As for Enjolras, he was reloading his gun. He looked around him.
"Is there no objection?"
And he turned to Jean Valjean.
"Take the spy."
Jean Valjean took possession of Javert by seating himself on the end of the table. He seized the pistol, and a faint clink showed that he had cocked it. Almost at the same moment the bugle-call was heard.
"Mind yourselves!" Marius shouted from the top of the barricade.
Javert began laughing that noiseless laugh peculiar to him, and, looking intently at the insurgents, said to them,—
"You are no healthier than I am."
"All outside," Enjolras cried.
The insurgents rushed tumultuously forth, and as they passed, Javert smote them on the back, so to speak, with the expression, "We shall meet again soon."
CHAPTER XIX.
JEAN VALJEAN REVENGES HIMSELF.
So soon as Jean Valjean was alone with Javert he undid the rope which fastened the prisoner round the waist, the knot of which was under the table. After this, he made him a signal to rise. Javert obeyed with that indefinable smile in which the supremacy of enchained authority is condensed. Jean Valjean seized Javert by the martingale, as he would have taken an ox by its halter, and dragging him after him, quitted the wine-shop slowly, for Javert, having his feet hobbled, could only take very short steps. Jean Valjean held the pistol in his hand, and they thus crossed the inner trapeze of the barricade; the insurgents, prepared for the imminent attack, turned their backs.
Marius alone, placed at the left extremity of the barricade, saw them pass. This group of the victim and the executioner was illumined by the sepulchral gleams which he had in his soul. Jean Valjean forced Javert to climb over the barricade with some difficulty, but did not loosen the cord. When they had crossed the bar, they found themselves alone in the lane, and no one could now see them, for the elbow formed by the houses hid them from the insurgents. The corpses removed from the barricade formed a horrible pile a few paces from them. Among the dead could be distinguished a livid face, dishevelled hair, a pierced hand, and a half-naked female bosom; it was Éponine. Javert looked askance at this dead girl, and said with profound calmness,—
"It seems to me I know that girl."
Then he turned to Jean Valjean, who placed the pistol under his arm, and fixed on Javert a glance which had no need of words to say, "Javert, it is I."
Javert answered, "Take your revenge."
Jean Valjean took a knife from his pocket and opened it.
"A clasp-knife," Javert exclaimed. "You are right, that suits you better."
Jean Valjean cut the martingale which Javert had round his neck, then he cut the ropes on his wrists, and stooping down, those on his feet; then rising again, he said, "You are free."
It was not easy to astonish Javert, still, master though he was of himself, he could not suppress his emotion; he stood gaping and motionless, while Jean Valjean continued,—
"I do not believe that I shall leave this place. Still, if by accident I do, I live under the name of Fauchelevent, at No. 7, Rue de l'Homme Armé."
Javert gave a tigerish frown, which opened a corner of his mouth, and muttered between his teeth,—
"Take care!"
"Begone!" said Jean Valjean.
Javert added,—
"You said Fauchelevent, Rue de l'Homme Armé?"
"No. 7."
Javert repeated in a low voice,—"No. 7."
He rebuttoned his frock-coat, restored his military stiffness between his shoulders, made a half turn, crossed his arms while supporting his chin with one of his hands, and walked off in the direction of the markets. Jean Valjean looked after him. After going a few yards Javert turned and said,—
"You annoy me. I would sooner be killed by you."
Javert did not even notice that he no longer addressed Jean Valjean with familiarity.
"Begone!" said Jean Valjean.
Javert retired slowly, and a moment after turned the corner of the Rue des Prêcheurs. When Javert had disappeared, Jean Valjean discharged the pistol in the air, and then returned to the barricade, saying,—
"It is all over."
This is what had taken place in the mean while. Marius, more occupied with the outside than the inside, had not hitherto attentively regarded the spy fastened up at the darkened end of the ground-floor room. When he saw him in the open daylight bestriding the barricade, he recognized him, and a sudden hope entered his mind. He remembered the inspector of the Rue de Pontoise, and the two pistols he had given him, which he, Marius, had employed at this very barricade, and he not only remembered his face but his name.
This recollection, however, was foggy and disturbed, like all his ideas. It was not an affirmation he made so much as a question which he asked himself. "Is that not the Police Inspector, who told me that his name was Javert?" Marius shouted to Enjolras, who had just stationed himself at the other end of the barricade,—
"Enjolras?"
"Well?"
"What is that man's name?"
"Which man?"
"The police agent. Do you know his name?"
"Of course I do, for he told it to us."
"What is it?"
"Javert."
Marius started, but at this moment a pistol-shot was heard, and Jean Valjean reappeared, saying, "It is all over." A dark chill crossed Marius's heart.
CHAPTER XX.
THE DEAD ARE RIGHT AND THE LIVING ARE NOT WRONG.
The death-struggles of the barricade were about to begin, and everything added to the tragical majesty of this supreme moment,—a thousand mysterious sounds in the air, the breathing of armed masses set in motion in streets which could not be seen, the intermittent gallop of cavalry, the heavy rumor of artillery, the platoon firing and the cannonade crossing each other in the labyrinth of Paris, the smoke of the battle rising all golden above the roofs, distant and vaguely terrible cries, flashes of menace everywhere, the tocsin of St. Merry, which now had the sound of a sob, the mildness of the season, the splendor of the sky full of sunshine and clouds, the beauty of the day, and the fearful silence of the houses. For since the previous evening the two rows of houses in the Rue de la Chanvrerie had become two walls,—ferocious walls with closed doors, closed windows, and closed shutters.
At that day, so different from the present time, when the hour arrived in which the people wished to be done with a situation which had lasted too long, with a conceded charter or a restricted suffrage, when the universal wrath was diffused in the atmosphere, when the city consented to an upheaving of paving-stones, when the insurrection made the bourgeoisie smile by whispering its watchword in their ear, then the inhabitant, impregnated with riot, so to speak, was the auxiliary of the combatant, and the house fraternized with the improvised fortress which it supported. When the situation was not ripe, when the insurrection was not decidedly accepted, when the masses disavowed the movement, it was all over with the combatants, the town was changed into a desert round the revolt, minds were chilled, the asylums were walled up, and the street became converted into a defile to help the army in taking the barricade. A people cannot be forced to move faster than it wishes by a surprise, and woe to the man who tries to compel it; a people will not put up with it, and then it abandons the insurrection to itself. The insurgents become lepers; a house is an escarpment, a door is a refusal, and a façade is a wall. This wall sees, hears, and will not; it might open and save you, but no, the wall is a judge, and it looks at you and condemns you. What gloomy things are these closed houses! They seem dead though they are alive, and life, which is, as it were, suspended, clings to them. No one has come out for the last four-and-twenty hours, but no one is absent. In the interior of this rock people come and go, retire to bed and rise again; they are in the bosom of their family, they eat and drink, and are afraid, terrible to say. Fear excuses this formidable inhospitality, and the alarm offers extenuating circumstanced. At times even, and this has been witnessed, the fear becomes a passion, and terror may be changed into fury, and prudence into rage; hence the profound remark, "The enraged moderates." There are flashes of supreme terror, from which passion issues like a mournful smoke. "What do these people want? They are never satisfied; they compromise peaceable men. As if we had not had revolutions of that nature! What have they come to do here? Let them get out of it as they can. All the worse for them, it is their fault, and they have only what they deserve. That does not concern us. Look at our poor street torn to pieces by cannon: they are a heap of scamps; above all do not open the door." And the house assumes the aspect of a tomb: the insurgent dies a lingering death before their door; he sees the grape-shot and naked sabres arrive; if he cries out, he knows there are people who hear him but will not help him; there are walls which might protect him, and men who might save him, and these walls have ears of flesh, and these men have entrails of stone.
