We must lay a stress upon a psychological fact peculiar to barricades, for nothing which characterizes this surprising war of streets ought to be omitted. Whatever the internal tranquillity to which we have just referred may be, the barricade does not the less remain a vision for those who are inside it There is an apocalypse in a civil war, all the darkness of the unknown world is mingled with these stern flashes, revolutions are sphinxes, and any one who has stood behind a barricade believes that he has gone through a dream. What is felt at these spots, as we have shown in the matter of Marius, and whose consequences we shall see, is more and less than life. On leaving a barricade, a man no longer knows what he has seen; he may have been terrible, but he is ignorant of the fact. He has been surrounded there by combating ideas which possessed human faces, and had his head in the light of futurity. There were corpses laid low and phantoms standing upright; and the hours were colossal, and seemed hours of eternity. A man has lived in death, and shadows have passed. What was it? He has seen hands on which was blood; it was a deafening din, but at the same time a startling silence: there were open mouths that cried, and other open mouths which were silent, and men were in smoke, perhaps in night. A man fancies he has touched the sinister dripping of unknown depths, and he looks at something red which he has in his nails, but he no longer recollects anything. Let us return to the Rue de la Chanvrerie. Suddenly, between two discharges, the distant sound of a clock striking was heard. "It is midday," said Combeferre. The twelve strokes had not died out ere Enjolras drew himself up to his full height and hurled the loud cry from the top of the barricade,-- "Take up the paving-stones into the house, and line the windows with them. One half of you to the stones, the other half to the muskets. There is not a moment to lose." A party of sappers, with their axes on their shoulders, had just appeared in battle-array at the end of the street. This could only be the head of a column; and of what column? Evidently the column of attack; for the sappers ordered to demolish the barricade always precede the troops appointed to escalade it. It was plain that the moment was at hand which M. Clermont Tonnerre called in 1822 "a strong pull."