CORINTHE
I. HISTORY OF CORINTHE FROM ITS FOUNDATION
Parisians today who enter the rue Rambuteau coming from Les Halles and notice, on their right, opposite the rue Mondétour, a basket weaver’s shop whose sign is a basket in the shape of the emperor, Napoléon the Great, with this inscription:
NAPOLÉON IS MADE ENTIRELY OF WICKERWORK
have no inkling of the terrible scenes that this same spot saw barely thirty years ago.
This is the site of the rue de la Chanvrerie, which used to be spelled Chanverrerie in old deeds, as well as the famous tavern known as Corinthe.
You will recall all that has been said about the barricade put up on this spot and eclipsed, as it happens, by the barricade at Saint-Merry. It is over this famous barricade in the rue de la Chanvrerie, nowadays vanished into the mists of time, that we will now throw a little light.
I hope, for the sake of the tale’s clarity, we may be allowed to resort to a simple device already used on Waterloo. Anyone wanting to get a pretty precise image of the jumble of houses that stood in those days near the tip of Saint-Eustache, at the northeast corner of Les Halles of Paris, where the rue Rambuteau comes out today, has only to imagine an N, joining the rue Saint-Denis at the top and Les Halles at the bottom. The two vertical strokes would be the rue de la Grande-Truanderie and the rue de la Chanvrerie and the horizontal stroke would be the rue de la Petite-Truanderie. The old rue Mondétour cut the three strokes at the most tortured angles. So much so that the tangled maze of the four streets was enough to create, over a space of less than two hundred square yards between Les Halles and the rue Saint-Denis on one side, and between the rue du Cygne and the rue des Prêcheurs on the other, seven islands of houses, bizarrely shaped, of varying sizes, placed crookedly and apparently randomly and barely separated, like blocks of stone on a building site, by narrow crevices.
We say narrow crevices and we can’t give a better idea of these dark, constricted, angular lanes, bordered by eight-story slums. These slums were so decrepit that, in the streets of la Chanvrerie and de la Petite-Truanderie, the façades were propped up by wooden beams that ran from one house to the next. The street was narrow and the gutters wide, so anyone walking along had to wend their way on a pavement that was always wet, alongside shops like cellars, great big iron-hooped curbstones, unbelievable mounds of garbage, alley gates fortified with enormous age-old grilles. The rue Rambuteau laid waste to all that.
The name Mondétour wonderfully conjures up the way the whole of this road network snaked around. A bit farther along, this was even better expressed by the rue Pirouette, which flowed into the rue Mondétour.
The pedestrian coming from the rue Saint-Denis and going into the rue de la Chanvrerie saw it gradually shrivel away in front of him as though he had stepped into an elongated funnel. At the end of the street, which was incredibly short, he found the way barred on the Les Halles side by a tall row of houses and he would have thought himself in a dead end if he did not see, to right and left, two black trenches down which he could escape. This was the rue Mondétour, which went off to join the rue des Prêcheurs on one side, and, on the other, the rue du Cygne and the rue de la Petite-Truanderie. At the bottom of this sort of dead end, at the corner of the right-hand trench, you noticed a house that was not nearly as tall as the rest and that formed a sort of promontory on the street.
It is in this house, only two stories high, that an illustrious tavern had been merrily chugging along for the past three hundred years. This tavern made a joyous racket on the very spot old Théophile noted in these two lines:
Here bobs the horrible skeleton
Of a poor lover who hanged himself.
The position was good and the tavern was handed down from father to son.
In the days of Mathurin Régnier the tavern was called the Pot-aux-Roses and as plays on words were all the rage, the sign was a post—poteau—painted rose pink. In the last century, the worthy Natoire, one of the masters of whimsy now scorned by the school of rigidity, having gotten tipsy several times in this tavern at the very table where Régnier got plastered, had painted a bunch of Corinth grapes on a rose pink post out of gratitude. The publican gleefully changed his sign and had these words done in gold letters below the bunch of grapes: au Raisin de Corinthe. Hence the name, Corinthe. Nothing comes more naturally to staggering drunks than elliptical expressions. The elliptical expression is the zigzagging phrase. Corinthe had gradually dethroned the Pot-aux-Roses. The last publican of the dynasty, old man Hucheloup, not even having a clue about the tradition anymore, had had the post painted blue.
