BENEATH THE surface of that seemingly apathetic age there was a faint revolutionary stir. Gusts from the depths of ’89 and ’92 were again to be felt in the air. Youth, if we may be allowed the phrase, was on the move. Attitudes were changing, almost unconsciously, in accordance with the changing times. The compass needle swinging over its dial has its equivalent in men’s souls. Everyone was preparing for a forward step. Royalists were becoming liberal, liberals were becoming democrats.
It was like a rising tide complicated by a thousand eddies. It is the nature of an eddy that it confuses things, hence the conjunction of oddly assorted ideas. Napoleon was venerated and, with him, liberty. We are describing a period in history, and these were its mirages. Opinions go through phases. Voltairian royalism, that weird variant, had a no less strange pendant – Bonapartist liberalism.
Other schools of thought were more sober-minded. There were those who looked for basic principles, those who stood for law. There was a passion for the Absolute, affording a glimpse of limitless achievement. The Absolute, by its very rigidity, sends spirits soaring heavenwards. Nothing excels dogma as a begetter of dreams: and nothing excels dreaming as a begetter of the future. Today’s Utopia is the flesh and blood of tomorrow.
Advanced opinion was ambivalent. The mysterious beginnings of change threatened the established order, which was both suspect and crafty. In this lay a clear hint of revolution. The secret aims of power conflict fundamentally with the secret aims of the people. The incubation of revolt is the reply to the planning of coups d’état.
There did not yet exist in France such vast, widespread organizations as the German Tugendbund or the Italian Carbonari; but small, obscure cells were ramifying. The Cougourde was taking shape in Aix, and in Paris, along with similar bodies, there was the Society of the Friends of the ABC.
The ostensible purpose of the ABC Society was the education of children, but its real purpose was the elevation of men. The letters ABC, as pronounced in French, make the word abaissé, that is to say, the under-dog, the people. The people were to assert themselves. To deride the pun would have been a mistake. A pun can be weighty in politics, as witness Castratus ad castra, which made of the eunuch Narses a Roman general, and ‘You are Peter (the rock) and on this rock I will build my church.’
The ABC Society was small in numbers, no more than a secret society in embryo; we might almost call it a clique, if cliques gave birth to heroes. They had two meeting-places in Paris, the one a drinking-place called Corinthe, near Les Halles, of which there will be mention later on, and the other a small café on the Place Saint-Michel, the Café Musain. The first was handy for the workers, the second for the students.
The councils of the ABC Society were held as a rule in a back room at the Café Musain. The room, which was at some distance from the café proper, and separated from it by a long passage, had two windows and a door leading to an inconspicuous flight of steps down to the narrow Rue des Grès. Its frequenters smoked and drank, played cards and laughed, talking in loud voices about general matters and in low voices about particular ones. Nailed to the wall – a portent calculated to arouse the suspicions of any police agent – was an old map of France under the Republic
Most of the members of the ABC Society were students having friendly relations with a number of workers. These are the names of the more important, those who have, to some extent, a place in history: Enjolras, Combeferre, Jean Prouvaire, Feuilly, Courfeyrac, Bahorel, Lesgle or Laigle, Joly, Grantaire. These young men formed a sort of family, united by friendship. All except Laigle came from the Midi.
They formed a remarkable group, one which has vanished into the limbo of the years that lie behind us, but at this point in our story it may be of value to shed some light on their youthful countenances before the reader follows them as they plunge into the shadow of a tragic adventure.
We have named Enjolras first, and the reason for this will be seen later. He was the only son of wealthy parents, a charming young man who was capable of being a terror. He was angelically good-looking, an untamed Antinous. From the thoughtfulness of his gaze one might have supposed that in some previous existence he had lived through all the turmoil of the Revolution. He was familiar with every detail of that great event; he had it in his blood as though he had been there. His was a nature at once scholarly and warlike, and this is rare in an adolescent. He was both thinker and man of action, a soldier of democracy in the short term and at the same time a priest of the ideal rising above the contemporary movement. He had deep eyes, their lids slightly reddened, a thick lower lip which readily curled in disdain, and a high forehead – a large expanse of forehead in a face like a wide stretch of sky on the horizon. In common with certain young men of the beginning of this century and the end of the last who achieved distinction early in life, he had the glow of over-vibrant youth, with a skin like a girl’s but with moments of pallor. Grown to manhood, he still appeared a youth, his twenty-two years seeming no more than seventeen. He was austere, seeming not to be aware of the existence on earth of a creature called woman. His sole passion was for justice, his sole thought to overcome obstacles. On the Aventine hill he would have been Gracchus, in the Convention he would have been Saint-Just. He scarcely noticed a rose, was unconscious of the springtime and paid no heed to the singing of birds. The bared bosom of the nymph Evadne would have left him unmoved, and like Harmodius he had no use for flowers except to conceal a sword. He was austere in all his pleasures, chastely averting his eyes from everything that did not concern the republic, a marble lover of Liberty. His speech was harsh and intense, with a lyrical undertone, and given to unexpected flights of eloquence. It would have gone hard with any love-affair that sought to lead him astray. Had a grisette from the Place Cambrai or the Rue Saint-Jean-de-Beauvais, seeing that schoolboy face, the pageboy figure, the long, fair lashes over blue eyes, the hair ruffled in the breeze, the fresh lips and perfect teeth, been so taken with his beauty as to seek to thrust herself upon him, she would have encountered a cold, dismissive stare, like the opening of an abyss, which would have taught her not to confuse the Cherubini of Beaumarchais with the cherubim of Ezekiel.
