Les Misérables, v. 5/5: Jean Valjean Read online

  CHAPTER I.

  THE CHARYBDIS OF THE FAUBOURG ST. ANTOINE AND THE SCYLLA OF THEFAUBOURG DU TEMPLE.

  The two most memorable barricades which the observer of social diseasescan mention do not belong to the period in which the action of thisbook is laid. These two barricades, both symbols under differentaspects of a formidable situation, emerged from the earth during thefatal insurrection of June, 1848, the greatest street-war which historyhas seen. It happens sometimes that the canaille, that great despairingcrowd, contrary to principles, even contrary to liberty, equality, andfraternity, even contrary to the universal vote, the government of allby all, protests, in the depths of its agony, its discouragement, itsdestitution, its fevers, its distresses, its miasmas, its ignorance,and its darkness, and the populace offers battle to the people. Thebeggars attack the common right, the ochlocracy rises in insurrectionagainst the demos. Those are mournful days; for there is always acertain amount of right even in this mania, there is suicide in thisduel, and these words, intended to be insults, such as beggars,canaille, ochlocracy, and populace, prove, alas! rather the faultof those who reign than the fault of those who suffer; rather thefault of the privileged than the fault of the disinherited. For ourpart, we never pronounce these words without grief and respect, forwhen philosophy probes the facts with which they correspond it oftenfinds much grandeur by the side of misery. Athens was an ochlocracy;the beggars produced Holland; the populace more than once savedRome; and the canaille followed the Saviour. There is no thinker whohas not at times contemplated the magnificence below. Saint Jeromedoubtless thought of this canaille, of all these poor people, all thesevagabonds, and all the wretches whence the apostles and martyrs issued,when he uttered the mysterious words,--"Fex urbis, lux orbis."

  The exasperations of this mob, which suffers and which bleeds, itsunwilling violence against the principles which are its life, itsassaults upon the right, are popular coups d'état, and must berepressed. The just man devotes himself, and through love for thisvery mob, combats it. But how excusable he finds it while resistingit; how he venerates it, even while opposing it! It is one of thoserare moments in which a man while doing his duty feels something thatdisconcerts him, and almost dissuades him from going further; hepersists, and must do so, but the satisfied conscience is sad, andthe accomplishment of the duty is complicated by a contraction of theheart. June, 1848, was, let us hasten to say, a separate fact, andalmost impossible to classify in the philosophy of history. All thewords we have uttered must be laid aside when we have to deal withthis extraordinary riot, in which the holy anxiety of labor claimingits right was felt. It must be combated, and it was a duty to do so,for it attacked the Republic; but, in reality, what was June, 1848?A revolt of the people against itself. When the subject is not leftout of sight there is no digression, and hence we may be permitted toconcentrate the reader's attention momentarily upon the two absolutelyunique barricades to which we have alluded, and which characterizedthis insurrection. The one blocked up the entrance to the Faubourg St.Antoine, the other defended the approaches to the Faubourg du Temple;those before whom these two frightful masterpieces of civil war wereraised in the dazzling June sun will never forget them.

