trapezium of the barricade. The insurgents, all intent on the attack, which was imminent, had their backs turned to these two.

　　Marius alone, stationed on one side, at the extreme left of the barricade, saw them pass.

　　This group of victim and executioner was illuminated by the sepulchral light which he bore in his own soul.

　　Jean Valjean with some difficulty, but without relaxing his hold for a single instant, made Javert, pinioned as he was, scale the little entrenchment in the Mondetour lane.

　　When they had crossed this barrier, they found themselves alone in the lane.

　　No one saw them.

　　Among the heap they could distinguish a livid face, streaming hair, a pierced hand and the half nude breast of a woman.

　　It was Eponine.

　　The corner of the houses hid them from the insurgents.

　　The corpses carried away from the barricade formed a terrible pile a few paces distant.

　　Javert gazed askance at this body, and, profoundly calm, said in a low tone:

　　"It strikes me that I know that girl."

　　Then he turned to Jean Valjean.

　　Jean Valjean thrust the pistol under his arm and fixed on Javert a look which it required no words to interpret:

　　"Javert, it is I."

　　Javert replied:

　　"Take your revenge."

　　Jean Valjean drew from his pocket a knife, and opened it.

　　"A clasp-knife!" exclaimed Javert, "you are right.

　　That suits you better."

　　Jean Valjean cut the martingale which Javert had about his neck, then he cut the cords on his wrists, then, stooping down, he cut the cord on his feet; and, straightening himself up, he said to him:

　　"You are free."

　　Javert was not easily astonished.

　　Still, master of himself though he was, he could not repress a start.

　　He remained open-mouthed and motionless.

　　Jean Valjean continued:

　　"I do not think that I shall escape from this place.

　　But if, by chance, I do, I live, under the name of Fauchelevent, in the Rue de l'Homme Arme, No. 7."

　　Javert snarled like a tiger, which made him half open one corner of his mouth, and he muttered between his teeth:

　　"Have a care."

　　"Go," said Jean Valjean.

　　Javert began again:

　　"Thou saidst Fauchelevent, Rue de l'Homme Arme?"

　　"Number 7."

　　Javert repeated in a low voice:--"Number 7."

　　He buttoned up his coat once more, resumed the military stiffness between his shoulders, made a half turn, folded his arms and, supporting his chin on one of his hands, he set out in the direction of the Halles.

　　Jean Valjean followed him with his eyes:

　　A few minutes later, Javert turned round and shouted to Jean Valjean:

　　"You annoy me.

　　Kill me, rather."

　　Javert himself did not notice that he no longer addressed Jean Valjean as "thou."

　　"Be off with you," said Jean Valjean.

　　Javert retreated slowly.

　　A moment later he turned the corner of the Rue des Precheurs.

　　When Javert had disappeared, Jean Valjean fired his pistol in the air.

　　Then he returned to the barricade and said:

　　"It is done."

　　In the meanwhile, this is what had taken place.

　　Marius, more intent on the outside than on the interior, had not, up to that time, taken a good look at the pinioned spy in the dark background of the tap-room.

　　When he beheld him in broad daylight, striding over the barricade in order to proceed to his death, he recognized him. Something suddenly recurred to his mind.

　　He recalled the inspector of the Rue de Pontoise, and the two pistols which the latter had handed to him and which he, Marius, had used in this very barricade, and not only did he recall his face, but his name as well.

　　This recollection was misty and troubled, however, like all his ideas.

　　It was not an affirmation that he made, but a question which he put to himself:

　　"Is not that the inspector of police who told me that his name was Javert?"

　　Perhaps there was still time to intervene in behalf of that man. But, in the first place, he must know whether this was Javert.

　　Marius called to Enjolras, who had just stationed himself at the other extremity of the barricade:

　　"Enjolras!"

　　"What?"

　　"What is the name of yonder man?"

　　"What man?"

　　"The police agent.

　　Do you know his name?"

　　"Of course.

　　He told us."

　　"What is it?"

　　"Javert."

　　Marius sprang to his feet.

　　At that moment, they heard the report of the pistol.

　　Jean Valjean re-appeared and cried:

　　"It is done."

　　A gloomy chill traversed Marius' heart.

BOOK FIRST.--THE WAR BETWEEN FOUR WALLS

CHAPTER XX

　　THE DEAD ARE IN THE RIGHT AND THE LIVING ARE NOT IN THE WRONG

　　 The death agony of the barricade was about to begin.

　　Everything contributed to its tragic majesty at that supreme moment; a thousand mysterious crashes in the air, the breath of armed masses set in movement in the streets which were not visible, the intermittent gallop of cavalry, the heavy shock of artillery on the march, the firing by squads, and the cannonades crossing each other in the labyrinth of Paris, the smokes of battle mounting all gilded above the roofs, indescribable and vaguely terrible cries, lightnings of menace everywhere, the tocsin of Saint-Merry, which now had the accents of a sob, the mildness of the weather, the splendor of the sky filled with sun and clouds, the beauty of the day, and the alarming silence of the houses.

　　For, since the preceding evening, the two rows of houses in the Rue de la Chanvrerie had become two walls; ferocious walls, doors closed, windows closed, shutters closed.

　　In those days, so different from those in which we live, when the hour was come, when the people wished to put an end to a situation, which had lasted too long, with a charter granted or with a legal country, when universal wrath was diffused in the atmosphere, when the city consented to the tearing up of the pavements, when insurrection made the bourgeoisie smile by whispering its password in its ear, then the inhabitant, thoroughly penetrated with the revolt, so to speak, was the auxiliary of the combatant, and the house fraternized with the improvised fortress which rested on it.

　　When the situation was not ripe, when the insurrection was not decidedly admitted, when the masses disowned the movement, all was over with the combatants, the city was changed into a desert around the revolt, souls grew chilled, refuges were nailed up, and the street turned into a defile to help the army to take the barricade.

　　A people cannot be forced, through surprise, to walk more quickly than it chooses.

　　Woe to whomsoever tries to force its hand!

　　A people does not let itself go at random.

　　Then it abandons the insurrection to itself.

　　The insurgents become noxious, infected with the plague. A house is an escarpment, a door is a refusal, a facade is a wall. This wall hears, sees and will not.

　　It might open and save you. No. This wall is a judge.

　　It gazes at you and condemns you. What dismal things are closed houses.

　　They seem dead, they are living. Life which is, as it were, suspended there, persists there. No one has gone out of them for four and twenty hours, but no one is missing from them.

　　In the interior of that rock, people go and come, go to bed and rise again; they are a family party there; there they eat and drink; they are afraid, a terrible thing! Fear excuses this fearful lack of hospitality; terror is mixed with it, an extenuating circumstance.

　　Sometimes, even, and this has been actually seen, fear turns to passion; fright may change into fury, as prudence does into rage; hence this wise saying: "The enraged moderates."

　　There are outbursts of supreme terror, whence springs wrath like a mournful smoke.--"What do these people want? What have they come there to do?

　　Let them get out of the scrape. So much the worse for them.

　　It is their fault.

　　They are only getting what they deserve.

　　It does not concern us.

　　Here is our poor street all riddled with balls.

　　They are a pack of rascals.

　　Above all things, don't open the door."--And the house assumes the air of a tomb. The insurgent is in the death-throes in front of that house; he sees the grape-shot and naked swords drawing near; if he cries, he knows that they are listening to him, and that no one will come; there stand walls which might protect him, there are men who might save him; and these walls have ears of flesh, and these men have bowels of stone.

　　Whom shall he reproach?

　　No one and every one.

　　The incomplete times in which we live.

　　It is always at its own risk and peril that Utopia is converted into revolution, and from philosophical protest becomes an armed protest, and from Minerva turns to Pallas.

　　The Utopia which grows impatient and becomes revolt knows what awaits it; it almost always comes too soon.

　　Then it becomes resigned, and stoically accepts catastrophe in lieu of triumph.

　　It serves those who deny it without complaint, even excusing them, and even disculpates them, and its magnanimity consists in consenting to abandonment. It is indomitable in the face of obstacles and gentle towards ingratitude.

　　Is this ingratitude, however?

　　Yes, from the point of view of the human race.

　　No, from the point of view of the individual.

　　Progress is man's mode of existence.

　　The general life of the human race is called Progress, the collective stride of the human race is called Progress.

　　Progress advances; it makes the great human and terrestrial journey towards the celestial and the divine; it has its halting places where it rallies the laggard troop, it has its stations where it meditates, in the presence of some splendid Canaan suddenly unveiled on its horizon, it has its nights when it sleeps; and it is one of the poignant anxieties of the thinker that he sees the shadow resting on the human soul, and that he gropes in darkness without being able to awaken that slumbering Progress.

　　"God is dead, perhaps," said Gerard de Nerval one day to the writer of these lines, confounding progress with God, and taking the interruption of movement for the death of Being.

　　He who despairs is in the wrong.

　　Progress infallibly awakes, and, in short, we may say that it marches on, even when it is asleep, for it has increased in size.

　　When we behold it erect once more, we find it taller.

　　To be always peaceful does not depend on progress any more than it does on the stream; erect no barriers, cast in no boulders; obstacles make water froth and humanity boil. Hence arise troubles; but after these troubles, we recognize the fact that ground has been gained.

　　Until order, which is nothing else than universal peace, has been established, until harmony and unity reign, progress will have revolutions as its halting-places.

　　What, then, is progress?

　　We have just enunciated it; the permanent life of the peoples.

　　Now, it sometimes happens, that the momentary life of individuals offers resistance to the eternal life of the human race.

　　Let us admit without bitterness, that the individual has his distinct interests, and can, without forfeiture, stipulate for his interest, and defend it; the present has its pardonable dose of egotism; momentary life has its rights, and is not bound to sacrifice itself constantly to the future.

　　The generation which is passing in its turn over the earth, is not forced to abridge it for the sake of the generations, its equal, after all, who will have their turn later on.--"I exist," murmurs that some one whose name is All. "I am young and in love, I am old and I wish to repose, I am the father of a family, I toil, I prosper, I am successful in business, I have houses to lease, I have money in the government funds, I am happy, I have a wife and children, I have all this, I desire to live, leave me in peace."--Hence, at certain hours, a profound cold broods over the magnanimous vanguard of the human race.

　　Utopia, moreover, we must admit, quits its radiant sphere when it makes war.

　　It, the truth of to-morrow, borrows its mode of procedure, battle, from the lie of yesterday.

　　It, the future, behaves like the past.

　　It, pure idea, becomes a deed of violence. It complicates its heroism with a violence for which it is just that it should be held to answer; a violence of occasion and expedient, contrary to principle, and for which it is fatally punished. The Utopia, insurrection, fights with the old military code in its fist; it shoots spies, it executes traitors; it suppresses living beings and flings them into unknown darkness.

　　It makes use of death, a serious matter.

　　It seems as though Utopia had no longer any faith in radiance, its irresistible and incorruptible force.

　　It strikes with the sword.

　　Now, no sword is simple.

　　Every blade has two edges; he who wounds with the one is wounded with the other.

　　Having made this reservation, and made it with all severity, it is impossible for us not to admire, whether they succeed or not, those the glorious combatants of the future, the confessors of Utopia.

　　Even when they miscarry, they are worthy of veneration; and it is, perhaps, in failure, that they possess the most majesty. Victory, when it is in accord with progress, merits the applause of the people; but a heroic defeat merits their tender compassion. The one is magnificent, the other sublime.

　　For our own part, we prefer martyrdom to success.

　　John Brown is greater than Washington, and Pisacane is greater than Garibaldi.

　　It certainly is necessary that some one should take the part of the vanquished.

　　We are unjust towards these great men who attempt the future, when they fail.

　　Revolutionists are accused of sowing fear abroad.

　　Every barricade seems a crime.

　　Their theories are incriminated, their aim suspected, their ulterior motive is feared, their conscience denounced. They are reproached with raising, erecting, and heaping up, against the reigning social state, a mass of miseries, of griefs, of iniquities, of wrongs, of despairs, and of tearing from the lowest depths blocks of shadow in order therein to embattle themselves and to combat. People shout to them:

　　"You are tearing up the pavements of hell!" They might reply:

　　"That is because our barricade is made of good intentions."

　　The best thing, assuredly, is the pacific solution.

　　In short, let us agree that when we behold the pavement, we think of the bear, and it is a good will which renders society uneasy.

　　But it depends on society to save itself, it is to its own good will that we make our appeal.

　　No violent remedy is necessary.

　　To study evil amiably, to prove its existence, then to cure it.

　　It is to this that we invite it.

　　However that may be, even when fallen, above all when fallen, these men, who at every point of the universe, with their eyes fixed on France, are striving for the grand work with the inflexible logic of the ideal, are august; they give their life a free offering to progress; they accomplish the will of providence; they perform a religious act. At the appointed hour, with as much disinterestedness as an actor who answers to his cue, in obedience to the divine stage-manager, they enter the tomb.

　　And this hopeless combat, this stoical disappearance they accept in order to bring about the supreme and universal consequences, the magnificent and irresistibly human movement begun on the 14th of July, 1789; these soldiers are priests. The French revolution is an act of God.

　　Moreover, there are, and it is proper to add this distinction to the distinctions already pointed out in another chapter,--there are accepted revolutions, revolutions which are called revolutions; there are refused revolutions, which are called riots.

　　An insurrection which breaks out, is an idea which is passing its examination before the people.

　　If the people lets fall a black ball, the idea is dried fruit; the insurrection is a mere skirmish.

　　Waging war at every summons and every time that Utopia desires it, is not the thing for the peoples.

　　Nations have not always and at every hour the temperament of heroes and martyrs.

　　They are positive.

　　A priori, insurrection is repugnant to them, in the first place, because it often results in a catastrophe, in the second place, because it always has an abstraction as its point of departure.

　　Because, and this is a noble thing, it is always for the ideal, and for the ideal alone, that those who sacrifice themselves do thus sacrifice themselves.

　　An insurrection is an enthusiasm.

　　Enthusiasm may wax wroth; hence the appeal to arms.

　　But every insurrection, which aims at a government or a regime, aims higher.

　　Thus, for instance, and we insist upon it, what the chiefs of the insurrection of 1832, and, in particular, the young enthusiasts of the Rue de la Chanvrerie were combating, was not precisely Louis Philippe. The majority of them, when talking freely, did justice to this king who stood midway between monarchy and revolution; no one hated him. But they attacked the younger branch of the divine right in Louis Philippe as they had attacked its elder branch in Charles X.; and that which they wished to overturn in overturning royalty in France, was, as we have explained, the usurpation of man over man, and of privilege over right in the entire universe. Paris without a king has as result the world without despots. This is the manner in which they reasoned.

　　Their aim was distant no doubt, vague perhaps, and it retreated in the face of their efforts; but it was great.

　　Thus it is.

　　And we sacrifice ourselves for these visions, which are almost always illusions for the sacrificed, but illusions with which, after all, the whole of human certainty is mingled. We throw ourselves into these tragic affairs and become intoxicated with that which we are about to do.

　　Who knows?

　　We may succeed. We are few in number, we have a whole army arrayed against us; but we are defending right, the natural law, the sovereignty of each one over himself from which no abdication is possible, justice and truth, and in case of need, we die like the three hundred Spartans.

　　We do not think of Don Quixote but of Leonidas. And we march straight before us, and once pledged, we do not draw back, and we rush onwards with head held low, cherishing as our hope an unprecedented victory, revolution completed, progress set free again, the aggrandizement of the human race, universal deliverance; and in the event of the worst, Thermopylae.

　　These passages of arms for the sake of progress often suffer shipwreck, and we have just explained why.

　　The crowd is restive in the presence of the impulses of paladins.

　　Heavy masses, the multitudes which are fragile because of their very weight, fear adventures; and there is a touch of adventure in the ideal.

　　Moreover, and we must not forget this, interests which are not very friendly to the ideal and the sentimental are in the way. Sometimes the stomach paralyzes the heart.

　　The grandeur and beauty of France lies in this, that she takes less from the stomach than other nations:

　　she more easily knots the rope about her loins.

　　She is the first awake, the last asleep. She marches forwards.

　　She is a seeker.

　　This arises from the fact that she is an artist.

　　The ideal is nothing but the culminating point of logic, the same as the beautiful is nothing but the summit of the true. Artistic peoples are also consistent peoples.

　　To love beauty is to see the light.

　　That is why the torch of Europe, that is to say of civilization, was first borne by Greece, who passed it on to Italy, who handed it on to France.

　　Divine, illuminating nations of scouts! Vitaelampada tradunt.

　　It is an admirable thing that the poetry of a people is the element of its progress.

　　The amount of civilization is measured by the quantity of imagination.

　　Only, a civilizing people should remain a manly people.

　　Corinth, yes; Sybaris, no.

　　Whoever becomes effeminate makes himself a bastard.

　　He must be neither a dilettante nor a virtuoso:

　　but he must be artistic.

　　In the matter of civilization, he must not refine, but he must sublime.

　　On this condition, one gives to the human race the pattern of the ideal.

　　The modern ideal has its type in art, and its means is science. It is through science that it will realize that august vision of the poets, the socially beautiful.

　　Eden will be reconstructed by A+B. At the point which civilization has now reached, the exact is a necessary element of the splendid, and the artistic sentiment is not only served, but completed by the scientific organ; dreams must be calculated.

　　Art, which is the conqueror, should have for support science, which is the walker; the solidity of the creature which is ridden is of importance.

　　The modern spirit is the genius of Greece with the genius of India as its vehicle; Alexander on the elephant.

　　Races which are petrified in dogma or demoralized by lucre are unfit to guide civilization.

　　Genuflection before the idol or before money wastes away the muscles which walk and the will which advances. Hieratic or mercantile absorption lessens a people's power of radiance, lowers its horizon by lowering its level, and deprives it of that intelligence, at once both human and divine of the universal goal, which makes missionaries of nations.

　　Babylon has no ideal; Carthage has no ideal.

　　Athens and Rome have and keep, throughout all the nocturnal darkness of the centuries, halos of civilization.

　　France is in the same quality of race as Greece and Italy. She is Athenian in the matter of beauty, and Roman in her greatness. Moreover, she is good.

　　She gives herself.

