FIVE LESS AND ONE MORE.
After the man, whoever he aright be, who decreed the "protest of
corpses," had spokes, sad given the formula of the common soul, a
strangely satisfied and terrible cry issued from every mouth, funereal
in its meaning and triumphal in its accent.
"Long live death! Let us all remain here."
"Why all?" Enjolras asked.
"All, all!"
Enjolras continued,--
"The position is good and the barricade fine. Thirty men are
sufficient, then why sacrifice forty?"
They replied,--
"Because not one of us will go away."
"Citizens," Enjolras cried, and there was in his voice an almost
irritated vibration, "the republic is not rich enough in men to make
an unnecessary outlay. If it be the duty of some to go away, that duty
must be performed like any other."
Enjolras, the man-principle, had over his co-religionists that kind of
omnipotence which is evolved from the absolute. Still, however great
that omnipotence might be, they murmured. A chief to the tips of his
fingers, Enjolras, on seeing that they murmured, insisted. He continued
haughtily,--
"Let those who are afraid to be only thirty say so."
The murmurs were redoubled.
"Besides," a voice in the throng remarked, "it is easy to say, 'Go
away,' but the barricade is surrounded."
"Not on the side of the markets," said Enjolras. "The Rue Mondétour
is free, and the Marché des Innocents can be reached by the Rue des
Prêcheurs."
"And then," another voice in the group remarked, "we should be caught
by falling in with some grand rounds of the line or the National Guard.
They will see a man passing in blouse and cap: 'Where do you come from?
Don't you belong to the barricade?' and they will look at your hands;
you smell of powder, and will be shot."
Enjolras, without answering, touched Combeferre's shoulder, and both
entered the ground-floor room. They came out again a moment after,
Enjolras holding in his outstretched hands the four uniforms which
he had laid on one side, and Combeferre followed him carrying the
cross-belts and shakos.
"In this uniform," Enjolras said, "it is easy to enter the ranks and
escape. Here are four at any rate."
And he threw the four uniforms on the unpaved ground; but as no one
moved in the stoical audience, Combeferre resolved to make an appeal.
"Come," he said, "you must show a little pity. Do you know what the
question is here? It is about women. Look you, are there wives,--yes
or no? Are there children,--yes or no? Are these nothing, who rock a
cradle with their foot, and have a heap of children around them? Let
him among you who has never seen a nurse's breast hold up his hand.
Ah! you wish to be killed. I wish it too, I who am addressing you; but
I do not wish to feel the ghosts of women twining their arms around
me. Die,--very good; but do not cause people to die. Suicides like
the one which is about to take place here are sublime; but suicide is
restricted, and does not allow of extension, and so soon as it affects
your relations, suicide is called murder. Think of the little fair
heads, and think too of the white hair. Listen to me! Enjolras tells
me that just now he saw at the corner of the Rue du Cygne a candle at
a poor window on the fifth floor, and on the panes the shaking shadow
of an old woman who appeared to have spent the night in watching at
the window; she is perhaps the mother of one of you. Well, let that
man go, and hasten to say to his mother, 'Mother, here I am!' Let him
be easy in his mind, for the work will be done here all the same. When
a man supports his relatives by his toil, he has no longer any right
to sacrifice himself, for that is deserting his family. And then,
too, those who have daughters, and those who have sisters! Only think
of them. You let yourselves be killed, you are dead, very good; and
to-morrow? It is terrible when girls have no bread, for man begs, but
woman sells. Oh, those charming, graceful, and gentle creatures with
flowers in their caps, who fill the house with chastity, who sing,
who prattle, who are like a living perfume, who prove the existence of
angels in heaven by the purity of virgins on earth; that Jeanne, that
Lise, that Mimi, those adorable and honest creatures, who are your
blessing and your pride,--ah, my God! they will starve. What would you
have me say to you? There is a human flesh-market, and you will not
prevent them entering it with your shadowy hands trembling around them.
Think of the street; think of the pavement covered with strollers;
think of the shops before which women in low-necked dresses come and
go in the mud. Those women, too, were pure. Think of your sisters,
you who have any; misery, prostitution, the police. St Lazare, that
is what these delicate maidens, these fragile marvels of chastity,
modesty, and beauty, fresher than the lilies in May, will fall to. Ah,
you have let yourselves be killed! Ah, you are no longer there! That
is,--very good,--you have wished to withdraw the people from royalty,
and you give your daughters to the police. My friends, take care and
have compassion; we are not wont to think much about women, hapless
women; we trust to the fact that women have not received the education
of men. They are prevented reading, thinking, or occupying themselves
with politics; but will you prevent them going to-night to the Morgue
and recognizing your corpses? Come, those who have families must be
good fellows, and shake our hand and go away, leaving us to do the job
here all alone. I am well aware that courage is needed to go away, and
that it is difficult; but the more difficult the more meritorious it
is. Ton say, 'I have a gun and am at the barricade; all the worse, I
remain.' 'All the worse' is easily said. My friends, there is a morrow,
and that morrow you will not see; but your families will see it. And
what sufferings! Stay; do you know what becomes of a healthy child
with cheeks like an apple, who chatters, prattles, laughs, and smiles
as fresh as a kiss, when he is abandoned? I saw one, quite little,
about so high; his father was dead, and poor people had taken him in
through charity; but they had not bread for themselves. The child was
always hungry; it was winter-time, but though he was always hungry
he did not cry. He was seen to go close to the stove, whose pipe was
covered with yellow earth. The boy detached with his fingers a piece of
this earth and ate it; his breathing was hoarse, his face livid, his
legs soft, and his stomach swollen. He said nothing, and when spoken
to made no answer. He is dead, and was brought to die at the Necker
Hospital, where I saw him, for I was a student there. Now, if there be
any fathers among you, fathers who delight in taking a walk on Sunday,
holding in their powerful hand a child's small fingers, let each of
these fathers fancy this lad his own. The poor brat I can remember
perfectly; I fancy I see him now, and when he lay on the dissecting
table, his bones stood out under his skin like the tombs under the
grass of a cemetery. We found a sort of mud in his stomach, and he had
ashes between his teeth. Come, let us examine our conscience and take
the advice of our heart; statistics prove that the mortality among
deserted children is fifty-five per cent. I repeat, it is a question
of wives, of mothers, of daughters, and babes. Am I saying anything
about you? I know very well what you are. I know that you are all
brave. I know that you have all in your hearts the joy and glory of
laying down your lives for the great cause. I know very well that you
feel yourselves chosen to die usefully and magnificently, and that each
of you clings to his share of the triumph. Very good. But you are not
alone in this world, and there are other beings of whom you must think;
you should not be selfish."
