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The barricade is an ugly thing, a malignancy rising from the rabble and waste of Paris. It is a thing of broken carts, splintered boards, a child’s wardrobe with faded paint—to Grantaire, it doesn’t look like liberty at all. The artist within him marvels at its creation and its desperate, hungry growth, while the man suffocates under its shadow. With the barricade before him and the Corinthe behind, he feels more trapped than he ever has.
He points out as much to Enjolras, who has taken a rest from his proselytizing. “This is a death sentence,” he says, ignoring the long-suffering sigh that follows. “There is no way out that is not over that barricade.”
“That is the point,” Enjolras says.
Of course that is the point—the fundamental misunderstanding, which Grantaire does not have the heart to speak, is that Enjolras believes, truly and fiercely, that they will not need to go over the barricade. He believes this side to be the side from which freedom and liberty shall be realized, and so he stands at the top and sees it advancing to encompass the whole of France, the whole of mankind, and all from their small corner of the Rue de la Chanvrerie. He has been to the top of the barricade and seen this, but he has not looked down. He will not; it is not in his nature. So Grantaire must do it for him.
This is not such a hard task, as Grantaire was born in the low places of Paris and raised up merely by coincidental associations, so the hunched shoulders and downcast eyes still come naturally to his person. The ground beneath his feet is an old friend. He has woken with his head on the cobblestones, the last vestiges of a drunken haze still upon him, and known readily in which corner of Les Halles he had collapsed the night before.
Eventually Grantaire merely says, “Take care. Do not place your hopes upon the people of Paris. I know them, I am one of them. They will not rise.”
“You are one of them, yet you are here,” Enjolras responds. “For liberty, they will rise.”
“Have I risen?” Grantaire asks, from his position sprawled in one of the few chairs not sacrificed to the barricade, limbs askew. “I do not think so. And besides, I am not here for liberty. I am here for you.” He spreads his hands, gestures to the dark, shuttered windows lining the square. “Do our fellow citizens seem to share such ideals?”
“It does not matter,” Enjolras snaps. “Your cynicism will get us nowhere. Whether or not the people rise, we will stand tomorrow for what is just and right. You are welcome to leave if this offends your sensibilities. Even I cannot force you to do this.”
“You forget your Rousseau, then. We are all of us bound by this contract, whether I wish it or not.”
“If you must stay, then, stay and be silent.” A scuffle at the top of the barricade draws their mutual attention. Enjolras turns his head, and Grantaire is momentarily distracted by the elegant curve of his neck, the line of his jaw. “The spy has returned.”
“Go and speak with him, fearless leader,” Grantaire says, waving him off. “I will be here.”
“What did I say about silence?” But as Enjolras leaves, Grantaire thinks he sees the hint of a smile on his lips. This is why he does it, really, the prodding and needling. One cannot survive on solemnity alone.
----
Grantaire maintains that the Café Musain, despite being very much a public enterprise in which he has no claim, is his before it is anyone else’s, for he is often earliest to arrive and last to leave, and he certainly has spent more hours there in a drunken stupor than any other customer has, save for perhaps Joly, who is rarely drunk but always persistently jovial enough to pass. As such, he finds it incomparably rude that someone would now tell him to take his inebriated self elsewhere.
Without looking up, he says, “I cannot possibly remove myself, sir, as I have made a promise to this bottle, who has been a true friend to me, that I will not leave until I have seen the bottom. But it seems I am Sisyphus, and my friend refills each time I come to the end of it, so I fear I will be here quite a while yet.”
There is enough of a length of silence that Grantaire thinks the man has left. But then his bottle is abruptly snatched from his hand and its contents distributed upon the ground at his feet. With a surprised shout, Grantaire scrambles from his seat to avoid the splash. The movement sends his head spinning, which is the only reason he can procure to explain why he cannot speak, for a moment, upon seeing the man that stands before him.
“You will find the bottom quite easily now,” the man says, plunking the empty bottle back on the table. He shakes his blond hair from his eyes, and it falls to frame a cold, sharp face, so perfectly proportioned it might have been carved from marble. “May the search for a new friend take you somewhere else.”
“But I have found one here!” Grantaire proclaims, wrangling his wits back under control. “What is your name, sir, or shall I call you Antinous? Eros? Belvedere Apollo? I had not thought to find you so far from Rome! What cause have you to come to the Rue de Mondetour ? We are all heretics here, everyone in Paris is a skeptic or a fool. I happen to be both, which is the most miserable thing to be, but I am quite happy to do it. The drink I had, it’s prescription, you see, it makes everything from the Latin Quarter to the Place de La Bastille seem like the Champs Élysées. You’ve abused a man’s medicine, sir, and Dionysus is not so forgiving. But where are you going?”
For the man had begun walking away, back to where Grantaire noticed a group of young, well-dressed men waited for him. He calls out to his retreating figure: “What is your name, or are you an angel, that you may not speak it in any earthly tongue?”
One of the men, tall and broad with curly, dark hair, breaks into laughter. “You are psychic, sir!” he says. “This man is an angel, though he does not like to think so. He is Enjolras.”
“Anje ,” Grantaire murmurs, “Yes.”
“Why would you tell him,” Enjolras hisses at the man who had revealed his name. “He is a drunkard, I do not want his association.”
“No, he is funny, and I like him. You are too harsh on the world, Enjolras.” The man approaches Grantaire and holds out his hand, grinning ear to ear. “I am Courfeyrac. The skinny one there is Combeferre, and the quiet one is Jean Prouvaire, though he will tell you to call him Jehan. Let me buy you another drink, as Enjolras has so rudely rid you of the one you had.”
Grantaire takes his hand. “I am sure we will be good friends,” he says. “But I think Enjolras doesn’t like me much.”
“He doesn’t like most things, you mustn’t take it personally.”
“Oh, that will not be difficult,” Grantaire says. “I take nothing personally.”
