The barricade Saint Antoine converted everything into a weapon; everything that civil war could throw at the head of society proceeded thence; it was not combat, it was a paroxysm; the carbines which defended this redoubt, among which there were some blunderbusses, sent bits of earthenware bones, coat-buttons, even the casters from night-stands, dangerous projectiles on account of the brass.
This barricade was furious; it hurled to the clouds an inexpressible clamor; at certain moments, when provoking the army, it was covered with throngs and tempest; a tumultuous crowd of flaming heads crowned it; a swarm filled it; it had a thorny crest of guns, of sabres, of cudgels, of axes, of pikes and of bayonets; a vast red flag flapped in the wind; shouts of command, songs of attack, the roll of drums, the sobs of women and bursts of gloomy laughter from the starving were to be heard there.
It was huge and living, and, like the back of an electric beast, there proceeded from it little flashes of lightning.
The spirit of revolution covered with its cloud this summit where rumbled that voice of the people which resembles the voice of God; a strange majesty was emitted by this titanic basket of rubbish.
It was a heap of filth and it was Sinai.
As we have said previously, it attacked in the name of the revolution—what?
The revolution.
It—that barricade, chance, hazard, disorder, terror, misunderstanding, the unknown—had facing it the Constituent Assembly, the sovereignty of the people, universal suffrage, the nation, the republic; and it was the Carmagnole bidding defiance to the Marseillaise.
Immense but heroic defiance, for the old faubourg is a hero.
The faubourg and its redoubt lent each other assistance.
The faubourg shouldered the redoubt, the redoubt took its stand under cover of the faubourg.
The vast barricade spread out like a cliff against which the strategy of the African generals dashed itself.
Its caverns, its excrescences, its warts, its gibbosities, grimaced, so to speak, and grinned beneath the smoke.
The mitraille vanished in shapelessness; the bombs plunged into it; bullets only succeeded in making holes in it; what was the use of cannonading chaos? and the regiments, accustomed to the fiercest visions of war, gazed with uneasy eyes on that species of redoubt, a wild beast in its boar-like bristling and a mountain by its enormous size.
A quarter of a league away, from the corner of the Rue du Temple which debouches on the boulevard near the Chateau-d’Eau, if one thrust one’s head bodily beyond the point formed by the front of the Dallemagne shop, one perceived in the distance, beyond the canal, in the street which mounts the slopes of Belleville at the culminating point of the rise, a strange wall reaching to the second story of the house fronts, a sort of hyphen between the houses on the right and the houses on the left, as though the street had folded back on itself its loftiest wall in order to close itself abruptly.
This wall was built of paving-stones.
It was straight, correct, cold, perpendicular, levelled with the square, laid out by rule and line.
Cement was lacking, of course, but, as in the case of certain Roman walls, without interfering with its rigid architecture.
The entablature was mathematically parallel with the base.
From distance to distance, one could distinguish on the gray surface, almost invisible loopholes which resembled black threads.
These loopholes were separated from each other by equal spaces.
The street was deserted as far as the eye could reach. All windows and doors were closed. In the background rose this barrier, which made a blind thoroughfare of the street, a motionless and tranquil wall; no one was visible, nothing was audible; not a cry, not a sound, not a breath.
A sepulchre.
The dazzling sun of June inundated this terrible thing with light.
It was the barricade of the Faubourg of the Temple.
As soon as one arrived on the spot, and caught sight of it, it was impossible, even for the boldest, not to become thoughtful before this mysterious apparition.
It was adjusted, jointed, imbricated, rectilinear, symmetrical and funereal.
Science and gloom met there.
One felt that the chief of this barricade was a geometrician or a spectre.
One looked at it and spoke low.
From time to time, if some soldier, an officer or representative of the people, chanced to traverse the deserted highway, a faint, sharp whistle was heard, and the passer-by fell dead or wounded, or, if he escaped the bullet, sometimes a biscaien was seen to ensconce itself in some closed shutter, in the interstice between two blocks of stone, or in the plaster of a wall.
For the men in the barricade had made themselves two small cannons out of two cast-iron lengths of gas-pipe, plugged up at one end with tow and fire-clay.
There was no waste of useless powder. Nearly every shot told.
There were corpses here and there, and pools of blood on the pavement.
I remember a white butterfly which went and came in the street.
Summer does not abdicate.
In the neighborhood, the spaces beneath the portes-cocheres were encumbered with wounded.
One felt oneself aimed at by some person whom one did not see, and one understood that guns were levelled at the whole length of the street.
Massed behind the sort of sloping ridge which the vaulted canal forms at the entrance to the Faubourg du Temple, the soldiers of the attacking column, gravely and thoughtfully, watched this dismal redoubt, this immobility, this passivity, whence sprang death.
Some crawled flat on their faces as far as the crest of the curve of the bridge, taking care that their shakos did not project beyond it.
The valiant Colonel Monteynard admired this barricade with a shudder.—“How that is built!” he said to a Representative.
“Not one paving-stone projects beyond its neighbor.
It is made of porcelain.”—At that moment, a bullet broke the cross on his breast, and he fell.
“The cowards!” people said. “Let them show themselves.
Let us see them!
They dare not!
They are hiding!”
The barricade of the Faubourg du Temple, defended by eighty men, attacked by ten thousand, held out for three days.
On the fourth, they did as at Zaatcha, as at Constantine, they pierced the houses, they came over the roofs, the barricade was taken.
Not one of the eighty cowards thought of flight, all were killed there with the exception of the leader, Barthelemy, of whom we shall speak presently.