





At that epoch, which was, to all appearances indifferent, a certain
revolutionary quiver was vaguely current. Breaths which had started
forth from the depths of ’89 and ’93 were in the air. Youth was on the
point, may the reader pardon us the word, of moulting. People were
undergoing a transformation, almost without being conscious of it,
through the movement of the age. The needle which moves round the
compass also moves in souls. Each person was taking that step in
advance which he was bound to take. The Royalists were becoming
liberals, liberals were turning democrats. It was a flood tide
complicated with a thousand ebb movements; the peculiarity of ebbs is
to create intermixtures; hence the combination of very singular ideas;
people adored both Napoleon and liberty. We are making history here.
These were the mirages of that period. Opinions traverse phases.
Voltairian royalism, a quaint variety, had a no less singular sequel,
Bonapartist liberalism.

Other groups of minds were more serious. In that direction, they
sounded principles, they attached themselves to the right. They grew
enthusiastic for the absolute, they caught glimpses of infinite
realizations; the absolute, by its very rigidity, urges spirits towards
the sky and causes them to float in illimitable space. There is nothing
like dogma for bringing forth dreams. And there is nothing like dreams
for engendering the future. Utopia to-day, flesh and blood to-morrow.

These advanced opinions had a double foundation. A beginning of mystery
menaced “the established order of things,” which was suspicious and
underhand. A sign which was revolutionary to the highest degree. The
second thoughts of power meet the second thoughts of the populace in
the mine. The incubation of insurrections gives the retort to the
premeditation of _coups d’état_.

There did not, as yet, exist in France any of those vast underlying
organizations, like the German _tugendbund_ and Italian Carbonarism;
but here and there there were dark underminings, which were in process
of throwing off shoots. The Cougourde was being outlined at Aix; there
existed at Paris, among other affiliations of that nature, the society
of the Friends of the A B C.

What were these Friends of the A B C? A society which had for its
object apparently the education of children, in reality the elevation
of man.

They declared themselves the Friends of the A B C,—the _Abaissé_,—the
debased,—that is to say, the people. They wished to elevate the people.
It was a pun which we should do wrong to smile at. Puns are sometimes
serious factors in politics; witness the _Castratus ad castra_, which
made a general of the army of Narses; witness: _Barbari et Barberini_;
witness: _Tu es Petrus et super hanc petram_, etc., etc.

The Friends of the A B C were not numerous, it was a secret society in
the state of embryo, we might almost say a coterie, if coteries ended
in heroes. They assembled in Paris in two localities, near the
fish-market, in a wine-shop called _Corinthe_, of which more will be
heard later on, and near the Pantheon in a little café in the Rue
Saint-Michel called the _Café Musain_, now torn down; the first of
these meeting-places was close to the workingman, the second to the
students.

The assemblies of the Friends of the A B C were usually held in a back
room of the Café Musain.

This hall, which was tolerably remote from the café, with which it was
connected by an extremely long corridor, had two windows and an exit
with a private stairway on the little Rue des Grès. There they smoked
and drank, and gambled and laughed. There they conversed in very loud
tones about everything, and in whispers of other things. An old map of
France under the Republic was nailed to the wall,—a sign quite
sufficient to excite the suspicion of a police agent.

The greater part of the Friends of the A B C were students, who were on
cordial terms with the working classes. Here are the names of the
principal ones. They belong, in a certain measure, to history:
Enjolras, Combeferre, Jean Prouvaire, Feuilly, Courfeyrac, Bahorel,
Lesgle or Laigle, Joly, Grantaire.

These young men formed a sort of family, through the bond of
friendship. All, with the exception of Laigle, were from the South.

[Illustration: Friends of the a B C]

This was a remarkable group. It vanished in the invisible depths which
lie behind us. At the point of this drama which we have now reached, it
will not perhaps be superfluous to throw a ray of light upon these
youthful heads, before the reader beholds them plunging into the shadow
of a tragic adventure.

Enjolras, whose name we have mentioned first of all,—the reader shall
see why later on,—was an only son and wealthy.

Enjolras was a charming young man, who was capable of being terrible.
He was angelically handsome. He was a savage Antinous. One would have
said, to see the pensive thoughtfulness of his glance, that he had
already, in some previous state of existence, traversed the
revolutionary apocalypse. He possessed the tradition of it as though he
had been a witness. He was acquainted with all the minute details of
the great affair. A pontifical and warlike nature, a singular thing in
a youth. He was an officiating priest and a man of war; from the
immediate point of view, a soldier of the democracy; above the
contemporary movement, the priest of the ideal. His eyes were deep, his
lids a little red, his lower lip was thick and easily became
disdainful, his brow was lofty. A great deal of brow in a face is like
a great deal of horizon in a view. Like certain young men at the
beginning of this century and the end of the last, who became
illustrious at an early age, he was endowed with excessive youth, and
was as rosy as a young girl, although subject to hours of pallor.
Already a man, he still seemed a child. His two and twenty years
appeared to be but seventeen; he was serious, it did not seem as though
he were aware there was on earth a thing called woman. He had but one
passion—the right; but one thought—to overthrow the obstacle. On Mount
Aventine, he would have been Gracchus; in the Convention, he would have
been Saint-Just. He hardly saw the roses, he ignored spring, he did not
hear the carolling of the birds; the bare throat of Evadne would have
moved him no more than it would have moved Aristogeiton; he, like
Harmodius, thought flowers good for nothing except to conceal the
sword. He was severe in his enjoyments. He chastely dropped his eyes
before everything which was not the Republic. He was the marble lover
of liberty. His speech was harshly inspired, and had the thrill of a
hymn. He was subject to unexpected outbursts of soul. Woe to the
love-affair which should have risked itself beside him! If any grisette
of the Place Cambrai or the Rue Saint-Jean-de-Beauvais, seeing that
face of a youth escaped from college, that page’s mien, those long,
golden lashes, those blue eyes, that hair billowing in the wind, those
rosy cheeks, those fresh lips, those exquisite teeth, had conceived an
appetite for that complete aurora, and had tried her beauty on
Enjolras, an astounding and terrible glance would have promptly shown
her the abyss, and would have taught her not to confound the mighty
cherub of Ezekiel with the gallant Cherubino of Beaumarchais.

