When there were no longer any of the leaders left alive, except
Enjolras and Marius at the two extremities of the barricade, the
centre, which had so long sustained Courfeyrac, Joly, Bossuet, Feuilly
and Combeferre, gave way. The cannon, though it had not effected a
practicable breach, had made a rather large hollow in the middle of the
redoubt; there, the summit of the wall had disappeared before the
balls, and had crumbled away; and the rubbish which had fallen, now
inside, now outside, had, as it accumulated, formed two piles in the
nature of slopes on the two sides of the barrier, one on the inside,
the other on the outside. The exterior slope presented an inclined
plane to the attack.
A final assault was there attempted, and this assault succeeded. The
mass bristling with bayonets and hurled forward at a run, came up with
irresistible force, and the serried front of battle of the attacking
column made its appearance through the smoke on the crest of the
battlements. This time, it was decisive. The group of insurgents who
were defending the centre retreated in confusion.
Then the gloomy love of life awoke once more in some of them. Many,
finding themselves under the muzzles of this forest of guns, did not
wish to die. This is a moment when the instinct of self-preservation
emits howls, when the beast reappears in men. They were hemmed in by
the lofty, six-story house which formed the background of their
redoubt. This house might prove their salvation. The building was
barricaded, and walled, as it were, from top to bottom. Before the
troops of the line had reached the interior of the redoubt, there was
time for a door to open and shut, the space of a flash of lightning was
sufficient for that, and the door of that house, suddenly opened a
crack and closed again instantly, was life for these despairing men.
Behind this house, there were streets, possible flight, space. They set
to knocking at that door with the butts of their guns, and with kicks,
shouting, calling, entreating, wringing their hands. No one opened.
From the little window on the third floor, the head of the dead man
gazed down upon them.
But Enjolras and Marius, and the seven or eight rallied about them,
sprang forward and protected them. Enjolras had shouted to the
soldiers: “Don’t advance!” and as an officer had not obeyed, Enjolras
had killed the officer. He was now in the little inner court of the
redoubt, with his back planted against the Corinthe building, a sword
in one hand, a rifle in the other, holding open the door of the
wine-shop which he barred against assailants. He shouted to the
desperate men:—“There is but one door open; this one.”—And shielding
them with his body, and facing an entire battalion alone, he made them
pass in behind him. All precipitated themselves thither. Enjolras,
executing with his rifle, which he now used like a cane, what
single-stick players call a “covered rose” round his head, levelled the
bayonets around and in front of him, and was the last to enter; and
then ensued a horrible moment, when the soldiers tried to make their
way in, and the insurgents strove to bar them out. The door was slammed
with such violence, that, as it fell back into its frame, it showed the
five fingers of a soldier who had been clinging to it, cut off and
glued to the post.
Marius remained outside. A shot had just broken his collar bone, he
felt that he was fainting and falling. At that moment, with eyes
already shut, he felt the shock of a vigorous hand seizing him, and the
swoon in which his senses vanished, hardly allowed him time for the
thought, mingled with a last memory of Cosette:—“I am taken prisoner. I
shall be shot.”
Enjolras, not seeing Marius among those who had taken refuge in the
wine-shop, had the same idea. But they had reached a moment when each
man has not the time to meditate on his own death. Enjolras fixed the
bar across the door, and bolted it, and double-locked it with key and
chain, while those outside were battering furiously at it, the soldiers
with the butts of their muskets, the sappers with their axes. The
assailants were grouped about that door. The siege of the wine-shop was
now beginning.
The soldiers, we will observe, were full of wrath.
The death of the artillery-sergeant had enraged them, and then, a still
more melancholy circumstance. During the few hours which had preceded
the attack, it had been reported among them that the insurgents were
mutilating their prisoners, and that there was the headless body of a
soldier in the wine-shop. This sort of fatal rumor is the usual
accompaniment of civil wars, and it was a false report of this kind
which, later on, produced the catastrophe of the Rue Transnonain.
When the door was barricaded, Enjolras said to the others:
“Let us sell our lives dearly.”
Then he approached the table on which lay Mabeuf and Gavroche. Beneath
the black cloth two straight and rigid forms were visible, one large,
the other small, and the two faces were vaguely outlined beneath the
cold folds of the shroud. A hand projected from beneath the winding
sheet and hung near the floor. It was that of the old man.
Enjolras bent down and kissed that venerable hand, just as he had
kissed his brow on the preceding evening.
These were the only two kisses which he had bestowed in the course of
his life.
Let us abridge the tale. The barricade had fought like a gate of
Thebes; the wine-shop fought like a house of Saragossa. These
resistances are dogged. No quarter. No flag of truce possible. Men are
willing to die, provided their opponent will kill them.
When Suchet says:—“Capitulate,”—Palafox replies: “After the war with
cannon, the war with knives.” Nothing was lacking in the capture by
assault of the Hucheloup wine-shop; neither paving-stones raining from
the windows and the roof on the besiegers and exasperating the soldiers
by crushing them horribly, nor shots fired from the attic-windows and
the cellar, nor the fury of attack, nor, finally, when the door
yielded, the frenzied madness of extermination. The assailants, rushing
into the wine-shop, their feet entangled in the panels of the door
which had been beaten in and flung on the ground, found not a single
combatant there. The spiral staircase, hewn asunder with the axe, lay
in the middle of the tap-room, a few wounded men were just breathing
their last, every one who was not killed was on the first floor, and
from there, through the hole in the ceiling, which had formed the
entrance of the stairs, a terrific fire burst forth. It was the last of
their cartridges. When they were exhausted, when these formidable men
on the point of death had no longer either powder or ball, each grasped
in his hands two of the bottles which Enjolras had reserved, and of
which we have spoken, and held the scaling party in check with these
frightfully fragile clubs. They were bottles of aquafortis.
We relate these gloomy incidents of carnage as they occurred. The
besieged man, alas! converts everything into a weapon. Greek fire did
not disgrace Archimedes, boiling pitch did not disgrace Bayard. All war
is a thing of terror, and there is no choice in it. The musketry of the
besiegers, though confined and embarrassed by being directed from below
upwards, was deadly. The rim of the hole in the ceiling was speedily
surrounded by heads of the slain, whence dripped long, red and smoking
streams, the uproar was indescribable; a close and burning smoke almost
produced night over this combat. Words are lacking to express horror
when it has reached this pitch. There were no longer men in this
conflict, which was now infernal. They were no longer giants matched
with colossi. It resembled Milton and Dante rather than Homer. Demons
attacked, spectres resisted.
It was heroism become monstrous.