into outer
darkness. He listened for a moment to all this joy with folded arms, and
one hand on his mouth. Then, fresh and rosy in the growing whiteness of
the dawn, he said:

"The whole army of Paris is to strike. A third of the army is bearing
down upon the barricades in which you now are. There is the National
Guard in addition. I have picked out the shakos of the fifth of the
line, and the standard-bearers of the sixth legion. In one hour you will
be attacked. As for the populace, it was seething yesterday, to-day
it is not stirring. There is nothing to expect; nothing to hope for.
Neither from a faubourg nor from a regiment. You are abandoned."

These words fell upon the buzzing of the groups, and produced on them
the effect caused on a swarm of bees by the first drops of a storm. A
moment of indescribable silence ensued, in which death might have been
heard flitting by.

This moment was brief.

A voice from the obscurest depths of the groups shouted to Enjolras:

"So be it. Let us raise the barricade to a height of twenty feet, and
let us all remain in it. Citizens, let us offer the protests of corpses.
Let us show that, if the people abandon the republicans, the republicans
do not abandon the people."

These words freed the thought of all from the painful cloud of
individual anxieties. It was hailed with an enthusiastic acclamation.

No one ever has known the name of the man who spoke thus; he was some
unknown blouse-wearer, a stranger, a man forgotten, a passing hero, that
great anonymous, always mingled in human crises and in social geneses
who, at a given moment, utters in a supreme fashion the decisive word,
and who vanishes into the shadows after having represented for a minute,
in a lightning flash, the people and God.

This inexorable resolution so thoroughly impregnated the air of the
6th of June, 1832, that, almost at the very same hour, on the barricade
Saint-Merry, the insurgents were raising that clamor which has become a
matter of history and which has been consigned to the documents in the
case:--"What matters it whether they come to our assistance or not? Let
us get ourselves killed here, to the very last man."

As the reader sees, the two barricades, though materially isolated, were
in communication with each other.

CHAPTER IV--MINUS FIVE, PLUS ONE

After the man who decreed the "protest of corpses" had spoken, and had
given this formula of their common soul, there issued from