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After a preliminary stop at the Gaîté, they quarreled over what sort of debauch they should undertake for the rest of the night.
“I would prefer a fight,” said Grantaire, making a brave gesture with one fist held up. Abruptly, he swung around on his left heel, aiming the entire posture, appât à la face, at Prouvaire, who threw himself backwards into the street so quickly that his hat came off. It rolled in a lazy half-circle before coming to rest.
Prouvaire straightened, looked at his hat, and put a hand on his hair. Turning around, he collided bodily with two gentlemen passing the other way.
“I beg your pardon,” he said, and then said it again over the sound of Grantaire’s laughter.
He had hit, by some coincidence, Courfeyrac and his friend Marius, whose family name might have been something like Point D'appui. Courfeyrac’s hand was on his hat, and Point D’appui’s were both in his pockets, and there remained as they began to greet each other.
“My friends!” said Courfeyrac. “Gentlemen, ragazzi,” he looked at Grantaire and said in English: “miscreants,” as he took Grantaire’s elbow in his hand to steer him clear of the road. “Sit venia verbo. Good evening, and may I offer you an apology for stepping in on your brawl, ordinarily I would never, but it seemed rather unfairly turning in Prouvaire’s favor and then a voice from heaven said, peace hath her victories no less renowned than war, and so inspired I interceded and here you find yourselves separated. Again, good evening. Are you coming from the Gaîté, or something else? I can never quite say what you two fellows are dressed for.”
Grantaire picked up Prouvaire’s hat from the ground, hit it a few times to clear some of the dust, and handed it over with a gallant nod of his head.
“Leaving,” he said to Courfeyrac and Marius, “I fear. And yourselves? To the shadows of the Palais Royale together, if I catch the glance you share aright?”
Marius’s eyes widened in such an earnest expression of surprise that even Courfeyrac laughed at him, and spoke over him as he began to protest.
“Just so!” Courfeyrac said, and put his arm over Marius’s back, drawing him close so decisively that Marius stumbled. “We have been taken by the vogue of tenebrism -- say that the moment of unsheathing a blade is a dramatic subject in any light but,” he shook Marius’s shoulder fondly, “in the dark do the hues of bliss more brightly glow.”
“The caravagesque school is beneath my taste,” said Grantaire, and behind him Prouvaire started to laugh. “Give me an open window, effets de soir et de matin, with the neighbors and the wagon drivers staring inside! What effort, they say with admiration to one another, observe the pousse en quatre, and all graciously lit from above! For the common understanding cannot perceive excellence, or nudity to be perfectly frank, without the heavy-handed application of natural light.”
Prouvaire had turned around to produce the somewhat horse-like noise that was his unguarded laugh.
“You do not give common understanding sufficient credit,” said Courfeyrac. “And being of that opinion we must be along. Before the effects of the sunrise, you understand. M. Pontmercy,” he said, addressing Marius, and indicating with one hand that he should depart first.
When they were a building plot or so away, Prouvaire worked off one of his gloves to wipe a tear from his eye. “Pontmercy, was it?”
“Apparently,” Grantaire shrugged.
“I have thought it was Point D'appui for nearly a year,” Prouvaire admitted.
“What they must think of me,” said Marius quietly, when they had arrived back at Courfeyrac’s rooms.
“My dear,” said Courfeyrac, in his most expansive tone, with the rich baritonal resonance Marius found particularly compelling. “I tell you in tenderness that I doubt they think of you at all.”
Marius believed himself to be a man of analytical, if passionate, thought, and so he considered this information against his experiences and decided that Courfeyrac was very likely right.
Courfeyrac had been unknotting his necktie, but he went still for a moment in front of the mirror and traced the arch of his eyebrow with his thumb. “And let me promise you that I call it a deficiency that they do not,” he went on. He dragged the rest of the knot open and the points of his shirt collar fell forward.
Marius looked at his hands, and then he looked at the writing desk.
