Page 1979 - les-miserables

with a shudder.—‘How that is built!’ he said to a Represen-
tative. ‘Not one paving-stone projects beyond its neighbor.
It is made of porcelain.’—At that moment, a bullet broke the
cross on his breast, and he fell.
‘The cowards!’ people said. ‘Let them show themselves.
Let us see them! They dare not! They are hiding!’
The barricade of the Faubourg du Temple, defended by
eighty men, attacked by ten thousand, held out for three
days. On the fourth, they did as at Zaatcha, as at Constan-
tine, they pierced the houses, they came over the roofs, the
barricade was taken. Not one of the eighty cowards thought
of flight, all were killed there with the exception of the lead-
er, Barthelemy, of whom we shall speak presently.
The Saint-Antoine barricade was the tumult of thunders;
the barricade of the Temple was silence. The difference be-
tween these two redoubts was the difference between the
formidable and the sinister. One seemed a maw; the other
a mask.
Admitting that the gigantic and gloomy insurrection
of June was composed of a wrath and of an enigma, one
divined in the first barricade the dragon, and behind the
second the sphinx.
These two fortresses had been erected by two men named,
the one, Cournet, the other, Barthelemy. Cournet made the
Saint-Antoine barricade; Barthelemy the barricade of the
Temple. Each was the image of the man who had built it.
Cournet was a man of lofty stature; he had broad shoul-
ders, a red face, a crushing fist, a bold heart, a loyal soul, a
sincere and terrible eye. Intrepid, energetic, irascible, stormy;

1979