By the side of Enjolras, who represented the logic of the Revolution,
Combeferre represented its philosophy. Between the logic of the
Revolution and its philosophy there exists this difference—that its
logic may end in war, whereas its philosophy can end only in peace.
Combeferre complemented and rectified Enjolras. He was less lofty, but
broader. He desired to pour into all minds the extensive principles of
general ideas: he said: “Revolution, but civilization”; and around the
mountain peak he opened out a vast view of the blue sky. The Revolution
was more adapted for breathing with Combeferre than with Enjolras.
Enjolras expressed its divine right, and Combeferre its natural right.
The first attached himself to Robespierre; the second confined himself
to Condorcet. Combeferre lived the life of all the rest of the world
more than did Enjolras. If it had been granted to these two young men
to attain to history, the one would have been the just, the other the
wise man. Enjolras was the more virile, Combeferre the more humane.
_Homo_ and _vir_, that was the exact effect of their different shades.
Combeferre was as gentle as Enjolras was severe, through natural
whiteness. He loved the word _citizen_, but he preferred the word
_man_. He would gladly have said: _Hombre_, like the Spanish. He read
everything, went to the theatres, attended the courses of public
lecturers, learned the polarization of light from Arago, grew
enthusiastic over a lesson in which Geoffroy Sainte-Hilaire explained
the double function of the external carotid artery, and the internal,
the one which makes the face, and the one which makes the brain; he
kept up with what was going on, followed science step by step, compared
Saint-Simon with Fourier, deciphered hieroglyphics, broke the pebble
which he found and reasoned on geology, drew from memory a silkworm
moth, pointed out the faulty French in the Dictionary of the Academy,
studied Puységur and Deleuze, affirmed nothing, not even miracles;
denied nothing, not even ghosts; turned over the files of the
_Moniteur_, reflected. He declared that the future lies in the hand of
the schoolmaster, and busied himself with educational questions. He
desired that society should labor without relaxation at the elevation
of the moral and intellectual level, at coining science, at putting
ideas into circulation, at increasing the mind in youthful persons, and
he feared lest the present poverty of method, the paltriness from a
literary point of view confined to two or three centuries called
classic, the tyrannical dogmatism of official pedants, scholastic
prejudices and routines should end by converting our colleges into
artificial oyster beds. He was learned, a purist, exact, a graduate of
the Polytechnic, a close student, and at the same time, thoughtful
“even to chimæras,” so his friends said. He believed in all dreams,
railroads, the suppression of suffering in chirurgical operations, the
fixing of images in the dark chamber, the electric telegraph, the
steering of balloons. Moreover, he was not much alarmed by the citadels
erected against the human mind in every direction, by superstition,
despotism, and prejudice. He was one of those who think that science
will eventually turn the position. Enjolras was a chief, Combeferre was
a guide. One would have liked to fight under the one and to march
behind the other. It is not that Combeferre was not capable of
fighting, he did not refuse a hand-to-hand combat with the obstacle,
and to attack it by main force and explosively; but it suited him
better to bring the human race into accord with its destiny gradually,
by means of education, the inculcation of axioms, the promulgation of
positive laws; and, between two lights, his preference was rather for
illumination than for conflagration. A conflagration can create an
aurora, no doubt, but why not await the dawn? A volcano illuminates,
but daybreak furnishes a still better illumination. Possibly,
Combeferre preferred the whiteness of the beautiful to the blaze of the
sublime. A light troubled by smoke, progress purchased at the expense
of violence, only half satisfied this tender and serious spirit. The
headlong precipitation of a people into the truth, a ‘93, terrified
him; nevertheless, stagnation was still more repulsive to him, in it he
detected putrefaction and death; on the whole, he preferred scum to
miasma, and he preferred the torrent to the cesspool, and the falls of
Niagara to the lake of Montfaucon. In short, he desired neither halt
nor haste. While his tumultuous friends, captivated by the absolute,
adored and invoked splendid revolutionary adventures, Combeferre was
inclined to let progress, good progress, take its own course; he may
have been cold, but he was pure; methodical, but irreproachable;
phlegmatic, but imperturbable. Combeferre would have knelt and clasped
his hands to enable the future to arrive in all its candor, and that
nothing might disturb the immense and virtuous evolution of the races.
_The good must be innocent_, he repeated incessantly. And in fact, if
the grandeur of the Revolution consists in keeping the dazzling ideal
fixedly in view, and of soaring thither athwart the lightnings, with
fire and blood in its talons, the beauty of progress lies in being
spotless; and there exists between Washington, who represents the one,
and Danton, who incarnates the other, that difference which separates
the swan from the angel with the wings of an eagle.

Jean Prouvaire was a still softer shade than Combeferre. His name was
Jehan, owing to that petty momentary freak which mingled with the
powerful and profound movement whence sprang the very essential study
of the Middle Ages. Jean Prouvaire was in love; he cultivated a pot of
flowers, played on the flute, made verses, loved the people, pitied
woman, wept over the child, confounded God and the future in the same
confidence, and blamed the Revolution for having caused the fall of a
royal head, that of André Chénier. His voice was ordinarily delicate,
but suddenly grew manly. He was learned even to erudition, and almost
an Orientalist. Above all, he was good; and, a very simple thing to
those who know how nearly goodness borders on grandeur, in the matter
of poetry, he preferred the immense. He knew Italian, Latin, Greek, and
Hebrew; and these served him only for the perusal of four poets: Dante,
Juvenal, Æschylus, and Isaiah. In French, he preferred Corneille to
Racine, and Agrippa d’Aubigné to Corneille. He loved to saunter through
fields of wild oats and corn-flowers, and busied himself with clouds
nearly as much as with events. His mind had two attitudes, one on the
side towards man, the other on that towards God; he studied or he
contemplated. All day long, he buried himself in social questions,
salary, capital, credit, marriage, religion, liberty of thought,
education, penal servitude, poverty, association, property, production
and sharing, the enigma of this lower world which covers the human
ant-hill with darkness; and at night, he gazed upon the planets, those
enormous beings. Like Enjolras, he was wealthy and an only son. He
spoke softly, bowed his head, lowered his eyes, smiled with
embarrassment, dressed badly, had an awkward air, blushed at a mere
nothing, and was very timid. Yet he was intrepid.

Feuilly was a workingman, a fan-maker, orphaned both of father and
mother, who earned with difficulty three francs a day, and had but one
thought, to deliver the world. He had one other preoccupation, to
educate himself; he called this also, delivering himself. He had taught
himself to read and write; everything that he knew, he had learned by
himself. Feuilly had a generous heart. The range of his embrace was
immense. This orphan had adopted the peoples. As his mother had failed
him, he meditated on his country. He brooded with the profound
divination of the man of the people, over what we now call the _idea of
the nationality_, had learned history with the express object of raging
with full knowledge of the case. In this club of young Utopians,
occupied chiefly with France, he represented the outside world. He had
for his specialty Greece, Poland, Hungary, Roumania, Italy. He uttered
these names incessantly, appropriately and inappropriately, with the
tenacity of right. The violations of Turkey on Greece and Thessaly, of
Russia on Warsaw, of Austria on Venice, enraged him. Above all things,
the great violence of 1772 aroused him. There is no more sovereign
eloquence than the true in indignation; he was eloquent with that
eloquence. He was inexhaustible on that infamous date of 1772, on the
subject of that noble and valiant race suppressed by treason, and that
three-sided crime, on that monstrous ambush, the prototype and pattern
of all those horrible suppressions of states, which, since that time,
have struck many a noble nation, and have annulled their certificate of
birth, so to speak. All contemporary social crimes have their origin in
the partition of Poland. The partition of Poland is a theorem of which
all present political outrages are the corollaries. There has not been
a despot, nor a traitor for nearly a century back, who has not signed,
approved, counter-signed, and copied, _ne variatur_, the partition of
Poland. When the record of modern treasons was examined, that was the
first thing which made its appearance. The congress of Vienna consulted
that crime before consummating its own. 1772 sounded the onset; 1815
was the death of the game. Such was Feuilly’s habitual text. This poor
workingman had constituted himself the tutor of Justice, and she
recompensed him by rendering him great. The fact is, that there is
eternity in right. Warsaw can no more be Tartar than Venice can be
Teuton. Kings lose their pains and their honor in the attempt to make
them so. Sooner or later, the submerged part floats to the surface and
reappears. Greece becomes Greece again, Italy is once more Italy. The
protest of right against the deed persists forever. The theft of a
nation cannot be allowed by prescription. These lofty deeds of
rascality have no future. A nation cannot have its mark extracted like
a pocket handkerchief.

Courfeyrac had a father who was called M. de Courfeyrac. One of the
false ideas of the bourgeoisie under the Restoration as regards
aristocracy and the nobility was to believe in the particle. The
particle, as every one knows, possesses no significance. But the
bourgeois of the epoch of _la Minerve_ estimated so highly that poor
_de_, that they thought themselves bound to abdicate it. M. de
Chauvelin had himself called M. Chauvelin; M. de Caumartin, M.
Caumartin; M. de Constant de Robecque, Benjamin Constant; M. de
Lafayette, M. Lafayette. Courfeyrac had not wished to remain behind the
rest, and called himself plain Courfeyrac.

We might almost, so far as Courfeyrac is concerned, stop here, and
confine ourselves to saying with regard to what remains: “For
Courfeyrac, see Tholomyès.”


Courfeyrac had, in fact, that animation of youth which may be called
the _beauté du diable_ of the mind. Later on, this disappears like the
playfulness of the kitten, and all this grace ends, with the bourgeois,
on two legs, and with the tomcat, on four paws.