A downstairs room where the bar was, a room on the first floor where the billiard table was, a wooden spiral staircase going through the ceiling, wine on the tables, soot on the walls, candles in broad daylight—that was what the tavern was like. A stairwell with a trapdoor in the basement room led to the cellar. On the second floor were the Hucheloups’ rooms. You went up by a staircase, more like a ladder than a staircase, the only entrance being a door hidden in the main room on the first floor. Under the roof, two garrets with dormer windows, servants’ nests. The kitchen shared the ground floor with the barroom.
Old father Hucheloup may have been a born chemist; he was certainly a cook. You not only drank in his tavern, you ate there. Hucheloup had invented an excellent thing you could only get at his establishment and that was stuffed carp, which he called carpes au gras. This was eaten by the light of a tallow candle or an oil lamp from the days of Louis XVI on tables where an oilskin was nailed down as a tablecloth. People came from miles around. One fine day, Hucheloup decided the time had come to alert the passing trade to his “specialty”; he dipped a brush into a pot of black and as his spelling was peculiar to him, just like his cooking, he improvised on a wall outside this remarkable inscription:
CARPES HO GRAS
One winter the storms and squalls got it into their heads to wipe out the s at the end of the first word and the g at the start of the third, and this is what was left:
CARPE HO RAS
With the help of time and the rain, a humble gastronomical advertisement had become a profound piece of advice: Seize the hours.
And so it was that, not knowing French, old father Hucheloup had come up with Latin and brought philosophy out of the kitchen; wanting simply to erase Lent, he had equaled Horace. And the striking thing was that this also meant: Come into my tavern.
Not a trace of all this exists today. The Mondétour maze was ripped up and largely opened up in 1847 and may well be no more at the present time. The rue de la Chanvrerie has disappeared, and Corinthe with it, under the pavement of the rue Rambuteau.
As we said, Corinthe was one of those places where Courfeyrac and his friends gathered, if not rallied. It was Grantaire who had discovered Corinthe. He had gone in because of the Carpe horas and had gone back because of the Carpes au gras. They drank there, they ate there, they spouted there; they paid little, they paid badly, they did not pay at all, yet they were always welcome. Old man Hucheloup was a good sport.
This good sport, Hucheloup, as we said, was a mustachioed keeper of the grittier sort of tavern; an amusing variety. He always looked as if he was in a bad mood, seemed bent on intimidating the clientele, growled at people coming into his place, and looked like he’d rather pick a fight with them than serve them soup. And yet, we say again, everyone was always welcome. This quirkiness ensured that the place was always full, and brought him young men who would say to each other: “Come and see old man Hucheloup blow his top.” He had been a fencing master. He had a way of bursting out laughing all of a sudden. Big booming voice, but a good old fellow with it. He was at bottom a comedian behind a tragic mask; he liked nothing better than to scare you; a bit like those snuffboxes in the shape of a pistol. The shot is a sneeze. His wife, mother Hucheloup, was an uncommonly ugly bearded woman.
Around 1830, old man Hucheloup died. The secret of the carpes au gras died with him. His widow, who was barely consolable, kept the tavern going. But the cooking degenerated and became execrable, and the wine, which had always been bad, was now shocking. Courfeyrac and his friends continued to haunt Corinthe, though—out of pity, said Bossuet.
Widow Hucheloup was short-winded and misshapen, full of country memories. She relieved their tiresomeness by her pronunciation. She had her own way of saying things that spiced up these springtime village reminiscences of hers. Once upon a time it had been her delight, she claimed, to hear “the bread-breasts sing in the hawkthorns.”
The room on the upper floor, where the “restaurant” was, was a great long well crammed with stools, stepladders, chairs, benches, and tables and with a rickety old billiard table. You reached it by the spiral staircase that came out in a corner of the room in a square hole like a ship’s hatch.
