“That is right.  Rage away, Red Breeches,” said, laughingly, the man who had three shots to fire.

Behind them, the men of the Petit Carreau were crowded round Denis and Jeanty Sarre, and leaning on the crest of their barricade, stretching their necks towards the Mauconseil redoubt, they watched them like the gladiators of the next combat.

The six men of this Mauconseil redoubt resisted the onslaught of the battalion for nearly a quarter of an hour.  They did not fire together, “in order,” one of them said, “to make the pleasure last the longer.”  The pleasure of being killed for duty; a noble sentence in this workman’s mouth.  They did not fall back into the adjoining streets until after having exhausted their ammunition.  The last, he who had three cartridges, did not leave until the soldiers were actually scaling the summit of the barricade.

In the barricade of the Petit Carreau not a word was spoken; they followed all the phases of this struggle, and they pressed each other’s hands.

Suddenly the noise ceased, the last musket-shot was fired.  A moment afterwards they saw the lighted candles being placed in all the windows which looked on on the Mauconseil redoubt.  The bayonets and the brass ornaments on the shakos sparkled there.  The barricade was taken.

The commander of the battalion, as is always the custom in similar circumstances, had sent orders into the adjoining houses to light up all the windows.

This was done at the Mauconseil redoubt.

Seeing that their hour had come, the sixty combatants of the barricade of the Petit Carreau mounted their heap of paving-stones, and shouted with one voice, in the midst of the darkness, this piercing cry, “Long live the Republic!”

No one answered them.

They could only hear the battalion loading their guns.

This acted upon them as a species of signal for action.  They were all worn out with fatigue, having been on their feet since the preceding day, carrying paving-stones or fighting, the greater part had neither eaten nor slept.

Charpentier said to Jeanty Sarre,—­

“We shall all be killed.”

“Shall we really!” said Jeanty Sarre.

Jeanty Sarre ordered the door of the wine-shop to be closed, so that their barricade, completely shrouded in darkness, would give them some advantage over the barricade which was occupied by the soldiers and lighted up.

In the meantime the 51st searched the streets, carried the wounded into the ambulances, and took up their position in the double barricade of the Rue Mauconseil.  Half an hour thus elapsed.

Now, in order to clearly understand what is about to follow, the reader must picture to himself in this silent street, in this darkness of the night, at from sixty to eighty yards apart, within speaking distance, these two redoubts facing each other, and able as in an Iliad to address each other.