This sort of wit is transmitted from generation to generation of the
successive levies of youth who traverse the schools, who pass it from
hand to hand, _quasi cursores_, and is almost always exactly the same;
so that, as we have just pointed out, any one who had listened to
Courfeyrac in 1828 would have thought he heard Tholomyès in 1817. Only,
Courfeyrac was an honorable fellow. Beneath the apparent similarities
of the exterior mind, the difference between him and Tholomyès was very
great. The latent man which existed in the two was totally different in
the first from what it was in the second. There was in Tholomyès a
district attorney, and in Courfeyrac a paladin.

Enjolras was the chief, Combeferre was the guide, Courfeyrac was the
centre. The others gave more light, he shed more warmth; the truth is,
that he possessed all the qualities of a centre, roundness and
radiance.

Bahorel had figured in the bloody tumult of June, 1822, on the occasion
of the burial of young Lallemand.

Bahorel was a good-natured mortal, who kept bad company, brave, a
spendthrift, prodigal, and to the verge of generosity, talkative, and
at times eloquent, bold to the verge of effrontery; the best fellow
possible; he had daring waistcoats, and scarlet opinions; a wholesale
blusterer, that is to say, loving nothing so much as a quarrel, unless
it were an uprising; and nothing so much as an uprising, unless it were
a revolution; always ready to smash a window-pane, then to tear up the
pavement, then to demolish a government, just to see the effect of it;
a student in his eleventh year. He had nosed about the law, but did not
practise it. He had taken for his device: “Never a lawyer,” and for his
armorial bearings a nightstand in which was visible a square cap. Every
time that he passed the law-school, which rarely happened, he buttoned
up his frock-coat,—the paletot had not yet been invented,—and took
hygienic precautions. Of the school porter he said: “What a fine old
man!” and of the dean, M. Delvincourt: “What a monument!” In his
lectures he espied subjects for ballads, and in his professors
occasions for caricature. He wasted a tolerably large allowance,
something like three thousand francs a year, in doing nothing.

He had peasant parents whom he had contrived to imbue with respect for
their son.

He said of them: “They are peasants and not bourgeois; that is the
reason they are intelligent.”


Bahorel, a man of caprice, was scattered over numerous cafés; the
others had habits, he had none. He sauntered. To stray is human. To
saunter is Parisian. In reality, he had a penetrating mind and was more
of a thinker than appeared to view.

He served as a connecting link between the Friends of the A B C and
other still unorganized groups, which were destined to take form later
on.

In this conclave of young heads, there was one bald member.

The Marquis d’Avaray, whom Louis XVIII. made a duke for having assisted
him to enter a hackney-coach on the day when he emigrated, was wont to
relate, that in 1814, on his return to France, as the King was
disembarking at Calais, a man handed him a petition.

“What is your request?” said the King.

“Sire, a post-office.”


“What is your name?”


“L’Aigle.”


The King frowned, glanced at the signature of the petition and beheld
the name written thus: LESGLE. This non-Bonaparte orthography touched
the King and he began to smile. “Sire,” resumed the man with the
petition, “I had for ancestor a keeper of the hounds surnamed
Lesgueules. This surname furnished my name. I am called Lesgueules, by
contraction Lesgle, and by corruption l’Aigle.” This caused the King to
smile broadly. Later on he gave the man the posting office of Meaux,
either intentionally or accidentally.

The bald member of the group was the son of this Lesgle, or Légle, and
he signed himself, Légle [de Meaux]. As an abbreviation, his companions
called him Bossuet.

Bossuet was a gay but unlucky fellow. His specialty was not to succeed
in anything. As an offset, he laughed at everything. At five and twenty
he was bald. His father had ended by owning a house and a field; but
he, the son, had made haste to lose that house and field in a bad
speculation. He had nothing left. He possessed knowledge and wit, but
all he did miscarried. Everything failed him and everybody deceived
him; what he was building tumbled down on top of him. If he were
splitting wood, he cut off a finger. If he had a mistress, he speedily
discovered that he had a friend also. Some misfortune happened to him
every moment, hence his joviality. He said: “I live under falling
tiles.” He was not easily astonished, because, for him, an accident was
what he had foreseen, he took his bad luck serenely, and smiled at the
teasing of fate, like a person who is listening to pleasantries. He was
poor, but his fund of good humor was inexhaustible. He soon reached his
last sou, never his last burst of laughter. When adversity entered his
doors, he saluted this old acquaintance cordially, he tapped all
catastrophes on the stomach; he was familiar with fatality to the point
of calling it by its nickname: “Good day, Guignon,” he said to it.

These persecutions of fate had rendered him inventive. He was full of
resources. He had no money, but he found means, when it seemed good to
him, to indulge in “unbridled extravagance.” One night, he went so far
as to eat a “hundred francs” in a supper with a wench, which inspired
him to make this memorable remark in the midst of the orgy: “Pull off
my boots, you five-louis jade.”


Bossuet was slowly directing his steps towards the profession of a
lawyer; he was pursuing his law studies after the manner of Bahorel.
Bossuet had not much domicile, sometimes none at all. He lodged now
with one, now with another, most often with Joly. Joly was studying
medicine. He was two years younger than Bossuet.

Joly was the “malade imaginaire” junior. What he had won in medicine
was to be more of an invalid than a doctor. At three and twenty he
thought himself a valetudinarian, and passed his life in inspecting his
tongue in the mirror. He affirmed that man becomes magnetic like a
needle, and in his chamber he placed his bed with its head to the
south, and the foot to the north, so that, at night, the circulation of
his blood might not be interfered with by the great electric current of
the globe. During thunder storms, he felt his pulse. Otherwise, he was
the gayest of them all. All these young, maniacal, puny, merry
incoherences lived in harmony together, and the result was an eccentric
and agreeable being whom his comrades, who were prodigal of winged
consonants, called Jolllly. “You may fly away on the four _L’s_,” Jean
Prouvaire said to him.23

Joly had a trick of touching his nose with the tip of his cane, which
is an indication of a sagacious mind.

All these young men who differed so greatly, and who, on the whole, can
only be discussed seriously, held the same religion: Progress.

All were the direct sons of the French Revolution. The most giddy of
them became solemn when they pronounced that date: ’89. Their fathers
in the flesh had been, either royalists, doctrinaires, it matters not
what; this confusion anterior to themselves, who were young, did not
concern them at all; the pure blood of principle ran in their veins.
They attached themselves, without intermediate shades, to incorruptible
right and absolute duty.

Affiliated and initiated, they sketched out the ideal underground.

Among all these glowing hearts and thoroughly convinced minds, there
was one sceptic. How came he there? By juxtaposition. This sceptic’s
name was Grantaire, and he was in the habit of signing himself with
this rebus: R. Grantaire was a man who took good care not to believe in
anything. Moreover, he was one of the students who had learned the most
during their course at Paris; he knew that the best coffee was to be
had at the Café Lemblin, and the best billiards at the Café Voltaire,
that good cakes and lasses were to be found at the Ermitage, on the
Boulevard du Maine, spatchcocked chickens at Mother Sauget’s, excellent
matelotes at the Barrière de la Cunette, and a certain thin white wine
at the Barrière du Compat. He knew the best place for everything; in
addition, boxing and foot-fencing and some dances; and he was a
thorough single-stick player. He was a tremendous drinker to boot. He
was inordinately homely: the prettiest boot-stitcher of that day, Irma
Boissy, enraged with his homeliness, pronounced sentence on him as
follows: “Grantaire is impossible”; but Grantaire’s fatuity was not to
be disconcerted. He stared tenderly and fixedly at all women, with the
air of saying to them all: “If I only chose!” and of trying to make his
comrades believe that he was in general demand.

