After this prolonged fit of eloquence Grantaire subsided in a fit of coughing, not undeserved.
‘Talking about revolution,’ said Joly, struggling with his stuffed-up nose, ‘it seems that Barius – Marius – is head over heels in love.’
‘Does anyone know who with?’ asked Laigle.
‘No.’
‘Marius in love!’ cried Grantaire. ‘I can imagine Marius in a fog, and he has found himself a mist. He belongs to the tribe of poets, which is as good as saying that he’s crazy. Marius and his Marie or Maria or Mariette, whatever she’s called, they must be a rum pair of lovers. I can guess what it’s like – rarefied ecstasies with kisses all forgotten, chastity on earth and couplings in the infinite. Two sensitive spirits sleeping together amid the stars.’
Grantaire was embarking on his second bottle, and perhaps his second harangue, when a newcomer appeared in the hatchway, a boy less than ten years old, ragged, very small, sallow and pug-faced but bright-eyed, thoroughly unkempt and soaked to the skin, but looking pleased with himself. Without hesitating, although plainly he knew none of them, he addressed Laigle de Meaux.
‘Are you Monsieur Bossuet?’
‘That’s my nickname,’ said Laigle. ‘What do you want?’
‘Well, listen, a tall, fair-haired cove on the boulevard asked me if I knew Mère Hucheloup. “You mean the one in the Rue Chanvrerie, the old man’s widow?” I said. “That’s right,” he said. “I want you to go there and ask for Monsieur Bossuet. You’re to give him this message, ‘A-B-C.’” I reckon it’s a joke someone’s playing on you. He gave me ten sous.’
‘Joly, lend me ten sous,’ said Laigle. ‘And you, too, Grantaire.’
So the boy got another twenty sous.
‘What’s your name?’ asked Laigle.
‘Navet. I’m a pal of Gavroche.’
‘You’d better stay with us,’ said Laigle.
‘And have some breakfast,’ said Grantaire.
‘I can’t. I’m in the procession. I’m the one that shouts, “Down with Polignac!”’
And dragging one foot behind him, which is the most respectful of all salutations, the lad departed.
‘That’s a specimen of urchin pure and simple,’ said Grantaire. ‘There are a lot of varieties. There’s the lawyer’s gamin, known as a saute-ruisseau, the cook’s gamin, or marmiton, the baker’s gamin, or mitron –’ he reeled off a long list, ending with ‘– royal gamin, or dauphin, and holy gamin, or bambino.’
Meanwhile Laigle was considering.
‘A-B-C… Meaning, Lamarque’s burial’
‘And I suppose the tall fair-haired cove was Enjolras sending for you,’ said Grantaire.
‘Are we going?’ asked Bossuet.
‘It’s raining,’ said Joly. ‘I swore to go through fire, but not water. I don’t want to make my cold worse.’
‘I’m staying here,’ said Grantaire. ‘Better a breakfast table than a hearse.’
‘Very well, we stay where we are,’ said Laigle. ‘We might as well have some more to drink. Anyway, we can skip the funeral without skipping the insurrection.’
‘I’m all in favour of that,’ cried Joly.
‘We’re going on where 1830 left off,’ said Laigle, rubbing his hands. ‘The people are thoroughly worked up.’
‘I care precious little about your revolution,’ said Grantaire. ‘I don’t abominate this government – the Crown made homely with a cotton cap, the Sceptre ending in an umbrella. Come to think of him, in this weather Louis-Philippe can manifest his royalty in two ways, by waving his sceptre over the people and flourishing his umbrella at the gods.’
The room was dark, with dense clouds smothering the daylight. There was no one in the tavern or in the street, everyone having gone off to witness the happenings.
‘It might be midnight,’ said Bossuet. ‘One can’t see a thing. Gibelotte, fetch a light.’
Grantaire was sadly drinking.
‘Enjolras despises me,’ he murmured. “He said to himself,” Joly’s not well and Grantaire’s sure to be drunk. I’ll send the boy to Bossuet.” If he’d come after me himself I’d have gone with him. To the devil with Enjolras, he can have his funeral.’
