et. He stood with more than half his body above
the breastworks. There is no more violent prodigal than the avaricious
man who takes the bit in his teeth; there is no man more terrible in
action than a dreamer. Marius was formidable and pensive. In battle he
was as in a dream. One would have pronounced him a phantom engaged in
firing a gun.

The insurgents' cartridges were giving out; but not their sarcasms. In
this whirlwind of the sepulchre in which they stood, they laughed.

Courfeyrac was bare-headed.

"What have you done with your hat?" Bossuet asked him.

Courfeyrac replied:

"They have finally taken it away from me with cannon-balls."

Or they uttered haughty comments.

"Can any one understand," exclaimed Feuilly bitterly, "those men,--[and
he cited names, well-known names, even celebrated names, some belonging
to the old army]--who had promised to join us, and taken an oath to aid
us, and who had pledged their honor to it, and who are our generals, and
who abandon us!"

And Combeferre restricted himself to replying with a grave smile.

"There are people who observe the rules of honor as one observes the
stars, from a great distance."

The interior of the barricade was so strewn with torn cartridges that
one would have said that there had been a snowstorm.

The assailants had numbers in their favor; the insurgents had position.
They were at the top of a wall, and they thundered point-blank upon
the soldiers tripping over the dead and wounded and entangled in
the escarpment. This barricade, constructed as it was and admirably
buttressed, was really one of those situations where a handful of men
hold a legion in check. Nevertheless, the attacking column, constantly
recruited and enlarged under the shower of bullets, drew inexorably
nearer, and now, little by little, step by step, but surely, the army
closed in around the barricade as the vice grasps the wine-press.

One assault followed another. The horror of the situation kept
increasing.

Then there burst forth on that heap of paving-stones, in that Rue de la
Chanvrerie, a battle worthy of a wall of Troy. These haggard, ragged,
exhausted men, who had had nothing to eat for four and twenty hours, who
had not slept, who had but a few more rounds to fire, who were fumbling
in their pockets which had been emptied of cartridges, nearly all
of whom were wounded, with head or arm bandaged with black and
blood-stained linen, with holes in their clothes fr