Les Misérables
subject of that noble and valiant race suppressed by treason, and that
three-sided crime, on that monstrous ambush, the prototype and pattern
of all those horrible suppressions of states, which, since that time,
have struck many a noble nation, and have annulled their certificate of
birth, so to speak. All contemporary social crimes have their origin in
the partition of Poland. The partition of Poland is a theorem of which
all present political outrages are the corollaries. There has not been
a despot, nor a traitor for nearly a century back, who has not signed,
approved, counter-signed, and copied, _ne variatur_, the partition of
Poland. When the record of modern treasons was examined, that was the
first thing which made its appearance. The congress of Vienna consulted
that crime before consummating its own. 1772 sounded the onset; 1815
was the death of the game. Such was Feuilly’s habitual text. This poor
workingman had constituted himself the tutor of Justice, and she
recompensed him by rendering him great. The fact is, that there is
eternity in right. Warsaw can no more be Tartar than Venice can be
Teuton. Kings lose their pains and their honor in the attempt to make
them so. Sooner or later, the submerged part floats to the surface and
reappears. Greece becomes Greece again, Italy is once more Italy. The
protest of right against the deed persists forever. The theft of a
nation cannot be allowed by prescription. These lofty deeds of
rascality have no future. A nation cannot have its mark extracted like
a pocket handkerchief.
Courfeyrac had a father who was called M. de Courfeyrac. One of the
false ideas of the bourgeoisie under the Restoration as regards
aristocracy and the nobility was to believe in the particle. The
particle, as every one knows, possesses no significance. But the
bourgeois of the epoch of _la Minerve_ estimated so highly that poor
_de_, that they thought themselves bound to abdicate it. M. de
Chauvelin had himself called M. Chauvelin; M. de Caumartin, M.
Caumartin; M. de Constant de Robecque, Benjamin Constant; M. de
Lafayette, M. Lafayette. Courfeyrac had not wished to remain behind the
rest, and called himself plain Courfeyrac.
We might almost, so far as Courfeyrac is concerned, stop here, and
confine ourselves to saying with regard to what remains: “For
Courfeyrac, see Tholomyès.”
Courfeyrac had, in fact, that animation of youth which may be called
the _beauté du diable_ of the mind. Later on, this disappears like the
playfulness 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 the
successive levies of youth who traverse the schools, who pass it from
hand to hand, _quasi cursores_, and is almost always exactly the same;
so that, as we have just pointed out, any one who had listened to
Courfeyrac in 1828 would have thought he heard Tholomyès in 1817. Only,
Courfeyrac was an honorable fellow. Beneath the apparent similarities
of the exterior mind, the difference between him and Tholomyès was very
great. The latent man which existed in the two was totally different in
the first from what it was in the second. There was in Tholomyès a
district attorney, and in Courfeyrac a paladin.
Enjolras was the chief, Combeferre was the guide, Courfeyrac was the
centre. 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 occasion
of the burial of young Lallemand.
Bahorel was a good-natured mortal, who kept bad company, brave, a
spendthrift, prodigal, and to the verge of generosity, talkative, and
at times eloquent, bold to the verge of effrontery; the best fellow
possible; he had daring waistcoats, and scarlet opinions; a wholesale
blusterer, that is to say, loving nothing so much as a quarrel, unless
it were an uprising; and nothing so much as an uprising, unless it were
a revolution; always ready to smash a window-pane, then to tear up the
pavement, 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 not
practise it. He had taken for his device: “Never a lawyer,” and for his
armorial bearings a nightstand in which was visible a square cap. Every
time that he passed the law-school, which rarely happened, he buttoned
up his frock-coat,—the paletot had not yet been invented,—and took
hygienic precautions. Of the school porter he said: “What a fine old
man!” and of the dean, M. Delvincourt: “What a monument!” In his
lectures he espied subjects for ballads, and in his professors
occasions for caricature. He wasted a tolerably large allowance,
something like three thousand francs a year, in doing nothing.
He had peasant parents whom he had contrived to imbue with respect for
their son.
He said of them: “They are peasants and not bourgeois; that is the
reason they are intelligent.”
Bahorel, a man of caprice, was scattered over numerous cafés; the
others had habits, he had none. He sauntered. To stray is human. To
saunter is Parisian. In reality, he had a penetrating mind and was more
of a thinker than appeared to view.
He served as a connecting link between the Friends of the A B C and
other still unorganized groups, which were destined to take form later
on.
In this conclave of young heads, there was one bald member.
