ich has lingered as a tradition in the quarters
of the Temple, is one of the most terrible souvenirs of the elderly
bourgeois of the Marais, and is entitled in their memories: "The
nocturnal attack by the post of the Royal Printing Establishment."

[THE END OF VOLUME IV. "SAINT DENIS"]

VOLUME V--JEAN VALJEAN

[Illustration: Frontispiece Volume Five ]

[Illustration: Titlepage Volume Five ]

BOOK FIRST.--THE WAR BETWEEN FOUR WALLS

CHAPTER I--THE CHARYBDIS OF THE FAUBOURG SAINT ANTOINE AND THE SCYLLA OF
THE FAUBOURG DU TEMPLE

The two most memorable barricades which the observer of social maladies
can name do not belong to the period in which the action of this work
is laid. These two barricades, both of them symbols, under two different
aspects, of a redoubtable situation, sprang from the earth at the time
of the fatal insurrection of June, 1848, the greatest war of the streets
that history has ever beheld.

It sometimes happens that, even contrary to principles, even contrary to
liberty, equality, and fraternity, even contrary to the universal vote,
even contrary to the government, by all for all, from the depths of its
anguish, of its discouragements and its destitutions, of its fevers, of
its distresses, of its miasmas, of its ignorances, of its darkness, that
great and despairing body, the rabble, protests against, and that the
populace wages battle against, the people.

Beggars attack the common right; the ochlocracy rises against demos.

These are melancholy days; for there is always a certain amount of night
even in this madness, there is suicide in this duel, and those words
which are intended to be insults--beggars, canaille, ochlocracy,
populace--exhibit, alas! rather the fault of those who reign than the
fault of those who suffer; rather the fault of the privileged than the
fault of the disinherited.

For our own part, we never pronounce those words without pain and
without respect, for when philosophy fathoms the facts to which they
correspond, it often finds many a grandeur beside these miseries. Athens
was an ochlocracy; the beggars were the making of Holland; the populace
saved Rome more than once; and the rabble followed Jesus Christ.

There is no thinker who has not at times contemplated the magnificences
of the lower classes.

It was of this rabble that Saint Jerome was thinking, no doubt, and of
all these poor people and all these vagabonds and all these miserab