CLEARING AND CLOUDING.
Enjolras had gone out to reconnoitre, and had left by the Mondétour
Lane, keeping in the shadow of the houses. The insurgents, we must
state, were full of hope: the way in which they had repulsed the night
attack almost made them disdain beforehand the attack at daybreak.
They waited for it and smiled at it, and no more doubted of their
success than of their cause; moreover, help was evidently going to
reach them, and they reckoned on it. With that facility of triumphant
prophecy which is a part of the strength of the French fighter, they
divided into three certain phases the opening day,--at six in the
morning a regiment, which had been worked upon, would turn; at mid-day
insurrection all over Paris; at sunset the revolution. The tocsin of
St. Merry, which had not ceased once since the previous evening, could
be heard, and this was a proof that the other barricade, the great
one, Jeanne's, still held out. All these hopes were interchanged by
the groups with a species of gay and formidable buzzing which resemble
the war-hum of a swarm of bees. Enjolras reappeared returning from his
gloomy walk in the external darkness. He listened for a moment to all
this joy with his arms folded, and then said, fresh and rosy in the
growing light of dawn,--
"The whole army of Paris is out, and one third of that army is
preparing to attack the barricade behind which you now are. There is,
too, the National Guard. I distinguished the shakos of the fifth line
regiment and the colors of the sixth legion. You will be attacked in
an hour; as for the people, they were in a state of ferment yesterday,
but this morning do not stir. There is nothing to wait for, nothing to
hope; no more a faubourg than a regiment You are abandoned."
These words fell on the buzzing groups, and produced the same effect
as the first drops of a storm do on a swarm. All remained dumb, and
there was a moment of inexpressible silence, in which death might have
been heard flying past This moment was short, and a voice shouted to
Enjolras from the thickest of the crowd,--
"Be it so. Let us raise the barricade to a height of twenty feet, and
all fall upon it. Citizens, let us offer the protest of corpses, and
show that if the people abandon the republicans, the republicans do not
abandon the people."
These words disengaged the thoughts of all from the painful cloud of
individual anxieties, and an enthusiastic shout greeted them. The
name of the man who spoke thus was never known; he was Rome unknown
blouse-wearer, an unknown man, a forgotten man, a passing hero, that
great anonymous always mixed up in human crises and social Geneses,
who at the given moment utters the decisive word in a supreme fashion,
and who fades away into darkness after having represented for a minute,
in the light of a flash, the people and God. This inexorable resolution
was so strongly in the air of June 6, 1832, that almost at the same
hour the insurgents of the St. Merry barricade uttered this cry, which
became historical,--"Whether they come to our help, or whether they do
not, what matter! Let us all fall here, to the last man!" As we see,
the two barricades, though materially isolated, communicated.