This room, lit by a single narrow window and an oil lamp that was always burning, was a real shambles. All the furniture with four legs behaved as though they had three. As sole decoration, the whitewashed walls had this quatrain in honor of mother Hucheloup:
She passes at ten paces, she horrifies at two,
A wart lives up her nose, so risky—true;
You’re worried all the time she’ll blow down the house,
And that one fine day her nose will fall into her mouth.
This was written in charcoal on the wall.
Ma Hucheloup, true to life, went back and forth morning and night in front of those four lines with perfect serenity. Two servants, called Matelotte, Fish Stew, and Gibelotte, Rabbit Stew, whose real names no one ever knew, helped Ma Hucheloup deck the tables with the carafes of dark rotgut wine and the various gruels that were served to the hungry in earthenware bowls. Matelotte, fat, round, ruddy, and loud, former favorite sultaness of the late Hucheloup, was uglier than any mythological monster you care to name; and yet, as it is only fitting that the servant should always trail behind the mistress of the house, she was not as ugly as Ma Hucheloup. Gibelotte, long, delicate, white with a lymphatic whiteness, with rings round her eyes, drooping eyelids, always exhausted and overwhelmed, suffering from what we might call chronic fatigue, first up, last to bed, served everyone, even the other servant, silently and sweetly, smiling beneath the fatigue with a sort of sleepy vague smile.
There was a mirror above the bar.
Before entering the restaurant room, you could read this line written in chalk over the door by Courfeyrac:
REVEL IF YOU CAN AND EAT IF YOU DARE.
II. PRELIMINARY GAIETIES
L’Aigle de Meaux, as we know, lived rather more with Joly than anywhere else. He had a room the way a bird has a branch. The two friends lived together, ate together, slept together. They shared everything, even Musichetta, a little. They were what the hooded friars call bini, a pair. On the morning of June 5, they went off to have breakfast at Corinthe. Joly was all stuffed up with a bad head cold that Laigle was beginning to share. Laigle’s coat was threadbare, but Joly was dapper.
It was about nine in the morning when they pushed open the door of Corinthe. They went up to the first floor. Matelotte and Gibelotte greeted them.
“Oysters, cheese, and ham,” said Laigle.
And they sat down at a table. The tavern was empty; they were the only ones there. Gibelotte recognized Joly and Laigle and plunked a bottle of wine on the table.
As they were downing their first oysters, a head appeared at the stairwell hatch and a voice said: “I was just passing when I caught a heady whiff of Brie from the street. I’m coming in.”
It was Grantaire. Grantaire took a stool and planted himself at the table. Gibelotte, seeing Grantaire, put another two bottles of wine on the table. That made three.
“Are you going to drink those two bottles?” Laigle asked Grantaire.
Grantaire answered: “Everyone else is ingenious, you alone are ingenuous. No one ever balked at two bottles.”
The others had begun by eating, Grantaire began by drinking. Half a bottle was swiftly dispatched.
“Have you got hollow legs?” said Laigle.
“You obviously have,” said Grantaire. He emptied his glass and added: “Dear me, Laigle of the funeral orations, your coat has had it.”
“I should hope so,” Laigle retorted. “It means we get on well together, my coat and I. It’s taken on all my wrinkles, it doesn’t get in my way at all, it has molded itself to all my deformities, it goes along with all my movements, I only know it’s there because it keeps me warm. Old coats are exactly the same as old friends.”
“True,” cried Joly, chiming in. “An old coat is an old goat.”
“Especially,” said Grantaire, “in the mouth of a man stuffed up with a cold.”
“Grantaire,” Laigle asked, “did you come from the boulevard?”
“No.”
“We just saw the head of the procession go by, Joly and I.”
“It is a barvelous sight,” said Joly.
“This street is so quiet!” cried Laigle. “Who would ever suspect that Paris is in pandemonium? You can really tell it used to be all convents around here! Du Breul and Sauval list all of them and so does the abbé Lebeuf. They were all around here, the place was crawling with them, the shod, the unshod, the tonsured, the bearded, the grays, the blacks, the whites, the Franciscans, the Minimi, the Capuchins, the Carmelites, the Lesser Augustines, the Greater Augustines, the Old Augustines. The place was riddled with them.”
