this grating! this penthouse! this chimney-piece! this broken brazier! this cracked pot!
Give all! cast away all! Push this roll, dig, dismantle, overturn, ruin everything! It was the collaboration of the pavement, the block of stone, the beam, the bar of iron, the rag, the scrap, the broken pane, the unseated chair, the cabbage-stalk, the tatter, the rag, and the malediction.
It was grand and it was petty.
It was the abyss parodied on the public place by hubbub.
The mass beside the atom; the strip of ruined wall and the broken bowl,--threatening fraternization of every sort of rubbish.
Sisyphus had thrown his rock there and Job his potsherd.
Terrible, in short.
It was the acropolis of the barefooted.
Overturned carts broke the uniformity of the slope; an immense dray was spread out there crossways, its axle pointing heavenward, and seemed a scar on that tumultuous facade; an omnibus hoisted gayly, by main force, to the very summit of the heap, as though the architects of this bit of savagery had wished to add a touch of the street urchin humor to their terror, presented its horseless, unharnessed pole to no one knows what horses of the air.
This gigantic heap, the alluvium of the revolt, figured to the mind an Ossa on Pelion of all revolutions; ''93 on ''89, the 9th of Thermidor on the 10th of August, the 18th of Brumaire on the 11th of January, Vendemiaire on Prairial, 1848 on 1830. The situation deserved the trouble and this barricade was worthy to figure on the very spot whence the Bastille had disappeared. If the ocean made dikes, it is thus that it would build. The fury of the flood was stamped upon this shapeless mass. What flood?