k bees of violent progress.
Was it a thicket? Was it a bacchanalia? Was it a fortress? Vertigo
seemed to have constructed it with blows of its wings. There was
something of the cess-pool in that redoubt and something Olympian in
that confusion. One there beheld in a pell-mell full of despair, the
rafters of roofs, bits of garret windows with their figured paper,
window sashes with their glass planted there in the ruins awaiting
the cannon, wrecks of chimneys, cupboards, tables, benches, howling
topsyturveydom, and those thousand poverty-stricken things, the very
refuse of the mendicant, which contain at the same time fury and
nothingness. One would have said that it was the tatters of a people,
rags of wood, of iron, of bronze, of stone, and that the Faubourg Saint
Antoine had thrust it there at its door, with a colossal flourish of the
broom making of its misery its barricade. Blocks resembling headsman's
blocks, dislocated chains, pieces of woodwork with brackets having
the form of gibbets, horizontal wheels projecting from the rubbish,
amalgamated with this edifice of anarchy the sombre figure of the old
tortures endured by the people. The barricade Saint Antoine converted
everything into a weapon; everything that civil war could throw at the
head of society proceeded thence; it was not combat, it was a paroxysm;
the carbines which defended this redoubt, among which there were some
blunderbusses, sent bits of earthenware bones, coat-buttons, even the
casters from night-stands, dangerous projectiles on account of
the brass. This barricade was furious; it hurled to the clouds an
inexpressible clamor; at certain moments, when provoking the army, it
was covered with throngs and tempest; a tumultuous crowd of flaming
heads crowned it; a swarm filled it; it had a thorny crest of guns, of
sabres, of cudgels, of axes, of pikes and of bayonets; a vast red flag
flapped in the wind; shouts of command, songs of attack, the roll of
drums, the sobs of women and bursts of gloomy laughter from the starving
were to be heard there. It was huge and living, and, like the back of an
electric beast, there proceeded from it little flashes of lightning. The
spirit of revolution covered with its cloud this summit where rumbled
that voice of the people which resembles the voice of God; a strange
majesty was emitted by this titanic basket of rubbish. It was a heap of
filth and it was Sinai.

As we have said previously, it attacked in the name