All those words: rights of the people, rights of man, the social
contract, the French Revolution, the Republic, democracy, humanity,
civilization, religion, progress, came very near to signifying nothing
whatever to Grantaire. He smiled at them. Scepticism, that caries of
the intelligence, had not left him a single whole idea. He lived with
irony. This was his axiom: “There is but one certainty, my full glass.”
He sneered at all devotion in all parties, the father as well as the
brother, Robespierre junior as well as Loizerolles. “They are greatly
in advance to be dead,” he exclaimed. He said of the crucifix: “There
is a gibbet which has been a success.” A rover, a gambler, a libertine,
often drunk, he displeased these young dreamers by humming incessantly:
“J’aimons les filles, et j’aimons le bon vin.” Air: Vive Henri IV.

However, this sceptic had one fanaticism. This fanaticism was neither a
dogma, nor an idea, nor an art, nor a science; it was a man: Enjolras.
Grantaire admired, loved, and venerated Enjolras. To whom did this
anarchical scoffer unite himself in this phalanx of absolute minds? To
the most absolute. In what manner had Enjolras subjugated him? By his
ideas? No. By his character. A phenomenon which is often observable. A
sceptic who adheres to a believer is as simple as the law of
complementary colors. That which we lack attracts us. No one loves the
light like the blind man. The dwarf adores the drum-major. The toad
always has his eyes fixed on heaven. Why? In order to watch the bird in
its flight. Grantaire, in whom writhed doubt, loved to watch faith soar
in Enjolras. He had need of Enjolras. That chaste, healthy, firm,
upright, hard, candid nature charmed him, without his being clearly
aware of it, and without the idea of explaining it to himself having
occurred to him. He admired his opposite by instinct. His soft,
yielding, dislocated, sickly, shapeless ideas attached themselves to
Enjolras as to a spinal column. His moral backbone leaned on that
firmness. Grantaire in the presence of Enjolras became some one once
more. He was, himself, moreover, composed of two elements, which were,
to all appearance, incompatible. He was ironical and cordial. His
indifference loved. His mind could get along without belief, but his
heart could not get along without friendship. A profound contradiction;
for an affection is a conviction. His nature was thus constituted.
There are men who seem to be born to be the reverse, the obverse, the
wrong side. They are Pollux, Patrocles, Nisus, Eudamidas, Ephestion,
Pechmeja. They only exist on condition that they are backed up with
another man; their name is a sequel, and is only written preceded by
the conjunction _and_; and their existence is not their own; it is the
other side of an existence which is not theirs. Grantaire was one of
these men. He was the obverse of Enjolras.

One might almost say that affinities begin with the letters of the
alphabet. In the series O and P are inseparable. You can, at will,
pronounce O and P or Orestes and Pylades.

Grantaire, Enjolras’ true satellite, inhabited this circle of young
men; he lived there, he took no pleasure anywhere but there; he
followed them everywhere. His joy was to see these forms go and come
through the fumes of wine. They tolerated him on account of his good
humor.

Enjolras, the believer, disdained this sceptic; and, a sober man
himself, scorned this drunkard. He accorded him a little lofty pity.
Grantaire was an unaccepted Pylades. Always harshly treated by
Enjolras, roughly repulsed, rejected yet ever returning to the charge,
he said of Enjolras: “What fine marble!”







On a certain afternoon, which had, as will be seen hereafter, some
coincidence with the events heretofore related, Laigle de Meaux was to
be seen leaning in a sensual manner against the doorpost of the Café
Musain. He had the air of a caryatid on a vacation; he carried nothing
but his reverie, however. He was staring at the Place Saint-Michel. To
lean one’s back against a thing is equivalent to lying down while
standing erect, which attitude is not hated by thinkers. Laigle de
Meaux was pondering without melancholy, over a little misadventure
which had befallen him two days previously at the law-school, and which
had modified his personal plans for the future, plans which were rather
indistinct in any case.

Reverie does not prevent a cab from passing by, nor the dreamer from
taking note of that cab. Laigle de Meaux, whose eyes were straying
about in a sort of diffuse lounging, perceived, athwart his
somnambulism, a two-wheeled vehicle proceeding through the place, at a
foot pace and apparently in indecision. For whom was this cabriolet?
Why was it driving at a walk? Laigle took a survey. In it, beside the
coachman, sat a young man, and in front of the young man lay a rather
bulky hand-bag. The bag displayed to passers-by the following name
inscribed in large black letters on a card which was sewn to the stuff:
MARIUS PONTMERCY.

This name caused Laigle to change his attitude. He drew himself up and
hurled this apostrophe at the young man in the cabriolet:—

“Monsieur Marius Pontmercy!”


The cabriolet thus addressed came to a halt.

The young man, who also seemed deeply buried in thought, raised his
eyes:—

“Hey?” said he.

“You are M. Marius Pontmercy?”


“Certainly.”


“I was looking for you,” resumed Laigle de Meaux.

“How so?” demanded Marius; for it was he: in fact, he had just quitted
his grandfather’s, and had before him a face which he now beheld for
the first time. “I do not know you.”


“Neither do I know you,” responded Laigle.

Marius thought he had encountered a wag, the beginning of a
mystification in the open street. He was not in a very good humor at
the moment. He frowned. Laigle de Meaux went on imperturbably:—

“You were not at the school day before yesterday.”


“That is possible.”


“That is certain.”


“You are a student?” demanded Marius.

“Yes, sir. Like yourself. Day before yesterday, I entered the school,
by chance. You know, one does have such freaks sometimes. The professor
was just calling the roll. You are not unaware that they are very
ridiculous on such occasions. At the third call, unanswered, your name
is erased from the list. Sixty francs in the gulf.”


Marius began to listen.

“It was Blondeau who was making the call. You know Blondeau, he has a
very pointed and very malicious nose, and he delights to scent out the
absent. He slyly began with the letter P. I was not listening, not
being compromised by that letter. The call was not going badly. No
erasures; the universe was present. Blondeau was grieved. I said to
myself: ‘Blondeau, my love, you will not get the very smallest sort of
an execution to-day.’ All at once Blondeau calls, ‘Marius Pontmercy!’
No one answers. Blondeau, filled with hope, repeats more loudly:
‘Marius Pontmercy!’ And he takes his pen. Monsieur, I have bowels of
compassion. I said to myself hastily: ‘Here’s a brave fellow who is
going to get scratched out. Attention. Here is a veritable mortal who
is not exact. He’s not a good student. Here is none of your
heavy-sides, a student who studies, a greenhorn pedant, strong on
letters, theology, science, and sapience, one of those dull wits cut by
the square; a pin by profession. He is an honorable idler who lounges,
who practises country jaunts, who cultivates the grisette, who pays
court to the fair sex, who is at this very moment, perhaps, with my
mistress. Let us save him. Death to Blondeau!’ At that moment, Blondeau
dipped his pen in, all black with erasures in the ink, cast his yellow
eyes round the audience room, and repeated for the third time: ‘Marius
Pontmercy!’ I replied: ‘Present!’ This is why you were not crossed
off.”


“Monsieur!—” said Marius.

“And why I was,” added Laigle de Meaux.

“I do not understand you,” said Marius.

Laigle resumed:—

“Nothing is more simple. I was close to the desk to reply, and close to
the door for the purpose of flight. The professor gazed at me with a
certain intensity. All of a sudden, Blondeau, who must be the malicious
nose alluded to by Boileau, skipped to the letter L. L is my letter. I
am from Meaux, and my name is Lesgle.”


“L’Aigle!” interrupted Marius, “what fine name!”


“Monsieur, Blondeau came to this fine name, and called: ‘Laigle!’ I
reply: ‘Present!’ Then Blondeau gazes at me, with the gentleness of a
tiger, and says to me: ‘If you are Pontmercy, you are not Laigle.’ A
phrase which has a disobliging air for you, but which was lugubrious
only for me. That said, he crossed me off.”


Marius exclaimed:—

“I am mortified, sir—”


“First of all,” interposed Laigle, “I demand permission to embalm
Blondeau in a few phrases of deeply felt eulogium. I will assume that
he is dead. There will be no great change required in his gauntness, in
his pallor, in his coldness, and in his smell. And I say: ‘_Erudimini
qui judicatis terram_. Here lies Blondeau, Blondeau the Nose, Blondeau
Nasica, the ox of discipline, _bos disciplinæ_, the bloodhound of the
password, the angel of the roll-call, who was upright, square, exact,
rigid, honest, and hideous. God crossed him off as he crossed me off.’”


