Les Miserables (Movie Tie-in) (9781101612774)

by Hugo, Victor; Donougher, Christine (TRN)

  The faubourg and its stronghold sustained one another, the faubourg lending a shoulder to the stronghold and the stronghold bracing itself against the faubourg. The huge barricade was like a cliff against which the strategy of the generals from Africa was shattered. Its recesses and excrescences, its warts and swellings grinned, so to speak, and jeered through the smoke. Grapeshot vanished in its depths: shells were swallowed up in it; musket balls did no more than make small holes. What good does it do to bombard chaos? The soldiers, accustomed to the most fearful manifestations of war, were dismayed by this fortress that was like a wild beast, by its boar-like bristling and its mountainous size.

  Some half a mile away, near the Château D’Eau where the Rue du Temple runs into the boulevard, the onlooker, if he was not afraid to risk his head by peering round the promontory formed by the Magasin Dallemagne, might see, far off, looking across the canal and along the streets rising up to the heights of Belleville, at the summit of the rise, a strange-looking wall about two storeys high, a sort of hyphen between the houses on either side – as though the street had folded in upon itself to shut itself off. This wall, built of paving-stones, was straight and perpendicular, as though it had been constructed with the aid of a T-square. It was, no doubt, lacking in cement, but, as with some Roman walls, this in no way impaired the rigidity of its structure. A view from above enabled one to ascertain its thickness: it was mathematically even from top to bottom. Its grey surface was pierced at regular intervals with almost invisible loopholes, like dark threads. The street bore every sign of being deserted: all doors and windows were closed. The wall erected across it, a motionless, silent barrier, had made of it a cul-de-sac in which no person was to be seen, no sound heard. Bathed in the dazzling June sunshine, it had the look of a sepulchre. This was the Faubourg du Temple barricade.

  Coming to that place, and seeing that remarkable structure, even the boldest spirit was moved to ponder. It was immaculate in design, flawless in alignment, symmetrical, rectilinear and funereal, a thing of craftsmanship and darkness. One felt that its presiding spirit must be either a mathematician or a ghost: and, contemplating it, one spoke in a lowered voice.

  When, as happened from time to time, someone ventured to enter that deserted stretch of road – a soldier or a representative of the people – there was a faint, shrill whistle, and he fell, either wounded or dead; or, if he escaped, a bullet buried itself in a shutter or housefront. Sometimes it was a burst of grapeshot, for the defenders had contrived to make two small cannon out of gas-piping blocked at one end with oakum and fire-clay. Nearly every bullet found its mark. There were corpses here and there and pools of blood. I remember seeing a butterfly flutter up and down that street. Summer does not abdicate.

  The entrances to the houses in the neighbouring street were filled with wounded. One felt in that place the gaze of an unseen observer, as though the street itself were taking aim. Massed behind the hump of the narrow bridge across the canal, at the approach to the Faubourg du Temple, the attacking troops, grim-faced and wary, kept watch on that silent and impassive stronghold which spat death. Some crawled on their stomachs on to the hump, taking care that their tall helmets should not show.

  The gallant Colonel Monteynard observed the barricade with a shuddering admiration. ‘The way it’s built!’ he exclaimed. ‘Not a stone out of line. It might be made of earthenware!’ – and as he spoke the words, a bullet smashed the cross on his breast and he fell.

  ‘The cowards!’ men said. ‘Why don’t they show themselves? Why do they skulk in hiding?’… That barricade at the Faubourg du Temple, defended by eighty men against ten thousand, held out for three days. On the fourth day, it was captured by the device of breaking through the adjoining houses and clambering over the roofs. Not one of the eighty ‘cowards’ attempted to escape. All were killed except their leader, Barthélemy, of whom we shall have more to say.

  The Saint-Antoine barricade was a place of thunderous defiance, the one at the Temple a place of silence. The difference between these two strongholds was the difference between the savage and the sinister, the one a roaring open mouth, the other a mask. The huge, mysterious insurrection of June ’48 was at once an outburst of fury and an enigma: in the first of these barricades the dragon was discernible; in the second, the sphinx.

