بخش 3 کتاب 4

BOOK FOUR

FRIENDS OF THE ABC

A GROUP THAT NEARLY BECAME HISTORY

IN THOSE DAYS, outwardly so oblivious, a certain revolutionary frisson was vaguely felt around the place. Gusts of hot air rose up from the depths of ‘89 and ‘91 and floated about. The young were in the process of shedding their skins, if you’ll forgive the expression. People were transformed, almost without suspecting it, by the very movement of time. The hands that march over the dial are also busy marching inside people’s souls. Everyone took the step forward that they had to take. The royalists became liberals, the liberals became democrats.

It was like a rising tide chopped up by a thousand backward surges. The specialty of the backward surge is to churn things up as it ebbs; hence some very strange combinations of ideas; people worshipped Napoléon and Liberty at one and the same time. We are talking about history here. These were the mirages of those bygone days. Opinions go through phases. Voltairean royalism, that bizarre variation, had a counterpart no less strange in Bonapartist liberalism.

Other groups of leading lights were more serious. Some sought to define principles; others tackled the law. People were very keen on the absolute, imagining infinite forms it might take; the absolute, by its very rigidity, drives spirits upward into the blue and sets them floating in limitlessness. There is nothing like dogma to spawn dreams. And there is nothing like dreams to generate the future. Utopia today, flesh and blood tomorrow.

Advanced opinions, like suitcases, had false bottoms. The mysterious power emerging threatened “the established order,” which was suspect and sly. This was a sign of revolution in the making, if ever there was one. The ulterior motives of power collide head-on with the ulterior motives of the people who undermine it. The incubation of insurrection is the rejoinder to the premeditated coup d’état.

At that time, France still did not have any of those vast underground organizations like the German Tugendbund or the Italian Carbonari; but here and there obscure underground cells were ramifying. The Cougourde1 started up in Aix; in Paris, among other affiliations of the kind, there was the Society of the Friends of the ABC.

What were the Friends of the ABC? A society with the avowed aim of educating children, which, in reality, was designed to rehabilitate men.

They declared themselves the friends of the ABC—of the abaissé, the abased, the downtrodden, the people. They wanted to raise the people up, to set them on their feet. A pun you would be wrong to laugh at. Puns are sometimes serious in politics; witness the Castratus ad castrata, which made Narses an army general; witness Barbari et Barbarini; witness Fueros y fuegos; witness Tu es Petrus et super hanc Petram,2 etc., etc.

The Friends of the ABC were not numerous. It was a secret society at the embryo stage; we would say virtually a clique, if cliques produced heroes. They met in Paris in two places, near Les Halles in a tavern named Corinthe that comes up again later, and near the Panthéon in a little café in the place Saint-Michel named the Café Musain,3 today demolished; the first of these meeting places was close to the workers, the second, to the students.

The secret meetings of the Friends of the ABC were normally held in a back room in the Café Musain. This room was fairly removed from the café proper, with which it was connected by a very long corridor, and it had two windows and an exit onto the tiny rue des Grès via concealed stairs. They would smoke there, have a drink, play cards, have a laugh. They would carry on in very loud voices about everything and in very low voices about everything else. On the wall, an old map of France under the Republic was nailed up—enough of a clue for any passing police officer to smell a rat.

Most of the Friends of the ABC were students involved in an entente cordiale with a few workers. Here are the names of the main ones.4 They belong to a certain extent to history: Enjolras, Combeferre, Jean Prouvaire, Feuilly, Courfeyrac, Bahorel, Lesgle or Laigle, Joly, Grantaire.

These young men formed a sort of family among themselves, they were such close friends. All of them except Laigle were from the south.

It was a remarkable group before it vanished into the invisible depths at our backs. At the point we have reached in our tale, it might perhaps be useful to shine a beam of light on those young heads before the reader sees them sink into the shadows of a tragic episode.

Enjolras, who comes first on our list—we will see why later—was an only son and rich.

Enjolras was a charming young man, capable of being terrifying. He was angelically beautiful. He was Antinous,5 wild. To see the thoughtful light shining in his eyes, you’d have thought that he had already, in a previous life, lived through the apocalypse of the Revolution. He was familiar with its tradition as though he had been a witness to it. He knew every last detail of the broader canvas. His nature was both pompously dogmatic and warlike, which is strange in an adolescent. He was both officiant priest and militant; a soldier of democracy, in the immediate term, and, above and beyond the contemporary movement, a priest of the ideal. He had deep-set eyes, slightly red eyelids, a thick lower lip that could easily turn disdainful, a high forehead. A lot of forehead in a face is like a lot of sky over a skyline. Like certain young men at the end of last century and the beginning of this who were illustrious early, he had an excessively youthful look, as fresh as a young girl’s, though with moments of pallor. Already a man, he seemed still to be a child. He was twenty-two years old but he looked seventeen. He was grave, he did not seem to know that there was on earth a creature known as woman. He had only one passion, justice, one thought, to overturn all obstacles. On the Aventine Hill, he would have been Gracchus; in the Convention, he would have been Saint-Just.6 He barely saw the roses, ignored the spring, didn’t hear the birds sing; Evadné’s bare breast would not have moved him any more than Aristogeiton; for him, as for Harmodius,7 flowers were good only for camouflaging swords. He was austere in his pleasures. Before all that was not the Republic, he lowered his eyes chastely, Liberty’s marble lover. His words were fiercely inspired and had the trembling note of the hymn about them. He would suddenly spread his wings and take flight when you least expected it. Woe betide anyone who thought they could entice him into some casual fling! Had some grisette from the place Cambrai or the rue Saint-Jean-de-Beauvais clapped eyes on that college-escapee face, that page-boy neck, those long blond eyelashes, those blue eyes, that wild hair flying in the wind, those rosy cheeks, those fresh young lips, those exquisite teeth, and felt a violent stab of hunger for all that golden glow, and had she been bold enough to try and thrust her beauty on Enjolras, she would have promptly been shot a withering look from out of an unknowable abyss that would have taught her not to confuse the gallant cherubs of Beaumarchais with the awesome cherubim of Ezekiel.8 Alongside Enjolras, who represented the logic of the revolution, stood Combeferre, who represented its philosophy. Between the logic of the revolution and its philosophy, there is this difference—that its logic can logically lead to war, while its philosophy can only end in peace. Combeferre completed and corrected Enjolras. He was less high-minded and wider-ranging. He wanted them to fill hearts and minds with principles extrapolated into general ideas; he said, “Revolution, yes, but not without civilization”; and all around the mountain peak he opened up the vast blue horizon. This provided an accessible and pragmatic element in all Combeferre’s views. The revolution was more breathable with Combeferre than with Enjolras. Enjolras maintained its divine-right side and Combeferre its natural right. The former sided with Robespierre; the latter confined himself to Condorcet. Combeferre lived a much more normal life than Enjolras. If it had been given to these two young men to step onto the stage of history, one would have played the righteous man, the other would have played the sage. Enjolras was more manly. Combeferre was more human. Homo et Vir9—that was, indeed, the difference between them. Combeferre was as gentle as Enjolras was severe, from native innocence. He liked the word citizen but he preferred the word man. He would gladly have said hombre, like the Spanish. He read everything, did the theatres, followed public lectures, learned about the polarization of light from Arago, was wildly inspired by a lecture in which Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire10 explained the twin functions of the external carotid artery and the internal carotid artery, the one supplying the face, the other supplying the brain; he kept abreast of things, followed science every step of the way, compared Saint-Simon with Fourier,11 deciphered hieroglyphs, broke open any stones he could get his hands on to sift through geology, would draw a silk moth from memory, point out the mistakes in French in the Dictionnaire de l’Académie, studied Puységur and Deleuze,12 asserted nothing, not even miracles, denied nothing, not even ghosts, flipped through back issues of the Moniteur, daydreamed. He claimed that the future was in the hands of the schoolmaster and got involved in issues of education.13 He wanted society to work tirelessly at raising intellectual and moral standards, popularizing science, circulating ideas and cultivating the minds of the young, and he feared that the current impoverishment of the methods employed, the dire narrowness of the teaching of literature, which was limited to two or three centuries said to be “classical,” the tyrannical dogmatism of the official pedants, scholastic prejudices and routines, would wind up turning our colleges into artificial oyster farms. He was well-read, a purist, precise, polytechnical, hard-working, and at the same time imaginative “to the point of having hallucinations,” as his friends liked to say. He believed in all these dreams: railroads, the elimination of suffering in surgical operations, the fixing of the image in the camera obscura, the electric telegraph, the use of steering in hot-air balloons. On top of this, he was not afraid of all the bulwarks thrown up everywhere you turn by the various forms of superstition, despotism, and prejudice, designed to shut out the human race. He was one of those who think that science will wind up turning the tables. Enjolras was a leader, Combeferre was a guide. You would have wanted to fight alongside one and walk alongside the other. It wasn’t that Combeferre was not capable of fighting, he did not balk at taking an obstacle in hand-to-hand combat or grabbing it by brute force, explosively; but to bring the human race into harmony with its destinies, gradually, through the teaching of axioms and the promulgation of positive laws, was more to his liking; and between two bright lights, he tended toward illumination rather than conflagration. No doubt a raging fire can create light as bright as the light of day, but why not wait for daybreak? A volcano throws light, but sunrise throws even better light. Combeferre perhaps preferred the white purity of the beautiful to the flaming flash of the sublime. Clarity blurred by smoke, progress bought by violence, only half satisfied this tender and serious spirit. Any headlong plunge by a people into truth, any ‘93, frightened him; but stagnation revolted him even more—he smelled putrefaction and death in it. All in all, he liked sea spray better than miasma, preferred the torrent to the cesspool, and Niagara Falls to the lake of Montfaucon. In short, he wanted neither halt nor haste. While his boisterous friends, chivalrously in love with the absolute, worshipped and incited magnificent revolutionary adventures, Combeferre was inclined to let progress take its course—the right sort of progress, which was coolheaded, perhaps, but pure; methodical but irreproachable, phlegmatic but imperturbable. Combeferre would have fallen to his knees and prayed if it meant the future would arrive in all its candour, and for nothing to trouble the vast and virtuous evolution of the peoples of the world. “Good must be innocent,” he never tired of repeating. And, in effect, if the great thing about revolution is that it keeps its eye on the dazzling ideal and flies to it through flashing lightning, with fire and blood in its talons, the beauty of progress is to be stainless; and there is between Washington, who represents the former, and Danton, who embodies the latter, the difference that divides the angel with the wings of a swan and the angel with the wings of an eagle.

