re proceeded from it little flashes of lightning. The spirit of revolution covered with its cloud this summit where rumbled that voice of the people which resembles the voice of God; a strange majesty was emitted by this titanic basket of rubbish. It was a heap of filth and it was Sinai.
As we have said previously, it attacked in the name of the revolution--what?
The revolution.
It--that barricade, chance, hazard, disorder, terror, misunderstanding, the unknown-- had facing it the Constituent Assembly, the sovereignty of the people, universal suffrage, the nation, the republic; and it was the Carmagnole bidding defiance to the Marseillaise.
Immense but heroic defiance, for the old faubourg is a hero.
The faubourg and its redoubt lent each other assistance.
The faubourg shouldered the redoubt, the redoubt took its stand under cover of the faubourg.
The vast barricade spread out like a cliff against which the strategy of the African generals dashed itself.
Its caverns, its excrescences, its warts, its gibbosities, grimaced, so to speak, and grinned beneath the smoke.
The mitraille vanished in shapelessness; the bombs plunged into it; bullets only succeeded in making holes in it; what was the use of cannonading chaos? and the regiments, accustomed to the fiercest visions of war, gazed with uneasy eyes on that species of redoubt, a wild beast in its boar-like bristling and a mountain by its enormous size.