open mouths which held their peace; one was in the midst of smoke, of night, perhaps.
One fancied that one had touched the sinister ooze of unknown depths; one stares at something red on one''s finger nails.
One no longer remembers anything.
Let us return to the Rue de la Chanvrerie.
All at once, between two discharges, the distant sound of a clock striking the hour became audible.
"It is midday," said Combeferre.
The twelve strokes had not finished striking when Enjolras sprang to his feet, and from the summit of the barricade hurled this thundering shout:
"Carry stones up into the houses; line the windowsills and the roofs with them.
Half the men to their guns, the other half to the paving-stones. There is not a minute to be lost."
A squad of sappers and miners, axe on shoulder, had just made their appearance in battle array at the end of the street.
This could only be the head of a column; and of what column? The attacking column, evidently; the sappers charged with the demolition of the barricade must always precede the soldiers who are to scale it.
They were, evidently, on the brink of that moment which M. Clermont-Tonnerre, in 1822, called "the tug of war."
Enjolras'' order was executed with the correct haste which is peculiar to ships and barricades, the only two scenes of combat where escape is impossible.