  The St. Antoine barricade was monstrous; it was three stories high andseven hundred feet in width. It barred from one corner to the other thevast mouth of the faubourg, that is to say, three streets; ravined,slashed, serrated, surmounted by an immense jagged line, supportedby masses which were themselves bastions, pushing out capes here andthere, and powerfully reinforced by the two great promontories of thehouses of the faubourg, it rose like a Cyclopean wall at the back ofthe formidable square which had seen July 14. There were nineteenbarricades erected in the streets behind the mother barricade; but, onseeing it, you felt in the faubourg the immense agonizing sufferingwhich had reached that extreme stage in which misery desires to cometo a catastrophe. Of what was this barricade made? Of the tumbling inof three six-storied houses demolished on purpose, say some; of theprodigy of all the passions, say others. It possessed the lamentableaspect of all the buildings of hatred, ruin. You might ask whobuilt this, and you might also ask who destroyed this. It was theimprovisation of the ebullition. Here with that door, that grating,that awning, that chimney, that broken stove, that cracked stewpan!Give us anything! Throw everything in! Push, roll, pick, dismantle,overthrow, and pull down everything! It was a collaboration of thepavement-stones, beams, iron bars, planks, broken windows, unseatedchairs, cabbage-stalks, rags, tatters, and curses. It was great and itwas little; it was the abyss parodied on the square by the hurly-burly.It was the mass side by side with the atom, a pulled-down wall and abroken pipkin, a menacing fraternization of all fragments, into whichSisyphus had cast his rock and Job his potsherds. Altogether it wasterrible,--it was the acropolis of the barefooted. Overturned cartsstudded the slope; an immense wagon spread out across it, with itswheels to the sky, and looked like a scar on this tumultuous façade; anomnibus gayly hoisted by strength of arm to the very top of the pile,as if the architects of this savage edifice had wished to add mockeryto the horror, offered its bare pole to the horses of the air. Thisgigantic mound, the alluvium of the riot, represented to the mind anOssa upon Pelion of all revolutions,--'93 upon '89, the 9th Thermidorupon the 10th August, the 18th Brumaire upon January 21st, Vendémiaireupon Prairial, 1848 upon 1830. The place was worth the trouble, andthis barricade was worthy of appearing upon the very spot whence theBastille had disappeared. If the ocean made dykes it would build themin this way, and the fury of the tide was stamped on this shapelessencumbrance. What tide? The multitude. You fancied that you saw apetrified riot, and heard the enormous dark bees of violent progresshumming about this barricade as if they had their hive there. Was it athicket? Was it a Bacchanalian feast? Was it a fortress? Vertigo seemedto have built it with the flapping of its wings! There was a sewer inthis redoubt, and something Olympian in this mass. You saw there in aconfused heap, full of desperation, gables of roofs, pieces of garretswith their painted paper, window-frames with all their panes plantedin the rubbish and awaiting the cannon, pulled-down mantelpieces,chests of drawers, tables, benches, a howling topsy-turvy, and thosethousand wretched things cast away even by a beggar which contain atonce fury and nothingness. It may be said that it was the rags of apeople, rags of wood, of iron, of bronze, of stone; that the FaubourgSt. Antoine had swept them to their door with a gigantic broom, andmade a barricade of their misery. Logs resembling executioners' blocks,disjointed chains, anvil-frames of the shape of gallows, horizontalwheels emerging from the heap, produced on this edifice of anarchy therepresentation of the old punishment suffered by the people. The St.Antoine barricade made a weapon of everything. All that civil war canthrow at the head of society came from it; it was not a fight but aparoxysm: the muskets which defended this redoubt, among which wereseveral blunderbusses, discharged stones, bones, coat-buttons, and eventhe casters of night-commodes, very dangerous owing to the copper.This barricade was furious; it hurled an indescribable clamor into theclouds; at certain moments when challenging the army it was coveredwith a crowd and a tempest; it had a prickly crest of guns, sabres,sticks, axes, pikes, and bayonets; a mighty red flag fluttered uponit in the breeze, and the cries of command, the songs of attack, therolling of the drum, the sobs of women, and the sardonic laughter ofmen dying of starvation could be heard there. It was immeasurable andliving, and a flash of lightning issued from it as from the back of anelectric animal. The spirit of revolution covered with its cloud thissummit, where that voice of the people which resembles the voice of Godwas growling, and a strange majesty was disengaged from this Titanicmass of stones. It was a dungheap, and it was Sinai.

  As we said above, it attacked in the name of the revolution--what?The revolution. It, this barricade, an accident, a disorder, amisunderstanding, an unknown thing, had, facing it, the constituentassembly, the sovereignty of the people, universal suffrage,the nation, the republic: and it was the Carmagnole defying theMarseillaise. A mad defia
nce, but heroic, for this old faubourg is ahero. The faubourg and its redoubt supported each other; the faubourgrested on the redoubt, and the redoubt backed against the faubourg.The vast barricade was like a cliff against which the strategy of theAfrican generals was broken. Its caverns, its excrescences, its warts,its humps, made grimaces, if we may employ the expression, and grinnedbehind the smoke. The grape-shot vanished in the shapeless heap; shellsburied themselves in it and were swallowed up; cannon-balls onlysucceeded in forming holes, for of what use is it bombarding chaos? Andthe regiments, accustomed to the sternest visions of war, gazed withanxious eye at this species of wild-beast redoubt, which was a boarthrough its bristling and a mountain through its enormity.