Courfeyrac claps an arm around his shoulder, dragging him towards the bar while smoothly ignoring Enjolras’s glare. “I think we will get along quite well. Do you know, we are something of a secret society? A bit dangerous, even.”
----
So it turns out that the spy is not a spy; or at least, not their spy. The spy is Inspector Javert of the police force, favorite of M. Chabouillet, the Minister of State and prefect of police in Paris. All in all, he is quite an important person.
Naturally this sends the entirety of the barricade’s population into upheaval.
“I will not suffer a traitor among us,” Enjolras warns. He had turned red in the face upon Javert’s unmasking and had only just settled into a more palatable, steaming sort of rage. “But I will allow him a moment to speak for himself.”
Enjolras turns to where Bahorel and Feuilly hold the man on his knees. “We are fair and just. All accused may represent themselves—what do you say of your actions?”
Javert has the look of a feral dog, just barely restrained by its bonds. “Just? You are all schoolboys playing at rebellion,” he spits. “ I may be Inspector now, but I was not always—I dragged myself up from the gutter and made myself a man of respect and means, and yet I am threatened by a horde of rich bourgeoisie repeating things they have read in books. You have not lived the lives of those you preach to; you do not have their support, looking down on them from your high towers, and without it your paltry rebellion will fall. You have brought blood and chaos to this city that gave you the best of itself." He sneers, a brutal contortion of his face. "Come morning your bodies will be on the streets, and they will be gathered up and burned by better men than yourselves. I do not recognize your court.”
He sits back on his heels, matching Enjolras’s burning gaze with his own. They are the same sides of different coins, Justice with her scale and sword.
“Well,” Courfeyrac says, miffed. “Not much of a defense, that.”
----
“I am in love,” Grantaire says to Feuilly, who thinks of Grantaire’s love as one might a freak storm—intense, but unlikely to last long. “Oh, but Erato herself could not have written of the man I have just seen. The Bard is mistaken, Feuilly, Love cannot be blind! I barely know the mind of this man and yet still I have felt winged Cupid’s arrow pierce my heart. Do I appear different to you? I must, because I am changed.”
Feuilly rolls his eyes. “You forget what follows: Love, in choice, so oft’ beguiled.”
“I am clear of mind! You do not believe me, but I am sober. He did not even let me finish my drink.”
“Did he not?” Feuilly gives this some consideration. “Perhaps he is good for you, then.”
Feuilly, first an orphan, is now a craftsman, and having lost his parents had taken the city of Paris and all of her people as his patron. It was why they got along so well, despite their differences—though Feuilly despaired at Grantaire’s cynicism and lack of personal ambition, the two shared their love of Paris, and between them knew every part of the ancient city like the back of their hands.
Grantaire scoffs. “I doubt he will be good to me—he does not seem the type.”
“But you are in love, so you do not care?”
“It is not that I do not care. It is rather I do not mind. I do not know him well yet, but I expect he will prove to be a great man.” Grantaire sits down at his and Feuilly’s little table. “And great men, my dear friend, do not often care so much whether they are good.”
Feuilly gives him an assessing glance. “If it is all the same to you,” he says, “I hope you do not see him again. Perhaps he will have no reason to come back to the place where he had the most unpleasant conversation.”
“Oh no,” Grantaire laughs. “I am part of their secret society now! They are revolutionaries, insurgents, republicans, and they have taken the Café Musain for their treasonous rendez-vous. It is not even my fault—do not blame Echo for her misfortune.”
“Still,” Feuilly says, knowing Grantaire quite thoroughly by now. “I do not think this will end well."
“Nothing that ends can end well, Feuilly. It is everything in-between that matters!”
Feuilly sighs. “I suppose I must go with you to these secret republican meetings. Someone who knows you must hold you accountable for your words, as you never do.”
“I knew you would come around,” Grantaire says, and flings himself across Feuilly’s lap, grinning up at him. “Tell me. Wouldn’t you like to see an angel?”
So. Initium sapientiae. This is the manner in which Grantaire begins to attend the weekly gatherings of Les Amis de l’ABC, under the pretense that they cannot use his café for clandestine meetings without inviting the resident drunkard along. Enjolras says he is capable of becoming drunk at another café, but as it is not really due to this that Grantaire stays, the argument is futile from its inception. Grantaire wonders whether Enjolras knows why it is that he comes, though he does not care for revolution. He decides he doesn’t—if Enjolras knew the truth of it, he would never have thought Grantaire so faithless.
----
Javert is not particularly repentant—Grantaire curses the world for surrounding him with principled, stubborn, ridiculous men who cannot see beyond their ideals to save their own skins. But as it is in his nature to bend, it is in Javert’s only to break.
Bossuet and Joly play a game of cards by candlelight, something that involves a lot of jostling and snatching of the other’s hand. Feuilly is at the top of the barricade, keeping watch, his delicate, artist’s fingers white-knuckled on the barrel of the gun. Gavroche, who had done the hard work of unveiling the Inspector’s identity, sleeps under an old coat. He is too young to have the endurance one learns from knowing great despair, but Grantaire has drunk of it often, its taste an old friend, and so he sits awake in the light of the Corinthe and watches his friends go about their business as if they did not also go to their deaths.
Enjolras has taken to holding court on a small platform towards the center of the barricade, no more than a consequence of its haphazard birth, but he makes it appear like Olympus, or Sinai. From it he seems invincible, immortal.
“He should be killed,” Courfeyrac is saying. “He is a traitor to the revolution and a police, besides.”
“If we begin executing men who do not believe what we do, we are no better than those against whom we have rebelled!” Jehan protests. “We cannot kill this man who has done right by his own self.”
Combeferre runs a distressed hand down his face. “To kill a captive,” he says. “An unarmed man. It does not feel right.”
Grantaire observes this from the shadows, this strange mockery of his friends’ old meetings. Combeferre had been a medical student, once. He would have taken an oath vowing to do no harm. Where before they sat debating liberty, now they sentence a man to death. They are only students—what do they know of justice and law? No more than they have read. But for the young and privileged, this is enough. They are Liberty leading the people and do not see the bodies beneath them.
