‘Javert.’
Enjolras nodded to the four men. Before Javert had time to move he was seized, overpowered, bound, and searched. A small round card was found on him, enclosed between two pieces of glass and bearing on one side the words ‘Surveillance et Vigilance’, and on the other the following particulars: ‘Javert, Inspector of Police, aged 52’ signed by the Prefect of Police of the time, M. Henri-Joseph Gisquet.
He also had a watch on him and a purse containing a few gold pieces. These were restored to him. But at the bottom of his watch-pocket was a scrap of paper in an envelope on which were his orders, written in the Prefect’s own hand:
‘Having fulfilled his political mission Inspector Javert will endeavour to confirm the truth of the report that the miscreants have places of resort on the right bank of the Seine, near the Pont d’Iéna.’
After being searched Javert was stood upright with his hands tied behind his back and bound to the wooden pillar in the centre of the room that had given the tavern its original name.
Gavroche, who had intently followed the proceedings, nodding his head in approval, now addressed Javert:
‘So the mouse has caught the cat!’
Everything had happened so swiftly that it was all over before the news became known. Javert had not uttered a sound. Hearing what had happened, Courfeyrac, Bossuet, Joly, Combeferre, and some of the men on the barricades came trooping in. Javert, so securely lashed to the post that he could not move, contronted them with the cool serenity of a man who has never in his life told a lie.
‘He’s a police spy,’ said Enjolras. And to Javert he said: ‘You will be shot two minutes before the barricade falls.’
‘Why not now?’ Javert inquired with the utmost composure.
‘We don’t want to waste ammunition.’
‘You could use a knife.’
‘Policeman,’ said the high-minded Enjolras, ‘we are judges, not murderers.’ He gestured to Gavroche. ‘You! Get started. Do what I told you.’
‘I’m off,’ said Gavroche.
But at the door he paused.
‘Anyway, let me have his musket. I’m leaving you the musician, but I’d like to have his trumpet.’
He made them a military salute and slipped happily through the gap in the large barricade.
VIII
Questions regarding a man called Le Cabuc
The tragic picture we are printing would be incomplete, the reader would not see in their true proportions those momentous hours of civic travail and revolutionary birth wherein confusion was mingled with noble striving, were we to omit from this summary account the incident of epic and savage horror which took place almost immediately after the departure of Gavroche.
Crowds gather and then, as we know, grow like rolling snow balls, attracting violent men who do not ask each other where they come from. Among those who joined the contingent led by Enjolras and the others, there was a man in worn labourer’s clothes whose wild shouts and gestures were those of an uncontrolled drunkard. This man, who went by the name of Le Cabuc, but who was in reality quite unknown to the people who pretended to recognize him and who was either very drunk or pretending to be, had seated himself with several others at a table which they had dragged out of the tavern. While encouraging his companions to drink he seemed to be surveying the house at the back of the barricade, a five-storey house, looking along the street to the Rue Saint-Denis. Suddenly he cried:
‘You know what, comrades? That house is the place to shoot from. With marksmen at all the windows, devil a soul could come along the street!’
‘But the house is shut.’
‘We can knock, can’t we?’
‘They won’t open.’
‘Then we’ll break down the door.’
The door had a massive knocker. Le Cabuc went and hammered on it, without result. He knocked a second and a third time, but there was still no response.
‘Is anyone in?’ shouted Le Cabuc.
Silence.
So then he picked up a musket and hammered on the door with the butt. It was an old-fashioned arched doorway, low and narrow, the door made solidly of oak, lined with sheet metal and reinforced with iron bands, a real fortress door. The blows of the musket-butt shook the house but left the door unshattered. However, they had evidently alarmed the inmates, because eventually a light showed and a small window on the third floor opened to disclose the grey head of a man who was presumably the doorkeeper.
‘Messieurs,’ he asked, ‘What do you want?’
‘Open the door!’ shouted Le Cabuc.
‘I’m not allowed to, Monsieur.’
‘Do it all the same.’
