Presently, from the direction of St Denis, there arrived simultaneously a gamin and a lookout.
"They're coming! My musket!" cried the gamin.
"To arms!" cried Enjolras. Grantaire, silent and thoughtful, handed his shotgun to little Gavroche, who crowed. Then footsteps, heavy and ominous, sounded from the direction of St-Leu. Solemnity fell over each man like an axe as he crouched in his position for the combat, all seventy-to-a-hundred of them. Even Grantaire could not suppress a caught breath at the wild excitement in the eyes of Combeferre, and of Enjolras. He was also excited, but he ignored that quickly. The mists beyond the barricade seemed to gleam unnervingly now, shimmering every so often like rain frozen vertically against the sky. It was the glint of muskets and bayonets in dim torchlight. There was a collective shiver on the part of the insurgents and then, even more chilling, from the depths of the brouillard came a deep, disembodied voice like a fatal spirit.
"Who goes there?" cried the fog.
"The Boston Tea Party!" cried Grantaire. "Would you like a cup?"
"Fire!" shouted the fog.
"Duck!" shouted Grantaire, diving to safety behind the barricade. Paralyzed by the force of the command, the rest of the insurgents followed suit, hardly needing his cursory, "For god's sake, hold your fire!" until the end of the opposing volley. The ensuing silence, but for the monotony of the city wide drum roll, was total. Grantaire picked himself up gingerly, examining his flock, still, scared, and expectant. Combeferre watched him curiously. Enjolras was aghast, his mouth hanging open -- he could shut that soon enough. For now, Grantaire was in his element: expectation. The waiting of the sheep and the wolves on the other side; the tension of the drum roll and the cumulative caught breath for news of any of the other barricades carried him up the side of the barricade, to the point where his head could be seen from the other side, and his voice would carry both to friend and foe. The insurgents rustled a little, eagerly. They knew him, as the National Guard did not. So they believed, anyway, thought Grantaire with a bemused smile that faded soon into a ferocious seriousness, as he opened his mouth to address the fog, here and there.
"Citizens," his voice rolled like distant thunder, "do you imagine the future? Naturally. But ask yourselves, can you see the past? Can you see the spectral 1830 and 1822 cringing in the lengthening shadows of dusk, ill because there is nothing so painful than Yesterday's fallacies in the mouths of Today, silent because Today is holding a musket.
"Imagine the future; look at the past. Do you hear how the streets are quiet today; your mothers, sisters, and mistresses say, 'He is not come home!' and they cry. They do not think nor suspect nor say, 'Oh, he has gone to market to buy me a future.' No, they think, they suspect, they moan that you are past, and they weep for days that are long ago and dead, and will stretch on forever in complacency and dust. Tomorrow when the newspapers are opened, there will be a shaken head to mark the fifth and probably the sixth days of June, punctuated with sighing reminiscences of yesterday: remember the Sun King, remember L'Aiglon, long live the Pear! One after the other, the people you long to liberate turn their backs on the radiance of the cockade to kneel before splendor of a crown. Voila, they fall to their knees, as a sailor shipwrecked, they grovel in the dust of antiquity and kiss the ashes of things dead as if they were new come home. They pale at terror and mean our faces; they plug up their ears to our voices. "Morte à la Morte!" means us. And truly, we are a half-step away from a yawning grave all shrouded with the night. Be glad of this! That shroud, which is called L'avinier, will be pulled over our still-warm bodies with an embarrassed expression. Paris shall sigh to the markets in the morning, grumbling over the prices of bread and brie.
"Comrades, they know what they want, our people, our Paris: it is to be left alone.
"The same for the army, there yonder, your more prudent fathers and brothers with the muskets and the nonentity of the National Guard's frock. They wait and they hold their guns at attention and they sigh at us. You see that General there? He is some dusty old relic of the Empire; he grumbles with the Masons, sympathetic but unwilling. Right now, he could be in bed with his wife or with his mistress, mais non. Some rabble has started a row in the Rue de la Chanvrerie, or the Cloitre Saint-Merry, or Faubourg Saint-Antoine, or somewhere that way. I feel deeply for this old man. He flew once on the wings of an eagle, and now makes his home in a falconer's mews, bowing to the commands of old buzzards. Despise him not! He is feeding his family, albeit on the bones of his sons instead of the blood of the English. For that is what weighs truly on his mind and all of France, my friends: what shall we have for dinner, lamb or pork?
"Ah, ah, but when the King falls, when the Empire falls, when the barricade falls, there is still dinner must needs be got on the table. There are pipes to be sucked and wine to be drunk; the bowels must move and a man must have his hour of sleep. Your landlady will forgive rent to a dead man if she can let your room to someone else, and at a better rate!
