1848 Les Miserables
that the mob had rushed into it.—‘Ah my God! Ah my God!’
sighed Mame Hucheloup.
Bossuet had gone down to meet Courfeyrac.
Joly, who had placed himself at the window,
exclaimed:—
‘Courfeyrac, you ought to have brought an umbrella. You
will gatch gold.’
In the meantime, in the space of a few minutes, twenty
iron bars had been wrenched from the grated front of the
wine-shop, ten fathoms of street had been unpaved; Gavro-
che and Bahorel had seized in its passage, and overturned,
the dray of a lime-dealer named Anceau; this dray contained
three barrels of lime, which they placed beneath the piles
of paving-stones: Enjolras raised the cellar trap, and all the
widow Hucheloup’s empty casks were used to flank the bar-
rels of lime; Feuilly, with his fingers skilled in painting the
delicate sticks of fans, had backed up the barrels and the
dray with two massive heaps of blocks of rough stone. Blocks
which were improvised like the rest and procured no one
knows where. The beams which served as props were torn
from the neighboring house-fronts and laid on the casks.
When Bossuet and Courfeyrac turned round, half the street
was already barred with a rampart higher than a man. There
is nothing like the hand of the populace for building every-
thing that is built by demolishing.
Matelote and Gibelotte had mingled with the workers.
Gibelotte went and came loaded with rubbish. Her lassitude
helped on the barricade. She served the barricade as she
would have served wine, with a sleepy air.