　　Oftener than is the case with other races, is she in the humor for self-devotion and sacrifice. Only, this humor seizes upon her, and again abandons her. And therein lies the great peril for those who run when she desires only to walk, or who walk on when she desires to halt. France has her relapses into materialism, and, at certain instants, the ideas which obstruct that sublime brain have no longer anything which recalls French greatness and are of the dimensions of a Missouri or a South Carolina.

　　What is to be done in such a case? The giantess plays at being a dwarf; immense France has her freaks of pettiness.

　　That is all.

　　To this there is nothing to say.

　　Peoples, like planets, possess the right to an eclipse.

　　And all is well, provided that the light returns and that the eclipse does not degenerate into night. Dawn and resurrection are synonymous.

　　The reappearance of the light is identical with the persistence of the _I_.

　　Let us state these facts calmly.

　　Death on the barricade or the tomb in exile, is an acceptable occasion for devotion. The real name of devotion is disinterestedness.

　　Let the abandoned allow themselves to be abandoned, let the exiled allow themselves to be exiled, and let us confine ourselves to entreating great nations not to retreat too far, when they do retreat.

　　One must not push too far in descent under pretext of a return to reason.

　　Matter exists, the minute exists, interest exists, the stomach exists; but the stomach must not be the sole wisdom.

　　The life of the moment has its rights, we admit, but permanent life has its rights also. Alas! the fact that one is mounted does not preclude a fall. This can be seen in history more frequently than is desirable: A nation is great, it tastes the ideal, then it bites the mire, and finds it good; and if it be asked how it happens that it has abandoned Socrates for Falstaff, it replies:

　　"Because I love statesmen."

　　One word more before returning to our subject, the conflict.

　　A battle like the one which we are engaged in describing is nothing else than a convulsion towards the ideal.

　　Progress trammelled is sickly, and is subject to these tragic epilepsies.

　　With that malady of progress, civil war, we have been obliged to come in contact in our passage.

　　This is one of the fatal phases, at once act and entr'acte of that drama whose pivot is a social condemnation, and whose veritable title is Progress.

　　Progress!

　　The cry to which we frequently give utterance is our whole thought; and, at the point of this drama which we have now reached, the idea which it contains having still more than one trial to undergo, it is, perhaps, permitted to us, if not to lift the veil from it, to at least allow its light to shine through.

　　The book which the reader has under his eye at this moment is, from one end to the other, as a whole and in detail, whatever may be its intermittences, exceptions and faults, the march from evil to good, from the unjust to the just, from night to day, from appetite to conscience, from rottenness to life, from hell to heaven, from nothingness to God.

　　Point of departure:

　　matter; point of arrival: the soul.

　　The hydra at the beginning, the angel at the end.

BOOK FIRST.--THE WAR BETWEEN FOUR WALLS

CHAPTER XXI

　　THE HEROES

　　 All at once, the drum beat the charge.

　　The attack was a hurricane.

　　On the evening before, in the darkness, the barricade had been approached silently, as by a boa.

　　Now, in broad daylight, in that widening street, surprise was decidedly impossible, rude force had, moreover, been unmasked, the cannon had begun the roar, the army hurled itself on the barricade.

　　Fury now became skill. A powerful detachment of infantry of the line, broken at regular intervals, by the National Guard and the Municipal Guard on foot, and supported by serried masses which could be heard though not seen, debauched into the street at a run, with drums beating, trumpets braying, bayonets levelled, the sappers at their head, and, imperturbable under the projectiles, charged straight for the barricade with the weight of a brazen beam against a wall.

　　The wall held firm.

　　The insurgents fired impetuously.

　　The barricade once scaled had a mane of lightning flashes.

　　The assault was so furious, that for one moment, it was inundated with assailants; but it shook off the soldiers as the lion shakes off the dogs, and it was only covered with besiegers as the cliff is covered with foam, to re-appear, a moment later, beetling, black and formidable.

　　The column, forced to retreat, remained massed in the street, unprotected but terrible, and replied to the redoubt with a terrible discharge of musketry.

　　Any one who has seen fireworks will recall the sheaf formed of interlacing lightnings which is called a bouquet. Let the reader picture to himself this bouquet, no longer vertical but horizontal, bearing a bullet, buck-shot or a biscaien at the tip of each one of its jets of flame, and picking off dead men one after another from its clusters of lightning.

　　The barricade was underneath it.

　　On both sides, the resolution was equal.

　　The bravery exhibited there was almost barbarous and was complicated with a sort of heroic ferocity which began by the sacrifice of self.

　　This was the epoch when a National Guardsman fought like a Zouave. The troop wished to make an end of it, insurrection was desirous of fighting.

　　The acceptance of the death agony in the flower of youth and in the flush of health turns intrepidity into frenzy. In this fray, each one underwent the broadening growth of the death hour. The street was strewn with corpses.

　　The barricade had Enjolras at one of its extremities and Marius at the other.

　　Enjolras, who carried the whole barricade in his head, reserved and sheltered himself; three soldiers fell, one after the other, under his embrasure, without having even seen him; Marius fought unprotected.

　　He made himself a target.

　　He stood with more than half his body above the breastworks.

　　There is no more violent prodigal than the avaricious man who takes the bit in his teeth; there is no man more terrible in action than a dreamer. Marius was formidable and pensive.

　　In battle he was as in a dream. One would have pronounced him a phantom engaged in firing a gun.

　　The insurgents' cartridges were giving out; but not their sarcasms. In this whirlwind of the sepulchre in which they stood, they laughed.

　　Courfeyrac was bare-headed.

　　"What have you done with your hat?"

　　Bossuet asked him.

　　Courfeyrac replied:

　　"They have finally taken it away from me with cannon-balls."

　　Or they uttered haughty comments.

　　"Can any one understand," exclaimed Feuilly bitterly, "those men,--[and he cited names, well-known names, even celebrated names, some belonging to the old army]--who had promised to join us, and taken an oath to aid us, and who had pledged their honor to it, and who are our generals, and who abandon us!"

　　And Combeferre restricted himself to replying with a grave smile.

　　"There are people who observe the rules of honor as one observes the stars, from a great distance."

　　The interior of the barricade was so strewn with torn cartridges that one would have said that there had been a snowstorm.

　　The assailants had numbers in their favor; the insurgents had position. They were at the top of a wall, and they thundered point-blank upon the soldiers tripping over the dead and wounded and entangled in the escarpment.

　　This barricade, constructed as it was and admirably buttressed, was really one of those situations where a handful of men hold a legion in check.

　　Nevertheless, the attacking column, constantly recruited and enlarged under the shower of bullets, drew inexorably nearer, and now, little by little, step by step, but surely, the army closed in around the barricade as the vice grasps the wine-press.

　　One assault followed another.

　　The horror of the situation kept increasing.

　　Then there burst forth on that heap of paving-stones, in that Rue de la Chanvrerie, a battle worthy of a wall of Troy. These haggard, ragged, exhausted men, who had had nothing to eat for four and twenty hours, who had not slept, who had but a few more rounds to fire, who were fumbling in their pockets which had been emptied of cartridges, nearly all of whom were wounded, with head or arm bandaged with black and blood-stained linen, with holes in their clothes from which the blood trickled, and who were hardly armed with poor guns and notched swords, became Titans. The barricade was ten times attacked, approached, assailed, scaled, and never captured.

　　In order to form an idea of this struggle, it is necessary to imagine fire set to a throng of terrible courages, and then to gaze at the conflagration.

　　It was not a combat, it was the interior of a furnace; there mouths breathed the flame; there countenances were extraordinary.

　　The human form seemed impossible there, the combatants flamed forth there, and it was formidable to behold the going and coming in that red glow of those salamanders of the fray.

　　The successive and simultaneous scenes of this grand slaughter we renounce all attempts at depicting.

　　The epic alone has the right to fill twelve thousand verses with a battle.

　　One would have pronounced this that hell of Brahmanism, the most redoubtable of the seventeen abysses, which the Veda calls the Forest of Swords.

　　They fought hand to hand, foot to foot, with pistol shots, with blows of the sword, with their fists, at a distance, close at hand, from above, from below, from everywhere, from the roofs of the houses, from the windows of the wine-shop, from the cellar windows, whither some had crawled.

　　They were one against sixty.

　　The facade of Corinthe, half demolished, was hideous.

　　The window, tattooed with grape-shot, had lost glass and frame and was nothing now but a shapeless hole, tumultuously blocked with paving-stones.

　　Bossuet was killed; Feuilly was killed; Courfeyrac was killed; Combeferre, transfixed by three blows from a bayonet in the breast at the moment when he was lifting up a wounded soldier, had only time to cast a glance to heaven when he expired.

　　Marius, still fighting, was so riddled with wounds, particularly in the head, that his countenance disappeared beneath the blood, and one would have said that his face was covered with a red kerchief.

　　Enjolras alone was not struck.

　　When he had no longer any weapon, he reached out his hands to right and left and an insurgent thrust some arm or other into his fist.

　　All he had left was the stumps of four swords; one more than Francois I. at Marignan.

　　Homer says: "Diomedes cuts the throat of Axylus, son of Teuthranis, who dwelt in happy Arisba; Euryalus, son of Mecistaeus, exterminates Dresos and Opheltios, Esepius, and that Pedasus whom the naiad Abarbarea bore to the blameless Bucolion; Ulysses overthrows Pidytes of Percosius; Antilochus, Ablerus; Polypaetes, Astyalus; Polydamas, Otos, of Cyllene; and Teucer, Aretaon.

　　Meganthios dies under the blows of Euripylus' pike.

　　Agamemnon, king of the heroes, flings to earth Elatos, born in the rocky city which is laved by the sounding river Satnois." In our old poems of exploits, Esplandian attacks the giant marquis Swantibore with a cobbler's shoulder-stick of fire, and the latter defends himself by stoning the hero with towers which he plucks up by the roots.

　　Our ancient mural frescoes show us the two Dukes of Bretagne and Bourbon, armed, emblazoned and crested in war-like guise, on horseback and approaching each other, their battle-axes in hand, masked with iron, gloved with iron, booted with iron, the one caparisoned in ermine, the other draped in azure:

　　Bretagne with his lion between the two horns of his crown, Bourbon helmeted with a monster fleur de lys on his visor.

　　But, in order to be superb, it is not necessary to wear, like Yvon, the ducal morion, to have in the fist, like Esplandian, a living flame, or, like Phyles, father of Polydamas, to have brought back from Ephyra a good suit of mail, a present from the king of men, Euphetes; it suffices to give one's life for a conviction or a loyalty.

　　This ingenuous little soldier, yesterday a peasant of Bauce or Limousin, who prowls with his clasp-knife by his side, around the children's nurses in the Luxembourg garden, this pale young student bent over a piece of anatomy or a book, a blond youth who shaves his beard with scissors,--take both of them, breathe upon them with a breath of duty, place them face to face in the Carrefour Boucherat or in the blind alley Planche-Mibray, and let the one fight for his flag, and the other for his ideal, and let both of them imagine that they are fighting for their country; the struggle will be colossal; and the shadow which this raw recruit and this sawbones in conflict will produce in that grand epic field where humanity is striving, will equal the shadow cast by Megaryon, King of Lycia, tiger-filled, crushing in his embrace the immense body of Ajax, equal to the gods.

BOOK FIRST.--THE WAR BETWEEN FOUR WALLS

CHAPTER XXII

　　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 aquafortis.

　　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.

BOOK FIRST.--THE WAR BETWEEN FOUR WALLS

CHAPTER XXIII

　　ORESTES FASTING AND PYLADES DRUNK

　　 At length, by dint of mounting on each other's backs, aiding themselves with the skeleton of the staircase, climbing up the walls, clinging to the ceiling, slashing away at the very brink of the trap-door, the last one who offered resistance, a score of assailants, soldiers, National Guardsmen, municipal guardsmen, in utter confusion, the majority disfigured by wounds in the face during that redoubtable ascent, blinded by blood, furious, rendered savage, made an irruption into the apartment on the first floor.

　　There they found only one man still on his feet, Enjolras.

　　Without cartridges, without sword, he had nothing in his hand now but the barrel of his gun whose stock he had broken over the head of those who were entering. He had placed the billiard table between his assailants and himself; he had retreated into the corner of the room, and there, with haughty eye, and head borne high, with this stump of a weapon in his hand, he was still so alarming as to speedily create an empty space around him.

　　A cry arose:

　　"He is the leader!

　　It was he who slew the artillery-man. It is well that he has placed himself there.

　　Let him remain there. Let us shoot him down on the spot."

　　"Shoot me," said Enjolras.

　　And flinging away his bit of gun-barrel, and folding his arms, he offered his breast.

　　The audacity of a fine death always affects men.

　　As soon as Enjolras folded his arms and accepted his end, the din of strife ceased in the room, and this chaos suddenly stilled into a sort of sepulchral solemnity.

　　The menacing majesty of Enjolras disarmed and motionless, appeared to oppress this tumult, and this young man, haughty, bloody, and charming, who alone had not a wound, who was as indifferent as an invulnerable being, seemed, by the authority of his tranquil glance, to constrain this sinister rabble to kill him respectfully.

　　His beauty, at that moment augmented by his pride, was resplendent, and he was fresh and rosy after the fearful four and twenty hours which had just elapsed, as though he could no more be fatigued than wounded.

　　It was of him, possibly, that a witness spoke afterwards, before the council of war:

　　"There was an insurgent whom I heard called Apollo." A National Guardsman who had taken aim at Enjolras, lowered his gun, saying:

　　"It seems to me that I am about to shoot a flower."

　　Twelve men formed into a squad in the corner opposite Enjolras, and silently made ready their guns.

　　Then a sergeant shouted:

　　"Take aim!"

　　An officer intervened.

　　"Wait."

　　And addressing Enjolras:

　　"Do you wish to have your eyes bandaged?"

　　"No."

　　"Was it you who killed the artillery sergeant?"

　　"Yes."

　　Grantaire had waked up a few moments before.

　　Grantaire, it will be remembered, had been asleep ever since the preceding evening in the upper room of the wine-shop, seated on a chair and leaning on the table.

　　He realized in its fullest sense the old metaphor of "dead drunk." The hideous potion of absinthe-porter and alcohol had thrown him into a lethargy.

　　His table being small, and not suitable for the barricade, he had been left in possession of it. He was still in the same posture, with his breast bent over the table, his head lying flat on his arms, surrounded by glasses, beer-jugs and bottles.

　　His was the overwhelming slumber of the torpid bear and the satiated leech.

　　Nothing had had any effect upon it, neither the fusillade, nor the cannon-balls, nor the grape-shot which had made its way through the window into the room where he was. Nor the tremendous uproar of the assault.

　　He merely replied to the cannonade, now and then, by a snore.

　　He seemed to be waiting there for a bullet which should spare him the trouble of waking. Many corpses were strewn around him; and, at the first glance, there was nothing to distinguish him from those profound sleepers of death.

　　Noise does not rouse a drunken man; silence awakens him.

　　The fall of everything around him only augmented Grantaire's prostration; the crumbling of all things was his lullaby.

　　The sort of halt which the tumult underwent in the presence of Enjolras was a shock to this heavy slumber.

　　It had the effect of a carriage going at full speed, which suddenly comes to a dead stop.

　　The persons dozing within it wake up.

　　Grantaire rose to his feet with a start, stretched out his arms, rubbed his eyes, stared, yawned, and understood.

　　A fit of drunkenness reaching its end resembles a curtain which is torn away.

　　One beholds, at a single glance and as a whole, all that it has concealed.

　　All suddenly presents itself to the memory; and the drunkard who has known nothing of what has been taking place during the last twenty-four hours, has no sooner opened his eyes than he is perfectly informed.

　　Ideas recur to him with abrupt lucidity; the obliteration of intoxication, a sort of steam which has obscured the brain, is dissipated, and makes way for the clear and sharply outlined importunity of realities.

　　Relegated, as he was, to one corner, and sheltered behind the billiard-table, the soldiers whose eyes were fixed on Enjolras, had not even noticed Grantaire, and the sergeant was preparing to repeat his order:

　　"Take aim!" when all at once, they heard a strong voice shout beside them:

　　"Long live the Republic!

　　I'm one of them."

　　Grantaire had risen.

　　The immense gleam of the whole combat which he had missed, and in which he had had no part, appeared in the brilliant glance of the transfigured drunken man.

　　He repeated:

　　"Long live the Republic!" crossed the room with a firm stride and placed himself in front of the guns beside Enjolras.

　　"Finish both of us at one blow," said he.

　　And turning gently to Enjolras, he said to him:

　　"Do you permit it?"

　　Enjolras pressed his hand with a smile.

　　This smile was not ended when the report resounded.

　　Enjolras, pierced by eight bullets, remained leaning against the wall, as though the balls had nailed him there.

　　Only, his head was bowed.

　　Grantaire fell at his feet, as though struck by a thunderbolt.

　　A few moments later, the soldiers dislodged the last remaining insurgents, who had taken refuge at the top of the house.

　　They fired into the attic through a wooden lattice.

　　They fought under the very roof. They flung bodies, some of them still alive, out through the windows. Two light-infantrymen, who tried to lift the shattered omnibus, were slain by two shots fired from the attic.

　　A man in a blouse was flung down from it, with a bayonet wound in the abdomen, and breathed his last on the ground.

　　A soldier and an insurgent slipped together on the sloping slates of the roof, and, as they would not release each other, they fell, clasped in a ferocious embrace.

　　A similar conflict went on in the cellar.

　　Shouts, shots, a fierce trampling. Then silence.

　　The barricade was captured.

　　The soldiers began to search the houses round about, and to pursue the fugitives.

BOOK FIRST.--THE WAR BETWEEN FOUR WALLS

CHAPTER XXIV

　　PRISONER

　　 Marius was, in fact, a prisoner.

　　The hand which had seized him from behind and whose grasp he had felt at the moment of his fall and his loss of consciousness was that of Jean Valjean.

　　Jean Valjean had taken no other part in the combat than to expose himself in it.

　　Had it not been for him, no one, in that supreme phase of agony, would have thought of the wounded.

　　Thanks to him, everywhere present in the carnage, like a providence, those who fell were picked up, transported to the tap-room, and cared for. In the intervals, he reappeared on the barricade.

　　But nothing which could resemble a blow, an attack or even personal defence proceeded from his hands.

