CHAPTER III

LIGHT AND SHADOW


Enjolras had been to make a reconnaissance. He had made his way
out through Mondetour lane, gliding along close to the houses.

The insurgents, we will remark, were full of hope. The manner in which
they had repulsed the attack of the preceding night had caused them
to almost disdain in advance the attack at dawn. They waited for it
with a smile. They had no more doubt as to their success than as to
their cause. Moreover, succor was, evidently, on the way to them.
They reckoned on it. With that facility of triumphant prophecy
which is one of the sources of strength in the French combatant,
they divided the day which was at hand into three distinct phases.
At six o'clock in the morning a regiment "which had been
labored with," would turn; at noon, the insurrection of all Paris;
at sunset, revolution.

They heard the alarm bell of Saint-Merry, which had not been silent
for an instant since the night before; a proof that the other barricade,
the great one, Jeanne's, still held out.

All these hopes were exchanged between the different groups in a
sort of gay and formidable whisper which resembled the warlike
hum of a hive of bees.

Enjolras reappeared. He returned from his sombre eagle flight
into outer darkness. He listened for a moment to all this joy
with folded arms, and one hand on his mouth. Then, fresh and rosy
in the growing whiteness of the dawn, he said:

"The whole army of Paris is to strike. A third of the army is bearing
down upon the barricades in which you now are. There is the National
Guard in addition. I have picked out the shakos of the fifth of the line,
and the standard-bearers of the sixth legion. In one hour you will
be attacked. As for the populace, it was seething yesterday, to-day it
is not stirring. There is nothing to expect; nothing to hope for.
Neither from a faubourg nor from a regiment. You are abandoned."

These words fell upon the buzzing of the groups, and produced on them
the effect caused on a swarm of bees by the first drops of a storm.
A moment of indescribable silence ensued, in which death might have
been heard flitting by.

This moment was brief.

A voice from the obscurest depths of the groups shouted to Enjolras:

"So be it. Let us raise the barricade to a height of twenty feet,
and let us all remain in it. Citizens, let us offer the protests
of corpses. Let us show that, if the people abandon the republicans,
the republicans do not abandon the people."

These words freed the thought of all from the painful cloud of
individual anxieties. It was hailed with an enthusiastic acclamation.

No one ever has known the name of the man who spoke thus; he was some
unknown blouse-wearer, a stranger, a man forgotten, a passing hero,
that great anonymous, always mingled in human crises and in social
geneses who, at a given moment, utters in a supreme fashion
the decisive word, and who vanishes into the shadows after having
represented for a minute, in a lightning flash, the people and God.

This inexorable resolution so thoroughly impregnated the air
of the 6th of June, 1832, that, almost at the very same hour,
on the barricade Saint-Merry, the insurgents were raising that clamor
which has become a matter of history and which has been consigned
to the documents in the case:--"What matters it whether they come
to our assistance or not? Let us get ourselves killed here,
to the very last man."

As the reader sees, the two barricades, though materially isolated,
were in communication with each other.