“Don’t talk to me about monks,” Grantaire cut in. “It makes you want to scratch yourself.”
Then he exclaimed: “Errk! I’ve just swallowed a bad oyster. Looks like my hypochondria’s back. The oysters are off, the servants are dogs. How I hate the human race. I was in the rue Richelieu just now and I went past the big public library. That great mound of oyster shells they call a library—it makes me sick just thinking about it. All that paper! All that ink! All that scribbling! Someone wrote all that! What moron once said that man was a biped without feathers? And then I ran into a pretty girl I know, lovely as springtime, a girl worthy of being called Floréal, and she was delighted, overjoyed, delirious, in seventh heaven, the poor silly goose, because yesterday some ghastly banker, pitted with smallpox, deigned to fancy her! Alas! A woman watches the quack treating her as keenly as her case of thrush; cats chase mice as well as birds. This little madam, not even two months ago, was sitting pretty in a garret, fitting the little copper rings in the eyeholes of corsets, what do you call those things? She sewed, she slept on a camp bed, she lived with a flowerpot for company, she was content. Now she’s a lady banker. This transformation happened overnight. I met the victim this morning, jubilant. The awful part of it is that the brazen hussy was just as pretty today as she was yesterday. Her financier didn’t show on her face. Roses are better or worse than women in that you can see when the grubs have been attacking them. Ah, there is no morality on this earth. I call as my witness the myrtle, symbol of love, the laurel, symbol of war, the olive, that ninny, symbol of peace, the apple that nearly choked Adam with its pips, and the fig leaf, ancestor of the petticoat. As to justice, do you want to know what justice is? The Gauls covet Clusium, Rome defends Clusium and asks them what wrong Clusium has done to them. Brennus replies: ‘The wrong Alba did to you, the wrong Fidenae did to you, the wrong the Aequi, the Volsci, and the Sabines did to you. They were your neighbors. The Clusians are ours. We understand neighborliness the same way you do. You stole Alba, we are taking Clusium.’ Rome says: ‘You will not take Clusium.’ Brennus took Rome. Then he cried: ‘Vae victis!’ Woe to the vanquished! That’s what justice is! Ah, in this world, there are only beasts of prey! only eagles! only eagles! It makes my skin crawl.”
He held his glass out to Joly, who refilled it, then he drank, and proceeded, almost without having been interrupted by this glass of wine which no one noticed, not even himself.
“Brennus, who takes Rome, is an eagle; the banker, who takes the little working girl, is an eagle. One is as shameless as the other. So we may as well believe in nothing. There’s only one reality: drinking. Whatever your opinion, whether you are for the lean cock like the canton of Uri, or for the fat cock like the canton of Glaris, it matters little, so drink. You talk to me about the boulevard, the procession, etc. Well, well, so there’s going to be another revolution, is there? This poverty of means amazes me on the part of the good Lord. He has to keep on greasing the groove of events without letup. Things get stuck, they won’t shift. Quick, a revolution. The good Lord’s hands are black all the time from this dreadful dirty oil. In his place, I’d keep it simple, I wouldn’t keep cranking up my machinery in an endless restaging, I’d promptly lead the human race by the horns, I’d knit events together stitch by stitch without breaking the thread, I wouldn’t have any tricks up my sleeve, I wouldn’t have any fancy repertoire. What you lot call ‘progress’ runs on two engines, people and events. But the sad thing is that, from time to time, something exceptional is called for. For events as for people, the stock company’s not enough; there have to be geniuses among people, and among events, revolutions. Great accidents are the rule, the nature of things can’t do without them, and going on the way comets appear, you could be forgiven for thinking that heaven itself needs star attractions. The moment you least expect it, God plasters a meteor across the wall of the firmament. Some bizarre star shoots out, emphasized by an enormous tail. And that’s the reason Caesar dies. Brutus strikes him with a knife, and God strikes him with a comet. Hey presto! Up pops an aurora borealis, up pops a revolution, up pops a great man; ’93 in big letters, Napoléon in the starring role, the comet of 1811 at the top of the bill. Ah, and