When he next lifted his eyes, Courfeyrac had put his waistcoat over the back of one of his chairs.
In the light from the branch of candles just to his left, his shirt was not perfectly opaque, and Marius saw the shadow of a forearm through the sleeve. With less distinction and during a shorter glance he saw Courfeyrac’s chest move on an indrawn breath, and reminded himself of the rude reference made earlier in the night, the hues of bliss more brightly glow, chastised by sabler tints of woe.
Georges de La Tour worked in a room lit with one candle.
Searching for something to say that was on a different topic, Marius put out an elbow to lean on the windowsill, and missing it by a good four inches he fell sideways. Instinctively he held onto a curtain with one hand, and pulled it down with him onto the floor.
As this happened he saw Courfeyrac spin around from the mirror, a hand at his cuff.
“Good god!” he was saying, crossing the distance of about four paces between them in two strides.
“I beg your pardon --” said Marius, and stood up while trying to untangle the curtain from his legs.
“These violent redecorations,” said Courfeyrac, and dragged Marius upright by his armpits, “have violent ends. My dear fellow, are you quite alright, can you move all of your limbs, or tell me the day of the week, the number which remains when you subtract Furies from Muses?”
Marius stared at him. “Six,” he said. And, it is Saturday.”
“I had asked for the day first. But your answers are sound. Unlike --" he inspected the bracket on which the curtain rod had rested. "Well. Forget it, and we shall have it fixed.”
“I truly am sorry,” said Marius.
“I have brutally torn the curtains from my own walls a dozen times at least,” said Courfeyrac. “Your actions are only typical. Come now! Pick your spirits up from the floor. If you can stand a moment to let me get dressed again I shall take you out for one of the three-sou desserts you are so fond of.”
Courfeyrac reached for his waistcoat, and the movement drew his shirt taut across his shoulders.
Marius looked at the wreckage of the curtain on the floor and felt numb.
Prouvaire was looking at the door, both opacity and stillness in his expression, and Grantaire realized he had forgotten that his friend was capable of either.
“If you had any fidelity to the opinions you state you would have insisted we wait for the sunset,” said Prouvaire. “For it strikes me now we have just performed by candlelight what you insisted required, what, a window flung open or wet grass in the evening.”
“The second is your own invention,” said Grantaire. “And not, I offer by the way, the first time you have suggested it.”
“Rather, it is the wrong encounter,” said Prouvaire, and if he’d smirked saying it Grantaire would have wanted to hit him.
“It is,” said Grantaire shortly. Then: “You look like Allori’s Judith in that banyan.”
Prouvaire exhaled sharply. “Then you own this article at your peril,” he said, and suddenly he lunged across the bed to take a fistful of Grantaire’s hair. He pulled on it enough to hurt, and Grantaire cried out and tried to move Prouvaire’s hand.
“Have pity,” cried Grantaire, “have mercy, leave off -- or let me drink myself to sleep, Holofernes had the correct idea and was admirable in his approach. Say that we all have an idea for our deaths, this is mine: wine until sunrise, and that is all, for I hold that death is a sleep! Even when life is but a dream, to dispense with your objection.”
Prouvaire snorted, and let up his pressure on Grantaire’s hair, sinking out of the pose. “I do not for a minute believe you think there was no rude awakening! How does that rhyme end? Our future doom is but to awake. So you will have to find another ideal.”
“Or another method,” said Grantaire. “Socratic, then, for me. I am heartily sick of the nature morte, we are victimized by the concept. I shall take charge. A harangue until the last moment, with my friends arranged about me. I enjoy myself in spite of them, as Rousseau wrote, and then, as he did not: the end.”
He looked over at Prouvaire, who had removed himself to the desk, and had failed somewhat spectacularly to warm to his favorite topic.
“And let me guess,” said Grantaire. “After getting your mortal hurt by the intermediary of a bridal wreath, you will die cursing us all roundly, Nimm deinen Raub! If only for the reference. A tear will run down the cheek of whatever von Weber ancestor remains for the event.”