At the side of Enjolras, who represented the logic of revolution, was Combeferre, representing its philosophy. The difference between logic and philosophy is that the one can decide upon war, whereas the other can only be fulfilled by peace. Combeferre supplemented and restrained Enjolras. He was less lofty but broader of mind. He sought to instil principles in terms of basic ideas, saying, ‘Revolution, but civilization’ and spreading wider horizons round the stern peaks of dogma. In all his thinking there was an element of the attainable and the practicable. Revolution with Combeferre was more breatheable than with Enjolras. Enjolras stood for its divine right, Combeferre for its natural right. The first went all the way with Robespierre, the second stopped at Condorcet. Combeferre lived closer than Enjolras to the life of everyday. Had it been given to these two young men to attain to the pages of history, the one would have been the man of principle, the other the man of wisdom. Enjolras was the more virile, but Combeferre was the more human - homo and vir, this was the distinction between them. Combeferre was as gentle as Enjolras was rigid, from innate purity. He respected the word ‘citizen’ but preferred the word ‘man’, and would gladly have called his fellows hombre, as the Spaniards do. He read everything, went to the theatre and attended public lectures, learning from Arago, the director of the Observatory, about the polarization of light and from Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire about the functions of the external and internal arteries, one of which serves the face and the other the brain. He was in touch with scientific developments, contrasted Saint-Simon with Fourier, deciphered hieroglyphics, broke up pebbles to study geology, could draw a silk-worm moth from memory, pointed out errors in the Dictionnaire de 1’Académie, studied Puységur and Deleuze, vouched positively for nothing, not even the miracles, denied nothing, not even the existence of ghosts, browsed in the files of the Moniteur, and meditated. He declared that the future lay in the hands of the schoolmaster and was much concerned with the question of education. He believed that society should strive incessantly for the raising of intellectual and moral standards, the popularization of science, the dissemination of ideas and the enlightenment of the young, and he feared that the inadequacy of present methods, the poverty of literary teaching confined to the two or three centuries said to be ‘classical’, the tyrannical dogmatism of official pedants, their prejudices and rigid routines, would end by making our schools mere artificial forcing-houses. He was learned and a purist, precise, eclectic, hard-thinking, and at the same time imaginative ‘to the point of fantasy’, his friends said. He shared every dream for the future – the development of railways, the elimination of suffering by surgery, the fixing of pictures in a darkroom, the electric telegraph, the guided balloon. For the rest, he was undismayed by the barriers to human progress erected by superstition, despotism, and prejudice, being among those who believe that knowledge must always prevail in the end. Enjolras was a commander; Combeferre was a guide. One was moved to combat the former but to accompany the latter. This is not to say that Combeferre was incapable of fighting; he was ready if need be to assail an obstacle and attack it with violence. But it suited him better to make men aware of their destiny by persuasion and the use of reason and precept. Of the two extremes, he preferred enlightenment to conflagration. A bonfire will cast a glow, but why not await the rising of the sun? A volcano sheds a light, but the light of dawn is better. Combeferre perhaps preferred the white purity of the good to the savage splendour of the sublime. Light mingled with smoke, progress achieved by violence, these only partly satisfied his gentle, earnest soul. The sudden plunging of a nation into truth, the events of 1793, this frightened him; but he was even more repelled by apathy, in which he saw putrefaction and death. All in all, he preferred spray to mist, the torrent to the cloaca, Niagara to the Lac de Montfaucon. He wanted neither immobility nor over-haste. While his exuberant friends, chivalrously in love with the Absolute, extolled the splendid lottery of revolution, he was more disposed to let progress take its course, sane progress, cold-blooded perhaps but undefiled, methodical but irreproachable, phlegmatic but unshakeable. Combeferre would have prayed on his knees for the future to come in all simplicity, with nothing to trouble the vast, virtuous evolution of mankind. ‘Good must be innocent,’ he constantly said. And indeed, if it is the grandeur of revolution that, with eyes fixed on the blinding ideal, it flies like an eagle towards it with blood and flame in its talons, the beauty of progress resides in the fact that it is unsullied. Between Washington who represents the one and Danton who embodies the other, the difference is that between the angel with swan’s wings and the angel with eagle’s wings.
Jean Prouvaire was a shade more soft-hearted than Combeferre. He called himself Jehan, with the touch of fantasy that characterized the profound and widespread impulse of that time, which has given rise to our most necessary study of the middle ages. Jean Prouvaire was a lover; he cherished a pot of flowers, played the flute, wrote verses, loved the people, pitied women, wept over the lot of children, divided his faith equally between the future and God, and reproached the Revolution for having cut off an illustrious head, that of André Chénier. His voice, which was ordinarily soft, would suddenly become masterful. He was widely-read to the point of erudition and near to being an orientalist. Above all he was kind; and (a matter easily understandable by those who know how closely kindness is akin to greatness,) in poetry he favoured the grandiose. He knew Italian, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, but the four languages served him for the reading of only four poets, Dante, Juvenal, Aeschylus, and Isaiah. In French he preferred Corneille to Racine and Agrippa d’Aubigné to Corneille. He loved to stroll through meadows of wild flowers and was scarcely less interested in the passage of the clouds than in the passage of events. There were two sides to his mind, the side of men and the side of God; he studied, or he meditated. During the day he pored over social questions – wages, capital, credit, marriage, religion, freedom of thought, freedom to love, education, the penal system, poverty, the right of free association, property, production and distribution, the riddle of the lowest stratum which spreads its shadow over the human ant-heap; and at night he contemplated the immensity of the heavens. Like Enjolras he was rich and an only son. He talked gently, bowed his head, smiled self-consciously, blushed for no reason, was awkward and extremely shy – and, for the rest, fearless.
Feuilly was a fan-maker, orphaned of both father and mother, who laboriously earned three francs a day and whose mind was obsessed with a single thought, to liberate the world. His other preoccupation was to educate himself, which he called self-liberation. He had taught himself to read and write, and everything he knew he had learned in solitude. He had a warm heart, an immense capacity for affection. Being an orphan he had adopted mankind as his parents. His country took the place of his mother. He hated to think that there should be any man without a country. With the profound instinct of a man of the people he cherished in his heart something that we now call the ‘idea of nationality’. He read history precisely in order that his protest might be well-informed in this matter. In that youthful circle of Utopians, which was concerned principally with France, he stood for the world outside, specializing in Greece, Poland, Hungary, Romania, and Italy. The names cropped up constantly in his discourse, with or without reason, with the obstinacy of conscious rightness. The rape of Crete and Thessaly by Turkey, of Warsaw by Russia, of Venice by Austria, these things outraged him. Above all, the first partition of Poland in 1772 roused him to fury. There is no more powerful eloquence than that of indignation based on true conviction, and this was the power that he possessed. He never wearied of talking about that infamous event, a noble and gallant race subdued by treachery, a crime with three participants, a monstrous trap, the prototype and forerunner of all the shameful acts of oppression which had subsequently afflicted other nations, eliminating them, so to speak, in the moment of their birth. All contemporary social assassinations derive from the partition of Poland; it is a proposition of which all current political misdeeds are corollaries. Not a despot, not a traitor in the past near-century but in one way and another has paraphrased and endorsed that criminal act. When the history of modern betrayals is compiled, it will be first on the list. The Congress of Vienna examined it before committing its own crime. The ‘tally-ho’ was in 1772, the ‘kill’ in 1815. Such was Feuilly’s thesis. The penniless workman had constituted himself the guardian of Justice, and Justice had rewarded him with a touch of greatness. The right, indeed, is indestructible. Warsaw can no more be Tartar than Venice can be Teutonic. Kings waste their energies in that contention, and lose their honour. Sooner or later the submerged nation rises again to the surface; Greece is still Greece and Italy, Italy. The struggle of the right against the deed persists for ever. The theft of a people can never be justified. These august swindles have no future. A nation cannot be shaped as though it were a pocket handkerchief.
Courfeyrac had a father who was addressed as Monsieur de Courfeyrac, a belief in that particle being one of the misconceptions of the Restoration bourgeoisie in the matter of aristocracy and titles of nobility. As we know, it has no real significance. But the bourgeoisie in the days of La Minerve esteemed it so highly that many who had legitimately borne it were constrained to abandon it, Monsieur de Constant de Rebecque becoming plain Benjamin Constant, and Monsieur de Lafayette plain Monsieur Lafayette. Not wishing to be behindhand, Courfeyrac called himself plain Courfeyrac
Where Courfeyrac is concerned we might almost leave it at that, simply adding: for Courfeyrac read Tholomyès, the one-time lover of Fantine. He possessed that youthful ardour that may be termed the infernal beauty of the spirit. Later it fades like the grace and beauty of a kitten, becoming, on two legs, a bourgeois, and on four legs a tabby-cat. This is a type of individual that constantly recurs in seats of learning, as though its quality were handed down from generation to generation. Anyone listening to Courfeyrac in 1828 might have been hearing Tholomyès in 1817. Only, Courfeyrac was a decent young man. Despite their superficial resemblance, the difference between them was great. Inwardly they were poles apart. In the heart of Tholomyès there was a pander, in Courfeyrac a paladin.