Whom should we accuse? Nobody and everybody,—the imperfect times in which we live. It is always at its own risk and peril that the Utopia converts itself into an insurrection, and becomes an armed protest instead of a philosophic protest,—a Pallas and no longer a Minerva. The Utopia which grows impatient and becomes a riot knows what awaits it, and it nearly always arrives too soon. In that case it resigns itself, and stoically accepts the catastrophe in lieu of a triumph. It serves, without complaining, and almost exculpating them, those who deny it, and its magnanimity is to consent to abandonment. It is indomitable against obstacles, and gentle toward ingratitude. Is it ingratitude after all? Yes, from the human point of view; no, from the individual point of view. Progress is the fashion of man; the general life of the human race is called progress; and the collective step of the human race is also called progress. Progress marches; it makes the great human and earthly journey toward the celestial and divine; it has its halts where it rallies the straying flock; it has its stations where it meditates, in the presence of some splendid Canaan suddenly unveiling its horizon; it has its nights when it sleeps; and it is one of the poignant anxieties of the thinker to see the shadow on the human soul, and to feel in the darkness sleeping progress, without being able to awaken it.
"God is perhaps dead," Gérard de Nerval said one day to the writer of these lines, confounding progress with God, and taking the interruption of the movement for the death of the Being. The man who despairs is wrong: progress infallibly reawakens, and we might say that it moves even when sleeping, for it has grown. When we see it upright again we find that it is taller. To be ever peaceful depends no more on progress than on the river; do not raise a bar, or throw in a rock, for the obstacle makes the water foam, and humanity boil. Hence come troubles; but after these troubles we notice that way has been made. Until order, which is nought else than universal peace, is established, until harmony and unity reign, progress will have revolutions for its halting-places. What, then, is progress? We have just said, the permanent life of the peoples. Now, it happens at times that the momentary life of individuals offers a resistance to the eternal life of the human race.
Let us avow without bitterness that the individual has his distinct interest, and can without felony stipulate for that interest and defend it; the present has its excusable amount of egotism, momentary right has its claims, and cannot be expected to sacrifice itself incessantly to the future. The generation which at the present moment is passing over the earth is not forced to abridge it for the generations, its equals, after all, whose turn will come at a later date. "I exist," murmurs that some one, who is everybody. "I am young and in love, I am old and wish to rest, I am father of a family, I work, I prosper, I do a good business, I have houses to let, I have money in the funds, I am happy, I have wife and children, I like all that, I wish to live, and so leave us at peace." Hence at certain hours a profound coldness falls on the magnanimous vanguard of the human race. Utopia, moreover, we confess it, emerges from its radiant sphere in waging war. It, the truth of to-morrow, borrows its process, battle, from the falsehood of yesterday. It, the future, acts like the past; it, the pure idea, becomes an assault. It complicates its heroism with a violence for which it is but fair that it should answer,—a violence of opportunity and expediency, contrary to principles, and for which it is fatally punished. The Utopia, when in a state of insurrection, combats with the old military code in its hand; it shoots spies, executes traitors, suppresses living beings and hurls them into unknown darkness. It makes use of death, a serious thing. It seems that the Utopia no longer pats faith in the radiance, which is its irresistible and incorruptible strength. It strikes with the sword, but no sword is simple; every sword has two edges, and the man who wounds with one wounds himself with the other.
This reservation made, and made with all severity, it is impossible for us not to admire, whether they succeed or no, the glorious combatants of the future, the confessors of the Utopia. Even when they fail they are venerable, and it is perhaps in ill-success that they possess most majesty. Victory, when in accordance with progress, deserves the applause of the peoples, but an heroic defeat merits their tenderness. The one is magnificent, the other sublime. With us who prefer martyrdom to success, John Brown is greater than Washington, and Pisacane greater than Garibaldi. There should be somebody to take the part of the conquered, and people are unjust to these great assayers of the future when they foil. Revolutionists are accused of sowing terror, and every barricade appears an attack. Their theory is incriminated, their object is suspected, their after-thought is apprehended, and their conscience is denounced. They are reproached with elevating and erecting against the reigning social fact a pile of miseries, griefs, iniquities, and despair, and with pulling down in order to barricade themselves behind the ruins and combat. People shout to them, "You are unpaving hell!" And they might answer, "That is the reason why our barricade is made of good intentions." The best thing is certainly the pacific solution; after all, let us allow, when people see the pavement, they think of the bear, and it is a good will by which society is alarmed. But it depends on society to save itself, and we appeal to its own good-will. No violent remedy is necessary: study the evil amicably, and then cure it,—that is all we desire.
However this may be, those men, even when they have fallen, and especially then, are august, who at all points of the universe, with their eyes fixed on France, are struggling for the great work with the inflexible logic of the ideal; they give their life as a pure gift for progress, they accomplish the will of Providence, and perform a religious act. At the appointed hour, with as much disinterestedness as an actor who takes up his cue, they enter the tomb in obedience to the divine scenario, and they accept this hopeless combat and this stoical disappearance in order to lead to its splendid and superior universal consequences. The magnificent human movement irresistibly began on July 14. These soldiers are priests, and the French revolution is a gesture of God. Moreover, there are—and it is proper to add this distinction to the distinctions already indicated in another chapter,—there are accepted insurrections which are called revolutions; and there are rejected revolutions which are called riots. An insurrection which breaks out is an idea which passes its examination in the presence of the people. If the people drops its blackball, the idea is dry fruit, and the insurrection is a street-riot. Waging war at every appeal and each time that the Utopia desires it is not the fact of the peoples; for nations have not always, and at all hours, the temperament of heroes and martyrs. They are positive; a priori insurrection is repulsive to them, in the first place, because it frequently has a catastrophe for result, and, secondly, because it always has an abstraction as its starting-point.
For, and this is a grand fact, those who devote themselves do so for the ideal, and the ideal alone. An insurrection is an enthusiasm, and enthusiasm may become a fury, whence comes an upraising of muskets. But every insurrection which aims at a government or a regime aims higher. Hence, for instance, we will dwell on the fact that what the chiefs of the insurrection of 1832, and especially the young enthusiasts of the Rue de la Chanvrerie, combated was not precisely Louis Philippe. The majority, speaking candidly, did justice to the qualities of this king who stood between monarchy and revolution, and not one of them hated him. But they attacked the younger branch of the right divine in Louis Philippe, as they had attacked the elder branch in Charles X., and what they wished to overthrow in overthrowing the Monarchy in France was, as we have explained, the usurpation of man over man, and the privilege opposing right throughout the universe. Paris without a king has as its counterstroke the world without despots. They reasoned in this way. Their object was far off without doubt, vague perhaps, and retreating before the effort, but grand.