Marius resumed:—

“I am very sorry—”


“Young man,” said Laigle de Meaux, “let this serve you as a lesson. In
future, be exact.”


“I really beg you a thousand pardons.”


“Do not expose your neighbor to the danger of having his name erased
again.”


“I am extremely sorry—”


Laigle burst out laughing.

“And I am delighted. I was on the brink of becoming a lawyer. This
erasure saves me. I renounce the triumphs of the bar. I shall not
defend the widow, and I shall not attack the orphan. No more toga, no
more stage. Here is my erasure all ready for me. It is to you that I am
indebted for it, Monsieur Pontmercy. I intend to pay a solemn call of
thanks upon you. Where do you live?”


“In this cab,” said Marius.

“A sign of opulence,” retorted Laigle calmly. “I congratulate you. You
have there a rent of nine thousand francs per annum.”


At that moment, Courfeyrac emerged from the café.

Marius smiled sadly.

“I have paid this rent for the last two hours, and I aspire to get rid
of it; but there is a sort of history attached to it, and I don’t know
where to go.”


“Come to my place, sir,” said Courfeyrac.

“I have the priority,” observed Laigle, “but I have no home.”


“Hold your tongue, Bossuet,” said Courfeyrac.

“Bossuet,” said Marius, “but I thought that your name was Laigle.”


“De Meaux,” replied Laigle; “by metaphor, Bossuet.”


Courfeyrac entered the cab.

“Coachman,” said he, “hotel de la Porte-Saint-Jacques.”


And that very evening, Marius found himself installed in a chamber of
the hotel de la Porte-Saint-Jacques side by side with Courfeyrac.






In a few days, Marius had become Courfeyrac’s friend. Youth is the
season for prompt welding and the rapid healing of scars. Marius
breathed freely in Courfeyrac’s society, a decidedly new thing for him.
Courfeyrac put no questions to him. He did not even think of such a
thing. At that age, faces disclose everything on the spot. Words are
superfluous. There are young men of whom it can be said that their
countenances chatter. One looks at them and one knows them.

One morning, however, Courfeyrac abruptly addressed this interrogation
to him:—

“By the way, have you any political opinions?”


“The idea!” said Marius, almost affronted by the question.

“What are you?”


“A democrat-Bonapartist.”


“The gray hue of a reassured rat,” said Courfeyrac.

On the following day, Courfeyrac introduced Marius at the Café Musain.
Then he whispered in his ear, with a smile: “I must give you your entry
to the revolution.” And he led him to the hall of the Friends of the A
B C. He presented him to the other comrades, saying this simple word
which Marius did not understand: “A pupil.”


Marius had fallen into a wasps’-nest of wits. However, although he was
silent and grave, he was, nonetheless, both winged and armed.

Marius, up to that time solitary and inclined to soliloquy, and to
asides, both by habit and by taste, was a little fluttered by this
covey of young men around him. All these various initiatives solicited
his attention at once, and pulled him about. The tumultuous movements
of these minds at liberty and at work set his ideas in a whirl.
Sometimes, in his trouble, they fled so far from him, that he had
difficulty in recovering them. He heard them talk of philosophy, of
literature, of art, of history, of religion, in unexpected fashion. He
caught glimpses of strange aspects; and, as he did not place them in
proper perspective, he was not altogether sure that it was not chaos
that he grasped. On abandoning his grandfather’s opinions for the
opinions of his father, he had supposed himself fixed; he now
suspected, with uneasiness, and without daring to avow it to himself,
that he was not. The angle at which he saw everything began to be
displaced anew. A certain oscillation set all the horizons of his
brains in motion. An odd internal upsetting. He almost suffered from
it.

It seemed as though there were no “consecrated things” for those young
men. Marius heard singular propositions on every sort of subject, which
embarrassed his still timid mind.

A theatre poster presented itself, adorned with the title of a tragedy
from the ancient repertory called classic: “Down with tragedy dear to
the bourgeois!” cried Bahorel. And Marius heard Combeferre reply:—

“You are wrong, Bahorel. The bourgeoisie loves tragedy, and the
bourgeoisie must be left at peace on that score. Bewigged tragedy has a
reason for its existence, and I am not one of those who, by order of
Æschylus, contest its right to existence. There are rough outlines in
nature; there are, in creation, ready-made parodies; a beak which is
not a beak, wings which are not wings, gills which are not gills, paws
which are not paws, a cry of pain which arouses a desire to laugh,
there is the duck. Now, since poultry exists by the side of the bird, I
do not see why classic tragedy should not exist in the face of antique
tragedy.”


Or chance decreed that Marius should traverse Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau
between Enjolras and Courfeyrac.

Courfeyrac took his arm:—

“Pay attention. This is the Rue Plâtrière, now called Rue Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, on account of a singular household which lived in it sixty
years ago. This consisted of Jean-Jacques and Thérèse. From time to
time, little beings were born there. Thérèse gave birth to them,
Jean-Jacques represented them as foundlings.”


And Enjolras addressed Courfeyrac roughly:—

“Silence in the presence of Jean-Jacques! I admire that man. He denied
his own children, that may be; but he adopted the people.”


Not one of these young men articulated the word: The Emperor. Jean
Prouvaire alone sometimes said Napoleon; all the others said
“Bonaparte.” Enjolras pronounced it “Buonaparte.”


Marius was vaguely surprised. _Initium sapientiæ_.






One of the conversations among the young men, at which Marius was
present and in which he sometimes joined, was a veritable shock to his
mind.

This took place in the back room of the Café Musain. Nearly all the
Friends of the A B C had convened that evening. The argand lamp was
solemnly lighted. They talked of one thing and another, without passion
and with noise. With the exception of Enjolras and Marius, who held
their peace, all were haranguing rather at hap-hazard. Conversations
between comrades sometimes are subject to these peaceable tumults. It
was a game and an uproar as much as a conversation. They tossed words
to each other and caught them up in turn. They were chattering in all
quarters.

No woman was admitted to this back room, except Louison, the
dish-washer of the café, who passed through it from time to time, to go
to her washing in the “lavatory.”


Grantaire, thoroughly drunk, was deafening the corner of which he had
taken possession, reasoning and contradicting at the top of his lungs,
and shouting:—

