Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [350]
“Monsieur de Courfeyrac?”
“Portress, what is your name?” responded Courfeyrac.
The portress stood aghast.
“Why, you know it very well; I am the portress, my name is Mother Veuvain.”
“Well, if you call me Monsieur de Courfeyrac again, I shall call you Mother de Veuvain. Now, speak, what is it? What do you want?”
“There is somebody who wishes to speak to you.”
“Who is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where is he?”
“In my lodge.”
“The devil!” said Courfeyrac.
“But he has been waiting more than an hour for you to come home!” replied the portress.
At the same time, a sort of young working-man, thin, pale, small, freckled, dressed in a torn smock and patched trousers of ribbed velvet, and who had rather the appearance of a girl in boy’s clothes than of a man, came out of the lodge and said to Courfeyrac in a voice which, to be sure, was not the least in the world like a woman’s voice.
“Monsieur Marius, if you please?”
“He is not in.”
“Will he be in this evening?”
“I don’t know anything about it.”
And Courfeyrac added: “As for myself, I shall not be in.”
The young man looked fixedly at him, and asked him:
“Why so?”
“Because.”
“Where are you going then?”
“What is that to you?”
“Do you want me to carry your box?”
“I am going to the barricades.”
“Do you want me to go with you?”
“If you like,” answered Courfeyrac. “The road is free; the streets belong to everybody.”
And he ran off to rejoin his friends. When he had rejoined them, he gave the box to one of them to carry. It was not until a quarter of an hour afterwards that he perceived that the young man had in fact followed them.
A mob does not go precisely where it wishes. We have explained that a gust of wind carries it along. They went beyond Saint Merry and found themselves, without really knowing how, in the Rue Saint-Denis.
BOOK TWELVE
CORINTH
1
HISTORY OF CORINTH FROM ITS FOUNDATION
THE PARISIANS who, to-day, upon entering the Rue Rambuteau from the side of the markets, notice on their right, opposite the Rue Mondétour, a basket-maker’s shop, with a basket for a sign, in the shape of the Emperor Napoleon the Great, with this inscription: do not suspect the terrible scenes which this very place saw thirty years ago.
NAPOLEON EST FAIT
TOUT EN OSIER,gf
Here were the Rue de la Chanvrerie, which the old signs spelled Chan verrerie, and the celebrated tavern called Corinth.
The reader will remember all that has been said about the barricade erected on this spot and eclipsed elsewhere by the barricade of Saint Merry. Upon this famous barricade of the Rue de la Chanvrerie, now fallen into deep obscurity, we are about to throw some little light.
Permit us to resort, for the sake of clearness, to the simple means already employed by us for Waterloo. Those who would picture to themselves with sufficient exactness the confused blocks of houses which stood at that period near the Pointe Saint Eustache, at the northeast comer of the markets of Paris, where is now the mouth of the Rue Rambuteau, have only to figure to themselves, touching the Rue Saint-Denis at its summit, and the markets at its base, an N, of which the two vertical strokes would be the Rue de la Grande Truanderie and the Rue de la Chanvrerie, and the Rue de la Petite Truanderie would make the transverse stroke. The old Rue Mondétour cut the three strokes at the most awkward angles. So that the labyrinthine entanglement of these four streets sufficed to make, in a space of four hundred square yards, between the markets and the Rue Saint-Denis, in one direction, and between the Rue du Cygne and the Rue des Prêcheurs in the other direction, seven islets of houses, oddly intersecting, of various sizes, placed crosswise and as if by chance, and separated but slightly, like blocks of stone in a stone yard, by narrow crevices.
We say narrow crevices, and we cannot give a more just idea of those dark, contracted, angular lanes, bordered