Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [395]
It was the heroism of monsters.
20 (23)
ORESTES FASTING AND PYLADES DRUNK
AT LAST, mounting on each other’s shoulders, helping themselves by the skeleton of the staircase, climbing up the walls, hanging to the ceiling, cutting to pieces, at the very edge of the hatchway, the last to resist, some twenty of the besiegers, soldiers, National Guards, Municipal Guards, pell-mell, most disfigured by wounds in the face of this terrible ascent, blinded with blood, furious, become savages, burst into the room of the second story. There was now but a single man there on his feet, Enjolras. Without cartridges, without a sword, he had now in his hand only the barrel of his carbine, the stock of which he had broken over the heads of those who were entering. He had put the billiard table between the assailants and himself; he had retreated to the comer of the room, and there, with proud eye, haughty head, and that stump of a weapon in his grasp, he was still so formidable that a large space was left about him. A cry arose:
“This is the chief. It is he who killed the artilleryman. As he has put himself there, it is a good place. Let him stay. Let us shoot him on the spot.”
“Shoot me,” said Enjolras.
And, throwing away the stump of his carbine, and folding his arms, he presented his breast.
The boldness that dies well always moves men. As soon as Enjolras had folded his arms, accepting the end, the uproar of the conflict ceased in the room, and that chaos suddenly hushed into a sort of sepulchral solemnity. It seemed as if the menacing majesty of Enjolras, disarmed and motionless, weighed upon that tumult, and as if, merely by the authority of his tranquil eye, this young man, who alone had no wound, superb, bloody, fascinating, indifferent as if he were invulnerable, compelled that sinister mob to kill him respectfully. His beauty, at that moment, augmented by his dignity, was a resplendence, and, as if he could no more be fatigued than wounded, after the terrible twenty-four hours which had just elapsed, he was fresh and rosy. It was of him perhaps that the witness spoke who said afterwards before the court-martial: “There was one insurgent whom I heard called Apollo.” A National Guard who was aiming at Enjolras, dropped his weapon, saying: “It seems to me that I am shooting a flower.”
Twelve men formed in platoon in the corner opposite Enjolras and made their muskets ready in silence.
Then a sergeant cried: “Take aim!”
An officer intervened.
“Wait.”
And addressing Enjolras:
“Do you wish your eyes bandaged?”
“No.”
“Was it really you who killed the sergeant of artillery?”
“Yes.”
Within a few seconds Grantaire had awakened.
Grantaire, it will be remembered, had been asleep since the day previous in the upper room of the tavern sitting in a chair, leaning heavily forward on a table.
He realised, in all its energy, strength, the old metaphor: dead drunk. The hideous potion, the absinthe-stout-alcohol, had thrown him into a lethargy. His table being small, and of no use in the barricade, they had left it to him. He had continued in the same posture, his breast doubled over the table, his head lying flat upon his arms, surrounded by glasses, jugs, and bottles. He slept with that crushing sleep of the torpid bear and the overfed leech. Nothing had affected him, neither the musketry, nor the balls, nor the grapeshot which penetrated through the casement into the room in which he was. Nor the prodigious uproar of the assault. Only, he responded sometimes to the cannon with a snore. He seemed waiting there for a ball to come and save him the trouble of awaking. Several corpses lay about him; and, at the first glance, nothing distinguished him from those deep sleepers of death.
Noise does not waken a drunkard; silence wakens him. This peculiarity has been observed more than once. The fall of everything about him augmented Grantaire’s oblivion; destruction was a lullaby to him. The kind of halt in the tumult before Enjolras was a shock to