one passed close to him at a run. Was it a
man? Or a woman? Were there many of them? he could not have told. It had
passed and vanished.

Proceeding from circuit to circuit, he reached a lane which he judged
to be the Rue de la Poterie; near the middle of this street, he came in
contact with an obstacle. He extended his hands. It was an overturned
wagon; his foot recognized pools of water, gullies, and paving-stones
scattered and piled up. A barricade had been begun there and abandoned.
He climbed over the stones and found himself on the other side of the
barrier. He walked very near the street-posts, and guided himself along
the walls of the houses. A little beyond the barricade, it seemed to him
that he could make out something white in front of him. He approached,
it took on a form. It was two white horses; the horses of the omnibus
harnessed by Bossuet in the morning, who had been straying at random all
day from street to street, and had finally halted there, with the weary
patience of brutes who no more understand the actions of men, than man
understands the actions of Providence.

Marius left the horses behind him. As he was approaching a street which
seemed to him to be the Rue du Contrat-Social, a shot coming no one
knows whence, and traversing the darkness at random, whistled close by
him, and the bullet pierced a brass shaving-dish suspended above his
head over a hairdresser's shop. This pierced shaving-dish was still
to be seen in 1848, in the Rue du Contrat-Social, at the corner of the
pillars of the market.

This shot still betokened life. From that instant forth he encountered
nothing more.

The whole of this itinerary resembled a descent of black steps.

Nevertheless, Marius pressed forward.

CHAPTER II--AN OWL'S VIEW OF PARIS

A being who could have hovered over Paris that night with the wing of
the bat or the owl would have had beneath his eyes a gloomy spectacle.

All that old quarter of the Halles, which is like a city within a
city, through which run the Rues Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin, where a
thousand lanes cross, and of which the insurgents had made their
redoubt and their stronghold, would have appeared to him like a dark and
enormous cavity hollowed out in the centre of Paris. There the glance
fell into an abyss. Thanks to the broken lanterns, thanks to the closed
windows, there all radiance, all life, all sound, all movement ceased.
The invisible police of the insurrection wer