“I am thirsty. Mortals, I am dreaming: that the tun of Heidelberg has
an attack of apoplexy, and that I am one of the dozen leeches which
will be applied to it. I want a drink. I desire to forget life. Life is
a hideous invention of I know not whom. It lasts no time at all, and is
worth nothing. One breaks one’s neck in living. Life is a theatre set
in which there are but few practicable entrances. Happiness is an
antique reliquary painted on one side only. Ecclesiastes says: ‘All is
vanity.’ I agree with that good man, who never existed, perhaps. Zero
not wishing to go stark naked, clothed himself in vanity. O vanity! The
patching up of everything with big words! a kitchen is a laboratory, a
dancer is a professor, an acrobat is a gymnast, a boxer is a pugilist,
an apothecary is a chemist, a wigmaker is an artist, a hodman is an
architect, a jockey is a sportsman, a wood-louse is a pterigybranche.
Vanity has a right and a wrong side; the right side is stupid, it is
the negro with his glass beads; the wrong side is foolish, it is the
philosopher with his rags. I weep over the one and I laugh over the
other. What are called honors and dignities, and even dignity and
honor, are generally of pinchbeck. Kings make playthings of human
pride. Caligula made a horse a consul; Charles II. made a knight of a
sirloin. Wrap yourself up now, then, between Consul Incitatus and
Baronet Roastbeef. As for the intrinsic value of people, it is no
longer respectable in the least. Listen to the panegyric which neighbor
makes of neighbor. White on white is ferocious; if the lily could
speak, what a setting down it would give the dove! A bigoted woman
prating of a devout woman is more venomous than the asp and the cobra.
It is a shame that I am ignorant, otherwise I would quote to you a mass
of things; but I know nothing. For instance, I have always been witty;
when I was a pupil of Gros, instead of daubing wretched little
pictures, I passed my time in pilfering apples; _rapin_24 is the
masculine of _rapine_. So much for myself; as for the rest of you, you
are worth no more than I am. I scoff at your perfections, excellencies,
and qualities. Every good quality tends towards a defect; economy
borders on avarice, the generous man is next door to the prodigal, the
brave man rubs elbows with the braggart; he who says very pious says a
trifle bigoted; there are just as many vices in virtue as there are
holes in Diogenes’ cloak. Whom do you admire, the slain or the slayer,
Cæsar or Brutus? Generally men are in favor of the slayer. Long live
Brutus, he has slain! There lies the virtue. Virtue, granted, but
madness also. There are queer spots on those great men. The Brutus who
killed Cæsar was in love with the statue of a little boy. This statue
was from the hand of the Greek sculptor Strongylion, who also carved
that figure of an Amazon known as the Beautiful Leg, Eucnemos, which
Nero carried with him in his travels. This Strongylion left but two
statues which placed Nero and Brutus in accord. Brutus was in love with
the one, Nero with the other. All history is nothing but wearisome
repetition. One century is the plagiarist of the other. The battle of
Marengo copies the battle of Pydna; the Tolbiac of Clovis and the
Austerlitz of Napoleon are as like each other as two drops of water. I
don’t attach much importance to victory. Nothing is so stupid as to
conquer; true glory lies in convincing. But try to prove something! If
you are content with success, what mediocrity, and with conquering,
what wretchedness! Alas, vanity and cowardice everywhere. Everything
obeys success, even grammar. _Si volet usus_, says Horace. Therefore I
disdain the human race. Shall we descend to the party at all? Do you
wish me to begin admiring the peoples? What people, if you please?
Shall it be Greece? The Athenians, those Parisians of days gone by,
slew Phocion, as we might say Coligny, and fawned upon tyrants to such
an extent that Anacephorus said of Pisistratus: “His urine attracts the
bees.” The most prominent man in Greece for fifty years was that
grammarian Philetas, who was so small and so thin that he was obliged
to load his shoes with lead in order not to be blown away by the wind.
There stood on the great square in Corinth a statue carved by Silanion
and catalogued by Pliny; this statue represented Episthates. What did
Episthates do? He invented a trip. That sums up Greece and glory. Let
us pass on to others. Shall I admire England? Shall I admire France?
France? Why? Because of Paris? I have just told you my opinion of
Athens. England? Why? Because of London? I hate Carthage. And then,
London, the metropolis of luxury, is the headquarters of wretchedness.
There are a hundred deaths a year of hunger in the parish of
Charing-Cross alone. Such is Albion. I add, as the climax, that I have
seen an Englishwoman dancing in a wreath of roses and blue spectacles.
A fig then for England! If I do not admire John Bull, shall I admire
Brother Jonathan? I have but little taste for that slave-holding
brother. Take away _Time is money_, what remains of England? Take away
_Cotton is king_, what remains of America? Germany is the lymph, Italy
is the bile. Shall we go into ecstasies over Russia? Voltaire admired
it. He also admired China. I admit that Russia has its beauties, among
others, a stout despotism; but I pity the despots. Their health is
delicate. A decapitated Alexis, a poignarded Peter, a strangled Paul,
another Paul crushed flat with kicks, divers Ivans strangled, with
their throats cut, numerous Nicholases and Basils poisoned, all this
indicates that the palace of the Emperors of Russia is in a condition
of flagrant insalubrity. All civilized peoples offer this detail to the
admiration of the thinker; war; now, war, civilized war, exhausts and
sums up all the forms of ruffianism, from the brigandage of the
Trabuceros in the gorges of Mont Jaxa to the marauding of the Comanche
Indians in the Doubtful Pass. ‘Bah!’ you will say to me, ‘but Europe is
certainly better than Asia?’ I admit that Asia is a farce; but I do not
precisely see what you find to laugh at in the Grand Lama, you peoples
of the west, who have mingled with your fashions and your elegances all
the complicated filth of majesty, from the dirty chemise of Queen
Isabella to the chamber-chair of the Dauphin. Gentlemen of the human
race, I tell you, not a bit of it! It is at Brussels that the most beer
is consumed, at Stockholm the most brandy, at Madrid the most
chocolate, at Amsterdam the most gin, at London the most wine, at
Constantinople the most coffee, at Paris the most absinthe; there are
all the useful notions. Paris carries the day, in short. In Paris, even
the rag-pickers are sybarites; Diogenes would have loved to be a
rag-picker of the Place Maubert better than to be a philosopher at the
Piræus. Learn this in addition; the wineshops of the rag-pickers are
called _bibines_; the most celebrated are the _Saucepan_ and _The
Slaughter-House_. Hence, tea-gardens, goguettes, caboulots, bouibuis,
mastroquets, bastringues, manezingues, bibines of the rag-pickers,
caravanseries of the caliphs, I certify to you, I am a voluptuary, I
eat at Richard’s at forty sous a head, I must have Persian carpets to
roll naked Cleopatra in! Where is Cleopatra? Ah! So it is you, Louison.
Good day.”


Thus did Grantaire, more than intoxicated, launch into speech, catching
at the dish-washer in her passage, from his corner in the back room of
the Café Musain.

Bossuet, extending his hand towards him, tried to impose silence on
him, and Grantaire began again worse than ever:—

“Aigle de Meaux, down with your paws. You produce on me no effect with
your gesture of Hippocrates refusing Artaxerxes’ bric-à-brac. I excuse
you from the task of soothing me. Moreover, I am sad. What do you wish
me to say to you? Man is evil, man is deformed; the butterfly is a
success, man is a failure. God made a mistake with that animal. A crowd
offers a choice of ugliness. The first comer is a wretch,
_Femme_—woman—rhymes with _infâme_,—infamous. Yes, I have the spleen,
complicated with melancholy, with homesickness, plus hypochondria, and
I am vexed and I rage, and I yawn, and I am bored, and I am tired to
death, and I am stupid! Let God go to the devil!”


“Silence then, capital R!” resumed Bossuet, who was discussing a point
of law behind the scenes, and who was plunged more than waist high in a
phrase of judicial slang, of which this is the conclusion:—

“—And as for me, although I am hardly a legist, and at the most, an
amateur attorney, I maintain this: that, in accordance with the terms
of the customs of Normandy, at Saint-Michel, and for each year, an
equivalent must be paid to the profit of the lord of the manor, saving
the rights of others, and by all and several, the proprietors as well
as those seized with inheritance, and that, for all emphyteuses,
leases, freeholds, contracts of domain, mortgages—”


“Echo, plaintive nymph,” hummed Grantaire.

Near Grantaire, an almost silent table, a sheet of paper, an inkstand
and a pen between two glasses of brandy, announced that a vaudeville
was being sketched out.

This great affair was being discussed in a low voice, and the two heads
at work touched each other: “Let us begin by finding names. When one
has the names, one finds the subject.”


“That is true. Dictate. I will write.”


“Monsieur Dorimon.”


“An independent gentleman?”


“Of course.”


“His daughter, Célestine.”


“—tine. What next?”


“Colonel Sainval.”


“Sainval is stale. I should say Valsin.”


Beside the vaudeville aspirants, another group, which was also taking
advantage of the uproar to talk low, was discussing a duel. An old
fellow of thirty was counselling a young one of eighteen, and
explaining to him what sort of an adversary he had to deal with.

“The deuce! Look out for yourself. He is a fine swordsman. His play is
neat. He has the attack, no wasted feints, wrist, dash, lightning, a
just parade, mathematical parries, _bigre!_ and he is left-handed.”


In the angle opposite Grantaire, Joly and Bahorel were playing
dominoes, and talking of love.

“You are in luck, that you are,” Joly was saying. “You have a mistress
who is always laughing.”


