Les Misérables, v. 3/5: Marius

  Jean Prouvaire was of an even softer tinge than Combeferre; he wascalled "Jehan," through that little momentary fantasy which wasblended with the powerful and profound movement from which issuedthe study of the Middle Ages, so essential. Jean Prouvaire was inlove, cultivated a pot of flowers, played the flute, wrote verses,loved the people, pitied women, wept over children, confounded in thesame confidence the future and God, and blamed the Revolution forhaving caused a royal head to fall, that of André Chénier. He had avoice which was habitually delicate, and suddenly became masculine;he was erudite, and almost an Orientalist. He was good before all,and through a motive which those will easily understand who know howclosely goodness borders on grandeur,--he loved immensity in poetry. Heknew Italian, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and he employed his knowledgeto read only four poets,--Dante, Juvenal, Æschylus, and Isaiah. InFrench he preferred Corneille to Racine, and Agrippa d'Aubigné toCorneille. He was fond of strolling about the fields of wild oats andcorn-flowers, and occupied himself with clouds almost as much as withevents. His mind had two attitudes,--one turned to man, the other toGod; he either studied or contemplated. The whole day long he studiedsocial questions,--wages, capital, credit, marriage, religion, libertyof thought, liberty of love, education, the penal code, wretchedness,partnership, property, production, and division, that enigma of thelower world which casts a shadow over the human ant-heap, and at nighthe looked at the stars, those enormous beings. Like Enjolras, he wasrich, and an only son; he talked softly, hung his head, looked down,smiled with an embarrassed air, dressed badly, had an awkward gait,blushed at a nothing, and was very timid; with all that he was intrepid.

  Feuilly was a journeyman fan-maker, doubly an orphan, who laboriouslyearned three francs a day, and had only one idea,--to deliver theworld. He had another preoccupation as well, instructing himself, whichhe called self-deliverance. He had taught himself to read and write,and all that he knew he had learned alone. Feuilly had a generousheart, and hugged the world. This orphan had adopted the peoples,and as he had no mother, he meditated on his country. He had wishedthat there should not be in the world a man who had no country, andhe brooded over what we now call the "idea of nationalities" with theprofound divination of the man of the people. He had studied historyexpressly that he might be indignant with a knowledge of the fact, andin this youthful assembly of Utopians who were specially interestedabout France, he represented the foreign element. His specialty wasGreece, Poland, Roumania, Hungary, and Italy; he pronounced thesenames incessantly, in season and out of season, with the tenacity ofright. The violations committed by Turkey on Greece and Thessaly, ofRussia on Warsaw, and Austria on Venice, exasperated him, and aboveall the great highway robbery of 1772 aroused him. There can be nomore sovereign eloquence than truth in indignation; and he was eloquentwith that eloquence. He never left off talking about the infamousdate 1772, the noble and valiant people suppressed by treachery, thiscrime committed by three accomplices, and the monstrous ambush, whichis the prototype and pattern of all those frightful suppressions ofstates, which have since struck several nations, and have, so to speak,erased their name from the baptismal register. All the social assaultsof the present day emanate from the division of Poland, and it is atheorem to which all our political crimes are corollaries. There isnot a despot or a traitor who for a century past has not revised,confirmed, countersigned, and margined with the words _ne varietur_,the division of Poland. When we consult the list of modern treasonsthis appears the first, and the Congress of Vienna consulted this crimeere it consummated its own; 1772 sounds the view-halloo, and 1815witnesses the quarry of the stag. Such was Feuilly's usual text. Thispoor workman had made himself the guardian of Justice, and she rewardedhim by making him grand. In truth, there is an eternity in justice,and Warsaw can no more be Tartar than Venice can be Teutonic. Kingslose their time and their honor over such things. Sooner or later thesubmerged country floats on the surface and reappears. Greece becomesGreece once more, and Italy, Italy. The protest of right against deedspersists forever, and there is no law of limitations for the robbery ofa nation. Such superior swindles have no future, and the mark cannotbe taken out of a nation like a handkerchief.

