Page 2064 - les-miserables

CHAPTER XVIII

THE VULTURE

BECOME PREY

We must insist upon one psychological fact peculiar to
barricades. Nothing which is characteristic of that surpris-
ing war of the streets should be omitted.
Whatever may have been the singular inward tranquil-
lity which we have just mentioned, the barricade, for those
who are inside it, remains, none the less, a vision.
There is something of the apocalypse in civil war, all the
mists of the unknown are commingled with fierce flash-
es, revolutions are sphinxes, and any one who has passed
through a barricade thinks he has traversed a dream.
The feelings to which one is subject in these places we
have pointed out in the case of Marius, and we shall see
the consequences; they are both more and less than life.
On emerging from a barricade, one no longer knows what
one has seen there. One has been terrible, but one knows it
not. One has been surrounded with conflicting ideas which
had human faces; one’s head has been in the light of the fu-
ture. There were corpses lying prone there, and phantoms

2064 Les Miserables