Les Misérables - Victor Hugo (best finance books of all time TXT) 📗
- Author: Victor Hugo
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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 Maubuée, 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, manœuvres 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.
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 Angélique; 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 manœuvres 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.
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:
C’est la faute à Voltaire; ‘Tis the fault of Voltaire;
Et bête à Palaiseau, And dull at Palaiseau,
C’est la faute à 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:
C’est la faute à Voltaire; ‘Tis the fault of Voltaire;
Je suis un petit oiseau, I’m a little bird,
C’est la faute à Rousseau.” ‘Tis the fault of Rousseau.”
A fifth bullet only succeeded in drawing from him a third couplet.
C’est la faute à Voltaire; ‘Tis the fault of Voltaire;
Misère est mon trousseau, Misery is my trousseau,
C’est la faute à 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, reappeared, scampered away, returned, replied to the grape-shot with his thumb at his nose, and, all
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