Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [354]
Nothing could be more fantastic and more motley than this band. One had a short jacket, a cavalry sabre, and two horse-pistols; another was in shirt sleeves, with a round hat, and a powder-horn hung at his side; a third had a breast-plate of nine sheets of brown paper, and was armed with a saddler’s awl. There was one of them who cried: “Let us exterminate to the last man, and die on the point of our bayonets!” This man had no bayonet. Another displayed over his coat a cross-belt and cartridge-box of the National Guard, with the box cover adorned with this inscription in red cloth: Public Order. Many muskets bearing the numbers of their legions, few hats, no cravats, many bare arms, some pikes. Add to this all ages, all faces, small pale young men, bronzed longshoremen. All were hurrying, and, while helping each other, they talked about the possible chances—that they would have help by three o‘clock in the morning—that they were sure of one regiment—that Paris would rise. Terrible subjects, with which were mingled a sort of cordial joviality. One would have said they were brothers, they did not know each other’s names. Great perils have this beauty, that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers.
A fire had been kindled in the kitchen, and they were melting pitchers, dishes, forks, all the pewter ware of the tavern into bullets. They drank through it all. Percussion-caps and buck-shot rolled pell-mell upon the tables with glasses of wine. In the billiard-room, Ma‘am Hucheloup, Chowder, and Fricassee, variously modified by terror, one being stupefied, another breathless, the third alert, were tearing up old linen and making lint; three insurgents assisted them, three long-haired, bearded, and mous tached wags who tore up the cloth with the fingers of a laundress, and who made them tremble.
The man of tall stature whom Courfeyrac, Combeferre, and Enjolras had noticed, at the moment he joined the company at the corner of the Rue des Billettes, was working on the little barricade, and making himself useful there. Gavroche worked on the large one. As for the young man who had waited for Courfeyrac at his house, and had asked him for Monsieur Marius, he had disappeared very nearly at the moment the omnibus was overturned.
Gavroche, completely carried away and radiant, had charged himself with making all ready. He went, came, mounted, descended, remounted, bustled, sparkled. He seemed to be there for the encouragement of all. Had he a spur? yes, certainly, his misery; had he wings? yes, certainly, his joy. Gavroche was a whirlwind. They saw him incessantly, they heard him constantly. He filled the air, being everywhere at once. He was a kind of stimulating ubiquity; no stop possible with him. The enormous barricade felt him on its back. He vexed the loungers, he urged on the idle, he reanimated the weary, he provoked the thoughtful, kept some in cheerfulness, others in breath, others in anger, all in motion, piqued a student, was biting to a working-man; took position, stopped, started on, flitted above the tumult and the effort, leaped from these to those, murmured, hummed, and stirred up the whole train; the fly of the revolutionary coach.gg
Perpetual motion was in his little arms, and perpetual clamour in his little lungs.
“Go to it! more paving stones! more barrels! more gizmos! where are they? A basket of plaster, to stop that hole. It is too small, your barricade. It must go higher. Pile on everything, brace it with everything. Break up the house. A barricade is Mother Gibou’s tea-party. Hold on, there is a glass-door.”
This made the labourers exclaim:
“A glass-door? what do you want us to do with a glass-door, you little wart?”
“Wart yourselves,” retorted Gavroche. “A glass-door in a barricade is excellent. It doesn’t prevent attacking it, but it bothers them in taking it. Then you have never snitched