"You say, 'Throw out the unjust law; down with tyrannical rule!' But I say the laws of nature are unjust, and life is a tyrant. Your mistress infuriates you, you spend your passion in an emeuté; you do not want to work for a living, you fight till you die. Well, there's nothing wrong with that! The Earth shall not be free, non, but these dreamers shall be free of it, and we shall have given Notre Dame, our Paris, a night she will remember, if only because it is such an embarrasment that she cannot forget."
The silence endured for some minutes after the leader of the insurgents shut his mouth. Through the fog, General Honoré Reille, commanding officer of the unit assigned to this particular neighborhood, regarded the bobbing dark head of the speechifying lout over the top of the barricade with an expression of mingled exasperation and something unreadable. Frowning suddenly, ostensibly at the uncomfortable damp, he tugged his woolen coat closer about him. Behind him, he could feel the nervous tension in his troops, waiting for their orders. Their fidgeting irritated him only slightly less than the incessant droning of the drum roll that echoed throughout Paris. Really, when he figured out just whose bright idea it was to equip the military with such infernal instruments.... He closed his eyes, gritting his teeth, until he felt a light tapping on his shoulder. It was his aide-- a skinny, freckled sergeant who would really have been more in place on the other side of the bloody contraption. Honoré found his surreptitious throat-clearing marginally preferable to the drums.
"What is it, sergeant?" He tried to keep most of his ire out of his voice, and almost succeeded. The sergeant flinched anyway.
"General Reille, that fellow, the one who was speaking. I know him. Know of him, anyway." He added the last hurriedly, and Honoré sighed, quirking an eyebrow.
"Oh? Who is he?"
The sergeant fumbled in his jacket, retrieving a dog-eared pamphlet that made Honoré blink. He'd seen such a thing before; Elza had tried to show such a paper to him the other day. She had been crowing about it, in fact. He'd gathered it was some friend of her young ex-lover the newspaper publisher -- a bad association there. Because of him, Honoré was possessed of an instinctive dislike of hot-blooded young republicans-- at least, ones in publishing. Attempts on one's life and reputation tend to do that, especially when the matter concerns a woman. Honoré had had a highly colored view of the situation, and so he had only paid a token amount of attention to the paper. He took it now, flipped through and matched the unmistakable voice of the pretentiously named 'Grandeur' with that of the impudent young babbler still holding his breath on the barricade. He cursed intelligibly under his breath, and the sergeant blinked his big blue eyes.
"Sir?"
"What?" Honoré couldn't keep the snap out of his voice. The poor sergeant practically yelped, and his commander sighed once more. "Hand me the horn, sergeant."
"Yes, sir." The boy scurried away, fetched the instrument, came back, and handed it to Honoré. "If I may ask, general, what are you going to do?"
"Damned if I know," Honoré muttered, half to himself, and raised the horn to his lips.
The other side of the barricade startled as if out of a strange sleep as the general's voice issued suddenly through the soup of the fog.
"You! Young idiot! I'd like a word with you."
"A trap!" Enjolras whispered hoarsely into Grantaire's ear.
Grantaire responded with a withering glance, and shouted, brightly, back at Honoré, "Certainly, old fool! Pray tell, your place or mine?" Grantaire stifled a near-giggle, both at the shocked drop of Enjolras' jaw and the confused blinking he envisioned on the face of the opposing general. After a moment, there came some inaudible scruffling and a very distinct, "What?" through the horn. Grantaire chuckled again.
"I mean to say, general, shall you come back here, where we, through the good fortune of having barricaded a wine shop, have brie and oysters and some excellent wine; or shall I sortie unto you, where waits nothing so attractive save a regiment of bayonets and all that lovely cannon?"
The sergeant, whose name, Honoré remembered finally, was Chauvert or something like it, turned to him in wide eyed alarm.
"Do you suppose it's a trap?"
Honoré sighed. Perhaps it was his imagination, but he swore he could smell the most delicious odor of brie wafting over the barricade, as if it were baking. His stomach growled in response. Not at all sure of himself, but hardly about to let that show, he shook his head at his aide.
"I don't think it is. You don't have to come if you don't want." He signaled to the troops to lower their weapons. Chauvert gaped, but scurried along behind him, eager to show his mettle before his commanding officer. Some ten or so others, along with the rather obvious general in his uniform with the full epaulets, could soon be seen approaching the barricade through the mists. Grantaire bounded towards the gap between the barricade and the buildings; but his arm and attention were arrested mid-leap by young Enjolras, fury burning beautifully in his azure orbs.
"What the hell do you think you're doing?" he hissed, gesturing both towards the gap and towards the tavern, from which, sure enough, the odor of warm melting cheese was rumbling every belly in the barricade. "We're supposed to be fighting the monarchists, not feeding them! Damn it, Marion --"
Grantaire smiled sweetly and kissed him on the flaring nostrils. "I am seducing the National Guard, petit. It worked well enough with you." With a wink, Grandeur sauntered off to greet his guests, leaving Enjolras to splutter and stare.