Enjolras was the leader, Combeferre the guide and Courfeyrac the centre. The others shed more light, but he shed more warmth. He had, indeed, all the qualities of a centre, both roundness and radiation.
Bahorel had had a share in the bloody riot of June 1822, occasioned by the funeral of Lallemand, a student who had been killed in a liberal demonstration. Bahorel was a creature of good intentions but a dangerous ally, courageous, spendthrift, generous to the point of prodigality, voluble to the point of eloquence, bold to the point of audacity, the best possible material for the devil to work on, with opinions as crimson as his waistcoats. He was a born agitator: that is to say, he enjoyed nothing more than a quarrel except a rebellion, and nothing more than a rebellion except a revolution. He was always ready to smash a window, strip a street of its cobbles and then overthrow a government, just to see what would come of it – an eleventh-year student. He perceived the right but did not follow it. His motto was, ‘No lawyers’ and his coat-of-arms might have been a bedside table on which was a mortarboard. Whenever he passed the School of Law, which happened seldom, he buttoned his tail-coat, the top-coat having not yet been invented, as a precaution against contamination. He said of the school building, ‘What a handsome old person!’ and of the dean, Monsieur Delvincourt, ‘What a noble monument!’ His courses furnished him with matter for songs and his professors with subjects for caricature. He squandered a fairly large allowance in idleness, something of the order of three thousand francs. His family were farmers whom he had taught to respect their son. He said of them, ‘They’re peasants, not bourgeois. That’s why they’ve got some sense.’
Bahorel, a creature of whims, frequented a number of cafés. The others had regular habits, he had none. He strolled. To err is human, to stroll is Parisian. But with all this he had an acute mind and was more given to thought than he appeared to be. He served as a link between the ABC Society and other groups, still not fully constituted, which were destined later to take shape.
In this conclave of youthful heads there was one which was bald.
The Marquis d’Avaray, whom Louis XVIII made a duke for having helped him into a hired cab on the day of his emigration, has related that when the king disembarked at Calais on his return to France in 1814, a man approached him with a petition. ‘What is it you want?’ the king asked. ‘If it please your Majesty, a post-office’ … ‘What’s your name?’ … ‘My name is L’Aigle.’
The king frowned, glanced at the written petition and saw that the name was spelt ‘Lesgle’. This un-Napoleonic spelling amused him and he began to smile. ‘The fact is, Sire,’ said the man, ‘that one of my forebears was a dog-minder who was nicknamed Lesgueules (the jowls). That is the origin of my name. Lesgueules has been shortened to Lesgle and corrupted to L’Aigle’ … This caused the king’s smile to widen and later the man got his post-office. Whether by accident or design it was at Meaux (or ‘Mots’).
The bald member of the group was the son of this Lesgle, and he signed himself Laigle (de Meaux). His comrades rounded off the joke by calling him Bossuet.
Bossuet was a cheerful but unlucky young man, notable for the fact that he succeeded in nothing. On the other hand, he laughed at everything. He was bald at the age of twenty-five. His father had wound up with a house and land, but the son had promptly lost both in an ill-advised speculation. Nothing of his inheritance remained. He possessed learning and wit, but both miscarried. Nothing went right for him, everything failed him, all his undertakings went awry. If he tried to split logs he split his finger. If he acquired a mistress he rapidly discovered that he also had a new male friend. He was the constant victim of mischance, hence his merriment. He said, ‘I spend my life walking under ladders.’ Nothing surprised him, for he took these accidents for granted, smiling at the mockery of fate like someone who joins in the joke. He was poor, but his store of good humour was inexhaustible. He was always down to his last penny, but never to his last laugh. He greeted adversity like an old friend, patted disaster on the back, and was on first-name terms with fatality – ‘Well, Old Man of the Sea!’ This constant harassing had made him inventive. He was endlessly resourceful. Although he had no money he found the means, when he was in the mood, to squander ‘fantastic sums’. On one occasion, so he said, he spent ‘a hundred francs’ on supper with a streetwalker, and at the height of the orgy delivered himself of the resounding phrase, ‘Daughter of five crowns, pull off my boots!’
Bossuet was slowly heading for the legal profession – reading law, that is to say, in the fashion of Bahorel. He had little in the way of lodging, sometimes none at all; he roosted with one friend or another but most often with Joly, a medical student two years younger than Bossuet.
Joly was a youthful malade imaginaire. Such medicine as he had learned had made him more a patient than a doctor. At twenty-three he considered himself a chronic invalid and he spent his life inspecting his tongue in the mirror. He maintained that man was subject to magnetism like a compass-needle, and placed his bed with its head pointing north and its feet south so that his circulation might not be affected by the attraction of the poles. He felt his pulse in thundery weather. For the rest, he was the gayest of them all. His youthful inconsistencies, exaggerated, morbid but light-hearted, blended harmoniously together to make an eccentric, agreeable young man to whom his comrades applied the English word ‘jolly’. Joly had a habit of rubbing his nose with the knob of his cane, the sign of a sagacious mind.
All these young men, so diverse but who, when all is said, deserved to be taken seriously, had a religion in common: Progress. All were the direct descendants of the French Revolution, and even the most frivolous became serious at the mention of the year 1789. Their fathers in the flesh had been royalists, feuillants, doctrinaires of all kinds, but it made no odds. Those earlier contradictions meant nothing to this younger generation with the pure blood of principle coursing through its veins. They stood, without having passed through any intermediary stages, for uncompromising right and absolute duty. United and initiated, they were the underground portrayal of the ideal.
But amid these hot-blooded and passionate believers there was one sceptic, attracted to them, it would seem, by force of contrast. This was Grantaire, who ordinarily signed himself with the letter R – a play on the pronunciation of his name, grand R [or ‘capital R’]. Grantaire was a young man who made a point of believing in nothing. He was, however, one of those students who acquire a wide diversity of knowledge during their time in Paris. He knew that the best coffee was to be had at Lemblin’s, that the best billiard-room was at the Café Voltaire, that the best rolls and nicest girls were to be found at the Ermitage on the Boulevard du Maine, excellent chicken at Mère Saguet’s, bouillabaisse at the Barrière de la Cunette and a particularly good little white wine at the Barrière du Combat. He knew the best places for everything, besides being a boxer, gymnast and dancer, and skilled in the use of the singlestick. A great drinker into the bargain. He was astonishingly ugly, so much so that the prettiest boot-embroiderer of the day, Irma Boissy, was so revolted by his looks as to declare him to be impossible. But this in no way discouraged Grantaire, who gazed tenderly and fixedly at all women with an air of saying, ‘If I chose’, and strove to persuade his comrades that he was universally sought after.
