“What have you done with your hat?” Bossuet asked him.
Courfeyrac replied:
“They have finally taken it away from me with cannonballs.”
Or they uttered haughty comments.
“Can anyone understand,” exclaimed Feuilly bitterly, “those men—[and he cited names, well-known names, even celebrated names, some belonging to the old army]—who had promised to join us, and taken an oath to aid us, and who had pledged their honor to it, and who are our generals, and who abandon us!”
And Combeferre restricted himself to replying with a grave smile.
“There are people who observe the rules of honor as one observes the stars, from a great distance.”
The interior of the barricade was so strewn with torn cartridges that one would have said that there had been a snowstorm.
The assailants had numbers in their favor; the insurgents had position. They were at the top of a wall, and they thundered point-blank upon the soldiers tripping over the dead and wounded and entangled in the escarpment. This barricade, constructed as it was and admirably buttressed, was really one of those situations where a handful of men hold a legion in check. Nevertheless, the attacking column, constantly recruited and enlarged under the shower of bullets, drew inexorably nearer, and now, little by little, step by step, but surely, the army closed in around the barricade as the vice grasps the winepress.
One assault followed another. The horror of the situation kept increasing.