Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [362]
“Take aim!”
“Fire!” said Enjolras.
The two explosions were simultaneous, and everything disappeared in the smoke.
A stinging and stifling smoke amid which writhed, with dull and feeble groans, the wounded and the dying.
When the smoke cleared away, on both sides the combatants were seen, thinned out, but still in the same places, and reloading their pieces in silence.
Suddenly, a thundering voice was heard, crying:
“Clear out, or I’ll blow up the barricade!”
All turned in the direction whence the voice came.
Marius had entered the basement room, and had taken the keg of powder, then he had profited by the smoke and the kind of dark fog which filled the intrenched inclosure, to glide along the barricade as far as that cage of paving-stones in which the torch was fixed. To pull out the torch, to put the keg of powder in its place, to push the pile of paving-stones upon the keg, which stove it in, with a sort of terrible self-control—all this had been for Marius the work of stooping down and rising up; and now all, National Guards, Municipal Guards, officers, soldiers, grouped at the other extremity of the barricade, beheld him with horror, his foot upon the stones, the torch in his hand, his stern face lighted by a deadly resolution, bending the flame of the torch towards that formidable pile in which they discerned the broken barrel of powder, and uttering that terrific cry:
“Clear out, or I’ll blow up the barricade!”
Marius upon this barricade, after the octogenarian, was the vision of the young revolution after the apparition of the old.
“Blow up the barricade!” said a sergeant, “and yourself also!”
Marius answered:
“And myself also.”
And he brought the torch closer to the keg of powder.
But there was no longer anybody on the wall. The assailants, leaving their dead and wounded, fled pell-mell and in disorder towards the extremity of the street, and were again lost in the night. It was a rout.
The barricade was redeemed.
3 (5)
END OF JEAN PROUVAIRE’S RHYME
ALL FLOCKED round Marius. Courfeyrac sprang to his neck.
“You here!”
“How fortunate!” said Combeferre.
“You came in good time!” said Bossuet.
“Without you I should have been dead!” continued Courfeyrac.
“Without you I’d been gobbled!” added Gavroche.
Marius inquired:
“Where is the chief?”
“You are the chief,” said Enjolras.
Marius had all day had a furnace in his brain, now it was a whirlwind. This whirlwind which was within him, affected him as if it were without, and were sweeping him along. It seemed to him that he was already at an immense distance from life. His two luminous months of joy and of love, terminating abruptly upon this frightful precipice, Cosette lost to him, this barricade, himself a chief of insurgents, ail these things appeared a monstrous nightmare. He was obliged to make a mental effort to assure himself that all this which surrounded him was real. Marius had lived too little as yet to know that nothing is more imminent than the impossible, and that what we must always foresee is the unforeseen. He was a spectator of his own drama, as of a play which one does not comprehend.
In this mist in which his mind was struggling, he did not recognise Javert who, bound to his post, had not moved his head during the attack upon the barricade, and who beheld the revolt going on about him with the resignation of a martyr and the majesty of a judge. Marius did not even perceive him.
Meanwhile the assailants made no movement, they were heard marching and swarming at the end of the street, but they did not venture forward, either that they were awaiting orders, or that before rushing anew upon that impregnable redoubt, they were awaiting reinforcements. The insurgents had posted sentinels, and some who were students in medicine had set about dressing the wounded.
A bitter emotion came to darken their joy over the redeemed barricade.
They called