  A quarter of a league farther on, at the corner of the Rue du Temple,which debouches on the boulevard near the Chateau d'Eau, if you boldlyadvanced your head beyond the point formed by the projection of themagazine Dallemagne, you could see in the distance across the canal,and at the highest point of the ascent to Belleville, a strange wallrising to the second floor and forming a sort of connecting linkbetween the houses on the right and those on the left, as if thestreet had folded back its highest wall in order to close itself up.This was built of paving-stones; it was tall, straight, correct, cold,perpendicular, and levelled with the plumb-line and the square; ofcourse there was no cement, but, as in some Roman walls, this in noway disturbed its rigid architecture. From its height, its thicknesscould be guessed, for the entablature was mathematically parallelto the basement At regular distances almost invisible loopholes,resembling black threads, could be distinguished in the gray wall,separated from each other by equal intervals. This street was desertedthroughout its length, and all the windows and doors were closed. Inthe background rose this bar, which converted the street into a blindalley; it was a motionless and tranquil wall; no one was seen, nothingwas heard, not a cry, nor a sound, nor a breath. It was a sepulchre.The dazzling June sun inundated this terrible thing with light,--itwas the barricade of the Faubourg du Temple. So soon as you reachedthe ground and perceived it, it was impossible even for the boldestnot to become pensive in the presence of this mysterious apparition.It was adjusted, clamped, imbricated, rectilinear, symmetrical, andfunereal; science and darkness were there. You felt that the chief ofthis barricade was a geometrician or a spectre, and as you gazed youspoke in a whisper. From time to time if any one--private, officer,or representative of the people--ventured to cross the solitary road,a shrill faint whistling was heard, and the passer-by fell wounded ordead; or, if he escaped, a bullet could be seen to bury itself in someshutter, or the stucco of the wall. Sometimes it was a grape-shot,for the man of the barricade had made out of gas-pipes, stopped upat one end with tow and clay, two small cannon. There was no uselessexpenditure of gunpowder, and nearly every shot told. There were afew corpses here and there, and patches of blood on the pavement. Iremember a white butterfly that fluttered up and down the street;summer does not abdicate. All the gateways in the vicinity were crowdedwith corpses, and you felt in this street that you were covered bysome one you could not see, and that the whole street was under themarksman's aim.

  The soldiers of the attacking column, massed behind the species ofridge which the canal bridge forms at the entrance of the Faubourg duTemple, watched gravely and thoughtfully this mournful redoubt, thisimmobility, this impassiveness, from which death issued. Some crawledon their stomachs to the top of the pitch of the bridge, while carefulnot to let their shakos pass beyond it. Brave Colonel Monteynardadmired this barricade with a tremor. "How it is built," he said to arepresentative; "not a single paving-stone projects beyond the other.It is made of porcelain." At this moment a bullet smashed the crosson his chest and he fell. "The cowards!" the troops shouted, "Why dothey not show themselves? They dare not! They hide!" The barricade ofthe Faubourg du Temple, defended by eighty men and attacked by tenthousand, held out for three days, and on the fourth day the troopsacted as they had done at Zaatcha and Constantine,--they broke throughhouses, passed along roofs, and the barricade was taken. Not one of theeighty cowards dreamed of flying; all were killed with the exception ofBarthélemy, the chief, to whom we shall allude directly. The barricadeof St. Antoine was the tumult of the thunder; the barricade of theTemple was the silence. There was between the two barricades the samedifference as exists between the formidable and the sinister. The oneseemed a throat, the other a mask. Admitting that the gigantic and darkinsurrection of June was composed of a fury and an enigma, the dragonwas seen in the first barricade and the sphinx behind the second.

  These two fortresses were built by two men, Cournet and Barthélemy:Cournet made the St. Antoine barricade, Barthélemy the Templebarricade, and each of them was the image of the man who built it.Cournet was a man of tall stature; he had wide shoulders, a red face, asmashing fist, a brave heart, a loyal soul, a sincere and terrible eye.He was intrepid, energetic, irascible, and stormy; the most cordialof men, and the most formidable of combatants. War, contest, medleywere the air he breathed, and put him in good temper. He had been anofficer in the navy, and from his gestures and his voice it could bedivined that he issued from the ocean and came from the tempest; hecontinued the hurricane in battle. Omitting the genius, there was inCournet something of Danton, as, omitting the divinity, there wasin Danton something of Hercules. Barthélemy, thin, weak, pale, andtaciturn, was a species of tragical gamin, who, having been struck bya policeman, watched for him, waited for him, and killed him, and atthe age of seventeen was sent to the galleys. He came out and builtthis barricade. At a later date, when both were exiles in London,Barthélemy killed Cournet: it was a melancholy duel. Some time afterthat, Barthélemy, caught in the cog-wheels of one of those mysteriousadventures in which passion is mingled, catastrophes in which Frenchjustice sees extenuating circumstances and English justice only seesdeath, was hanged. The gloomy social edifice is so built that, owing tomaternal denudation and moral darkness, this wretched being, who hadhad an intellect, certainly firm and possibly great, began with thegalleys in France and ended with the gibbet in England. Barthélemy onlyhoisted one flag,--it was the black one.