The Marquis d’Avaray, whom Louis XVIII. made a duke for having assisted
him to enter a hackney-coach on the day when he emigrated, was wont to
relate, that in 1814, on his return to France, as the King was
disembarking 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 beheld
the name written thus: LESGLE. This non-Bonaparte orthography touched
the King and he began to smile. “Sire,” resumed the man with the
petition, “I had for ancestor a keeper of the hounds surnamed
Lesgueules. This surname furnished my name. I am called Lesgueules, by
contraction Lesgle, and by corruption l’Aigle.” This caused the King to
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, and
he signed himself, Légle [de Meaux]. As an abbreviation, his companions
called him Bossuet.
Bossuet was a gay but unlucky fellow. His specialty was not to succeed
in anything. As an offset, he laughed at everything. At five and twenty
he was bald. His father had ended by owning a house and a field; but
he, the son, had made haste to lose that house and field in a bad
speculation. He had nothing left. He possessed knowledge and wit, but
all he did miscarried. Everything failed him and everybody deceived
him; what he was building tumbled down on top of him. If he were
splitting wood, he cut off a finger. If he had a mistress, he speedily
discovered that he had a friend also. Some misfortune happened to him
every moment, hence his joviality. He said: “I live under falling
tiles.” He was not easily astonished, because, for him, an accident was
what he had foreseen, he took his bad luck serenely, and smiled at the
teasing of fate, like a person who is listening to pleasantries. He was
poor, but his fund of good humor was inexhaustible. He soon reached his
last sou, never his last burst of laughter. When adversity entered his
doors, he saluted this old acquaintance cordially, he tapped all
catastrophes on the stomach; he was familiar with fatality to the point
of calling it by its nickname: “Good day, Guignon,” he said to it.
These persecutions of fate had rendered him inventive. He was full of
resources. He had no money, but he found means, when it seemed good to
him, to indulge in “unbridled extravagance.” One night, he went so far
as to eat a “hundred francs” in a supper with a wench, which inspired
him to make this memorable remark in the midst of the orgy: “Pull off
my boots, you five-louis jade.”
Bossuet was slowly directing his steps towards the profession of a
lawyer; he was pursuing his law studies after the manner of Bahorel.
Bossuet had not much domicile, sometimes none at all. He lodged now
with one, 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
was to be more of an invalid than a doctor. At three and twenty he
thought himself a valetudinarian, and passed his life in inspecting his
tongue in the mirror. He affirmed that man becomes magnetic like a
needle, and in his chamber he placed his bed with its head to the
south, and the foot to the north, so that, at night, the circulation of
his blood might not be interfered with by the great electric current of
the globe. During thunder storms, he felt his pulse. Otherwise, he was
the gayest of them all. All these young, maniacal, puny, merry
incoherences lived in harmony together, and the result was an eccentric
and agreeable being whom his comrades, who were prodigal of winged
consonants, called Jolllly. “You may fly away on the four _L’s_,” Jean
Prouvaire said to him.23
Joly had a trick of touching his nose with the tip of his cane, which
is an indication of a sagacious mind.
All these young men who differed so greatly, and who, on the whole, can
only be discussed seriously, held the same religion: Progress.
All were the direct sons of the French Revolution. The most giddy of
them became solemn when they pronounced that date: ’89. Their fathers
in the flesh had been, either royalists, doctrinaires, it matters not
what; this confusion anterior to themselves, who were young, did not
concern them at all; the pure blood of principle ran in their veins.
They attached themselves, without intermediate shades, to incorruptible
right and absolute duty.
Affiliated and initiated, they sketched out the ideal underground.
Among all these glowing hearts and thoroughly convinced minds, there
was one sceptic. How came he there? By juxtaposition. This sceptic’s
name was Grantaire, and he was in the habit of signing himself with
this rebus: R. Grantaire was a man who took good care not to believe in
anything. Moreover, he was one of the students who had learned the most
during their course at Paris; he knew that the best coffee was to be
had at the Café Lemblin, and the best billiards at the Café Voltaire,
that good cakes and lasses were to be found at the Ermitage, on the
Boulevard du Maine, spatchcocked chickens at Mother Sauget’s, excellent
matelotes at the Barrière de la Cunette, and a certain thin white wine
at the Barrière du Compat. He knew the best place for everything; in
addition, boxing and foot-fencing and some dances; and he was a
thorough single-stick player. He was a tremendous drinker to boot. He
was inordinately homely: the prettiest boot-stitcher of that day, Irma
Boissy, enraged with his homeliness, pronounced sentence on him as
follows: “Grantaire is impossible”; but Grantaire’s fatuity was not to
be disconcerted. He stared tenderly and fixedly at all women, with the
air of saying to them all: “If I only chose!” and of trying to make his
comrades believe that he was in general demand.
All those words: rights of the people, rights of man, the social
contract, the French Revolution, the Republic, democracy, humanity,
civilization, religion, progress, came very near to signifying nothing
whatever to Grantaire. He smiled at them. Scepticism, that caries of
the intelligence, had not left him a single whole idea. He lived with