I won’t go to his funeral.”
This resolution once arrived at, Bossuet, Joly, and Grantaire did not stir from the wine-shop.
By two o’clock in the afternoon, the table at which they sat was covered with empty bottles.
Two candles were burning on it, one in a flat copper candlestick which was perfectly green, the other in the neck of a cracked carafe.
Grantaire had seduced Joly and Bossuet to wine; Bossuet and Joly had conducted Grantaire back towards cheerfulness.
As for Grantaire, he had got beyond wine, that merely moderate inspirer of dreams, ever since midday.
Wine enjoys only a conventional popularity with serious drinkers.
There is, in fact, in the matter of inebriety, white magic and black magic; wine is only white magic.
Grantaire was a daring drinker of dreams.
The blackness of a terrible fit of drunkenness yawning before him, far from arresting him, attracted him.
He had abandoned the bottle and taken to the beerglass.
The beer-glass is the abyss.
Having neither opium nor hashish on hand, and being desirous of filling his brain with twilight, he had had recourse to that fearful mixture of brandy, stout, absinthe, which produces the most terrible of lethargies.
It is of these three vapors, beer, brandy, and absinthe, that the lead of the soul is composed.
They are three grooms; the celestial butterfly is drowned in them; and there are formed there in a membranous smoke, vaguely condensed into the wing of the bat, three mute furies, Nightmare, Night, and Death, which hover about the slumbering Psyche.
Grantaire had not yet reached that lamentable phase; far from it.
He was tremendously gay, and Bossuet and Joly retorted. They clinked glasses.
Grantaire added to the eccentric accentuation of words and ideas, a peculiarity of gesture; he rested his left fist on his knee with dignity, his arm forming a right angle, and, with cravat untied, seated astride a stool, his full glass in his right hand, he hurled solemn words at the big maid-servant Matelote:—
“Let the doors of the palace be thrown open!
Let every one be a member of the French Academy and have the right to embrace Madame Hucheloup.
Let us drink.”
And turning to Madame Hucheloup, he added:—
“Woman ancient and consecrated by use, draw near that I may contemplate thee!”
And Joly exclaimed:—
“Matelote and Gibelotte, dod’t gib Grantaire anything more to drink.
He has already devoured, since this bording, in wild prodigality, two francs and ninety-five centibes.”
And Grantaire began again:—
“Who has been unhooking the stars without my permission, and putting them on the table in the guise of candles?”
Bossuet, though very drunk, preserved his equanimity.
He was seated on the sill of the open window, wetting his back in the falling rain, and gazing at his two friends.
All at once, he heard a tumult behind him, hurried footsteps, cries of
“To arms!”
He turned round and saw in the Rue Saint-Denis, at the end of the Rue de la Chanvrerie, Enjolras passing, gun in hand, and Gavroche with his pistol, Feuilly with his sword, Courfeyrac with his sword, and Jean Prouvaire with his blunderbuss, Combeferre with his gun, Bahorel with his gun, and the whole armed and stormy rabble which was following them.
The Rue de la Chanvrerie was not more than a gunshot long.
Bossuet improvised a speaking-trumpet from his two hands placed around his mouth, and shouted:—
“Courfeyrac! Courfeyrac!
Hohee!”
Courfeyrac heard the shout, caught sight of Bossuet, and advanced a few paces into the Rue de la Chanvrerie, shouting:
“What do you want?” which crossed a
“Where are you going?”
“To make a barricade,” replied Courfeyrac.
“Well, here!
This is a good place!
Make it here!”
“That’s true, Aigle,” said Courfeyrac.
And at a signal from Courfeyrac, the mob flung themselves into the Rue de la Chanvrerie.
CHAPTER III—NIGHT BEGINS TO DESCEND UPON GRANTAIRE
The spot was, in fact, admirably adapted, the entrance to the street widened out, the other extremity narrowed together into a pocket without exit.
Corinthe created an obstacle, the Rue Mondetour was easily barricaded on the right and the left, no attack was possible except from the Rue Saint-Denis, that is to say, in front, and in full sight.
Bossuet had the comprehensive glance of a fasting Hannibal.