Such words and phrases as ‘rights of the people’, ‘rights of man’, ‘the social contract’, ‘the French Revolution’, republic, democracy, humanity, civilization, religion, progress, came very near to meaning nothing whatever to Grantaire, who merely smiled at them. Scepticism, that dry-rot of the intellect, had left him without a whole thought in his head. He lived in irony, and his motto was, ‘The only certainty is a full glass.’ He was scornful of allegiance to any cause, as derisive of brother as of father, of the young Robespierre as of Loizerolles – ‘A fat lot of good it did them, getting killed.’ He said of the crucifix, ‘Well, that’s one gallows that worked.’ Womanizer, gambler, profligate and often drunk, he annoyed that circle of young dreamers by constantly humming a ditty in praise of Henri IV, which also extolled women and wine.
But, sceptic that he was, he had one fanatical devotion, not for an idea, a creed, an art or a science, but for a man – for Enjolras. Grantaire admired, loved, and venerated Enjolras. The anarchic questioner of all beliefs had attached himself to the most absolute of all that circle of believers. Enjolras had conquered him not by any force of reason but by character. It is a not uncommon phenomenon. The sceptic clinging to a believer is something as elementary as the law of complementary colours. We are drawn to what we lack. No one loves daylight more than a blind man. The dwarf adores the drum-major. The toad has its eyes upturned to Heaven, and for what? – to watch the flight of birds. Grantaire, earthbound in doubt, loved to watch Enjolras soaring in the upper air of faith. He needed Enjolras. Without being fully aware of it, or seeking to account for it to himself, he was charmed by that chaste, upright, inflexible, and candid nature. Instinctively he was attracted to his opposite. His flabby, incoherent, and shapeless thinking attached itself to Enjolras as to a spinal column. He was in any case a compound of apparently incompatible elements, at once ironical and friendly, affectionate beneath his seeming indifference. His mind could do without faith, but his heart could not do without friendship: a profound contradiction, for affection in itself is faith. Such was his nature. There are men who seem born to be two-sided. They are Pollux, Patrocles, Nisus, Ephestion. They can live only in union with the other who is their reverse side; their name is one of a pair, always preceded by the conjunction ‘and’; their lives are not their own; they are the other side of a destiny which is not theirs. Grantaire was one of those, the reverse side of Enjolras. Truly the satellite of Enjolras, he formed one of that circle of young men, went everywhere with, them and was only happy in their company. His delight was to see those figures moving amid the mists of wine, and they bore with him because of his good humour.
Enjolras, the believer, despised the sceptic and soberly deplored the drunkard. His attitude towards him was one of pitying disdain. Grantaire was an unwelcome Ephestion. But, roughly treated though he was by Enjolras, harshly repulsed and rejected, he always came back, saying of him: ‘What a splendid statue!’
On a certain afternoon which, as will be seen, has its bearing on the events previously related, Laigle de Meaux stood voluptuously propped in the dorway of the Café Musain, looking like a caryatid on holiday, idle except for his thoughts. He was gazing over the Place Saint-Michel. To stand with one’s back against something upright is a manner of dozing on one’s feet which is not displeasing to dreamers. Laigle de Meaux was musing without sorrow over a trifling misadventure which had befallen him two days previously at the School of Law, modifying his plans for the future, which were in any case sufficiently vague.
A state of reverie does not prevent a cab from passing or the dreamer from observing it. Through the mists of his meditations, Laigle de Meaux drowsily perceived a two-wheeled vehicle moving slowly round the Place as though uncertain of its destination. What was it looking for? Seated in the cab was a young man with a bulky travelling bag to which was affixed a card bearing in large black letters the name MARIUS PONTMERCY.
The sight of this name aroused Laigle. He straightened himself and called:
‘Monsieur Marius Pontmercy?’
The cab stopped. The young man, who seemed also to have been plunged in thought, looked up.
‘Eh?’
‘You are Monsieur Marius Pontmercy?’
‘Certainly.’
I’ve been looking for you,’ said Laigle de Meaux.
‘What do you mean?’ asked Marius, who had just left his grandfather’s house and was now staring at someone he had never seen before. ‘I don’t know you.’
‘I don’t know you either,’ said Laigle.
Marius frowned, thinking he had encountered a practical joker. He was not at that moment in the best of humours or prepared to put up with this kind of pleasantry in the open street. Laigle de Meaux was unabashed.
‘Weren’t you at Law School the day before yesterday?’
‘Possibly.’
‘You certainly were.’
‘Are you a student?’ asked Marius.
‘Yes, monsieur, I am a student like yourself, and the day before yesterday I chanced to drop in at the school. One has these whims. The professor was calling the roll. As you know, they’re particularly tiresome on these occasions. If you fail to answer after your name has been called three times it is struck off the list, and that means sixty francs down the drain.’
Marius was now listening with interest. Laigle proceeded:
‘The professor was Blondeau. You know what he’s like, with his pointed nose and spiteful nature. He delights in spotting absentees. He had craftily begun the roll-call at the letter P, and I wasn’t paying attention because that isn’t my initial. It was going quite well, no defaulters, all present and correct. But then he called “Marius Pontmercy” and there was no reply. He repeated it more loudly, looking hopeful, and when there was still no reply he picked up his pen. But I, monsieur, have bowels of compassion. I thought to myself, here is a good man about to be struck off, a living, breathing fellow-mortal who is unpunctual. Not a good student. Not a lead-bottomed student who studies, a Simon Pure pedant, bursting with art and letters, theology and erudition, cut and dried to the pattern prescribed by the Faculty. Here is a noble idler who enjoys life, who plays truant, who chases girls, who may at this very moment be in bed with my mistress. He must be saved! Down with Blondeau! And so, when Blondeau, having dipped his pen in the ink and gazing with beady eyes round the assembly repeated for the third time, “Marius Pontmercy,” I answered, “Present!” In consequence of which you were not struck off.’
‘Monsieur, I -’ began Marius.
‘But I was,’ said Laigle de Meaux.
‘But why?’ asked Marius.
‘It’s quite simple. I had answered from near the podium, and then I moved towards the door to slip away. But he was staring fixedly at me, and with a diabolical cunning he switched back to the letter L, which is my initial. I come from Meaux and my name is Lesgle.’
‘L’Aigle!’ exclaimed Marius.’ The Eagle! What a splendid name.’
‘So Blondeau called out the splendid name and I answered, “Present!” upon which, looking at me with a tigerish satisfaction, he smiled and said, “If you are Pontmercy you cannot be Lesgle,” a remark uncomplimentary to yourself but grievous only to me. Having said which, he struck me off.’
‘I’m mortified,’ said Marius.
