2092 Les Miserables
interior of a furnace; there mouths breathed the flame; there
countenances were extraordinary. The human form seemed
impossible there, the combatants flamed forth there, and it
was formidable to behold the going and coming in that red
glow of those salamanders of the fray.
The successive and simultaneous scenes of this grand
slaughter we renounce all attempts at depicting. The epic
alone has the right to fill twelve thousand verses with a bat-
tle.
One would have pronounced this that hell of Brahman-
ism, the most redoubtable of the seventeen abysses, which
the Veda calls the Forest of Swords.
They fought hand to hand, foot to foot, with pistol shots,
with blows of the sword, with their fists, at a distance, close
at hand, from above, from below, from everywhere, from
the roofs of the houses, from the windows of the wine-shop,
from the cellar windows, whither some had crawled. They
were one against sixty.
The facade of Corinthe, half demolished, was hideous.
The window, tattooed with grape-shot, had lost glass and
frame and was nothing now but a shapeless hole, tumultu-
ously blocked with paving-stones.
Bossuet was killed; Feuilly was killed; Courfeyrac was
killed; Combeferre, transfixed by three blows from a bayo-
net in the breast at the moment when he was lifting up a
wounded soldier, had only time to cast a glance to heaven
when he expired.
Marius, still fighting, was so riddled with wounds, par-
ticularly in the head, that his countenance disappeared