An Owl’s View of Paris — Les Misérables

A being who could have hovered over Paris that night with the wing of the bat or the owl would have had beneath his eyes a gloomy spectacle. All that old quarter of the Halles, a city within a city, through which run the Rues Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin, would have appeared like a dark and enormous cavity hollowed out in the centre of Paris. There the glance fell into an abyss. Thanks to the broken lanterns and the closed windows, all radiance, all life, all sound, all movement ceased. The invisible police of the insurrection were on the watch everywhere, and maintained order, that is to say, night. At dusk, every window where a candle was burning received a shot. The light was extinguished, sometimes the inhabitant was killed. Hence nothing was stirring. There was nothing but fright, mourning, stupor in the houses, and in the streets a sort of sacred horror. An eye cast upward at that mass of shadows might have caught, here and there, indistinct gleams like the lights which go and come in ruins. It was at such points that the barricades were situated. The rest was a lake of obscurity, foggy, heavy, and funereal, above which rose the tower of Saint-Jacques, the church of Saint-Merry, and two or three more of those grand edifices of which man makes giants and the night makes phantoms.

All around this deserted labyrinth, where a few street lanterns still burned, the aerial observer might have distinguished the metallic gleam of swords and bayonets, the dull rumble of artillery, and the swarming of silent battalions whose ranks were swelling from minute to minute: a formidable girdle which was slowly drawing in. The invested quarter was no longer anything more than a monstrous cavern. Any street offered nothing but darkness. A wild darkness, full of traps, where those who entered shivered before those whom they awaited, and those who waited shuddered before those who were coming. Invisible combatants were entrenched at every corner. No more light was to be hoped for except the lightning of guns, no further encounter except the abrupt apparition of death. Where? How? When? No one knew, but it was certain. The Government and the insurrection, the National Guard and popular societies, the bourgeois and the uprising, were about to come into contact. The only possible issue was to emerge killed or conquerors. For the one party, to advance meant death, and no one dreamed of retreating. For the other, to remain meant death, and no one dreamed of flight.

It was indispensable that all should be ended on the following day, that the insurrection should prove itself a revolution or a skirmish. The most insignificant bourgeois felt it. Hence a thought of anguish in that gloom where all was at the point of being decided. Here only one sound was audible, a sound as heart-rending as the death rattle, as menacing as a malediction: the tocsin of Saint-Merry. Nothing could be more blood-curdling than that wild and desperate bell, wailing amid the shadows. The stars had disappeared. Heavy clouds filled the horizon. A black sky rested on these dead streets, as though an immense winding-sheet were being outspread over this immense tomb. While youth and the schools, in the name of principles, and the middle classes, in the name of interests, were approaching to dash themselves together, far away, in the unfathomable cavities of that wretched old Paris which disappears under the splendour of happy and opulent Paris, the sombre voice of the people could be heard giving utterance to a dull roar. A fearful and sacred voice, composed of the roar of the brute and of the word of God, which comes both from below like the voice of the lion, and from on high like the voice of the thunder.