Page 1887 - les-miserables

CHAPTER II

AN OWL’S VIEW OF PARIS

A being who could have hovered over Paris that night with
the wing of the bat or the owl would have had beneath his
eyes a gloomy spectacle.
All that old quarter of the Halles, which is like a city
within a city, through which run the Rues Saint-Denis and
Saint-Martin, where a thousand lanes cross, and of which
the insurgents had made their redoubt and their strong-
hold, would have appeared to him like a dark and enormous
cavity hollowed out in the centre of Paris. There the glance
fell into an abyss. Thanks to the broken lanterns, thanks to
the closed windows, there all radiance, all life, all sound, all
movement ceased. The invisible police of the insurrection
were on the watch everywhere, and maintained order, that
is to say, night. The necessary tactics of insurrection are to
drown small numbers in a vast obscurity, to multiply every
combatant by the possibilities which that obscurity con-
tains. At dusk, every window where a candle was burning
received a shot. The light was extinguished, sometimes the
inhabitant was killed. Hence nothing was stirring. There
was nothing but fright, mourning, stupor in the houses;

1887