All hung their heads with a gloomy air. Strange contradictions of the
human heart in the sublimest moments! Combeferre, who spoke thus,
was not an orphan; he remembered the mothers of others and forgot
his own; he was going to let himself be killed, and was "selfish."
Marius, fasting and feverish, who had successively given up all hope,
cast ashore on grief, the most mournful of shipwrecks, saturated with
violent emotions, and feeling the end coming, had buried himself deeper
and deeper in that visionary stupor which ever precedes the fatal and
voluntarily accepted hour. A physiologist might have studied in him
the growing symptoms of that febrile absorption which is known and
classified by science, and which is to suffering what voluptuousness
is to pleasure, for despair also has its ecstasy. Marius had attained
that stage; as we have said, things which occurred before him appeared
to him remote, he distinguished the ensemble, but did not perceive the
details. He saw people coming and going before him in a flash, and he
heard voices speaking as if from the bottom of an abyss. Still this
affected him, for there was in this scene a point which pierced to him
and aroused him. He had but one idea, to die, and he did not wish to
avert his attention from it; but he thought in his gloomy somnambulism
that in destroying himself he was not prohibited from saving somebody.
He raked his voice,--
"Enjolras and Combeferre are right," he said: "let us have no useless
sacrifice. I join them, and we must make haste. Combeferre has told you
decisive things: there are men among you who have families, mothers,
sisters, wives, and children. Such must leave the ranks."
Not a soul stirred.
"Married men and supporters of families will leave the ranks," Marius
repeated.
His authority was great, for though Enjolras was really the chief of
the barricade, Marius was its savior.
"I order it," Enjolras cried.
"I implore it," Marius said.
Then these heme men, stirred up by Combeferre's speech, shaken by
Enjolras's order, and moved by Marius's entreaty, began denouncing one
another. "It is true," a young man said to a grown-up man, "you are a
father of a family: begone!" "No! you ought to do so rather," the man
replied, "for you have two sisters to support;" and an extraordinary
contest broke out, in which each struggled not to be thrust out of the
tomb.
"Make haste," said Combeferre; "in a quarter of an hour there will no
longer be time."
"Citizens," Enjolras added, "we have a republic here, and universal
suffrage reigns. Point out yourselves the men who are to leave us."
They obeyed, and at the end of a few minutes five were unanimously
pointed out and left the ranks.
"There are five of them!" Marius exclaimed.
There were only four uniforms.
"Well," the five replied, "one will have to remain behind."
And then came who should remain, and who should find reasons for others
not to remain. The generous quarrel began again.
"You have a wife who loves you.--You have your old mother.--You have
neither father nor mother; what will become of your three little
brothers?--You are the father of five children.--You have a right to
live, for you are only seventeen, and it is too early to die."
These great revolutionary barricades were meeting-places of heroisms.
The improbable was simple there, and these men did not astonish one
another.
"Make haste," Courfeyrac repeated.
Cries to Marius came from the groups.
"You must point out the one who is to remain."
"Yes," the five said; "do you choose, and we will obey you."
Marius did not believe himself capable of any emotion; still, at this
idea of choosing a man for death all the blood flowed back to his
heart, and he would have tamed pale could he have grown paler. He
walked up to the five, who smiled upon him, and each, with his eye full
of that great flame which gleams through history on Thermopylæ, cried
to him,--
"I! I! I!"
And Marius stupidly counted them. There were still five! Then his eyes
settled on the four uniforms. All at once a fifth uniform fell, as if
from heaven, on the other four; the fifth man was saved. Marius raised
his eyes, and recognized M. Fauchelevent.
Jean Valjean had just entered the barricade; either through information
he had obtained, through instinct, or through accident, he arrived by
the Mondétour Lane, and, thanks to his National Guard uniform, passed
without difficulty. The vedette stationed by the insurgents in the Rue
Mondétour had no cause to give the alarm-signal for a single National
Guard, and had let him enter the street, saying to himself, "He is
probably a reinforcement, or at the worst a prisoner." The moment was
too serious for a sentry to turn away from his duty or his post of
observation. At the moment when Jean Valjean entered the redoubt, no
one noticed him, for all eyes were fixed on the five chosen men and the
four uniforms. Jean Valjean, however, had seen and heard, and silently
took off his coat and threw it on the pile formed by the other coats.
The emotion was indescribable.
"Who is this man?" Bossuet asked.
"He is a man," Combeferre replied, "who saves his fellow-man."
Marius added in a grave voice,--
"I know him."
This bail was sufficient for all, and Enjolras turned to Jean Valjean.
"Citizen, you are welcome."
And he added,--
"You are aware that you will die."
Jean Valjean, without answering, helped the man he was saving to put on
his uniform.