At that epoch, which was to all appearances indifferent, a certain revolutionary quiver was vaguely current. Breaths from eighty-nine and ninety-three were in the air. Youth was on the point of moulting. Royalists were becoming liberals, liberals were turning democrats; people adored both Napoleon and liberty. Other groups of minds were more serious. They sounded principles and attached themselves to the right. There is nothing like dogma for bringing forth dreams, and nothing like dreams for engendering the future. Utopia today, flesh and blood tomorrow. France did not yet have vast underground organizations, but here and there dark underminings were throwing off shoots. At Paris, among other affiliations, there existed the society of the Friends of the ABC. Apparently they existed for the education of children. In reality they existed for the elevation of man. They declared themselves the Friends of the Abaissé, the debased, that is to say the people. They wished to elevate the people. It was a pun one should do wrong to smile at. They were not numerous: a secret society in the state of embryo, almost a coterie, if coteries ended in heroes. They assembled near the fish-market in a wine-shop called Corinthe, close to the workingman, and near the Pantheon in a little café in the Rue Saint-Michel called the Café Musain, now torn down, close to the students. The assemblies were usually held in a back room, remote from the café, with two windows and a private stairway on the Rue des Grès. There they smoked and drank and gambled and laughed. They conversed in very loud tones about everything, and in whispers of other things. An old map of France under the Republic was nailed to the wall, a sign quite sufficient to excite the suspicion of a police agent. The greater part were students on cordial terms with the working classes. They formed a sort of family through the bond of friendship. The group vanished in the invisible depths behind us. A ray of light is needed on these youthful heads before the reader beholds them plunging into the shadow of a tragic adventure.
Enjolras, named first, was an only son and wealthy, charming and capable of being terrible, already a man who still seemed a child. He had but one passion, the right, and but one thought, to overthrow the obstacle. He was the marble lover of liberty. He represented the logic of the Revolution. Beside him Combeferre represented its philosophy. Logic may end in war; philosophy can end only in peace. Enjolras was a chief, Combeferre a guide. One would have liked to fight under the one and to march behind the other. Combeferre said Revolution, but civilization. He preferred illumination to conflagration, and he repeated that the good must be innocent. Jean Prouvaire was a still softer shade: in love, a pot of flowers, a flute, verses; he buried himself in social questions by day and gazed upon the planets at night; timid, and yet intrepid. Feuilly was a workingman, a fan-maker, orphaned, earning three francs a day, with one thought: to deliver the world. He called educating himself delivering himself. This orphan had adopted the peoples. In a club occupied chiefly with France, he represented the outside world.
Courfeyrac was the centre. The others gave more light; he shed more warmth. Anyone who had listened to him in 1828 would have thought he heard Tholomyès in 1817, only Courfeyrac was an honourable fellow. There was in Tholomyès a district attorney, and in Courfeyrac a paladin. Bahorel had figured in the bloody tumult of June 1822. He loved nothing so much as a quarrel, unless it were an uprising, and nothing so much as an uprising, unless it were a revolution. He served as a connecting link between the Friends and other still unorganized groups. In this conclave of young heads there was one bald member: Lesgle de Meaux, called Bossuet, a gay but unlucky fellow whose specialty was not to succeed in anything. I live under falling tiles, he said. He soon reached his last sou, never his last burst of laughter. He lodged most often with Joly, who was studying medicine and had won from it only to be more of an invalid than a doctor. Otherwise he was the gayest of them all.
All these young men who differed so greatly held the same religion: Progress. All were the direct sons of the French Revolution. The most giddy of them became solemn when they pronounced that date, eighty-nine. Among all these glowing hearts there was one sceptic. How came he there? By juxtaposition. Grantaire took good care not to believe in anything. There is but one certainty, my full glass. This sceptic had one fanaticism, and it was a man: Enjolras. Grantaire, in whom writhed doubt, loved to watch faith soar in Enjolras. He had need of Enjolras. His moral backbone leaned on that firmness. Grantaire in the presence of Enjolras became some one once more. His mind could get along without belief, but his heart could not get along without friendship. 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, rejected yet ever returning to the charge. He said of Enjolras: What fine marble!