  The two strongholds were the work of two men, Cournet and Barthélemy, and each bore the image of the man responsible. Cournet of Saint-Antoine was a burly broad-shouldered man, red-faced, heavy-fisted, daring, and loyal, his gaze candid but awe-inspiring. He was intrepid, energetic, irascible and temperamental, the warmest of friends and the most formidable of enemies. War and conflict, the mêlée, were the air he breathed, they put him in high spirits. He had been a naval officer, and his voice and bearing had the flavour of sea and tempest – he brought the gale with him into battle. Except for genius there was in Cournet something of Danton, just as, except for divinity, there was in Danton something of Hercules.

  Barthélemy, of the Temple, was thin and puny, sallow-faced and taciturn, a sort of tragic outcast who, having been beaten by a police officer, waited for the chance and killed him. He was sent to the galleys at the age of seventeen, and when he came out he built this barricade.

  Later a terrible thing happened in London, where both men were in hiding. Barthélemy killed Cournet. It was a duel to the death, one of those mysterious affairs of passion in which French justice sees extenuating circumstances and English justice sees only the death penalty. Barthélemy was hanged. Thanks to the sombre ordering of society, that luckless man, who possessed a mind that was certainly resolute and perhaps great, by reason of material privation and moral darkness, began life in a French prison, and ended it on an English scaffold. Barthélemy at all times flew one flag only, and it was black.

  II

  What to do in a bottomless pit except talk?

  Sixteen years are a useful period in the underground instruction of rebellion, and they were wiser in June 1848 than in June 1832. The barricade in the Rue de la Chanvrerie was nothing but a first outline, an embryo, compared with those we have been describing. Nevertheless, it was impressive for its time.

  Under the eye of Enjolras, for Marius no longer took count of anything, the rebels made good use of the hours of darkness. The barricade was not merely repaired but strengthened, its height raised by two feet. Iron bars projected from between the paving-stones like couched lances. Fresh material had been brought in to add to the complexity of its outer face and it had been cunningly rebuilt so that on the one side it resembled a thicket and on the other side a wall. The stairway of paving-stones which made it possible to climb to the top, as on to the battlements of a fortress, had been restored. The whole area within the barricades had been tidied up, the ground-floor room of the tavern cleared and the kitchen converted into a first-aid post where all wounds had been dressed. More bullets had been cast and cartridges made. The weapons of the fallen had been redistributed, and the bodies of the dead removed. They were heaped in the Mondétour alleyway, still commanded by the rebels, of which the pavement had long been red with blood. Among the dead were four suburban National Guards. Enjolras had their uniforms laid aside.

  Enjolras had advised everyone to get two hours sleep, and a hint from him amounted to a command. Nevertheless, only three or four obeyed it. Feuilly spent the two hours carving the words ‘Long Live the People!’ on the house facing the tavern. They were still there, carved with a nail on a beam, in 1848.

  The three women had taken advantage of the darkness to vanish finally from the scene, which was a relief to the rebels. They were now hiding in a near-by house.

  The majority of the casualties were still able and willing to fight; but five badly wounded men lay on a bed of straw and mattresses in the kitchen, two of them National Guards. These latter were the first to be attended to.

  No one remained in the downstairs room except Monsieur Mabeuf under his black shroud and Javert, lashed to his pillar.


  ‘The house of the dead,’ said Enjolras.

  The table on which Monsieur Mabeuf lay was at the far end of the room, lighted by a single candle, its horizontal outline visible behind the pillar, so that the two figures, Javert upright and Mabeuf prone, vaguely suggested the form of a cross.

  The shaft of the omnibus, damaged though it was by musket fire, was still sufficiently upright to fly a flag; and Enjolras who possessed the especial virtue of a leader, in that he always did what he said he would do, had attached the old man’s bloodstained jacket to it.

  No meal was possible, since there was neither bread nor meat. In the sixteen hours they had been there the fifty defenders of the barricade had devoured all the tavern’s scanty store. There comes a point when every fortress that holds out becomes a raft of the Medusa. They had to put up with being hungry. It was on that Spartan day of 6 June that Jeanne, the commander of the Saint-Merry barricade, surrounded by supporters clamouring to be fed, retorted: ‘What for? It is now three – by four o’clock we shall be dead.’

