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No one ever has known the name of the man who spoke
thus; he was some unknown blouse-wearer, a stranger, a
man forgotten, a passing hero, that great anonymous, al-
ways mingled in human crises and in social geneses who,
at a given moment, utters in a supreme fashion the decisive
word, and who vanishes into the shadows after having rep-
resented for a minute, in a lightning flash, the people and
God.
This inexorable resolution so thoroughly impregnat-
ed the air of the 6th of June, 1832, that, almost at the very
same hour, on the barricade Saint-Merry, the insurgents
were raising that clamor which has become a matter of his-
tory and which has been consigned to the documents in
the case:—‘What matters it whether they come to our as-
sistance or not? Let us get ourselves killed here, to the very
last man.’
As the reader sees, the two barricades, though materially
isolated, were in communication with each other.