Prouvaire scowled at him, which was so properly in character that Grantaire suspected him of mockery.
“Speak,” he said, as if Prouvaire needed prompting.
“Tell me truly,” said Prouvaire, pointing at Grantaire with a pencil he had stolen from the drawer, “what do you think it is that Courfeyrac and his friend Ponce-de-Nancy are discussing at this moment?”
“German pornography,” said Grantaire, leaning on the corner of his bedframe so his torso fell back behind his arms. He was lighting a cigar of Spanish tobacco, and he threw the spent match out the window. Lifting his eyebrows playfully at Prouvaire, he held the gaze as he puffed roundly on the cigar to start it off, and grinned.
“Certainly,” said Prouvaire, drily. “Well, not German, necessarily. So. Knowing this --”
“Knowing this, nothing,” said Grantaire. He squinted at the burning front of his cigar and stretched out his unoccupied arm. “Let them find how there is no joy in love but utility, let them find that passion is a category which prohibits duplication; we know our friend Courfeyrac, at least, we know he goes seeking liberty which is so dear; and he for it renounces life, but we shall always say with confidence, passion looks ultimately at one thing! Let them find it out on their own, that love itself is not grace, that grace is some other separate thing! They are smart enough, let them understand what fate Dante gave to Virgil.”
Prouvaire laughed, and stood up to take the cigar from Grantaire and draw in a long breath from it. He had to climb over the bed, and Grantaire’s legs, to knock ash onto the windowsill, and then went back to his seat at the desk, smoke leaking from his lips like a medieval dragon at rest.
“I had not thought you saw the situation so seriously,” he said, still laughing.
“I see everything seriously,” said Grantaire, and then he winked. “For what is a subject more grave than vanity?”
“Hah!” said Prouvaire, and then: “A night with your conversation, and only the windows to leave by.”
Grantaire put a finger at the side of his nose and smiled.
“Why did you say that, to Grantaire?” said Marius, over a three-sou teurgoule and a bottle of wine.
“What, about us unsheathing our swords together in the shadows of the Palais-Royal until we had achieved satisfaction?” Courfeyrac stopped himself and seemed to reconsider what he’d just said. “Lord but that sounds rather combative, I hope he took it aright, I had meant to say we drank from the same cup of Eros, you know, we fucked. Either way, this is what you meant, why did I say etc. etc., to Grantaire?”
Courfeyrac was plainly waiting for an answer, so Marius nodded. “Yes,” he said, to speed things along.
“Because it will drive him mad,” said Courfeyrac. He looked happily into the space above Marius’s shoulder, and under the shadows in the café, he appeared somewhat sinister. Then he steepled his fingers, and the effect became so exaggerated that Marius laughed.
“That seems a steep price for his joke,” said Marius.
Courfeyrac waved a hand. “Steep, never. Grantaire needs reminding that his friends are not given to him by his creator, but that instead we are a voluntary association and, he will have occasional need of us even when we do not shake our ambrosial curls and give the nod.”
Marius blinked at him. “You want him to be jealous?”
“Jealous! I want him to be better,” said Courfeyrac, so quickly on the edge of Marius’s question that his voice, which was typically warm and resolute, had a shade of agitation to it. His wineglass had been halfway off the table, and he looked at it as if he had forgotten the direction of his motion and chose to lift it and drink.
“You can’t possibly,” said Marius, who knew Courfeyrac well enough, and his plots were never at their core scornful. He put a hasty four spoonfuls of teurgoule into his mouth, feeling that he understood less than half of what had been said.
“Perhaps you are right,” said Courfeyrac. “One loves better when one competes. In any event, it profits him to think of us,” he shrugged, then: “We have made the bid, now we must secure it,” he said, leaning in and bringing his voice to a whisper. “Approaching: Bahorel. He will gossip. Here,” he seized Marius’s spoon and attempted to feed him some of the teurgoule, but Marius drew his head back before he understood the game.