“Courfeyrac,” Jehan says, “You are bloodthirsty tonight. Where has your good-nature gone?”
“I am not in the business of forgiveness when it is my life on the line, Jean Prouvaire!” Courfeyrac responds. “He is but one man, and there is an army at our gates.”
Jehan leans forward, engaged now. He has always been a Romantic, one who felt passionately and loved freely. Courfeyrac’s display of casual cruelty is oddly fascinating. “You would kill one who has only offended you?”
“Pro patria mori, no?” Courfeyrac says, spreading his hands. “He will die for his country, as he wishes to. We will live another night for our rebellion, as we wish to. All is as it should be.”
“I do not believe a revolution that begins with murder will end with anything but more death,” Combeferre interrupts. “We must go forward with peace and justice.”
“It is not peace that affects change.” Enjolras’s quiet words cut through the dissenting voices. “Terror and virtue, that is what revolution is, what it must be. ‘Terror is only justice.’”
“You know, maybe Robespierre’s terror and virtue aren’t the best model,” Grantaire says, surprising everyone, and himself. Every eye turns to him, noticing him for the first time. “Seeing as he was guillotined by the same people he tried to free. Seeing as here we sit, under another King.”
Enjolras looks at him with that angry fire in his eyes, the light that says be silent, you speak out of turn. Grantaire should be immune to it by now, but he is not. He is no stronger now than the day he met Enjolras in the back of the Musain. That does not mean he cannot endure.
“Do you know, Enjolras, how important this man is? He is the prodigy of the prefect of police, who is the man currently signing an order for our heads. He is worth more now than any of us, and perhaps all of us together.”
“You advocate for this man, Grantaire?” Courfeyrac asks.
Combeferre says, “What are you proposing?”
Enjolras remains silent, assessing. Of the three, Combeferre will be the most easily convinced—his philosophy has always been one of peace, and he does not want unnecessary violence. Courfeyrac is unpredictable, warm one moment and dangerous the next, according to any passing fancy. Enjolras… Enjolras will never be convinced.
“There need not be a sentence at all,” Grantaire says at last. “Trade his life for ours. We are no state—we have no laws.”
“Ours are the laws of liberty and the people,” Courfeyrac proclaims.
“You know as well as I that laws not promulgated or written are no laws, Courf, and beyond that, this barricade is on French land. By her law, the Inspector is a free man. What sentence is there that you may deliver? Are you Themis, that Justice is yours by word alone?”
What he does not say is this: Enjolras has not killed a man before. When the fighting takes them, and they all fire into the mob as one frenzied beast, that is different. Who is to know which bullet kills which man, or whether it struck at all? Only the dead can say, and they are not ones for speaking. But if Javert were to die, it would be an execution, and it would be at Enjolras’s hand, for he could not abide anyone else administering the sentence. Execution is not in his nature. Such an act would pain him, and Grantaire would see him spared this.
It is only by long-standing habit that such concerns emerge so contrarian. Grantaire has only ever been able to stand in opposition.
Enjolras’s jaw clenches in a way that suggests irritation.
“This is an inspector who would see the revolution stifled,” he says, slowly, as if Grantaire maybe hadn’t caught that part of the story. “He would kill us all given the chance. Why do you speak for him?”
“I do not pretend I like the man himself—I just ask whether his death would see the revolution made manifest, and whether his single, continued life would destroy it.”
“Yes,” Enjolras hisses. “His single life could bring absolute ruin.” He is furious now, as Grantaire questions the very lifeblood of the revolution he has given everything to build. But Grantaire knows this sort of fire—he has lived in the back alleys of Paris, and he has seen dry wood and thatch ignite at the smallest spark. He has seen conflagrations arise from candlesticks, and he has seen them burn to nothing in seconds. Enjolras has not the fuel to sustain him for the end that is coming.
“And so what of your life?” Grantaire retorts. “What of ours? You will give it here upon this barricade, with no thought of the future? If one life may sway the tide, as you say this Inspector’s will, give more thought to your own, Apollo. Your gift is prophecy; tell me, what good will this bring?”
“I have every thought of the future! It is for that future that I freely give my life here, so that others may take up our banners.”
“Can you not see? Has your own light blinded you? There are no others. There will not be tonight, nor will there be tomorrow when our bodies have become part of this damn barricade.” Grantaire smiles cruelly. “Do not be so humble as to presume others will do as you have done. You are the only one of your kind.”
----
By the end of the first meeting, Grantaire has been introduced formally to Combeferre, Jehan, Bahorel, and Bossuet, and in turn introduces Les Amis to Musichetta, the pretty bartender with a sharp smile and sharper wit. Bossuet is immediately fascinated. Grantaire does not have the heart to tell him that she is already quite involved with Joly, though by Musichetta’s glances this does not seem to be much of an obstacle.
By the end of the second, he has discovered that Les Amis de l’ABC is a political society in the way the National Guard is a club of rule-abiding men—they would have stormed the Bastille had it but waited for them to finish grade school. Courfeyrac in particular, though playful and quick-witted, jumps at any provocation, and it is only by Combeferre’s calming influence that he and Enjolras have not already called the streets of Paris to arms.
Jehan helps. He is a strange fellow, quiet and unassuming, but he speaks as a poet and an artist. He sees beauty in the world as it is, and does not sacrifice such simple things for revolution.
“If it is to be a revolution without art, without beauty,” Jehan says one day, early on in their acquaintance, “I do not think it is the right revolution. We must let the muses have their place in the new order.”
“Pretty girls will always have a place in revolution,” Courfeyrac suggests, wiggling his eyebrows.
“Yes,” Musichetta cuts in. “At the head of it!”