Jean Prouvaire was a tad more mellow than Combeferre. He actually called himself Jehan,14 due to the momentary touch of whimsy that got mixed up in the profound and powerful movement from which that most necessary study of the Middle Ages emerged. Jean Prouvaire was in love, cultivated a flower in a pot, played the flute, wrote poetry, loved the people, pitied womankind, wept for children, confused God and the future in the same trusting attitude, and blamed the Revolution for having caused a royal head to roll, that of André Chénier.15 His voice was usually soft but would suddenly become manly. He was scholarly to the point of erudition and almost an orientalist. He was good, above all; and, in a way that is perfectly straightforward for those who know how closely goodness borders on greatness, he preferred the great in matters of poetry. He was fluent in Italian, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew; and this served him to read only four poets: Dante, Juvenal, Aeschylus, and Isaiah. In French, he preferred Corneille to Racine, and Agrippa d’Aubigné16 to Corneille. He liked to stroll through fields of wild oats and cornflowers and was almost as involved with clouds as he was with events. His mind had two modes, one to do with man, the other to do with God; he was either studying or meditating. All day long, he pored over social questions: wages, capital, credit, marriage, religion, freedom of thought, freedom of choice in love, education, crime and punishment, poverty, freedom of association, property, production and distribution, the enigma of life here below that casts its shadow over the human anthill; and at night, he would gaze at those enormous beings, the stars. Like Enjolras, he was an only son and rich. He spoke softly, cocked his head to one side, kept his eyes downcast, smiled apologetically, dressed badly, looked a little gauche, blushed at nothing, was extremely shy. Otherwise, fearless.

Feuilly was a fan-maker, an orphan on both sides, who worked his fingers to the bone for his three francs a day and whose sole thought was to save the world. He had one other worry: to teach himself, which he also described as saving himself. He had taught himself to read and write; all he knew, he had learned on his own. Feuilly was very bighearted. He had a huge embrace. This orphan had adopted the whole world. Since he lacked a mother, he meditated on the motherland. He did not want there to be a single person on earth without a motherland. With the profound clairvoyance of the man of the people, he nurtured deep within what we now know as “the idea of different nationalities.” He had learned history for the express purpose of being outraged with good reason. In this inner circle of young utopians, specifically focused on France, he represented the outside world. His specialty was Greece, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Italy.17 He was always saying those names, appropriately or inappropriately, with the doggedness of those in the right. The rape of Crete and Thessaly by Turkey, of Warsaw by Russia, of Venice by Austria, these violations infuriated him. The great assault and battery of 1772,18 when Poland was partitioned, got him going more than anything else. There is no more supreme eloquence than that derived from outrage based on truth, and he was eloquent with that kind of eloquence. He never tired of that infamous date, 1772, of that noble and valiant people put down by treachery, of that crime of three, of that monstrous ambush, the prototype and model of all the shocking acts of state repression committed since that have struck several noble nations and erased the records of their birth, so to speak. All contemporary social acts of terrorism derive from the partition of Poland. The partition of Poland is the theorem of which all current political crimes are the corollaries. There has been no despot, no traitor, for what will shortly be a century, who has not initialled, ratified, signed and countersigned, ne varietur,19 the partition of Poland. When you consult the file of modern betrayals, that one appears at the top of the list. The Congress of Vienna consulted this crime before it perpetrated its own. The year 1772 sounds the mort, 1815 gives the hounds their quarry. Such was Feuilly’s usual script. This poor workingman had made himself the guardian of justice, and justice rewarded him by making him great. The reason is that right is, in fact, indestructible. Warsaw can no more be Tartar than Venice can be Teutonic. Kings waste their time over such matters—and lose their honour. Sooner or later the submerged homeland floats to the surface and reappears. Greece goes back to being Greece; Italy goes back to being Italy. The protest of right against crime goes on forever. The theft of a people has no statutory limit. These top-level swindles have no future. You can’t pick the initials off a nation the way you can off a handkerchief.

Courfeyrac had a father who was known as Monsieur de Courfeyrac. One of the false ideas the bourgeoisie of the Restoration held about the aristocracy and the nobility was to believe in that particle.20 The particle, as we know, has no significance. But the bourgeoisie in the days of the Minerve21 thought so highly of that poor little de that they felt obliged to surrender it. Monsieur de Chauvelin called himself Monsieur Chauvelin; Monsieur de Caumartin, Monsieur Caumartin; Monsieur de Constant de Rebecque, Benjamin Constant; Monsieur de Lafayette, Monsieur Lafayette. Courfeyrac did not want to be left behind so he called himself plain old Courfeyrac.

We could almost leave it there as far as Courfeyrac goes and just say, as for the rest: For Courfeyrac, see Tholomyès.

Courfeyrac did in fact have that youthful vim we might call the diabolical beauty of wit. Later on, this fades away like the sweetness of a kitten and all that grace ends, on two legs in the bourgeois, and on four legs in the tomcat.