　　He held his peace and lent succor. Moreover he had received only a few scratches.

　　The bullets would have none of him.

　　If suicide formed part of what he had meditated on coming to this sepulchre, to that spot, he had not succeeded. But we doubt whether he had thought of suicide, an irreligious act.

　　Jean Valjean, in the thick cloud of the combat, did not appear to see Marius; the truth is, that he never took his eyes from the latter. When a shot laid Marius low, Jean Valjean leaped forward with the agility of a tiger, fell upon him as on his prey, and bore him off.

　　The whirlwind of the attack was, at that moment, so violently concentrated upon Enjolras and upon the door of the wine-shop, that no one saw Jean Valjean sustaining the fainting Marius in his arms, traverse the unpaved field of the barricade and disappear behind the angle of the Corinthe building.

　　The reader will recall this angle which formed a sort of cape on the street; it afforded shelter from the bullets, the grape-shot, and all eyes, and a few square feet of space.

　　There is sometimes a chamber which does not burn in the midst of a conflagration, and in the midst of raging seas, beyond a promontory or at the extremity of a blind alley of shoals, a tranquil nook.

　　It was in this sort of fold in the interior trapezium of the barricade, that Eponine had breathed her last.

　　There Jean Valjean halted, let Marius slide to the ground, placed his back against the wall, and cast his eyes about him.

　　The situation was alarming.

　　For an instant, for two or three perhaps, this bit of wall was a shelter, but how was he to escape from this massacre?

　　He recalled the anguish which he had suffered in the Rue Polonceau eight years before, and in what manner he had contrived to make his escape; it was difficult then, to-day it was impossible.

　　He had before him that deaf and implacable house, six stories in height, which appeared to be inhabited only by a dead man leaning out of his window; he had on his right the rather low barricade, which shut off the Rue de la Petite Truanderie; to pass this obstacle seemed easy, but beyond the crest of the barrier a line of bayonets was visible. The troops of the line were posted on the watch behind that barricade. It was evident, that to pass the barricade was to go in quest of the fire of the platoon, and that any head which should run the risk of lifting itself above the top of that wall of stones would serve as a target for sixty shots.

　　On his left he had the field of battle. Death lurked round the corner of that wall.

　　What was to be done?

　　Only a bird could have extricated itself from this predicament.

　　And it was necessary to decide on the instant, to devise some expedient, to come to some decision.

　　Fighting was going on a few paces away; fortunately, all were raging around a single point, the door of the wine-shop; but if it should occur to one soldier, to one single soldier, to turn the corner of the house, or to attack him on the flank, all was over.

　　Jean Valjean gazed at the house facing him, he gazed at the barricade at one side of him, then he looked at the ground, with the violence of the last extremity, bewildered, and as though he would have liked to pierce a hole there with his eyes.

　　By dint of staring, something vaguely striking in such an agony began to assume form and outline at his feet, as though it had been a power of glance which made the thing desired unfold. A few paces distant he perceived, at the base of the small barrier so pitilessly guarded and watched on the exterior, beneath a disordered mass of paving-stones which partly concealed it, an iron grating, placed flat and on a level with the soil.

　　This grating, made of stout, transverse bars, was about two feet square. The frame of paving-stones which supported it had been torn up, and it was, as it were, unfastened.

　　Through the bars a view could be had of a dark aperture, something like the flue of a chimney, or the pipe of a cistern. Jean Valjean darted forward.

　　His old art of escape rose to his brain like an illumination.

　　To thrust aside the stones, to raise the grating, to lift Marius, who was as inert as a dead body, upon his shoulders, to descend, with this burden on his loins, and with the aid of his elbows and knees into that sort of well, fortunately not very deep, to let the heavy trap, upon which the loosened stones rolled down afresh, fall into its place behind him, to gain his footing on a flagged surface three metres below the surface,--all this was executed like that which one does in dreams, with the strength of a giant and the rapidity of an eagle; this took only a few minutes.

　　Jean Valjean found himself with Marius, who was still unconscious, in a sort of long, subterranean corridor.

　　There reigned profound peace, absolute silence, night.

　　The impression which he had formerly experienced when falling from the wall into the convent recurred to him.

　　Only, what he was carrying to-day was not Cosette; it was Marius.

　　He could barely hear the formidable tumult in the wine-shop, taken by assault, like a vague murmur overhead.

BOOK SECOND.--THE INTESTINE OF THE LEVIATHAN

CHAPTER I

　　THE LAND IMPOVERISHED BY THE SEA

　　Paris casts twenty-five millions yearly into the water.

　　And this without metaphor.

　　How, and in what manner?

　　Day and night. With what object?

　　With no object.

　　With what intention? With no intention.

　　Why?

　　For no reason.

　　By means of what organ? By means of its intestine.

　　What is its intestine?

　　The sewer.

　　Twenty-five millions is the most moderate approximative figure which the valuations of special science have set upon it.

　　Science, after having long groped about, now knows that the most fecundating and the most efficacious of fertilizers is human manure. The Chinese, let us confess it to our shame, knew it before us. Not a Chinese peasant--it is Eckberg who says this,--goes to town without bringing back with him, at the two extremities of his bamboo pole, two full buckets of what we designate as filth.

　　Thanks to human dung, the earth in China is still as young as in the days of Abraham. Chinese wheat yields a hundred fold of the seed.

　　There is no guano comparable in fertility with the detritus of a capital. A great city is the most mighty of dung-makers. Certain success would attend the experiment of employing the city to manure the plain.

　　If our gold is manure, our manure, on the other hand, is gold.

　　What is done with this golden manure?

　　It is swept into the abyss.

　　Fleets of vessels are despatched, at great expense, to collect the dung of petrels and penguins at the South Pole, and the incalculable element of opulence which we have on hand, we send to the sea. All the human and animal manure which the world wastes, restored to the land instead of being cast into the water, would suffice to nourish the world.

　　Those heaps of filth at the gate-posts, those tumbrils of mud which jolt through the street by night, those terrible casks of the street department, those fetid drippings of subterranean mire, which the pavements hide from you,--do you know what they are? They are the meadow in flower, the green grass, wild thyme, thyme and sage, they are game, they are cattle, they are the satisfied bellows of great oxen in the evening, they are perfumed hay, they are golden wheat, they are the bread on your table, they are the warm blood in your veins, they are health, they are joy, they are life. This is the will of that mysterious creation which is transformation on earth and transfiguration in heaven.

　　Restore this to the great crucible; your abundance will flow forth from it.

　　The nutrition of the plains furnishes the nourishment of men.

　　You have it in your power to lose this wealth, and to consider me ridiculous to boot.

　　This will form the master-piece of your ignorance.

　　Statisticians have calculated that France alone makes a deposit of half a milliard every year, in the Atlantic, through the mouths of her rivers.

　　Note this:

　　with five hundred millions we could pay one quarter of the expenses of our budget.

　　The cleverness of man is such that he prefers to get rid of these five hundred millions in the gutter.

　　It is the very substance of the people that is carried off, here drop by drop, there wave after wave, the wretched outpour of our sewers into the rivers, and the gigantic collection of our rivers into the ocean.

　　Every hiccough of our sewers costs us a thousand francs.

　　From this spring two results, the land impoverished, and the water tainted.

　　Hunger arising from the furrow, and disease from the stream.

　　It is notorious, for example, that at the present hour, the Thames is poisoning London.

　　So far as Paris is concerned, it has become indispensable of late, to transport the mouths of the sewers down stream, below the last bridge.

　　A double tubular apparatus, provided with valves and sluices, sucking up and driving back, a system of elementary drainage, simple as the lungs of a man, and which is already in full working order in many communities in England, would suffice to conduct the pure water of the fields into our cities, and to send back to the fields the rich water of the cities, and this easy exchange, the simplest in the world, would retain among us the five hundred millions now thrown away.

　　People are thinking of other things.

　　The process actually in use does evil, with the intention of doing good. The intention is good, the result is melancholy.

　　Thinking to purge the city, the population is blanched like plants raised in cellars. A sewer is a mistake.

　　When drainage, everywhere, with its double function, restoring what it takes, shall have replaced the sewer, which is a simple impoverishing washing, then, this being combined with the data of a now social economy, the product of the earth will be increased tenfold, and the problem of misery will be singularly lightened.

　　Add the suppression of parasitism, and it will be solved.

　　In the meanwhile, the public wealth flows away to the river, and leakage takes place.

　　Leakage is the word.

　　Europe is being ruined in this manner by exhaustion.

　　As for France, we have just cited its figures.

　　Now, Paris contains one twenty-fifth of the total population of France, and Parisian guano being the richest of all, we understate the truth when we value the loss on the part of Paris at twenty-five millions in the half milliard which France annually rejects.

　　These twenty-five millions, employed in assistance and enjoyment, would double the splendor of Paris.

　　The city spends them in sewers.

　　So that we may say that Paris's great prodigality, its wonderful festival, its Beaujon folly, its orgy, its stream of gold from full hands, its pomp, its luxury, its magnificence, is its sewer system.

　　It is in this manner that, in the blindness of a poor political economy, we drown and allow to float down stream and to be lost in the gulfs the well-being of all.

　　There should be nets at Saint-Cloud for the public fortune.

　　Economically considered, the matter can be summed up thus: Paris is a spendthrift.

　　Paris, that model city, that patron of well-arranged capitals, of which every nation strives to possess a copy, that metropolis of the ideal, that august country of the initiative, of impulse and of effort, that centre and that dwelling of minds, that nation-city, that hive of the future, that marvellous combination of Babylon and Corinth, would make a peasant of the Fo-Kian shrug his shoulders, from the point of view which we have just indicated.

　　Imitate Paris and you will ruin yourselves.

　　Moreover, and particularly in this immemorial and senseless waste, Paris is itself an imitator.

　　These surprising exhibitions of stupidity are not novel; this is no young folly.

　　The ancients did like the moderns. "The sewers of Rome," says Liebig, "have absorbed all the well-being of the Roman peasant."

　　When the Campagna of Rome was ruined by the Roman sewer, Rome exhausted Italy, and when she had put Italy in her sewer, she poured in Sicily, then Sardinia, then Africa. The sewer of Rome has engulfed the world.

　　This cess-pool offered its engulfment to the city and the universe.

　　Urbi et orbi. Eternal city, unfathomable sewer.

　　Rome sets the example for these things as well as for others.

　　Paris follows this example with all the stupidity peculiar to intelligent towns.

　　For the requirements of the operation upon the subject of which we have just explained our views, Paris has beneath it another Paris; a Paris of sewers; which has its streets, its cross-roads, its squares, its blind-alleys, its arteries, and its circulation, which is of mire and minus the human form.

　　For nothing must be flattered, not even a great people; where there is everything there is also ignominy by the side of sublimity; and, if Paris contains Athens, the city of light, Tyre, the city of might, Sparta, the city of virtue, Nineveh, the city of marvels, it also contains Lutetia, the city of mud.

　　However, the stamp of its power is there also, and the Titanic sink of Paris realizes, among monuments, that strange ideal realized in humanity by some men like Macchiavelli, Bacon and Mirabeau, grandiose vileness.

　　The sub-soil of Paris, if the eye could penetrate its surface, would present the aspect of a colossal madrepore.

　　A sponge has no more partitions and ducts than the mound of earth for a circuit of six leagues round about, on which rests the great and ancient city. Not to mention its catacombs, which are a separate cellar, not to mention the inextricable trellis-work of gas pipes, without reckoning the vast tubular system for the distribution of fresh water which ends in the pillar fountains, the sewers alone form a tremendous, shadowy net-work under the two banks; a labyrinth which has its slope for its guiding thread.

　　There appears, in the humid mist, the rat which seems the product to which Paris has given birth.

BOOK SECOND.--THE INTESTINE OF THE LEVIATHAN

CHAPTER II

　　ANCIENT HISTORY OF THE SEWER

　　 Let the reader imagine Paris lifted off like a cover, the subterranean net-work of sewers, from a bird's eye view, will outline on the banks a species of large branch grafted on the river.

　　On the right bank, the belt sewer will form the trunk of this branch, the secondary ducts will form the branches, and those without exit the twigs.

　　This figure is but a summary one and half exact, the right angle, which is the customary angle of this species of subterranean ramifications, being very rare in vegetation.

　　A more accurate image of this strange geometrical plan can be formed by supposing that one is viewing some eccentric oriental alphabet, as intricate as a thicket, against a background of shadows, and the misshapen letters should be welded one to another in apparent confusion, and as at haphazard, now by their angles, again by their extremities.

　　Sinks and sewers played a great part in the Middle Ages, in the Lower Empire and in the Orient of old.

　　The masses regarded these beds of decomposition, these monstrous cradles of death, with a fear that was almost religious.

　　The vermin ditch of Benares is no less conducive to giddiness than the lions' ditch of Babylon. Teglath-Phalasar, according to the rabbinical books, swore by the sink of Nineveh.

　　It was from the sewer of Munster that John of Leyden produced his false moon, and it was from the cess-pool of Kekscheb that oriental menalchme, Mokanna, the veiled prophet of Khorassan, caused his false sun to emerge.

　　The history of men is reflected in the history of sewers. The Germoniae[58] narrated Rome.

　　The sewer of Paris has been an ancient and formidable thing.

　　It has been a sepulchre, it has served as an asylum.

　　Crime, intelligence, social protest, liberty of conscience, thought, theft, all that human laws persecute or have persecuted, is hidden in that hole; the maillotins in the fourteenth century, the tire-laine of the fifteenth, the Huguenots in the sixteenth, Morin's illuminated in the seventeenth, the chauffeurs [brigands] in the eighteenth.

　　A hundred years ago, the nocturnal blow of the dagger emerged thence, the pickpocket in danger slipped thither; the forest had its cave, Paris had its sewer. Vagrancy, that Gallic picareria, accepted the sewer as the adjunct of the Cour des Miracles, and at evening, it returned thither, fierce and sly, through the Maubuee outlet, as into a bed-chamber.

　　 [58] Steps on the Aventine Hill, leading to the Tiber, to which the bodies of executed criminals were dragged by hooks to be thrown into the Tiber.

　　 It was quite natural, that those who had the blind-alley Vide-Gousset, [Empty-Pocket] or the Rue Coupe-Gorge [Cut-Throat], for the scene of their daily labor, should have for their domicile by night the culvert of the Chemin-Vert, or the catch basin of Hurepoix. Hence a throng of souvenirs.

　　All sorts of phantoms haunt these long, solitary corridors; everywhere is putrescence and miasma; here and there are breathing-holes, where Villon within converses with Rabelais without.

　　The sewer in ancient Paris is the rendezvous of all exhaustions and of all attempts.

　　Political economy therein spies a detritus, social philosophy there beholds a residuum.

　　The sewer is the conscience of the city.

　　Everything there converges and confronts everything else.

　　In that livid spot there are shades, but there are no longer any secrets. Each thing bears its true form, or at least, its definitive form. The mass of filth has this in its favor, that it is not a liar. Ingenuousness has taken refuge there.

　　The mask of Basil is to be found there, but one beholds its cardboard and its strings and the inside as well as the outside, and it is accentuated by honest mud. Scapin's false nose is its next-door neighbor.

　　All the uncleannesses of civilization, once past their use, fall into this trench of truth, where the immense social sliding ends.

　　They are there engulfed, but they display themselves there.

　　This mixture is a confession. There, no more false appearances, no plastering over is possible, filth removes its shirt, absolute denudation puts to the rout all illusions and mirages, there is nothing more except what really exists, presenting the sinister form of that which is coming to an end. There, the bottom of a bottle indicates drunkenness, a basket-handle tells a tale of domesticity; there the core of an apple which has entertained literary opinions becomes an apple-core once more; the effigy on the big sou becomes frankly covered with verdigris, Caiphas' spittle meets Falstaff's puking, the louis-d'or which comes from the gaming-house jostles the nail whence hangs the rope's end of the suicide.

　　a livid foetus rolls along, enveloped in the spangles which danced at the Opera last Shrove-Tuesday, a cap which has pronounced judgment on men wallows beside a mass of rottenness which was formerly Margoton's petticoat; it is more than fraternization, it is equivalent to addressing each other as thou.

　　All which was formerly rouged, is washed free.

　　The last veil is torn away. A sewer is a cynic.

　　It tells everything.

　　The sincerity of foulness pleases us, and rests the soul.

　　When one has passed one's time in enduring upon earth the spectacle of the great airs which reasons of state, the oath, political sagacity, human justice, professional probity, the austerities of situation, incorruptible robes all assume, it solaces one to enter a sewer and to behold the mire which befits it.

　　This is instructive at the same time.

　　We have just said that history passes through the sewer.

　　The Saint-Barthelemys filter through there, drop by drop, between the paving-stones. Great public assassinations, political and religious butcheries, traverse this underground passage of civilization, and thrust their corpses there.

　　For the eye of the thinker, all historic murderers are to be found there, in that hideous penumbra, on their knees, with a scrap of their winding-sheet for an apron, dismally sponging out their work. Louis XI.

　　is there with Tristan, Francois I. with Duprat, Charles IX. is there with his mother, Richelieu is there with Louis XIII., Louvois is there, Letellier is there, Hebert and Maillard are there, scratching the stones, and trying to make the traces of their actions disappear.

　　Beneath these vaults one hears the brooms of spectres. One there breathes the enormous fetidness of social catastrophes. One beholds reddish reflections in the corners.

　　There flows a terrible stream, in which bloody hands have been washed.

　　The social observer should enter these shadows.

　　They form a part of his laboratory.

　　Philosophy is the microscope of the thought. Everything desires to flee from it, but nothing escapes it. Tergiversation is useless.

　　What side of oneself does one display in evasions? the shameful side.

　　Philosophy pursues with its glance, probes the evil, and does not permit it to escape into nothingness. In the obliteration of things which disappear, in the watching of things which vanish, it recognizes all.

　　It reconstructs the purple from the rag, and the woman from the scrap of her dress. From the cess-pool, it re-constitutes the city; from mud, it reconstructs manners; from the potsherd it infers the amphora or the jug.

　　By the imprint of a finger-nail on a piece of parchment, it recognizes the difference which separates the Jewry of the Judengasse from the Jewry of the Ghetto.