By the third meeting, Grantaire is quite accustomed to the way the students flit between topics according to their own whims. Courfeyrac passionately despises the monarchy; Jehan loves the Middle Ages; Combeferre and Bossouet demonstrate feats of judicial jargon; and Enjolras… Enjolras wants to change the world, desperately and in every direction at once.
Grantaire, ever uncertain, cannot comprehend a cause so worth believing in that its advancement becomes the very structure upon which one stands. Of course he and Enjolras were destined to clash.
“Do you think me a fool, Tymbraeus Apollo?” he asks upon one such clash. “I have my Rousseau, Robespierre, Danton, and Voltaire just as you do, and I was not given them by a schoolteacher. Arma virumque cano, don’t you know, I learned it, too. I am a skeptic, but I am not trapped in a cave, amusing myself with shadows and tricks of light. Please do not condescend to me—it does not suit my tastes.”
The others look between them, by now used to these disagreements.
Enjolras frowns. “I do not condescend to you, Grantaire,” he says. “I think you are aimless and irresponsible and crude, and I do not like you much.”
“Oh!” Grantaire says. “Well then. That’s all right.”
Feuilly, who is so good-natured and pleasant that naturally he gets on famously with the rest of the group, sighs and drops his head into his hands.
----
More arguments follow the first: Grantaire questions the movement, Enjolras questions Grantaire, and it becomes a series of increasingly vicious ad hominem attacks until Combeferre or Jehan step in with a compromise satisfactory to neither party. On some subliminal level, Grantaire recognizes the needling for what it is—a pathetic, desperate attempt to gain Enjolras’s attention for a scant few minutes. But the cause gets the rest of him; Grantaire can allow himself this.
He is half asleep one night, having decided to drink for the duration of Enjolras’s lecture and unwittingly slipping several cups past his usual tolerance. So it happens that as the others file out in fits and bursts, it is Enjolras, Combeferre, and himself who are left alone in the Musain.
“You are hurting him,” Combeferre says, and Grantaire realizes they think him asleep. “Unfairly so.”
“It is not unfair; I ask of him only what I ask of you, or Courf.”
“But he is Grantaire, not you or me or Courf. And he does try. It is just that you do not see it.”
“I would see it!” Enjolras sounds insulted. “Tell me where; he drinks and he critiques and mocks and generally abhors everything you and I stand for.”
“Yes,” Combeferre agrees. “But that is more than he has ever done.”
“He does not know anything of the revolution—”
“The two of you are antithetical to the other, we all know this,” Combeferre interrupts, impatient. “It is the most obvious thing in the room. You fight incessantly with no recourse, and yet both you and he come back every time and start anew. Perhaps this is a sustainable relationship; I don’t know. The both of you confound me. But do you not see? He has done as you asked—he has taken a stance. It is anything that is against yours, but every aspect he critiques, you improve. Everything he mocks, you make irreproachable. And I do not think he abhors anything you say. So you cannot call him the things you do, because, though I will not deny he is often drunk and unruly, on the other counts he is not any worse than the rest of us.”
Combeferre is far too observant, Grantaire thinks, with his head pressed firmly against the table. It is an unfortunate position, but he cannot move now—they have said too much, he has stayed too long.
Enjolras is silent for several moments. “I do not mean to be cruel,” he says at last. “I know I am often single-minded and severe, but it is only because that is what the world requires.”
“Grantaire is your friend, Enjolras. We are your friends,” Combeferre says softly. “We are not the world.”
“This is the only way I know to be.”
“Then perhaps he has something to offer you.”
Enjolras’s voice, when he finally speaks, is contemplative. “Perhaps.” He hesitates. “But I do not like him antagonizing me, ‘Ferre. If he has suggestions, why does he not submit them like a reasonable person? He does it on purpose, you know. He doesn’t believe any of what he says, he just says it so that I will become irritated.” He sounds almost like a petulant child now—Grantaire hides his grin in the crook of his elbow, wishing he could see his face.
Combeferre lets out an exasperated sigh. “In some things, Enjolras, you are the most foolish man I know.”
“I think you are speaking nonsense,” Enjolras says. “You should not stay up so late reading, it has addled your brain.”
“I am going, I am going.” Combeferre rustles around, picking books and notes up from where his friends have left them, as is their habit. He will return them all next week. “Help him home,” he says. “Maybe you will understand, then.”
Combeferre leaves then, and upon his exit Grantaire makes a show of waking up. He stretches, yawns, and in general behaves as if he has not just heard Combeferre air his most personal feelings to the object of his attention.
“What are you still doing here, oh fearless leader?” he quips, slurring his words more than necessary. “The sun is down, and your carriage has left without you.” He tries to stand and stumbles, holding onto the back of the chair for support. He pauses, lets the world cease its spinning, and thinks he might be more drunk than he thought.
Enjolras grimaces at the display. “Don’t kill yourself on a barstool, Grantaire. I would be embarrassed.” With long strides he approaches, faster than Grantaire can register, and sets Grantaire’s hand on his shoulder with an arm around his waist. “I’ll help you downstairs.”
The sudden contact has a sobering effect. “There is no need,” he manages, mouth suddenly quite dry. “I have made it home in worse condition.”
“I’ll not have you doing so tonight,” Enjolras says, and then adds, “That would be rude, especially after you’ve been so blessedly quiet these past hours.”
Grantaire freezes. The action makes Enjolras bump into his side. “Naturally,” he croaks. “Seeing as I was asleep.”
“You are not a sleepy drunk, Grantaire, nor do you sleep deeply.”
“Combeferre speaks very softly,” Grantaire protests. “A bit of talking would not wake me.”
A sly grin creeps over Enjolras’s lips. “I did not say it was Combeferre who was talking.”
Grantaire grimaces, a sinking weight in his stomach. “Indeed you hadn’t,” he mutters. “That is my mistake.”
Enjolras is like a bird of prey, triumphant in the way he digs his talons into Grantaire’s weakness. “Now you must tell me. Is all that ‘Ferre said true?”