This kind of wit is transmitted from generation to generation at school, in successive levies of young men who pass it along from hand to hand, quasi cursores,22 more or less exactly the same; so that, as we have just noted, anyone hearing Courfeyrac in 1828 would have thought they were hearing Tholomyès in 1817. Only, Courfeyrac was a good lad. Beneath the apparent outward similarities of wit, there was a huge difference between him and Tholomyès. The latent man that existed in each was altogether different. In Tholomyès there was a prosecutor and in Courfeyrac a paladin.23 Enjolras was the leader, Combeferre the guide, and Courfeyrac the centre. The others gave out more light, he gave out more heat; the fact is, he had all the properties of a centre, being round and radiant.

Bahorel had featured in the bloody tumult of June 1822,24 on the occasion of the funeral of the young student Lallemand.

Bahorel was the man to see for good humour and bad company; he was brave, hopeless with money, profligate verging on generous, chatty verging on eloquent, bold verging on provocative; he was the best bastard that ever there was; he wore loud waistcoats and flaming red opinions to match; he was a great one for noise, which is to say he liked nothing more than a good brawl except a riot, and nothing more than a riot except a revolution; always ready to throw a cobblestone through a window, then to tear up the whole street, then to tear down a government, just to see the effect; a student of the nursery school, always playing up. He sniffed around the law for a bit, but he never did it. He had taken as his motto: never a lawyer be, and for his coat of arms a night table on which a square cap25 might be glimpsed. Every time he went past the law school, which was rarely, he would button up his redingote, the short jacket known as a paletot not having been invented yet, and he would take hygienic precautions. He said of the school portal: “What a fine old man!” and of the dean, Monsieur Delvincourt,26 “What a monument!” For him, his courses were mere subjects for ditties and his professors, opportunities for caricatures. He ate up a fairly large allowance, something like three thousand francs, doing nothing. His parents were peasants he’d managed to teach to respect their son.

He used to say of them: “They’re peasants, not bourgeois; that’s why they’re smart.”

Bahorel was a capricious man and spread himself thin over several cafés; the others had habits, he had none. He strolled. To err is human, to stroll, Parisian. At bottom, a penetrating mind and more of a thinker than he let on.

He served as the connection between the Friends of the ABC and other groups that were still nebulous then, but would later take shape.

There was one bald member of this conclave of young heads.

The marquis d’Avaray, whom Louis XVIII had made a duke for having helped him to get up into a hackney cab the day he emigrated, told how in 1814, on his return to France, the king disembarked at Calais and a man presented him with a petition. “What are you after?” asked the king. “Sire, a post office.” “What’s your name?” “L’Aigle.” The Eagle!

The king frowned, looked at the signature on the petition and saw the name written: Lesgle. This spelling, which was anything but Bonapartist, touched the king and he cracked a smile. “Sire,” the man with the petition went on, “my grandfather was a whipper-in, a dog man, nicknamed Lesgueules, muzzles. That nickname became my name. I’m known as Lesgueules, Lesgle by contraction, and L’Aigle by corruption.” This put the smile back on the king’s face. Later on he gave the man the post office at Meaux—Mots—either by accident or design.

The bald member of the group was the son of this Lesgle or Lègle, and signed his name Lègle (de Meaux). His friends “shortened” this to Bossuet.27 Bossuet was a cheery boy who had bad luck. His specialty was not to succeed at anything. On the other hand, he laughed at everything. At twenty-five, he was as bald as a badger. His father had wound up with a house and a field; but he, the son, had wasted no time losing said house and field in a dodgy speculation. He had nothing left. He had erudition and wit, but he always misfired. Everything came to nothing on him, everything failed him; whatever he tried to achieve came crashing down on his head. If he tried to chop wood, he cut his finger. If he found a mistress, he very soon discovered he had also found a new male friend. At any given moment, some mishap would befall him; hence his joviality. He would say: “I live under a roof of falling tiles.” Nothing surprised him, for accidents were only to be expected, as far as he was concerned; he took bad luck in his stride and smiled at fate’s taunts as though they were terrific jokes. He was poor, but his fund of good humour was inexhaustible. He was very soon down to his last sou, never to his last laugh. When adversity came calling, he cordially greeted that old acquaintance; he was on very good terms with catastrophe; he was so familiar with the twist of fate that he called it by a nickname. “Hello, you old Spoilsport,” he would say.

This relentless persecution by fate had made him inventive. He was endlessly resourceful. He had no money but, whenever the fancy took him, he always found the means to “damn the expense.” One night he went so far as to gobble up a hundred francs dining with some scatterbrain, which inspired him to utter this memorable phrase in the middle of his orgy: “Five-gold-louis woman, pull off my boots!” Bossuet was slowly making his way toward the legal profession; he did his law, in the manner of Bahorel. Bossuet didn’t have much of a roof over his head; at times, none at all. He would camp for a while at one person’s place, then at someone else’s, most often at Joly’s. Joly was studying medicine. He was two years younger than Bossuet.

Joly was the malade imaginaire,28 the imaginary invalid, as a young man. What he had got out of medicine had made him more of an invalid than a doctor. At twenty-three, he believed himself to be chronically ill and spent his life looking at his tongue in the mirror. He asserted that man was magnetized like the needle of a compass and in his room he positioned his bed with the head facing south and the foot facing north so that at night the circulation of his blood would not be impeded by the great magnetic current between the two poles of the globe. In stormy weather, he would take his pulse. Otherwise, he was the cheeriest of the lot. All these inconsistencies—being young, fastidious, hypochondriacal, full of life—got on very well together, and produced an eccentric and likable person that his cronies, always free with winged consonants, called Jolllly. “You can take off with four L’s,” Jean Prouvaire told him.

Joly was in the habit of rubbing his nose with the end of his cane, which is a sure sign of a sagacious mind.

All these young men, so diverse, and of whom, when it comes down to it, we should only speak seriously, shared the same religion: Progress.

All were the direct descendants of the French Revolution. The most lighthearted became solemn in pronouncing that date: 1789. Their flesh-and-blood fathers were, or had been, feuillants, royalists, doctrinaires;29 it didn’t matter much; this mishmash that came before them, the young, did not concern them; the blue blood of principles ran in their veins. They were directly related, without any intermediary link, to incorruptible right and absolute duty.

Associates and initiates, they drafted the ideal together in secret.

Among all these passionate hotheads and true believers, there was one skeptic. How did he get to be there? By juxtaposition. This skeptic’s name was Grantaire and he normally signed with this rebus: R, for grand R, capital R. Grantaire was a man who took good care not to believe in anything. And he was one of the students who had got the most out of his studies in Paris; he knew that the best coffee was in the Café Lemblin and that the best billiard table was in the Café Voltaire; that you got good cakes and good girls at L’Ermitage on the boulevard du Maine, spatchcock chickens at mother Saguet’s, excellent fish stews at the barrière de la Cunette, and a certain light white wine at the barrière du Combat. For everything, he knew all the best places; he also knew how to kickbox and make his way around a gymnasium and a dance floor, and he was a natural with a singlestick in stickfighting. A big drinker to boot. And unnaturally ugly. The prettiest boot-stitcher of the day, Irma Boissy, appalled by his ugliness, had come out with this sentence: “Grantaire is impossible.” But Grantaire was so conceited he was not at all put off by this. He looked on all women tenderly and staringly, with an air of saying of all of them, If I wanted to! and hoping to persuade his friends that he was in general demand.