  Courfeyrac had a father who was known as M. de Courfeyrac. One of theincorrect ideas of the bourgeoisie of the Restoration in the matterof the aristocracy and the nobility was a belief in the particle. Theparticle, as we know, has no meaning but the bourgeois of the time ofthe _Minerve_ esteemed this poor _de_ so highly that persons thoughtthemselves obliged to abdicate it. M. de Chauvelin called himself M.Chauvelin; M. de Caumartin, M. Caumartin; M. de Constant de Rebecque,Benjamin Constant, and M. de Lafayette, M. Lafayette. Courfeyrac wasunwilling to remain behindhand, and called himself Courfeyrac quiteshort. As concerns this gentleman, we might almost stop here andcontent ourselves with saying as to the rest, in Courfeyrac you seeTholomyès; Courfeyrac, in fact, had those sallies of youth which mightbe called a mental _beauté du diable_. At a later date this expireslike the prettiness of the kitten; and all this grace produces, upontwo feet the bourgeois, and on four paws the tom-cat.

  The generations which pass through the schools, and the successivelevies of youth, transmit this species of wit from one to the other,and pass it from hand to hand, _quasi cursores_, nearly always thesame; so that, as we have said, the first comer who had listened toCourfeyrac in 1828 might have fancied he was hearing Tholomyès in 1817.The only thing was that Courfeyrac was an honest fellow, and beneathan apparent external similitude, the difference between Tholomyès andhimself was great, and the latent man who existed within them was quitedifferent in the former from what it was in the latter. In Tholomyèsthere was an attorney, and in Courfeyrac a Paladin; Enjolras was thechief, Combeferre the guide, and Courfeyrac the centre. The others gavemore light, but he produced more heat; and he had in truth all thequalities of a centre, in the shape of roundness and radiation.

  Bahorel had been mixed up in the sanguinary tumult of June, 1822, onthe occasion of the burial of young Lallemand. Bahorel was a being ofgood temper and bad company, brave and a spendthrift, prodigal andgenerous, chattering and eloquent, bold and insolent, and the very bestclay for the devils moulding imaginable. He displayed daring waistcoatsand scarlet opinions; he was a turbulent on a grand scale, that isto say, that he liked nothing so much as a quarrel unless it were anémeute, and nothing so much as an émeute except a revolution. He wasever ready to break a pane of glass, tear up the paving-stones, anddemolish a government, in order to see the effect; he was a studentin his eleventh year. He sniffed at the law, but did not practise it,and he had taken as his motto, "Never a lawyer," and as his coat ofarms a night-table surmounted by a square cap. Whenever he passed infront of the law-school, which rarely happened to him, he buttoned uphis frock-coat and took hygienic precautions. He said of the schoolgate, "What a fierce old man!" and of the Dean M. Devincourt, "What amonument!" He found in his lectures a subject for coarse songs, andin his professors an occasion for laughter. He spent in doing nothinga very considerable allowance, something like three thousand francs.His parents were peasants in whom he had inculcated a respect for theirson. He used to say of them, "They are peasants, and not towns-people,that is why they are so intelligent." Bahorel, as a capricious man,visited several cafés; and while the others had habits he had none. Hestrolled about: to err is human, to stroll is Parisian. Altogether, hehad a penetrating mind, and thought more than people fancied. He servedas the connecting link between the Friends of the A. B. C. and othergroups which were still unformed, but which were to be constituted at alater date.

  There was in this assembly of young men a bald-headed member. TheMarquis d'Avaray, whom Louis XVIII. made a duke because he helped himto get into a hired cab on the day when he emigrated, used to tell how,when the King landed in 1814 at Calais upon his return to France, a manhanded him a petition.

  "What do you want?" the King said.

  "A postmastership, Sire."

  "What is your name?"

  "L'Aigle.
"

  The King frowned, but looked at the signature of the petition, andread the name thus written, LESGLE. This, anything but Bonapartistorthography, touched the King, and he began smiling. "Sire," the manwith the petition went on, "my ancestor was a whipper-in of the nameof Lesgueules, and my name came from that. I called myself Lesgueules,by contraction Lesgle, and by corruption L'Aigle." This remark causedthe King to smile still more, and at a later date he gave the man thepost-office at Meaux, purposely or through a mistake. The bald Mentorof the group was son of this Lesgle or Legle, and signed himself Legle(of Meaux.) His comrades, to shorten this, called him Bossuet.