So it is. And men sacrifice themselves for these visions, which are for the sacrificed nearly always illusions, but illusions with which the whole of human certainty is mingled. The insurgent poetizes and gilds the insurrection, and men hurl themselves into these tragical things, intoxicating themselves upon what they are about to do. Who knows? Perhaps they will succeed; they are the minority; they have against them an entire army; but they are defending the right, natural law, the sovereignty of each over himself, which allows of no possible abdication, justice, and truth, and, if necessary, they die like the three hundred Spartans. They do not think of Don Quixote, but of Leonidas, and they go onward, and once the battle has begun they do not recoil, but dash forward head down-wards, having for hope an extraordinary victory, the revolution completed, progress restored to liberty, the aggrandizement of the human race, universal deliverance, and at the worst a Thermopylæ. These combats for progress frequently fail, and we have explained the cause. The mob is restive against the impulse of the Paladins; the heavy masses, the multitudes, fragile on account of their very heaviness, fear adventures, and there is adventure in the ideal. Moreover, it must not be forgotten that these are interests which are no great friends of the ideal and the sentimental. Sometimes the stomach paralyzes the heart. The greatness and beauty of France are, that she does not grow so stout as other nations, and knots the rope round her hips with greater facility. She is the first to wake and the last to fall asleep; she goes onward. She is seeking.
The reason of this is because she is artistic. The ideal is nought else than the culminating point of logic, in the same way as the beautiful is only the summit of the true. Artistic peoples are also consistent peoples; loving beauty is to see light. The result of this is, that the torch of Europe, that is to say of civilization, was first borne by Greece, who passed it to Italy, who passed it to France. Divine enlightening nations! Vita lampada tradunt. It is an admirable thing that the poetry of a people is the element of its progress, and the amount of civilization is measured by the amount of imagination. Still, a civilizing people must remain masculine; Corinth yes, but Sybaris no, for the man who grows effeminate is bastardized. A man must be neither dilettante nor virtuoso, but he should be artistic. In the matter of civilization, there must not be refinement, but sublimation, and on that condition the pattern of the ideal is given to the human race. The modern ideal has its type in art and its means in science. It is by science that the august vision of the poet, the social beauty, will be realized, and Eden will be remade by A + B. At the point which civilization has reached exactitude is a necessary element of the splendid, and the artistic feeling is not only served but completed by the scientific organ; the dream must calculate. Art, which is the conqueror, ought to have science, which is the mover, as its base. The strength of the steed is an imported factor, and the modern mind is the genius of Greece, having for vehicle the genius of India,—Alexander mounted on an elephant. Races petrified in dogma or demoralized by time are unsuited to act as guides to civilization. Genuflection before the idol or the crown-piece ruins the muscle which moves and the will that goes. Hieratic or mercantile absorption reduces the radiance of a people, lowers its horizon by lowering its level, and withdraws from it that both human and divine intelligence of the universal object which renders nations missionaries. Babylon has no ideal, nor has Carthage while Athens and Rome have, and retain, even through all the nocturnal density of ages, a halo of civilization.
France is of the same quality, as a people, as Greece and Rome; she is Athenian through the beautiful, and Roman through her grandeur. Besides, she is good, and is more often than other nations in the humor for devotion and sacrifice. Still, this humor takes her and leaves her; and this is the great danger for those who run when she merely wishes to walk, or who walk when she wishes to halt. France has her relapses into materialism, and at seasons the ideas which obstruct this sublime brain have nothing that recalls French grandeur, and are of the dimensions of a Missouri or a South Carolina. What is to be done? The giantess plays the dwarf, and immense France feels a fancy for littleness. That is all. To this nothing can be said, for peoples like planets have the right to be eclipsed. And that is well, provided that light return and the eclipse does not degenerate into night. Dawn and resurrection are synonymous, and the reappearance of light is synonymous with the existence of the Ego. Let us state these facts calmly. Death on a barricade, or a tomb in exile, is an acceptable occasion for devotion, for the real name of devotion is disinterestedness. Let the abandoned be abandoned, let the exiles be exiled, and let us confine ourselves to imploring great nations not to recoil too far when they do recoil. Under the pretext of returning to reason, it is not necessary to go too far down the incline. Matter exists, the moment exists, interests exist, the stomach exists, but the stomach must not to the sole wisdom. Momentary life has its rights, we admit, but permanent life has them also. Alas! To have mounted does not prevent falling, and we see this in history more frequently than we wish; a nation is illustrious, it tastes of the ideal, then it bites into the mud and finds it good, and when we ask it why it abandons Socrates for Falstaff, it replies, "Because I like statesmen."
One word before returning to the barricade. A battle like the one which we are describing at this moment is only a convulsion toward the ideal. Impeded progress is sickly, and has such tragic attacks of epilepsy. This malady of progress, civil war, we have met as we passed along, and it is one of the social phases, at once an act and an interlude of that drama whose pivot is a social condemnation, and whose veritable title is "Progress." Progress! This cry, which we raise so frequently, is our entire thought, and at the point of our drama which we We reached, as the idea which it contains has still more than one trial to undergo, we may be permitted, even if we do not raise the veil, to let its gleams pierce through clearly. The book which the reader has before him at this moment is, from one end to the other, in its entirety and its details, whatever the intermittences, exceptions, and short-comings may be, the progress from evil to good, from injustice to justice, from falsehood to truth, from night to day, from appetite to conscience, from corruption to life, from bestiality to duty, from hell to heaven, and from nothingness to God. The starting-point is matter, the terminus the soul; the hydra at the commencement, the angel at the end.
CHAPTER XXI.
THE HEROES.
Suddenly the drum beat the charge, and the attack was a hurricane. On the previous evening the barricade had been silently approached in the darkness as by a boa; but at present, in broad daylight, within this gutted street, surprise was impossible; besides, the armed force was unmasked, the cannon had begun the roaring, and the troops rushed upon the barricade. Fury was now skill. A powerful column of line infantry, intersected at regular intervals by National Guards and dismounted Municipal Guards, and supported by heavy masses that could be heard if not seen, debouched into the street at a running step, with drums beating, bugles braying, bayonets levelled, and sappers in front, and imperturbable under the shower of projectiles dashed straight at the barricade with all the weight of a bronze battering-ram. But the wall held out firmly, and the insurgents fired impetuously; the escaladed barricade displayed a flashing mane. The attack was so violent that it was in a moment inundated by assailants; but it shook off the soldiers as the lion does the dogs, and it was only covered with besiegers as the cliff is with foam, to reappear a minute later scarped, black, and formidable.
