Page 1983 - les-miserables

the kitchen, which had been converted into an ambulance,
there were five men gravely wounded, two of whom were
municipal guardsmen. The municipal guardsmen were at-
tended to first.
In the tap-room there remained only Mabeuf under his
black cloth and Javert bound to his post.
‘This is the hall of the dead,’ said Enjolras.
In the interior of this hall, barely lighted by a candle at
one end, the mortuary table being behind the post like a
horizontal bar, a sort of vast, vague cross resulted from Jav-
ert erect and Mabeuf lying prone.
The pole of the omnibus, although snapped off by the
fusillade, was still sufficiently upright to admit of their fas-
tening the flag to it.
Enjolras, who possessed that quality of a leader, of always
doing what he said, attached to this staff the bullet-ridden
and bloody coat of the old man’s.
No repast had been possible. There was neither bread nor
meat. The fifty men in the barricade had speedily exhausted
the scanty provisions of the wine-shop during the sixteen
hours which they had passed there. At a given moment, ev-
ery barricade inevitably becomes the raft of la Meduse. They
were obliged to resign themselves to hunger. They had then
reached the first hours of that Spartan day of the 6th of June
when, in the barricade Saint-Merry, Jeanne, surrounded by
the insurgents who demanded bread, replied to all com-
batants crying: ‘Something to eat!’ with: ‘Why? It is three
o’clock; at four we shall be dead.’
As they could no longer eat, Enjolras forbade them to

1983