“There is but one certainty, my full glass.”
He sneered at all devotion in all parties, the father as well as the brother, Robespierre junior as well as Loizerolles.
“They are greatly in advance to be dead,” he exclaimed.
He said of the crucifix: “There is a gibbet 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 a dogma, nor an idea, nor an art, nor a science; it was a man: Enjolras.
Grantaire admired, loved, and venerated Enjolras.
To whom did this anarchical scoffer unite himself in this phalanx of absolute minds?
To the most absolute.
In what manner had Enjolras subjugated him?
By his ideas?
No.
By his character.
A phenomenon which is often observable.
A sceptic who adheres to a believer is as simple as the law of complementary colors.
That which we lack attracts us.
No one loves the light like the blind man.
The dwarf adores the drum-major.
The toad always has his eyes fixed on heaven.
Why?
In order to watch the bird in its flight.
Grantaire, in whom writhed doubt, loved to watch faith soar in Enjolras.
He had need of Enjolras.
That chaste, healthy, firm, upright, hard, candid nature charmed him, without his being clearly aware of it, and without the idea of explaining it to himself having occurred to him.
He admired his opposite by instinct.
His soft, yielding, dislocated, sickly, shapeless ideas attached themselves to Enjolras as to a spinal column.
His moral backbone leaned on that firmness.
Grantaire in the presence of Enjolras became some one once more.
He was, himself, moreover, composed of two elements, which were, to all appearance, incompatible.
He was ironical and cordial.
His indifference loved.
His mind could get along without belief, but his heart could not get along without friendship.
A profound contradiction; for an affection is a conviction.
His nature was thus constituted.
There are men who seem to be born to be the reverse, the obverse, the wrong side.
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 an existence which is not theirs.
Grantaire was one of these men.
He was the obverse of Enjolras.
One might almost say that affinities begin with the letters of the alphabet.
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 them everywhere.
His joy was to see these forms go and come through the fumes of wine.
They tolerated him on account of his good humor.
Enjolras, the believer, disdained this sceptic; and, a sober man himself, 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 of Enjolras:
“What fine marble!”