e on the watch everywhere,
and maintained order, that is to say, night. The necessary tactics of
insurrection are to drown small numbers in a vast obscurity, to multiply
every combatant by the possibilities which that obscurity contains. At
dusk, every window where a candle was burning received a shot. The light
was extinguished, sometimes the inhabitant was killed. Hence nothing was
stirring. There was nothing but fright, mourning, stupor in the houses;
and in the streets, a sort of sacred horror. Not even the long rows of
windows and stores, the indentations of the chimneys, and the roofs,
and the vague reflections which are cast back by the wet and muddy
pavements, were visible. An eye cast upward at that mass of shadows
might, perhaps, have caught a glimpse here and there, at intervals,
of indistinct gleams which brought out broken and eccentric lines, and
profiles of singular buildings, something like the lights which go and
come in ruins; it was at such points that the barricades were situated.
The rest was a lake of obscurity, foggy, heavy, and funereal, above
which, in motionless and melancholy outlines, rose the tower of
Saint-Jacques, the church of Saint-Merry, and two or three more of those
grand edifices of which man makes giants and the night makes phantoms.

All around this deserted and disquieting labyrinth, in the quarters
where the Parisian circulation had not been annihilated, and where a
few street lanterns still burned, the aerial observer might have
distinguished the metallic gleam of swords and bayonets, the dull rumble
of artillery, and the swarming of silent battalions whose ranks were
swelling from minute to minute; a formidable girdle which was slowly
drawing in and around the insurrection.

The invested quarter was no longer anything more than a monstrous
cavern; everything there appeared to be asleep or motionless, and, as we
have just seen, any street which one might come to offered nothing but
darkness.

A wild darkness, full of traps, full of unseen and formidable shocks,
into which it was alarming to penetrate, and in which it was terrible to
remain, where those who entered shivered before those whom they awaited,
where those who waited shuddered before those who were coming. Invisible
combatants were entrenched at every corner of the street; snares of the
sepulchre concealed in the density of night. All was over. No more
light was to be hoped for, henceforth, except the lightning of gu