Les Misérables
These young men formed a sort of family, through the bond of
friendship. All, with the exception of Laigle, were from the South.
This was a remarkable group. It vanished in the invisible depths which
lie behind us. At the point of this drama which we have now reached, it
will not perhaps be superfluous to throw a ray of light upon these
youthful heads, before the reader beholds them plunging into the shadow
of a tragic adventure.
Enjolras, whose name we have mentioned first of all,—the reader shall
see why later on,—was an only son and wealthy.
Enjolras was a charming young man, who was capable of being terrible.
He was angelically handsome. He was a savage Antinous. One would have
said, to see the pensive thoughtfulness of his glance, that he had
already, in some previous state of existence, traversed the
revolutionary apocalypse. He possessed the tradition of it as though he
had been a witness. He was acquainted with all the minute details of
the great affair. A pontifical and warlike nature, a singular thing in
a youth. He was an officiating priest and a man of war; from the
immediate point of view, a soldier of the democracy; above the
contemporary movement, the priest of the ideal. His eyes were deep, his
lids a little red, his lower lip was thick and easily became
disdainful, his brow was lofty. A great deal of brow in a face is like
a great deal of horizon in a view. Like certain young men at the
beginning of this century and the end of the last, who became
illustrious at an early age, he was endowed with excessive youth, and
was as rosy as a young girl, although subject to hours of pallor.
Already a man, he still seemed a child. His two and twenty years
appeared to be but seventeen; he was serious, it did not seem as though
he were aware there was on earth a thing called woman. He had but one
passion—the right; but one thought—to overthrow the obstacle. On Mount
Aventine, he would have been Gracchus; in the Convention, he would have
been Saint-Just. He hardly saw the roses, he ignored spring, he did not
hear the carolling of the birds; the bare throat of Evadne would have
moved him no more than it would have moved Aristogeiton; he, like
Harmodius, thought flowers good for nothing except to conceal the
sword. He was severe in his enjoyments. He chastely dropped his eyes
before everything which was not the Republic. He was the marble lover
of liberty. His speech was harshly inspired, and had the thrill of a
hymn. He was subject to unexpected outbursts of soul. Woe to the
love-affair which should have risked itself beside him! If any grisette
of the Place Cambrai or the Rue Saint-Jean-de-Beauvais, seeing that
face of a youth escaped from college, that page’s mien, those long,
golden lashes, those blue eyes, that hair billowing in the wind, those
rosy cheeks, those fresh lips, those exquisite teeth, had conceived an
appetite for that complete aurora, and had tried her beauty on
Enjolras, an astounding and terrible glance would have promptly shown
her the abyss, and would have taught her not to confound the mighty
cherub of Ezekiel with the gallant Cherubino of Beaumarchais.
By the side of Enjolras, who represented the logic of the Revolution,
Combeferre represented its philosophy. Between the logic of the
Revolution and its philosophy there exists this difference—that its
logic may end in war, whereas its philosophy can end only in peace.
Combeferre complemented and rectified Enjolras. He was less lofty, but
broader. He desired to pour into all minds the extensive principles of
general ideas: he said: “Revolution, but civilization”; and around the
mountain peak he opened out a vast view of the blue sky. The Revolution
was more adapted for breathing with Combeferre than with Enjolras.
Enjolras expressed its divine right, and Combeferre its natural right.
The first attached himself to Robespierre; the second confined himself
to Condorcet. Combeferre lived the life of all the rest of the world
more than did Enjolras. If it had been granted to these two young men
to attain to history, the one would have been the just, the other the
wise man. Enjolras was the more virile, Combeferre the more humane.
_Homo_ and _vir_, that was the exact effect of their different shades.
