CHAPTER I--A GROUP WHICH BARELY MISSED BECOMING HISTORIC

  At that epoch, which was, to all appearances indifferent, a certainrevolutionary quiver was vaguely current. Breaths which had startedforth from the depths of '89 and '93 were in the air. Youth was onthe point, may the reader pardon us the word, of moulting. People wereundergoing a transformation, almost without being conscious of it,through the movement of the age. The needle which moves round thecompass also moves in souls. Each person was taking that step in advancewhich he was bound to take. The Royalists were becoming liberals,liberals were turning democrats. It was a flood tide complicated witha thousand ebb movements; the peculiarity of ebbs is to createintermixtures; hence the combination of very singular ideas; peopleadored both Napoleon and liberty. We are making history here. Thesewere the mirages of that period. Opinions traverse phases. Voltairianroyalism, a quaint variety, had a no less singular sequel, Bonapartistliberalism.

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

  These advanced opinions had a double foundation. A beginning of mysterymenaced "the established order of things," which was suspicious andunderhand. A sign which was revolutionary to the highest degree. Thesecond thoughts of power meet the second thoughts of the populace inthe mine. The incubation of insurrections gives the retort to thepremeditation of _coups d'état_.

  There did not, as yet, exist in France any of those vast underlyingorganizations, like the German _tugendbund_ and Italian Carbonarism; buthere and there there were dark underminings, which were in process ofthrowing off shoots. The Cougourde was being outlined at Aix; thereexisted at Paris, among other affiliations of that nature, the societyof the Friends of the A B C.

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

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

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

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

  This hall, which was tolerably remote from the café, with which it wasconnected by an extremely long corridor, had two windows and an exitwith a private stairway on the little Rue des Grès. There they smokedand drank, and gambled and laughed. There they conversed in very loudtones about everything, and in whispers of other things. An old mapof France under the Republic was nailed to the wall,--a sign quitesufficient to excite the suspicion of a police agent.

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

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

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

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

  Enjolras was a charming young man, who was capable of being terrible. Hewas angelically handsome. He was a savage Antinous. One would have said,to see the pensive thoughtfulness of his glance, that he had already,in some previous state of existence, traversed the revolutionaryapocalypse. He possessed the tradition of it as though he had been awitness. He was acquainted with all the minute details of the greataffair. A pontifical and warlike nature, a singular thing in a youth. Hewas an officiating priest and a man of war; from the immediate point ofview, a soldier of the democracy; above the contemporary movement, thepriest of the ideal. His eyes were deep, his lids a little red, hislower lip was thick and easily became disdainful, his brow was lofty. Agreat deal of brow in a face is like a great deal of horizon in a view.Like certain young men at the beginning of this century and the end ofthe last, who became illustrious at an early age, he was endowed withexcessive youth, and was as rosy as a young girl, although subject tohours of pallor. Already a man, he still seemed a child. His two andtwenty years appeared to be but seventeen; he was serious, it did notseem as though he were aware there was on earth a thing called woman.He had but one passion--the right; but one thought--to overthrowthe obstacle. On Mount Aventine, he would have been Gracchus; in theConvention, he would have been Saint-Just. He hardly saw the roses, heignored spring, he did not hear the carolling of the birds; the barethroat of Evadne would have moved him no more than it would have movedAristogeiton; he, like Harmodius, thought flowers good for nothingexcept to conceal the sword. He was severe in his enjoyments. Hechastely dropped his eyes before everything which was not the Republic.He was the marble lover of liberty. His speech was harshly inspired,and had the thrill of a hymn. He was subject to unexpected outbursts ofsoul. Woe to the love-affair which should have risked itself beside him!If any grisette of the Place Cambrai or the Rue Saint-Jean-de-Beauvais,seeing that face of a youth escaped from college, that page's mien,those long, golden lashes, those blue eyes, that hair billowing in thewind, those rosy cheeks, those fresh lips, those exquisite teeth, hadconceived an appetite for that complete aurora, and had tried her beautyon Enjolras, an astounding and terrible glance would have promptly shownher the abyss, and would have taught her not to confound the mightycherub of Ezekiel with the gallant Cherubino of Beaumarchais.

