Waiting — Les Misérables

During those hours of waiting, what did they do? We must needs tell, since this is a matter of history. While the men made bullets and the women lint, while a saucepan of melted brass and lead smoked over a brazier, while the sentinels watched on the barricade, while Enjolras, whom it was impossible to divert, kept an eye on the sentinels, Combeferre, Courfeyrac, Jean Prouvaire, Feuilly, Bossuet, Joly, Bahorel, and some others sought each other out as in the most peaceful days of their student life. In one corner of the wine-shop, a couple of paces from the redoubt, with their carbines loaded and primed resting against the backs of their chairs, these fine young fellows, so close to a supreme hour, began to recite love verses.

They were verses of a hidden household: two people who had not forty years between them, a cheap dinner, a garret where a stocking pulled on a fine leg made a star at the bottom of the attic, a Shakespeare sold for supper, a first kiss that left him pale and made him believe in God. The hour, the spot, these souvenirs of youth recalled, a few stars which began to twinkle, the funeral repose of those deserted streets, and the imminence of the inexorable adventure, gave a pathetic charm to these verses murmured in a low tone in the dusk by Jean Prouvaire, who was a gentle poet.

In the meantime, a lamp had been lighted in the small barricade, and in the large one, one of those wax torches such as are to be met with on Shrove-Tuesday in front of vehicles loaded with masks. The torch had been placed in a sort of cage of paving-stones closed on three sides to shelter it from the wind, and disposed so that all the light fell on the flag. The street and the barricade remained sunk in gloom, and nothing was to be seen except the red flag formidably illuminated as by an enormous dark-lantern. This light enhanced the scarlet of the flag, with an indescribable and terrible purple.