what a beautiful bill it is, blue and all studded with stunning flashing lights! Boom! Boom! What an amazing show! Look up, you gawking spectators. Everything’s out of control, the star as well as the play. Good God, it’s both too much and not enough. Such resources, plucked from the grab bag of the exceptional, seem magnificent, yet they are really rather poor. My friends, Providence is down to expedients. A revolution—what does that prove? That God is hard up. He stages a coup d’état, because there is a break in the connection between the present and the future and because, even being God, he can’t make the two ends meet. In fact, this confirms my conjectures about the state of Jehovah’s fortunes; and to see so much uneasiness up above as well as down below, so much meanness and stinginess and miserliness and distress in heaven as well as on earth, from the bird, who doesn’t have a grain of millet, to little old me, who doesn’t have a hundred thousand livres a year in income, to see the fate of humanity, which is pretty threadbare, and even the fate of royalty, which is showing its warp—witness the hanging of the prince de Condé, to see winter, which is nothing more than a rip in the zenith that the wind blows through, to see all those streaks like tatters in the brand-new crimson of the morning over the hilltops, to see the dewdrops, those fake pearls, to see the frost, that jewelry paste, to see humanity coming apart at the seams and events patched up, and so many spots on the sun, and so many holes in the moon, to see so much misery everywhere, I suspect God is not rich. He keeps up appearances, it’s true, but I sense the straits He’s in. He throws a revolution the way a merchant whose coffers are empty throws a ball. We must not judge gods by appearances. Beneath the gilding of the heavens I glimpse a destitute universe. There is bankruptcy in creation. That’s why I’m out of sorts. You see, it’s June 5, it’s almost night; I’ve been waiting for the day to come since morning. It hasn’t come yet and I bet it won’t come all day. That’s like the lack of punctuality of a poorly paid clerk. Yes, everything’s badly organized, nothing hangs together, this old world is a shambles, I’m going over to the opposition. Everything’s going to rack and ruin; the world is a pain in the neck. It’s like children: The people who want them don’t have any, those who don’t want them, do. Net result: I’m riled. On top of that, Laigle de Meaux, that baldy, hurts my eyes. It humiliates me to think I’m the same age as that cue ball. Otherwise, I criticize but I don’t insult. The world is what it is. I’m talking here without any malice and to ease my conscience. Receive, Eternal Father, the assurance of my sincere esteem. Ah, by all the saints on Olympus and by all the gods in heaven, I was not made to be Parisian, meaning, to ricochet forever between two gangs, like a shuttlecock between two racquets, from the strutting flâneurs to the loudmouth louts! I was made to be a Turk gazing all the livelong day at oriental scatterbrains performing that exquisite Egyptian dancing, lewd as the dreams of a celibate, or a hick from Beauce, or a Venetian gentleman surrounded by gentle dames, or a German princeling,9 providing half a foot soldier to the German Confederation and filling his spare time drying his socks on his hedge, that is, on his border! That’s what I was born for! Yes, I say Turk, and I’m not about to unsay it. I don’t understand why everyone’s so hard on the Turks; Mohammed has his good side; let’s have some respect for the inventor of seraglios full of houris and of paradises full of odalisques! Let’s not insult Mohammedanism, the only religion that comes complete with a henhouse! On that note, I insist on drinking. The earth is one huge silly prank. And it seems they’re going to fight, all these half-wits, bash each other’s heads in, slaughter each other, in the middle of summer, in the month of Prairial, when they could be going off to the countryside with some luscious creature on their arm to breathe in that great cup of tea of freshly mown hay! They really are too silly for words. An old broken oil lamp I saw just a moment ago in a junk shop prompts me to make this point: It’s time to illuminate the human race. Yes, I’ve come over all sad again! What a thing it is to swallow an oyster or a revolution the wrong way! I’m getting gloomy again. Oh, this rotten old world! We vie against one another, we depose one another, we prostitute ourselves, we kill one another—and then we put up with it all in the end!”
