Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [352]
Bossuet had gone down to meet Courfeyrac.
Joly, who had come to the window, cried:
“Courfeyrac, you bust take ad ubbrella. You will catch cold.”
Meanwhile, in a few minutes, twenty iron bars had been wrested from the grated front of the tavern, twenty yards of pavement had been torn up, Gavroche and Bahorel had seized on its passage and tipped over the dray of a lime merchant named Anceau, this dray contained three barrels full of lime, which they had placed under the piles of paving-stones; Enjolras had opened the trap-door of the cellar and all the widow Hucheloup’s empty casks had gone to flank the lime barrels; Feuilly, with his fingers accustomed to colour the delicate folds of fans, had buttressed the barrels and the dray with two massive heaps of stones. Stones improvised like the rest, and obtained nobody knows where. Some shoring-timbers had been pulled down from the front of a neighbouring house and laid upon the casks. When Bossuet and Courfeyrac turned round, half the street was already barred by a rampart higher than a man. There is nothing like the popular hand to build whatever can be built by demolishing.
Chowder and Fricassee had joined the labourers. Fricassee went back and forth loaded with rubbish. Her weariness contributed to the barricade. She served paving-stones, as she would have served wine, with a sleepy air.
An omnibus with two white horses passed at the end of the street.
Bossuet sprang over the pavement, ran, stopped the driver, made the passengers get down, gave his hand “to the ladies,” dismissed the conductor, and came back with the vehicle, leading the horses by the bridle.
“An omnibus,” said he, “doesn’t pass by Corinth. Non licet omnibus adire Corinthum.”
A moment later the horses were unhitched and going off at will through the Rue Mondétour, and the omnibus, lying on its side, completed the barring of the street.
Ma‘am Hucheloup, completely upset, had taken refuge in the second story.
Her eyes were wandering, and she looked without seeing, crying in a whisper. Her cries were dismayed and dared not come out of her throat.
“It is the end of the world,” she murmured.
Joly deposited a kiss upon Ma‘am Hucheloup’s coarse, red, and wrinkled neck, and said to Grantaire: “My dear fellow, I have always considered a woman’s neck an infinitely delicate thing.”
But Grantaire was attaining the highest regions of dithyramb. Chowder having come up to the second floor, Grantaire seized her by the waist and pulled her towards the window with long bursts of laughter.
“Chowder is ugly!” cried he; “Chowder is the dream of ugliness! Chowder is a chimera. Listen to the secret of her birth: a Gothic Pygmalion who was making cathedral waterspouts, fell in love with one of them one fine morning, the most horrible of all. He implored Love to animate her, and that made Chowder. Behold her, citizens! her hair is the colour of chromate of lead, like that of Titian’s mistress, and she is a good girl. I warrant you that she will fight well. Every good girl contains a hero. As for Mother Hucheloup, she is an old soldier. Look at her moustaches! she inherited them from her husband. A hussaress, indeed, she will fight too. They two by themselves will frighten the banlieue. Comrades, we will overturn the government, as true as there are fifteen acids intermediate between margaric acid and formic acid; besides, I don’t care. Messieurs, my father always detested me because I could not understand mathematics. I only understand love and liberty. I am Grantaire, a good boy. Never having had any money, I have never got used to it,