The columns, compelled to fall back, remained massed in the street, exposed but terrible, and answered the redoubt by a tremendous musketry-fire. Any one who has seen fireworks will remember the piece composed of a cross-fire of lightnings, which is called a bouquet. Imagine this bouquet, no longer vertical but horizontal, and bearing at the end of each jet a bullet, slugs, or iron balls, and scattering death. The barricade was beneath it. On either side was equal resolution. The bravery was almost barbarous, and was complicated by a species of heroic ferocity which began with self-sacrifice. It was the epoch when a National Guard fought like a Zouave. The troops desired an end, and the insurrection wished to wrestle. The acceptance of death in the height of youth and health converts intrepidity into a frenzy, and each man in this action had the grandeur of the last hour. The street was covered with corpses. The barricade had Marius at one of its ends and Enjolras at the other. Enjolras, who carried the whole barricade in his head, reserved and concealed himself. Three soldiers fell under his loop-hole without even seeing him, while Marius displayed himself openly, and made himself a mark. More than once half his body rose above the barricade. There is no more violent prodigal than a miser who takes the bit between his teeth, and no man more startling in action than a dreamer. Marius was formidable and pensive, and in the battle was like a dream. He looked like a ghost firing. The cartridges of the besieged were exhausted, but not their sarcasms; and they laughed in the tornado of the tomb in which they stood. Courfeyrac was bareheaded.
"What have you done with your hat?" Bossuet asked him; and Courfeyrac answered,—
"They carried it away at last with cannon-balls."
Or else they made haughty remarks.
"Can you understand," Feuilly exclaimed bitterly, "those men,"—and he mentioned names, well-known and even celebrated names that belonged to the old army,—"who promised to join us and pledged their honor to aid us, and who are generals, and abandon us?"
And Combeferre restricted himself to replying with a grave smile,—
"They are people who observe the rules of honor as they do the stars,—a long distance off."
The interior of the barricade was so sown with torn cartridges that it seemed as if there had been a snow-storm. The assailants had the numbers and the insurgents the position. They were behind a wall, and crushed at point-blank range the soldiers who were stumbling over the dead and wounded. This barricade, built as it was, and admirably strengthened, was really one of those situations in which a handful of men holds a legion in check. Still, constantly recruited and growing beneath the shower of bullets, foe column of attack inexorably approached, and little by little, step by step, but with certainty, the army squeezed the barricade as the screw does the press.
The assaults succeeded each other, and the horror became constantly greater. Then there broke out on this pile of paving-stones, in this Rue de la Chanvrerie, a struggle worthy of the wall of Troy. These sallow, ragged, and exhausted men, who had not eaten for four-and-twenty hours, who had not slept, who had only a few rounds more to fire, who felt their empty pockets for cartridges,—these men, nearly all wounded, with head or arm bound round with a blood-stained blackish rag, having holes in their coat from which the blood flowed, scarce armed with bad guns and old rusty sabres, became Titans. The barricade was ten times approached, assaulted, escaladed, and never captured. To form an idea of the contest it would be necessary to imagine a heap of terrible courages set on fire, and that you are watching the flames. It was not a combat, but the interior of a furnace; mouths breathed flames there, and the faces were extraordinary. The human form seemed impossible there, the combatants flashed, and it was a formidable sight to see these salamanders of the mêlée flitting about in this red smoke. The successive and simultaneous scenes of this butchery are beyond our power to depict, for the epic alone has the right to fill twelve thousand verses with a battle. It might have been called that Inferno of Brahminism, the most formidable of the seventeen abysses, which the Veda calls the Forest of Swords. They fought foot to foot, body to body, with pistol-shots, sabre-cuts, and fists, close by, at a distance, above, below, on all sides, from the roof of the house, from the wine-shop, and even from the traps of the cellars into which some had slipped. The odds were sixty to one, and the frontage of Corinth half demolished was hideous. The window, pock-marked with grape-shot, had lost glass and frame, and was only a shapeless hole tumultuously stopped up with paving-stones. Bossuet was killed. Feuilly was killed, Courfeyrac was killed, Joly was killed. Combeferre, traversed by three bayonet stabs in the breast at the moment when he was raising a wounded soldier, had only time to look up to heaven, and expired. Marius, still fighting, had received so many wounds, especially in the head, that his face disappeared in blood and looked as if it were covered by a red handkerchief. Enjolras alone was not wounded; when he had no weapon he held out his arm to the right or left, and an insurgent placed some instrument in his hand. He had only four broken sword-blades left,—one more than Francis I. had at Marignano.
Homer says: "Diomed slew Axylus, the son of Teuthras, who dwelt in well-built Arisba; Euryalus, son of Mecisteus, slew Dresus and Opheltius, Æsepus and Pedasus, whom the Naiad Abarbarea brought forth to blameless Bucolion; Ulysses killed Percosian Pidytes; Antilochus, Ablerus; Polypœtes, Astyalus; Polydamas, Otus of Cyllene; and Teucer, Aretaus. Meganthius fell by the spear of Euripilus; Agamemnon, king of heroes, struck down Elatus, born in the walled town which the sounding river Satniois washes."
In our old poems of the Gesta, Esplandian attacks with a flaming falchion Swantibore, the giant margins, who defends himself by storming the knight with towers which he uproots. Our old mural frescos show us the two Dukes of Brittany and Bourbon armed for war and mounted, and approaching each other, axe in hand, masked with steel, shod with steel, gloved with steel, one caparisoned with ermine and the other draped in azure; Brittany with his lion between the two horns of his crown, and Bourbon with an enormous fleur-de-lys at his visor. But in order to be superb it is not necessary to wear, like Yvon, the ducal morion, or to have in one hand a living flame like Esplandian; it is sufficient to lay down one's life for a conviction or a loyal deed. This little simple soldier, yesterday a peasant of Bearne or the Limousin, who prowls about, cabbage-cutter by his side, round the nursemaids in the Luxembourg, this young, pale student bowed over an anatomical study or book, a fair-haired boy who shaves himself with a pair of scissors,—take them both, breathe duty into them, put them face to face in the Carrefour Boucherat or the Planche Mibray blind alley, and let one fight for his flag and the other combat for his ideal, and let them both imagine that they are contending for their country, and the struggle will be colossal; and the shadow cast by these two contending lads on the great epic field where humanity is struggling will be equal to that thrown by Megarion, King of Lycia, abounding in tigers, as he wrestles with the immense Ajax, the equal of the gods.
CHAPTER XXII.
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.
CHAPTER XXIII.
ORESTES SOBER AND PYLADES DRUNK.
At length, by employing the skeleton of the staircase, by climbing up the walls, clinging to the ceiling, and killing on the very edge of the trap the last who resisted, some twenty assailants, soldiers, National and Municipal Guards, mostly disfigured by wounds in the face received in this formidable ascent, blinded by blood, furious and savage, burst into the first-floor room. There was only one man standing there,—Enjolras; without cartridges or sword, he only held in his hand the barrel of his carbine, whose butt he had broken on the heads of those who entered. He had placed the billiard-table between himself and his assailants, he had fallen back to the end of the room, and there, with flashing eye and head erect, holding the piece of a weapon in his hand, he was still sufficiently alarming for a space to be formed round him. A cry was raised,—
"It is the chief; it was he who killed the artilleryman; as he has placed himself there, we will let him remain there. Shoot him on the spot!"
"Shoot me!" Enjolras said.
