STEP BY STEP.
When there were no chiefs left but Enjolras and Marius at the two
ends of the barricade, the centre, which had so long been supported
by Courfeyrac, Bossuet, Joly, Feuilly, and Combeferre, yielded. The
cannon, without making a practicable breach, had severely injured the
centre of the redoubt, then the crest of the wall had disappeared
under the balls and fallen down, and the fragments which had collected
both inside and out had in the end formed two slopes, the outer one of
which offered an inclined plane by which to attack. A final assault was
attempted thus, and this assault was successful; the bristling mass of
bayonets, hurled forward at a run, came up irresistibly, and the dense
line of the attacking column appeared in the smoke on the top of the
scarp. This time it was all over, and the band of insurgents defending
the centre recoiled pell-mell.
Then the gloomy love of life was rekindled in some; covered by this
forest of muskets, several did not wish to die. It is the moment when
the spirit of self-preservation utters yells, and when the beast
reappears in man. They were drawn up against the six-storied house at
the back of the barricade, and this house might be their salvation.
This house was barricaded, as it were walled up from top to bottom, but
before the troops reached the interior of the redoubt, a door would
have time to open and shut, and it would be life for these desperate
men; for at the back of this house were streets, possible flight, and
space. They began kicking and knocking at the door, while calling,
crying, imploring, and clasping their hands. But no one opened. The
dead head looked down on them from the third-floor window. But Marius
and Enjolras, and seven or eight men who rallied round them, had rushed
forward to protect them. Enjolras shouted to the soldiers, "Do not
advance," and as an officer declined to obey he killed the officer. He
was in the inner yard of the redoubt, close to Corinth, with his sword
in one hand and carbine in the other, holding open the door of the
wine-shop, which he barred against the assailants. He shouted to the
desperate men, "There is only one door open, and it is this one;" and
covering them with his person, and alone facing a battalion, he made
them pass behind him. All rushed in, and Enjolras, whirling his musket
round his head, drove back the bayonets and entered the last, and there
was a frightful moment, during which the troops tried to enter and the
insurgents to bar the door. The latter was closed with such violence
that the five fingers of a soldier who had caught hold of a doorpost
were cut off clean, and remained in the crevice. Marius remained
outside; a bullet broke his collar-bone, and he felt himself fainting
and falling. At this moment, when his eyes were already closed, he felt
the shock of a powerful hand seizing him, and his fainting-fit scarce
left him time for this thought, blended with the supreme recollection
of Cosette, "I am made prisoner and shall be shot."
Enjolras, not seeing Marius among those who had sought shelter in the
house, had the same idea, but they had reached that moment when each
could only think of his own death. Enjolras put the bar on the door,
bolted and locked it, while the soldiers beat it with musket-butts, and
the sappers attacked it with their axes outside. The assailants were
grouped round this door, and the siege of the wine-shop now began. The
soldiers, let us add, were full of fury; the death of the sergeant of
artillery had irritated them, and then, more mournful still, during the
few hours that preceded the attack a whisper ran along the ranks that
the insurgents were mutilating their prisoners, and that there was the
headless body of a soldier in the cellar. This species of fatal rumor
is the general accompaniment of civil wars, and it was a false report
of the same nature which at a later date produced the catastrophe of
the Rue Transnonain. When the door was secured, Enjolras said to the
others,--
"Let us sell our lives dearly."
Then he went up to the table on which Mabœuf and Gavroche were
lying; under the black cloth two forms could be seen straight and
livid, one tall, the other short, and the two faces were vaguely
designed under the cold folds of the winding-sheet. A hand emerged
from under it, and hung toward the ground; it was that of the old man.
Enjolras bent down and kissed this venerable hand, in the same way as
he had done the forehead on the previous evening. They were the only
two kisses he had ever given in his life.
Let us abridge. The barricade had resisted like a gate of Thebes, and
the wine-shop resisted like a house of Saragossa. Such resistances are
violent, and there is no quarter, and a flag of truce is impossible;
people are willing to die provided that they can kill. When Suchet says
"capitulate," Palafox answers, "After the war with cannon, the war
with the knife." Nothing was wanting in the attack on the Hucheloup
wine-shop: neither paving-stone showering from the window and roof on
the assailants, and exasperating the troops by the frightful damage
they committed, nor shots from the attics and cellar, nor the fury of
the attack, nor the rage of the defence, nor, finally, when the door
gave way, the frenzied mania of extermination. When the assailants
rushed into the wine-shop, their feet entangled in the panels of
the broken door which lay on the ground, they did not find a single
combatant. The winding staircase, cut away with axes, lay in the middle
of the ground-floor room, a few wounded men were on the point of dying,
all who were not killed were on the first-floor, and a terrific fire
was discharged thence through the hole in the ceiling which had been
the entrance to the restaurant. These were the last cartridges, and
when they were expended and nobody had any powder or balls left, each
man took up two of the bottles reserved by Enjolras, and defended the
stairs with these frightfully fragile weapons. They were bottles of
aquafortis. We describe the gloomy things of carnage exactly as they
are: the besieged, alas! makes a weapon of everything. Greek fire did
not dishonor Archimedes, boiling pitch did not dishonor Bayard; every
war is a horror, and there is no choice. The musketry-fire of the
assailants, though impeded and discharged from below, was murderous;
and the brink of the hole was soon lined with dead heads, whence
dripped long red and steaming jets. The noise was indescribable, and a
compressed burning smoke almost threw night over the combat. Words fail
to describe horror when it has reached this stage. There were no longer
men in this now infernal struggle, no longer giants contending against
Titans. It resembled Milton and Dante more than Homer, for demons
attacked and spectres resisted. It was a monster heroism.