Here Grantaire, after this fit of eloquence, had a well-earned fit of coughing.
“Speaking of revolution,” said Joly, “it would appear that Barius is decibedly aborous.”
“Who of, do we know?” asked Laigle.
“Do.”
“No?”
“Do, I told you!”
The love life of Marius!” cried Grantaire. “I can see it now. Marius is a mist and he will have found himself some vapor. Marius is a born poet. Say poet and you say madman. Tymbraes Apollo. Marius and his Marie, or his Maria, or his Mariette, or his Marion, they must make pretty hilarious lovers. I can see it all. Ecstasies in which they forget to kiss. Chaste here below but going at it for all they’re worth in infinity. They are souls with senses. They sleep together among the stars.”
Grantaire was getting stuck into his second bottle and perhaps his second harangue when a new creature emerged from the square hole at the top of the stairs. This was a boy of under ten, in rags, tiny, sallow, with a sharp little muzzle of a face, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, hair all over the place, soaked with rain, looking pleased.
Making his choice without hesitation from among the three even though he obviously didn’t know any of them, the boy addressed Laigle de Meaux.
“Are you Monsieur Bossuet?” he asked.
“That’s my nickname,” answered Laigle. “What do you want?”
“All right. A big fair-headed fellow on the boulevard says to me: ‘Do you know mother Hucheloup?’ ‘Yes,’ I says, ‘rue Chanvrerie, widow of the old geezer.’ He says to me: ‘Get yourself over there. You’ll find Monsieur Bossuet there. Tell him from me: A—B—C.’ They’re pulling your leg, aren’t they? He gave me six sous.”
“Joly, lend me ten sous,” said Laigle. Then he turned to Grantaire: “Grantaire, lend me ten sous.”
That made twenty sous, which Laigle promptly gave the boy.
“Thank you, Monsieur,” the boy said.
“What’s your name?” asked Laigle.
“Turnip, Gavroche’s friend.”
“Stay here with us,” said Laigle.
“Have breakfast with us,” said Grantaire.
The child replied: “I can’t, I’m in the procession, I’m the one crying, ‘Down with Polignac.’ ”
And kicking his foot way out behind him, which is the most respectful of all possible bows, he took off.
Once the child was gone, Grantaire took the floor again: “That is pure gamin, pure Paris boy. There are many varieties in the gamin genus. The notary’s boy is known as a gutter-leaper, a saute-ruisseau, the cook’s boy is known as a pot-stirrer, a marmiton, the baker’s boy is known as a pastry-puff, a mitron, the footman’s boy is known as a groom, the sailor boy is known as a latherer, a mousse, the soldier boy is known as a drummer boy, a tapin, the painter’s boy is known as an apprentice dauber, a rapin, the merchant’s boy is known as an errand boy, a runner, a trottin, the boy courtier is known as a junior gentleman-in-waiting, a menin, the king’s boy is known as a dauphin, the boy god is known as a bambino.”
Laigle, meanwhile, was musing; he said in a small voice:
“ABC. That’d be: Lamarque’s funeral.”
“The big fair-headed fellow,” observed Grantaire, “that’d be Enjolras alerting you.”
“Will we go?” said Bossuet.
“It’s raining,” said Joly. “I swore I’d go through fire, not water. I do’d wad do catch a cold.”
“I’m staying put,” said Grantaire. “I prefer breakfast to a hearse.”
“Conclusion: We’re staying,” Laigle summed up. “Well, then, we’d better drink. Anyway, you can miss the funeral without missing the riot.”
“Ah, the riod! I’b all for it,” cried Joly.
Laigle rubbed his hands together: “So we’re going to go back to the revolution of 1830. Actually, it’s a bit tight in the arms for the people now.”
“I really couldn’t care less about your revolution,” said Grantaire. “I don’t abhor this particular government. It’s a crown tempered with a cotton cap. It’s a scepter ending in an umbrella. In fact, today, I’m just reminded by the weather, Louis-Philippe could use his royalty at both ends, extend the scepter end against the people and open up the umbrella end against the skies.”