“I am still not sure I was awake—tell me what he said.”
“Why must you make me say it?”
“Because I want to hear you admit it, Apollo.”
“Admit what? That we argue? That you are endlessly irritating? That I am not sure why you keep coming, if it is true it hurts to do it?”
“He was wrong about that,” Grantaire murmurs. “It does not hurt me. It is only an ache.”
“Then what would you have me say?” Enjolras demands.
The thing is, Enjolras is charming and terrible all at once, and in possession of a gift of seductive eloquence he uses at the pulpit and debates. But Grantaire, feeling it turned upon himself, quails under the heat of it. And Enjolras would not understand, anyway—he is something of a force of nature, and such things are not to be tamed. Combeferre was wrong, anyway; he has never needed absolution.
“I would have you say nothing, Enjolras. Say nothing. You do not hurt me, do not fear for my small, unfortunate emotions. You who are already Atlas need not look down. Only look ahead, and I will follow.”
Enjolras’s grip on his arm eases. “Grantaire…”
“Please do not call me like that.”
“Like what?”
“So softly. It does not seem right.”
“You are drunk, Grantaire,” Enjolras says, in that same charming, terrible voice. “Let me take you home.”
Grantaire acquiesces, and together they go from the steps of the Musain out into the night.
----
“Can you kill one on the scaffold without making ten more your enemies?” Combeferre asks.
Courfeyrac says, “Camille Desmoulins was guillotined for his mercy.”
Grantaire raises a finger. “Yes. By Robespierre, who was himself guillotined not long after—is this the sort of legacy you wish to inspire? A second la Terreur?”
Why is it always Grantaire who gets the brunt of Enjolras’s glare?
----
Marius and Courfeyrac are roommates, which is how Marius joins them.
“This is my roommate,” Courfeyrac proclaims, presenting Marius to the room at large. Marius hunches in on himself, blushing faintly. “He says he is a democrat-Bonapartist, but I say he is confused, and friends, it is our sacred duty to enlighten him!”
“I really am not much for politics,” Marius protests faintly.
“We are revolutionaries as well,” Courfeyrac says, offended. “Pupils of freedom and liberty! Vanguards of the Republic of France!”
“Instigators of civil unrest,” Grantaire adds.
Courfeyrac gasps, playfully aghast. “R! Are you a royalist?”
“No, you know I am not anything at all.”
“Grantaire, you really must stop equivocating,” Enjolras cuts in, irritated, while at the same time Jehan says, “Grantaire, it’s quite all right not being anything at all.”
“Thank you, Jehan.” Grantaire flourishes a bow, grinning. “Not all of us can be gods with grand designs. Some of us must be devotees, going whichever way they are told.”
“You never go where you are told,” Enjolras points out.
“Oh, but that is not for want of devotion.”
“Sua cuique deus fit dira cupido?” Jehan quotes. Does each man’s mad desire become his god?
Grantaire claps his hands. “The poet speaks true! In fact I am so devoted to this bottle that I could not possibly leave. Well, it is certainly not the politics keeping me here. I despise politicians. Of course, I also despise the apolitical. The former have too many opinions and the latter not nearly enough.”
“One day you will have to be serious,” Enjolras says, frowning.
“I could never be serious,” Grantaire retorts. “What a terrible way to live.”
Enjolras makes a sound almost like a growl and turns sharply on his heel. He sweeps off towards Combeferre. Grantaire’s gaze lingers, watching him leave.
“Do not mind Enjolras and Grantaire,” Courfeyrac tells Marius, who has watched the whole exchange with wide eyes. “They have always been like this. I don’t think they will ever change.”
----
The first attack ends, and Jean Prouvaire is not amongst the students on the Corinthe’s side of the barricade. Combeferre is beside himself. Grantaire watches Enjolras weigh mens’ lives in the palm of his hand.
“We must make the trade,” Combeferre urges. “They will accept it; it is more than fair. Jehan is nothing but a poet, surely they will give him back to us.”
Enjolras hesitates. “The death of the Inspector is set,” he says. “But I will not kill Jean Prouvaire with the same blow.”
Jean Prouvaire is perhaps the only soul Enjolras would have done this for—the only one of them he could not in good conscience condemn to death.
Among them, Jehan is the only true innocent. This is not to say he is naive, or harmless, because he is not. He has killed on the barricade, but only out of love for his friends—Jehan is in love, fiercely and always and entirely. He is in love with the plants on his windowsill, the rain on the streets of Paris, his friends’ laughter after a night at the Musain, poems and books and essays, politics and romance, the stars and the oceans. He sees the world as it is and as it could become and even all that never will be, and seeing all of this, somehow he still loves it. So it is the greatest injustice to sentence one such as him to die alone, or to die at all.
To Enjolras, Death is an abstraction, a weapon to be used as necessary. He will martyr himself to benefit the Republic. But Jean Prouvaire’s weapon is his life, and his infinite capacity to love, despite everything.
“I will go over the barricade with a flag of truce,” Combeferre says, already busying himself. He rounds on Javert, who is bound nearby. “If they have killed him, Inspector, you will find yourself in hell before the smoke has cleared.”
“I will see you all there,” Javert retorts, a savage grin on his lips.
----
That night, when they finally reach Grantaire’s place, Enjolras lingers on the threshold.
“Is this the way it will always be between us?” he asks. There is a strange light in his eye, but it could be the reflection of the street lamps. Paris is full of little oddities.
“How has it always been between us?”
“Factious. Bitter. Antagonistic. You know.”
“Is that so?”
The corners of Enjolras’s lips turn down. He is irritated. “You think otherwise? Tell me, then. What am I to you?’
“Oh, but that is unfair,” Grantaire says. “In so few words? You are Adonis—”
“Be serious,” he snaps.
“I told you, do not ask me that. Ask me to do anything for you, I will do it, but I cannot do that. It wants too much honesty of me.”