All these words: the right of the people, the rights of man, the social contract, the French Revolution, republic, democracy, humanity, civilization, religion, progress, were, for Grantaire, very close to being completely meaningless. He smiled at them. Skepticism, that dry rot of the intellect, had not left one intact idea in his head. He thrived on irony. This was his axiom: “There is only one certainty: my full glass.” He derided any allegiance to any party, in the brother as much as in the father, in the young Robespierre as much as in Loizerolles.30 “A fat lot of good it did them, dying,” he would cry. He said of the crucifix: “Now there’s a gibbet that worked.” Womanizer, gambler, lecher, often drunk, he riled those young dreamers by endlessly crooning, “I loves the girls and I loves good wine,” to the tune of “Long Live Henri IV.” Still, this skeptic was fanatical about one thing. This one thing he was fanatical about was neither an idea nor a dogma, neither an art nor a science; it was a man: Enjolras. Grantaire admired, loved, and venerated Enjolras. Who did this anarchic doubter rally to in this phalanx of absolutists? To the most absolute. In what way did Enjolras enthrall him? Through ideas? No. Through character. A phenomenon frequently observed. A skeptic sticking to a believer—it is as elementary as the law of complementary colours. What we lack attracts us. No one loves daylight more than the blind. The dwarf adores the drum major. The toad always has his eyes on the heavens. Why? To see the birds fly. Grantaire, in whom doubt lurked, loved to see faith soar in Enjolras. He needed Enjolras. Without really realizing it and without trying to explain it to himself, he was held spellbound by that chaste, healthy, firm, upright, hard, candid character. He admired, instinctively, his opposite. His limp, wavering, disjointed, sick, deformed ideas attached themselves to Enjolras as to a backbone. His moral spine leaned on that firm frame. Beside Enjolras, Grantaire became somebody again. He was himself, in any case, composed of two apparently incomptible elements. He was ironic and warmhearted. His indifference was loving. His mind dispensed with faith but his heart could not dispense with friendship. A profound contradiction—for an affection is a conviction. That was his nature. Some men seem born to be the verso, the reverse, the wrong side. They are Pollux, Patroclus, Nisus, Eudamidas, Hephaestion, Pechméja.31 They can live only on condition of leaning on someone else; their name is a sequel and can only be written preceded by the conjunction and; their existence is not their own; it is the other side of a destiny that is not theirs. Grantaire was one of these men. He was the wrong side of Enjolras.

We could almost say that affinities begin with the letters of the alphabet. In the series, O and P are inseparable. You can say O and P, or Orestes and Pylades,32 whichever you prefer.

Grantaire, as a true satellite of Enjolras, dwelt in this circle of young men; he lived there, he was only happy there, he followed them everywhere. His great delight was to see those silhouettes coming and going in the haze of wine. They put up with him because of his good humour.

The believer in Enjolras looked down on the skeptic and the teetotaller looked down on the drunk. He would dole out a dose of pity from on high. Grantaire was a Pylades who did not pass muster. Always treated roughly by Enjolras, pushed away harshly, rejected yet coming back for more, he would say of Enjolras: “Such a beautiful slab of marble!” BLONDEAU’S FUNERAL ORATION, BY BOSSUET

ONE PARTICULAR AFTERNOON that, as we are about to see, roughly coincided with the events related above, Laigle de Meaux was leaning back sensually in the doorway of the Café Musain. He looked like a caryatid on holiday, holding up nothing more than his reverie. He was watching the place Saint-Michel. Leaning back on something is a way of lying down standing up that dreamers don’t mind at all. Laigle de Meaux was thinking, not too sorrowfully, of a bit of a mishap that had befallen him two days before at law school and that changed his personal plans for the future, plans that were, in any case, fairly vague.

Reverie does not stop a cabriolet from passing or the dreamer from noticing this cabriolet. Laigle de Meaux’s eyes were wandering in a sort of leisurely stroll, and he saw, through the haze of his somnambulism, a two-wheeled vehicle making its way around the square at a very slow trot as though unsure where it was going. Who was this cabriolet after? Why was it going at such a slow trot? Laigle looked at it. Inside, next to the driver, there was a young man, and in front of this young man there was a fairly big overnight bag. The bag revealed to bystanders this name written in big black letters on a card sewed to the material: MARIUS PONTMERCY.

The name made Laigle shift position. He straightened up and called out to the young man in the cabriolet: “Monsieur Marius Pontmercy!”

The cabriolet thus hailed, stopped.

The young man, who also seemed deeply lost in thought, raised his eyes.

“Pardon?” he said.

“You are Monsieur Marius Pontmercy?”

“I am.”

“I’ve been looking for you,” said Laigle de Meaux.

“How come?” asked Marius, for it was he, in fact, fresh from his grandfather’s and setting eyes on this figure before him for the first time in his life. “I don’t know you.” “I don’t know you, either,” answered Laigle.

Marius thought he’d run into a funny man, and that some sort of practical joke was being played in the middle of the street. He was not in a joking mood just then. He frowned. The unflappable Laigle de Meaux went on: “Weren’t you at school the day before yesterday?” “It’s possible.”

“It’s a fact.”

“Are you a student?” asked Marius.

“Yes, Monsieur. Like you. The day before yesterday, I just happened to turn up at school. You know how it is, you sometimes get these funny ideas. The professor was calling the roll. You’re well aware how ridiculous they are about roll call. If you miss three calls, they take your name off the roll. Sixty francs down the drain.” Marius started to listen. Laigle continued: “It was Blondeau1 who was calling the roll. You know Blondeau, he’s the one with the very pointy, very spiteful nose who loves sniffing out absentees. He cunningly began with the letter P. I wasn’t listening, not being implicated in that particular letter. The roll call wasn’t going too badly. No one was struck off. Every man and his dog was present. Blondeau was disappointed. I said to myself: Blondeau, my love, you won’t have even a hint of an execution today. Suddenly Blondeau calls out ‘Marius Pontmercy.’ No one answers. Blondeau gets his hopes up and repeats, louder: ‘Marius Pontmercy.’ And he grabs his pen. Monsieur, I’m not heartless. I swiftly told myself: Here’s a brave lad who’s about to be struck off. Careful. This one’s a real live human being who is not punctual. This one’s not a good boy. This is not some fat-arsed bookworm, a student who actually studies, some pimply pedant, strong in science, literature, theology, and sapience, one of those ninnies dressed to the nines, with a different outfit for each faculty. He’s an honourable bludger who’s ambling about the place somewhere, busy being on holidays, cultivating grisettes, courting beauties, who may, perhaps, at this very instant be with my mistress at her place. Let’s save him. Death to Blondeau! At that moment, Blondeau dipped his pen, black with crossings out, in the ink, gave his audience the once-over with his catlike eyes, and repeated for the third time: ‘Marius Pontmercy!’ I answered: ‘Present!’ And that means you were not struck off.” “Monsieur—” said Marius.

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

“I don’t understand,” said Marius.

Laigle resumed: “Nothing simpler. I stood next to the rostrum to answer and next to the door to make my escape. The professor gave me a pretty steady stare. He’d have to be the cunning nose Boileau talks about, because suddenly Blondeau jumps to the letter L. L, that’s my letter. I am from Meaux and my name’s Lesgle.” “L’Aigle!” Marius interrupted. “What a beautiful name!”

“Monsieur, old Blondeau gets to that beautiful name and cries: ‘Laigle!’ I answer: ‘Present!’ So then Blondeau looks at me with the sweet smile of a tiger and he says: ‘If you are Pontmercy, you are not Laigle.’ A phrase that seems a bit insulting to you, but it was sinister only to me. And without further ado, he strikes me off.” Marius exclaimed: “Monsieur, I’m mortified—”

“Before anything else,” Laigle broke in, “I ask to embalm Blondeau with a few phrases of heartfelt praise. I’m assuming he’s dead. That wouldn’t be much of a change, he’s so skinny and pale and cold and stiff and smelly. And I say: Erudimini qui judicatis terram.2 Here lies Blondeau, Blondeau the Nose, Blondeau Nasica, the bullock of discipline, bos disciplinae, the great watchdog of order, the angel of roll call, who was straight, square, punctual, rigid, honest, and awful. God struck him off just as he struck me off.” Marius went on: “I am so sorry—”

“Young man,” said Laigle de Meaux, “let this be a lesson to you. In future, be on time.”