Combeferre was as gentle as Enjolras was severe, through natural
whiteness. He loved the word _citizen_, but he preferred the word
_man_. He would gladly have said: _Hombre_, like the Spanish. He read
everything, went to the theatres, attended the courses of public
lecturers, learned the polarization of light from Arago, grew
enthusiastic over a lesson in which Geoffroy Sainte-Hilaire explained
the double function of the external carotid artery, and the internal,
the one which makes the face, and the one which makes the brain; he
kept up with what was going on, followed science step by step, compared
Saint-Simon with Fourier, deciphered hieroglyphics, broke the pebble
which he found and reasoned on geology, drew from memory a silkworm
moth, pointed out the faulty French in the Dictionary of the Academy,
studied Puységur and Deleuze, affirmed nothing, not even miracles;
denied nothing, not even ghosts; turned over the files of the
_Moniteur_, reflected. He declared that the future lies in the hand of
the schoolmaster, and busied himself with educational questions. He
desired that society should labor without relaxation at the elevation
of the moral and intellectual level, at coining science, at putting
ideas into circulation, at increasing the mind in youthful persons, and
he feared lest the present poverty of method, the paltriness from a
literary point of view confined to two or three centuries called
classic, the tyrannical dogmatism of official pedants, scholastic
prejudices and routines should end by converting our colleges into
artificial oyster beds. He was learned, a purist, exact, a graduate of
the Polytechnic, a close student, and at the same time, thoughtful
“even to chimæras,” so his friends said. He believed in all dreams,
railroads, the suppression of suffering in chirurgical operations, the
fixing of images in the dark chamber, the electric telegraph, the
steering of balloons. Moreover, he was not much alarmed by the citadels
erected against the human mind in every direction, by superstition,
despotism, and prejudice. He was one of those who think that science
will eventually turn the position. Enjolras was a chief, Combeferre was
a guide. One would have liked to fight under the one and to march
behind the other. It is not that Combeferre was not capable of
fighting, he did not refuse a hand-to-hand combat with the obstacle,
and to attack it by main force and explosively; but it suited him
better to bring the human race into accord with its destiny gradually,
by means of education, the inculcation of axioms, the promulgation of
positive laws; and, between two lights, his preference was rather for
illumination than for conflagration. A conflagration can create an
aurora, no doubt, but why not await the dawn? A volcano illuminates,
but daybreak furnishes a still better illumination. Possibly,
Combeferre preferred the whiteness of the beautiful to the blaze of the
sublime. A light troubled by smoke, progress purchased at the expense
of violence, only half satisfied this tender and serious spirit. The
headlong precipitation of a people into the truth, a ‘93, terrified
him; nevertheless, stagnation was still more repulsive to him, in it he
detected putrefaction and death; on the whole, he preferred scum to
miasma, and he preferred the torrent to the cesspool, and the falls of
Niagara to the lake of Montfaucon. In short, he desired neither halt
nor haste. While his tumultuous friends, captivated by the absolute,
adored and invoked splendid revolutionary adventures, Combeferre was
inclined to let progress, good progress, take its own course; he may
have been cold, but he was pure; methodical, but irreproachable;
phlegmatic, but imperturbable. Combeferre would have knelt and clasped
his hands to enable the future to arrive in all its candor, and that
nothing might disturb the immense and virtuous evolution of the races.
_The good must be innocent_, he repeated incessantly. And in fact, if
the grandeur of the Revolution consists in keeping the dazzling ideal
fixedly in view, and of soaring thither athwart the lightnings, with
fire and blood in its talons, the beauty of progress lies in being
spotless; and there exists between Washington, who represents the one,
and Danton, who incarnates the other, that difference which separates
the swan from the angel with the wings of an eagle.
Jean Prouvaire was a still softer shade than Combeferre. His name was
Jehan, owing to that petty momentary freak which mingled with the
powerful and profound movement whence sprang the very essential study
of the Middle Ages. Jean Prouvaire was in love; he cultivated a pot of
flowers, played on the flute, made verses, loved the people, pitied
woman, wept over the child, confounded God and the future in the same
confidence, and blamed the Revolution for having caused the fall of a
royal head, that of André Chénier. His voice was ordinarily delicate,
but suddenly grew manly. He was learned even to erudition, and almost
an Orientalist. Above all, he was good; and, a very simple thing to
those who know how nearly goodness borders on grandeur, in the matter
of poetry, he preferred the immense. He knew Italian, Latin, Greek, and
Hebrew; and these served him only for the perusal of four poets: Dante,
Juvenal, Æschylus, and Isaiah. In French, he preferred Corneille to
Racine, and Agrippa d’Aubigné to Corneille. He loved to saunter through
fields of wild oats and corn-flowers, and busied himself with clouds
nearly as much as with events. His mind had two attitudes, one on the
side towards man, the other on that towards God; he studied or he
contemplated. All day long, he buried himself in social questions,
salary, capital, credit, marriage, religion, liberty of thought,
education, penal servitude, poverty, association, property, production
and sharing, the enigma of this lower world which covers the human
ant-hill with darkness; and at night, he gazed upon the planets, those
enormous beings. Like Enjolras, he was wealthy and an only son. He
spoke softly, bowed his head, lowered his eyes, smiled with
embarrassment, dressed badly, had an awkward air, blushed at a mere
nothing, and was very timid. Yet he was intrepid.
Feuilly was a workingman, a fan-maker, orphaned both of father and
mother, who earned with difficulty three francs a day, and had but one
thought, to deliver the world. He had one other preoccupation, to
educate himself; he called this also, delivering himself. He had taught
himself to read and write; everything that he knew, he had learned by
himself. Feuilly had a generous heart. The range of his embrace was
immense. This orphan had adopted the peoples. As his mother had failed
him, he meditated on his country. He brooded with the profound
divination of the man of the people, over what we now call the _idea of
the nationality_, had learned history with the express object of raging
with full knowledge of the case. In this club of young Utopians,
occupied chiefly with France, he represented the outside world. He had
for his specialty Greece, Poland, Hungary, Roumania, Italy. He uttered
these names incessantly, appropriately and inappropriately, with the
tenacity of right. The violations of Turkey on Greece and Thessaly, of
Russia on Warsaw, of Austria on Venice, enraged him. Above all things,
the great violence of 1772 aroused him. There is no more sovereign
eloquence than the true in indignation; he was eloquent with that
eloquence. He was inexhaustible on that infamous date of 1772, on the