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FOOT TO FOOT
When there were no longer any of the leaders left alive,
except Enjolras and Marius at the two extremities of the barricade,
the centre, which had so long sustained Courfeyrac, Joly, Bossuet,
Feuilly and Combeferre, gave way.
The cannon, though it had not effected a practicable breach,
had made a rather large hollow in the middle of the redoubt; there,
the summit of the wall had disappeared before the balls, and had
crumbled away; and the rubbish which had fallen, now inside, now
outside, had, as it accumulated, formed two piles in the nature
of slopes on the two sides of the barrier, one on the inside,
the other on the outside. The exterior slope presented an inclined
plane to the attack.
A final assault was there attempted, and this assault succeeded.
The mass bristling with bayonets and hurled forward at a run,
came up with irresistible force, and the serried front of battle
of the attacking column made its appearance through the smoke
on the crest of the battlements.
This time, it was decisive. The group of insurgents who were
defending the centre retreated in confusion.
Then the gloomy love of life awoke once more in some of them.
Many, finding themselves under the muzzles of this forest of guns,
did not wish to die.
This is a moment when the instinct of self-preservation emits
howls, when the beast re-appears in men. They were hemmed in by
the lofty, six-story house which formed the background of their
redoubt.
This house might prove their salvation. The building was barricaded,
and walled, as it were, from top to bottom. Before the troops
of the line had reached the interior of the redoubt, there was
time for a door to open and shut, the space of a flash of lightning
was sufficient for that, and the door of that house, suddenly
opened a crack and closed again instantly, was life for these
despairing men.
Behind this house, there were streets, possible flight, space.
They set to knocking at that door with the butts of their
guns, and with kicks, shouting, calling, entreating, wringing
their hands.
No one opened.
From the little window on the third floor, the head of the
dead man gazed down upon them.
But Enjolras and Marius, and the seven or eight rallied about
them, sprang forward and protected them.
Enjolras had shouted to the soldiers:
"Don't advance!" and as an officer had not obeyed,
Enjolras had killed the officer.
He was now in the little inner court of the redoubt, with
his back planted against the Corinthe building, a sword in one
hand, a rifle in the other, holding open the door of the wine-shop
which he barred against assailants.
He shouted to the desperate men:--"There is but one door
open; this one."-- And shielding them with his body, and
facing an entire battalion alone, he made them pass in behind
him.
All precipitated themselves thither. Enjolras, executing with
his rifle, which he now used like a cane, what single-stick players
call a "covered rose" round his head, levelled the bayonets
around and in front of him, and was the last to enter; and then
ensued a horrible moment, when the soldiers tried to make their
way in, and the insurgents strove to bar them out. The door was
slammed with such violence, that, as it fell back into its frame,
it showed the five fingers of a soldier who had been clinging
to it, cut off and glued to the post.
Marius remained outside.
A shot had just broken his collar bone, he felt that he was
fainting and falling.
At that moment, with eyes already shut, he felt the shock
of a vigorous hand seizing him, and the swoon in which his senses
vanished, hardly allowed him time for the thought, mingled with
a last memory of Cosette:--"I am taken prisoner.
I shall be shot."
Enjolras, not seeing Marius among those who had taken refuge
in the wine-shop, had the same idea.
But they had reached a moment when each man has not the time
to meditate on his own death. Enjolras fixed the bar across the
door, and bolted it, and double-locked it with key and chain,
while those outside were battering furiously at it, the soldiers
with the butts of their muskets, the sappers with their axes.
The assailants were grouped about that door. The siege of
the wine-shop was now beginning.
The soldiers, we will observe, were full of wrath.
The death of the artillery-sergeant had enraged them, and
then, a still more melancholy circumstance.
during the few hours which had preceded the attack, it had
been reported among them that the insurgents were mutilating their
prisoners, and that there was the headless body of a soldier in
the wine-shop. This sort of fatal rumor is the usual accompaniment
of civil wars, and it was a false report of this kind which, later
on, produced the catastrophe of the Rue Transnonain.
When the door was barricaded, Enjolras said to the others:
"Let us sell our lives dearly."
Then he approached the table on which lay Mabeuf and Gavroche.
Beneath the black cloth two straight and rigid forms were visible,
one large, the other small, and the two faces were vaguely outlined
beneath the cold folds of the shroud.
A hand projected from beneath the winding sheet and hung near
the floor.
It was that of the old man.
Enjolras bent down and kissed that venerable hand, just as
he had kissed his brow on the preceding evening.
These were the only two kisses which he had bestowed in the
course of his life.
Let us abridge the tale.
The barricade had fought like a gate of Thebes; the wine-shop
fought like a house of Saragossa. These resistances are dogged.
No quarter.
No flag of truce possible. Men are willing to die, provided
their opponent will kill them.
When Suchet says:--"Capitulate,"--Palafox replies:
"After the war with cannon, the war with knives."
Nothing was lacking in the capture by assault of the Hucheloup
wine-shop; neither paving-stones raining from the windows and
the roof on the besiegers and exasperating the soldiers by crushing
them horribly, nor shots fired from the attic-windows and the
cellar, nor the fury of attack, nor, finally, when the door yielded,
the frenzied madness of extermination. The assailants, rushing
into the wine-shop, their feet entangled in the panels of the
door which had been beaten in and flung on the ground, found not
a single combatant there.
The spiral staircase, hewn asunder with the axe, lay in the
middle of the tap-room, a few wounded men were just breathing
their last, every one who was not killed was on the first floor,
and from there, through the hole in the ceiling, which had formed
the entrance of the stairs, a terrific fire burst forth.
It was the last of their cartridges. When they were exhausted,
when these formidable men on the point of death had no longer
either powder or ball, each grasped in his hands two of the bottles
which Enjolras had reserved, and of which we have spoken, and
held the scaling party in check with these frightfully fragile
clubs.
They were bottles of aquafortis.
We relate these gloomy incidents of carnage as they occurred.
The besieged man, alas! converts everything into a weapon.
Greek fire did not disgrace Archimedes, boiling pitch did
not disgrace Bayard. All war is a thing of terror, and there is
no choice in it. The musketry of the besiegers, though confined
and embarrassed by being directed from below upwards, was deadly.
The rim of the hole in the ceiling was speedily surrounded
by heads of the slain, whence dripped long, red and smoking streams,
the uproar was indescribable; a close and burning smoke almost
produced night over this combat. Words are lacking to express
horror when it has reached this pitch. There were no longer men
in this conflict, which was now infernal. They were no longer
giants matched with colossi.
It resembled Milton and Dante rather than Homer.
Demons attacked, spectres resisted.
It was heroism become monstrous.
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