“You are not a dishonest man.” Enjolras tilts his head, forcing Grantaire to meet his gaze. “But you still do not tell the truth of yourself.”
“Is that for you to know?” Grantaire asks. He leans against the doorframe, still feeling faintly dizzy.
“Yes,” Enjolras says. “It is. I would know you.”
Enjolras does not say things like I want to, or I would like to. He says I would know you, and Grantaire recognizes that there is nothing he can do to the contrary.
“How it has always been,” Grantaire muses, and shakes his head. “No, there is nothing like always in us. We mortals do not live forever.”
“You know that is not what I mean,” Enjolras sighs, exasperated. “In our lifetime, I would like for us to be cordial, at least.”
“Oh Apollo, your impossible tasks. I am afraid that I cannot do so.”
Enjolras narrows his eyes.“What prevents you?”
Grantaire hesitates, the sharp burn of truth on the tip of his tongue. No, he decides, and swallows it down, burying it deep in his chest. “An excess of emotion,” he says, and straightens up, causing Enjolras to lean backwards quickly so they do not collide. Really it is not even a lie. “Now I am quite exhausted. You may sleep in my hallway, if you must, but I am not allowed suitors unchaperoned. Good night.”
----
Jehan is a Romantic, a bohemian, and a revolutionary. He looks the sergeant in the eye and says, Vive la futur.
Combeferre has not yet made it off the barricade, and upon hearing the shot, becomes quite still.
“They have killed him,” he says. “I don’t understand.”
He has to be restrained by Courfeyrac and Feuilly so that he will not kill Javert where he stands. There is no point to it now.
So the litany of death begins with a poet.
----
It is the height of irony, really, that at the moment Grantaire has found something he actually considers meaningful, he cannot have it. It is driving him mad, and it drives him to drink. There is a reason why Dionysus is god of both.
Nearly every day he sees Enjolras. One the days where he does not, the man haunts him still. Something as absurdly red as that coat he wears will turn his head, he will see a book Enjolras might like and ask the price instinctually.
“Eight sous for you, Monsieur,” the man says, shrewdly catching Grantaire’s eye.
Grantaire reminds himself that Enjolras can certainly buy things on his own time and expense, but he feels oddly disappointed coming into the Musain that day empty-handed.
“Grantaire!” Jehan calls upon his entrance. There are already several of them in attendance—Feuilly, Courfeyrac, Combeferre, and of course Enjolras, who would rather personally sign France over to a new king than be late to a meeting. “If there are five people who might be saved by your action, but your action sends another to certain death, what would you do?”
“I really don’t know,” Grantaire says, taking his customary seat towards the back. He feels Enjolras’s eyes on him the whole way. “I suppose I would let the gods hold their course.”
“To hell with your inaction,” Courfeyrac laughs. “I would like to know who I am killing and who I might save—then I can decide. We are incommensurable, you know!”
Combeferre rolls his eyes. “You cannot pick your favorite, Courf. No one should die because they were not well-liked by you.”
“No?” Courfeyrac asks. “For what reason, then?”
“Yes, for what reason?” Grantaire echoes. “On what moral basis does the armée révolutionnaire go to war? Apollo, what will you do when the barricades rise?”
Enjolras, though he always frowns at the nickname, answers to it anyway. “What do you know of morality, Grantaire?” he asks.
“Oh, nothing at all,” Grantaire says, leaning back in his chair. “Mine is the wisdom of Solomon—good wines, good food, and pretty girls. There is nothing else that I need! But I know you mean what I will do at the barricades, when we must fight and kill for the revolution. You think I will not do it, or perhaps that I will turn traitor? Do not fret. I will take your word as divine providence. So again I ask, what will you do when the barricade rises?”
He looks up at Enjolras, a crooked grin on his lips. Enjolras is looking at him strangely. “I do not know,” he admits, a faint blush high on his cheekbones.
Grantaire laughs, surprised. “You don’t know? I thought I would never see the day!”
“There are many factors to consider,” Enjolras snaps, but then he sighs, and the fight leaves him. “And—one of them is that I do not want to kill another man, but I am afraid that I will no longer care once the barricade goes up. And I do not want to be the sort of person that does not care. So I don’t know what I will do there, because I do not want to know. Not yet.”
It is a strange thing to see fear in the eyes of someone who had seemed so fearless. Grantaire looks at Enjolras, whose unrelenting faith and conviction had so long ago trapped him in his gravity, and thinks, with some amount of horror, we are the same.
Jehan, gently, says, “Enjolras, that is only human.”
----
Some time after that night at Grantaire’s doorstep, Enjolras corners Grantaire in the back of the Musain. Courfeyrac, the last one to leave, shoots them a mischievous glance.
Enjolras stands over Grantaire’s chair, his expression as unreadable as ever. “Despite what the others say, I am not blind, Grantaire. I see how you look at me. I know what you feel.”
Grantaire raises an eyebrow. “Do you?”
“I am only a man,” Enjolras says. “And you are not subtle.”
“In my defense, I thought you would not look.”
A faint blush rises in the tips of Enjolras’s ears, and he does not look directly at Grantaire when he says, “You are distracting. I cannot help it.”
“Apollo!” Grantaire gasps, feigning surprise, but he is still unable to hide the pleased grin slipping onto his face. “I do believe that is the nicest thing you have ever said to me.”
“You must stop, Grantaire. I cannot focus with you being as you are.”
Now that the secret is out, Grantaire feels bolder than he ever has. He leans forward, lowering his voice as if telling a secret. Enjolras is forced to bend at the waist to hear him.
“Why focus? Come home with me,” he whispers. “We will debate in the manner of the Greeks. I will distract you further—let me be your Pylades, Leander, Hyacinthus.”
“I cannot,” Enjolras murmurs. “If I go with you, I fear I will never leave.”
“Stay, then. I will permit it.” He does not want to think of it as begging, but it is not far off. If it is or isn’t, it does not matter—there is no place lower than where he is now, and he does not mind it much.
