Kabanata Kabanata 177 · A GROUP WHICH BARELY MISSED BECOMING HISTORIC

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!”