The room grew dark, huge clouds now completely blotted out the sun. There was no one in the tavern or on the street, everybody having gone “to see the events.”
“Is it midday or midnight?” cried Bossuet. “You can’t see a bloody thing. Gibelotte, some light on the subject!”
Grantaire went on forlornly drinking.
“Enjolras looks down on me,” he murmured. “Enjolras must have said: Joly is sick. Grantaire is drunk. So he sent Turnip for Bossuet. If he’d come to get me, I’d have gone with him. Too bad for Enjolras! I won’t be going to his funeral!”
This resolution taken, Bossuet, Joly, and Grantaire did not budge from the tavern. At around two in the afternoon, the table they were leaning on was covered in empty bottles. Two candles were burning on it, one in a bright green copper candlestick, the other in the neck of a cracked carafe. Grantaire had led Joly and Bossuet to the wine; Bossuet and Joly had jollied Grantaire up again.
Speaking of Grantaire, since midday, he had progressed beyond wine, a mediocre source of dreams. Wine, with serious drunkards, has only a succès d’estime. When it comes to inebriety, there is black magic and white magic; wine is merely white magic. Grantaire was a daring drinker of dreams. The black hole of a fearful drunkenness gaping open before him, far from stopping him in his tracks, drew him in. He had abandoned the bottle and taken to the tankard. The tankard is a bottomless pit. Not having either opium or hashish to hand, and wanting to fill his brain with twilight dimness, he had resorted to that frightening mix of eau-de-vie, stout, and absinthe that produces such terrible sluggishness. It is from these three vapors, beer, eau-de-vie, and absinthe, that the soul is turned to lead. They are three forms of darkness, the celestial butterfly drowns in them; and, in a membranous smog vaguely condensed into a bat’s wing, three mute furies, Nightmare, Night, and Death, form and flit over the sleeping Psyche.
Grantaire had not yet reached that dismal point—far from it. He was wildly gay, and Bossuet and Joly kept pace with him. They clinked glasses. Grantaire added rambling gestures to the eccentric emphasis of his words and ideas; he sat straddling his stool, resting his left hand on his knee with dignity, his arm at a right angle, and, with his cravat loose and his glass full in his right hand, he tossed these solemn words to the fat servant, Matelotte: “Let the palace doors be opened! Let everyone belong to the Académie Française and have the right to kiss Madame Hucheloup! Let’s drink to that.”
Then he turned toward Ma Hucheloup and added: “Antique woman consecrated by use, approach, that I may contemplate you!”
And Joly shouted: “Batelotte and Bibelotte, dod’t give Gradtaire ady bore to drik. He spedds crazy abouds of boney. Since this borning, he’s already eaden up two francs nidety-five centibes in desperade extravagandce.”
Grantaire went on: “Who the hell took the stars down without my permission only to put them on again, this time disguised as candles?”
Bossuet, completely plastered, had kept his cool.
He had gone and sat on the sill of the open window, getting his back wet with the falling rain, and he contemplated his two friends.
All of a sudden, he heard a racket behind him, the sound of running, cries of “To arms!” He turned round and saw, in the rue Saint-Denis, at the end of the rue de la Chanvrerie, Enjolras flying past, musket in hand, and Gavroche with his pistol, Feuilly with his saber, Courfeyrac with his sword, Jean Prouvaire with his carbine, Combeferre with his musket, Bahorel with his rifle, and the whole stormy armed mob that followed them.
The rue de la Chanvrerie was scarcely as long as the range of a rifle. Bossuet improvised a megaphone with both hands cupped around his mouth and shouted: “Courfeyrac! Courfeyrac! Ahoy there!”
Courfeyrac heard the call, spotted Bossuet, and took a few steps into the rue de la Chanvrerie, shouting a “What do you want?” that got crossed on the way with a “Where are you going?”
“To make a barricade,” answered Courfeyrac.
“Why not here! This is the place for it! Make one here!”
“You’re right, Laigle,” said Courfeyrac.
And at a sign from Courfeyrac, the mob rushed into the rue de la Chanvrerie.