The matter being thus decided, the three of them stayed in the tavern. By two o’clock that afternoon their table was covered with empty bottles. Two candles were burning, one in a copper candlestick that was green all over and the other in the neck of a cracked carafe. Grantaire had tempted Joly and Bossuet to drink, and they had done something to restore his spirits.
But by midday Grantaire had gone beyond wine, that moderate source of dreaming. To the serious drinker wine is only an appetizer. In this matter of insobriety there is black as well as white magic, and wine is of the latter kind. Grantaire was an adventurous drinker. The black approach of real drunkenness, far from appalling, allured him. He had deserted the wine-bottle and gone on to the chope, the bottomless pit. Having neither opium nor hashish to hand, and wanting to befog his mind, he had had recourse to that terrible mixture of eau-de-vie, stout, and absinthe, which so utterly drugs the spirit. Those three ingredients are a dead weight on the soul, three darknesses in which the butterfly life of the mind is drowned; they create a vapour, tenuous yet with the membranous substance of a bat’s wing, in which three furies lurk – Nightmare, Night, and Death, hovering over the slumbering Psyche.
Grantaire was still far from having reached that last stage; he was uproariously gay, and Bossuet and Joly were keeping up with him. They raised their glasses in a series of toasts, and to high-flown speech Grantaire added extravagance of gesture. Seated with dignity astride a chair, with his left hand on his knee, the arm akimbo, and his right hand holding his glass, he solemnly addressed the plump waitress, Matelote:
‘Let the doors of the palace be flung wide! Let all men become members of the Académie Française and all have the right to embrace Madame Hucheloup. And let me drink!’ Then he added, addressing Madame Hucheloup, ‘Antique lady, hallowed by custom, draw near that I may gaze upon you.’
‘Matelote and Gibelotte,’ cried Joly, ‘don’t for Heaven’s sake give Grantaire anything more to drink. He spends money like water. He has squandered two francs ninety-five centimes in reckless dissipation this morning alone.’
‘Who is the person,’ Grantaire intoned, ‘who without my leave has plucked stars from the sky and set them on this table in the guise of candles?’
Bossuet, although very drunk, had remained calm. Seated on the ledge of the open window, with the rain beating on his back, he was gravely contemplating his friends.
But suddenly tumult broke out behind him, the sound of running feet and the cry of ‘To arms!’ Looking round he saw a party consisting of Enjolras, with a musket, Gavroche with his pistol, Feuilly with a sabre, Courfeyrac with a sword, Jean Prouvaire with a musketoon, Combeferre with a musket, and Bahorel with a carbine. They were proceeding along the Rue Saint-Denis, past the end of the Rue de la Chanvrerie, followed by an excited crowd.
The Rue de la Chanvrerie was short. Making a trumpet of his hands, Bossuet bellowed, ‘Courfeyrac! Courfeyrac! Hoy!’
Courfeyrac heard the call and, seeing who it was, turned and advanced a few paces into the Rue de la Chanvrerie. His ‘What do you want?’ clashed with Bossuet’s ‘Where are you going?’
‘To build a barricade,’ shouted Courfeyrac.
‘Why not here? This is a good place.’
‘You’re right, Laigle,’ said Courfeyrac.
Beckoning to the others, he led them into the Rue de la Chanvrerie.
III
Darkness gathers about Grantaire
The place was indeed particularly suitable, with the side entrance from the street rapidly narrowing to the bottleneck constituted by Corinth, the Rue de Mondétour easily blocked on either side and direct, frontal attack impossible from the Rue Saint-Denis. Bossuet drunk had had the clear vision of a Hannibal sober.
Dismay gripped the whole street when the newcomers p
oured in. Casual loiterers took to their heels. In the twinkling of an eye doors were bolted and windows shuttered from one end to the other and from ground-floor to attic, and an old dame had rigged a mattress across her window as a protection against musket-fire. Only the tavern remained open, for the good reason that the party made straight for it. ‘May the saints preserve us!’ moaned Mère Huche-loup.
Bossuet had run down to greet Courfeyrac while Joly shouted to him from the window:
‘Why haven’t you got your umbrella? You’ll catch cold like me.’
