You shall go to the Barriere du Maine.”
Grantaire lived in furnished lodgings very near the Cafe Musain.
He went out, and five minutes later he returned.
He had gone home to put on a Robespierre waistcoat.
“Red,” said he as he entered, and he looked intently at Enjolras.
Then, with the palm of his energetic hand, he laid the two scarlet points of the waistcoat across his breast.
And stepping up to Enjolras, he whispered in his ear:—
“Be easy.”
He jammed his hat on resolutely and departed.
A quarter of an hour later, the back room of the Cafe Musain was deserted.
All the friends of the A B C were gone, each in his own direction, each to his own task.
Enjolras, who had reserved the Cougourde of Aix for himself, was the last to leave.
Those members of the Cougourde of Aix who were in Paris then met on the plain of Issy, in one of the abandoned quarries which are so numerous in that side of Paris.
As Enjolras walked towards this place, he passed the whole situation in review in his own mind.
The gravity of events was self-evident.
When facts, the premonitory symptoms of latent social malady, move heavily, the slightest complication stops and entangles them.
A phenomenon whence arises ruin and new births.
Enjolras descried a luminous uplifting beneath the gloomy skirts of the future.
Who knows?
Perhaps the moment was at hand.
The people were again taking possession of right, and what a fine spectacle!
The revolution was again majestically taking possession of France and saying to the world:
“The sequel to-morrow!”
Enjolras was content.
The furnace was being heated.
He had at that moment a powder train of friends scattered all over Paris.
He composed, in his own mind, with Combeferre’s philosophical and penetrating eloquence, Feuilly’s cosmopolitan enthusiasm, Courfeyrac’s dash, Bahorel’s smile, Jean Prouvaire’s melancholy, Joly’s science, Bossuet’s sarcasms, a sort of electric spark which took fire nearly everywhere at once.
All hands to work.
Surely, the result would answer to the effort.
This was well.
This made him think of Grantaire.
“Hold,” said he to himself, “the Barriere du Maine will not take me far out of my way.
What if I were to go on as far as Richefeu’s?
Let us have a look at what Grantaire is about, and see how he is getting on.”
One o’clock was striking from the Vaugirard steeple when Enjolras reached the Richefeu smoking-room.
He pushed open the door, entered, folded his arms, letting the door fall to and strike his shoulders, and gazed at that room filled with tables, men, and smoke.
A voice broke forth from the mist of smoke, interrupted by another voice.
It was Grantaire holding a dialogue with an adversary.
Grantaire was sitting opposite another figure, at a marble Saint-Anne table, strewn with grains of bran and dotted with dominos.
He was hammering the table with his fist, and this is what Enjolras heard:—
“Double-six.”
“Fours.”
“The pig!
I have no more.”
“You are dead.
A two.”
“Six.”
“Three.”
“One.”
“It’s my move.”