Page 1860 - les-miserables

mounted on the table. Enjolras brought the square coffer, and
Courfeyrac opened it. This coffer was filled with cartridges.
When the mob saw the cartridges, a tremor ran through the
bravest, and a momentary silence ensued.
Courfeyrac distributed them with a smile.
Each one received thirty cartridges. Many had powder,
and set about making others with the bullets which they had
run. As for the barrel of powder, it stood on a table on one
side, near the door, and was held in reserve.
The alarm beat which ran through all Paris, did not cease,
but it had finally come to be nothing more than a monoto-
nous noise to which they no longer paid any attention. This
noise retreated at times, and again drew near, with melan-
choly undulations.
They loaded the guns and carbines, all together, with-
out haste, with solemn gravity. Enjolras went and stationed
three sentinels outside the barricades, one in the Rue de la
Chanvrerie, the second in the Rue des Precheurs, the third
at the corner of the Rue de la Petite Truanderie.
Then, the barricades having been built, the posts as-
signed, the guns loaded, the sentinels stationed, they waited,
alone in those redoubtable streets through which no one
passed any longer, surrounded by those dumb houses which
seemed dead and in which no human movement palpitat-
ed, enveloped in the deepening shades of twilight which
was drawing on, in the midst of that silence through which
something could be felt advancing, and which had about
it something tragic and terrifying, isolated, armed, deter-
mined, and tranquil.

1860 Les Miserables