Les Miserables (Movie Tie-in) (9781101612774)

by Hugo, Victor; Donougher, Christine (TRN)

  There is nothing to be said about that. Nations, like stars, are entitled to eclipse. All is well, provided the light returns and the eclipse does not become endless night. Dawn and resurrection are synonymous. The reappearance of the light is the same as the survival of the soul.

  We may note the facts with calm. Death on the barricades or an exile’s grave are, to those devoted to a cause, acceptable alternatives. The true name for devotion is disinterest. Let the deserted accept desertion and the exiled resign themselves to exile: we can only beseech the great people, when they withdraw, not to withdraw too far. They must not, on the pretext of returning to reason, advance too far on the downward path.

  Matter exists, and the moment exists, as do the self-interest and the belly; but the belly must not be the sole source of wisdom. The life of the moment has its rights, and we admit them; but enduring life also has rights. Alas, to have climbed high does not preclude a fall. We see this in history more often than we would like. A nation is illustrious, it knows the taste of the ideal; then it lapses into squalor and finds this good. And if you ask why it has abandoned Socrates for Falstaff it replies: ‘The truth is, I like statesmen.’

  One last word before we return to battle.

  A conflict like the one we are describing is nothing but a convulsive movement towards the ideal. Frustrated progress is sickly, and it is from this that these tragic epilepsies arise. We were bound to meet it on our journey, that affliction of progress, civil war. It is one of the fateful stages, both act and interval, in this play which centres upon a social outcast, and of which the real title is, Progress.

  Progress!

  That cry which we so often utter encompasses all our thought; and, at the point in the drama which we have now reached, the idea it contains having yet more than one trial to undergo, we may perhaps be allowed, if not to lift the veil, at least to let a clear light shine through it.

  The book which the reader now holds in his hands, from one end to the other, as a whole and in its details, whatever gaps, exceptions, or weaknesses it may contain, treats of the advance from evil to good, from injustice to justice, from falsity to truth, from darkness to daylight, from blind appetite to conscience, from decay to life, from bestiality to duty, from Hell to Heaven, from limbo to God. Matter itself is the starting-point, and the point of arrival is the soul. Hydra at the beginning, an angel at the end.

  XXI

  The heroes

  Suddenly a drum beat the charge.

  The attack was a hurricane. During the night, under cover of darkness, the barricade had been stealthily approached. In the present broad daylight, and in that open street, there was no possibility of surprise: it was a matter of naked force, cannon-fire paving the way while the infantry rushed the barricade. Ferocity was now allied to skill. A powerful column of infantry of the line, broken at equal intervals by contingents of foot-soldiers from the national and municipal guards, and reinforced in depth by additional bodies of soldiery which could be heard but not seen, advanced at the double down the street, drums playing and trumpets sounding, bayonets fixed, sappers in the lead and, unshaken by the counter-fire, flung itself upon the barricade with the weight of a metal battering-ram against a wall.

  The wall held.

  The insurgents fired impetuously. The barricade under the assault had a crest of flashes like a lion’s mane. The counter-attack was so violent that although at one moment it was submerged beneath the attackers, it shrugged off the soldiers as the lion shrugs off the dogs and was covered only as a cliff is covered with sea-foam, to re-emerge an instant later, sheer, black, and formidable.

  The attacking column, forced to retreat, stayed massed in the street, exposed but terrible, and replied with a terrifying burst of musket-fire. Anyone who has witnessed a firework display will recall the pattern made by the cluster of rockets that is called a ‘bouquet’. We must think of this bouquet as being not vertical but horizontal, with musket bullets or grapeshot at each of its points of fire, and carrying death in its patterned thunders. The barricade was subjected to this.

  Determination was equal on either side. Bravery became almost barbarous and to it was added a sort of heroic ferocity beginning with the sacrifice of self. It was the time when members of the Garde Nationale fought like zouaves. The troops wanted to be done with it; the rebels wanted to fight. The acceptance of death in the fullness of youth and health turns daring into frenzy. Everyone in that mêlée was filled with the inspiration of a supreme moment. The street was littered with bodies.