  Since there was nothing to eat, Enjolras placed a ban on drinking, withholding wine altogether and rationing eau-de-vie. Fifteen hermetically sealed bottles were found in the cellar. Enjolras and Combeferre went down to inspect them, and Combeferre said when they came back:

  ‘They must be some of Père Hucheloup’s original stock. He started life as a grocer.

  ‘Probably good wine,’ said Bossuet. ‘It’s lucky Grantaire’s still asleep. Otherwise we should have had a job protecting them.’

  Despite murmurs of protest. Enjolras vetoed the fifteen bottles, and, to prevent anyone touching them, to make them as it were sacrosanct, he had them placed under Monsieur Mabeuf’s table.

  At two o’clock in the morning roll was called. There were thirty-seven of them.

  Dawn was beginning to show, and the torch, replaced in its screen of paving-stones, had been extinguished. The interior of the stronghold, the small area of street which it enclosed, was still in shadow, and in that vaguely ominous first light it resembled the deck of a ship in distress. The dark forms of the defenders passed to and fro, while, overhanging the sombre redoubt, the housefronts and chimney-tops grew gradually distinct. The sky was in that state of fragile uncertainty which hovers between white and blue. Birds flew happily. The roof of the tall house at the back of the stronghold, which faced east, had a pinkish glow, and a morning breeze was stirring in the grey locks of the dead man in the third-storey window.

  ‘I’m glad we’ve put out the torch,’ Courfeyrac said to Feuilly. ‘I didn’t like the way it flared in the wind, as though it was afraid. A torch-flame resembles the wisdom of cowards: it gives a poor light because it trembles.’

  Dawn rouses the spirits as it does the birds. Everyone was talking. Joly, seeing a cat exploring the gutter, was moved to philosophize.

  ‘After all, what is a cat?’ he demanded.’ It’s a correction. Having created the mouse God said to himself, “That was silly of me!” and so he created the cat. The cat is the erratum of the mouse. Mouse and cat together represent the revised proofs of Creation.’

  Combeferre was discoursing to a circle of students and workmen on the subject of the dead – Jean Prouvaire, Bahorel, Mabeuf, even Cabuc – and Enjolras’s stern sadness.

  ‘All those who have killed have suffered,’ he said. ‘Harmodius and Aristogeiton, Brutus, St Stephen, Cromwell, Charlotte Corday – all have had their moments of anguish. Our hearts are so sensitive, and human life is so great a mystery, that even after a civic murder, a liberating murder, if such exists, our feeling of remorse at having killed a man exceeds the joy of having served mankind.’

  A minute later, such are the twists and turns of conversation, they had arrived, by way of the verse of Jean Prouvaire and a comparison of different translations of the Georgics, particularly of the passage describing the prodigies which heralded the death of Caesar, at the subject of Caesar himself, whence their discussion returned to Brutus.

  ‘Caesar,’ said Combeferre, ‘was justly killed. Cicero was hard on him, but with reason. When Zoilus attacked Homer, Maevius attacked Virgil, Vise attacked Molière, Pope attacked Shakespeare and Fréron attacked Voltaire, these insults were merely in accord with the age-old law of envy and hatred: genius invites hostility. Great men are always more or less assailed. But Zoilus and Cicero are two birds of a different kind. Cicero did justice with the mind just as Brutus did justice with the sword. For my part, I condemn that latter kind of justice, but the ancient world accepted it. Caesar, in crossing the Rubicon, conferring, as though they came from himself, dignities which came from the people, and not rising to greet the Senate, performed, as Eutropius said, the acts of a king and almost of a tyrant – regía acpaene tyranmca He was a great man, and so much the worse or so much the better – the lesson was the greater. His twenty-three wounds afflict me less than the spittle on the forehead of Christ. Caesar was stabbed to death by senators; Christ was mauled by underlings. In the greater outrage we perceive the God.’

