- The barricade was ten times
attacked, approached, assailed, scaled, and never captured.
In order to form an idea of this struggle, it is necessary to
imagine fire set to a throng of terrible courages, and then to
gaze at the conflagration. It was not a combat, it was the
interior of a furnace; there mouths breathed the flame; there
countenances were extraordinary. (from a transl. of Victor Hugo - Les Miserables)