　　It re-discovers in what remains that which has been, good, evil, the true, the blood-stain of the palace, the ink-blot of the cavern, the drop of sweat from the brothel, trials undergone, temptations welcomed, orgies cast forth, the turn which characters have taken as they became abased, the trace of prostitution in souls of which their grossness rendered them capable, and on the vesture of the porters of Rome the mark of Messalina's elbowing.

BOOK SECOND.--THE INTESTINE OF THE LEVIATHAN

CHAPTER III

　　BRUNESEAU

　　 The sewer of Paris in the Middle Ages was legendary.

　　In the sixteenth century, Henri II.

　　attempted a bore, which failed. Not a hundred years ago, the cess-pool, Mercier attests the fact, was abandoned to itself, and fared as best it might.

　　Such was this ancient Paris, delivered over to quarrels, to indecision, and to gropings.

　　It was tolerably stupid for a long time. Later on, '89 showed how understanding comes to cities.

　　But in the good, old times, the capital had not much head.

　　It did not know how to manage its own affairs either morally or materially, and could not sweep out filth any better than it could abuses. Everything presented an obstacle, everything raised a question. The sewer, for example, was refractory to every itinerary. One could no more find one's bearings in the sewer than one could understand one's position in the city; above the unintelligible, below the inextricable; beneath the confusion of tongues there reigned the confusion of caverns; Daedalus backed up Babel.

　　Sometimes the Paris sewer took a notion to overflow, as though this misunderstood Nile were suddenly seized with a fit of rage. There occurred, infamous to relate, inundations of the sewer. At times, that stomach of civilization digested badly, the cess-pool flowed back into the throat of the city, and Paris got an after-taste of her own filth.

　　These resemblances of the sewer to remorse had their good points; they were warnings; very badly accepted, however; the city waxed indignant at the audacity of its mire, and did not admit that the filth should return.

　　Drive it out better.

　　The inundation of 1802 is one of the actual memories of Parisians of the age of eighty.

　　The mud spread in cross-form over the Place des Victoires, where stands the statue of Louis XIV.; it entered the Rue Saint-Honore by the two mouths to the sewer in the Champs-Elysees, the Rue Saint-Florentin through the Saint-Florentin sewer, the Rue Pierre-a-Poisson through the sewer de la Sonnerie, the Rue Popincourt, through the sewer of the Chemin-Vert, the Rue de la Roquette, through the sewer of the Rue de Lappe; it covered the drain of the Rue des Champs-Elysees to the height of thirty-five centimetres; and, to the South, through the vent of the Seine, performing its functions in inverse sense, it penetrated the Rue Mazarine, the Rue de l'Echaude, and the Rue des Marais, where it stopped at a distance of one hundred and nine metres, a few paces distant from the house in which Racine had lived, respecting, in the seventeenth century, the poet more than the King. It attained its maximum depth in the Rue Saint-Pierre, where it rose to the height of three feet above the flag-stones of the water-spout, and its maximum length in the Rue Saint-Sabin, where it spread out over a stretch two hundred and thirty-eight metres in length.

　　At the beginning of this century, the sewer of Paris was still a mysterious place.

　　Mud can never enjoy a good fame; but in this case its evil renown reached the verge of the terrible.

　　Paris knew, in a confused way, that she had under her a terrible cavern. People talked of it as of that monstrous bed of Thebes in which swarmed centipedes fifteen long feet in length, and which might have served Behemoth for a bathtub.

　　The great boots of the sewermen never ventured further than certain well-known points.

　　We were then very near the epoch when the scavenger's carts, from the summit of which Sainte-Foix fraternized with the Marquis de Crequi, discharged their loads directly into the sewer.

　　As for cleaning out,-- that function was entrusted to the pouring rains which encumbered rather than swept away.

　　Rome left some poetry to her sewer, and called it the Gemoniae; Paris insulted hers, and entitled it the Polypus-Hole. Science and superstition were in accord, in horror. The Polypus hole was no less repugnant to hygiene than to legend. The goblin was developed under the fetid covering of the Mouffetard sewer; the corpses of the Marmousets had been cast into the sewer de la Barillerie; Fagon attributed the redoubtable malignant fever of 1685 to the great hiatus of the sewer of the Marais, which remained yawning until 1833 in the Rue Saint-Louis, almost opposite the sign of the Gallant Messenger.

　　The mouth of the sewer of the Rue de la Mortellerie was celebrated for the pestilences which had their source there; with its grating of iron, with points simulating a row of teeth, it was like a dragon's maw in that fatal street, breathing forth hell upon men.

　　The popular imagination seasoned the sombre Parisian sink with some indescribably hideous intermixture of the infinite. The sewer had no bottom.

　　The sewer was the lower world.

　　The idea of exploring these leprous regions did not even occur to the police. To try that unknown thing, to cast the plummet into that shadow, to set out on a voyage of discovery in that abyss--who would have dared? It was alarming.

　　Nevertheless, some one did present himself. The cess-pool had its Christopher Columbus.

　　One day, in 1805, during one of the rare apparitions which the Emperor made in Paris, the Minister of the Interior, some Decres or Cretet or other, came to the master's intimate levee. In the Carrousel there was audible the clanking of swords of all those extraordinary soldiers of the great Republic, and of the great Empire; then Napoleon's door was blocked with heroes; men from the Rhine, from the Escaut, from the Adige, and from the Nile; companions of Joubert, of Desaix, of Marceau, of Hoche, of Kleber; the aerostiers of Fleurus, the grenadiers of Mayence, the pontoon-builders of Genoa, hussars whom the Pyramids had looked down upon, artillerists whom Junot's cannon-ball had spattered with mud, cuirassiers who had taken by assault the fleet lying at anchor in the Zuyderzee; some had followed Bonaparte upon the bridge of Lodi, others had accompanied Murat in the trenches of Mantua, others had preceded Lannes in the hollow road of Montebello. The whole army of that day was present there, in the court-yard of the Tuileries, represented by a squadron or a platoon, and guarding Napoleon in repose; and that was the splendid epoch when the grand army had Marengo behind it and Austerlitz before it.--"Sire," said the Minister of the Interior to Napoleon, "yesterday I saw the most intrepid man in your Empire."--"What man is that?" said the Emperor brusquely, "and what has he done?"--"He wants to do something, Sire."--"What is it?"--"To visit the sewers of Paris."

　　This man existed and his name was Bruneseau.

BOOK SECOND.--THE INTESTINE OF THE LEVIATHAN

CHAPTER IV

　　 The visit took place.

　　It was a formidable campaign; a nocturnal battle against pestilence and suffocation.

　　It was, at the same time, a voyage of discovery.

　　One of the survivors of this expedition, an intelligent workingman, who was very young at the time, related curious details with regard to it, several years ago, which Bruneseau thought himself obliged to omit in his report to the prefect of police, as unworthy of official style.

　　The processes of disinfection were, at that epoch, extremely rudimentary.

　　Hardly had Bruneseau crossed the first articulations of that subterranean network, when eight laborers out of the twenty refused to go any further.

　　The operation was complicated; the visit entailed the necessity of cleaning; hence it was necessary to cleanse and at the same time, to proceed; to note the entrances of water, to count the gratings and the vents, to lay out in detail the branches, to indicate the currents at the point where they parted, to define the respective bounds of the divers basins, to sound the small sewers grafted on the principal sewer, to measure the height under the key-stone of each drain, and the width, at the spring of the vaults as well as at the bottom, in order to determine the arrangements with regard to the level of each water-entrance, either of the bottom of the arch, or on the soil of the street.

　　They advanced with toil.

　　The lanterns pined away in the foul atmosphere.

　　From time to time, a fainting sewerman was carried out.

　　At certain points, there were precipices. The soil had given away, the pavement had crumbled, the sewer had changed into a bottomless well; they found nothing solid; a man disappeared suddenly; they had great difficulty in getting him out again.

　　On the advice of Fourcroy, they lighted large cages filled with tow steeped in resin, from time to time, in spots which had been sufficiently disinfected.

　　In some places, the wall was covered with misshapen fungi,--one would have said tumors; the very stone seemed diseased within this unbreathable atmosphere.

　　Bruneseau, in his exploration, proceeded down hill.

　　At the point of separation of the two water-conduits of the Grand-Hurleur, he deciphered upon a projecting stone the date of 1550; this stone indicated the limits where Philibert Delorme, charged by Henri II. with visiting the subterranean drains of Paris, had halted. This stone was the mark of the sixteenth century on the sewer; Bruneseau found the handiwork of the seventeenth century once more in the Ponceau drain of the old Rue Vielle-du-Temple, vaulted between 1600 and 1650; and the handiwork of the eighteenth in the western section of the collecting canal, walled and vaulted in 1740. These two vaults, especially the less ancient, that of 1740, were more cracked and decrepit than the masonry of the belt sewer, which dated from 1412, an epoch when the brook of fresh water of Menilmontant was elevated to the dignity of the Grand Sewer of Paris, an advancement analogous to that of a peasant who should become first valet de chambre to the King; something like Gros-Jean transformed into Lebel.

　　Here and there, particularly beneath the Court-House, they thought they recognized the hollows of ancient dungeons, excavated in the very sewer itself.

　　Hideous in-pace. An iron neck-collar was hanging in one of these cells.

　　They walled them all up.

　　Some of their finds were singular; among others, the skeleton of an ourang-outan, who had disappeared from the Jardin des Plantes in 1800, a disappearance probably connected with the famous and indisputable apparition of the devil in the Rue des Bernardins, in the last year of the eighteenth century.

　　The poor devil had ended by drowning himself in the sewer.

　　Beneath this long, arched drain which terminated at the Arche-Marion, a perfectly preserved rag-picker's basket excited the admiration of all connoisseurs.

　　Everywhere, the mire, which the sewermen came to handle with intrepidity, abounded in precious objects, jewels of gold and silver, precious stones, coins.

　　If a giant had filtered this cesspool, he would have had the riches of centuries in his lair. At the point where the two branches of the Rue du Temple and of the Rue Sainte-Avoye separate, they picked up a singular Huguenot medal in copper, bearing on one side the pig hooded with a cardinal's hat, and on the other, a wolf with a tiara on his head.

　　The most surprising rencounter was at the entrance to the Grand Sewer. This entrance had formerly been closed by a grating of which nothing but the hinges remained.

　　From one of these hinges hung a dirty and shapeless rag which, arrested there in its passage, no doubt, had floated there in the darkness and finished its process of being torn apart.

　　Bruneseau held his lantern close to this rag and examined it.

　　It was of very fine batiste, and in one of the corners, less frayed than the rest, they made out a heraldic coronet and embroidered above these seven letters:

　　LAVBESP.

　　The crown was the coronet of a Marquis, and the seven letters signified Laubespine. They recognized the fact, that what they had before their eyes was a morsel of the shroud of Marat.

　　Marat in his youth had had amorous intrigues.

　　This was when he was a member of the household of the Comte d'Artois, in the capacity of physician to the Stables. From these love affairs, historically proved, with a great lady, he had retained this sheet.

　　As a waif or a souvenir.

　　At his death, as this was the only linen of any fineness which he had in his house, they buried him in it.

　　Some old women had shrouded him for the tomb in that swaddling-band in which the tragic Friend of the people had enjoyed voluptuousness.

　　Bruneseau passed on.

　　They left that rag where it hung; they did not put the finishing touch to it. Did this arise from scorn or from respect?

　　Marat deserved both. And then, destiny was there sufficiently stamped to make them hesitate to touch it.

　　Besides, the things of the sepulchre must be left in the spot which they select.

　　In short, the relic was a strange one.

　　A Marquise had slept in it; Marat had rotted in it; it had traversed the Pantheon to end with the rats of the sewer. This chamber rag, of which Watteau would formerly have joyfully sketched every fold, had ended in becoming worthy of the fixed gaze of Dante.

　　The whole visit to the subterranean stream of filth of Paris lasted seven years, from 1805 to 1812.

　　As he proceeded, Bruneseau drew, directed, and completed considerable works; in 1808 he lowered the arch of the Ponceau, and, everywhere creating new lines, he pushed the sewer, in 1809, under the Rue Saint-Denis as far as the fountain of the Innocents; in 1810, under the Rue Froidmanteau and under the Salpetriere; in 1811 under the Rue Neuve-des-Petits-Peres, under the Rue du Mail, under the Rue de l'Echarpe, under the Place Royale; in 1812, under the Rue de la Paix, and under the Chaussee d'Antin. At the same time, he had the whole net-work disinfected and rendered healthful.

　　In the second year of his work, Bruneseau engaged the assistance of his son-in-law Nargaud.

　　It was thus that, at the beginning of the century, ancient society cleansed its double bottom, and performed the toilet of its sewer. There was that much clean, at all events.

　　Tortuous, cracked, unpaved, full of fissures, intersected by gullies, jolted by eccentric elbows, mounting and descending illogically, fetid, wild, fierce, submerged in obscurity, with cicatrices on its pavements and scars on its walls, terrible,--such was, retrospectively viewed, the antique sewer of Paris.

　　Ramifications in every direction, crossings, of trenches, branches, goose-feet, stars, as in military mines, coecum, blind alleys, vaults lined with saltpetre, pestiferous pools, scabby sweats, on the walls, drops dripping from the ceilings, darkness; nothing could equal the horror of this old, waste crypt, the digestive apparatus of Babylon, a cavern, ditch, gulf pierced with streets, a titanic mole-burrow, where the mind seems to behold that enormous blind mole, the past, prowling through the shadows, in the filth which has been splendor.

　　This, we repeat, was the sewer of the past.

BOOK SECOND.--THE INTESTINE OF THE LEVIATHAN

CHAPTER V

　　PRESENT PROGRESS

　　 To-day the sewer is clean, cold, straight, correct.

　　It almost realizes the ideal of what is understood in England by the word "respectable."

　　It is proper and grayish; laid out by rule and line; one might almost say as though it came out of a bandbox. It resembles a tradesman who has become a councillor of state. One can almost see distinctly there.

　　The mire there comports itself with decency.

　　At first, one might readily mistake it for one of those subterranean corridors, which were so common in former days, and so useful in flights of monarchs and princes, in those good old times, "when the people loved their kings." The present sewer is a beautiful sewer; the pure style reigns there; the classical rectilinear alexandrine which, driven out of poetry, appears to have taken refuge in architecture, seems mingled with all the stones of that long, dark and whitish vault; each outlet is an arcade; the Rue de Rivoli serves as pattern even in the sewer.

　　However, if the geometrical line is in place anywhere, it is certainly in the drainage trench of a great city. There, everything should be subordinated to the shortest road. The sewer has, nowadays, assumed a certain official aspect. The very police reports, of which it sometimes forms the subject, no longer are wanting in respect towards it.

　　The words which characterize it in administrative language are sonorous and dignified. What used to be called a gut is now called a gallery; what used to be called a hole is now called a surveying orifice.

　　Villon would no longer meet with his ancient temporary provisional lodging. This net-work of cellars has its immemorial population of prowlers, rodents, swarming in greater numbers than ever; from time to time, an aged and veteran rat risks his head at the window of the sewer and surveys the Parisians; but even these vermin grow tame, so satisfied are they with their subterranean palace.

　　The cesspool no longer retains anything of its primitive ferocity.

　　The rain, which in former days soiled the sewer, now washes it.

　　Nevertheless, do not trust yourself too much to it.

　　Miasmas still inhabit it. It is more hypocritical than irreproachable.

　　The prefecture of police and the commission of health have done their best. But, in spite of all the processes of disinfection, it exhales, a vague, suspicious odor like Tartuffe after confession.

　　Let us confess, that, taking it all in all, this sweeping is a homage which the sewer pays to civilization, and as, from this point of view, Tartuffe's conscience is a progress over the Augean stables, it is certain that the sewers of Paris have been improved.

　　It is more than progress; it is transmutation.

　　Between the ancient and the present sewer there is a revolution.

　　What has effected this revolution?

　　The man whom all the world forgets, and whom we have mentioned, Bruneseau.

BOOK SECOND.--THE INTESTINE OF THE LEVIATHAN

CHAPTER VI

　　FUTURE PROGRESS

　　 The excavation of the sewer of Paris has been no slight task. The last ten centuries have toiled at it without being able to bring it to a termination, any more than they have been able to finish Paris.

　　The sewer, in fact, receives all the counter-shocks of the growth of Paris.

　　Within the bosom of the earth, it is a sort of mysterious polyp with a thousand antennae, which expands below as the city expands above.

　　Every time that the city cuts a street, the sewer stretches out an arm.

　　The old monarchy had constructed only twenty-three thousand three hundred metres of sewers; that was where Paris stood in this respect on the first of January, 1806. Beginning with this epoch, of which we shall shortly speak, the work was usefully and energetically resumed and prosecuted; Napoleon built--the figures are curious--four thousand eight hundred and four metres; Louis XVIII., five thousand seven hundred and nine; Charles X., ten thousand eight hundred and thirty-six; Louis-Philippe, eighty-nine thousand and twenty; the Republic of 1848, twenty-three thousand three hundred and eighty-one; the present government, seventy thousand five hundred; in all, at the present time, two hundred and twenty-six thousand six hundred and ten metres; sixty leagues of sewers; the enormous entrails of Paris.

　　An obscure ramification ever at work; a construction which is immense and ignored.

　　As the reader sees, the subterranean labyrinth of Paris is to-day more than ten times what it was at the beginning of the century. It is difficult to form any idea of all the perseverance and the efforts which have been required to bring this cess-pool to the point of relative perfection in which it now is.

　　It was with great difficulty that the ancient monarchical provostship and, during the last ten years of the eighteenth century, the revolutionary mayoralty, had succeeded in perforating the five leagues of sewer which existed previous to 1806.

　　All sorts of obstacles hindered this operation, some peculiar to the soil, others inherent in the very prejudices of the laborious population of Paris.

　　Paris is built upon a soil which is singularly rebellious to the pick, the hoe, the bore, and to human manipulation.

　　There is nothing more difficult to pierce and to penetrate than the geological formation upon which is superposed the marvellous historical formation called Paris; as soon as work in any form whatsoever is begun and adventures upon this stretch of alluvium, subterranean resistances abound. There are liquid clays, springs, hard rocks, and those soft and deep quagmires which special science calls moutardes.[59] The pick advances laboriously through the calcareous layers alternating with very slender threads of clay, and schistose beds in plates incrusted with oyster-shells, the contemporaries of the pre-Adamite oceans.