And throwing away his weapon and folding his arms, he offered his chest. The boldness of dying bravely always moves men. So soon as Enjolras folded his arms, accepting the end, the din of the struggle ceased in the room, and the chaos was suddenly appeased in a species of sepulchral solemnity. It seemed as if the menacing majesty of Enjolras, disarmed and motionless, produced an effect on the tumult, and that merely by the authority of his tranquil glance, this young man, who alone was unwounded, superb, blood-stained, charming, and indifferent like one invulnerable, constrained this sinister mob to kill him respectfully. His beauty, heightened at this moment by his haughtiness, was dazzling, and as if he could be no more fatigued than wounded after the frightful four-and-twenty hours which had elapsed, he was fresh and rosy. It was to him that the witness referred when he said at a later date before the court-martial, "There was an insurgent whom I heard called Apollo." A National Guard who aimed at Enjolras lowered his musket, saying, "I feel as if I were going to kill a flower." Twelve men formed into a platoon in the corner opposite to the one in which Enjolras stood, and got their muskets ready in silence. Then a sergeant shouted, "Present!"
An officer interposed.
"Wait a minute."
And, addressing Enjolras,—
"Do you wish to have your eyes bandaged?"
"No."
"It was really you who killed the sergeant of artillery?"
"Yes."
Grantaire had been awake for some minutes past. Grantaire, it will be remembered, had been sleeping since the past evening in the upper room, with his head lying on a table. He realized in all its energy the old metaphor, dead drunk. The hideous philter of absinthe, stout, and alcohol, had thrown him into a lethargic state, and, as his table was small, and of no use at the barricade, they had left it him. He was still in the same posture, with his chest upon the table, his head reeling on his arms, and surrounded by glasses and bottles. He was sleeping the deadly sleep of the hibernating bear or the filled leech. Nothing had roused him,—neither the platoon fire, nor the cannon-balls, nor the canister which penetrated through the window into the room where he was, nor the prodigious noise of the assault. Still, he at times responded to the cannon by a snore. He seemed to be waiting for a bullet to save him the trouble of waking; several corpses lay around him, and at the first glance nothing distinguished him from these deep sleepers of death.
Noise does not wake a drunkard, but silence arouses him, and this peculiarity has been more than once observed. The fall of anything near him increased Grantaire's lethargy, and noise lulled him. The species of halt which the tumult made before Enjolras was a shock for this heavy sleep. It is the effect of a galloping coach which stops short. Grantaire started up, stretched out his arms, rubbed his eyes, looked, yawned, and understood. Intoxication wearing off resembles a curtain that is rent, and a man sees at once, and at a single glance, all that it concealed. Everything presents itself suddenly to the memory, and the drunkard, who knows nothing of what has happened during the last twenty-four hours, has scarce opened his eyes ere he understands it all. Ideas return with a sudden lucidity; the species of suds that blinded the brain is dispersed, and makes way for a clear and distinctive apprehension of the reality.
Concealed, as he was, in a corner, and sheltered, so to speak, by the billiard-table, the soldiers, who had their eyes fixed on Enjolras, had not even perceived Grantaire, and the sergeant was preparing to repeat the order to fire, when all at once they heard a powerful voice crying at their side,—
"Long live the Republic! I belong to it."
Grantaire had risen; and the immense gleam of all the combat which he had missed appeared in the flashing glance of the transfigured drunkard. He repeated, "Long live the Republic!" crossed the room with a firm step, and placed himself before the muskets by Enjolras's side.
"Kill us both at once," he said.
And turning gently to Enjolras, he asked him,—
"Do you permit it?"
Enjolras pressed his hand with a smile, and this smile had not passed away ere the detonation took place. Enjolras, pierced by eight bullets, remained leaning against the wall as if nailed to it; he merely hung his head. Grantaire was lying stark dead at his feet. A few minutes later the soldiers dislodged the last insurgents who had taken refuge at the top of the house, and were firing through a partition in the garret. They fought desperately, and threw bodies out of windows, some still alive. Two voltigeurs, who were trying to raise the smashed omnibus, were killed by two shots from the attics; a man in a blouse rushed out of them, with a bayonet thrust in his stomach, and lay on the ground expiring. A private and insurgent slipped together down the tiles of the roof, and as they would not loosen their hold fell into the street, holding each other in a ferocious embrace. There was a similar struggle in the cellar,—cries, shots, and a fierce clashing,—then a silence. The barricade was captured, and the soldiers began searching the adjacent houses and pursuing the fugitives.
CHAPTER XXIV.
PRISONER!
Marius was really a prisoner;—prisoner to Jean Valjean.
The hand which had clutched him behind at the moment when he was falling, and of which he felt the pressure as he lost his senses, was that of Jean Valjean.
Jean Valjean had taken no other part in the struggle than that of exposing himself. Had it not been for him, in the supreme moment of agony no one would have thought of the wounded. Thanks to him, who was everywhere present in the carnage like a Providence, those who fell were picked up, carried to the ground-floor room, and had their wounds dressed, and in the intervals he repaired the barricade. But nothing that could resemble a blow, an attack, or even personal defence, could be seen with him, and he kept quiet and succored. However, he had only a few scratches, and the bullets had no billet for him. If suicide formed part of what he dreamed of when he came to this sepulchre, he had not been successful; but we doubt whether he thought of suicide, which is an irreligious act. Jean Valjean did not appear to see Marius in the thick of the combat; but in truth he did not take his eyes off him. When a bullet laid Marius low, Jean Valjean leaped upon him with the agility of a tiger, dashed upon him as on a prey, and carried him off.
The whirlwind of the attack was at this moment so violently concentrated on Enjolras and the door of the wine-shop, that no one saw Jean Valjean, supporting the fainting Marius in his arms, cross the unpaved ground of the barricade and disappear round the corner of Corinth. Our readers will remember this corner, which formed a sort of cape in the street, and protected a few square feet of ground from bullets and grape-shot, and from glances as well. There is thus at times in fires a room which does not burn, and in the most raging seas, beyond a promontory, or at the end of a reef, a little quiet nook. It was in this corner of the inner trapeze of the barricade that Éponine drew her last breath. Here Jean Valjean stopped, let Marius slip to the ground, leaned against a wall, and looked around him.
The situation was frightful; for the instant, for two or three minutes perhaps, this piece of wall was a shelter, but how to get out of this massacre? He recalled the agony he had felt in the Rue Polonceau, eight years previously, and in what way he had succeeded in escaping; it was difficult then, but now it was impossible. He had in front of him that implacable and silent six-storied house, which only seemed inhabited by the dead man leaning out of his window; he had on his right the low barricade which closed the Petite Truanderie; to climb over this obstacle appeared easy, but a row of bayonet-points could be seen over the crest of the barricade; they were line troops posted beyond the barricade and on the watch. It was evident that crossing the barricade was seeking a platoon fire, and that any head which appeared above the wall of paving-stones would serve as a mark for sixty muskets. He had on his left the battle-field, and death was behind the corner of the wall.
