Page 1976 - les-miserables

little flashes of lightning. The spirit of revolution covered
with its cloud this summit where rumbled that voice of the
people which resembles the voice of God; a strange majesty
was emitted by this titanic basket of rubbish. It was a heap
of filth and it was Sinai.
As we have said previously, it attacked in the name of
the revolution—what? The revolution. It—that barricade,
chance, hazard, disorder, terror, misunderstanding, the
unknown— had facing it the Constituent Assembly, the
sovereignty of the people, universal suffrage, the nation, the
republic; and it was the Carmagnole bidding defiance to the
Marseillaise.
Immense but heroic defiance, for the old faubourg is a
hero.
The faubourg and its redoubt lent each other assistance.
The faubourg shouldered the redoubt, the redoubt took its
stand under cover of the faubourg. The vast barricade spread
out like a cliff against which the strategy of the African gen-
erals dashed itself. Its caverns, its excrescences, its warts, its
gibbosities, grimaced, so to speak, and grinned beneath the
smoke. The mitraille vanished in shapelessness; the bombs
plunged into it; bullets only succeeded in making holes in it;
what was the use of cannonading chaos? and the regiments,
accustomed to the fiercest visions of war, gazed with uneasy
eyes on that species of redoubt, a wild beast in its boar-like
bristling and a mountain by its enormous size.
A quarter of a league away, from the corner of the Rue
du Temple which debouches on the boulevard near the
Chateaud’Eau, if one thrust one’s head bodily beyond the

1976 Les Miserables