  Enjolras was at one end of the barricade, Marius at the other. Enjolras, who carried the whole affair in his head, was keeping under cover and reserving himself; three soldiers fell under his redoubt without even seeing him. Marius had no cover. He set himself up as a target. Half his body was exposed above the top of the barricade. There is no greater spendthrift than the miser who throws over the traces, and no man more terrible in action than a dreamer. Marius was formidable and reflective, engaged in the battle as though it was a dream, as it were a ghost firing a musket.

  The defenders’ ammunition was running low, but not their sarcasm. They still laughed, even amid that deadly whirlwind.

  Courfeyrac was bare-headed.

  ‘What have you done with your hat?’ Bossuet asked.

  ‘It was taken off by a cannon-ball,’ Courfeyrac replied.

  Or they said more serious things. Feuilly cried bitterly:

  ‘What are we to make of the men’ – and he cited well-known and even celebrated names, some belonging to the old army – ‘who promised to join us and swore to assist us, who gave us their word of honour, who were to have been our leaders and who have deserted us?’

  To which Combeferre replied with a melancholy smile:

  ‘There are people who observe the rules of honour as we do the stars, from a very long way off.’

  The ground within the barricade was so covered with used cartridge-cases that it might have been a snowstorm.

  The attackers had the advantage of numbers; the rebels had the advantage of position. They were defending a wall whence they shot down at point-blank range the soldiers staggering amid their dead and wounded or enmeshed in the barricade itself. The barricade, constructed as it was and admirably buttressed, did indeed present one of those positions where a handful of men could defy a legion. Nevertheless, being constantly reinforced and expanding under the hail of bullets, the attacking column inexorably moved forward and now, little by little and step by step, but with certainty, the army was compressing the barricade like the screw of a wine-press.

  The assaults continued one after another. The horror was steadily growing.

  There ensued, on that heap of paving-stones in the Rue de la Chanvrerie, a struggle worthy of the ruins of Troy. That handful of haggard, ragged, and exhausted men, who had not eaten for twenty-four hours, who had not slept, who had only a few shots left to fire, so that they searched their empty pockets for cartridges, nearly all wounded, with head or arm swathed in rough, blackening bandages, having holes in their clothing through which the blood flowed, ill-armed with insufficient muskets and old, worn sabres, became Titans. The barricade was ten times assailed and climbed, but still it did not fall.

  To form an idea of that conflict one must imagine a terrible pyre of courage set on fire and oneself watching the blaze. It was not a battle but the inside of a furnace; mouths breathed out fumes; faces were extraordinary, seeming no longer human but living flames; and it was awe-inspiring to watch those salamanders of battle move to and fro in the red haze. We shall not seek to depict the successive stages of the slaughter. Only an epic is entitled to fill twelve thousand lines with an account of battle. It might have been that Hell of Brahmanism, the most awful of the seventeen abysses, which the Veda calls ‘the forest of swords’.

  They fought body to body, hand to hand, with pistol-shots, sabre-thrusts, bare fists, from above and below, from all quarters, the roof of the house, the windows of the tavern, the vent-
holes of the cellars into which some had slipped. They were one against sixty. The façade of Corinth, half pounded to rubble, was made hideous. The window, peppered with grapeshot, had lost both glass and framework and was nothing but a shapeless hole hastily blocked with paving-stones. Bossuet, Feuilly, Courfeyrac, Joly, all were killed; Combeferre, pierced by three bayonet thrusts while he was picking up a wounded soldier, had only time to look up to the sky before he died.

  Marius, still fighting, was so covered with wounds, particularly on the head, that his face was smothered with blood as though he had a red scarf tied round it.

  Enjolras alone was unscathed. When he was weaponless he reached to right or left and a blade of sorts was placed by a fellow rebel in his hand. Of four swords, one more than François I had had at Marignano, he had only the stump of one left.