‘Before going further,’ said Laigle, ‘I insist upon burying Blondeau with a few well-chosen phrases. We will suppose him to be dead. It would call for no great alteration in his skinniness, his pallor, his coldness, his stiffness or his smell. I pronounce the words, Frudimini qui judicatis terram – take note, oh judges of earth. Here lies Blondeau, Blondeau the nose, the willing ox of discipline, the slave of order, the destroying angel of the roll-call, who was upright, square, punctilious, inflexible, honest, and hideous. After which God will remove his name as he removed mine.’
‘I’m most distressed …’ said Marius.
‘Young man,’ said Laigle de Meaux, ‘let this be a warning to you. In future be punctual.’
‘I owe you a thousand apologies.’
‘Do not expose your fellows to the risk of being struck off.’
‘I’m really extremely sorry -’
Laigle burst out laughing.
‘And I’m delighted. I was in danger of becoming a lawyer and this has saved me. After all, I shall not defend the widow or attack the orphan. No gown and no rostrum. I have been thrown out, and I owe it to you, Monsieur Pontmercy. I would like to pay you a visit of gratitude. Where do you live?’
‘In this cab,’ said Marius.
‘A sign of wealth,’ said Laigle calmly. ‘I congratulate you. You have a lodging worth nine thousand francs a year.’
At this moment Courfeyrac emerged from the café. Marius was smiling sadly.
‘I have had it for two hours and I would like to get out of it. The fact is, I don’t know where to go.’
‘Monsieur,’ said Courfeyrac, ‘come to the place where I live.’
‘I should have the priority,’ said Laigle, ‘but I don’t live anywhere.’
‘Dry up, Bossuet,’ said Courfeyrac
‘Bossuet?’ said Marius, ‘I thought your name was Laigle.’
‘A jest,’ said Laigle. ‘The eagle of words. They call me Bossuet.’
Courfeyrac got into the cab and directed the driver to the Hôtel de la Porte Saint-Jacques. By the evening Marius was installed in that hotel, in a room next to Courfeyrac’s own.
Within a few days Marius and Courfeyrac were friends. Youth is a time of quick resilience and the rapid healing of wounds. Marius found that in company with Courfeyrac he could breathe freely, a sufficiently novel experience. Courfeyrac asked no questions, nor even thought of doing so. At that age the face tells everything and words are unnecessary. One can say of a young man that he has a speaking countenance. A single look, and we know him.
But one morning Courfeyrac did put a question to Marius. He asked abruptly:
‘By the way, have you any political views?’
‘Of course,’ said Marius, slightly ruffled.
‘Well, what are you?’
‘I’m a Bonapartist democrat.’
‘A wary compromise,’ commented Courfeyrac.
The next day he took Marius to the Café Musain. Murmuring with a smile, ‘I must introduce you to the revolution,’ he led him into the back room used by the ABC Society and presented him to his friends with the single word, ‘A novice’.
Marius had fallen into a hornet’s nest of lively minds, albeit, taciturn and sober though he normally was, he was no less winged or capable of stinging than they. Being a solitary both by force of circumstances and inclination, and given to self-communion, he was at first somewhat dismayed by the tumult with which these young men assailed him, the hubbub of outspoken, unbridled thoughts, some so remote from his own thinking that he could not grasp them. He heard philosophy, literature, art, history, and religion discussed in terms that were quite new to him. New vistas were opened up, and since he could not get them in any perspective he was not sure that they were not visions of chaos. When he discarded his grandfather’s views in favour of those of his father he had thought that his mind was made up; but now, in some perturbation and without wholly admitting it to himself, he began to suspect that this was not the case. His whole outlook began again to change; all his previous notions were called in question in a process of internal upheaval that he found almost painful. It seemed that his new friends held nothing sacred. No matter what the subject, it gave rise to forthright language that was disconcerting to his still-timid mind.
A theatre poster, announcing a new production of a stock repertory ‘classic’, came up for discussion, and Bahorel exclaimed, ‘To hell with these old bourgeois tragedies!,’ to which Combeferre replied:
‘You’re wrong, Bahorel. The bourgeoisie adore tragedies and they must be allowed to go on doing so. Costume-drama has its place in the scheme of things, and I am not one of those who in the name of Aeschylus deny it the right to exist Nature contains its abortions, and its self-parodies. Take a beak that isn’t a beak, wings that aren’t wings, fins that aren’t fins, paws that aren’t paws, agonized squawks that make you want to laugh, and you have a duck. But if domestic poultry can exist side by side with real birds I see no reason why our “classic” tragedy should not exist side by side with the antique.’
It happened one day that Marius was strolling with Enjolras and Courfeyrac along the Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Courfeyrac took him by the arm.
‘Do you see where we are? This is the former Rue Plâtrière, now named the Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau after a curious household which lived here sixty years ago. Jean-Jacques and Thérèse. Children were born to them. Thérèse brought them forth and Jean-Jacques threw them out.’
Enjolras said sternly:
‘I won’t hear a word against Jean-Jacques. He is a man I revere. True, he disowned his children; but he adopted the people.’
None of the young men ever used the word ‘Emperor’. Jean Prouvaire occasionally referred to Napoleon; the others all called him Bonaparte. Enjolras pronounced it Buonaparte.
One of the many conversations to which Marius listened, occasionally joining in, had a profoundly disturbing effect upon him.
It took place in the back room at the Café Musain on an evening when nearly all the members of the ABC Society were present. The big lamp had been ceremonially lighted. They had been talking casually of one thing and another, without excitement or uproar, each of them except Enjolras and Marius holding forth more or less at random. These gatherings of comrades can be tranquil occasions. Separate conversations were going on in all four corners of the room, words flung occasionally from one group to another.
No woman was allowed in that room except Louison, the scullery-maid, who passed through it now and then on her way to the kitchen, which they called the ‘laboratory’.