What was he to do? A bird alone could have escaped from this place. And he must decide at once, find an expedient, and make up his mind. They were fighting a few paces from him, but fortunately all were obstinately engaged at one point, the wine-shop door; but if a single soldier had the idea of turning the house or attacking it on the flank all would be over. Jean Valjean looked at the house opposite to him, he looked at the barricade by his side, and then looked on the ground, with the violence of supreme extremity, wildly, and as if he would have liked to dig a hole with his eyes. By much looking, something vaguely discernible in such an agony became perceptible, and assumed a shape at his feet, as if the eyes had the power to produce the thing demanded. He perceived a few paces from him, at the foot of the small barricade so pitilessly guarded and watched from without, and beneath a pile of paving-stones which almost concealed it, an iron grating, laid flat and flush with the ground. This grating made of strong cross-bars was about two feet square, and the framework of paving-stones which supported it had been torn out, and it was as it were dismounted. Through the bars a glimpse could be caught of an obscure opening, something like a chimney-pot or the cylinder of a cistern. Jean Valjean dashed up, and his old skill in escapes rose to his brain like a beam of light. To remove the paving-stones, tear up the grating, take Marius, who was inert as a dead body, on his shoulders, descend with this burden on his loins, helping himself with his elbows and knees, into this sort of well which was fortunately of no great depth, to let the grating fall again over his head, to set foot on a paved surface, about ten feet below the earth,—all this was executed like something done in delirium, with a giant's strength and the rapidity of an eagle: this occupied but a few minutes. Jean Valjean found himself with the still fainting Marius in a sort of long subterranean corridor, where there was profound peace, absolute silence, and night. The impression which he had formerly felt in falling out of the street into the convent recurred to him; still, what he now carried was not Cosette, but Marius.
He had scarce heard above his head like a vague murmur the formidable tumult of the wine-shop being taken by assault.
BOOK II.
THE INTESTINE OF LEVIATHAN.
CHAPTER I.
THE EARTH IMPOVERISHED BY THE SEA.
Paris casts twenty-five millions of francs annually into the sea; and we assert this without any metaphor. How so, and in what way? By day and night. For what object? For no object. With what thought? Without thinking. What to do? Nothing. By means of what organ? Its intestines. What are its intestines? Its sewers. Twenty-five millions are the most moderate of the approximative amounts given by the estimates of modern science. Science, after groping for a long time, knows now that the most fertilizing and effective of manures is human manure. The Chinese, let us say it to our shame, knew this before we did; not a Chinese peasant—it is Eckeberg who states the fact—who goes to the city, but brings at either end of his bamboo a bucket full of what we call filth. Thanks to the human manure, the soil in China is still as youthful as in the days of Abraham, and Chinese wheat yields just one hundred and twenty fold the sowing. There is no guano comparable in fertility to the detritus of a capital, and a large city is the strongest of stercoraries. To employ the town in manuring the plain would be certain success; for if gold be dung, on the other hand our dung is gold.
What is done with this golden dung? It is swept into the gulf. We send at a great expense fleets of ships to collect at the southern pole the guano of petrels and penguins, and cast into the sea the incalculable element of wealth which we have under our hand. All the human and animal manure which the world loses, if returned to the land instead of being thrown into the sea, would suffice to nourish the world. Do you know what those piles of ordure are, collected at the corners of streets, those carts of mud carried off at night from the streets, the frightful barrels of the night-man, and the fetid streams of subterranean mud which the pavement conceals from you? All this is a flowering field, it is green grass, it is mint and thyme and sage, it is game, it is cattle, it is the satisfied lowing of heavy kine at night, it is perfumed hay, it is gilded wheat, it is bread on your table, it is warm blood in your veins, it is health, it is joy, it is life. So desires that mysterious creation, which is transformation on earth and transfiguration in heaven; restore this to the great crucible, and your abundance will issue from it, for the nutrition of the plains produces the nourishment of men. You are at liberty to lose this wealth and consider me ridiculous into the bargain; it would be the masterpiece of your ignorance. Statistics have calculated that France alone pours every year into the Atlantic a sum of half a milliard. Note this; with these five hundred millions one quarter of the expenses of the budget would be paid. The cleverness of man is so great that he prefers to get rid of these five hundred millions in the gutter. The very substance of the people is borne away, here drop by drop, and there in streams, by the wretched vomiting of our sewers into the rivers, and the gigantic vomiting of our rivers into the ocean. Each eructation of our cloacas costs us one thousand francs, and this has two results,—the earth impoverished and the water poisoned; hunger issuing from the furrow and illness from the river. It is notorious that at this very hour the Thames poisons London; and as regards Paris, it has been found necessary to remove most of the mouths of the sewers down the river below the last bridge.
A double tubular apparatus supplied with valves and flood-gates, a system of elementary drainage as simple as the human lungs, and which is already in full work in several English parishes, would suffice to bring into bur towns the pure water of the fields and send to the fields the rich water of the towns; and this easy ebb and flow, the most simple in the world, would retain among us the five hundred millions thrown away. But people are thinking of other things. The present process does mischief while meaning well. The intention is good, but the result is sorrowful; they believe they are draining the city, while they are destroying the population. A sewer is a misunderstanding; and when drainage, with its double functions, restoring what it takes, is everywhere substituted for the sewer, that simple and impoverishing washing, and is also combined with the data of a new social economy, the produce of the soil will be increased tenfold, and the problem of misery will be singularly attenuated. Add the suppression of parasitisms, and it will be solved. In the mean while the public wealth goes to the river, and a sinking takes place,—sinking is the right word, for Europe is being ruined in this way by exhaustion. As for France, we have mentioned the figures. Now, as Paris contains one twenty-fifth of the whole French population, and the Parisian guano is the richest of all, we are beneath the truth when we estimate at twenty-five millions the share of Paris in the half-milliard which France annually refuses. These twenty-five millions, employed in assistance and enjoyment, would double the splendor of Paris, and the city expends them in sewers. So that we may say, the great prodigality of Paris, its marvellous fête, its Folie Beaujon, its orgie, its lavishing of gold, its luxury, splendor, and magnificence, is its sewerage. It is in this way that in the blindness of a bad political economy people allow the comfort of all to be drowned and wasted in the water; there ought to be St. Cloud nets to catch the public fortunes.
Economically regarded, the fact may be thus summarized: Paris is a regular spendthrift. Paris, that model city, that pattern of well-conducted capitals, of which every people strives to have a copy, that metropolis of the ideal, that august home of initiative, impulse, and experiment, that centre and gathering-place of minds, that nation city, that beehive of the future, that marvellous composite of Babylon and Corinth, would make a peasant of Fo-Kian shrug his shoulders, from our present point of view. Imitate Paris, and you will ruin yourself; moreover, Paris imitates itself particularly in this immemorial and insensate squandering. These surprising follies are not new; it is no youthful nonsense. The ancients acted like the moderns. "The cloacas of Rome," says Liebig, "absorbed the entire welfare of the Roman peasant." When the Campagna of Rome was ruined by the Roman sewer, Rome exhausted Italy; and when it had placed Italy in its cloaca, it poured into it Sicily, and then Sardinia, and then Africa. The sewer of Rome swallowed up the world. This cloaca offered its tunnels to the city and to the world. Urbi et orbi. Eternal city and unfathomable drain.
