All hung their heads with a gloomy air. Strange contradictions of the human heart in the sublimest moments! Combeferre, who spoke thus, was not an orphan; he remembered the mothers of others and forgot his own; he was going to let himself be killed, and was "selfish." Marius, fasting and feverish, who had successively given up all hope, cast ashore on grief, the most mournful of shipwrecks, saturated with violent emotions, and feeling the end coming, had buried himself deeper and deeper in that visionary stupor which ever precedes the fatal and voluntarily accepted hour. A physiologist might have studied in him the growing symptoms of that febrile absorption which is known and classified by science, and which is to suffering what voluptuousness is to pleasure, for despair also has its ecstasy. Marius had attained that stage; as we have said, things which occurred before him appeared to him remote, he distinguished the ensemble, but did not perceive the details. He saw people coming and going before him in a flash, and he heard voices speaking as if from the bottom of an abyss. Still this affected him, for there was in this scene a point which pierced to him and aroused him. He had but one idea, to die, and he did not wish to avert his attention from it; but he thought in his gloomy somnambulism that in destroying himself he was not prohibited from saving somebody. He raked his voice,-- "Enjolras and Combeferre are right," he said: "let us have no useless sacrifice. I join them, and we must make haste. Combeferre has told you decisive things: there are men among you who have families, mothers, sisters, wives, and children. Such must leave the ranks." Not a soul stirred. "Married men and supporters of families will leave the ranks," Marius repeated. His authority was great, for though Enjolras was really the chief of the barricade, Marius was its savior. "I order it," Enjolras cried. "I implore it," Marius said. Then these heme men, stirred up by Combeferre's speech, shaken by Enjolras's order, and moved by Marius's entreaty, began denouncing one another. "It is true," a young man said to a grown-up man, "you are a father of a family: begone!" "No! you ought to do so rather," the man replied, "for you have two sisters to support;" and an extraordinary contest broke out, in which each struggled not to be thrust out of the tomb. "Make haste," said Combeferre; "in a quarter of an hour there will no longer be time." "Citizens," Enjolras added, "we have a republic here, and universal suffrage reigns. Point out yourselves the men who are to leave us." They obeyed, and at the end of a few minutes five were unanimously pointed out and left the ranks. "There are five of them!" Marius exclaimed. There were only four uniforms. "Well," the five replied, "one will have to remain behind." And then came who should remain, and who should find reasons for others not to remain. The generous quarrel began again.