‘Out of the question.’
Le Cabuc levelled his musket, aiming at the man’s head; but since he was standing in the street, and it was very dark, the doorkeeper did not see him.
‘Are you going to open, or aren’t you?’
‘No, Monsieur.’
‘You refuse?’
‘I do, my good –’
The sentence was cut short by the report of the musket. The ball took the old man under the chin and travelled through his neck, severing the jugular vein. He sank forward without a sound, and the candle he had been holding fell from his hand and went out. Nothing was now to be seen but a motionless head resting on the window-ledge and a rising wisp of smoke.
‘There you are!’ said Le Cabuc, grounding his musket on the cobbles.
Scarcely had he uttered the words than a hand fell on his shoulder, gripping it as tightly as an eagle’s talon, and a voice said:
‘On your knees!’
He turned to confront the white, cold face of Enjolras, who had a pistol in his other hand. He had been brought out at the sound of the shot.
‘On your knees,’ he repeated; and with an imperious gesture the slender youth of twenty, compelling the muscular broad-shouldered dock-worker to bend like a reed before him, forced him to kneel in the mud. Le Cabuc tried to resist, but seemed to be in the grip of a superhuman power. Enjolras, with his girlish face, his bare neck and untidy hair, had at that moment something of the look of an antique god. The dilated nostrils and glaring eyes conferred upon his implacable Greek countenance that expression of chaste and righteous anger which in the ancient world was the face of justice.
The men on the barricades had come hurrying to the scene and now stood silently a short distance away, finding it impossible to utter any word of protest at what was about to take place.
Le Cabuc, wholly subdued, made no further attempt to struggle. He was now trembling in every limb. Enjolras released his hold on him and got out his watch.
‘Pull yourself together,’ he said. ‘Pray or ponder. You have one minute.’
‘Mercy!’ the murderer gasped, and then, with his head bowed, fell to muttering inarticulate profanities.
Enjolras did not take his eyes off his watch, and when the minute had passed he returned it to his pocket. He gripped Le Cabuc by the hair, and as the man knelt screaming pressed the muzzle of the pistol to his ear. Many of those hot-blooded men, who had so lightly engaged upon a desperate enterprise, turned away their heads.
The shot rang out, the murderer fell face down on the cobbles, and Enjolras, straightening, gazed sternly and assuredly about him. He thrust aside the body with his foot and said:
‘Get rid of that.’
Three men picked it up, still twitching in its last death-throes, and flung it over the smaller barricade into the Rue Mondétour.
Enjolras stayed deep in thought, and who shall say what fearful shadows were massing behind his outward calm. Suddenly he raised his voice, and there was silence.
‘Citizens,’ said Enjolras, ‘what that man did was abominable and what I have done is horrible. He killed, and that is why I killed. I was obliged to do it, for this rebellion must be disciplined. Murder is an even greater crime here than elsewhere. We are under the eyes of the revolution, priests of the republic, the tokens of a cause, and our actions must
not be subject to calumny. Therefore I judged this man and condemned him to death. But at the same time, compelled to do what I did but also abhorring it, I have passed judgement on myself, and you will learn in due course what my sentence is.’
A quiver ran through his audience.
‘We will share your fate,’ cried Combeferre.
‘It may be,’ said Enjolras. ‘I have more to say. In executing that man I bowed to necessity. But the necessity was a monster conceived in the old world, and its name is fatality. By the law of progress, this fatality must give way to fraternity. This is a bad moment for speaking the word “love”; nevertheless I do speak it, and glory in it. Love is the future. I have had resort to death, but I hate it. In the future, citizens, there will be no darkness or lightnings, no savage ignorance or blood-feuds. Since there will be no Satan there will be no Michael. No man will kill his fellow, the earth will be radiant, mankind will be moved by love. That time will come, citizens, the time of peace, light, and harmony, of joy and life. It will come. And the purpose of our death is to hasten its coming.’
