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Richefeu’s is not Enjolras’s last stop after the Cougourde. His evening’s work is not finished. He trusts the others not to fail him as Grantaire has, and need not check their progress, but nevertheless he wishes to hear their news, to pass the word along to other contacts. He’s not done until the evening is overblown and all the shutters seem to be closed against him, until even the faint gleam of light around their edges vanishes as candles are snuffed and lamps put out. Paris sleeps, except in the pockets and nests where life seethes eternally, but that world is not his, and he is not interested in it.
He is, perhaps, grateful to be on his final way home to the rue Saint-Séverin. The brief refreshment of sleep, for the body; some reading for the mind; and then in the morning, the day anew.
By his tenement door, there’s a dark form. Closer, it reveals itself to be a man half-curled in a graceless slump against the wall. Enjolras has the customary moment of quickened heartbeat – a police spy, a contact? Should he keep on walking past his own lodgings, and raise his hat to the man as a stranger? – and then, closer still, the man is revealed to be a common drunkard, the sharp smell of whiskey and ammonia rising from him like a contagion cloud.
Enjolras attempts to step over him.
“Don’t,” the man mutters. Then he uncurls, getting slowly and staggeringly to his feet. “I have come to make my apologies; don’t leave me in the gutter.”
“I had no hand in putting you there,” Enjolras says. The form is familiar now, recognisable against the distant light of the streetlamp and by the tailoring of his overcoat, fine despite the stains and creases.
“You’re angry with me?”
“I am.”
“And yet so cold,” Grantaire says, wondering. He sways closer, and peers. “I would think wrath would give a red tinge to your cheeks, would lend an unholy light to your eyes; and yet nothing. Only a crease in your pale brow. Does your blood still flow? Shall I check for your pulse?”
“Would you do a better job of finding mine than you did the sculptors’?”
“– Ah. You heard.”
“I saw.”
A longer pause. “How pleased you must be,” Grantaire says softly. “You thought me incapable, and I proved you right.”
“I thought you intolerable – but I gave you a chance, and you made of your chance what you would.”
Grantaire sighs at this harsh answer, and sways closer still. The sharp reek of him increases. There is an empty bottle by his feet, and his whole person suggests the sort of bravado that comes out of the neck of such a vessel. Vainglory, bluster, and melancholia; not a little self-pity, and no true contrition.
“Ah, Enjolras – I could call you an ingrate again, but I’d rather call you any number of things – αγαπατος, for one. Lucius Junius Brutus, sitting in cruel judgment. Shall I wallow at your feet, pitiless Achilles, as you sit in your tent and sneer?”
Enjolras wants to kick him from his step like a dog. “Inside, if you mean to do so,” he says. “You’re disturbing my neighbours.”
“Little you care what they think,” Grantaire says, but he’s quick to follow when Enjolras brushes brusquely past him. “And when we are private – I may present my Apologia?”
“If you must,” Enjolras says, unlocking his door. He moves to check that the shutters are fastened before he lights any of the candles.
He has no ear for anything Grantaire might say in his own mitigation. He’ll listen, and allow Grantaire to make his case – the least he can do for any man – but there’s nothing this man can say that will move him, and what he’ll say for himself cannot be anything but distasteful. Something of that must communicate itself to Grantaire.
He makes a show of drawing himself up, smoothing his wrinkled waistcoat, and gazing around the small room. “Ah, the inner sanctum – At last, the temple of your worship.”
Enjolras frowns. “A place to sleep.” There’s truly little enough to admire. It’s a temporary bolthole, not a home. None of the furniture is his own, only the books and the linen.
“You are the officiating priest of the Republic,” Grantaire says in grandiose contradiction. He concludes a thorough and covetous survey before he turns back to Enjolras and fixes him with bloodshot blue eyes, tragic as a hound’s. Now it comes; the excuses, the apologies. “But I am yours – the celebrant of your altar.”
“Idolatrous fancy.”
Enjolras doesn’t believe in God, or gods. He has no time for talk of them. They are the mere reflected hopes of men themselves, turned against them to keep them down. In the days of 93 they pulled down the shrines and shut the churches; muffled the bells of Paris. In Notre-Dame they dismantled the altar and carried in the effigy of Reason enthroned on the backs of sans-culottes. Great Talma died and was buried without fanfare. It was Buonaparte who brought back the incense and the censors, the smoke of superstition clouding the clear light of Reason.
“Idolatry indeed,” Grantaire agrees, unembarrassed. “Sweet idolatry,” he adds, and, before Enjolras can respond, he drops with unexpected grace to his knees.
"O! Tu eidolon de Ganymède adorable,
Votre corps est parfait, et nulle part déplorable.
Le soleil et les étoiles et la mer et le firmament,
Ils sont comme toi et l'Éternel a fait les permanente.”
Again Enjolras feels the brief, violent impulse to lash out with his foot. There’s something in him that recoils violently not only from this mockery of worship, but from Grantaire himself. It brings out the worst in him, this spectacle of self-abasement, of weakness and vacillation, of being both unkempt and unarmed.