Grantaire, who was decidedly drunk, was booming away in his own corner, arguing and refuting at the top of his voice. Suddenly he cried:
‘I’m thirsty! I have a dream, brothers – that the great wine-tun of Heidelberg is seized with apoplexy and I am one of the leeches attached to it. I want to drink. I want to forget life. Life is the disgusting invention of God-knows-who. It doesn’t last and it isn’t worth anything. We twist our necks trying to stay alive. Life is a stage setting in which almost nothing is real. Happiness is an old canvas painted on one side. “All is vanity,” said the preacher in Ecclesiastes, and I agree with him, even if he never existed. Nothingness, not wanting to go naked, has clothed herself in vanity, which is the dressing-up of everything in big words. The kitchen becomes a laboratory, the dancer a professor of the dance, the fairground tumbler a gymnast, the boxer a pugilist, the apothecary a chemist, the wig-maker an artist, the house-botcher an architect, the jockey a sportsman, the wood-louse a pterygibranchiate. Vanity has an outside and an inside. The outside is the negro decked in beads, and the inside is the philosopher in rags. I weep for the one and laugh at the other. Our so-called honours and dignities, and even true dignity and honour, are generally an empty shell. Kings make a mock of human pride. Caligula made his horse a consul, Charles II knighted a sirloin of beef. Thus we may array ourselves between the Consul Incitatus and the most excellent Sir Sirloin. And the true worth of man is scarcely more admirable. Listen to any man praising his neighbour. White is the ferocious enemy of white; if the lily could speak, how it would tear the dove to shreds! A bigot talking of another bigot is as venomous as a snake. It is a pity that I am ignorant; I would tell you countless things if only I knew them. I have always had brains, but when I was at school I spent my time robbing orchards instead of poring over my books. So much for me. As for you others, I value you. I care nothing for your perfections, your excellences and good qualities. Every virtue flows over into vice. Prudence is the neighbour of miserliness, generosity of prodigality, bravery of bravado; excessive piety becomes sanctimoniousness; there are as many vices in virtue as holes in Diogenes’s cloak. Which do we admire more, the killed or the killer, Caesar or Brutus? Generally it is the killer. Long live Brutus, who killed. That’s virtue for you! Virtue perhaps, but madness as well. There are strange flaws in those great men. The Brutus who stabbed Caesar was in love with the statue of a little boy, the work of the Greek sculptor Strongylion who also carved the statue of the Amazon Eucnemon, renowned for the beauty of her legs, which Nero took with him on his travels. Strongylion left only those two statues, and they are a link between Brutus and Nero, each of whom loved one of them. History is one long repetition, each century plagiarizing the next. The battle of Marengo copies the battle of Pydna, and Clovis’s victory at Tolbiac resembles Napoleon’s victory at Austerlitz as closely as two drops of blood. I care nothing for victory. Nothing is more pointless than to win, the real triumph is to win over. But try to prove anything! We are content with success, which is mediocrity; and to conquer is misery. Alas, we meet everywhere with vanity and betrayal. Everything bows to success, even grammar. Si volet usus, if use ordains it, said Horace. So I scorn the human race. To come down from the whole to the part, am I to admire one particular people? Which people, may I ask? The Greeks? The Athenians, those Parisians of the ancient world, killed Phocion, as it might have been Coligny, and so toadied to their tyrants that Anacephores said of Pisistratus, “His urine attracts the bees.” The most considerable man in Greece for fifty years was the grammarian, Philetas, who was so small and frail that he had to wear soles of lead to prevent himself being carried away by the wind. In the main square of Corinth there was a statue carved by Silanion and catalogued by Pliny. It was a statue of Episthates. And who was he? He was the wrestler who invented the cross-buttock. So much for the glory of Greece. Let us move on. Am I to admire England or France? Why France? Because of Paris? I have told you what I think of Athens. Why England? Because of London? I detest Carthage. And then London, the metropolis of luxury, is also the capital of poverty. Every year a hundred people die of hunger in the parish of Charing Cross alone. That’s Albion. I may add, to put the lid on it, that I have seen an Englishwoman dancing with a crown of roses and blue spectacles. So to hell with England. But if I refuse to esteem John Bull should I therefore esteem Brother Jonathan? I have no fondness for that slave-owner. If we leave out “Time is money” what is left of England; and if we leave out “Cotton is king” what remains of America? Germany is lymphatic and Italy is bilious. Should we then love Russia? Voltaire did so, but he admired China as well. I will agree that there are beauties to be found in Russia, among others that of a strong despotism. But I feel sorry for the despots. Their health is precarious. One Alexis was beheaded, one Peter was stabbed, one Paul was strangled and another stamped to death by jackboots. Various Ivans have had their throats cut and several Nicholases and Basils have been poisoned. All of which suggests that the imperial residence of a Russian Tsar is a decidedly unhealthy place. All civilized people have one offering to propose for the admiration of the thinker: it is war. But warfare, civilized warfare, contains and summarizes every form of banditry, from brigandage on a mountain-pass to the marauding raids of the Comanche Indians in the American west. Never mind, you may say to me, Europe is at least better than Asia. I will agree with you that Asia is a farce, but I do not see that we have much reason to deride the Grand Lama, we western peoples who have adopted into our modes and fashions all the complicated filth of majesty, from Queen Isabella’s dirty chemise to the Dauphin’s holed chair. Gentlemen of the human race, I say to hell with the lot of you. They drink the most beer in Brussels, the most eau-de-vie in Stockholm, the most chocolate in Madrid, the most gin in Amsterdam, the most wine in London, the most coffee in Constaninople and the most absinthe in Paris – and that is all we need to know. On the whole Paris comes off best. In Paris even the street scavengers are sybarites; Diogenes would have enjoyed being a scavenger in the Place Maubert as much as he enjoyed being a philosopher in the Piraeus. And here’s something else you should know. The scavengers’ drinking-places are called bibines. I salute all drinking-places, bars, bistros, cabarets, guinguettes, the bibines of the scavengers, and the caravenserais of caliphs. I am a voluptuary. I dine chez Richard at forty sous a head, but I must have a Persian carpet on which to roll Cleopatra naked. And here comes Cleopatra. Oh, it’s you, Louison. How are you, my love?’
Then Grantaire, something more than drunk and pouring out words, seized hold of the scullery-wench and sought to drive her into his corner of the back room of the Café Musain. When Bossuet put out a hand to restrain him he became more voluble than ever.
‘Hands off, Aigle de Meaux. You can do no good with Hippocratic gestures offering soothing potions. I refuse to be calmed. Besides, I am depressed. What can I say to you? Mankind is shoddy and misshapen. The butterfly is a success, but Man is a failure. God made a mess of that particular animal. A crowd is an assembly of ugliness and each member of it is a wretch. Femme rhymes with infame – woman with infamy. Yes, I am suffering from spleen, complicated by melancholy, nostalgia and hypochondria, and so I rant and rage and splutter and bore and irritate myself, and may God go to the devil’
‘Well, shut up in any case,’ said Bossuet, who was discussing a point of law, up to the neck in a flood of legal terminology of which the following is a sample:
‘For my part, although I’m scarcely a lawyer, at best only a half-taught amateur, this is what I maintain – that by Norman custom, a token sum should be paid to the lord at Michaelmas every year, subject to the rights of other title-holders whether by lease or copyhold or right of succession, whether mortgagors or mortgagees, holders of common or woodland rights –’
‘Woodland rites,’ sang Grantaire. ‘Echo, sweet nymph of nowhere.’
On a quiet table near that of Grantaire there were arrayed a sheaf of paper, ink-well and pen, flanked by two glasses, in evidence of the fact that a stage-comedy was being roughed out. Its two compilers were talking in low voices with their heads close together.
‘Better find some names first. When we’ve got the names they’ll give us a plot.’
‘That’s true. You dictate and I’ll write them down.’
‘How about Monsieur Dorimon?’
‘A rentier?’
‘Undoubtedly. And with a daughter, Célestine.’
‘Célestine. And then?’
‘Colonel Sainval’
‘Sainval’s too ordinary. Call him Valsin.’
Alongside the aspiring dramatists another couple, also taking advantage of the general hubbub to talk in low voices, were discussing a duel. An older man, aged thirty, was telling a youngster of eighteen about his prospective adversary.
‘You’ll have to watch out for yourself. He’s a fine swordsman, no nonsense about him, no wasted passes, always on the attack, good wrists, quick reflexes and, damme, he’s left-handed!’
