Buy a good pair of trousers of double-milled cloth at Staub’s.
That will assist.”
“At what price?” shouted Grantaire.
The third corner was delivered up to a poetical discussion.
Pagan mythology was giving battle to Christian mythology.
The question was about Olympus, whose part was taken by Jean Prouvaire, out of pure romanticism. Jean Prouvaire was timid only in repose. Once excited, he burst forth, a sort of mirth accentuated his enthusiasm, and he was at once both laughing and lyric.
“Let us not insult the gods,” said he. “The gods may not have taken their departure.
Jupiter does not impress me as dead.
The gods are dreams, you say.
Well, even in nature, such as it is to-day, after the flight of these dreams, we still find all the grand old pagan myths.
Such and such a mountain with the profile of a citadel, like the Vignemale, for example, is still to me the headdress of Cybele; it has not been proved to me that Pan does not come at night to breathe into the hollow trunks of the willows, stopping up the holes in turn with his fingers, and I have always believed that Io had something to do with the cascade of Pissevache.”
In the last corner, they were talking politics.
The Charter which had been granted was getting roughly handled.
Combeferre was upholding it weakly. Courfeyrac was energetically making a breach in it.
On the table lay an unfortunate copy of the famous Touquet Charter.
Courfeyrac had seized it, and was brandishing it, mingling with his arguments the rattling of this sheet of paper.
“In the first place, I won’t have any kings; if it were only from an economical point of view, I don’t want any; a king is a parasite.
One does not have kings gratis.
Listen to this: the dearness of kings.
At the death of Francois I., the national debt of France amounted to an income of thirty thousand livres; at the death of Louis XIV. it was two milliards, six hundred millions, at twenty-eight livres the mark, which was equivalent in 1760, according to Desmarets, to four milliards, five hundred millions, which would to-day be equivalent to twelve milliards.
In the second place, and no offence to Combeferre, a charter granted is but a poor expedient of civilization.
To save the transition, to soften the passage, to deaden the shock, to cause the nation to pass insensibly from the monarchy to democracy by the practice of constitutional fictions,—what detestable reasons all those are!
No! no! let us never enlighten the people with false daylight.
Principles dwindle and pale in your constitutional cellar.
No illegitimacy, no compromise, no grant from the king to the people.
In all such grants there is an Article 14.
By the side of the hand which gives there is the claw which snatches back.
I refuse your charter point-blank.
A charter is a mask; the lie lurks beneath it.
A people which accepts a charter abdicates.
The law is only the law when entire.
No! no charter!”
It was winter; a couple of fagots were crackling in the fireplace.
This was tempting, and Courfeyrac could not resist.
He crumpled the poor Touquet Charter in his fist, and flung it in the fire.
The paper flashed up.
Combeferre watched the masterpiece of Louis XVIII. burn philosophically, and contented himself with saying:—
“The charter metamorphosed into flame.”
And sarcasms, sallies, jests, that French thing which is called entrain, and that English thing which is called humor, good and bad taste, good and bad reasons, all the wild pyrotechnics of dialogue, mounting together and crossing from all points of the room, produced a sort of merry bombardment over their heads.
CHAPTER V—ENLARGEMENT OF HORIZON
The shocks of youthful minds among themselves have this admirable property, that one can never foresee the spark, nor divine the lightning flash.
What will dart out presently?
No one knows.
The burst of laughter starts from a tender feeling.
At the moment of jest, the serious makes its entry.
Impulses depend on the first chance word.
The spirit of each is sovereign, jest suffices to open the field to the unexpected.
These are conversations with abrupt turns, in which the perspective changes suddenly.
Chance is the stage-manager of such conversations.
A severe thought, starting oddly from a clash of words, suddenly traversed the conflict of quips in which Grantaire, Bahorel, Prouvaire, Bossuet, Combeferre, and Courfeyrac were confusedly fencing.