  Homer wrote: ‘Diomed slays Axylus, the son of Teuthranis, who lived in happy Arisbe; Euryalus, the son of Mecisteus, destroys Dresos, Opheltios, Esepes, and that Pedasus whom the Naiad Abarbarea bore to the irreproachable Bucolion; Ulysses overthrows Pidutes of Percote, Antilochus, Ablerus; Polypaetes, Astyalus, Polydamas, Otus of Cyllend, Teucer and Aretaon. Meganthis dies beneath the pike-thrusts of Euripylus. Agamemnon, the king of heroes, fells Elatos, who was born in the fortified town washed by the rippling River Satnois.’ In our old poems of battle Esplandian attacks with a two-forked flame the giant Marquis Swantibore, who defends himself by pelting the knight with the stones of towers he uproots. Ancient mural frescoes depict for us the dukes of Brittany and of Bourbon, armed and accoutred for battle, mounted and encountering each other, battle-axe in hand, visored with iron, shod with iron, gauntletted with iron, the one caparisoned with ermine, the other draped in blue; Brittany with a lion’s head between the two horns of his crown, Bourbon adorned with a huge fleur-de-lys at his visor. But to be superb it is not necessary to flaunt, like Yvon, the ducal morion, or to carry in the hand a living flame, like Esplandian, or, like Phyles, the father of Polydamas, to have brought back a suit of armour from Ephyrae, the present of the king of Corinth; it is only necessary to give one’s life for a conviction or for a loyalty. The simple-minded soldier, yesterday a peasant in La Beauce or Le Limousin, who strays, pigsticker at his side, round the children’s nurses in the Luxembourg; the pale young student bent over a piece of anatomy or a book; a blond adolescent who trims his beard with scissors – infuse these with a sense of duty and plant them face to face in the Carrefour Boucherat or the blind alley Blanche Mibray, the one fighting for his flag, the other for his ideals, and both believing that they are fighting for their country, and you will find that the shadow cast by the country bumpkin and the aspirant doctor, in the epic field where mankind struggles, will be no less great than the shadow cast by Megaryon, the king of tiger-filled Lycia, in his struggle with the giant Ajax, the equal of the Gods.

  XXII

  Close quarters

  When only two of the leaders were left alive, Marius and Enjolras at either end of the barricade, the centre, which for so long had been sustained by Courfeyrac, Joly, Bossuet, Feuilly, and Combeferre, gave way. The cannon-fire, without making an effective breach in the wall, had sufficiently damaged it. The top had been shot away, falling on either side, so that the debris formed two inclines, one within the stronghold and the other outside it, the one outside providing a ramp for the attackers.

  A supreme assault was launched, and this time it succeeded. The mass of soldiery, bristling with bayonets and advancing at the double, was irresistible, and the dense front line of the attacking force appeared amid the smoke on the top of the barricade. This time all was over. The group of rebels defending the centre beat a hasty retreat.

  And then in some of them the deeply implanted love of life was revived. Faced by that forest of muskets, several no longer wanted to die. It is a moment when the instinct of self-preservation cries out loud and the animal reappears in man. They were pressed against the six-storey house which formed the back of the stronghold. This house might be the saving of them. It was barricaded and, so to speak, walled in from top to bottom. Before the troops had penetrated into the stronghold, there was time for a door to open and close, only a moment was needed, and that door might be life itself to the handful of desperate men. Beyond the house lay streets, space, the possibility of flight. They began to hammer on the door with musket-butts, and to kick it, calling out and begging with clasped hands. But no one opened the door. From the window on the third floor the dead head looked down on them.

