Page 2097 - les-miserables

he now used like a cane, what single-stick players call a ‘cov-
ered rose’ round his head, levelled the bayonets around and
in front of him, and was the last to enter; and then ensued
a horrible moment, when the soldiers tried to make their
way in, and the insurgents strove to bar them out. The door
was slammed with such violence, that, as it fell back into its
frame, it showed the five fingers of a soldier who had been
clinging to it, cut off and glued to the post.
Marius remained outside. A shot had just broken his
collar bone, he felt that he was fainting and falling. At that
moment, with eyes already shut, he felt the shock of a vig-
orous hand seizing him, and the swoon in which his senses
vanished, hardly allowed him time for the thought, min-
gled with a last memory of Cosette:—‘I am taken prisoner.
I shall be shot.’
Enjolras, not seeing Marius among those who had tak-
en refuge in the wine-shop, had the same idea. But they
had reached a moment when each man has not the time to
meditate on his own death. Enjolras fixed the bar across the
door, and bolted it, and double-locked it with key and chain,
while those outside were battering furiously at it, the sol-
diers with the butts of their muskets, the sappers with their
axes. The assailants were grouped about that door. The siege
of the wine-shop was now beginning.
The soldiers, we will observe, were full of wrath.
The death of the artillery-sergeant had enraged them,
and then, a still more melancholy circumstance. During
the few hours which had preceded the attack, it had been
reported among them that the insurgents were mutilating

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