he shots, amid the cries of the assaulted guards, the assailants had climbed the entrenchment, on whose summit Municipal Guards, soldiers of the line and National Guards from the suburbs could now be seen, gun in hand, rearing themselves to more than half the height of their bodies.
They already covered more than two-thirds of the barrier, but they did not leap into the enclosure, as though wavering in the fear of some trap.
They gazed into the dark barricade as one would gaze into a lion''s den.
The light of the torch illuminated only their bayonets, their bear-skin caps, and the upper part of their uneasy and angry faces.
Marius had no longer any weapons; he had flung away his discharged pistols after firing them; but he had caught sight of the barrel of powder in the tap-room, near the door.
As he turned half round, gazing in that direction, a soldier took aim at him.
At the moment when the soldier was sighting Marius, a hand was laid on the muzzle of the gun and obstructed it. This was done by some one who had darted forward,--the young workman in velvet trousers.
The shot sped, traversed the hand and possibly, also, the workman, since he fell, but the ball did not strike Marius. All this, which was rather to be apprehended than seen through the smoke, Marius, who was entering the tap-room, hardly noticed. Still, he had, in a confused way, perceived that gun-barrel aimed at him, and the hand which had blocked it, and he had heard the discharge. But in moments like this, the things which one sees vacillate and are precipitated, and one pauses for nothing.