ns,
no further encounter except the abrupt and rapid apparition of death.
Where? How? When? No one knew, but it was certain and inevitable. In
this place which had been marked out for the struggle, the Government
and the insurrection, the National Guard, and popular societies, the
bourgeois and the uprising, groping their way, were about to come into
contact. The necessity was the same for both. The only possible issue
thenceforth was to emerge thence killed or conquerors. A situation so
extreme, an obscurity so powerful, that the most timid felt themselves
seized with resolution, and the most daring with terror.

Moreover, on both sides, the fury, the rage, and the determination were
equal. For the one party, to advance meant death, and no one dreamed of
retreating; for the other, to remain meant death, and no one dreamed of
flight.

It was indispensable that all should be ended on the following day, that
triumph should rest either here or there, that the insurrection should
prove itself a revolution or a skirmish. The Government understood this
as well as the parties; the most insignificant bourgeois felt it. Hence
a thought of anguish which mingled with the impenetrable gloom of this
quarter where all was at the point of being decided; hence a redoubled
anxiety around that silence whence a catastrophe was on the point of
emerging. Here only one sound was audible, a sound as heart-rending
as the death rattle, as menacing as a malediction, the tocsin of
Saint-Merry. Nothing could be more blood-curdling than the clamor of
that wild and desperate bell, wailing amid the shadows.

As it often happens, nature seemed to have fallen into accord with what
men were about to do. Nothing disturbed the harmony of the whole effect.
The stars had disappeared, heavy clouds filled the horizon with their
melancholy folds. A black sky rested on these dead streets, as though an
immense winding-sheet were being outspread over this immense tomb.

While a battle that was still wholly political was in preparation in the
same locality which had already witnessed so many revolutionary events,
while youth, the secret associations, the schools, in the name of
principles, and the middle classes, in the name of interests, were
approaching preparatory to dashing themselves together, clasping and
throwing each other, while each one hastened and invited the last and
decisive hour of the crisis, far away and quite outside of this fatal
quarter, in