In the corner opposite Grantaire, Joly and Bahorel were talking about their love-affairs over a game of dominoes.
‘You’re lucky,’ said Joly. ‘Your mistress is always laughing.’
‘It’s a mistake on her part,’ said Bahorel. ‘A mistress shouldn’t laugh too much. It encourages you to be unfaithful. If she always looks happy your conscience doesn’t trouble you, whereas if she looks miserable it does.’
‘Wretch! A happy woman is a lovely thing. And you say you never quarrel.’
‘That’s because of the treaty we signed when we formed our little Holy Alliance. We drew a frontier and we never intrude on the other’s territory. Hence the peace between us.’
‘Peace,’ said Joly, ‘is happiness in process of digestion.’
‘And what about you, Joly? How’s your squabble going with Mamselle – you know who I mean.’
‘She’s still holding me off with cruel persistence.’
‘And yet you look wan and thin enough to melt any girl’s heart.’
‘Alas.’
‘If I were you, I’d ditch her.’
‘That’s easy to say.’
‘And easy to do. Her name’s Musichetta, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. But, my dear Bahorel, she’s a wonderful girl, very literary, with small hands and feet, well dressed, fair complexion, dimples and eyes like a fortune-teller. I’m mad about her.’
“Then, my dear boy, you’ll have to woo her. Be elegant and cut a dash. Get Staub the tailor to make you a pair of doeskin trousers, like Lucien de Rubempré in Illusions perdues. That would help.’
‘But at what a cost!’ cried Grantaire.
The third comer of the room was immersed in a discussion of poetry, pagan mythology as opposed to Christian mythology, with Jean Prouvaire taking the side of Olympus. Jean Prouvaire was diffident only in repose. When overtaken by excitement a sort of wild gaiety was mingled with his ardour and he became at once humorous and lyrical.
‘We must not insult the antique gods,’ he said. ‘Perhaps they haven’t left us after all. I can never feel that Jupiter is dead. You may say that they were all dreams; but even now, when the dreaming is over, all the great pagan myths are still with us. A mountain like Vignemale, for instance, with the outline of a fortress, still looks to me like the headdress of Cybele, and I have yet to be convinced that Pan doesn’t come at night and blow through the hollow trunks of willows, covering the holes in turn with his hand …’
In the last corner they were talking politics, dissecting Louis XVIII’s Charter, with Combeferre mildly defending it and Courfeyrac tearing it to shreds. They had a copy of the famous document in front of them, and he picked it up and brandished it, punctuating his discourse with the rustle of paper.
‘In the first place, I’ve no use for kings. I’d like to see them abolished if only for economic reasons. A king is a parasite, and you don’t get him for nothing. Have you any idea what they cost? At the death of François I the French national debt amounted to thirty thousand livres revenue; at the death of Louis XIV it was two milliard six hundred million, at twenty-six livres to the mark, which, according to Desmarest, was the equivalent of four milliard five hundred millions in 1760 and today would be the equivalent of twelve milliards. Secondly, with all respect to Combeferre, the concession of a charter is a dangerous way of doing things. To ease the transition, smooth the passage, damp the shock, slide the country imperceptibly from monarchy into democracy – all those are detestable proceedings. The people must never be led by the nose. Principles wilt and wither away in that constitutional fog. There must be no half-measures, no compromises, no concessions offered by the king to the people. Those offerings always include a Clause Fourteen, empowering the monarch to make special decrees “in the national interest” – giving with one hand and taking back with the other. I absolutely reject the Charter. It’s nothing but a smoke-screen covering a lie. A nation which accepts it is abandoning its rights. Rights must be whole or they are nothing. The Charter – no!’
It was winter and two logs were crackling in the hearth. The temptation was more than Courfeyrac could resist. Crumpling the document, he tossed it on the fire, remarking dryly:
‘So Louis XVIII’s master-stroke goes up in flames!’
This was the tone of the gathering, sarcasm, jest and foolery, the thing that the French call wit and the English call humour, good taste and bad taste, good reasoning and bad, the tumult of talk volleyed from every corner of the room to echo like a cheerful cannonade above the talkers’ heads.
What is admirable in the clash of young minds is that no one can foresee the spark that sets off an explosion, or predict what kind of explosion it will be. A moment of light-heartedness produces a burst of laughter, and then, at the height of the merriment, a serious note is struck. A hasty word or an idle phrase may give the proceedings an entirely new turn, opening up unexplored fields. Chance is the conductor of those youthful symphonies.
A sudden thought pierced through the confusion of a talk to which Grantaire, Bahorel, Prouvaire, Bossuet, Combeferre, and Courfeyrac were all contributing. How does it happen that a single phrase may suddenly attract the notice of every person in a room? As we have said, there is no knowing. In the midst of the hubbub Bossuet concluded whatever he had been saying to Combeferre by citing a date:
‘18 June 1815 – Waterloo.’
At the mention of Waterloo, Marius, who had been leaning over his table with his chin resting on his hand and a glass of water beside him, suddenly looked up and gazed fixedly at the company.
‘Strange, isn’t it,’ said Courfeyrac. ‘I’ve always been struck by that number, 18. It is Bonaparte’s fatal number. Put Louis in front of it, and Brumaire after it – Louis XVIII and 18 Brumaire – and you have the man’s whole destiny, the end triggered by the beginning.’
Enjolras, who had hitherto been silent, now spoke.
‘You should say, the crime matched by its expiation.’
The word ‘crime’ was more than Marius could accept, excited as he already was by the mention of Waterloo. He rose and walked slowly to the map of France hanging on the wall. In the bottom corner, in a separate compartment, was the map of Corsica.
‘Corsica,’ he said, pointing to it. ‘A small island that made France great.’
It was as though a cold wind had blown. All conversation ceased and a feeling of expectancy filled the room. Enjolras, whose blue eyes seemed to be gazing into space, said without looking at Marius:
‘France did not need Corsica to make her great. She is great because she is France.’
But Marius was not disposed to leave it at that. He turned to face Enjolras and spoke in a voice trembling with emotion.
‘God forbid that I should seek to diminish France. But to associate her with Napoleon is not to diminish her. Let us be clear about that. I am a newcomer among you, and I must confess that you astonish me. Where do we all stand? Who are you, and who am I? Where do we stand about the Emperor? I’ve heard you call him Buonaparte, putting the accent on the “u” as the royalists do, and I may tell you that my grandfather goes even further and pronounces the final “e” as well. I think of you as young men, but where does your allegiance lie and what do you do about it? Whom do you admire if you do not admire the Emperor? What more do you want, what other great men, if that one is not good enough for you? He had everything. He was entire. He had in his brain the whole range of human faculties. He coded the laws like Justinian, was dictator like Caesar, and his conversation mingled the lightnings of Pascal with the thunderbolts of Tacitus. He made history and wrote it – his bulletins are epics. He combined the mathematics of Newton with the metaphors of Mahomet, and left behind him in the East words as great as the pyramids. At Tilsit he taught kingliness to emperors, at the Académie des Sciences he answered Laplace and in the Council of State he held his ground with Merlin. He infused soul into the calculations of some and the machinations of others. He was a lawyer among lawyers and an astronomer among astronomers. Like Cromwell, blowing out every other candle, he went to the Temple to bargain for a curtain-tassel. He saw everything and knew everything, which did not prevent him from rejoicing like the simplest of men over the cradle of his newborn son. And suddenly Europe found itself listening in terror to the march of armies, the thunder of artillery columns, the clouds of cavalry galloping like a tempest, the cries and the bugle-calls, the trembling of thrones while frontiers vanished from the map. They heard the sound of a superhuman blade being drawn from its sheath and they saw him towering on the horizon with flame in his hands and a dazzling light in his eyes, spreading amid the thunder his two great wings, the Grande Armée and the Vieille Garde, and they knew him for the Archangel of War!’