“In the sight of heaven,” said Bahorel. “Has it come to this?”
Marius took the spoon from Courfeyrac, complicity making his mind work faster, and was silent as he chewed.
“My dear fellow,” said Courfeyrac. “We await some elaboration from you.”
“This is why I shall never share a room,” said Bahorel, making an open-palmed gesture at Courfeyrac and Marius that seemed to confuse him. He closed his hand, looked at it, and set it under his chin, putting his body at a better oratorical angle and drawing his free hand out in a graceful curve. “One is led into such embarrassments of domesticity that one can never perceive whether the scene takes place in a public way, or in private, or even in the dark! I propose to keep my wits about me: a bachelor for all my days, and alone in my bed, or on my blue brocade récamier, when I choose to be!”
“Do you see a scenario where your roommates are rather less than intimately dear to you?”
"Never,” said Bahorel.
“I am advised,” said Courfeyrac, decisively. He put a hand on the table, causing the wineglasses to jump. Marius moved his pudding closer to his body. “Marius, alas! This very mustachioed gentlemen here has made his case exquisitely and so you must move out, I fear, the minute you have finished your dessert.”
Marius glared at him, and Courfeyrac smiled. Bahorel took this natural pause to pull up a chair.
“Something by the way,” said Bahorel, in a confidential tone to Courfeyrac. “Is that I have given up a pair of new gloves at M. Staub’s, for his glover either lost the pattern or did not emerge from a weeklong debauch of opium to cut the leather, for they are a fair bit too short for my hands. Which I own are a bit graceful, more’s the pity. You were the first to come to mind, my dear fellow, for a better fit.”
Marius, looking down to avoid looking at Courfeyrac’s hand, unposed and relaxed by his wineglass, discovered he had no pudding left.
“Your thoughtfulness does you credit,” said Courfeyrac, his eyes narrow. “But I have no use for them. M. Pontmercy, what would you say to a new set of gloves? The apparel often proclaims the main, as the English say.”
“I am well enough off,” said Marius.
“Nevertheless,” said Courfeyrac. “You will not remain so forever. Yesterday it was summer; today it is autumn, let us agree to collect these gloves which were not shapely enough for the hand of Bahorel, who bears the crucifix and the delight of counting among his forebears Titian’s young Englishman and likely the Mona Lisa,” at the end of this monologue Courfeyrac had locked his eyes on Marius and was tilting an eyebrow toward the door.
“I shall tell M. Staub to expect you,” said Bahorel.
"We are pleased that he will,” said Courfeyrac, still undertaking to say something to Marius with his single left eyebrow.
Marius shook his head, and hiked up his shoulders, attempting to say, I don’t know what you mean without speaking. In the end Courfeyrac stood, combining with the motion the draining of his wineglass, and put an appropriate sum on the table.
Prouvaire moved his knee up, the muscles of his thigh taut to keep still as Grantaire drew back with a careful motion, a shade too slow in his own opinion, but courteous.
“Tempus volat,” Prouvaire said, “I have stayed on until dawn and should be away."
Grantaire was sitting up. “I won’t ask you to stay on,” he mumbled.
Prouvaire’s mouth moved ironically, and he got out of bed and began to look for his clothes. “No,” he said. “Of everyone I have met you are the most eager to put an end to the idyll. A languorous summer descends, and as men say they hope it will last for twenty years you are already dressed for autumn rain, saying, et latet et lucet Phaetontide condita gutta, and, you are all fools to think any day in May has not already two feet in November!”
“You would like me to ask you to stay on?” Grantaire asked, ignoring the rest. “Do what you will, Prouvaire.”
Prouvaire tossed his head, and some of the fine strands of his hair spread themselves across his damp cheek to the corner of his jaw. “Do you think that M. Courfeyrac says that to his friend, Marius Point D'Alençon?”