  Bossuet was a merry fellow, who was unlucky, and his specialty was tosucceed in nothing. _Per contra_, he laughed at everything. At theage of five-and-twenty he was bald; his father left him a house and afield; but the son knew nothing so pressing as to lose them both in aswindling speculation, and nothing was left him. He had learning andsense, but miscarried; he failed in everything, and everything cozenedhim; whatever he built up broke down under him. If he chopped wood,he cut his fingers; and if he had a mistress, he speedily discoveredthat she had also a friend. At every moment some misfortune happened tohim, and hence came his joviality; and he used to say, "I live underthe roof of falling tiles." Feeling but slight astonishment, for everyaccident was foreseen by him, he accepted ill-luck serenely, and smiledat the pin-pricks of destiny like a man who is listening to a goodjoke. He was poor, but his wallet of good-temper was inexhaustible; hespeedily reached his last halfpenny, but never his last laugh. Whenadversity entered his room he bowed to his old acquaintance cordially;he tickled catastrophes in the ribs, and was so familiar with fatalityas to call it by a nickname.

  These persecutions of fate had rendered him inventive, and he was fullof resources. He had no money, but contrived to make "an unbridledoutlay" whenever he thought proper. One night he went so far as todevour a hundred francs in a supper with a girl, which inspired him inthe middle of the orgie with the memorable remark, "Fille de cinq Louis(Saint Louis), pull off my boots." Bossuet was advancing slowly to thelegal profession, and studied law much after the fashion of Bahorel.Bossuet had but little domicile, at times none at all, and he livedfirst with one and then with the other, but most frequently with Joly.

  Joly was a student of medicine, of two years' younger standing thanBossuet, and was the young imaginary sick man. What he had gained byhis medical studies was to be more a patient than a doctor, for at theage of twenty-three he fancied himself a valetudinarian, and spenthis life in looking at his tongue in a mirror. He declared that a manbecomes magnetized like a needle, and in his room he placed his bedwith the head to the south and the feet to the north, so that at nightthe circulation of his blood might not be impeded by the great magneticcurrent of the globe. In storms he felt his pulse, but for all that wasthe gayest of all. All these incoherences, youth, mania, dyspepsia, andfun, lived comfortably together, and the result was an eccentric andagreeable being, whom his comrades, lavish of liquid consonants, calledJolllly. Joly was accustomed to touch his nose with the end of hiscane, which is the sign of a sagacious mind.

  All these young men, who differed so greatly, and of whom, after all,we must speak seriously, had the same religion,--Progress. They wereall the direct sons of the French Revolution, and the lightest amongthem became serious when pronouncing the date of '89. Their fathers inthe flesh were, or had been, _feuilleants_, royalists, or doctrinaires,but that was of little consequence; this pell-mell, anterior tothemselves, who were young, did not concern them, and the pure bloodof principles flowed in their veins; they attached themselves, withoutany intermediate tinge, to incorruptible right and absolute duty.Confederates and initiated, they secretly sketched the ideal.

  Amid all these impassioned hearts and convinced minds there was asceptic. How did he get there? Through juxtaposition. The name ofthis sceptic was Grantaire, and he usually wrote it after the mannerof a rebus: R--(Grand R., i. e. Grantaire). Grantaire was a man whocarefully avoided believing in anything; he was, however, one of thesestudents who had learned the most during a Parisian residence. He knewthat the best coffee was at Lemblier's, and the best billiard-tableat the Café Voltaire; that excellent cakes and agreeable girls couldbe found at the Hermitage on the Boulevard du Maine, spatch-cocks atMother Saquet's, excellent matelottes at the Barrière de la Cunette,and a peculiar white wine at the Barrière du Combat. Besides allthis, he was a mighty drinker. He was abominably ugly, and IrmaBoissy, the prettiest boot-stitcher of that day, in her indignationat his ugliness, passed the verdict,--"Grantaire is impossible." ButGrantaire's fatuity was not disconcerted by this. He looked tenderlyand fixedly at every woman, and assumed an expression of "If I onlyliked!" and he tried to make his companions believe that he was ingeneral request with the sex.

  All such words as rights of the people, rights of man, the socialcontract, the French Revolution, republic, democracy, humanity,civilization, progress, had as good as no meaning with Grantaire, andhe smiled at them. Scepticism, that curse of the intellect, had notleft him one whole idea in his mind. He lived in irony, and his axiomwas, "There is only one thing certain, my full glass." He ridiculedevery act of devotion in every party,--the brother as much as thefather, young Robespierre as heartily as Loizerolles. "They made greatprogress by dying," he would exclaim; and would say of the crucifix,"There is a gallows which was successful." Idler, gambler, libertine,and often intoxicated, he annoyed these young democrats by incessantlysinging, "_J'aimons les filles et j'aimons le bon vin_" to the tune of"Long live Henri IV."