In a few days, Marius had become Courfeyrac’s friend. Youth is the
season for prompt welding and the rapid healing of scars. Marius
breathed freely in Courfeyrac’s society, a decidedly new thing for him.
Courfeyrac put no questions to him. He did not even think of such a
thing. At that age, faces disclose everything on the spot. Words are
superfluous. There are young men of whom it can be said that their
countenances chatter. One looks at them and one knows them.
One morning, however, Courfeyrac abruptly addressed this interrogation
to him:—
“By the way, have you any political opinions?”
“The idea!” said Marius, almost affronted by the question.
“What are you?”
“A democrat-Bonapartist.”
“The gray hue of a reassured rat,” said Courfeyrac.
On the following day, Courfeyrac introduced Marius at the Café Musain.
Then he whispered in his ear, with a smile: “I must give you your entry
to the revolution.” And he led him to the hall of the Friends of the A
B C. He presented him to the other comrades, saying this simple word
which Marius did not understand: “A pupil.”
Marius had fallen into a wasps’-nest of wits. However, although he was
silent and grave, he was, nonetheless, both winged and armed.
Marius, up to that time solitary and inclined to soliloquy, and to
asides, both by habit and by taste, was a little fluttered by this
covey of young men around him. All these various initiatives solicited
his attention at once, and pulled him about. The tumultuous movements
of these minds at liberty and at work set his ideas in a whirl.
Sometimes, in his trouble, they fled so far from him, that he had
difficulty in recovering them. He heard them talk of philosophy, of
literature, of art, of history, of religion, in unexpected fashion. He
caught glimpses of strange aspects; and, as he did not place them in
proper perspective, he was not altogether sure that it was not chaos
that he grasped. On abandoning his grandfather’s opinions for the
opinions of his father, he had supposed himself fixed; he now
suspected, with uneasiness, and without daring to avow it to himself,
that he was not. The angle at which he saw everything began to be
displaced anew. A certain oscillation set all the horizons of his
brains in motion. An odd internal upsetting. He almost suffered from
it.
It seemed as though there were no “consecrated things” for those young
men. Marius heard singular propositions on every sort of subject, which
embarrassed his still timid mind.
A theatre poster presented itself, adorned with the title of a tragedy
from the ancient repertory called classic: “Down with tragedy dear to
the bourgeois!” cried Bahorel. And Marius heard Combeferre reply:—
“You are wrong, Bahorel. The bourgeoisie loves tragedy, and the
bourgeoisie must be left at peace on that score. Bewigged tragedy has a
reason for its existence, and I am not one of those who, by order of
Æschylus, contest its right to existence. There are rough outlines in
nature; there are, in creation, ready-made parodies; a beak which is
not a beak, wings which are not wings, gills which are not gills, paws
which are not paws, a cry of pain which arouses a desire to laugh,
there is the duck. Now, since poultry exists by the side of the bird, I
do not see why classic tragedy should not exist in the face of antique
tragedy.”
Or chance decreed that Marius should traverse Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau
between Enjolras and Courfeyrac.
Courfeyrac took his arm:—
“Pay attention. This is the Rue Plâtrière, now called Rue Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, on account of a singular household which lived in it sixty
years ago. This consisted of Jean-Jacques and Thérèse. From time to
time, little beings were born there. Thérèse gave birth to them,
Jean-Jacques represented them as foundlings.”
And Enjolras addressed Courfeyrac roughly:—
“Silence in the presence of Jean-Jacques! I admire that man. He denied
his own children, that may be; but he adopted the people.”
Not one of these young men articulated the word: The Emperor. Jean
Prouvaire alone sometimes said Napoleon; all the others said
“Bonaparte.” Enjolras pronounced it “Buonaparte.”
Marius was vaguely surprised. _Initium sapientiæ_.