Let us state these facts calmly.
Death on the barricade or the tomb in exile, is an acceptable occasion for devotion.
The real name of devotion is disinterestedness.
Let the abandoned allow themselves to be abandoned, let the exiled allow themselves to be exiled, and let us confine ourselves to entreating great nations not to retreat too far, when they do retreat.
One must not push too far in descent under pretext of a return to reason.
Matter exists, the minute exists, interest exists, the stomach exists; but the stomach must not be the sole wisdom.
The life of the moment has its rights, we admit, but permanent life has its rights also.
Alas! the fact that one is mounted does not preclude a fall.
This can be seen in history more frequently than is desirable: A nation is great, it tastes the ideal, then it bites the mire, and finds it good; and if it be asked how it happens that it has abandoned Socrates for Falstaff, it replies:
“Because I love statesmen.”
One word more before returning to our subject, the conflict.
A battle like the one which we are engaged in describing is nothing else than a convulsion towards the ideal.
Progress trammelled is sickly, and is subject to these tragic epilepsies.
With that malady of progress, civil war, we have been obliged to come in contact in our passage.
This is one of the fatal phases, at once act and entr’acte of that drama whose pivot is a social condemnation, and whose veritable title is Progress.
Progress!
The cry to which we frequently give utterance is our whole thought; and, at the point of this drama which we have now reached, the idea which it contains having still more than one trial to undergo, it is, perhaps, permitted to us, if not to lift the veil from it, to at least allow its light to shine through.
The book which the reader has under his eye at this moment is, from one end to the other, as a whole and in detail, whatever may be its intermittences, exceptions and faults, the march from evil to good, from the unjust to the just, from night to day, from appetite to conscience, from rottenness to life, from hell to heaven, from nothingness to God.
Point of departure: matter; point of arrival: the soul.
The hydra at the beginning, the angel at the end.
CHAPTER XXI—THE HEROES
All at once, the drum beat the charge.
The attack was a hurricane.
On the evening before, in the darkness, the barricade had been approached silently, as by a boa.
Now, in broad daylight, in that widening street, surprise was decidedly impossible, rude force had, moreover, been unmasked, the cannon had begun the roar, the army hurled itself on the barricade. Fury now became skill.
A powerful detachment of infantry of the line, broken at regular intervals, by the National Guard and the Municipal Guard on foot, and supported by serried masses which could be heard though not seen, debauched into the street at a run, with drums beating, trumpets braying, bayonets levelled, the sappers at their head, and, imperturbable under the projectiles, charged straight for the barricade with the weight of a brazen beam against a wall.
The wall held firm.
The insurgents fired impetuously.
The barricade once scaled had a mane of lightning flashes.
The assault was so furious, that for one moment, it was inundated with assailants; but it shook off the soldiers as the lion shakes off the dogs, and it was only covered with besiegers as the cliff is covered with foam, to reappear, a moment later, beetling, black and formidable.
The column, forced to retreat, remained massed in the street, unprotected but terrible, and replied to the redoubt with a terrible discharge of musketry.
Any one who has seen fireworks will recall the sheaf formed of interlacing lightnings which is called a bouquet.
Let the reader picture to himself this bouquet, no longer vertical but horizontal, bearing a bullet, buckshot or a biscaien at the tip of each one of its jets of flame, and picking off dead men one after another from its clusters of lightning.
The barricade was underneath it.
On both sides, the resolution was equal.
The bravery exhibited there was almost barbarous and was complicated with a sort of heroic ferocity which began by the sacrifice of self.
This was the epoch when a National Guardsman fought like a Zouave.
The troop wished to make an end of it, insurrection was desirous of fighting.
The acceptance of the death agony in the flower of youth and in the flush of health turns intrepidity into frenzy.
In this fray, each one underwent the broadening growth of the death hour.
The street was strewn with corpses.
The barricade had Enjolras at one of its extremities and Marius at the other.
Enjolras, who carried the whole barricade in his head, reserved and sheltered himself; three soldiers fell, one after the other, under his embrasure, without having even seen him; Marius fought unprotected.
He made himself a target.
He stood with more than half his body above the breastworks.
There is no more violent prodigal than the avaricious man who takes the bit in his teeth; there is no man more terrible in action than a dreamer.
Marius was formidable and pensive.
In battle he was as in a dream.
One would have pronounced him a phantom engaged in firing a gun.
The insurgents’ cartridges were giving out; but not their sarcasms.