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MARIUS' ASTONISHMENTS
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
Cafe 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, none the
less, 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 AEschylus,
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 Platriere, 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 Therese. From time to time,
little beings were born there.
Therese 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 sapientiae.
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