  By the side of Enjolras, who represented the logic of the Revolution,Combeferre represented its philosophy. Between the logic of theRevolution and its philosophy there exists this difference--that itslogic may end in war, whereas its philosophy can end only in peace.Combeferre complemented and rectified Enjolras. He was less lofty, butbroader. He desired to pour into all minds the extensive principles ofgeneral ideas: he said: "Revolution, but civilization"; and around themountain peak he opened out a vast view of the blue sky. The Revolutionwas more adapted for breathing with Combeferre than with Enjolras.Enjolras expressed its divine right, and Combeferre its natural right.The first attached himself to Robespierre; the second confined himselfto Condorcet. Combeferre lived the life of all the rest of the worldmore than did Enjolras. If it had been granted to these two young men toattain to history, the one would have been the just, the other the wiseman. Enjolras was the more virile, Combeferre the more humane. _Homo_and _vir_, that was the exact effect of their different shades.Combeferre was as gentle as Enjolras was severe, through naturalwhiteness. He loved the word _citizen_, but he preferred the word_man_. He would gladly have said: _Hombre_, like the Spanish. Heread everything, went to the theatres, attended the courses ofpublic lecturers, learned the polarization of light from Arago, grewenthusiastic over a lesson in which Geoffroy Sainte-Hilaire explainedthe double function of the external carotid artery, and the internal,the one which makes the face, and the one which makes the brain; hekept up with what was going on, followed science step by step, comparedSaint-Simon with Fourier, deciphered hieroglyphics, broke the pebblewhich he found and reasoned on geology, drew from memory a silkwormmoth, pointed out the faulty French in the Dictionary of the Academy,studied Puységur and Deleuze, affirmed nothing, not even miracles;denied nothing, not even ghosts; turned over the files of the_Moniteur_, reflected. He declared that the future lies in the handof the schoolmaster, and busied himself with educational questions. Hedesired that society should labor without relaxation at the elevation ofthe moral and intellectual level, at coining science, at putting ideasinto circulation, at increasing the mind in youthful persons, andhe feared lest the present poverty of method, the paltriness froma literary point of view confined to two or three centuries calledclassic, the tyrannical dogmatism of official pedants, scholasticprejudices and routines should end by converting our colleges intoartificial oyster beds. He was learned, a purist, exact, a graduate ofthe Polytechnic, a close student, and at the same time, thoughtful "evento chimæras," so his friends said. He believed in all dreams, railroads,the suppression of suffering in chirurgical operations, the fixing ofimages in the dark chamber, the electric telegraph, the steering ofballoons. Moreover, he was not much alarmed by the citadels erectedagainst the human mind in every direction, by superstition, despotism,and prejudice. He was one of those who think that science willeventually turn the position. Enjolras was a chief, Combeferre was aguide. One would have liked to fight under the one and to march behindthe other. It is not that Combeferre was not capable of fighting, he didnot refuse a hand-to-hand combat with the obstacle, and to attack it bymain force and explosively; but it suited him better to bring the humanrace into accord with its destiny gradually, by means of education, theinculcation of axioms, the promulgation of positive laws; and, betweentwo lights, his preference was rather for illumination than forconflagration. A conflagration can create an aurora, no doubt, but whynot await the dawn? A volcano illuminates, but daybreak furnishes astill better illumination. Possibly, Combeferre preferred the whitenessof the beautiful to the blaze of the sublime. A light troubled by smoke,progress purchased at the expense of violence, only half satisfied thistender and serious spirit. The headlong precipitation of a people intothe truth, a '93, terrified him; nevertheless, stagnation was stillmore repulsive to him, in it he detected putrefaction and death; on thewhole, he preferred scum to miasma, and he preferred the torrent to thecesspool, and the falls of Niagara to the lake of Montfaucon. Inshort, he desired neither halt nor haste. While his tumultuous friends,captivated by the absolute, adored and invoked splendid revolutionaryadventures, Combeferre was inclined to let progress, good progress, takeits own course; he may have been cold, but he was pure; methodical, butirreproachable; phlegmatic, but imperturbable. Combeferre would haveknelt and clasped his hands to enable the future to arrive in allits candor, and that nothing might disturb the immense and virtuousevolution of the races. _The good must be innocent_, he repeatedincessantly. And in fact, if the grandeur of the Revolution consistsin keeping the dazzling ideal fixedly in view, and of soaring thitherathwart the lightnings, with fire and blood in its talons, the beautyof progress lies in being spotless; and there exists between Washington,who represents the one, and Danton, who incarnates the other, thatdifference which separates the swan from the angel with the wings of aneagle.

