The feelings to which one is subject in these places we have pointed out in the case of Marius, and we shall see the consequences; they are both more and less than life.
On emerging from a barricade, one no longer knows what one has seen there.
One has been terrible, but one knows it not.
One has been surrounded with conflicting ideas which had human faces; one’s head has been in the light of the future.
There were corpses lying prone there, and phantoms standing erect.
The hours were colossal and seemed hours of eternity.
One has lived in death.
Shadows have passed by.
What were they?
One has beheld hands on which there was blood; there was a deafening horror; there was also a frightful silence; there were open mouths which shouted, and other open mouths which held their peace; one was in the midst of smoke, of night, perhaps.
One fancied that one had touched the sinister ooze of unknown depths; one stares at something red on one’s finger nails.
One no longer remembers anything.
Let us return to the Rue de la Chanvrerie.
All at once, between two discharges, the distant sound of a clock striking the hour became audible.
“It is midday,” said Combeferre.
The twelve strokes had not finished striking when Enjolras sprang to his feet, and from the summit of the barricade hurled this thundering shout:
“Carry stones up into the houses; line the windowsills and the roofs with them.
Half the men to their guns, the other half to the paving-stones.
There is not a minute to be lost.”
A squad of sappers and miners, axe on shoulder, had just made their appearance in battle array at the end of the street.
This could only be the head of a column; and of what column?
The attacking column, evidently; the sappers charged with the demolition of the barricade must always precede the soldiers who are to scale it.
They were, evidently, on the brink of that moment which M. Clermont-Tonnerre, in 1822, called “the tug of war.”
Enjolras’ order was executed with the correct haste which is peculiar to ships and barricades, the only two scenes of combat where escape is impossible.
In less than a minute, two thirds of the stones which Enjolras had had piled up at the door of Corinthe had been carried up to the first floor and the attic, and before a second minute had elapsed, these stones, artistically set one upon the other, walled up the sash-window on the first floor and the windows in the roof to half their height.
A few loop-holes carefully planned by Feuilly, the principal architect, allowed of the passage of the gun-barrels.
This armament of the windows could be effected all the more easily since the firing of grape-shot had ceased.
The two cannons were now discharging ball against the centre of the barrier in order to make a hole there, and, if possible, a breach for the assault.
When the stones destined to the final defence were in place, Enjolras had the bottles which he had set under the table where Mabeuf lay, carried to the first floor.
“Who is to drink that?” Bossuet asked him.
“They,” replied Enjolras.
Then they barricaded the window below, and held in readiness the iron cross-bars which served to secure the door of the wine-shop at night.
The fortress was complete.
The barricade was the rampart, the wine-shop was the dungeon.
With the stones which remained they stopped up the outlet.
As the defenders of a barricade are always obliged to be sparing of their ammunition, and as the assailants know this, the assailants combine their arrangements with a sort of irritating leisure, expose themselves to fire prematurely, though in appearance more than in reality, and take their ease.
The preparations for attack are always made with a certain methodical deliberation; after which, the lightning strikes.
This deliberation permitted Enjolras to take a review of everything and to perfect everything.
He felt that, since such men were to die, their death ought to be a masterpiece.
He said to Marius:
“We are the two leaders.
I will give the last orders inside.
Do you remain outside and observe.”
Marius posted himself on the lookout upon the crest of the barricade.
Enjolras had the door of the kitchen, which was the ambulance, as the reader will remember, nailed up.
“No splashing of the wounded,” he said.
He issued his final orders in the tap-room in a curt, but profoundly tranquil tone; Feuilly listened and replied in the name of all.
“On the first floor, hold your axes in readiness to cut the staircase.
Have you them?”
“Yes,” said Feuilly.