The sentries, whom it was necessary to post in every direction, and who were chosen from the most trustworthy men, thinned and exhausted the little central land.  There were scarcely thirty in the barricade itself.

There, as in the Quarter of the Temple, all the streetlamps were extinguished; the gas-pipes cut; the windows closed and unlighted; no moon, not even stars.  The night was profoundly dark.

They could hear distant fusillades.  The soldiers were firing from around Saint Eustache, and every three minutes sent a ball in their direction, as much as to say, “We are here.”  Nevertheless they did not expect an attack before the morning.

Dialogues like the following took place amongst them:—­

“I wish I had a truss of straw,” said Charpentier; “I have a notion that we shall sleep here to-night.”

“Will you be able to get to sleep?” asked Jeanty Sarre.

“I?  Certainly I shall go to sleep.”

He did go to sleep, in fact, a few moments later.

In this gloomy network of narrow streets, intersected with barricades, and blockaded by soldiers, two wine-shops had remained open.  They made more lint there, however, than they drank wine; the orders of the chiefs were only to drink reddened water.

The doorway of one of these wine-shops opened exactly between the two barricades of the Petit Cancan.  In it was a clock by which they regulated the sentries’ relief.  In a back room they had locked up two suspicious-looking persons who had intermingled with the combatants.  One of these men at the moment when he was arrested said, “I have come to fight for Henri V.”  They kept them under lock and key, and placed a sentry at the door.

An ambulance had been established in an adjoining room.  There the wounded shoemaker was lying upon a mattress thrown upon the ground.

They had established, in case of need, another ambulance in the Rue du Cadran.  An opening had been effected at the corner of the barricade on this side, so that the wounded could be easily carried away.

Towards half-past nine in the evening a man came up to the barricade.

Jeanty Sarre recognized him.

“Good day, Denis,” said he.

“Call me, Gaston,” said the man.

“Why?”

“Because—­”

“Are you your brother?”

“Yes, I am my brother.  For to-day.”

“Very well.  Good-day, Gaston.”

They heartily shook hands.

It was Denis Dussoubs.

He was pale, calm, and bleeding; he had already been fighting during the morning.  At the barricade of the Faubourg Saint Martin a ball had grazed his breast, but had been turned off by some money in his pocket, and had only broken the skin.  He had had the rare good fortune of being scratched by a ball.  It was like the first touch from the claws of death.  He wore a cap, his hat having been left behind in the barricade where he had fought:  and he had replaced his bullet-pierced overcoat, which was made of Belleisle cloth, by a pea-jacket bought at a slop-shop.