Enjolras shakes his head, resigned. “But I will not. Don’t you see? I cannot do this; there are greater things than myself.”
Perhaps it is the kinder thing, what Enjolras is doing now. Perhaps this is where they were always meant to end.
But the worst part is, Grantaire does see. He has always seen, but still a desperate hope existed within him. He knows, Enjolras is of the future and belongs to it, and is far too valuable to injure, or keep for himself—curious, desirous Pandora took what she had no right to take and unleashed pain and suffering upon the world. Grantaire would not do the same. Enjolras is not for him to have, though he thinks that perhaps in another lifetime, things may be different. But in this one…he would allow himself this, his own selfish martyrdom.
----
Eponine dies quietly, unbeknownst to Grantaire and the rest. Marius does not think the girl he had known as only the little street shadow would have been great friends with the well-to-do students, and Eponine does not think to mention, in her dying breaths, that the others might like to know. It is not her nature to make a scene.
So Grantaire stumbles upon her body in the fading candlelight, her hair cut short and blouse torn and bloody, and believes he must have died without knowing it, to see something so terrible. It is so much worse when Gavroche notices. Neither had known Eponine had been on the barricade at all. He does not see the honor in her death that the others speak of—he just sees her absence.
When the National Guard brings a cannon to their doorstep, Grantaire is almost honored. The other barricades, having fallen in the night, did not get the distinction of their walls being blown apart by great iron projectiles. But the lieutenant's aim is poor, and the cannon falls short of the barricade twice.
A blond man bearing a sergeant’s insignia comes forward and adjusts the aim. He fires, and the cannonball tears a hole through the top of the barricade in a great shower of splinters. There is a moment of silence in the wake of the explosion as he turns to adjust the cannon’s aim again. He is young, the same age as Grantaire and Enjolras and the others.
A single gunshot cuts through the silence. The sergeant slumps over his cannon with a bleeding hole through his chest, and Enjolras shakily lowers his gun. The cannon does not fire again that night, but neither does Enjolras speak to anyone.
Gavroche is shot, then. Courfeyrac almost kills himself retrieving his body.
----
There is no point in begging for the life of the Inspector anymore—Jehan’s death, Eponine’s, Gavroche’s, they have gone too far down this road. The Inspector will not be missed among the mass of bodies at the end of it all. But a part of Grantaire still hopes. He approaches where Enjolras sits.
“I was wrong,” Grantaire says. “What I said that day in the Musain. You are not Belvedere Apollo—he is marble, he has stood for one thousand years, and he will stand for a thousand more. The Romans built things to last, you know, but we French, we’re volatile. We’ve had three regimes in as many decades. You, Enjolras, are dry kindling. I think you want to burn.”
“The revolution must live,” Enjolras replies, simply, because it is, to him. “I am not wood or marble. I am just a man.”
“You are the revolution!” Grantaire cries. “It is nothing but an idea, and it lives in you. You cannot kill an idea. But it must be nurtured, and it needs people like you, and Combeferre, and Courfeyrac, to do it. And you are not immortal. You want it to live? I tell you that you must live, also.”
“What do you know of revolution, Grantaire? You, who does not believe in anything?”
“I believe in you, haven’t you realized? Utterly and completely.” It is a raw admission, from the depths of Grantaire’s being. It emerges desperate and rough and jagged around the edges. “It is the same thing.”
But Enjolras is shaking his head already. “Too many have already died. For their sacrifice… for the future, I must do this, here and now.”
“But must you? You say there are others—where are they? Why do you stand here alone, if not because you wish to be Atlas, despite knowing the weight of the world will crush you? You say I am despicable because I go through life in drunken stupors and cynicism—yet you are as self-destructive as I. What you are doing is not martyrdom, it’s suicide.”
Enjolras sighs, opening his mouth, but Grantaire barrels on, fueled by Enjolras’s inexplicable calm.
“You cannot let this country, your lady Patria, kill you so easily,” he exclaims, a wild look in his eyes. “Do you not wish to live in the future you see?”
“If the price of that future is my death, I am more than willing to pay it—”
“But I am not! Enjolras, I am not willing. I do not know if your death will bring about that world. Maybe it will, maybe it won’t. But I do know, truly and with every part of my soul, that I do not want that world.” Grantaire grasps Enjolras’s hand tightly, feels the bones of his wrist shift. He wants to bruise him. He wants to leave a mark. He wants to engrave this into the core of his being. “I am serious, listen to me. You don’t like to, but I am begging you now, please. I am cynical, and a coward. I confess I do not want to die, but I will, if you ask it of me, and I do not begrudge you this. It is a gift. But that is just me—I am only Grantaire. You are so much more. The barricade may have me, if it must, but it does not deserve you. There are certain things that are too great for a person to bear, and one of them is this: please do not let me die knowing that you will also.
“That future you speak of, it is nothing without you. I will not have it. So if you have made this barricade your pyre, I will join you on it, and happily so. We can all burn together and hope, somehow, that our ashes birth a new Eden. But I am telling you that in Eden there will be other barricades, because there always are, and whether or not you die upon this one, countless more will rise elsewhere. Enjolras, tell me, how can your death do more good than your life?”
----
Grantaire, despite what Courfeyrac had said that first day in the Musain, is not psychic. He does not know or see everything, and in some ways he and Enjolras are equally blind. It is only when taken together that either of them can see the full truth of a thing. Plato once wrote of two souls in one body, beings with four arms and four legs—sometimes Grantaire feels that he and Enjolras would have been better off as one.
The people do rise, as Enjolras said, one by one—a widow shoots a guard from her window; a street urchin steals cartridges from a cart. But, one by one, they fall, as Grantaire knew they would, and they make no difference at all. So they are both correct, in the end.
----
“I heard that he sent you to the Barriere du Maine, to Richefeu’s, to speak to the men there,” Courfeyrac says. He has found Grantaire in a compromising position—in the back corner of the Musain, drinking, several empty bottles standing formation around him. Though, Grantaire supposes, the only thing making it so compromising is that it is only a few hours past noon. Everything else is quite typical.
