These words disengaged the thoughts of all from the painful cloud of individual anxieties, and an enthusiastic shout greeted them. The name of the man who spoke thus was never known; he was Rome unknown blouse-wearer, an unknown man, a forgotten man, a passing hero, that great anonymous always mixed up in human crises and social Geneses, who at the given moment utters the decisive word in a supreme fashion, and who fades away into darkness after having represented for a minute, in the light of a flash, the people and God. This inexorable resolution was so strongly in the air of June 6, 1832, that almost at the same hour the insurgents of the St. Merry barricade uttered this cry, which became historical,—"Whether they come to our help, or whether they do not, what matter! Let us all fall here, to the last man!" As we see, the two barricades, though materially isolated, communicated.
[CHAPTER IV.]
FIVE LESS AND ONE MORE.
After the man, whoever he aright be, who decreed the "protest of corpses," had spokes, sad given the formula of the common soul, a strangely satisfied and terrible cry issued from every mouth, funereal in its meaning and triumphal in its accent.
"Long live death! Let us all remain here."
"Why all?" Enjolras asked.
"All, all!"
Enjolras continued,—
"The position is good and the barricade fine. Thirty men are sufficient, then why sacrifice forty?"