All were silent, and Enjolras bowed his head. Silence has always something of the effect of acquiescence or of the building of a wall. Scarcely pausing for breath, Marius continued with increasing vehemence.
‘Let us be fair, my friends. What more splendid destiny could befall any nation than to be the Empire of such an Emperor, when the nation is France and its genius is added to the genius of such a man? To rise and prevail, to march in triumph from capital to capital, to make kings of grenadiers and decree the downfall of dynasties; to change the face of Europe at the pace of a cavalry-charge; to feel, when you are threatened, that the sword you hold is the sword of God; to follow Hannibal, Caesar, and Charlemagne in the person of one man; to be the nation whose every dawn is greeted with the tidings of a new victory; to awaken to the salvoes of gunfire from the Invalides, and live in the brilliance of imperishable names, Marengo, Arcole, Austerlitz, Iéna, Wagram! … To make the French Empire the successor of Rome; to be the great nation that gave birth to the Grande Armée, sending its legions to the four corners of the world like a mountain sending forth its eagles; to be a nation ablaze with glory, sounding its titanic fanfare to echo down the corridors of history; to conquer the world twice over, by force of arms and by brilliance – all this is sublime! What can possibly be greater?’
‘To be free,’ said Combeferre.
And now it was Marius who bowed his head. The cool, incisive words had pierced like a swordthrust to the heart of his eloquence, and he felt his ardour evaporate. When at length he looked up, Combeferre was no longer there. Satisfied, no doubt, with that devastating reply, he had left the room, and the others had followed him, all save Enjolras, who, left alone with Marius, was now gravely regarding him. Marius, having by now somewhat recovered, did not yet consider himself beaten. Something of his fire remained, and would doubtless have been poured out in a further exordium to Enjolras had they not heard a voice in the passage outside. It was Combeferre, and this is the song he sang:
If Caesar had offered me
Glory and war
For which I must abandon
My mother’s love
I would say to great Caesar:
‘Take back your sceptre and your chariot.
I love my mother more, alas,
I love my mother more.’
The wistful tenderness with which Combeferre sang it invested the little song with a strange grandeur. Marius was staring thoughtfully at the ceiling. He repeated, half-unconsciously, ‘My mother? …’
And Enjolras laid a hand on his shoulder.
‘Citizen,’ he said, ‘my mother is the Republic’
That evening left Marius profoundly shaken and with a sense of obscure sadness, such a feeling as perhaps the earth knows when the ploughshare furrows it for the sowing of seed. It feels only the wound. The stirring of the seed and the joy of harvest come later.
Marius was filled with gloom. Having so lately found a faith, must he now renounce it? He told himself that he need not; he resolved not to doubt, and began despite himself to do so. To be torn between two creeds, one which one has not yet wholly abandoned and one which one has not yet embraced, this is intolerable; it is a half-light in which only a bat can be at ease. Marius, with his candid gaze, needed a true light; the twilight of doubt tormented him. However great his desire to stand firm and leave things as they were, he was inexorably compelled to go further; to reflect, to speculate, to prove. Where was his thinking to lead him? He greatly feared lest, having drawn so close to his father, he might now be drawn away from him, and the more he brooded the more did his perturbation grow. A barrier seemed to enclose him. He was in step neither with his grandfather nor with his friends, outrageous to the former and behind the times for the latter, and he had a sense of double isolation, both from the old and from the young. He gave up going to the Café Musain.
In his troubled state of mind, he gave little heed to certain prosaic aspects of life; but they were matters that could not be ignored. They brought themselves abruptly to his notice. The hotelkeeper came to his room and said:
‘Monsieur Courfeyrac has vouched for you, has he not?’
‘Yes.’
‘But I need money.’
‘Will you please ask Monsieur Courfeyrac if he can spare me a moment?’
Courfeyrac came to see him, and Marius told him what he had not thought of telling him until then, that for practical purposes he was alone in the world, having no parents.
‘So what’s to become of you?’ asked Courfeyrac.
‘I don’t know,’ said Marius.
‘What are you going to do?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘How much money have you?’
‘Fifteen francs.’
‘Do you want me to lend you some?’
‘No – never.’
‘Have you any clothes?’
‘Only these.’
‘Any jewellery?’
‘A watch.’
‘Silver?’
‘I know a second-hand dealer who will take your tail-coat and spare pair of trousers.’
‘Good.’
‘That’ll leave you with one pair of trousers, a waistcoat, a hat, and a jacket’
‘And my boots.’
‘You mean you won’t go barefoot? What luxury!’
‘That ought to be enough.’
‘And I know a clockmaker who will buy your watch.’
‘That’s good.’
‘No, it isn’t good. What will you do when the money’s gone?’
‘Whatever I have to do – anything honest.’
‘Do you know English?’
‘No.’
‘German?’
‘No.’
‘That’s a pity.’
‘Why?’
‘A friend of mine, a bookseller, is compiling a sort of encyclopedia. You might have translated articles for it, from English or German. It’s badly paid work, but one can live on it.’
‘Then I’ll learn English and German.’
‘And in the meantime?’
‘I’ll live on my clothes and my watch.’
The clothes fetched twenty francs and the watch forty-five francs.
‘That’s not bad,’ said Marius when they got back to the hotel. ‘With the fifteen francs I already have that makes eighty altogether.’
‘And what about the hotel bill?’ said Courfeyrac.
‘Oh, lord, I’d clean forgotten!’
The bill came to seventy francs.
‘The devil!’ said Courfeyrac. ‘So you’re to live on five francs while you’re learning English and five more while you’re learning German. You’ll either have to digest a language very quickly or make a hundred sous go a very long way.’
Meanwhile Aunt Gillenormand, who was at least a good soul in emergencies, had succeeded in discovering Marius’s address. One morning he received a letter from her and a sealed package containing the ‘sixty pistoles’ his grandfather had authorized – that is to say, six hundred francs in gold. He returned the money with a graceful letter saying that he had found a means of livelihood which would supply him with all his needs. At the moment he had three francs in the world.
His aunt did not tell his grandfather of this, fearing to add to the old gentleman’s fury. Besides which, he had told her never to mention that ‘blood-drinker’ again.
Marius left the Hôtel de la Porte Saint-Jacques, not wanting to run further into debt.