Page 1974 - les-miserables

fraternization of every sort of rubbish. Sisyphus had thrown
his rock there and Job his potsherd. Terrible, in short. It was
the acropolis of the barefooted. Overturned carts broke the
uniformity of the slope; an immense dray was spread out
there crossways, its axle pointing heavenward, and seemed
a scar on that tumultuous facade; an omnibus hoisted gayly,
by main force, to the very summit of the heap, as though
the architects of this bit of savagery had wished to add a
touch of the street urchin humor to their terror, presented
its horseless, unharnessed pole to no one knows what horses
of the air. This gigantic heap, the alluvium of the revolt, fig-
ured to the mind an Ossa on Pelion of all revolutions; ‘93 on
‘89, the 9th of Thermidor on the 10th of August, the 18th of
Brumaire on the 11th of January, Vendemiaire on Prairial,
1848 on 1830. The situation deserved the trouble and this
barricade was worthy to figure on the very spot whence the
Bastille had disappeared. If the ocean made dikes, it is thus
that it would build. The fury of the flood was stamped upon
this shapeless mass. What flood? The crowd. One thought
one beheld hubbub petrified. One thought one heard hum-
ming above this barricade as though there had been over
their hive, enormous, dark bees of violent progress. Was it
a thicket? Was it a bacchanalia? Was it a fortress? Vertigo
seemed to have constructed it with blows of its wings. There
was something of the cess-pool in that redoubt and some-
thing Olympian in that confusion. One there beheld in a
pell-mell full of despair, the rafters of roofs, bits of garret
windows with their figured paper, window sashes with their
glass planted there in the ruins awaiting the cannon, wrecks

1974 Les Miserables