Enjolras fell silent. His virgin lips closed, and he remained for some moments standing like a statue on the spot where he had shed blood, while his steadfast gaze subdued the murmur of voices about him. Jean Prouvaire and Combeferre silently clasped hands and, standing together at the corner of the barricade, gazed in admiration mingled with compassion at the stern-faced young man who was at once priest and executioner, shining like a crystal but unshakeable as a rock.
We may say here that when, after the business was over, the bodies were taken to the morgue and searched, a police-card was found on Le Cabuc. In 1848 the author of this work saw the special report on this episode delivered to the Prefect of Police in 1832.
It may be added that, according to a police surmise which seems to have been not without substance, Le Cabuc was Claquesous. The fact is that after the death of Le Cabuc nothing more was heard of Claquesous. He vanished without trace, seeming to have faded into invisibility. His life had been lived in shadow, his end was total darkness.
The band of rebels was still oppressed by that tragic trial, so rapidly conducted and so summarily concluded, when Courfeyrac caught sight of the slim young man who that morning had come to his lodging in search of Marius. This youth, who had a bold and heedless air, had come to rejoin them.
Book Thirteen
Marius Enters the Darkness
I
From the Rue Plumet to the Quartier Saint-Denis
THE VOICE summoning Marius in the dusk to join the barricade on the Rue de la Chanvrerie, had sounded to him like the voice of Fate. He wished to die and here was the means; his knock on the door of the tomb was answered by a hand tendering him the key. There is a fascination in the melancholy inducements that darkness offers to the despairing. Marius parted the bars of the gate, as he had done so many times before, and leaving the garden behind him said, ‘So be it!’ Half-crazed with grief, with nothing clear or settled in his mind, unable to face the realities of life after those two intoxicated months of youthfulness and love, overwhelmed by the bewilderment of despair, his only thought was to put a rapid end to his misery. He set out at a brisk walk. As it happened, he was already armed, having Javert’s pistols on him. The youth he thought he had discerned in the shadows had vanished.
He went from the Rue Plumet to the boulevard, crossed the Esplanade, the Pont des Invalides, the Champs-Élysées, and the Place Louis XV (both before and after this the Place de la Concorde) and so came to the Rue de Rivoli. The shops were open and women were shopping under the lights of the arcade or eating ices at the Café Laiter or cakes at the English pastry-cook’s. But now and then a post-chaise set off at a gallop from the Hôtel des Princes or the Hôtel Meurice.
Marius went by way of the Passage Delorme into the Rue Saint-Honoré. Here the shops were shut. Shopkeepers were talking in their half-closed doorways, people were passing along the pavements, the street-lamps were lit and the houses were lighted as usual above the first floor. There was a detachment of cavalry in the Place du Palais-Royal.
But as he left the Palais-Royal behind him, following the Rue Saint-Honoré, Marius noted that there were fewer lighted windows. Doors were locked and there were no gossipers in the doorways. The street grew darker and the crowd more dense: for the number of people in the street had become a crowd – a crowd in which no one spoke, but from which a deep, heavy murmur arose. Around the Fontaine de l’Arbre-Sec there were ‘rallying points’, motionless groups of men detached from the ebb and flow of passers-by like rocks in a stream.
By the time it reached the end of the Rue des Prouvaires the crowd could move no more. It had become a solid, almost impenetrable mass of people talking in undertones. Scarcely any black coats and round hats were to be seen here. There were smocks and tradesmen’s jackets, caps, sallow faces and bare heads of unkempt hair. This multitude swayed confusedly in the night mist, and its low-voiced muttering resembled a shudder. Although no man was walking there was nevertheless a sound of feet stamping in the mud. Beyond this concentration, in the Rue de Roule, the Rue des Prouvaires, and the further length of the Rue Saint-Honoré, not a lighted window was to be seen. The single lines of street-lamps were seen to dwindle along the street. The lamps in those days were like red stars slung on ropes which cast a pool of light like a great spider on the pavement. But these streets were not empty. Stacked muskets were to be seen in them, bayonets moving on sentry-go and bivouacking troops. No sightseer penetrated as far as this. All traffic had stopped. Here the crowd ended and the army began.