Within a few minutes twenty iron bars had been wrenched out of the tavern’s window-grilles and street cobbles and paving-stones had been torn up over a distance of perhaps a dozen yards. A cart containing three barrels of lime, the property of a lime-merchant named Anceau, had been overturned by Gavroche and Bahorel, and the barrels had been surrounded by piles of paving-stones and flanked by empty wine-casks which Enjolras had brought up from Mère Hucheloup’s cellar. Feuilly, with hands more accustomed to decorating the fragile blades of fans, had buttressed the whole with solid heaps of stone, procured no one knew where, and the large timbers used to prop up a near-by housefront had been laid across the casks. By the time Bossuet and Courfeyrac desisted from their labour half the street was blocked with a rampart higher than a man. Nothing can exceed the zeal of the populace when it is a matter of building up by pulling down.
The two waitresses had joined in the work, Gibelotte going to and fro with loads of rubble. Her weariness was equal to any task. She served paving-stones as she might have served bottles of wine, still looking half asleep.
An omnibus drawn by two white horses appeared at the end of the street. Climbing on the barricade, Bossuet ran after it, ordered the driver to pull up and the passengers to get out. After assisting the ladies to descend he dismissed the driver and brought the omnibus back with him, leading the horses. ‘No omnibus,’ he said, ‘is allowed to pass Corinth. Non licet omnibus adire Corintkum.’
The horses were unharnessed and turned loose along the Rue Mondétour, and the omnibus, pushed over on its side, made a useful addition to the barricade.
The distraught Mère Hucheloup had taken refuge on the upper floor, where she sat gazing wild-eyed at these proceedings and muttering about the end of the world. Joly deposited a kiss on her thick red neck and remarked to Grantaire: ‘You know, I have always considered a woman’s neck a thing of infinite delicacy.’
But Grantaire had now achieved the highest flights of dithyramb. When Matelote came upstairs he grabbed her round the waist and then bellowed with laughter out of the window.
‘Matelote is ugly!’ he shouted. ‘Matelote is a dream of ugliness, a chimera! I will tell you the secret of her birth. A gothic Pygmalion carving cathedral gargoyles fell in love with one of them. He besought the God of Love to bring the stone to life, and that was Matelote. Look at her, everyone! She has hair the colour of lead-oxide, like Titian’s mistress, and she’s a good wench. I guarantee she’ll fight well; there’s a hero in every good wench. As for Mère Hucheloup, she’s a sturdy old soul. Look at that moustache, inherited from her husband; a real hussar, she is, and she’ll fight too. These two alone will terrify the neighbourhood. Comrades, we’re going to throw out the Government and that’s the truth, as true as the fact that between margaric acid and formic acid there are fifteen intermediate acids. Not that I care a straw about that. My father always abominated me because I couldn’t understand mathematics. The only things I understand are love and liberty. I’m good old Grantaire. Never having had any money I’ve never got into the way of having it and so I’ve never missed it; but if I’d been rich, no one else would have been poor. You’d have seen! This would be a far better world if the generous hearts had the fat purses. Think of Jesus Christ with Rothschild’s fortune, the good he’d have done! Matelote, come and kiss me. You are sensual and shy. You have cheeks which call for a sister’s kiss and lips which call for a lover.’
‘Stow it, you wine-cask!’ said Courfeyrac.
‘I am High Magistrate and Master of Ceremonies!’ proclaimed Grantaire.
Enjolras, who was standing on the barricade, musket in hand looked sternly round at him. Enjolras, as we know, was a Spartan and a puritan. He would have died with Leonidas at Thermopylae or massacred the garrison of Drogheda with Cromwell.
‘Grantaire,’ he called, ‘go and sleep your wine off somewhere else. This is a place for intoxication but not for drunkenness. Don’t dishonour the barricade.’
The sharp rebuke had a remarkable effect on Grantaire, as though he had received a douche of cold water. Suddenly he was sober. He sat down with his elbows on a table by the window, and looking with great sweetness at Enjolras called back;
‘You know I believe in you.’
‘Go away.’
Les Miserables (Movie Tie-in) (9781101612774) Page 110