  Jean Prouvaire was a still softer shade than Combeferre. His namewas Jehan, owing to that petty momentary freak which mingled with thepowerful and profound movement whence sprang the very essential studyof the Middle Ages. Jean Prouvaire was in love; he cultivated a potof flowers, played on the flute, made verses, loved the people, pitiedwoman, wept over the child, confounded God and the future in the sameconfidence, and blamed the Revolution for having caused the fall of aroyal head, that of André Chénier. His voice was ordinarily delicate,but suddenly grew manly. He was learned even to erudition, and almost anOrientalist. Above all, he was good; and, a very simple thing to thosewho know how nearly goodness borders on grandeur, in the matter ofpoetry, he preferred the immense. He knew Italian, Latin, Greek, andHebrew; and these served him only for the perusal of four poets: Dante,Juvenal, Æschylus, and Isaiah. In French, he preferred Corneille toRacine, and Agrippa d'Aubigné to Corneille. He loved to saunter throughfields of wild oats and corn-flowers, and busied himself with cloudsnearly as much as with events. His mind had two attitudes, one onthe side towards man, the other on that towards God; he studied orhe contemplated. All day long, he buried himself in social questions,salary, capital, credit, marriage, religion, liberty of thought,education, penal servitude, poverty, association, property, productionand sharing, the enigma of this lower world which covers the humanant-hill with darkness; and at night, he gazed upon the planets, thoseenormous beings. Like Enjolras, he was wealthy and an only son. He spokesoftly, bowed his head, lowered his eyes, smiled with embarrassment,dressed badly, had an awkward air, blushed at a mere nothing, and wasvery timid. Yet he was intrepid.

  Feuilly was a workingman, a fan-maker, orphaned both of father andmother, who earned with difficulty three francs a day, and had butone thought, to deliver the world. He had one other preoccupation, toeducate himself; he called this also, delivering himself. He had taughthimself to read and write; everything that he knew, he had learned byhimself. Feuilly had a generous heart. The range of his embrace wasimmense. This orphan had adopted the peoples. As his mother hadfailed him, he meditated on his country. He brooded with the profounddivination of the man of the people, over what we now call the _idea ofthe nationality_, had learned history with the express object ofraging with full knowledge of the case. In this club of young Utopians,occupied chiefly with France, he represented the outside world. He hadfor his specialty Greece, Poland, Hungary, Roumania, Italy. He utteredthese names incessantly, appropriately and inappropriately, with thetenacity of right. The violations of Turkey on Greece and Thessaly, ofRussia on Warsaw, of Austria on Venice, enraged him. Above all things,the great violence of 1772 aroused him. There is no more sovereigneloquence than the true in indignation; he was eloquent with thateloquence. He was inexhaustible on that infamous date of 1772, on thesubject of that noble and valiant race suppressed by treason, and thatthree-sided crime, on that monstrous ambush, the prototype and patternof all those horrible suppressions of states, which, since that time,have struck many a noble nation, and have annulled their certificate ofbirth, so to speak. All contemporary social crimes have their origin inthe partition of Poland. The partition of Poland is a theorem of whichall present political outrages are the corollaries. There has not beena despot, nor a traitor for nearly a century back, who has not signed,approved, counter-signed, and copied, _ne variatur_, the partition ofPoland. When the record of modern treasons was examined, that was thefirst thing which made its appearance. The congress of Vienna consultedthat crime before consummating its own. 1772 sounded the onset; 1815was the death of the game. Such was Feuilly's habitual text. Thispoor workingman had constituted himself the tutor of Justice, and sherecompensed him by rendering him great. The fact is, that there iseternity in right. Warsaw can no more be Tartar than Venice can beTeuton. Kings lose their pains and their honor in the attempt to makethem so. Sooner or later, the submerged part floats to the surface andreappears. Greece becomes Greece again, Italy is once more Italy. Theprotest of right against the deed persists forever. The theft of anation cannot be allowed by prescription. These lofty deeds of rascalityhave no future. A nation cannot have its mark extracted like a pockethandkerchief.

  Courfeyrac had a father who was called M. de Courfeyrac. One ofthe false ideas of the bourgeoisie under the Restoration as regardsaristocracy and the nobility was to believe in the particle. Theparticle, as every one knows, possesses no significance. But thebourgeois of the epoch of _la Minerve_ estimated so highly that poor_de_, that they thought themselves bound to abdicate it. M. de Chauvelinhad himself called M. Chauvelin; M. de Caumartin, M. Caumartin; M. deConstant de Robecque, Benjamin Constant; M. de Lafayette, M. Lafayette.Courfeyrac had not wished to remain behind the rest, and called himselfplain Courfeyrac.

