Les Misérables, page 91
CHAPTER XIV--THE LAST SQUARE
Several squares of the Guard, motionless amid this stream of the defeat,as rocks in running water, held their own until night. Night came,death also; they awaited that double shadow, and, invincible, allowedthemselves to be enveloped therein. Each regiment, isolated from therest, and having no bond with the army, now shattered in every part,died alone. They had taken up position for this final action, some onthe heights of Rossomme, others on the plain of Mont-Saint-Jean. There,abandoned, vanquished, terrible, those gloomy squares endured theirdeath-throes in formidable fashion. Ulm, Wagram, Jena, Friedland, diedwith them.
At twilight, towards nine o'clock in the evening, one of them was leftat the foot of the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean. In that fatal valley,at the foot of that declivity which the cuirassiers had ascended, nowinundated by the masses of the English, under the converging firesof the victorious hostile cavalry, under a frightful density ofprojectiles, this square fought on. It was commanded by an obscureofficer named Cambronne. At each discharge, the square diminished andreplied. It replied to the grape-shot with a fusillade, continuallycontracting its four walls. The fugitives pausing breathless for amoment in the distance, listened in the darkness to that gloomy andever-decreasing thunder.
When this legion had been reduced to a handful, when nothing was leftof their flag but a rag, when their guns, the bullets all gone, were nolonger anything but clubs, when the heap of corpses was larger than thegroup of survivors, there reigned among the conquerors, around those mendying so sublimely, a sort of sacred terror, and the English artillery,taking breath, became silent. This furnished a sort of respite. Thesecombatants had around them something in the nature of a swarm ofspectres, silhouettes of men on horseback, the black profiles of cannon,the white sky viewed through wheels and gun-carriages, the colossaldeath's-head, which the heroes saw constantly through the smoke, in thedepths of the battle, advanced upon them and gazed at them. Through theshades of twilight they could hear the pieces being loaded; the matchesall lighted, like the eyes of tigers at night, formed a circle roundtheir heads; all the lintstocks of the English batteries approached thecannons, and then, with emotion, holding the supreme moment suspendedabove these men, an English general, Colville according to some,Maitland according to others, shouted to them, "Surrender, braveFrenchmen!" Cambronne replied, "----."
{EDITOR'S COMMENTARY: Another edition of this book has the word "Merde!"in lieu of the ---- above.}
