He merely replied to the cannonade, now and then, by a snore.
He seemed to be waiting there for a bullet which should spare him the trouble of waking.
Many corpses were strewn around him; and, at the first glance, there was nothing to distinguish him from those profound sleepers of death.
Noise does not rouse a drunken man; silence awakens him.
The fall of everything around him only augmented Grantaire’s prostration; the crumbling of all things was his lullaby.
The sort of halt which the tumult underwent in the presence of Enjolras was a shock to this heavy slumber.
It had the effect of a carriage going at full speed, which suddenly comes to a dead stop.
The persons dozing within it wake up.
Grantaire rose to his feet with a start, stretched out his arms, rubbed his eyes, stared, yawned, and understood.
A fit of drunkenness reaching its end resembles a curtain which is torn away.
One beholds, at a single glance and as a whole, all that it has concealed.
All suddenly presents itself to the memory; and the drunkard who has known nothing of what has been taking place during the last twenty-four hours, has no sooner opened his eyes than he is perfectly informed.
Ideas recur to him with abrupt lucidity; the obliteration of intoxication, a sort of steam which has obscured the brain, is dissipated, and makes way for the clear and sharply outlined importunity of realities.
Relegated, as he was, to one corner, and sheltered behind the billiard-table, the soldiers whose eyes were fixed on Enjolras, had not even noticed Grantaire, and the sergeant was preparing to repeat his order:
“Take aim!” when all at once, they heard a strong voice shout beside them:
“Long live the Republic!
I’m one of them.”
Grantaire had risen.
The immense gleam of the whole combat which he had missed, and in which he had had no part, appeared in the brilliant glance of the transfigured drunken man.
He repeated: “Long live the Republic!” crossed the room with a firm stride and placed himself in front of the guns beside Enjolras.
“Finish both of us at one blow,” said he. And turning gently to Enjolras, he said to him:
“Do you permit it?”
Enjolras pressed his hand with a smile.
This smile was not ended when the report resounded.
Enjolras, pierced by eight bullets, remained leaning against the wall, as though the balls had nailed him there.
Only, his head was bowed.
Grantaire fell at his feet, as though struck by a thunderbolt.
A few moments later, the soldiers dislodged the last remaining insurgents, who had taken refuge at the top of the house.
They fired into the attic through a wooden lattice.
They fought under the very roof.
They flung bodies, some of them still alive, out through the windows.
Two light-infantrymen, who tried to lift the shattered omnibus, were slain by two shots fired from the attic.
A man in a blouse was flung down from it, with a bayonet wound in the abdomen, and breathed his last on the ground.
A soldier and an insurgent slipped together on the sloping slates of the roof, and, as they would not release each other, they fell, clasped in a ferocious embrace.
A similar conflict went on in the cellar.
Shouts, shots, a fierce trampling.
Then silence.
The barricade was captured.
The soldiers began to search the houses round about, and to pursue the fugitives.
CHAPTER XXIV—PRISONER
Marius was, in fact, a prisoner.
The hand which had seized him from behind and whose grasp he had felt at the moment of his fall and his loss of consciousness was that of Jean Valjean.
Jean Valjean had taken no other part in the combat than to expose himself in it.
Had it not been for him, no one, in that supreme phase of agony, would have thought of the wounded.
Thanks to him, everywhere present in the carnage, like a providence, those who fell were picked up, transported to the tap-room, and cared for.
In the intervals, he reappeared on the barricade.
But nothing which could resemble a blow, an attack or even personal defence proceeded from his hands.
He held his peace and lent succor.
Moreover, he had received only a few scratches.
The bullets would have none of him.