　　Sometimes a rivulet suddenly bursts through a vault that has been begun, and inundates the laborers; or a layer of marl is laid bare, and rolls down with the fury of a cataract, breaking the stoutest supporting beams like glass.

　　Quite recently, at Villette, when it became necessary to pass the collecting sewer under the Saint-Martin canal without interrupting navigation or emptying the canal, a fissure appeared in the basin of the canal, water suddenly became abundant in the subterranean tunnel, which was beyond the power of the pumping engines; it was necessary to send a diver to explore the fissure which had been made in the narrow entrance of the grand basin, and it was not without great difficulty that it was stopped up.

　　Elsewhere near the Seine, and even at a considerable distance from the river, as for instance, at Belleville, Grand-Rue and Lumiere Passage, quicksands are encountered in which one sticks fast, and in which a man sinks visibly.

　　Add suffocation by miasmas, burial by slides, and sudden crumbling of the earth. Add the typhus, with which the workmen become slowly impregnated. In our own day, after having excavated the gallery of Clichy, with a banquette to receive the principal water-conduit of Ourcq, a piece of work which was executed in a trench ten metres deep; after having, in the midst of land-slides, and with the aid of excavations often putrid, and of shoring up, vaulted the Bievre from the Boulevard de l'Hopital, as far as the Seine; after having, in order to deliver Paris from the floods of Montmartre and in order to provide an outlet for that river-like pool nine hectares in extent, which crouched near the Barriere des Martyrs, after having, let us state, constructed the line of sewers from the Barriere Blanche to the road of Aubervilliers, in four months, working day and night, at a depth of eleven metres; after having--a thing heretofore unseen-- made a subterranean sewer in the Rue Barre-du-Bec, without a trench, six metres below the surface, the superintendent, Monnot, died. After having vaulted three thousand metres of sewer in all quarters of the city, from the Rue Traversiere-Saint-Antoine to the Rue de l'Ourcine, after having freed the Carrefour Censier-Mouffetard from inundations of rain by means of the branch of the Arbalete, after having built the Saint-Georges sewer, on rock and concrete in the fluid sands, after having directed the formidable lowering of the flooring of the vault timber in the Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth branch, Duleau the engineer died.

　　There are no bulletins for such acts of bravery as these, which are more useful, nevertheless, than the brutal slaughter of the field of battle.

　　 [59] Mustards.

　　 The sewers of Paris in 1832 were far from being what they are to-day. Bruneseau had given the impulse, but the cholera was required to bring about the vast reconstruction which took place later on.

　　It is surprising to say, for example, that in 1821, a part of the belt sewer, called the Grand Canal, as in Venice, still stood stagnating uncovered to the sky, in the Rue des Gourdes. It was only in 1821 that the city of Paris found in its pocket the two hundred and sixty-thousand eighty francs and six centimes required for covering this mass of filth.

　　The three absorbing wells, of the Combat, the Cunette, and Saint-Mande, with their discharging mouths, their apparatus, their cesspools, and their depuratory branches, only date from 1836.

　　The intestinal sewer of Paris has been made over anew, and, as we have said, it has been extended more than tenfold within the last quarter of a century.

　　Thirty years ago, at the epoch of the insurrection of the 5th and 6th of June, it was still, in many localities, nearly the same ancient sewer. A very great number of streets which are now convex were then sunken causeways.

　　At the end of a slope, where the tributaries of a street or cross-roads ended, there were often to be seen large, square gratings with heavy bars, whose iron, polished by the footsteps of the throng, gleamed dangerous and slippery for vehicles, and caused horses to fall.

　　The official language of the Roads and Bridges gave to these gratings the expressive name of Cassis.[60]

　　 [60] From casser, to break:

　　break-necks.

　　 In 1832, in a number of streets, in the Rue de l'Etoile, the Rue Saint-Louis, the Rue du Temple, the Rue Vielle-duTemple, the Rue Notre-Dame de Nazareth, the Rue Folie-Mericourt, the Quai aux Fleurs, the Rue du Petit-Muse, the Rue du Normandie, the Rue Pont-Aux-Biches, the Rue des Marais, the Faubourg Saint-Martin, the Rue Notre Dame des-Victoires, the Faubourg Montmartre, the Rue Grange-Bateliere, in the Champs-Elysees, the Rue Jacob, the Rue de Tournon, the ancient gothic sewer still cynically displayed its maw. It consisted of enormous voids of stone catch-basins sometimes surrounded by stone posts, with monumental effrontery.

　　Paris in 1806 still had nearly the same sewers numerically as stated in 1663; five thousand three hundred fathoms.

　　After Bruneseau, on the 1st of January, 1832, it had forty thousand three hundred metres. Between 1806 and 1831, there had been built, on an average, seven hundred and fifty metres annually, afterwards eight and even ten thousand metres of galleries were constructed every year, in masonry, of small stones, with hydraulic mortar which hardens under water, on a cement foundation.

　　At two hundred francs the metre, the sixty leagues of Paris' sewers of the present day represent forty-eight millions.

　　In addition to the economic progress which we have indicated at the beginning, grave problems of public hygiene are connected with that immense question:

　　the sewers of Paris.

　　Paris is the centre of two sheets, a sheet of water and a sheet of air. The sheet of water, lying at a tolerably great depth underground, but already sounded by two bores, is furnished by the layer of green clay situated between the chalk and the Jurassic lime-stone; this layer may be represented by a disk five and twenty leagues in circumference; a multitude of rivers and brooks ooze there; one drinks the Seine, the Marne, the Yonne, the Oise, the Aisne, the Cher, the Vienne and the Loire in a glass of water from the well of Grenelle. The sheet of water is healthy, it comes from heaven in the first place and next from the earth; the sheet of air is unhealthy, it comes from the sewer.

　　All the miasms of the cess-pool are mingled with the breath of the city; hence this bad breath.

　　The air taken from above a dung-heap, as has been scientifically proved, is purer than the air taken from above Paris.

　　In a given time, with the aid of progress, mechanisms become perfected, and as light increases, the sheet of water will be employed to purify the sheet of air; that is to say, to wash the sewer.

　　The reader knows, that by "washing the sewer" we mean:

　　the restitution of the filth to the earth; the return to the soil of dung and of manure to the fields. Through this simple act, the entire social community will experience a diminution of misery and an augmentation of health. At the present hour, the radiation of diseases from Paris extends to fifty leagues around the Louvre, taken as the hub of this pestilential wheel.

　　We might say that, for ten centuries, the cess-pool has been the disease of Paris.

　　The sewer is the blemish which Paris has in her blood. The popular instinct has never been deceived in it.

　　The occupation of sewermen was formerly almost as perilous, and almost as repugnant to the people, as the occupation of knacker, which was so long held in horror and handed over to the executioner.

　　High wages were necessary to induce a mason to disappear in that fetid mine; the ladder of the cess-pool cleaner hesitated to plunge into it; it was said, in proverbial form:

　　"to descend into the sewer is to enter the grave;" and all sorts of hideous legends, as we have said, covered this colossal sink with terror; a dread sink-hole which bears the traces of the revolutions of the globe as of the revolutions of man, and where are to be found vestiges of all cataclysms from the shells of the Deluge to the rag of Marat.

BOOK THIRD.--MUD BUT THE SOUL

CHAPTER I

　　THE SEWER AND ITS SURPRISES

　　 It was in the sewers of Paris that Jean Valjean found himself.

　　Still another resemblance between Paris and the sea.

　　As in the ocean, the diver may disappear there.

　　The transition was an unheard-of one.

　　In the very heart of the city, Jean Valjean had escaped from the city, and, in the twinkling of an eye, in the time required to lift the cover and to replace it, he had passed from broad daylight to complete obscurity, from midday to midnight, from tumult to silence, from the whirlwind of thunders to the stagnation of the tomb, and, by a vicissitude far more tremendous even than that of the Rue Polonceau, from the most extreme peril to the most absolute obscurity.

　　An abrupt fall into a cavern; a disappearance into the secret trap-door of Paris; to quit that street where death was on every side, for that sort of sepulchre where there was life, was a strange instant.

　　He remained for several seconds as though bewildered; listening, stupefied.

　　The waste-trap of safety had suddenly yawned beneath him.

　　Celestial goodness had, in a manner, captured him by treachery.

　　Adorable ambuscades of providence!

　　Only, the wounded man did not stir, and Jean Valjean did not know whether that which he was carrying in that grave was a living being or a dead corpse.

　　His first sensation was one of blindness.

　　All of a sudden, he could see nothing.

　　It seemed to him too, that, in one instant, he had become deaf.

　　He no longer heard anything.

　　The frantic storm of murder which had been let loose a few feet above his head did not reach him, thanks to the thickness of the earth which separated him from it, as we have said, otherwise than faintly and indistinctly, and like a rumbling, in the depths. He felt that the ground was solid under his feet; that was all; but that was enough.

　　He extended one arm and then the other, touched the walls on both sides, and perceived that the passage was narrow; he slipped, and thus perceived that the pavement was wet. He cautiously put forward one foot, fearing a hole, a sink, some gulf; he discovered that the paving continued.

　　A gust of fetidness informed him of the place in which he stood.

　　After the lapse of a few minutes, he was no longer blind.

　　A little light fell through the man-hole through which he had descended, and his eyes became accustomed to this cavern.

　　He began to distinguish something. The passage in which he had burrowed--no other word can better express the situation--was walled in behind him.

　　It was one of those blind alleys, which the special jargon terms branches. In front of him there was another wall, a wall like night. The light of the air-hole died out ten or twelve paces from the point where Jean Valjean stood, and barely cast a wan pallor on a few metres of the damp walls of the sewer.

　　Beyond, the opaqueness was massive; to penetrate thither seemed horrible, an entrance into it appeared like an engulfment.

　　A man could, however, plunge into that wall of fog and it was necessary so to do.

　　Haste was even requisite. It occurred to Jean Valjean that the grating which he had caught sight of under the flag-stones might also catch the eye of the soldiery, and that everything hung upon this chance.

　　They also might descend into that well and search it.

　　There was not a minute to be lost. He had deposited Marius on the ground, he picked him up again,-- that is the real word for it,--placed him on his shoulders once more, and set out.

　　He plunged resolutely into the gloom.

　　The truth is, that they were less safe than Jean Valjean fancied. Perils of another sort and no less serious were awaiting them, perchance.

　　After the lightning-charged whirlwind of the combat, the cavern of miasmas and traps; after chaos, the sewer. Jean Valjean had fallen from one circle of hell into another.

　　When he had advanced fifty paces, he was obliged to halt.

　　A problem presented itself.

　　The passage terminated in another gut which he encountered across his path.

　　There two ways presented themselves. Which should he take?

　　Ought he to turn to the left or to the right? How was he to find his bearings in that black labyrinth? This labyrinth, to which we have already called the reader's attention, has a clue, which is its slope.

　　To follow to the slope is to arrive at the river.

　　This Jean Valjean instantly comprehended.

　　He said to himself that he was probably in the sewer des Halles; that if he were to choose the path to the left and follow the slope, he would arrive, in less than a quarter of an hour, at some mouth on the Seine between the Pont au Change and the Pont-Neuf, that is to say, he would make his appearance in broad daylight on the most densely peopled spot in Paris.

　　Perhaps he would come out on some man-hole at the intersection of streets.

　　Amazement of the passers-by at beholding two bleeding men emerge from the earth at their feet. Arrival of the police, a call to arms of the neighboring post of guards.

　　Thus they would be seized before they had even got out. It would be better to plunge into that labyrinth, to confide themselves to that black gloom, and to trust to Providence for the outcome.

　　He ascended the incline, and turned to the right.

　　When he had turned the angle of the gallery, the distant glimmer of an air-hole disappeared, the curtain of obscurity fell upon him once more, and he became blind again.

　　Nevertheless, he advanced as rapidly as possible.

　　Marius' two arms were passed round his neck, and the former's feet dragged behind him.

　　He held both these arms with one hand, and groped along the wall with the other.

　　Marius' cheek touched his, and clung there, bleeding. He felt a warm stream which came from Marius trickling down upon him and making its way under his clothes.

　　But a humid warmth near his ear, which the mouth of the wounded man touched, indicated respiration, and consequently, life.

　　The passage along which Jean Valjean was now proceeding was not so narrow as the first. Jean Valjean walked through it with considerable difficulty. The rain of the preceding day had not, as yet, entirely run off, and it created a little torrent in the centre of the bottom, and he was forced to hug the wall in order not to have his feet in the water.

　　Thus he proceeded in the gloom.

　　He resembled the beings of the night groping in the invisible and lost beneath the earth in veins of shadow.

　　Still, little by little, whether it was that the distant air-holes emitted a little wavering light in this opaque gloom, or whether his eyes had become accustomed to the obscurity, some vague vision returned to him, and he began once more to gain a confused idea, now of the wall which he touched, now of the vault beneath which he was passing.

　　The pupil dilates in the dark, and the soul dilates in misfortune and ends by finding God there.

　　It was not easy to direct his course.

　　The line of the sewer re-echoes, so to speak, the line of the streets which lie above it.

　　There were then in Paris two thousand two hundred streets.

　　Let the reader imagine himself beneath that forest of gloomy branches which is called the sewer. The system of sewers existing at that epoch, placed end to end, would have given a length of eleven leagues.

　　We have said above, that the actual net-work, thanks to the special activity of the last thirty years, was no less than sixty leagues in extent.

　　Jean Valjean began by committing a blunder.

　　He thought that he was beneath the Rue Saint-Denis, and it was a pity that it was not so. Under the Rue Saint-Denis there is an old stone sewer which dates from Louis XIII.

　　and which runs straight to the collecting sewer, called the Grand Sewer, with but a single elbow, on the right, on the elevation of the ancient Cour des Miracles, and a single branch, the Saint-Martin sewer, whose four arms describe a cross.

　　But the gut of the Petite-Truanderie the entrance to which was in the vicinity of the Corinthe wine-shop has never communicated with the sewer of the Rue Saint-Denis; it ended at the Montmartre sewer, and it was in this that Jean Valjean was entangled.

　　There opportunities of losing oneself abound.

　　The Montmartre sewer is one of the most labyrinthine of the ancient network.

　　Fortunately, Jean Valjean had left behind him the sewer of the markets whose geometrical plan presents the appearance of a multitude of parrots' roosts piled on top of each other; but he had before him more than one embarrassing encounter and more than one street corner--for they are streets-- presenting itself in the gloom like an interrogation point; first, on his left, the vast sewer of the Platriere, a sort of Chinese puzzle, thrusting out and entangling its chaos of Ts and Zs under the Post-Office and under the rotunda of the Wheat Market, as far as the Seine, where it terminates in a Y; secondly, on his right, the curving corridor of the Rue du Cadran with its three teeth, which are also blind courts; thirdly, on his left, the branch of the Mail, complicated, almost at its inception, with a sort of fork, and proceeding from zig-zag to zig-zag until it ends in the grand crypt of the outlet of the Louvre, truncated and ramified in every direction; and lastly, the blind alley of a passage of the Rue des Jeuneurs, without counting little ducts here and there, before reaching the belt sewer, which alone could conduct him to some issue sufficiently distant to be safe.

　　Had Jean Valjean had any idea of all that we have here pointed out, he would speedily have perceived, merely by feeling the wall, that he was not in the subterranean gallery of the Rue Saint-Denis. Instead of the ancient stone, instead of the antique architecture, haughty and royal even in the sewer, with pavement and string courses of granite and mortar costing eight hundred livres the fathom, he would have felt under his hand contemporary cheapness, economical expedients, porous stone filled with mortar on a concrete foundation, which costs two hundred francs the metre, and the bourgeoise masonry known as a petits materiaux--small stuff; but of all this he knew nothing.

　　He advanced with anxiety, but with calmness, seeing nothing, knowing nothing, buried in chance, that is to say, engulfed in providence.

　　By degrees, we will admit, a certain horror seized upon him. The gloom which enveloped him penetrated his spirit.

　　He walked in an enigma.

　　This aqueduct of the sewer is formidable; it interlaces in a dizzy fashion.

　　It is a melancholy thing to be caught in this Paris of shadows.

　　Jean Valjean was obliged to find and even to invent his route without seeing it.

　　In this unknown, every step that he risked might be his last.

　　How was he to get out? should he find an issue? should he find it in time? would that colossal subterranean sponge with its stone cavities, allow itself to be penetrated and pierced? should he there encounter some unexpected knot in the darkness? should he arrive at the inextricable and the impassable? would Marius die there of hemorrhage and he of hunger? should they end by both getting lost, and by furnishing two skeletons in a nook of that night?

　　He did not know. He put all these questions to himself without replying to them. The intestines of Paris form a precipice.

　　Like the prophet, he was in the belly of the monster.

　　All at once, he had a surprise.

　　At the most unforeseen moment, and without having ceased to walk in a straight line, he perceived that he was no longer ascending; the water of the rivulet was beating against his heels, instead of meeting him at his toes. The sewer was now descending.

　　Why?

　　Was he about to arrive suddenly at the Seine?

　　This danger was a great one, but the peril of retreating was still greater.

　　He continued to advance.

　　It was not towards the Seine that he was proceeding.

　　The ridge which the soil of Paris forms on its right bank empties one of its water-sheds into the Seine and the other into the Grand Sewer. The crest of this ridge which determines the division of the waters describes a very capricious line.

　　The culminating point, which is the point of separation of the currents, is in the Sainte-Avoye sewer, beyond the Rue Michelle-Comte, in the sewer of the Louvre, near the boulevards, and in the Montmartre sewer, near the Halles. It was this culminating point that Jean Valjean had reached.

　　He was directing his course towards the belt sewer; he was on the right path. But he did not know it.

　　Every time that he encountered a branch, he felt of its angles, and if he found that the opening which presented itself was smaller than the passage in which he was, he did not enter but continued his route, rightly judging that every narrower way must needs terminate in a blind alley, and could only lead him further from his goal, that is to say, the outlet.

　　Thus he avoided the quadruple trap which was set for him in the darkness by the four labyrinths which we have just enumerated.