“I am truly sorry.”

“Never expose yourself again to having your fellow man struck off.”

“I don’t know what I can do—”

Laigle burst out laughing.

“I do: I’m thrilled! I was on the brink of becoming a lawyer. This being crossed out saves me. I renounce the triumphs of the bar. I will not defend the widow, nor will I attack the orphan. No more robe, no more professional training. My crossing out has already been achieved. I owe this to you, Monsieur Pontmercy. I intend to pay you a solemn visit of thanks. Where do you live?” “In a cabriolet,” said Marius.

“A sure sign of opulence,” Laigle calmly shot back. “I congratulate you. You have there a rent of nine thousand francs a year.”

At that moment Courfeyrac came out of the café.

Marius continued sadly: “I’ve been paying that rent for two hours now and I hope to get out of it; but, it’s the usual story, I don’t know where to go.” “Monsieur,” said Courfeyrac, “come home with me.”

“I should have priority,” observed Laigle, “but I don’t have a home to go to.”

“Shut up, Bossuet,” Courfeyrac went on.

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

“De Meaux,” replied Laigle. “Bossuet, metaphorically speaking.”

Courfeyrac climbed up into the cabriolet.

“Driver,” he said, “Hôtel de la Porte Saint-Jacques.”

And that very evening, Marius was installed at the Hôtel de la Porte Saint-Jacques in a room right alongside Courfeyrac.

THE AMAZEMENT OF MARIUS

IN A FEW days, Marius was friends with Courfeyrac. Youth is the season when bones are swiftly mended and wounds rapidly healed. Marius breathed freely by Courfeyrac’s side, a fairly new sensation for him. Courfeyrac did not ask him any questions. He did not even think to. At that age faces say it all right away. Words are pointless. There is a kind of young man you could describe as having a face that talks. One look and you know each other.

One morning, though, Courfeyrac suddenly shot him this question: “By the way, do you have any political views?”

“Really!” said Marius, almost offended by the question.

“What are you?”

“A Bonapartist democrat.”

“Ah, a nice grey shade of mousy,” said Courfeyrac.

The next day, Courfeyrac introduced Marius to the Café Musain. Then he whispered in his ear with a smile: “I must gain your admission to the revolution.” And he took him to the room of the Friends of the ABC. He introduced him to the other comrades, adding in an undertone this simple word that Marius did not quite get: “A novice.” Marius had fallen into a mental hornet’s nest. But, although quiet and grave, he was just as quick on his feet and just as ready to sting as the best of them.

Till then solitary and given to monologues and private asides out of habit and inclination, Marius was a bit scared by this flock of young men flapping all around him. All these diverse initiatives demanded his attention and pulled him in all directions at once. The tumultuous give-and-take of all these minds at liberty and at work set his ideas in a whirl. Sometimes, in the confusion, they floated off so far away from him that he had trouble catching up with them again. He heard talk of philosophy, literature, art, history, religion, in the most unexpected ways. He glimpsed things from strange angles; and, as he could not put them into perspective, he wasn’t sure whether he wasn’t looking at chaos. In shrugging off the opinions of his grandfather to don the opinions of his father, he thought he was set; he now suspected, anxiously and without daring to admit it to himself, that he was not. The point from which he viewed all things was shifting once more. A certain oscillation was shaking up all the horizons of his brain. A bizarre inner commotion. It almost hurt him physically.

It looked like nothing was sacred to these young men. Marius had to listen to the most peculiar talk on every issue and this upset his still-timid mind.

A theatre poster turned up, emblazoned with the title of a tragedy from the old, so-called classical, repertoire. “Down with tragedy, so dear to the bourgeois!” yelled Bahorel. And Marius heard Combeferre reply: “You’re wrong, Bahorel. The bourgeoisie love tragedy and they should be left alone on that score. Bewigged tragedy1 has its raison d’être and far be it from me to challenge its right to exist, as some do in the name of Aeschylus.2 There are rough drafts in nature; there are, in creation, ready-made parodies. A beak that is not a beak, wings that aren’t wings, fins that aren’t fins, paws that aren’t paws, a cry of pain that makes you want to laugh—there you have the duck in a nutshell. Now, since the domestic fowl exists alongside the bird, I can’t see why ‘classical’ tragedy should not exist in the face of antique tragedy.” Another time, Marius happened to be going down the rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau between Enjolras and Courfeyrac.

Courfeyrac took his arm.

“Be careful. This is the rue Plâtrière, now called the rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau because of an odd couple that lived here about sixty years ago. That was Jean-Jacques and Thérèse.3 From time to time, little creatures would be born there. Thérèse brought them into the world, Jean-Jacques booted them out into the world.” Enjolras then savaged Courfeyrac. “Silence in front of Jean-Jacques! I admire the man. He disowned his own children, admittedly; but he adopted the people.” None of these young men spoke the word emperor. Jean Prouvaire alone sometimes said Napoléon; all the others said Bonaparte. Enjolras pronounced it Buonaparte.

Marius was vaguely amazed. Initium sapientiae.

THE BACK ROOM OF THE CAFÉ MUSAIN

ONE OF THE conversations these young men had, conversations that Marius sat in on and sometimes took part in, was a real eye-opener for Marius and shook him up quite badly.

It happened in the back room of the Café Musain. Just about all the Friends of the ABC were there that night. The oil lamp had been solemnly lit. They talked about this and that, noisily, passionately. Except for Enjolras and Marius, who kept silent, everyone joined in the aimless ranting. Talk among friends sometimes reaches this quietly tumultuous pitch. It was more random banter than conversation. Words were tossed around and caught. The talk was coming from all sides.