He’s searching for a better response when Grantaire leans further forward and kisses the top of his booted foot. His bent head bares the back of his neck, shockingly pale between his crushed collar and the dark spill of his hair. Enjolras’s mouth opens, but still shapes no words, and Grantaire tips his head back and looks up at him.
The expression on his face seems to court cruelty.
Grantaire, Enjolras deduces rapidly, wants to be kicked – so he might feel better about his failure with the sculptors. Any guilt he might feel will be relieved by receiving such rebuke. He wants Enjolras to take himself violently off the false pedestal Grantaire himself has so helpfully placed him upon.
His suspicion is confirmed when Grantaire’s mouth turns up at his shock. It’s not his usual smile, but something darker and less formed. “I said I’d black your boots for you, didn’t I? Lick them to a polish so fine you could see your face in them. Would that curb your wrath?”
Enjolras has no answer, but Grantaire doesn’t wait for one. He lowers his eyes and presses his lips to the boot again. From there, he moves downwards, a trail of small deliberate kisses that only ends at the toe.
The sound of each touch of his lips to leather makes Enjolras think of the solemn kisses bestowed by a child to a parent, or perhaps by a priest in benediction to a man’s brow. A lover permitted to hold his beloved’s hand and press his kisses into her palm. Each successive thought is worse than the former; each successive, unstopped kiss is worse than those prior. Enjolras can’t move or speak, his eyes fixed on that dallying dark head. Hot-cold sweat prickles between his shoulder-blades at the almost absurd blasphemy of it, another man kissing his feet. Grantaire might as well be anointing them with oil and drying them with his hair.
“Stop that!” he exclaims, finding his words at last. It’s a wrench. “You’ll make yourself sick.”
“What, with the dust of the streets? A little muck won’t affect my constitution; it has weathered worse than la légère teinte de boue.” Grantaire lifts his head and puts out his tongue in demonstration. It is an obscene thing, wet with his spit in the candlelight, a flexing muscle with too much power and too little discipline. Then he tilts his head. “Isn’t it your part to embrace it also? Wouldn’t you kiss the hard hands of the twenty-year workman in his sweat and call him brother?”
“If I did, that man would be worth ten of you.”
“You’re still angry with me, despite my Apologia?”
“You’re lucky I don’t kick you to the floor or slap your face for you.”
Grantaire doesn’t recoil. If anything, the reverse; his eye brightens. “Any penance I might make for my sins, I will perform. Any reprimand you might give – Hit me, if you wish. Only don’t turn your face away from me.”
Enjolras is almost tempted. He’s wound like a spring after the evening’s work, and his frustration with Grantaire has reached true anger at last, after all these years. The two twist together into something sharp and pressing, seeking a release. There is a satisfaction to witnessing Grantaire’s act of self-degradation that is not at all fraternal, and it disturbs him. It disturbs him that he thought twice of kicking Grantaire away before he thought of raising him to his feet.
The true republican is just, not punitive; judge, not hangman. He masters the urge yet again. “I don’t practice unnecessary violence.”
“No – but you want to,” Grantaire says, sounding surprised and then delighted, as though this discovery has given him a long-desired grip, made Enjolras somehow real to him. His voice goes low and cajoling, as though he's speaking to a woman he’s attempting to seduce. “There’s blood moving in your veins after all - You’re furious enough to hit me. How you must choke on your smothered wrath! Do you swallow down fire day after day? Does it give you indigestion? Let a little out – it is only what I deserve, after all.”
If Enjolras’s lieutenants are each oiled and necessary parts of a complete machine, working together in quiet and deadly harmony, Grantaire is the obstruction which causes it to break apart, the damp sand in their powder train. He contributes nothing to their company but a little goodwill, an occasional turn of debate or discussion; and his demerits weigh far more heavily now. He is a friend they have carried this far on their shoulders, but now he burdens them.
Enjolras expected little from him, but hoped much; and having argued for his chance, Grantaire’s subsequent failure is starker still. He seems determined to point up with his person the argument he so frequently makes: that man is by nature indolent, unwilling to sacrifice or even stretch a little and disturb his comfort – or his discomfort. Man would rather wallow in his own misery and filth than dare to break from his torpor. Enjolras doesn’t believe that of mankind in general, but he has no choice now but to believe it of Grantaire, and no sweet, insolent, self-abasing kisses can soften that. There’s no fitting punishment to balance the scale, to alter that truth.
“No,” he says curtly. “That would only make you feel better, and I don’t propose to ease your conscience. If you came to me for absolution, you won’t find it.”
Grantaire looks daunted for a moment. Then, bereft, as though the magnitude of his failure has at last struck him, physically, as Enjolras himself refused to do so. When Enjolras refused to do so. And then – and Enjolras is watching closely, so he observes the change – Grantaire pushes away the knowledge that he cannot make up for this failure, no matter what he does, and tries to pretend it hasn’t come to him at all; as though, if he can only change the terms of this conversation, he may still come out some sort of Pyrrhic victor.