　　At a certain moment, he perceived that he was emerging from beneath the Paris which was petrified by the uprising, where the barricades had suppressed circulation, and that he was entering beneath the living and normal Paris.

　　Overhead he suddenly heard a noise as of thunder, distant but continuous.

　　It was the rumbling of vehicles.

　　He had been walking for about half an hour, at least according to the calculation which he made in his own mind, and he had not yet thought of rest; he had merely changed the hand with which he was holding Marius.

　　The darkness was more profound than ever, but its very depth reassured him.

　　All at once, he saw his shadow in front of him.

　　It was outlined on a faint, almost indistinct reddish glow, which vaguely empurpled the flooring vault underfoot, and the vault overhead, and gilded to his right and to his left the two viscous walls of the passage. Stupefied, he turned round.

　　Behind him, in the portion of the passage which he had just passed through, at a distance which appeared to him immense, piercing the dense obscurity, flamed a sort of horrible star which had the air of surveying him.

　　It was the gloomy star of the police which was rising in the sewer.

　　In the rear of that star eight or ten forms were moving about in a confused way, black, upright, indistinct, horrible.

　　THE SEWER AND ITS SURPRISES

　　 It was in the sewers of Paris that Jean Valjean found himself.

　　Still another resemblance between Paris and the sea.

　　As in the ocean, the diver may disappear there.

　　The transition was an unheard-of one.

　　In the very heart of the city, Jean Valjean had escaped from the city, and, in the twinkling of an eye, in the time required to lift the cover and to replace it, he had passed from broad daylight to complete obscurity, from midday to midnight, from tumult to silence, from the whirlwind of thunders to the stagnation of the tomb, and, by a vicissitude far more tremendous even than that of the Rue Polonceau, from the most extreme peril to the most absolute obscurity.

　　An abrupt fall into a cavern; a disappearance into the secret trap-door of Paris; to quit that street where death was on every side, for that sort of sepulchre where there was life, was a strange instant.

　　He remained for several seconds as though bewildered; listening, stupefied.

　　The waste-trap of safety had suddenly yawned beneath him.

　　Celestial goodness had, in a manner, captured him by treachery.

　　Adorable ambuscades of providence!

　　Only, the wounded man did not stir, and Jean Valjean did not know whether that which he was carrying in that grave was a living being or a dead corpse.

　　His first sensation was one of blindness.

　　All of a sudden, he could see nothing.

　　It seemed to him too, that, in one instant, he had become deaf.

　　He no longer heard anything.

　　The frantic storm of murder which had been let loose a few feet above his head did not reach him, thanks to the thickness of the earth which separated him from it, as we have said, otherwise than faintly and indistinctly, and like a rumbling, in the depths. He felt that the ground was solid under his feet; that was all; but that was enough.

　　He extended one arm and then the other, touched the walls on both sides, and perceived that the passage was narrow; he slipped, and thus perceived that the pavement was wet. He cautiously put forward one foot, fearing a hole, a sink, some gulf; he discovered that the paving continued.

　　A gust of fetidness informed him of the place in which he stood.

　　After the lapse of a few minutes, he was no longer blind.

　　A little light fell through the man-hole through which he had descended, and his eyes became accustomed to this cavern.

　　He began to distinguish something. The passage in which he had burrowed--no other word can better express the situation--was walled in behind him.

　　It was one of those blind alleys, which the special jargon terms branches. In front of him there was another wall, a wall like night. The light of the air-hole died out ten or twelve paces from the point where Jean Valjean stood, and barely cast a wan pallor on a few metres of the damp walls of the sewer.

　　Beyond, the opaqueness was massive; to penetrate thither seemed horrible, an entrance into it appeared like an engulfment.

　　A man could, however, plunge into that wall of fog and it was necessary so to do.

　　Haste was even requisite. It occurred to Jean Valjean that the grating which he had caught sight of under the flag-stones might also catch the eye of the soldiery, and that everything hung upon this chance.

　　They also might descend into that well and search it.

　　There was not a minute to be lost. He had deposited Marius on the ground, he picked him up again,-- that is the real word for it,--placed him on his shoulders once more, and set out.

　　He plunged resolutely into the gloom.

　　The truth is, that they were less safe than Jean Valjean fancied. Perils of another sort and no less serious were awaiting them, perchance.

　　After the lightning-charged whirlwind of the combat, the cavern of miasmas and traps; after chaos, the sewer. Jean Valjean had fallen from one circle of hell into another.

　　When he had advanced fifty paces, he was obliged to halt.

　　A problem presented itself.

　　The passage terminated in another gut which he encountered across his path.

　　There two ways presented themselves. Which should he take?

　　Ought he to turn to the left or to the right? How was he to find his bearings in that black labyrinth? This labyrinth, to which we have already called the reader's attention, has a clue, which is its slope.

　　To follow to the slope is to arrive at the river.

　　This Jean Valjean instantly comprehended.

　　He said to himself that he was probably in the sewer des Halles; that if he were to choose the path to the left and follow the slope, he would arrive, in less than a quarter of an hour, at some mouth on the Seine between the Pont au Change and the Pont-Neuf, that is to say, he would make his appearance in broad daylight on the most densely peopled spot in Paris.

　　Perhaps he would come out on some man-hole at the intersection of streets.

　　Amazement of the passers-by at beholding two bleeding men emerge from the earth at their feet. Arrival of the police, a call to arms of the neighboring post of guards.

　　Thus they would be seized before they had even got out. It would be better to plunge into that labyrinth, to confide themselves to that black gloom, and to trust to Providence for the outcome.

　　He ascended the incline, and turned to the right.

　　When he had turned the angle of the gallery, the distant glimmer of an air-hole disappeared, the curtain of obscurity fell upon him once more, and he became blind again.

　　Nevertheless, he advanced as rapidly as possible.

　　Marius' two arms were passed round his neck, and the former's feet dragged behind him.

　　He held both these arms with one hand, and groped along the wall with the other.

　　Marius' cheek touched his, and clung there, bleeding. He felt a warm stream which came from Marius trickling down upon him and making its way under his clothes.

　　But a humid warmth near his ear, which the mouth of the wounded man touched, indicated respiration, and consequently, life.

　　The passage along which Jean Valjean was now proceeding was not so narrow as the first. Jean Valjean walked through it with considerable difficulty. The rain of the preceding day had not, as yet, entirely run off, and it created a little torrent in the centre of the bottom, and he was forced to hug the wall in order not to have his feet in the water.

　　Thus he proceeded in the gloom.

　　He resembled the beings of the night groping in the invisible and lost beneath the earth in veins of shadow.

　　Still, little by little, whether it was that the distant air-holes emitted a little wavering light in this opaque gloom, or whether his eyes had become accustomed to the obscurity, some vague vision returned to him, and he began once more to gain a confused idea, now of the wall which he touched, now of the vault beneath which he was passing.

　　The pupil dilates in the dark, and the soul dilates in misfortune and ends by finding God there.

　　It was not easy to direct his course.

　　The line of the sewer re-echoes, so to speak, the line of the streets which lie above it.

　　There were then in Paris two thousand two hundred streets.

　　Let the reader imagine himself beneath that forest of gloomy branches which is called the sewer. The system of sewers existing at that epoch, placed end to end, would have given a length of eleven leagues.

　　We have said above, that the actual net-work, thanks to the special activity of the last thirty years, was no less than sixty leagues in extent.

　　Jean Valjean began by committing a blunder.

　　He thought that he was beneath the Rue Saint-Denis, and it was a pity that it was not so. Under the Rue Saint-Denis there is an old stone sewer which dates from Louis XIII.

　　and which runs straight to the collecting sewer, called the Grand Sewer, with but a single elbow, on the right, on the elevation of the ancient Cour des Miracles, and a single branch, the Saint-Martin sewer, whose four arms describe a cross.

　　But the gut of the Petite-Truanderie the entrance to which was in the vicinity of the Corinthe wine-shop has never communicated with the sewer of the Rue Saint-Denis; it ended at the Montmartre sewer, and it was in this that Jean Valjean was entangled.

　　There opportunities of losing oneself abound.

　　The Montmartre sewer is one of the most labyrinthine of the ancient network.

　　Fortunately, Jean Valjean had left behind him the sewer of the markets whose geometrical plan presents the appearance of a multitude of parrots' roosts piled on top of each other; but he had before him more than one embarrassing encounter and more than one street corner--for they are streets-- presenting itself in the gloom like an interrogation point; first, on his left, the vast sewer of the Platriere, a sort of Chinese puzzle, thrusting out and entangling its chaos of Ts and Zs under the Post-Office and under the rotunda of the Wheat Market, as far as the Seine, where it terminates in a Y; secondly, on his right, the curving corridor of the Rue du Cadran with its three teeth, which are also blind courts; thirdly, on his left, the branch of the Mail, complicated, almost at its inception, with a sort of fork, and proceeding from zig-zag to zig-zag until it ends in the grand crypt of the outlet of the Louvre, truncated and ramified in every direction; and lastly, the blind alley of a passage of the Rue des Jeuneurs, without counting little ducts here and there, before reaching the belt sewer, which alone could conduct him to some issue sufficiently distant to be safe.

　　Had Jean Valjean had any idea of all that we have here pointed out, he would speedily have perceived, merely by feeling the wall, that he was not in the subterranean gallery of the Rue Saint-Denis. Instead of the ancient stone, instead of the antique architecture, haughty and royal even in the sewer, with pavement and string courses of granite and mortar costing eight hundred livres the fathom, he would have felt under his hand contemporary cheapness, economical expedients, porous stone filled with mortar on a concrete foundation, which costs two hundred francs the metre, and the bourgeoise masonry known as a petits materiaux--small stuff; but of all this he knew nothing.

　　He advanced with anxiety, but with calmness, seeing nothing, knowing nothing, buried in chance, that is to say, engulfed in providence.

　　By degrees, we will admit, a certain horror seized upon him. The gloom which enveloped him penetrated his spirit.

　　He walked in an enigma.

　　This aqueduct of the sewer is formidable; it interlaces in a dizzy fashion.

　　It is a melancholy thing to be caught in this Paris of shadows.

　　Jean Valjean was obliged to find and even to invent his route without seeing it.

　　In this unknown, every step that he risked might be his last.

　　How was he to get out? should he find an issue? should he find it in time? would that colossal subterranean sponge with its stone cavities, allow itself to be penetrated and pierced? should he there encounter some unexpected knot in the darkness? should he arrive at the inextricable and the impassable? would Marius die there of hemorrhage and he of hunger? should they end by both getting lost, and by furnishing two skeletons in a nook of that night?

　　He did not know. He put all these questions to himself without replying to them. The intestines of Paris form a precipice.

　　Like the prophet, he was in the belly of the monster.

　　All at once, he had a surprise.

　　At the most unforeseen moment, and without having ceased to walk in a straight line, he perceived that he was no longer ascending; the water of the rivulet was beating against his heels, instead of meeting him at his toes. The sewer was now descending.

　　Why?

　　Was he about to arrive suddenly at the Seine?

　　This danger was a great one, but the peril of retreating was still greater.

　　He continued to advance.

　　It was not towards the Seine that he was proceeding.

　　The ridge which the soil of Paris forms on its right bank empties one of its water-sheds into the Seine and the other into the Grand Sewer. The crest of this ridge which determines the division of the waters describes a very capricious line.

　　The culminating point, which is the point of separation of the currents, is in the Sainte-Avoye sewer, beyond the Rue Michelle-Comte, in the sewer of the Louvre, near the boulevards, and in the Montmartre sewer, near the Halles. It was this culminating point that Jean Valjean had reached.

　　He was directing his course towards the belt sewer; he was on the right path. But he did not know it.

　　Every time that he encountered a branch, he felt of its angles, and if he found that the opening which presented itself was smaller than the passage in which he was, he did not enter but continued his route, rightly judging that every narrower way must needs terminate in a blind alley, and could only lead him further from his goal, that is to say, the outlet.

　　Thus he avoided the quadruple trap which was set for him in the darkness by the four labyrinths which we have just enumerated.

　　At a certain moment, he perceived that he was emerging from beneath the Paris which was petrified by the uprising, where the barricades had suppressed circulation, and that he was entering beneath the living and normal Paris.

　　Overhead he suddenly heard a noise as of thunder, distant but continuous.

　　It was the rumbling of vehicles.

　　He had been walking for about half an hour, at least according to the calculation which he made in his own mind, and he had not yet thought of rest; he had merely changed the hand with which he was holding Marius.

　　The darkness was more profound than ever, but its very depth reassured him.

　　All at once, he saw his shadow in front of him.

　　It was outlined on a faint, almost indistinct reddish glow, which vaguely empurpled the flooring vault underfoot, and the vault overhead, and gilded to his right and to his left the two viscous walls of the passage. Stupefied, he turned round.

　　Behind him, in the portion of the passage which he had just passed through, at a distance which appeared to him immense, piercing the dense obscurity, flamed a sort of horrible star which had the air of surveying him.

　　It was the gloomy star of the police which was rising in the sewer.

　　In the rear of that star eight or ten forms were moving about in a confused way, black, upright, indistinct, horrible.

　　THE SEWER AND ITS SURPRISES

　　 It was in the sewers of Paris that Jean Valjean found himself.

　　Still another resemblance between Paris and the sea.

　　As in the ocean, the diver may disappear there.

　　The transition was an unheard-of one.

　　In the very heart of the city, Jean Valjean had escaped from the city, and, in the twinkling of an eye, in the time required to lift the cover and to replace it, he had passed from broad daylight to complete obscurity, from midday to midnight, from tumult to silence, from the whirlwind of thunders to the stagnation of the tomb, and, by a vicissitude far more tremendous even than that of the Rue Polonceau, from the most extreme peril to the most absolute obscurity.

　　An abrupt fall into a cavern; a disappearance into the secret trap-door of Paris; to quit that street where death was on every side, for that sort of sepulchre where there was life, was a strange instant.

　　He remained for several seconds as though bewildered; listening, stupefied.

　　The waste-trap of safety had suddenly yawned beneath him.

　　Celestial goodness had, in a manner, captured him by treachery.

　　Adorable ambuscades of providence!

　　Only, the wounded man did not stir, and Jean Valjean did not know whether that which he was carrying in that grave was a living being or a dead corpse.

　　His first sensation was one of blindness.

　　All of a sudden, he could see nothing.

　　It seemed to him too, that, in one instant, he had become deaf.

　　He no longer heard anything.

　　The frantic storm of murder which had been let loose a few feet above his head did not reach him, thanks to the thickness of the earth which separated him from it, as we have said, otherwise than faintly and indistinctly, and like a rumbling, in the depths. He felt that the ground was solid under his feet; that was all; but that was enough.

　　He extended one arm and then the other, touched the walls on both sides, and perceived that the passage was narrow; he slipped, and thus perceived that the pavement was wet. He cautiously put forward one foot, fearing a hole, a sink, some gulf; he discovered that the paving continued.

　　A gust of fetidness informed him of the place in which he stood.

　　After the lapse of a few minutes, he was no longer blind.

　　A little light fell through the man-hole through which he had descended, and his eyes became accustomed to this cavern.

　　He began to distinguish something. The passage in which he had burrowed--no other word can better express the situation--was walled in behind him.

　　It was one of those blind alleys, which the special jargon terms branches. In front of him there was another wall, a wall like night. The light of the air-hole died out ten or twelve paces from the point where Jean Valjean stood, and barely cast a wan pallor on a few metres of the damp walls of the sewer.

　　Beyond, the opaqueness was massive; to penetrate thither seemed horrible, an entrance into it appeared like an engulfment.

　　A man could, however, plunge into that wall of fog and it was necessary so to do.

　　Haste was even requisite. It occurred to Jean Valjean that the grating which he had caught sight of under the flag-stones might also catch the eye of the soldiery, and that everything hung upon this chance.

　　They also might descend into that well and search it.

　　There was not a minute to be lost. He had deposited Marius on the ground, he picked him up again,-- that is the real word for it,--placed him on his shoulders once more, and set out.

　　He plunged resolutely into the gloom.

　　The truth is, that they were less safe than Jean Valjean fancied. Perils of another sort and no less serious were awaiting them, perchance.

　　After the lightning-charged whirlwind of the combat, the cavern of miasmas and traps; after chaos, the sewer. Jean Valjean had fallen from one circle of hell into another.

　　When he had advanced fifty paces, he was obliged to halt.

　　A problem presented itself.

　　The passage terminated in another gut which he encountered across his path.

　　There two ways presented themselves. Which should he take?

　　Ought he to turn to the left or to the right? How was he to find his bearings in that black labyrinth? This labyrinth, to which we have already called the reader's attention, has a clue, which is its slope.

　　To follow to the slope is to arrive at the river.

　　This Jean Valjean instantly comprehended.

　　He said to himself that he was probably in the sewer des Halles; that if he were to choose the path to the left and follow the slope, he would arrive, in less than a quarter of an hour, at some mouth on the Seine between the Pont au Change and the Pont-Neuf, that is to say, he would make his appearance in broad daylight on the most densely peopled spot in Paris.

　　Perhaps he would come out on some man-hole at the intersection of streets.

　　Amazement of the passers-by at beholding two bleeding men emerge from the earth at their feet. Arrival of the police, a call to arms of the neighboring post of guards.

　　Thus they would be seized before they had even got out. It would be better to plunge into that labyrinth, to confide themselves to that black gloom, and to trust to Providence for the outcome.

　　He ascended the incline, and turned to the right.

　　When he had turned the angle of the gallery, the distant glimmer of an air-hole disappeared, the curtain of obscurity fell upon him once more, and he became blind again.

　　Nevertheless, he advanced as rapidly as possible.

　　Marius' two arms were passed round his neck, and the former's feet dragged behind him.

　　He held both these arms with one hand, and groped along the wall with the other.

　　Marius' cheek touched his, and clung there, bleeding. He felt a warm stream which came from Marius trickling down upon him and making its way under his clothes.

　　But a humid warmth near his ear, which the mouth of the wounded man touched, indicated respiration, and consequently, life.

　　The passage along which Jean Valjean was now proceeding was not so narrow as the first. Jean Valjean walked through it with considerable difficulty. The rain of the preceding day had not, as yet, entirely run off, and it created a little torrent in the centre of the bottom, and he was forced to hug the wall in order not to have his feet in the water.

