Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [353]
“Be still, wine-cask!” said Courfeyrac.
Grantaire answered:
“I am Capitoul and Master of Floral Games!”
Enjolras, who was standing on the crest of the barricade, musket in hand, raised his fine austere face. Enjolras, we know, had something of the Spartan and of the Puritan. He would have died at Thermopylæ with Leonidas, and would have burned Drogheda with Cromwell.
“Grantaire,” cried he, “go sleep yourself sober away from here. This is the place for intoxication and not for drunkenness. Do not dishonour the barricade!”
This angry speech produced upon Grantaire a singular effect. One would have said that he had received a glass of cold water in his face. He appeared suddenly sobered. He sat down, leaned upon a table near the window, looked at Enjolras with an inexpressible gentleness, and said to him:
“Let me sleep here.”
“Go sleep elsewhere,” cried Enjolras.
But Grantaire, keeping his tender and troubled eyes fixed upon him, answered:
“Let me sleep here—until I die here.”
Enjolras regarded him with a disdainful eye:
“Grantaire, you are incapable of belief, of thought, of will, of life, and of death.”
Grantaire answered gravely: “You’ll see.”
He stammered out a few more unintelligible words, then his head fell heavily upon the table, and, a common effect of the second stage of inebri ety into which Enjolras had roughly and suddenly pushed him, a moment later he was asleep.
3 (4)
ATTEMPT TO CONSOLE THE WIDOW HUCHELOUP
BAHOREL, in ecstasies over the barricade, cried:
“There is the street in a low neck, how well it looks!”
Courfeyrac, even while helping to demolish the tavern, sought to console the widowed landlady.
“Mother Hucheloup, were you not complaining the other day that you had been summoned and fined because Fricassee had shaken a rug out of your window?”
“Yes, my good Monsieur Courfeyrac. Oh! my God! are you going to put that table also into your horror? And besides that, for the rug, and also for a flower-pot which fell from the attic into the street, the government fined me a hundred francs. If that isn’t an abomination!”
“Well, Mother Hucheloup, we are avenging you.”
Mother Hucheloup, in this reparation which they were making her, did not seem to understand her advantage very well. She was satisfied after the manner of that Arab woman who, having received a blow from her husband, went to complain to her father, crying for vengeance and saying: “Father, you owe my husband affront for affront.” The father asked: “Upon which cheek did you receive the blow?” “Upon the left cheek.” The father struck the right cheek, and said: “Now you are satisfied. Go and tell your husband that he has struck my daughter, but that I have struck his wife.”
The rain had ceased. Recruits had arrived. Some working-men had brought under their smocks a keg of powder, a hamper containing bottles of vitriol, two or three carnival torches, and a basket full of lamps, “relics of the king’s fête,” which fête was quite recent, having taken place the 1st of May. It was said that these supplies came from a grocer of the Faubourg Saint Antoine, named Pépin. They broke the only lamp in the Rue de la Chanvrerie, the lamp opposite the Rue Saint-Denis, and all the lamps in the surrounding streets, Mondétour, du Cygne, des Prêcheurs, and de la Grande and de la Petite Truanderie.
Enjolras, Combeferre, and Courfeyrac, directed everything. Two barricades were now building at the same time, both resting on the house of Corinth and making a right angle; the larger one closed the Rue de la Chanvrerie, the other closed the Rue Mondétour in the direction of the Rue du Cygne. This last barricade,