“That is a fault of hers,” returned Bahorel. “One’s mistress does wrong
to laugh. That encourages one to deceive her. To see her gay removes
your remorse; if you see her sad, your conscience pricks you.”


“Ingrate! a woman who laughs is such a good thing! And you never
quarrel!”


“That is because of the treaty which we have made. On forming our
little Holy Alliance we assigned ourselves each our frontier, which we
never cross. What is situated on the side of winter belongs to Vaud, on
the side of the wind to Gex. Hence the peace.”


“Peace is happiness digesting.”


“And you, Jolllly, where do you stand in your entanglement with
Mamselle—you know whom I mean?”


“She sulks at me with cruel patience.”


“Yet you are a lover to soften the heart with gauntness.”


“Alas!”


“In your place, I would let her alone.”


“That is easy enough to say.”


“And to do. Is not her name Musichetta?”


“Yes. Ah! my poor Bahorel, she is a superb girl, very literary, with
tiny feet, little hands, she dresses well, and is white and dimpled,
with the eyes of a fortune-teller. I am wild over her.”


“My dear fellow, then in order to please her, you must be elegant, and
produce effects with your knees. Buy a good pair of trousers of
double-milled cloth at Staub’s. That will assist.”


“At what price?” shouted Grantaire.

The third corner was delivered up to a poetical discussion. Pagan
mythology was giving battle to Christian mythology. The question was
about Olympus, whose part was taken by Jean Prouvaire, out of pure
romanticism.

Jean Prouvaire was timid only in repose. Once excited, he burst forth,
a sort of mirth accentuated his enthusiasm, and he was at once both
laughing and lyric.

“Let us not insult the gods,” said he. “The gods may not have taken
their departure. Jupiter does not impress me as dead. The gods are
dreams, you say. Well, even in nature, such as it is to-day, after the
flight of these dreams, we still find all the grand old pagan myths.
Such and such a mountain with the profile of a citadel, like the
Vignemale, for example, is still to me the headdress of Cybele; it has
not been proved to me that Pan does not come at night to breathe into
the hollow trunks of the willows, stopping up the holes in turn with
his fingers, and I have always believed that Io had something to do
with the cascade of Pissevache.”


In the last corner, they were talking politics. The Charter which had
been granted was getting roughly handled. Combeferre was upholding it
weakly. Courfeyrac was energetically making a breach in it. On the
table lay an unfortunate copy of the famous Touquet Charter. Courfeyrac
had seized it, and was brandishing it, mingling with his arguments the
rattling of this sheet of paper.

“In the first place, I won’t have any kings; if it were only from an
economical point of view, I don’t want any; a king is a parasite. One
does not have kings gratis. Listen to this: the dearness of kings. At
the death of François I., the national debt of France amounted to an
income of thirty thousand livres; at the death of Louis XIV. it was two
milliards, six hundred millions, at twenty-eight livres the mark, which
was equivalent in 1760, according to Desmarets, to four milliards, five
hundred millions, which would to-day be equivalent to twelve milliards.
In the second place, and no offence to Combeferre, a charter granted is
but a poor expedient of civilization. To save the transition, to soften
the passage, to deaden the shock, to cause the nation to pass
insensibly from the monarchy to democracy by the practice of
constitutional fictions,—what detestable reasons all those are! No! no!
let us never enlighten the people with false daylight. Principles
dwindle and pale in your constitutional cellar. No illegitimacy, no
compromise, no grant from the king to the people. In all such grants
there is an Article 14. By the side of the hand which gives there is
the claw which snatches back. I refuse your charter point-blank. A
charter is a mask; the lie lurks beneath it. A people which accepts a
charter abdicates. The law is only the law when entire. No! no
charter!”


It was winter; a couple of fagots were crackling in the fireplace. This
was tempting, and Courfeyrac could not resist. He crumpled the poor
Touquet Charter in his fist, and flung it in the fire. The paper
flashed up. Combeferre watched the masterpiece of Louis XVIII. burn
philosophically, and contented himself with saying:—

“The charter metamorphosed into flame.”


And sarcasms, sallies, jests, that French thing which is called
_entrain_, and that English thing which is called humor, good and bad
taste, good and bad reasons, all the wild pyrotechnics of dialogue,
mounting together and crossing from all points of the room, produced a
sort of merry bombardment over their heads.






The shocks of youthful minds among themselves have this admirable
property, that one can never foresee the spark, nor divine the
lightning flash. What will dart out presently? No one knows. The burst
of laughter starts from a tender feeling.

At the moment of jest, the serious makes its entry. Impulses depend on
the first chance word. The spirit of each is sovereign, jest suffices
to open the field to the unexpected. These are conversations with
abrupt turns, in which the perspective changes suddenly. Chance is the
stage-manager of such conversations.

A severe thought, starting oddly from a clash of words, suddenly
traversed the conflict of quips in which Grantaire, Bahorel, Prouvaire,
Bossuet, Combeferre, and Courfeyrac were confusedly fencing.

How does a phrase crop up in a dialogue? Whence comes it that it
suddenly impresses itself on the attention of those who hear it? We
have just said, that no one knows anything about it. In the midst of
the uproar, Bossuet all at once terminated some apostrophe to
Combeferre, with this date:—

“June 18th, 1815, Waterloo.”


At this name of Waterloo, Marius, who was leaning his elbows on a
table, beside a glass of water, removed his wrist from beneath his
chin, and began to gaze fixedly at the audience.

“Pardieu!” exclaimed Courfeyrac (“Parbleu” was falling into disuse at
this period), “that number 18 is strange and strikes me. It is
Bonaparte’s fatal number. Place Louis in front and Brumaire behind, you
have the whole destiny of the man, with this significant peculiarity,
that the end treads close on the heels of the commencement.”


Enjolras, who had remained mute up to that point, broke the silence and
addressed this remark to Combeferre:—

“You mean to say, the crime and the expiation.”


This word _crime_ overpassed the measure of what Marius, who was
already greatly agitated by the abrupt evocation of Waterloo, could
accept.

He rose, walked slowly to the map of France spread out on the wall, and
at whose base an island was visible in a separate compartment, laid his
finger on this compartment and said:—

“Corsica, a little island which has rendered France very great.”


This was like a breath of icy air. All ceased talking. They felt that
something was on the point of occurring.

Bahorel, replying to Bossuet, was just assuming an attitude of the
torso to which he was addicted. He gave it up to listen.

Enjolras, whose blue eye was not fixed on any one, and who seemed to be
gazing at space, replied, without glancing at Marius:—

“France needs no Corsica to be great. France is great because she is
France. _Quia nomina leo_.”


Marius felt no desire to retreat; he turned towards Enjolras, and his
voice burst forth with a vibration which came from a quiver of his very
being:—

“God forbid that I should diminish France! But amalgamating Napoleon
with her is not diminishing her. Come! let us argue the question. I am
a newcomer among you, but I will confess that you amaze me. Where do we
stand? Who are we? Who are you? Who am I? Let us come to an explanation
about the Emperor. I hear you say _Buonaparte_, accenting the _u_ like
the Royalists. I warn you that my grandfather does better still; he
says _Buonaparté_’. I thought you were young men. Where, then, is your
enthusiasm? And what are you doing with it? Whom do you admire, if you
do not admire the Emperor? And what more do you want? If you will have
none of that great man, what great men would you like? He had
everything. He was complete. He had in his brain the sum of human
faculties. He made codes like Justinian, he dictated like Cæsar, his
conversation was mingled with the lightning-flash of Pascal, with the
thunderclap of Tacitus, he made history and he wrote it, his bulletins
are Iliads, he combined the cipher of Newton with the metaphor of
Mahomet, he left behind him in the East words as great as the pyramids,
at Tilsit he taught Emperors majesty, at the Academy of Sciences he
replied to Laplace, in the Council of State he held his own against
Merlin, he gave a soul to the geometry of the first, and to the
chicanery of the last, he was a legist with the attorneys and sidereal
with the astronomers; like Cromwell blowing out one of two candles, he
went to the Temple to bargain for a curtain tassel; he saw everything;
he knew everything; which did not prevent him from laughing
good-naturedly beside the cradle of his little child; and all at once,
frightened Europe lent an ear, armies put themselves in motion, parks
of artillery rumbled, pontoons stretched over the rivers, clouds of
cavalry galloped in the storm, cries, trumpets, a trembling of thrones
in every direction, the frontiers of kingdoms oscillated on the map,
the sound of a superhuman sword was heard, as it was drawn from its
sheath; they beheld him, him, rise erect on the horizon with a blazing
brand in his hand, and a glow in his eyes, unfolding amid the thunder,
his two wings, the grand army and the old guard, and he was the
archangel of war!”