Marius was imbued with the pertinacity of a man who has ceased to hope. He had been summoned and he must go. He contrived to pass through the crowd and the army bivouacs, dodging sentries and patrols. By means of a detour he reached the Rue de Bethisy and made for Les Halles. At the end of the Rue des Bourdonnais the street-lamps ceased. After passing first through the zone of the crowd and then through the military zone he found himself in a zone that to him seemed terrible – not a civilian or a soldier, not a light; a place of solitary darkness. A chill assailed him. To turn into any street was like entering a cellar. But he continued on his way.
There was a sound of running footsteps passing close by him, whether those of a man or woman, of one person or more than one, he could not tell. They echoed and died away.
By twists and turns he arrived at an alley which he thought must be the Rue de la Poterie. Halfway along it he bumped into something which he found to be an overturned cask. His feet discovered puddles. There were potholes in the street and piles of loose paving stones. A barricade had been started and then abandoned. Climbing over this obstacle, he moved further down the street, feeling his way along the housefronts. A little further on he saw a blur of white which, when he drew nearer to it, turned out to be the two white horses unharnessed from the omnibus that morning by Bossuet. After straying all day about the streets they had come to rest in this place with the tired patience of animals that no more understand the ways of men than men understand the ways of Providence.
Marius went past them. As he entered a street which he thought must be the Rue du Contrat-Social there was the report of a musket, and the ball, fired at random from Heaven knew where, pierced a copper shaving bowl just above his head, hanging outside a barber’s shop. That punctured shaving bowl was still to be seen in the Rue du Contrat-Social, near the pillars of Les Halles, in 1846.
It was at least a sign of life, but nothing else happened. Marius’s journey was like a descent down a pitch-dark stairway. Nevertheless, he went on.
II
Paris – a bird’s-eye view
Anyone capable at that moment of soaring over Paris on the wings of a bat or an owl would have had a dismal spectacle beneath his eyes.
The ancient quarter of Les Halles, intersected by the Rues Saint-Denis, Saint-Martin, and countless alleyways, which is like a town within a town, and which the insurgents had made their base and arms depot, would h
ave looked to him like a huge patch of darkness in the centre of Paris, a black gulf. Owing to the breaking of street-lamps and the shuttering of windows, no light was to be seen there, nor was any sound of life or movement to be heard. The invisible guardian of the uprising, that is to say, darkness, was everywhere on duty and everywhere kept order. This is the necessary tactic of insurrection, to veil smallness of numbers in a vast obscurity and enhance the stature of every combatant by the possibilities which obscurity affords. At nightfall every window where a light showed had been visited by a musket-ball; the light had gone out, and sometimes the occupant had been killed. Now nothing stirred; nothing dwelt in the houses but fear, mourning, and amazement; nothing in the streets but a kind of awestruck horror. Not even the long rows of storeyed windows were visible, nor the jagged outline of house-tops and chimneys, nor the dim sheen of lights reflected on wet, muddy pavements. The eye looking from a height into that mass of shadow might have discerned here and there at remote intervals feint gleams of light throwing into relief the irregular shapes of singular constructions, like lanterns moving amid ruins; these were the barricades. The rest was a pool of utter darkness, misty and oppressive, above which rose the still, brooding outlines of the Tour Saint-Jacques, the Église Saint-Merry, and two or three others of those great edifices which man makes into giants and night turns into ghosts.
All round that silent, ominous labyrinth, in those quarters where the Paris traffic had not been brought to a standstill and where a few street-lamps still shone, the aerial observer might have perceived the metallic glitter of drawn swords and bayonets, the rumbling wheels of artillery and the silent gathering of battalions growing in numbers from one minute to the next – a formidable girdle slowly tightening around the uprising.
The besieged quarter was nothing but a sort of monstrous cavern, everything within it seeming motionless or slumbering, and the roads to it were all plunged in darkness, as we have seen.
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