For these things, as for others, Rome gives the example, and this example Paris follows with all the folly peculiar to witty cities. For the requirements of the operation which we have been explaining, Paris has beneath it another Paris, a Paris of sewers, which has its streets, squares, lanes, arteries, and circulation, which is mud, with the human forces at least. For nothing must be flattered, not even a great people. Where there is everything, there is ignominy by the side of sublimity; and if Paris contain Athens the city of light, Tyre the city of power, Sparta the city of virtue, Nineveh the city of prodigies, it also contains Lutetia the city of mud. Moreover, the stamp of its power is there too, and the Titanic sewer of Paris realizes among monuments the strange ideal realized in humanity by a few men like Machiavelli, Bacon, and Mirabeau,—the grand abject. The subsoil of Paris, if the eye could pierce the surface, would offer the aspect of a gigantic madrepore; a sponge has not more passages and holes than the piece of ground, six leagues in circumference, upon which the old great city rests. Without alluding to the catacombs, which are a separate cellar, without speaking of the inextricable net of gas-pipes, without referring to the vast tubular system for the distribution of running water, the drains alone form on either bank of the river a prodigious dark ramification, a labyrinth which has its incline for its clew. In the damp mist of this labyrinth is seen the rat, which seems the produce of the accouchement of Paris.
CHAPTER II.
THE OLD HISTORY OF THE SEWER.
If we imagine Paris removed like a cover, the subterranean network of sewers, regarded from a birds'-eye view, would represent on either bank a sort of large branch grafted upon the river. On the right bank the encircling sewer will be the trunk of this branch, the secondary tubes the branches, and the blind alleys the twigs. This figure is only summary and half correct, as the right angle, which is the usual angle in subterranean ramifications of this nature, is very rare in vegetation. Our readers will form a better likeness of this strange geometric plan by supposing that they see lying on a bed of darkness some strange Oriental alphabet as confused as a thicket, and whose shapeless letters are welded to each other in an apparent confusion, and as if accidentally, here by their angles and there by their ends. The sewers and drains played a great part in the Middle Ages, under the Lower Empire and in the old East. Plague sprang from them and despots died of it. The multitudes regarded almost with a religious awe these beds of corruption, these monstrous cradles of death. The vermin-ditch at Benares is not more fearful than the Lion's den at Babylon. Tiglath-Pileser, according to the rabbinical books, swore by the sink of Nineveh. It was from the drain of Munster that John of Leyden produced his false moon, and it was from the cesspool-well of Kekhscheb that his Oriental menæchmus, Mokanna, the veiled prophet of Khorassan, brought his false sun.
The history of men is reflected in the history of the sewers, and the Gemoniæ narrated the story of Rome. The sewer of Paris is an old formidable thing, it has been a sepulchre, and it has been an asylum. Crime, intellect, the social protest, liberty of conscience, thought, robbery, all that human laws pursue or have pursued, have concealed themselves in this den,—the Maillotins in the fourteenth century, the cloak-stealers in the fifteenth, the Huguenots in the sixteenth, the illuminés of Morin in the seventeenth, and the Chauffeurs in the eighteenth. One hundred years ago the nocturnal dagger-issued from it, and the rogue in danger glided into it; the wood had the cave and Paris had the drain. The Truanderie, that Gallic picareria, accepted the drain as an annex of the Court of Miracles, and at night, cunning and ferocious, entered beneath the Maubuée vomitory as into an alcove. It was very simple that those who had for their place of daily toil the Vide-Gousset lane, or the Rue Coupe-Gorge, should have for their nightly abode the ponceau of the Chemin-Vert or the Hure-poix cagnard. Hence comes a swarm of recollections, all sorts of phantoms haunt these long solitary corridors, on all sides are putridity and miasma, and here and there is a trap through which Villon inside converses with Rabelais outside.
The sewer in old Paris is the meeting-place of all exhaustions and of all experiments; political economy sees there a detritus, and social philosophy a residuum. The sewer is the conscience of the city, and everything converges and is confronted there. In this livid spot there is darkness, but there are no secrets. Each thing has its true form, or at least its definitive form. The pile of ordure has this in its favor, that it tells no falsehood, and simplicity has taken refuge there. Basile's mask is found there, but you see the pasteboard, the threads, the inside and out, and it is marked with honest filth. Scapin's false nose is lying close by. All the uncleanlinesses of civilization, where no longer of service, fall into this pit of truth; they are swallowed up, but display themselves in it. This pell-mell is a confession: there no false appearance nor any plastering is possible, order takes off its shirt, there is an absolute nudity, a rout of illusions and mirage, and there nothing but what is assuming the gloomy face of what is finishing. Reality and disappearance. There a bottle-heel confesses intoxication, and a basket-handle talks about domesticity; there, the apple-core which has had literary opinions becomes once again the apple-core, the effigy on the double son grows frankly vert-de-grised, the saliva of Caiaphas meets the vomit of Falstaff, the louis-d'or which comes from the gambling-hell dashes against the nail whence hangs the end of the suicide's rope, a livid fœtus rolls along wrapped in spangles, which danced last Shrove Tuesday at the opera, a wig which has judged men wallows by the side of a rottenness which was Margotton's petticoat: it is more than fraternity, it is the extremest familiarity. All that painted itself is bedaubed, and the last veil is torn away. The sewer is a cynic and says everything. This sincerity of uncleanliness pleases us and reposes the mind. When a man has spent his time upon the earth in enduring the great airs assumed by state reasons, the oath, political wisdom, human justice, professional probity, the austerities of the situation, and incorruptible robes, it relieves him to enter a sewer and see there the mire which suits it.
It is instructive at the same time, for, as we said just now, history passes through the sewer. St. Bartholomew filters there drop by drop through the paving-stones, and great public assassinations, political and religious butcheries, traverse this subterranean way of civilization, and thrust their corpses into it. For the eye of the dreamer all historical murderers are there, in the hideous gloom, on their knees, with a bit of their winding-sheet for an apron, and mournfully sponging their task. Louis XI. is there with Tristan, Francis I. is there with Duprat, Charles IX. is there with his mother, Richelieu is there with Louis XIII., Louvois is there, Letellier is there, Hubert and Maillard are there, scratching the stones, and trying to efface the trace of their deeds. The brooms of these spectres can be heard under these vaults, and the enormous fetidness of social catastrophes is breathed there. You see in corners red flashes, and a terrible water flows there in which blood-stained hands have been washed.
The social observer should enter these shadows, for they form part of his laboratory. Philosophy is the microscope of thought; everything strives to fly from it, but nothing escapes it. Tergiversation is useless, for what side of himself does a man show in tergiversating? His ashamed side. Philosophy pursues evil with its upright glance, and does not allow it to escape into nothingness. It recognizes everything in the effacement of disappearing things, and in the diminution of vanishing things. It reconstructs the purple after the rags, and the woman after the tatters. With the sewer it re-makes the town; with the mud it re-makes manners. It judges from the potsherds whether it were an amphora or an earthenware jar. It recognizes by a nail-mark on a parchment the difference which separates the Jewry of the Juden-gasse from the Jewry of the Ghetto. It finds again in what is left what has been,—the good, the bad, the false, the true, the patch of blood in the palace, the ink-stain of the cavern, the tallow-drop of the brothel, trials undergone, temptations welcome, orgies vomited up, the wrinkle which characters have formed in abasing themselves, the traces of prostitution in the souls whose coarseness rendered them capable of it, and on the jacket of the street-porters of Rome the mark of the nudge of Messalina.