“Did I ask for absolution? No; chasten me, o Michael!” He throws up his head back provocatively. His collar is open, his cravat gone. His throat, bared to the lamplight, is in need of shaving. Enjolras can see the pulse beating under his ear, and the half-hooded eyes flash with desperation. “Leave the print of your hand on my face, and your touch will burn like an angel’s. I am unworthy: I have failed you. I inveigled an assignment from you to satisfy my own self-regard, that I should be busy on your business like my fellows – but I never had any intent of carrying it out. I meant only to make myself important! But your planned rising has no hope of success that I might have hurt; you will be crushed as easily as a man breaking the back of a flea with his thumb-nail –”
Grantaire goes abruptly and profoundly silent, his mouth still a little open in interrupted speech. His eyelids quiver. The star-shape of Enjolras’s hand stands out red on his cheek. Enjolras can’t quite believe that the act occurred, but his palm smarts and his nerve-endings dazzle like he was the one hit. In the silence, he can hear his own quickened breath.
Grantaire blinks again.
Then he turns his head deliberately and presents his unslapped cheek, reddened only by the small broken capillaries of too much wine, too often. “Another,” he says, and his voice has gone rough and strange. “That is how they do it in the lycée; a boy must count out his own punishment.”
Enjolras says, less in suggestion than in question, “Are you not punished enough?”
“No. Another.”
This time the blow is intended, and Grantaire is braced for it. They breathe out together when he makes contact, in a shared release that leaves Enjolras suddenly conscious that adrenaline, unwanted, is coursing through his veins.
He shakes his hand as though he can shake the frémissement out of his thrilling flesh. “Another?”
“Yes,” Grantaire says, and shuts his eyes. The look on his face is almost beatific.
Enjolras regards him coldly, then slaps him again. This third handprint overlaps the first fading one in palimpsest. The effect is uneven, but he won’t strike a fourth time. He’s no longer certain of precisely what he’s doing and for what purpose.
“That’s enough.”
Grantaire’s eyelids lift slowly, like a man coming out of a dream. His lips are still parted, and the tip of his tongue is briefly visible again when he wets them. “What?
“To your feet,” Enjolras says.
“Am I forgiven?”
A strange question to be asked by a man kneeling at one’s feet, unnaturally red and bright-eyed and breathing hard. The blue eyes are still red with wine and smoke – and possibly, Enjolras realises, weeping. It is an inquiry both too pitiful and too impossible to answer.
He silently offers his burning hand, and Grantaire takes it. He doesn’t put it to the use for which it is intended; to rise. Instead, his mouth brushes Enjolras’s pale knuckles like a religieux kissing the protuberant gilded folly of an ecclesiastical ring.
“Thank you,” he whispers, and the words are almost prayer. There’s a curious lack of mockery in the gesture which stops Enjolras from protesting, even though Grantaire has again taken what should bring him level as an excuse to deepen the gulf between them.
“Don’t make a false idol out of me. I won’t thank you for that.”
“Oh, never fear,” Grantaire says, and his mouth curls slightly, the sudden sweetness going out of it. “You are bent on iconoclasm. In the name of the republic, my altar will be shredded and my palladium smashed up.” The curl smooths out; for a moment he looks almost solemn, his eyes distant, still clutching Enjolras’s hand to his lips. “I think you will bleed, you know. The way reliquaries do, weeping tears of precious myrrh or expressing miraculous milk. They found them out to be hollow and their wonders mere trickery; that is what lesser men do, that is what faith means to them. When you bleed, however, the blood will be no fakery –”
“You’re drunk,” Enjolras says, and attempts to pull his hand free. “I don’t want to hear your ill-omened croaking.”
“You can’t have it both ways. You can’t throw out gods and godhead, yet allow for augury.”
Enjolras has no answer to that, and they both know it.
“Ah,” Grantaire says, and at last releases his grip.
He struggles to his feet unaided, and when he stands Enjolras is surprised afresh at the disparity in their heights. The crown of Grantaire’s head is level with his chin – or his mouth, if he sought to bestow the sort of consolamentum of lips to forehead he had briefly imagined while Grantaire kissed his feet. He frowns.
“You may sleep in my armchair for what remains of tonight. It’s not comfortable, but certainly preferable to my doorstep.”
“I’ll take the floor, if you allow it. I note you keep no carpets; doubtless you have no time to beat them properly. Is the omission is deliberate – to remove temptation? I’ll curl up at the foot of your bed and bless you for it.”
“Are you still not punished enough? How much easier it would have been to simply do as you said you would,” Enjolras says, wearily, “and not require such excessive penitence.”
“Am I forgiven?”
“Haven’t I answered that?”
“No,” Grantaire says, and tilts his head back until his chin rises and their eyes are as level as he can manage. His cheeks still faintly bear the mark of Enjolras's hand, and his mouth is melancholy. “No – but you needn’t. I know the answer.”
“Take the chair,” Enjolras says, and steps back, away from the heat of Grantaire’s body and those shame-filled blue eyes. There is no answer; there is no forgiveness, because it’s not his to give. It wasn’t Enjolras Grantaire failed, whatever he presumes, and that presumption is the real fault in him. A blow against the Republic can only be answered by a blow struck in its name, and that Grantaire will never rise to. Nevertheless – “Take the chair.”