rfectly
informed. Ideas recur to him with abrupt lucidity; the obliteration
of intoxication, a sort of steam which has obscured the brain, is
dissipated, and makes way for the clear and sharply outlined importunity
of realities.

Relegated, as he was, to one corner, and sheltered behind the
billiard-table, the soldiers whose eyes were fixed on Enjolras, had not
even noticed Grantaire, and the sergeant was preparing to repeat his
order: "Take aim!" when all at once, they heard a strong voice shout
beside them:

"Long live the Republic! I'm one of them."

Grantaire had risen. The immense gleam of the whole combat which he
had missed, and in which he had had no part, appeared in the brilliant
glance of the transfigured drunken man.

He repeated: "Long live the Republic!" crossed the room with a firm
stride and placed himself in front of the guns beside Enjolras.

"Finish both of us at one blow," said he.

And turning gently to Enjolras, he said to him:

"Do you permit it?"

Enjolras pressed his hand with a smile.

This smile was not ended when the report resounded.

Enjolras, pierced by eight bullets, remained leaning against the wall,
as though the balls had nailed him there. Only, his head was bowed.

Grantaire fell at his feet, as though struck by a thunderbolt.

A few moments later, the soldiers dislodged the last remaining
insurgents, who had taken refuge at the top of the house. They fired
into the attic through a wooden lattice. They fought under the very
roof. They flung bodies, some of them still alive, out through the
windows. Two light-infantrymen, who tried to lift the shattered omnibus,
were slain by two shots fired from the attic. A man in a blouse was
flung down from it, with a bayonet wound in the abdomen, and breathed
his last on the ground. A soldier and an insurgent slipped together
on the sloping slates of the roof, and, as they would not release each
other, they fell, clasped in a ferocious embrace. A similar conflict
went on in the cellar. Shouts, shots, a fierce trampling. Then silence.
The barricade was captured.

The soldiers began to search the houses round about, and to pursue the
fugitives.

CHAPTER XXIV--PRISONER

Marius was, in fact, a prisoner.

The hand which had seized him from behind and whose grasp he had felt
at the moment of his fall and his loss of consciousness was that of Jean
Valjean.

Jean Valjean had taken no other part in the combat than to expose
hi