CHAPTER III.
BRUNESEAU.
The sewer of Paris in the Middle Ages was legendary. In the sixteenth century Henry II. attempted soundings which failed, and not a hundred years ago, as Mercier testifies, the cloaca was abandoned to itself, and became what it could. Such was that ancient Paris, handed over to quarrels, indecisions, and groping. It was for a long time thus stupid, and a later period, '89, showed how cities acquire sense. But in the good old times the capital had but little head; it did not know how to transact its business either morally or materially, and could no more sweep away its ordure than its abuses. Everything was an obstacle, everything raised a question. The sewer, for instance, was refractory to any itinerary, and people could no more get on under the city than they did in it; above, everything was unintelligible; below, inextricable; beneath the confusion of tongues was the confusion of cellars, and Dædalus duplicated Babel. At times the sewer of Paris thought proper to overflow, as if this misunderstood Nile had suddenly fallen into a passion. There were, infamous to relate, inundations of the sewer. At moments this stomach of civilization digested badly, the sewer flowed back into the throat of the city, and Paris bad the after-taste of its ordure. These resemblances of the drain to remorse had some good about them, for they were warnings, very badly taken however; for the city was indignant that its mud should have so much boldness, and did not admit that the ordure should return. Discharge it better.
The inundation of 1802 is in the memory of Parisians of eighty years of age. The mud spread across the Place des Victoires, on which is the statue of Louis XIV.; it entered Rue St. Honoré by the two mouths of the sewer of the Champs Élysées, Rue St. Florentin by the St. Florentin sewer, Rue Pierre à Poisson by the sewer of the Sonnerie, Rue Popincourt by the Chemin-Vert sewer, and Rue de la Roquette by the Rue de Lappe sewer; it covered the level of the Rue des Champs Élysées to a height of fourteen inches, and in the south, owing to the vomitory of the Seine performing its duties contrariwise, it entered Rue Mazarine, Rue de l'Échaudé, and Rue des Marais, where it stopped after running on a hundred and twenty yards, just a few yards from the house which Racine had inhabited, respecting, in the seventeenth century, the poet more than the king. It reached its maximum depth in the Rue St. Pierre, where it rose three feet above the gutter, and its maximum extent in the Rue St. Sabin, where it extended over a length of two hundred and fifty yards.
At the beginning of the present century the sewer of Paris was still a mysterious spot. Mud can never be well famed, but here the ill reputation extended almost to terror. Paris knew confusedly that it had beneath it a grewsome cave; people talked about it as of that monstrous mud-bed of Thebes, in which centipedes fifteen feet in length swarmed, and which could have served as a bathing-place for Behemoth. The great boots of the sewers-men never ventured beyond certain known points. It was still very close to the time when the scavengers' carts, from the top of which St. Foix fraternized with the Marquis de Créqui, were simply unloaded into the sewer. As for the cleansing, the duty was intrusted to the showers, which choked up rather than swept away. Rome allowed some poetry to her cloaca, and called it the Gemoniæ, but Paris insulted its own, and called it the stench-hole. Science and superstition were agreed as to the horror, and the stench-hole was quite as repugnant to hygiene as to the legend. The goblin was hatched under the fetid arches of the Mouffetard sewer: the corpses of the Marmousets were thrown into the Barillerie sewer: Fagot attributed the malignant fever of 1685 to the great opening of the Marais sewer, which remained yawning until 1833 in the Rue St. Louis, nearly opposite the sign of the Messager Galant. The mouth of the sewer in the Rue de la Mortellerie was celebrated for the pestilences which issued from it; with its iron-pointed grating that resembled a row of teeth it yawned in this fatal street like the throat of a dragon breathing hell on mankind. The popular imagination seasoned the gloomy Parisian sewer with some hideous mixture of infinitude: the sewer was bottomless, the sewer was a Barathrum, and the idea of exploring these leprous regions never even occurred to the police. Who would have dared to cast a sound into this darkness, and go on a journey of discovery in this abyss? It was frightful, and yet some one presented himself at last. The cloaca had its Christopher Columbus.
One day in 1805, during one of the rare apparitions which the Emperor made in Paris, the Minister of the Interior attended at his master's petit lever. In the court-yard could be heard the clanging sabres of all the extraordinary soldiers of the great Republic and the great Empire; there was a swarm of heroes at Napoleon's gates; men of the Rhine, the Schelde, the Adage, and the Nile; comrades of Joubert, of Desaix, of Marceau, Hoche, and Kléber, aeronauts of Fleurus, grenadiers of Mayence, pontooners of Genoa, hussars whom the Pyramids had gazed at, artillerymen who had bespattered Junot's cannon-balls, cuirassiers who had taken by assault the fleet anchored in the Zuyderzee; some had followed Bonaparte upon the bridge of Lodi, others had accompanied Murat to the trenches of Mantua, while others had outstripped Lannes in the hollow way of Montebello. The whole army of that day was in the court of the Tuileries, represented by a squadron or a company, and guarding Napoleon, then resting; and it was the splendid period when the great army had Marengo behind it and Austerlitz before it. "Sire," said the Minister of the Interior to Napoleon, "I have seen to-day the most intrepid man of your Empire." "Who is the man?" the Emperor asked sharply, "and what has he done?" "He wishes to do something, Sire." "What is it?" "To visit the sewers of Paris." This man existed, and his name was Bruneseau.
CHAPTER IV.
CONCEALED DETAILS.
The visit took place, and was a formidable campaign,—a nocturnal battle against asphyxia and plague. It was at the same time a voyage of discovery, and one of the survivors of the exploration, an intelligent workman, very young at that time, used to recount a few years ago the curious details which Bruneseau thought it right to omit in his report to the Prefect of Police, as unworthy of the administrative style. Disinfecting processes were very rudimentary at that day, and Bruneseau had scarce passed the first articulations of the subterranean network ere eight workmen out of twenty refused to go farther. The operation was complicated, for the visit entailed cleansing: it was, therefore, requisite to cleanse and at the same time take measurements; note the water entrances, count the traps and mouths, detail the branches, indicate the currents, recognize the respective dimensions of the different basins, sound the small sewers grafted on the main, measure the height under the key-stone of each passage, and the width both at the bottom and the top, in order to determine the ordinates for levelling at the right of each entrance of water. They advanced with difficulty, and it was not rare for the ladders to sink into three feet of mud. The lanterns would scarce burn in the mephitic atmosphere, and from time to time a sewer-man was carried away in a fainting state. At certain spots there was a precipice; the soil had given way, the stones were swallowed up, and the drain was converted into a lost well; nothing solid could be found, and they had great difficulty in dragging out a man who suddenly disappeared. By the advice of Fourcroy large cages filled with tow saturated with resin were set fire to at regular distances. The wall was covered in spots with shapeless fungi, which might have been called tumors, and the stone itself seemed diseased in this unbreathable medium.