  But Enjolras and Marius, and the seven or eight who rallied round them, gave the rest some protection. Enjolras had cried to the soldiers, ‘Stand back!’ and when an officer had refused to obey he had killed him. He stood now in the little interior courtyard of the stronghold, his back to the tavern, a sword in one hand, a carbine in the other, defending the door against the attackers and cried to his men, ‘This is the only door.’ Covering them with his body, defying a battalion single-handed, he let them pass behind him. They hastened to do so; and Enjolras, using his carbine as a cudgel to batter down the bayonets that threatened him, was the last to enter. There was a terrible moment, with the soldiers striving to force open the door and the rebels striving to close it. Finally it was closed with such violence that, as it was slammed to, it still bore, adhering to the woodwork, the severed finger of a soldier who had clutched it.

  Marius had stayed outside. A ball had shattered his shoulder-blade. He felt himself grow dizzy and he fell. At this moment, when his eyes were already closed, he felt himself grasped by a vigorous hand, and in the moment before he sank into unconsciousness he had just time to think, mingled with the memory of Cosette, ‘I’m taken prisoner. I shall be shot.’

  Enjolras, not seeing Marius among those who had taken refuge in the tavern, thought the same. But it was a moment when there was no time to think of any death except one’s own. Enjolras barred and double-bolted the door while a thunder of blows from musket-butts and the axes of the sappers descended on it from outside. Their attackers were now concentrating upon the door. The siege of the tavern had begun.

  The soldiers were furiously angry. The death of the artillery sergeant had enraged them and, worse still, the rumour had gone round during the hours preceding the attack that the rebels were mutilating their prisoners, and that the headless body of a soldier lay in the tavern. Hideous rumours of this kind are a normal accompaniment of civil war, and it was a similar rumour which was later to lead to the disaster in the Rue Transnonain.

  When the door was secured, Enjolras said to his fellows:

  ‘We must sell our lives dearly.’

  Then he went to the table on which the bodies of Mabeuf and Gavroche were lying. Two rigid, motionless forms, one large, one small, lay covered by a black cloth, and the two faces could be faintly discerned beneath the stiff folds of the shroud. A hand had escaped its coverings and hung down towards the floor. It was that of the old man.

  Enjolras bent down and kissed the venerable hand as on the previous evening he had kissed the forehead. They were the only two kisses he had ever bestowed in his life.

  In brief, the barricade had fought like a doorway of Thebes, and the tavern fought like a house in Saragossa. Those were obstinate defences. No quarter was given, no discussion was possible. Men are ready to the provided they also kill. When Suchet cried, ‘Surrender!’ Palafox replied, ‘After the battle with firearms comes the battle with knives.’ Nothing was lacking in the capture by assault of the Hucheloup tavern, neither the paving-stones rained down upon the besiegers from the upper window and roof, causing hideous injuries, nor shots fired from the cellars and attics, neither fury in the attack nor rage in the defence – nor finally, when the door gave way, the frantic dementia of slaughter. The attackers, rushing into the tavern, their feet entangled in the panels of the broken door, found not a single defender. The circular staircase, cut in halves with an axe, lay in the middle of the lower room, where a few wounded men were in process of dying. All those rema
ining alive were on the upper floor, and from here, by way of the hole in the ceiling which had been the entrance to the staircase, there came a terrible burst of fire. Those were the last cartridges. When they had been fired, and when the heroic defenders were left with neither powder nor shot, each seized two of the bottles set aside by Enjolras, of which we have spoken, and held back the attack with these most fragile cudgels. They were bottles of brandy. We are depicting these sombre aspects of the carnage as they happened. The besieged, alas, makes a weapon of everything. Greek fire did no dishonour to Archimedes, nor boiling pitch to Bayard. All forms of warfare are terror, and there is nothing to choose between them. The musketry of the attackers, although harassed and aiming upwards, was murderous. The edge of that hole in the ceiling was soon surrounded by dead heads from which hung long, streaming red threads. The din was indescribable; and a reeking cloud of smoke plunged the battle in darkness. Words are lacking to depict a horror that has reached this point. There were no longer men engaged in a struggle that was now infernal, no longer giants against Titans; it was nearer to Milton and Dante than to Homer. Demons attacked and spectres resisted. It was heroism become monstrous.

  XXIII