No woman was admitted into this back room except Louison, the café dishwasher, who passed through from time to time on her way from the laundry to the “laboratory.” Grantaire, perfectly plastered, was deafening everyone in the corner he’d taken possession of. He reasoned and raved at the top of his lungs, shouting: “I’m thirsty. Mortals, I have a dream: that the Heidelberg tun1 has an attack of apoplexy and that I am among the dozen leeches they apply to it. I want to drink. I want to forget life. Life is a hideous invention of who knows who. It doesn’t last two ups and it’s not worth two ups. You break your neck trying to stay alive. Life is a stage set where nothing much actually works. Happiness is an old theatre flat painted on one side only. Ecclesiastes says:2 ‘All is vanity.’ I couldn’t agree more with the poor bastard, if he ever existed. Zero, not wishing to get around in the nude, decked itself out in vanity. O vanity! The tarting up of everything in grand 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 artiste, a plasterer’s helper is an architect, a jockey is a sportsman, a woodlouse is a pterygobranchiate. Vanity has a back and a front: The front is stupid, it’s the nigger decked out in his glass baubles; the back is silly, it’s the philosopher in rags. One makes me cry and the other makes me laugh. What are called honours and dignities, and even real honour and dignity, are generally fake gold. Kings make a mockery of human pride. Caligula made a horse a consul; Charles II made a sirloin steak a knight. So now you can drape yourselves between the consul Incitatus and the baronet Roastbeef.3 As for people’s intrinsic worth, that’s hardly any more respectable. Listen to the sort of praise a person heaps on their neighbour. White attacking white is ferocious; if the lily could talk, it’d make mincemeat of the dove! A bigot who tells tales about someone devout is more poisonous than an asp or a blue viper. It’s a pity I’m an ignoramus or I would cite a whole host of examples for you, but I know nothing. For instance, I’ve always been a bit of a wit; when I was studying under Gros, the painter, instead of mucking about daubing piddling little paintings, I spent my time pilfering apples; rapin—dauber—is the masculine of rapine—plunder. So much for me; as for the rest of you, you’re as bad as I am. I don’t give a fig for your perfections, excellences, and good qualities. Every good quality ends in a defect; the man who looks after his money verges on the miser, the generous man borders on the wastrel, the brave man is pretty close to the braggart; when you say very pious you say holier-than-thou; there are just as many vices in virtue as there are holes in Diogenes’ mantle.4 Who do you admire, the one killed or the killer, Caesar or Brutus? Generally people are for the killer. Long live Brutus! He killed. That’s virtue for you. Virtue? Very well, but madness too. Those great men, there, have some very strange blemishes. The Brutus who killed Caesar was in love with the statue of a little boy. This statue was made by the Greek sculptor Strongylion,5 who also sculpted the figure of an Amazon called Beautiful Legs, Euknemos, which Nero took with him on his jaunts. This Strongylion has left only two statues that Brutus and Nero agreed about; Brutus was in love with one of them and Nero was in love with the other. The whole of history is just one long rehash. One century plagiarizes another. The battle of Marengo copies the battle of Pydna;6 Clovis’s Tolbiac7 and Napoléon’s Austerlitz are as alike as two drops of blood. I don’t hold much store by victory. What could be stupider than winning? The real glory is in winning over. But just you try and prove anything! You’re satisfied with succeeding—what mediocrity! And with conquering—how pathetic! Alas, nothing but vanity and cowardice everywhere you turn. Everything bows down before success, even grammar. Si volet usus,8 says Horace. And so I despise the human race. Shall we descend from the whole to the part? Would you like me to admire the peoples of the world? Which particular people, if you please? Do you mean Greece? The Athenians, those Parisians of bygone days, killed Phocion, or Coligny9 as we might say, and crawled to the tyrants to the point where Anacephoras said of Pisistratus:10 ‘His urine attracts bees.’ The most important man in Greece for fifty years was the grammarian Philetas,11 who was so tiny and thin that he was forced to put lead in his shoes so he didn’t blow away in the breeze. In the biggest square in Corinth there was a statue sculpted by Silanion and catalogued by Pliny. This statue represented Episthates. What did Episthates do? He invented the wrestling move known as tripping someone up. That about sums up the glory of Greece. Let’s move on to other peoples. Shall I admire England? Shall I admire France? France? What for? Because of Paris? I’ve just told you what I think of Athens. England? What for? Because of London? I hate Carthage. Then again, London, metropolis of luxury, is the capital of destitution. Every year, in the parish of Charing Cross alone, a hundred people die of starvation. So much for Albion. I add, to cap it off, that I once saw an Englishwoman dancing with a crown of roses and blue spectacles. So, a big hiss and a boo for England! If I don’t admire John Bull, am I then to admire Brother Jonathan? I’m not too keen on this slave-owning brother. Take away ‘time is money’ and what’s left of England? Take away ‘cotton is king’ and what’s left of America? Germany is lymphatic; Italy is full of bile. Should we go into raptures over Russia? Voltaire admired it. He also admired China. I grant that Russia has its good points, among others a strong despotism; but I feel sorry for despots. Their health is delicate. An Alexis decapitated, a Peter stabbed, a Paul strangled, another Paul stomped on12 and kicked to death by jackboots; sundry Ivans have had their throats cut, several Nicolases and Basils have been poisoned—all this indicates that the palace of the emperors of Russia was a flagrantly insalubrious place. All civilized peoples offer the thinker this little detail for his admiration: war. Now, war, civilized war, sums up and exhausts all forms of banditry, from the armed robbery of the Catalan bands in the gorges of Mount Jaxa to the marauding of the Comanche Indians in Doubtful Pass. Bah, you’ll say to me, Europe is still better than Asia, surely? I agree that Asia is a joke; but I don’t really see what you can afford to laugh about in the Great Lama, you peoples of the West who have blended with your fashions and your elegant ways all the ornate filth of majesty, from the dirty chemise of Queen Isabella to the dauphin’s commode. Messieurs of the human race, I say: screw the lot of you! In Brussels they drink the most beer, in Stockholm the most eau-de-vie, in Madrid the most chocolate, in Amsterdam the most gin, in London the most wine, in Constantinople the most coffee, in Paris the most absinthe; that’s it for all the most useful notions. In a word, Paris wins hands down. In Paris, even the rag-and-bone merchants are sybarites; Diogenes would have been just as happy as a rag-and-bone man in the place Maubert as he was as a philosopher in Piraeus. And there’s something else you should know: The rag-and-bone-men’s cabarets are called bibines, watering holes where they serve cheap booze; the most famous are the Casserole and the Abattoir.13 And so, O open-air cafés, gin shops, little Lyon eateries, seedy dives, greasy spoons, pothouses, sleazy dance halls, smoky fleapit groggeries with your zink counters, dishwater bars of the rag-and-bone merchants, caravanserai of the caliphs, I swear to you I am a voluptuary, I eat at Richard’s at forty sous a head, and I need a Persian carpet to roll Cleopatra14 up in, naked! Where is Cleopatra? Ah! It’s you, Louison. Hello.” And so the words streamed out of Grantaire, in his corner of the back room of the Café Musain as he buttonholed the dishwasher on her way past, Grantaire being more than drunk by then.

Bossuet put out his hand and tried to shut him up but Grantaire started up again even louder: “Aigle de Meaux, mitts off. You don’t impress me, imitating the gesture of Hippocrates when he rejected Artaxerxes’s hodgepodge.15 I exempt you from calming me down. Besides, I’m sad. What do you want me to say? Man is bad, man is deformed; the butterfly is a success, man is a botched job. God bungled that particular animal. A crowd offers you a choice of ugliness. The first man that comes along is a miserable bastard. Femme rhymes with in-fam-y. Of course, I’m suffering from spleen, complicated with melancholy, nostalgia, plus hypochondria, and I rant and rage and yawn and bore myself, I bore myself to tears, I bore myself to death! God can go to hell!” “Well, then, shut up, capital R!” said Bossuet, who was discussing a point of law with the company at large and was up to his neck in legal jargon, his closing remarks going like this: “As for me, although I’m barely a jurist, at best an amateur attorney, I maintain this: that according to the custom of Normandy, every year at Michaelmas, a token sum must be paid for the benefit of the seigneur, unless others are entitled, by each and every title-holder, whether by lease or right of succession, and this, for all long leases, allodiums, private estate and state contracts, mortgages and mortgagees—” “Echo, plaintive nymph,” hummed Grantaire.

Right next to Grantaire, at an almost silent table, a sheet of paper, an inkwell, and a plume between two small glasses announced that a vaudeville sketch was being drafted. This very serious matter was being tackled by two people talking in low voices with their heads together: “Let’s start by finding the names. When we have the names, we have the subject.” “Right you are. You dictate. I’ll write.”

“Monsieur Dorimon?”

“Man of means?”

“Of course.”

“His daughter, Célestine.”

“—tine. Next?”

“Colonel Sainval.”

“Sainval’s a bit tired. I’d say Valsin.”

Alongside these vaudeville aspirants, another group, which was also taking advantage of the racket to whisper together privately, was discussing a duel. An old-timer, thirty years old, was advising a young whippersnapper, eighteen years old, about the adversary he was dealing with.

“Christ! Be careful. He’s a beautiful sword. He plays clean. He’s got attack, no wasted feints, good wrist action, real sparkle, lightning fast, good parry, accurate cut and thrust, heavens! And he’s left-handed.” In the corner opposite Grantaire, Joly and Bahorel were playing dominoes and talking about love.

