There was neither bread nor meat.
The fifty men in the barricade had speedily exhausted the scanty provisions of the wine-shop during the sixteen hours which they had passed there.
At a given moment, every barricade inevitably becomes the raft of la Meduse.
They were obliged to resign themselves to hunger.
They had then reached the first hours of that Spartan day of the 6th of June when, in the barricade Saint-Merry, Jeanne, surrounded by the insurgents who demanded bread, replied to all combatants crying:
“Something to eat!” with:
“Why?
It is three o’clock; at four we shall be dead.”
As they could no longer eat, Enjolras forbade them to drink.
He interdicted wine, and portioned out the brandy.
They had found in the cellar fifteen full bottles hermetically sealed. Enjolras and Combeferre examined them.
Combeferre when he came up again said:—“It’s the old stock of Father Hucheloup, who began business as a grocer.”—“It must be real wine,” observed Bossuet. “It’s lucky that Grantaire is asleep.
If he were on foot, there would be a good deal of difficulty in saving those bottles.”—Enjolras, in spite of all murmurs, placed his veto on the fifteen bottles, and, in order that no one might touch them, he had them placed under the table on which Father Mabeuf was lying.
About two o’clock in the morning, they reckoned up their strength.
There were still thirty-seven of them.
The day began to dawn.
The torch, which had been replaced in its cavity in the pavement, had just been extinguished.
The interior of the barricade, that species of tiny courtyard appropriated from the street, was bathed in shadows, and resembled, athwart the vague, twilight horror, the deck of a disabled ship.
The combatants, as they went and came, moved about there like black forms.
Above that terrible nesting-place of gloom the stories of the mute houses were lividly outlined; at the very top, the chimneys stood palely out.
The sky was of that charming, undecided hue, which may be white and may be blue.
Birds flew about in it with cries of joy.
The lofty house which formed the back of the barricade, being turned to the East, had upon its roof a rosy reflection.
The morning breeze ruffled the gray hair on the head of the dead man at the third-story window.
“I am delighted that the torch has been extinguished,” said Courfeyrac to Feuilly. “That torch flickering in the wind annoyed me. It had the appearance of being afraid.
The light of torches resembles the wisdom of cowards; it gives a bad light because it trembles.”
Dawn awakens minds as it does the birds; all began to talk.
Joly, perceiving a cat prowling on a gutter, extracted philosophy from it.
“What is the cat?” he exclaimed.
“It is a corrective.
The good God, having made the mouse, said:
‘Hullo! I have committed a blunder.’
And so he made the cat.
The cat is the erratum of the mouse.
The mouse, plus the cat, is the proof of creation revised and corrected.”
Combeferre, surrounded by students and artisans, was speaking of the dead, of Jean Prouvaire, of Bahorel, of Mabeuf, and even of Cabuc, and of Enjolras’ sad severity.
He said:—
“Harmodius and Aristogiton, Brutus, Chereas, Stephanus, Cromwell, Charlotte Corday, Sand, have all had their moment of agony when it was too late.
Our hearts quiver so, and human life is such a mystery that, even in the case of a civic murder, even in a murder for liberation, if there be such a thing, the remorse for having struck a man surpasses the joy of having served the human race.”
And, such are the windings of the exchange of speech, that, a moment later, by a transition brought about through Jean Prouvaire’s verses, Combeferre was comparing the translators of the Georgics, Raux with Cournand, Cournand with Delille, pointing out the passages translated by Malfilatre, particularly the prodigies of C?sar’s death; and at that word, C?sar, the conversation reverted to Brutus.
“C?sar,” said Combeferre, “fell justly.
Cicero was severe towards C?sar, and he was right.
That severity is not diatribe.
When Zoilus insults Homer, when M?vius insults Virgil, when Vise insults Moliere, when Pope insults Shakspeare, when Frederic insults Voltaire, it is an old law of envy and hatred which is being carried out; genius attracts insult, great men are always more or less barked at.
But Zoilus and Cicero are two different persons.
Cicero is an arbiter in thought, just as Brutus is an arbiter by the sword.
For my own part, I blame that last justice, the blade; but, antiquity admitted it.
C?sar, the violator of the Rubicon, conferring, as though they came from him, the dignities which emanated from the people, not rising at the entrance of the senate, committed the acts of a king and almost of a tyrant, regia ac pene tyrannica. He was a great man; so much the worse, or so much the better; the lesson is but the more exalted.
His twenty-three wounds touch me less than the spitting in the face of Jesus Christ.
C?sar is stabbed by the senators; Christ is cuffed by lackeys.