“You stray longer from the name with each guess,” said Grantaire. “And they are roommates, so Courfeyrac says nothing at all of staying or going.”
Prouvaire was dressing himself in an unfocused fashion; he jumped a few times to pull his trousers on, and left the fall open as he began to fasten his cuffs, pausing in the middle of that enterprise to wipe his hair off of his cheek.
“Well, I suppose heaven is not always at peace. Come. Grantaire. Content yourself that you are not in heaven, you are here! The bottle your ABCs, dice, cards, and Katherle your picturebook, and all the rest, master of your fate,” Prouvaire said, and having discovered Grantaire’s shirt under his own waistcoat threw it at Grantaire’s face.
Somewhat surprisingly, his aim was not bad, and Grantaire pulled the shirt off his head with aggravation, thinking that somewhere Courfeyrac and Marius created a picturesque tableau, likely asleep, with light sad or inspirational, diffuse through the clouds; it had rained since the sun began to rise. As richly textured and as bizarre as a Fuseli, with as many demons and hags in the shadows. The caravagesque school, he had said, was beneath his taste.
When Marius woke up, Courfeyrac was already shaving, angling his jaw up to keep his hair out of the way and ensure that his work was precise. The ruddy shadow of whiskers that he kept up were perfectly symmetrical, and required an artistic attention to detail.
“Good morning,” said Marius, through a stretch of his shoulders that did not quite access his discomfort, which was something like an itch below his sternum.
His words startled Courfeyrac somewhat beyond necessity, and his body clenched to a ready, upright posture, and then immediately fell into a laugh.
“Marius,” Courfeyrac said. “Arisen early! Observe, I have cut my own throat in service of expressing disbelief,” he was wiping down the razor, and it left a modest smear of blood on the white cloth.
“My apologies, I did not see your concentration,” said Marius. He looked out the window, and found that the pane and the street below were wet. The sun behind the clouds was early and colorless.
“Never fear,” said Courfeyrac. “I accept that you will bring ruin on this apartment and finally burn the rue de la Verrerie in its entirety to the ground. I saw it in your eyes when we first met.”
Marius laughed. “Perhaps I can pay for a new curtain.”
“And a new neck, thank you,” said Courfeyrac. “Never mind. I shall write to my father, and he will pay for it. The curtain, I mean.”
He tilted his head back to bare his neck at the mirror, blotting blood with the flannel.
Marius stopped himself from staring, and tried to consider growing whiskers himself, squinting at his own reflection in the window that observed the street. Perhaps in a year or so.
“But today,” said Courfeyrac, and he strode over, throwing the flannel on the floor. “Gloves. Bahorel’s unpaid-for cast-offs. Wear your best shirt, my dear fellow, and we will receive charity as archly as we are capable. Come," he took Marius by the shoulders, measuring the distance, and let one hand fall just above the widest part of his bicep. "For verisimilitude," he said, putting the other hand through the back of Marius's hair and rocking bodily forward to kiss him.
Marius had the sense to move his chin to the side, they were so similar in height that it was like joining a corner in woodworking. Courfeyrac's body was very warm, and the beat of his heart resounding enough that Marius could feel it in his own chest, and when Courfeyrac stepped back there was a rush of cool air between them.
"Well done," said Courfeyrac, "we'll convince them yet. Old Staub will be a challenge, I expect, but I am not afraid. Your arm is very creditably firm, by the way," he finished, punching Marius below the shoulder, and giving him a fraternal slap on the back before advancing on his wardrobe in the joining room.
When he was certain he was alone, Marius winked at himself in the mirror, brushing off his shoulder and practicing a roguish smile. This was libertinism, he thought, this was an indiscretion, and vigorous living, profligacy of youth.
In the mirror he decided he looked perfectly rakish, and noticed with an even more rakish scowl that Courfeyrac had left behind a bloodstain on the lifted point of his shirt collar.