“You’re a happy man, you are,” Joly was saying. “You’ve got a mistress who never stops laughing.”

“That’s a mistake on her part,” replied Bahorel. “A man’s mistress is wrong to laugh. It only encourages you to be unfaithful to her. Seeing her so gay takes away any remorse; if you see her sad, it pricks your conscience.” “Ungrateful bastard! A woman who laughs is a treasure! And you never ever fight!”

“That’s because we’ve made a pact when we formed our little Holy Alliance. We drew lines we never cross. Anything on the wintry side belongs to Vaud, on the windy side to Gex.16 Hence the peace.” “Peace is happiness digesting.”

“But what about you, Joly? Where are you up to in your falling-out with what’s-her-name—you know the one I mean?”

“She’s still sulking—it’s shocking how long she can sulk.”

“Yet you’re so lovesick you’re wasting away.”

“Alas!”

“If I were you, I’d dump her.”

“Easy to say.”

“Easy to do, too. Doesn’t she call herself Musichetta?”

“Yes. Ah, my poor Bahorel! She’s a wonderful girl, very literary, tiny feet, tiny hands, dresses well, white, plump; eyes of a fortune-teller. I’m mad about her.” “My dear man, in that case you have to sweep her off her feet, be elegant, bowl her over. Get yourself a pair of doeskin trousers run up at Staub’s.17 They stretch.” “How much are they?” cried Grantaire.

The third corner was in the throes of a poetry discussion. Pagan mythology was going head-to-head with Christian mythology. The subject was Olympus, whose side Jean Prouvaire took, out of sheer romanticism. Jean Prouvaire was only timid at rest. Once he got excited, he erupted, a sort of gaiety accentuated his enthusiasm and he was both laughing and lyrical: “Let’s not insult the gods,” he was saying. “The gods have not perhaps left us. Jupiter doesn’t strike me as being dead yet. The gods are mere dreams, you say. Yet now, when all these dreams have flown, the grand old pagan myths are still with us, even in nature, such as it is today. A mountain like Vignemale, for instance, which looks like a fortress from the side, is still, for me, Cybele’s headdress;18 it has not, to my mind, been proved that Pan19 doesn’t come out at night to blow in the hollow trunk of a willow, stopping the holes with his fingers one by one; and I’ve always thought that Io had a hand in the waterfall of Pissevache.”20 In the last corner they were talking politics. They were pulling apart the Charter that had just been granted. Combeferre was limply defending it. Courfeyrac was energetically demolishing it. There was an unfortunate copy of the famous Touquet Charter21 on the table in front of them, and Courfeyrac grabbed it and was waving it around, supporting his arguments with the rustling of that sheet of paper.

“First, I want no kings. I’ll have none of that, if only for economic reasons. A king is a parasite. Kings don’t come free. Listen to this:—the High Cost of Kings. At the death of François I, the public debt in France was thirty thousand livres in revenue; at the death of Louis XIV,22 it was two billion six hundred million, at twenty-eight livres a mark, which, according to Desmarets, was equivalent to four billion five hundred million in 1760, which is equivalent to twelve billion today. Second, whether Combeferre likes it or not, granting charters is not something civilization should resort to. To ease the transition, smooth the passage, dampen the shock, make the nation’s shift from monarchy to democracy imperceptible through the spinning of constitutional fictions—these are all despicable justifications! No! No! We must never light the people’s way with false daylight. Principles wither and fade in your constitutional cave. No bastardization. No compromise. No grant from the king to the people. In all such grants there is an Article 14. Alongside the hand that feeds there is the claw that takes it all back. I reject your charter outright. A charter is a mask; underneath it is the lie. A nation that accepts a charter abdicates. Rights are only rights when they are whole. No! No charter!” It was wintertime; two logs were crackling in the fireplace. It was tempting and Courfeyrac could not resist. He crumpled the poor Touquet Charter in his hand and tossed it on the fire. The paper caught fire. Combeferre watched philosophically as Louis XVIII’s masterpiece burned and all he said was: “The charter has gone up in flames.” And the sarcastic gibes, the sallies, the taunts, the thing the French call wit and the English call humour, good taste and bad, good reasoning and bad, all the wild projectiles of repartee, flared up all at once and crossfired from all points of the room, creating a sort of joyous bombardment overhead.

THE HORIZON EXPANDS

THE WONDERFUL THING about the clash of young minds is that you can never predict the spark or foresee the lightning flash of the explosion it sets off. Anything could erupt at any moment. You have no idea what. A burst of laughter starts out as tender emotion. During a bout of buffoonery, seriousness makes its entrance. Stimulus is provided by the slightest chance word. The verve of each is at its peak. A quip is enough to open the field up to the unexpected. This is the kind of talk that takes sharp turns where the perspective suddenly changes completely. Chance is the scene-shifter in such conversations.

A harsh thought, oddly emerging from the clatter of words, suddenly pierced through the verbal free-for-all in which Grantaire, Bahorel, Prouvaire, Bossuet, Combeferre, and Courfeyrac were chaotically clashing swords.

How does a single phrase stand out in the middle of a conversation? How does it manage to suddenly stop everyone in their tracks? As we just said, nobody knows. In the middle of the din, Bossuet ended whatever he had been saying to Combeferre with this date: “June 18, 1815: Waterloo.” At the mention of Waterloo, Marius, who was leaning on the table beside a glass of water, took his hand away from under his chin and began to study the room in earnest.

“God Almighty!” cried Courfeyrac (Good Lord was by then falling into disuse). “The number eighteen strikes me as odd. It’s Bonaparte’s fatal number.1 Put Louis in front and Brumaire behind and you have the man’s entire destiny, with this amazing peculiarity, which is that the end follows hot on the heels of the beginning.” Enjolras, who had not said a word till then, broke his silence and addressed Courfeyrac: “You mean atonement follows hot on the heels of the crime.” That word crime exceeded the limits of what Marius could endure, deeply stirred as he already was by the sudden evocation of Waterloo.

He got up, walked slowly over to the map of France spread out on the wall, at the bottom of which you could see an island in a separate box, and he stuck his finger on this box and said: “Corsica. A tiny island that has made France truly great.” This was like a blast of arctic air. Everyone broke off—you could have heard a pin drop. Something was clearly about to take off.

Bahorel, about to retort to Bossuet, had been taking up a favourite pose. He dropped it to listen.

