e hand, just as he had kissed
his brow on the preceding evening.

These were the only two kisses which he had bestowed in the course of
his life.

Let us abridge the tale. The barricade had fought like a gate of Thebes;
the wine-shop fought like a house of Saragossa. These resistances are
dogged. No quarter. No flag of truce possible. Men are willing to die,
provided their opponent will kill them.

When Suchet says:--"Capitulate,"--Palafox replies: "After the war with
cannon, the war with knives." Nothing was lacking in the capture by
assault of the Hucheloup wine-shop; neither paving-stones raining from
the windows and the roof on the besiegers and exasperating the soldiers
by crushing them horribly, nor shots fired from the attic-windows and
the cellar, nor the fury of attack, nor, finally, when the door yielded,
the frenzied madness of extermination. The assailants, rushing into the
wine-shop, their feet entangled in the panels of the door which had been
beaten in and flung on the ground, found not a single combatant there.
The spiral staircase, hewn asunder with the axe, lay in the middle of
the tap-room, a few wounded men were just breathing their last, every
one who was not killed was on the first floor, and from there, through
the hole in the ceiling, which had formed the entrance of the stairs,
a terrific fire burst forth. It was the last of their cartridges. When
they were exhausted, when these formidable men on the point of death had
no longer either powder or ball, each grasped in his hands two of the
bottles which Enjolras had reserved, and of which we have spoken, and
held the scaling party in check with these frightfully fragile clubs.
They were bottles of aquafortis.

We relate these gloomy incidents of carnage as they occurred. The
besieged man, alas! converts everything into a weapon. Greek fire did
not disgrace Archimedes, boiling pitch did not disgrace Bayard. All war
is a thing of terror, and there is no choice in it. The musketry of the
besiegers, though confined and embarrassed by being directed from below
upwards, was deadly. The rim of the hole in the ceiling was speedily
surrounded by heads of the slain, whence dripped long, red and smoking
streams, the uproar was indescribable; a close and burning smoke almost
produced night over this combat. Words are lacking to express horror
when it has reached this pitch. There were no longer men in this
conflict, which was now infernal. They were no lo