e made them pass in behind him. All
precipitated themselves thither. Enjolras, executing with his rifle,
which he now used like a cane, what single-stick players call a "covered
rose" round his head, levelled the bayonets around and in front of him,
and was the last to enter; and then ensued a horrible moment, when the
soldiers tried to make their way in, and the insurgents strove to bar
them out. The door was slammed with such violence, that, as it fell back
into its frame, it showed the five fingers of a soldier who had been
clinging to it, cut off and glued to the post.

Marius remained outside. A shot had just broken his collar bone, he
felt that he was fainting and falling. At that moment, with eyes already
shut, he felt the shock of a vigorous hand seizing him, and the swoon
in which his senses vanished, hardly allowed him time for the thought,
mingled with a last memory of Cosette:--"I am taken prisoner. I shall be
shot."

Enjolras, not seeing Marius among those who had taken refuge in the
wine-shop, had the same idea. But they had reached a moment when each
man has not the time to meditate on his own death. Enjolras fixed the
bar across the door, and bolted it, and double-locked it with key and
chain, while those outside were battering furiously at it, the soldiers
with the butts of their muskets, the sappers with their axes. The
assailants were grouped about that door. The siege of the wine-shop was
now beginning.

The soldiers, we will observe, were full of wrath.

The death of the artillery-sergeant had enraged them, and then, a still
more melancholy circumstance. During the few hours which had preceded
the attack, it had been reported among them that the insurgents were
mutilating their prisoners, and that there was the headless body of
a soldier in the wine-shop. This sort of fatal rumor is the usual
accompaniment of civil wars, and it was a false report of this kind
which, later on, produced the catastrophe of the Rue Transnonain.

When the door was barricaded, Enjolras said to the others:

"Let us sell our lives dearly."

Then he approached the table on which lay Mabeuf and Gavroche. Beneath
the black cloth two straight and rigid forms were visible, one large,
the other small, and the two faces were vaguely outlined beneath the
cold folds of the shroud. A hand projected from beneath the winding
sheet and hung near the floor. It was that of the old man.

Enjolras bent down and kissed that venerabl