　　Thus he proceeded in the gloom.

　　He resembled the beings of the night groping in the invisible and lost beneath the earth in veins of shadow.

　　Still, little by little, whether it was that the distant air-holes emitted a little wavering light in this opaque gloom, or whether his eyes had become accustomed to the obscurity, some vague vision returned to him, and he began once more to gain a confused idea, now of the wall which he touched, now of the vault beneath which he was passing.

　　The pupil dilates in the dark, and the soul dilates in misfortune and ends by finding God there.

　　It was not easy to direct his course.

　　The line of the sewer re-echoes, so to speak, the line of the streets which lie above it.

　　There were then in Paris two thousand two hundred streets.

　　Let the reader imagine himself beneath that forest of gloomy branches which is called the sewer. The system of sewers existing at that epoch, placed end to end, would have given a length of eleven leagues.

　　We have said above, that the actual net-work, thanks to the special activity of the last thirty years, was no less than sixty leagues in extent.

　　Jean Valjean began by committing a blunder.

　　He thought that he was beneath the Rue Saint-Denis, and it was a pity that it was not so. Under the Rue Saint-Denis there is an old stone sewer which dates from Louis XIII.

　　and which runs straight to the collecting sewer, called the Grand Sewer, with but a single elbow, on the right, on the elevation of the ancient Cour des Miracles, and a single branch, the Saint-Martin sewer, whose four arms describe a cross.

　　But the gut of the Petite-Truanderie the entrance to which was in the vicinity of the Corinthe wine-shop has never communicated with the sewer of the Rue Saint-Denis; it ended at the Montmartre sewer, and it was in this that Jean Valjean was entangled.

　　There opportunities of losing oneself abound.

　　The Montmartre sewer is one of the most labyrinthine of the ancient network.

　　Fortunately, Jean Valjean had left behind him the sewer of the markets whose geometrical plan presents the appearance of a multitude of parrots' roosts piled on top of each other; but he had before him more than one embarrassing encounter and more than one street corner--for they are streets-- presenting itself in the gloom like an interrogation point; first, on his left, the vast sewer of the Platriere, a sort of Chinese puzzle, thrusting out and entangling its chaos of Ts and Zs under the Post-Office and under the rotunda of the Wheat Market, as far as the Seine, where it terminates in a Y; secondly, on his right, the curving corridor of the Rue du Cadran with its three teeth, which are also blind courts; thirdly, on his left, the branch of the Mail, complicated, almost at its inception, with a sort of fork, and proceeding from zig-zag to zig-zag until it ends in the grand crypt of the outlet of the Louvre, truncated and ramified in every direction; and lastly, the blind alley of a passage of the Rue des Jeuneurs, without counting little ducts here and there, before reaching the belt sewer, which alone could conduct him to some issue sufficiently distant to be safe.

　　Had Jean Valjean had any idea of all that we have here pointed out, he would speedily have perceived, merely by feeling the wall, that he was not in the subterranean gallery of the Rue Saint-Denis. Instead of the ancient stone, instead of the antique architecture, haughty and royal even in the sewer, with pavement and string courses of granite and mortar costing eight hundred livres the fathom, he would have felt under his hand contemporary cheapness, economical expedients, porous stone filled with mortar on a concrete foundation, which costs two hundred francs the metre, and the bourgeoise masonry known as a petits materiaux--small stuff; but of all this he knew nothing.

　　He advanced with anxiety, but with calmness, seeing nothing, knowing nothing, buried in chance, that is to say, engulfed in providence.

　　By degrees, we will admit, a certain horror seized upon him. The gloom which enveloped him penetrated his spirit.

　　He walked in an enigma.

　　This aqueduct of the sewer is formidable; it interlaces in a dizzy fashion.

　　It is a melancholy thing to be caught in this Paris of shadows.

　　Jean Valjean was obliged to find and even to invent his route without seeing it.

　　In this unknown, every step that he risked might be his last.

　　How was he to get out? should he find an issue? should he find it in time? would that colossal subterranean sponge with its stone cavities, allow itself to be penetrated and pierced? should he there encounter some unexpected knot in the darkness? should he arrive at the inextricable and the impassable? would Marius die there of hemorrhage and he of hunger? should they end by both getting lost, and by furnishing two skeletons in a nook of that night?

　　He did not know. He put all these questions to himself without replying to them. The intestines of Paris form a precipice.

　　Like the prophet, he was in the belly of the monster.

　　All at once, he had a surprise.

　　At the most unforeseen moment, and without having ceased to walk in a straight line, he perceived that he was no longer ascending; the water of the rivulet was beating against his heels, instead of meeting him at his toes. The sewer was now descending.

　　Why?

　　Was he about to arrive suddenly at the Seine?

　　This danger was a great one, but the peril of retreating was still greater.

　　He continued to advance.

　　It was not towards the Seine that he was proceeding.

　　The ridge which the soil of Paris forms on its right bank empties one of its water-sheds into the Seine and the other into the Grand Sewer. The crest of this ridge which determines the division of the waters describes a very capricious line.

　　The culminating point, which is the point of separation of the currents, is in the Sainte-Avoye sewer, beyond the Rue Michelle-Comte, in the sewer of the Louvre, near the boulevards, and in the Montmartre sewer, near the Halles. It was this culminating point that Jean Valjean had reached.

　　He was directing his course towards the belt sewer; he was on the right path. But he did not know it.

　　Every time that he encountered a branch, he felt of its angles, and if he found that the opening which presented itself was smaller than the passage in which he was, he did not enter but continued his route, rightly judging that every narrower way must needs terminate in a blind alley, and could only lead him further from his goal, that is to say, the outlet.

　　Thus he avoided the quadruple trap which was set for him in the darkness by the four labyrinths which we have just enumerated.

　　At a certain moment, he perceived that he was emerging from beneath the Paris which was petrified by the uprising, where the barricades had suppressed circulation, and that he was entering beneath the living and normal Paris.

　　Overhead he suddenly heard a noise as of thunder, distant but continuous.

　　It was the rumbling of vehicles.

　　He had been walking for about half an hour, at least according to the calculation which he made in his own mind, and he had not yet thought of rest; he had merely changed the hand with which he was holding Marius.

　　The darkness was more profound than ever, but its very depth reassured him.

　　All at once, he saw his shadow in front of him.

　　It was outlined on a faint, almost indistinct reddish glow, which vaguely empurpled the flooring vault underfoot, and the vault overhead, and gilded to his right and to his left the two viscous walls of the passage. Stupefied, he turned round.

　　Behind him, in the portion of the passage which he had just passed through, at a distance which appeared to him immense, piercing the dense obscurity, flamed a sort of horrible star which had the air of surveying him.

　　It was the gloomy star of the police which was rising in the sewer.

　　In the rear of that star eight or ten forms were moving about in a confused way, black, upright, indistinct, horrible.

BOOK THIRD.--MUD BUT THE SOUL

CHAPTER II

　　EXPLANATION

　　 On the day of the sixth of June, a battue of the sewers had been ordered. It was feared that the vanquished might have taken to them for refuge, and Prefect Gisquet was to search occult Paris while General Bugeaud swept public Paris; a double and connected operation which exacted a double strategy on the part of the public force, represented above by the army and below by the police.

　　Three squads of agents and sewermen explored the subterranean drain of Paris, the first on the right bank, the second on the left bank, the third in the city.

　　The agents of police were armed with carabines, with bludgeons, swords and poignards.

　　That which was directed at Jean Valjean at that moment, was the lantern of the patrol of the right bank.

　　This patrol had just visited the curving gallery and the three blind alleys which lie beneath the Rue du Cadran.

　　While they were passing their lantern through the depths of these blind alleys, Jean Valjean had encountered on his path the entrance to the gallery, had perceived that it was narrower than the principal passage and had not penetrated thither.

　　He had passed on.

　　The police, on emerging from the gallery du Cadran, had fancied that they heard the sound of footsteps in the direction of the belt sewer. They were, in fact, the steps of Jean Valjean.

　　The sergeant in command of the patrol had raised his lantern, and the squad had begun to gaze into the mist in the direction whence the sound proceeded.

　　This was an indescribable moment for Jean Valjean.

　　Happily, if he saw the lantern well, the lantern saw him but ill. It was light and he was shadow.

　　He was very far off, and mingled with the darkness of the place.

　　He hugged the wall and halted. Moreover, he did not understand what it was that was moving behind him. The lack of sleep and food, and his emotions had caused him also to pass into the state of a visionary.

　　He beheld a gleam, and around that gleam, forms.

　　What was it?

　　He did not comprehend.

　　Jean Valjean having paused, the sound ceased.

　　The men of the patrol listened, and heard nothing, they looked and saw nothing.

　　They held a consultation.

　　There existed at that epoch at this point of the Montmartre sewer a sort of cross-roads called de service, which was afterwards suppressed, on account of the little interior lake which formed there, swallowing up the torrent of rain in heavy storms. The patrol could form a cluster in this open space.

　　Jean Valjean saw these spectres form a sort of circle.

　　These bull-dogs' heads approached each other closely and whispered together.

　　The result of this council held by the watch dogs was, that they had been mistaken, that there had been no noise, that it was useless to get entangled in the belt sewer, that it would only be a waste of time, but that they ought to hasten towards Saint-Merry; that if there was anything to do, and any "bousingot" to track out, it was in that quarter.

　　From time to time, parties re-sole their old insults.

　　In 1832, the word bousingot formed the interim between the word jacobin, which had become obsolete, and the word demagogue which has since rendered such excellent service.

　　The sergeant gave orders to turn to the left, towards the watershed of the Seine.

　　If it had occurred to them to separate into two squads, and to go in both directions, Jean Valjean would have been captured. All hung on that thread.

　　It is probable that the instructions of the prefecture, foreseeing a possibility of combat and insurgents in force, had forbidden the patrol to part company. The patrol resumed its march, leaving Jean Valjean behind it. Of all this movement, Jean Valjean perceived nothing, except the eclipse of the lantern which suddenly wheeled round.

　　Before taking his departure, the Sergeant, in order to acquit his policeman's conscience, discharged his gun in the direction of Jean Valjean.

　　The detonation rolled from echo to echo in the crypt, like the rumbling of that titanic entrail.

　　A bit of plaster which fell into the stream and splashed up the water a few paces away from Jean Valjean, warned him that the ball had struck the arch over his head.

　　Slow and measured steps resounded for some time on the timber work, gradually dying away as they retreated to a greater distance; the group of black forms vanished, a glimmer of light oscillated and floated, communicating to the vault a reddish glow which grew fainter, then disappeared; the silence became profound once more, the obscurity became complete, blindness and deafness resumed possession of the shadows; and Jean Valjean, not daring to stir as yet, remained for a long time leaning with his back against the wall, with straining ears, and dilated pupils, watching the disappearance of that phantom patrol.

BOOK THIRD.--MUD BUT THE SOUL

CHAPTER III

　　THE "SPUN" MAN

　　 This justice must be rendered to the police of that period, that even in the most serious public junctures, it imperturbably fulfilled its duties connected with the sewers and surveillance. A revolt was, in its eyes, no pretext for allowing malefactors to take the bit in their own mouths, and for neglecting society for the reason that the government was in peril.

　　The ordinary service was performed correctly in company with the extraordinary service, and was not troubled by the latter.

　　In the midst of an incalculable political event already begun, under the pressure of a possible revolution, a police agent, "spun" a thief without allowing himself to be distracted by insurrection and barricades.

　　It was something precisely parallel which took place on the afternoon of the 6th of June on the banks of the Seine, on the slope of the right shore, a little beyond the Pont des Invalides.

　　There is no longer any bank there now.

　　The aspect of the locality has changed.

　　On that bank, two men, separated by a certain distance, seemed to be watching each other while mutually avoiding each other.

　　The one who was in advance was trying to get away, the one in the rear was trying to overtake the other.

　　It was like a game of checkers played at a distance and in silence. Neither seemed to be in any hurry, and both walked slowly, as though each of them feared by too much haste to make his partner redouble his pace.

　　One would have said that it was an appetite following its prey, and purposely without wearing the air of doing so.

　　The prey was crafty and on its guard.

　　The proper relations between the hunted pole-cat and the hunting dog were observed.

　　The one who was seeking to escape had an insignificant mien and not an impressive appearance; the one who was seeking to seize him was rude of aspect, and must have been rude to encounter.

　　The first, conscious that he was the more feeble, avoided the second; but he avoided him in a manner which was deeply furious; any one who could have observed him would have discerned in his eyes the sombre hostility of flight, and all the menace that fear contains.

　　The shore was deserted; there were no passers-by; not even a boatman nor a lighter-man was in the skiffs which were moored here and there.

　　It was not easy to see these two men, except from the quay opposite, and to any person who had scrutinized them at that distance, the man who was in advance would have appeared like a bristling, tattered, and equivocal being, who was uneasy and trembling beneath a ragged blouse, and the other like a classic and official personage, wearing the frock-coat of authority buttoned to the chin.

　　Perchance the reader might recognize these two men, if he were to see them closer at hand.

　　What was the object of the second man?

　　Probably to succeed in clothing the first more warmly.

　　When a man clothed by the state pursues a man in rags, it is in order to make of him a man who is also clothed by the state.

　　Only, the whole question lies in the color.

　　To be dressed in blue is glorious; to be dressed in red is disagreeable.

　　There is a purple from below.

　　It is probably some unpleasantness and some purple of this sort which the first man is desirous of shirking.

　　If the other allowed him to walk on, and had not seized him as yet, it was, judging from all appearances, in the hope of seeing him lead up to some significant meeting-place and to some group worth catching. This delicate operation is called "spinning."

　　What renders this conjecture entirely probable is that the buttoned-up man, on catching sight from the shore of a hackney-coach on the quay as it was passing along empty, made a sign to the driver; the driver understood, evidently recognized the person with whom he had to deal, turned about and began to follow the two men at the top of the quay, at a foot-pace. This was not observed by the slouching and tattered personage who was in advance.

　　The hackney-coach rolled along the trees of the Champs-Elysees. The bust of the driver, whip in hand, could be seen moving along above the parapet.

　　One of the secret instructions of the police authorities to their agents contains this article:

　　"Always have on hand a hackney-coach, in case of emergency."

　　While these two men were manoeuvring, each on his own side, with irreproachable strategy, they approached an inclined plane on the quay which descended to the shore, and which permitted cab-drivers arriving from Passy to come to the river and water their horses. This inclined plane was suppressed later on, for the sake of symmetry; horses may die of thirst, but the eye is gratified.

　　It is probable that the man in the blouse had intended to ascend this inclined plane, with a view to making his escape into the Champs-Elysees, a place ornamented with trees, but, in return, much infested with policemen, and where the other could easily exercise violence.

　　This point on the quay is not very far distant from the house brought to Paris from Moret in 1824, by Colonel Brack, and designated as "the house of Francois I." A guard house is situated close at hand.

　　To the great surprise of his watcher, the man who was being tracked did not mount by the inclined plane for watering.

　　He continued to advance along the quay on the shore.

　　His position was visibly becoming critical.

　　What was he intending to do, if not to throw himself into the Seine?

　　Henceforth, there existed no means of ascending to the quay; there was no other inclined plane, no staircase; and they were near the spot, marked by the bend in the Seine towards the Pont de Jena, where the bank, growing constantly narrower, ended in a slender tongue, and was lost in the water.

　　There he would inevitably find himself blocked between the perpendicular wall on his right, the river on his left and in front of him, and the authorities on his heels.

　　It is true that this termination of the shore was hidden from sight by a heap of rubbish six or seven feet in height, produced by some demolition or other.

　　But did this man hope to conceal himself effectually behind that heap of rubbish, which one need but skirt? The expedient would have been puerile.

　　He certainly was not dreaming of such a thing.

　　The innocence of thieves does not extend to that point.

　　The pile of rubbish formed a sort of projection at the water's edge, which was prolonged in a promontory as far as the wall of the quay.

　　The man who was being followed arrived at this little mound and went round it, so that he ceased to be seen by the other.

　　The latter, as he did not see, could not be seen; he took advantage of this fact to abandon all dissimulation and to walk very rapidly. In a few moments, he had reached the rubbish heap and passed round it. There he halted in sheer amazement.

　　The man whom he had been pursuing was no longer there.

　　Total eclipse of the man in the blouse.

　　The shore, beginning with the rubbish heap, was only about thirty paces long, then it plunged into the water which beat against the wall of the quay.

　　The fugitive could not have thrown himself into the Seine without being seen by the man who was following him. What had become of him?

　　The man in the buttoned-up coat walked to the extremity of the shore, and remained there in thought for a moment, his fists clenched, his eyes searching.

　　All at once he smote his brow.

　　He had just perceived, at the point where the land came to an end and the water began, a large iron grating, low, arched, garnished with a heavy lock and with three massive hinges.

　　This grating, a sort of door pierced at the base of the quay, opened on the river as well as on the shore.

　　A blackish stream passed under it. This stream discharged into the Seine.

　　Beyond the heavy, rusty iron bars, a sort of dark and vaulted corridor could be descried.

　　The man folded his arms and stared at the grating with an air of reproach.

　　As this gaze did not suffice, he tried to thrust it aside; he shook it, it resisted solidly.

　　It is probable that it had just been opened, although no sound had been heard, a singular circumstance in so rusty a grating; but it is certain that it had been closed again. This indicated that the man before whom that door had just opened had not a hook but a key.

　　This evidence suddenly burst upon the mind of the man who was trying to move the grating, and evoked from him this indignant ejaculation:

　　"That is too much!

　　A government key!"

　　Then, immediately regaining his composure, he expressed a whole world of interior ideas by this outburst of monosyllables accented almost ironically:

　　"Come!

　　Come!

　　Come!

　　Come!"

　　That said, and in the hope of something or other, either that he should see the man emerge or other men enter, he posted himself on the watch behind a heap of rubbish, with the patient rage of a pointer.

　　The hackney-coach, which regulated all its movements on his, had, in its turn, halted on the quay above him, close to the parapet. The coachman, foreseeing a prolonged wait, encased his horses' muzzles in the bag of oats which is damp at the bottom, and which is so familiar to Parisians, to whom, be it said in parenthesis, the Government sometimes applies it.