All held their peace, and Enjolras bowed his head. Silence always
produces somewhat the effect of acquiescence, of the enemy being driven
to the wall. Marius continued with increased enthusiasm, and almost
without pausing for breath:—

“Let us be just, my friends! What a splendid destiny for a nation to be
the Empire of such an Emperor, when that nation is France and when it
adds its own genius to the genius of that man! To appear and to reign,
to march and to triumph, to have for halting-places all capitals, to
take his grenadiers and to make kings of them, to decree the falls of
dynasties, and to transfigure Europe at the pace of a charge; to make
you feel that when you threaten you lay your hand on the hilt of the
sword of God; to follow in a single man, Hannibal, Cæsar, Charlemagne;
to be the people of some one who mingles with your dawns the startling
announcement of a battle won, to have the cannon of the Invalides to
rouse you in the morning, to hurl into abysses of light prodigious
words which flame forever, Marengo, Arcola, Austerlitz, Jena, Wagram!
To cause constellations of victories to flash forth at each instant
from the zenith of the centuries, to make the French Empire a pendant
to the Roman Empire, to be the great nation and to give birth to the
grand army, to make its legions fly forth over all the earth, as a
mountain sends out its eagles on all sides to conquer, to dominate, to
strike with lightning, to be in Europe a sort of nation gilded through
glory, to sound athwart the centuries a trumpet-blast of Titans, to
conquer the world twice, by conquest and by dazzling, that is sublime;
and what greater thing is there?”


“To be free,” said Combeferre.

Marius lowered his head in his turn; that cold and simple word had
traversed his epic effusion like a blade of steel, and he felt it
vanishing within him. When he raised his eyes, Combeferre was no longer
there. Probably satisfied with his reply to the apotheosis, he had just
taken his departure, and all, with the exception of Enjolras, had
followed him. The room had been emptied. Enjolras, left alone with
Marius, was gazing gravely at him. Marius, however, having rallied his
ideas to some extent, did not consider himself beaten; there lingered
in him a trace of inward fermentation which was on the point, no doubt,
of translating itself into syllogisms arrayed against Enjolras, when
all of a sudden, they heard some one singing on the stairs as he went.
It was Combeferre, and this is what he was singing:—

“Si César m’avait donné
La gloire et la guerre,
Et qu’il me fallait quitter
L’amour de ma mère,
Je dirais au grand César:
Reprends ton sceptre et ton char,
J’aime mieux ma mère, ô gué!
J’aime mieux ma mère!”25


The wild and tender accents with which Combeferre sang communicated to
this couplet a sort of strange grandeur. Marius, thoughtfully, and with
his eyes diked on the ceiling, repeated almost mechanically: “My
mother?—”


At that moment, he felt Enjolras’ hand on his shoulder.

“Citizen,” said Enjolras to him, “my mother is the Republic.”







That evening left Marius profoundly shaken, and with a melancholy
shadow in his soul. He felt what the earth may possibly feel, at the
moment when it is torn open with the iron, in order that grain may be
deposited within it; it feels only the wound; the quiver of the germ
and the joy of the fruit only arrive later.

Marius was gloomy. He had but just acquired a faith; must he then
reject it already? He affirmed to himself that he would not. He
declared to himself that he would not doubt, and he began to doubt in
spite of himself. To stand between two religions, from one of which you
have not as yet emerged, and another into which you have not yet
entered, is intolerable; and twilight is pleasing only to bat-like
souls. Marius was clear-eyed, and he required the true light. The
half-lights of doubt pained him. Whatever may have been his desire to
remain where he was, he could not halt there, he was irresistibly
constrained to continue, to advance, to examine, to think, to march
further. Whither would this lead him? He feared, after having taken so
many steps which had brought him nearer to his father, to now take a
step which should estrange him from that father. His discomfort was
augmented by all the reflections which occurred to him. An escarpment
rose around him. He was in accord neither with his grandfather nor with
his friends; daring in the eyes of the one, he was behind the times in
the eyes of the others, and he recognized the fact that he was doubly
isolated, on the side of age and on the side of youth. He ceased to go
to the Café Musain.

In the troubled state of his conscience, he no longer thought of
certain serious sides of existence. The realities of life do not allow
themselves to be forgotten. They soon elbowed him abruptly.

One morning, the proprietor of the hotel entered Marius’ room and said
to him:—

“Monsieur Courfeyrac answered for you.”


“Yes.”


“But I must have my money.”


“Request Courfeyrac to come and talk with me,” said Marius.

Courfeyrac having made his appearance, the host left them. Marius then
told him what it had not before occurred to him to relate, that he was
the same as alone in the world, and had no relatives.

“What is to become of you?” said Courfeyrac.

“I do not know in the least,” replied Marius.

“What are you going to do?”


“I do not know.”


“Have you any money?”


“Fifteen francs.”


“Do you want me to lend you some?”


“Never.”


“Have you clothes?”


“Here is what I have.”


“Have you trinkets?”


“A watch.”


“Silver?”


“Gold; here it is.”


“I know a clothes-dealer who will take your frock-coat and a pair of
trousers.”


“That is good.”


“You will then have only a pair of trousers, a waistcoat, a hat and a
coat.”


“And my boots.”


“What! you will not go barefoot? What opulence!”


“That will be enough.”


“I know a watchmaker who will buy your watch.”


“That is good.”


“No; it is not good. What will you do after that?”


“Whatever is necessary. Anything honest, that is to say.”


“Do you know English?”


“No.”


“Do you know German?”


“No.”


“So much the worse.”


“Why?”


“Because one of my friends, a publisher, is getting up a sort of an
encyclopædia, for which you might have translated English or German
articles. It is badly paid work, but one can live by it.”


“I will learn English and German.”


“And in the meanwhile?”


“In the meanwhile I will live on my clothes and my watch.”


The clothes-dealer was sent for. He paid twenty francs for the cast-off
garments. They went to the watchmaker’s. He bought the watch for
forty-five francs.

“That is not bad,” said Marius to Courfeyrac, on their return to the
hotel, “with my fifteen francs, that makes eighty.”


“And the hotel bill?” observed Courfeyrac.

“Hello, I had forgotten that,” said Marius.

The landlord presented his bill, which had to be paid on the spot. It
amounted to seventy francs.

“I have ten francs left,” said Marius.

“The deuce,” exclaimed Courfeyrac, “you will eat up five francs while
you are learning English, and five while learning German. That will be
swallowing a tongue very fast, or a hundred sous very slowly.”


In the meantime Aunt Gillenormand, a rather good-hearted person at
bottom in difficulties, had finally hunted up Marius’ abode.

One morning, on his return from the law-school, Marius found a letter
from his aunt, and the _sixty pistoles_, that is to say, six hundred
francs in gold, in a sealed box.

Marius sent back the thirty louis to his aunt, with a respectful
letter, in which he stated that he had sufficient means of subsistence
and that he should be able thenceforth to supply all his needs. At that
moment, he had three francs left.

His aunt did not inform his grandfather of this refusal for fear of
exasperating him. Besides, had he not said: “Let me never hear the name
of that blood-drinker again!”


Marius left the hotel de la Porte Saint-Jacques, as he did not wish to
run in debt there.