Enjolras, whose blue eyes were not fixed on anyone, seemingly staring into space, answered without looking at Marius: “France doesn’t need any Corsica to be great. France is great because it is France. Quia nominor leo.”2 Marius did not feel even the vaguest desire to retreat; he turned toward Enjolras and he spoke in a voice ringing with emotion: “God forbid that I should diminish France! But it is not diminishing it by assimilating Napoléon to it. All right, so let’s talk. I’m new here, but I have to confess you amaze me. Where are we at? Who are we? Who are you? Who am I? Let’s be clear about the emperor. I hear you say Buonaparte, emphasizing the u the way the royalists do. I warn you that my grandfather goes one better still, he says Buonaparté. I thought you were young men. So where are you putting your enthusiasm, then? And what are you doing with it? Who do you admire if you don’t admire the emperor? And what more do you need? If you don’t want anything to do with that great man, what great men do you want? He had everything. He was complete. He had every human faculty in his brain—to the nth degree. He drew up codes like Justinian,3 he ruled alone like Caesar, when he talked he mixed Pascal’s lightning wit4 with the thunder of Tacitus, he made history and he wrote it, his bulletins are Iliads, he combined Newton’s mathematics5 with Mohammed’s metaphors, he left behind him in the Orient words as great as the pyramids; at Tilsit6 he taught majesty to emperors, at the Académie des Sciences he had answers for Laplace,7 at the Council of State he held his ground with Merlin,8 he gave soul to the geometry of some and and to the chicanery of others, he talked law with attorneys and the stars with astronomers; like Cromwell, blowing out alternate candles, he took himself off to the Temple to haggle over a curtain tassel;9 he saw everything, he knew everything, but that didn’t stop him from laughing with joy like an ordinary man at his little baby’s cradle; and all of a sudden Europe sat up and listened, armies went on the march, artillery parks rolled along, pontoon bridge trains stretched out over the rivers, clouds of cavalry galloped in the whirlwind, shouts, trumpets, everywhere the tottering of thrones, the borders of kingdoms wobbling on the map, you could hear the swoosh of a superhuman broadsword sliding out of its sheath, you could see him, the man himself, standing tall on the horizon with a blaze in his hand and a resplendent light in his eyes, deploying his two wings—the Grande Armée and the Old Guard—amid all the thunder, and there he was, the archangel of war!” No one spoke. Enjolras hung his head. Silence always acts a bit like assent—or backing someone into a corner. Marius, almost without pausing for breath, went on with added exuberance: “Let’s be fair, my friends! To be the empire of such an emperor—what more splendid destiny for a nation, when that nation is France and when its genius is added to the genius of the man! To come out of nowhere and take the reins, to march and to triumph, to have all the capitals of Europe as stops along the way, to take his grenadiers and turn them into kings, to decree the downfall of dynasties, to change the face of Europe as you charge on, for people to feel, when you threaten them, that you have your hand on the hilt of the sword of God, to follow Hannibal, Caesar, and Charlemagne in the person of one man, to be the nation of a man who greets you every dawn with the glorious announcement of a battle won, to have the cannon of the Invalides as your alarm clock, to hurl into the endless light mighty words that blaze out for all time, Marengo, Arcola, Austerlitz, Jena, Wagram! At every instant to cause constellations of victories to come out in the zenith of the centuries, to offer the French empire as a counterpart to the Roman empire, to be the grand nation that gives birth to the Grande Armée, sending its legions flying over the face of the earth the way a mountain sprays its eagles in all directions, to vanquish, dominate, crush, to be Europe’s golden nation, ablaze with glory, to sound a Titanic fanfare down through history, to conquer the world twice over, by force of arms and by dazzlement—all this is sublime; what could possibly be greater?” “To be free,” said Combeferre.

It was Marius’s turn to hang his head. That simple, chilling word had cut through his epic effusion like a steel blade and he felt it fall away inside him. When he raised his eyes, Combeferre was no longer there. Satisfied no doubt with pulling the rug from under Marius just as he reached his grand finale, he had simply left and everyone except Enjolras had followed suit. The room had emptied; Enjolras, left alone with Marius, looked at him gravely. Marius, though, having made an effort to rally his ideas, did not consider himself defeated; there was still something bubbling away inside him that would no doubt translate into syllogisms deployed against Enjolras. Then, all of a sudden, someone could be heard singing on the stairs as they went away. It was Combeferre, and this is what he sang: If Caesar had offered me

Glory and war,

But I had had to give up

My mother’s love,

I would say to great Caesar:

Take back your sceptre and your chariot,

I love my mother more, hey nonny!

I love my mother more.10

The tender and savage tone in which Combeferre was singing gave this verse a sort of strange grandeur. Marius, pensive and with his eyes on the ceiling, repeated almost mechanically: “My mother—” At that moment, he felt Enjolras’ hand on his shoulder.

“Citizen,”11 said Enjolras, “my mother is the Republic.”

RES ANGUSTA1

THAT SOIRÉE LEFT Marius deeply shaken, with a sad darkness in his soul. He felt what the earth perhaps feels as it is being dug into by iron for seeds of wheat to be sown; it feels only the wound; the bursting of the wheat germ into life and the thrill of the wheat only come later.

Marius was forlorn. He had only just acquired a faith; did he have to reject it already? He told himself no. He resolved not to doubt, but he started to have doubts just the same. To be between two religions, one you have not yet emerged from, the other you have not yet embraced, is unbearable; and such gloomy half-light only appeals to batlike souls. Marius was open-eyed and he needed real light. The crepuscular light of doubt hurt him. Whatever his desire to stay put and to hold out, he was invincibly compelled to move on, to advance, to examine, to think, to go one step further. Where was all that going to lead him? He feared, after having taken so many steps that had drawn him closer to his father, to take steps now that would take him away from him. His uneasiness grew with every thought that came to him. High walls hemmed him in on all sides. He did not fit in with either his grandfather or his friends; he was reckless according to the one, backward according to the others; and he recognized that he was doubly cut off—from the old and from the young. He stopped going to the Café Musain.

In this troubled state of mind, he barely gave a thought to certain serious aspects of existence. But the realities of life do not let themselves be forgotten. They suddenly came and gave him a sharp nudge.

One morning the hotelkeeper sailed into Marius’s room and said: “Monsieur Courfeyrac has vouched for you.”

“Yes.”

“But I need money.”

“Ask Courfeyrac to come and speak to me,” said Marius.

Courfeyrac came, the host left them to it. Marius now told him what he had not thought of telling him before this, which was that he was all alone in the world, not having any relatives.

“What’s going to become of you?” said Courfeyrac.

“I have no idea,” Marius replied.

“What are you going to do?”

“I have no idea.”

“Have you got any money?”

“Fifteen francs.”

“Would you like me to lend you some?”

“Not on your life.”

“Have you got any clothes?”

“What you see.”

“Any jewellery?”

“A watch.”

“Silver?”

“Gold. Here it is.”

“I know a secondhand-clothes dealer who’ll take your redingote and a pair of trousers.”

“That’s good.”

“You’ll only have one pair of trousers, a waistcoat, a hat, and a morning coat left.”

“And my boots.”

“What! You mean you won’t go barefoot? What luxury!”

“It’ll do me.”

“I know a watchmaker who’ll buy your watch.”

“That’s good.”

“No, it’s not good. What are you going to do after that?”

“Whatever I have to—that’s honest, at least.”

“Do you know English?”

“No.”

“Do you know German?”

“No.”

“Too bad.”

“Why?”

“It’s just that one of my friends is a bookseller and he’s doing a sort of encyclopædia and you could have translated articles from German or English for it. It’s badly paid but you can live on it.” “I’ll learn English and German.”

“And in the meantime?”

“In the meantime, I’ll eat my clothes and my watch.”

They sent for the clothes dealer. He bought the castoffs for twenty francs. They went to the watchmaker’s. He bought the watch for forty-five francs.

“That’s not bad,” said Marius to Courfeyrac on returning to the hotel. “With the fifteen francs I already have, that comes to eighty francs.”

“What about the hotel bill?” observed Courfeyrac.

“Ah, yes! I forgot,” said Marius.

“Christ!” went Courfeyrac. “You’ll eat up five francs while you’re learning English and five francs while you’re learning German. You’ll either have to swallow a language pretty fast or a hundred-sou piece pretty slowly.” Meanwhile Aunt Gillenormand, who was pretty good underneath it all in a crisis, wound up unearthing Marius’s hideout. One morning, as Marius was coming back from the law school, he found a letter from his aunt and those “sixty pistoles,” that is, six hundred francs, in gold, in a sealed box.

Marius sent the thirty louis back to his aunt with a respectful letter declaring he had the means to support himself and that he could now provide for all his needs on his own. At that point he had three francs left.

The aunt did not inform the grandfather about this rejection for fear of exasperating him further. Besides, hadn’t he said: “Never speak to me of that bloodsucker again!” Marius left the Hôtel de la Porte Saint-Jacques, not wanting to run up a debt there.