　　The rare passers-by on the Pont de Jena turned their heads, before they pursued their way, to take a momentary glance at these two motionless items in the landscape, the man on the shore, the carriage on the quay.

BOOK THIRD.--MUD BUT THE SOUL

CHAPTER IV

　　HE ALSO BEARS HIS CROSS

　　 Jean Valjean had resumed his march and had not again paused.

　　This march became more and more laborious.

　　The level of these vaults varies; the average height is about five feet, six inches, and has been calculated for the stature of a man; Jean Valjean was forced to bend over, in order not to strike Marius against the vault; at every step he had to bend, then to rise, and to feel incessantly of the wall.

　　The moisture of the stones, and the viscous nature of the timber framework furnished but poor supports to which to cling, either for hand or foot.

　　He stumbled along in the hideous dung-heap of the city.

　　The intermittent gleams from the air-holes only appeared at very long intervals, and were so wan that the full sunlight seemed like the light of the moon; all the rest was mist, miasma, opaqueness, blackness.

　　Jean Valjean was both hungry and thirsty; especially thirsty; and this, like the sea, was a place full of water where a man cannot drink.

　　His strength, which was prodigious, as the reader knows, and which had been but little decreased by age, thanks to his chaste and sober life, began to give way, nevertheless.

　　Fatigue began to gain on him; and as his strength decreased, it made the weight of his burden increase.

　　Marius, who was, perhaps, dead, weighed him down as inert bodies weigh.

　　Jean Valjean held him in such a manner that his chest was not oppressed, and so that respiration could proceed as well as possible.

　　Between his legs he felt the rapid gliding of the rats. One of them was frightened to such a degree that he bit him. From time to time, a breath of fresh air reached him through the vent-holes of the mouths of the sewer, and re-animated him.

　　It might have been three hours past midday when he reached the belt-sewer.

　　He was, at first, astonished at this sudden widening.

　　He found himself, all at once, in a gallery where his outstretched hands could not reach the two walls, and beneath a vault which his head did not touch. The Grand Sewer is, in fact, eight feet wide and seven feet high.

　　At the point where the Montmartre sewer joins the Grand Sewer, two other subterranean galleries, that of the Rue de Provence, and that of the Abattoir, form a square.

　　Between these four ways, a less sagacious man would have remained undecided.

　　Jean Valjean selected the broadest, that is to say, the belt-sewer. But here the question again came up--should he descend or ascend? He thought that the situation required haste, and that he must now gain the Seine at any risk.

　　In other terms, he must descend. He turned to the left.

　　It was well that he did so, for it is an error to suppose that the belt-sewer has two outlets, the one in the direction of Bercy, the other towards Passy, and that it is, as its name indicates, the subterranean girdle of the Paris on the right bank.

　　The Grand Sewer, which is, it must be remembered, nothing else than the old brook of Menilmontant, terminates, if one ascends it, in a blind sack, that is to say, at its ancient point of departure which was its source, at the foot of the knoll of Menilmontant.

　　There is no direct communication with the branch which collects the waters of Paris beginning with the Quartier Popincourt, and which falls into the Seine through the Amelot sewer above the ancient Isle Louviers. This branch, which completes the collecting sewer, is separated from it, under the Rue Menilmontant itself, by a pile which marks the dividing point of the waters, between upstream and downstream. If Jean Valjean had ascended the gallery he would have arrived, after a thousand efforts, and broken down with fatigue, and in an expiring condition, in the gloom, at a wall.

　　He would have been lost.

　　In case of necessity, by retracing his steps a little way, and entering the passage of the Filles-du-Calvaire, on condition that he did not hesitate at the subterranean crossing of the Carrefour Boucherat, and by taking the corridor Saint-Louis, then the Saint-Gilles gut on the left, then turning to the right and avoiding the Saint-Sebastian gallery, he might have reached the Amelot sewer, and thence, provided that he did not go astray in the sort of F which lies under the Bastille, he might have attained the outlet on the Seine near the Arsenal. But in order to do this, he must have been thoroughly familiar with the enormous madrepore of the sewer in all its ramifications and in all its openings.

　　Now, we must again insist that he knew nothing of that frightful drain which he was traversing; and had any one asked him in what he was, he would have answered: "In the night."

　　His instinct served him well.

　　To descend was, in fact, possible safety.

　　He left on his right the two narrow passages which branch out in the form of a claw under the Rue Laffitte and the Rue Saint-Georges and the long, bifurcated corridor of the Chaussee d'Antin.

　　A little beyond an affluent, which was, probably, the Madeleine branch, he halted.

　　He was extremely weary.

　　A passably large air-hole, probably the man-hole in the Rue d'Anjou, furnished a light that was almost vivid. Jean Valjean, with the gentleness of movement which a brother would exercise towards his wounded brother, deposited Marius on the banquette of the sewer.

　　Marius' blood-stained face appeared under the wan light of the air-hole like the ashes at the bottom of a tomb. His eyes were closed, his hair was plastered down on his temples like a painter's brushes dried in red wash; his hands hung limp and dead.

　　A clot of blood had collected in the knot of his cravat; his limbs were cold, and blood was clotted at the corners of his mouth; his shirt had thrust itself into his wounds, the cloth of his coat was chafing the yawning gashes in the living flesh. Jean Valjean, pushing aside the garments with the tips of his fingers, laid his hand upon Marius' breast; his heart was still beating. Jean Valjean tore up his shirt, bandaged the young man's wounds as well as he was able and stopped the flowing blood; then bending over Marius, who still lay unconscious and almost without breathing, in that half light, he gazed at him with inexpressible hatred.

　　On disarranging Marius' garments, he had found two things in his pockets, the roll which had been forgotten there on the preceding evening, and Marius' pocketbook.

　　He ate the roll and opened the pocketbook. On the first page he found the four lines written by Marius. The reader will recall them:

　　"My name is Marius Pontmercy.

　　Carry my body to my grandfather, M. Gillenormand, Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, No. 6, in the Marais."

　　Jean Valjean read these four lines by the light of the air-hole, and remained for a moment as though absorbed in thought, repeating in a low tone:

　　"Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, number 6, Monsieur Gillenormand."

　　He replaced the pocketbook in Marius' pocket.

　　He had eaten, his strength had returned to him; he took Marius up once more upon his back, placed the latter's head carefully on his right shoulder, and resumed his descent of the sewer.

　　The Grand Sewer, directed according to the course of the valley of Menilmontant, is about two leagues long.

　　It is paved throughout a notable portion of its extent.

　　This torch of the names of the streets of Paris, with which we are illuminating for the reader Jean Valjean's subterranean march, Jean Valjean himself did not possess.

　　Nothing told him what zone of the city he was traversing, nor what way he had made. Only the growing pallor of the pools of light which he encountered from time to time indicated to him that the sun was withdrawing from the pavement, and that the day would soon be over; and the rolling of vehicles overhead, having become intermittent instead of continuous, then having almost ceased, he concluded that he was no longer under central Paris, and that he was approaching some solitary region, in the vicinity of the outer boulevards, or the extreme outer quays. Where there are fewer houses and streets, the sewer has fewer air-holes. The gloom deepened around Jean Valjean.

　　Nevertheless, he continued to advance, groping his way in the dark.

　　Suddenly this darkness became terrible.

BOOK THIRD.--MUD BUT THE SOUL

CHAPTER V

　　IN THE CASE OF SAND AS IN THAT OF WOMAN, THERE IS A FINENESS WHICH IS TREACHEROUS

　　 He felt that he was entering the water, and that he no longer had a pavement under his feet, but only mud.

　　It sometimes happens, that on certain shores of Bretagne or Scotland a man, either a traveller or a fisherman, while walking at low tide on the beach far from shore, suddenly notices that for several minutes past, he has been walking with some difficulty. The beach under foot is like pitch; his soles stick fast to it; it is no longer sand, it is bird-lime. The strand is perfectly dry, but at every step that he takes, as soon as the foot is raised, the print is filled with water.

　　The eye, however, has perceived no change; the immense beach is smooth and tranquil, all the sand has the same aspect, nothing distinguishes the soil that is solid from that which is not solid; the joyous little cloud of sand-lice continues to leap tumultuously under the feet of the passer-by.

　　The man pursues his way, he walks on, turns towards the land, endeavors to approach the shore.

　　He is not uneasy.

　　Uneasy about what? Only he is conscious that the heaviness of his feet seems to be increasing at every step that he takes.

　　All at once he sinks in. He sinks in two or three inches.

　　Decidedly, he is not on the right road; he halts to get his bearings.

　　Suddenly he glances at his feet; his feet have disappeared.

　　The sand has covered them.

　　He draws his feet out of the sand, he tries to retrace his steps, he turns back, he sinks in more deeply than before.

　　The sand is up to his ankles, he tears himself free from it and flings himself to the left, the sand reaches to mid-leg, he flings himself to the right, the sand comes up to his knees.

　　Then, with indescribable terror, he recognizes the fact that he is caught in a quicksand, and that he has beneath him that frightful medium in which neither man can walk nor fish can swim.

　　He flings away his burden, if he have one, he lightens himself, like a ship in distress; it is too late, the sand is above his knees.

　　He shouts, he waves his hat, or his handkerchief, the sand continually gains on him; if the beach is deserted, if the land is too far away, if the bank of sand is too ill-famed, there is no hero in the neighborhood, all is over, he is condemned to be engulfed. He is condemned to that terrible interment, long, infallible, implacable, which it is impossible to either retard or hasten, which lasts for hours, which will not come to an end, which seizes you erect, free, in the flush of health, which drags you down by the feet, which, at every effort that you attempt, at every shout that you utter, draws you a little lower, which has the air of punishing you for your resistance by a redoubled grasp, which forces a man to return slowly to earth, while leaving him time to survey the horizon, the trees, the verdant country, the smoke of the villages on the plain, the sails of the ships on the sea, the birds which fly and sing, the sun and the sky.

　　This engulfment is the sepulchre which assumes a tide, and which mounts from the depths of the earth towards a living man.

　　Each minute is an inexorable layer-out of the dead. The wretched man tries to sit down, to lie down, to climb; every movement that he makes buries him deeper; he straightens himself up, he sinks; he feels that he is being swallowed up; he shrieks, implores, cries to the clouds, wrings his hands, grows desperate.

　　Behold him in the sand up to his belly, the sand reaches to his breast, he is only a bust now.

　　He uplifts his hands, utters furious groans, clenches his nails on the beach, tries to cling fast to that ashes, supports himself on his elbows in order to raise himself from that soft sheath, and sobs frantically; the sand mounts higher.

　　The sand has reached his shoulders, the sand reaches to his throat; only his face is visible now.

　　His mouth cries aloud, the sand fills it; silence.

　　His eyes still gaze forth, the sand closes them, night.

　　Then his brow decreases, a little hair quivers above the sand; a hand projects, pierces the surface of the beach, waves and disappears.

　　Sinister obliteration of a man.

　　Sometimes a rider is engulfed with his horse; sometimes the carter is swallowed up with his cart; all founders in that strand. It is shipwreck elsewhere than in the water.

　　It is the earth drowning a man.

　　The earth, permeated with the ocean, becomes a pitfall. It presents itself in the guise of a plain, and it yawns like a wave. The abyss is subject to these treacheries.

　　This melancholy fate, always possible on certain sea beaches, was also possible, thirty years ago, in the sewers of Paris.

　　Before the important works, undertaken in 1833, the subterranean drain of Paris was subject to these sudden slides.

　　The water filtered into certain subjacent strata, which were particularly friable; the foot-way, which was of flag-stones, as in the ancient sewers, or of cement on concrete, as in the new galleries, having no longer an underpinning, gave way. A fold in a flooring of this sort means a crack, means crumbling. The framework crumbled away for a certain length.

　　This crevice, the hiatus of a gulf of mire, was called a fontis, in the special tongue. What is a fontis?

　　It is the quicksands of the seashore suddenly encountered under the surface of the earth; it is the beach of Mont Saint-Michel in a sewer.

　　The soaked soil is in a state of fusion, as it were; all its molecules are in suspension in soft medium; it is not earth and it is not water.

　　The depth is sometimes very great.

　　Nothing can be more formidable than such an encounter. If the water predominates, death is prompt, the man is swallowed up; if earth predominates, death is slow.

　　Can any one picture to himself such a death?

　　If being swallowed by the earth is terrible on the seashore, what is it in a cess-pool? Instead of the open air, the broad daylight, the clear horizon, those vast sounds, those free clouds whence rains life, instead of those barks descried in the distance, of that hope under all sorts of forms, of probable passers-by, of succor possible up to the very last moment,--instead of all this, deafness, blindness, a black vault, the inside of a tomb already prepared, death in the mire beneath a cover! slow suffocation by filth, a stone box where asphyxia opens its claw in the mire and clutches you by the throat; fetidness mingled with the death-rattle; slime instead of the strand, sulfuretted hydrogen in place of the hurricane, dung in place of the ocean!

　　And to shout, to gnash one's teeth, and to writhe, and to struggle, and to agonize, with that enormous city which knows nothing of it all, over one's head!

　　Inexpressible is the horror of dying thus!

　　Death sometimes redeems his atrocity by a certain terrible dignity.

　　On the funeral pile, in shipwreck, one can be great; in the flames as in the foam, a superb attitude is possible; one there becomes transfigured as one perishes. But not here.

　　Death is filthy.

　　It is humiliating to expire. The supreme floating visions are abject.

　　Mud is synonymous with shame. It is petty, ugly, infamous.

　　To die in a butt of Malvoisie, like Clarence, is permissible; in the ditch of a scavenger, like Escoubleau, is horrible.

　　To struggle therein is hideous; at the same time that one is going through the death agony, one is floundering about.

　　There are shadows enough for hell, and mire enough to render it nothing but a slough, and the dying man knows not whether he is on the point of becoming a spectre or a frog.

　　Everywhere else the sepulchre is sinister; here it is deformed.

　　The depth of the fontis varied, as well as their length and their density, according to the more or less bad quality of the sub-soil. Sometimes a fontis was three or four feet deep, sometimes eight or ten; sometimes the bottom was unfathomable.

　　Here the mire was almost solid, there almost liquid.

　　In the Luniere fontis, it would have taken a man a day to disappear, while he would have been devoured in five minutes by the Philippeaux slough.

　　The mire bears up more or less, according to its density.

　　A child can escape where a man will perish. The first law of safety is to get rid of every sort of load. Every sewerman who felt the ground giving way beneath him began by flinging away his sack of tools, or his back-basket, or his hod.

　　The fontis were due to different causes:

　　the friability of the soil; some landslip at a depth beyond the reach of man; the violent summer rains; the incessant flooding of winter; long, drizzling showers. Sometimes the weight of the surrounding houses on a marly or sandy soil forced out the vaults of the subterranean galleries and caused them to bend aside, or it chanced that a flooring vault burst and split under this crushing thrust.

　　In this manner, the heaping up of the Parthenon, obliterated, a century ago, a portion of the vaults of Saint-Genevieve hill.

　　When a sewer was broken in under the pressure of the houses, the mischief was sometimes betrayed in the street above by a sort of space, like the teeth of a saw, between the paving-stones; this crevice was developed in an undulating line throughout the entire length of the cracked vault, and then, the evil being visible, the remedy could be promptly applied. It also frequently happened, that the interior ravages were not revealed by any external scar, and in that case, woe to the sewermen. When they entered without precaution into the sewer, they were liable to be lost.

　　Ancient registers make mention of several scavengers who were buried in fontis in this manner.

　　They give many names; among others, that of the sewerman who was swallowed up in a quagmire under the man-hole of the Rue Careme-Prenant, a certain Blaise Poutrain; this Blaise Poutrain was the brother of Nicholas Poutrain, who was the last grave-digger of the cemetery called the Charnier des Innocents, in 1785, the epoch when that cemetery expired.

　　There was also that young and charming Vicomte d'Escoubleau, of whom we have just spoken, one of the heroes of the siege of Lerida, where they delivered the assault in silk stockings, with violins at their head. D'Escoubleau, surprised one night at his cousin's, the Duchess de Sourdis', was drowned in a quagmire of the Beautreillis sewer, in which he had taken refuge in order to escape from the Duke. Madame de Sourdis, when informed of his death, demanded her smelling-bottle, and forgot to weep, through sniffling at her salts. In such cases, there is no love which holds fast; the sewer extinguishes it.

　　Hero refuses to wash the body of Leander. Thisbe stops her nose in the presence of Pyramus and says:

　　"Phew!"

BOOK THIRD.--MUD BUT THE SOUL

CHAPTER VI

　　THE FONTIS

　　 Jean Valjean found himself in the presence of a fontis.

　　This sort of quagmire was common at that period in the subsoil of the Champs-Elysees, difficult to handle in the hydraulic works and a bad preservative of the subterranean constructions, on account of its excessive fluidity.

　　This fluidity exceeds even the inconsistency of the sands of the Quartier Saint-Georges, which could only be conquered by a stone construction on a concrete foundation, and the clayey strata, infected with gas, of the Quartier des Martyrs, which are so liquid that the only way in which a passage was effected under the gallery des Martyrs was by means of a cast-iron pipe.

　　When, in 1836, the old stone sewer beneath the Faubourg Saint-Honore, in which we now see Jean Valjean, was demolished for the purpose of reconstructing it, the quicksand, which forms the subsoil of the Champs-Elysees as far as the Seine, presented such an obstacle, that the operation lasted nearly six months, to the great clamor of the dwellers on the riverside, particularly those who had hotels and carriages.

　　The work was more than unhealthy; it was dangerous.

　　It is true that they had four months and a half of rain, and three floods of the Seine.

　　The fontis which Jean Valjean had encountered was caused by the downpour of the preceding day.

　　The pavement, badly sustained by the subjacent sand, had given way and had produced a stoppage of the water.

　　Infiltration had taken place, a slip had followed. The dislocated bottom had sunk into the ooze.

　　To what extent? Impossible to say.

　　The obscurity was more dense there than elsewhere. It was a pit of mire in a cavern of night.

　　Jean Valjean felt the pavement vanishing beneath his feet. He entered this slime.

　　There was water on the surface, slime at the bottom.