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

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

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

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

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

  Bahorel was a good-natured mortal, who kept bad company, brave, aspendthrift, prodigal, and to the verge of generosity, talkative, andat times eloquent, bold to the verge of effrontery; the best fellowpossible; he had daring waistcoats, and scarlet opinions; a wholesaleblusterer, that is to say, loving nothing so much as a quarrel, unlessit were an uprising; and nothing so much as an uprising, unless it werea revolution; always ready to smash a window-pane, then to tear up thepavement, then to demolish a government, just to see the effect of it;a student in his eleventh year. He had nosed about the law, but did notpractise it. He had taken for his device: "Never a lawyer," and for hisarmorial bearings a nightstand in which was visible a square cap. Everytime that he passed the law-school, which rarely happened, he buttonedup his frock-coat,--the paletot had not yet been invented,--and tookhygienic precautions. Of the school porter he said: "What a fineold man!" and of the dean, M. Delvincourt: "What a monument!" In hislectures he espied subjects for ballads, and in his professors occasionsfor caricature. He wasted a tolerably large allowance, something likethree thousand francs a year, in doing nothing.

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

  He said of them: "They are peasants and not bourgeois; that is thereason they are intelligent."

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

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

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

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

  "What is your request?" said the King.

  "Sire, a post-office."

  "What is your name?"

  "L'Aigle."

  The King frowned, glanced at the signature of the petition and beheldthe name written thus: LESGLE. This non-Bonoparte orthography touchedthe King and he began to smile. "Sire," resumed the man with thepetition, "I had for ancestor a keeper of the hounds surnamedLesgueules. This surname furnished my name. I am called Lesgueules, bycontraction Lesgle, and by corruption l'Aigle." This caused the Kingto smile broadly. Later on he gave the man the posting office of Meaux,either intentionally or accidentally.

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

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

  These persecutions of fate had rendered him inventive. He was full ofresources. He had no money, but he found means, when it seemed good tohim, to indulge in "unbridled extravagance." One night, he went so faras to eat a "hundred francs" in a supper with a wench, which inspiredhim to make this memorable remark in the midst of the orgy: "Pull off myboots, you five-louis jade."

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

  Joly was the "malade imaginaire" junior. What he had won in medicine wasto be more of an invalid than a doctor. At three and twenty he thoughthimself a valetudinarian, and passed his life in inspecting his tonguein the mirror. He affirmed that man becomes magnetic like a needle, andin his chamber he placed his bed with its head to the south, and thefoot to the north, so that, at night, the circulation of his bloodmight not be interfered with by the great electric current of the globe.During thunder storms, he felt his pulse. Otherwise, he was the gayestof them all. All these young, maniacal, puny, merry incoherences livedin harmony together, and the result was an eccentric and agreeablebeing whom his comrades, who were prodigal of winged consonants, calledJolllly. "You may fly away on the four _L's_," Jean Prouvaire said tohim.23

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

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

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

  Affiliated and initiated, they sketched out the ideal underground.

  Among all these glowing hearts and thoroughly convinced minds, there wasone sceptic. How came he there? By juxtaposition. This sceptic's namewas Grantaire, and he was in the habit of signing himself with thisrebus: R. Grantaire was a man who took good care not to believe inanything. Moreover, he was one of the students who had learned the mostduring their course at Paris; he knew that the best coffee was to be hadat the Café Lemblin, and the best billiards at the Café Voltaire, thatgood cakes and lasses were to be found at the Ermitage, on the Boulevarddu Maine, spatchcocked chickens at Mother Sauget's, excellent matelotesat the Barrière de la Cunette, and a certain thin white wine at theBarrière du Compat. He knew the best place for everything; in addition,boxing and foot-fencing and some dances; and he was a thoroughsingle-stick player. He was a tremendous drinker to boot. He wasinordinately homely: the prettiest boot-stitcher of that day, IrmaBoissy, enraged with his homeliness, pronounced sentence on him asfollows: "Grantaire is impossible"; but Grantaire's fatuity was not tobe disconcerted. He stared tenderly and fixedly at all women, with theair of saying to them all: "If I only chose!" and of trying to make hiscomrades believe that he was in general demand.

  All those words: rights of the people, rights of man, the socialcontract, the French Revolution, the Republic, democracy, humanity,civilization, religion, progress, came very near to signifying nothingwhatever to Grantaire. He smiled at them. Scepticism, that caries of theintelligence, had not left him a single whole idea. He lived with irony.This was his axiom: "There is but one certainty, my full glass." Hesneered at all devotion in all parties, the father as well as thebrother, Robespierre junior as well as Loizerolles. "They are greatly inadvance to be dead," he exclaimed. He said of the crucifix: "There is agibbet which has been a success." A rover, a gambler, a libertine,often drunk, he displeased these young dreamers by humming incessantly:"J'aimons les filles, et j'aimons le bon vin." Air: Vive Henri IV.

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

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

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

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