  Bossuet, dominating the talkers from the top of a heap of paving-stones and flourishing his carbine, cried:

  ‘Oh Cydathenaeum!’ Oh Myrrhinus! Oh Probalinthus! Oh Graces of the Aeantides! Who will teach me to speak the lines of Homer like a Greek from Laurium or Edapteon?’

  III

  Light and shadow

  Enjorlas made a tour of reconnaissance. He went out by the Mondétour alleyway, moving cautiously along the housefronts.

  The rebels, be it said, were filled with hope. Their success in repelling the night attack had made them almost disdainful of the attack that must come with the dawn. They awaited it with confident smiles, no more doubtful of success than they were of their cause. Besides which, help must assuredly be on the way. They counted on this. With the gift of sanguine prophecy which is one of the strengths of the embattled French, they divided the coming day into three parts: at six o’clock in the morning a regiment which had been ‘worked on’ could come over to their side; at midday all Paris would rise in revolt, and by sundown the revolution would be accomplished. The tolling of the Saint-Merry tocsin, which had not ceased for a minute since the previous evening, was still to be heard, and this was evidence that the other stronghold, the big one commanded by Jeanne, was still holding out.

  Heady prognostications of this ran from group to group in a kind of grim and gay murmur resembling the buzz of war in a hive of bees.

  Enjolras returned from his cautious patrol of the surrounding darkness. He stood for a moment listening to this exuberance with arms folded and a hand pressed to his mouth. Then, cool and flushed with the gowing light of the morning, he said:

  ‘The whole Paris army is involved. A third of it is concentrated on us, besides a contingent of the Garde Nationale. I made out the shakos of the Fifth Infantry of the line and the colours of the Sixth. We shall be attacked within the hour. As for the populace, they were excited enough yesterday but now they aren’t stirring. We’ve nothing to hope for – not a single faubourg or a single regiment. They have failed us.’

  The effect of these words on the gossiping groups was like that of rainfall on a swarm of bees. All were silent. There was a moment of inexpressible terror, overshadowed by the wings of death.

  But it swiftly passed. A voice from one of the groups cried:

  ‘All right, then we’ll build the barricade up to twenty feet high, citizens, and defend it with our dead bodies. We’ll show the world that if the people have deserted the republicans, the republicans have not deserted the people!’

  The speech, releasing men from their private terror, was greeted with cheers.

  No one can say who delivered it – some ordinary working man, one of the unnamed, random heroes who crop up in moments of human crisis and social evolution to speak decisive words, and then, having in a lightning flash given utterance to the spirit of the people and of God, relapse into anonymity. So much was it in tune with the mood of that 6 June 1832, that, at almost the same moment,
defenders of the Saint-Merry stronghold raised their voices in a bellow that has gone down to history – ‘No matter whether they come to our aid or not, we’ll the to the last man!’

  As we see, the two strongholds, separated though they were, were together in spirit.

  IV

  Five fewers one more

  After that unknown man, demanding that they should ‘protest with their dead bodies’, had voiced the resolution of them all there arose a roar of strange satisfaction, deadly in its impact but triumphant in tone.

  ‘To the death! We’ll all stay here.’

  ‘Why all?’ asked Enjolras.

  ‘All of us – all!’

  Enjolras said:

  ‘It’s a strong position. The barricade is sound. Thirty men can hold it. Why sacrifice forty?’

  ‘Because no one wants to leave,’ was the reply.

  ‘Citizens,’ cried Enjolras, with a hint of exasperation in his voice. ‘The Republic is not so rich in men that it can afford to waste them. Heroics are wasteful. If it is the duty of some of us to leave, that duty should be carried out like any other.’

  Enjolras, their acknowledged leader, possessed over his followers the kind of authority that is born of absolute conviction. Nevertheless, there were rebellious murmurs. A leader to his finger-tips, Enjolras stood his ground and demanded coolly:

  ‘Will those who are afraid of our being no more than thirty kindly say so?’

  The murmurs grew louder.

  ‘Besides,’ a voice said, ‘it’s all very well to talk about leaving, but we’re surrounded.’

  ‘Not on the side of Les Halles,’ said Enjolras. ‘The Rue Mondétour is clear. You can get to the Marché des Innocents by way of the Rue des Prêcheurs.’