Grantaire makes a low noise that passes for affirmation, his head buried in the crook of his elbow.
“I also heard he came looking for you after and found you gambling with them.”
Grantaire sighs dramatically. It does not have the preferred effect of making Courfeyrac leave. Little can do such a thing; he is relentless, once on the scent.
“Why, R?” he asks, and Grantaire does not need to look up to know he is angry. “This is what you wanted—you asked for responsibility, and he gave it to you, and not, I might add, without much convincing. So why do you throw it away? Why at every turn do you prove to him that he is right in his assessment of you?”
“God, Courf,” Grantaire groans, lifting his head with great effort. Courfeyrac stands before him, irritation in every line of his body. “What is it to you what I do with myself?”
“Because I do not understand!” He throws his hands up. “Grantaire, you are smart and good, and I do not like to see my friends walk themselves over the edge of a cliff because they cannot look their problems in the eye!”
“I am the only one here who does ,” Grantaire snaps. “We are on a cliff, as you say, and I am the only one looking down at the rocks below. Yet still I am disgraced for not running blindly forward. ‘Grantaire, you lack ambition,’ you say, ‘Grantaire, you are too drunk to know things,’ you say, ‘Grantaire, you do not believe in anything.’ Well, it is true enough—I am not fit for many things, among those revolution. But I am still here. I believe in nothing but Enjolras, though he does not do me the same courtesy. Do you know, he did not ask me after, about what happened at the Barriere du Maine?”
Courfeyrac, put out by the sudden rant, pulls out a chair and drops into it. “No,” he says. “But he saw you at their table, betting on cards. What could you have said?”
Grantaire smiles bitterly. “Many things. I might have said, ‘These men are not right for your means, Enjolras.’ Or, ‘Here they do not care for Robespierre or Danton or principles of the French Republic.’ Or I could have invited him to play with us, though he does not know how to cheat and would only lose miserably, but still then he might have heard the truth of it all. Richefeu’s was never going to be his.”
“You did speak to them,” Courfeyrac realizes.
“I tried. Sometimes people do not listen.”
Courfeyrac grins, relaxing, the anger of only minutes ago gone. That is who he is, Courfeyrac—quick to anger and quicker to smile. “I am sorry for doubting you, then. I will tell Enjolras what you have said about the Barriere du Maine, though I do not know if it will help.”
“Oh,” Grantaire waves a hand, dismissing the sentiment. “It is not so hopeless between us. It is just that he does not like seeing me like that. I think it wouldn’t matter whether or not I spoke to them.”
“The two of you,” Courfeyrac says, “I will never understand.”
“It is nothing complicated,” Grantaire says. “There are aspects of myself he does not like—that is fine, I do not like them either. In the same way, I do not like what he does to himself. He does not like to do it, but he thinks he must. Still, we are not people who can change.”
In particular, there is no need for Grantaire to manage any of his problems, as they approach so much slower than the revolution, and there will be nothing after the revolution.
“Why not?”
Grantaire is silent for several seconds, wondering what he should say. Courfeyrac is a close friend, but he is not a secret-keeper, and what anyone says to him has the potential to be said to all of Les Amis and any passerby. But he thinks about Richefeu’s, and how Enjolras had stood at the entrance, watching him, only to leave in silence, and thinks—perhaps vindictively—that they could do with some publicity.
“It is possible,” he begins, “to be your own person. To look at yourself and think, this is me, this is who I am. But Enjolras and I, we are not so defined. He is the revolution and little else besides, a man built around an ideal. And I have built myself around him. We are all tangled up in each-other. So you see, how could we be anything other than what we are now?”
Courfeyrac cocks his head, thoughtful. “So it is like that,” he says.
Grantaire does not have the courage to ask him to elaborate.
----
“Liberty, what crimes we commit in thy name,” Grantaire says, and listens to the gunshot that kills Javert.
He is not to know that it was false; what good would it have done? The man is gone either way, and so is their hope for continued survival. Now that there is no alternative, the future is not so horrible to look upon. Such is the way of desperation, flighty when faced with true despair.
He goes to the barricade. Enjolras is there, with Combeferre at his side. They had always been a good match, mellowing the other’s worst impulses. Now, though, a cold sort of fury has taken hold of Combeferre, who only nods as Grantaire approaches. There will be no more mercy from this side of the revolution.
“If you stay here,” Enjolras says, “you will die.”
“Yes,” Grantaire replies. “So will you.”
Emotions shift across Enjolras’s face. “What will this bring?” he murmurs, gazing out at the battlefield beneath them. “Perhaps you were right. Perhaps I should have listened when you said we should not go down this path.”
“I said many things,” Grantaire muses. “If you listened to all of them, there would have been no revolution.”
“Would that have pleased you?” Enjolras asks. It is almost as if he is looking for absolution, or justification. From Grantaire, no less.
Confused, Grantaire frowns. “No,” he says, surprised at his own answer. “The hunger, the poverty—we are in desperate need of revolution. Though I suppose I’ve never thought about it—it always seemed an inevitability, with you.”
“You have always thought too highly of me.”
“I have not.” Grantaire smiles bitterly, an tight stretch of the mouth. “I know you exactly as you are. I would not be here, otherwise.”
Enjolras hesitates. “You know that—,” he says at last, haltingly. “Rather, I wanted to tell you—”
“Don’t hurt yourself now,” Grantaire says. “Not when we are so close to dying.”
“I’m not afraid to die,” Enjolras snaps, but then his gaze softens, and he takes Grantaire by the shoulder. There is dirt under his fingernails and streaks of gunpowder on his skin. “It is just that I regret we have come to it so soon. I regret that I have not had the time to return to you what you have given me.”
“Do not regret such things, Apollo. It is only another impossible task.”
“No,” Enjolras says. “It is not impossible to love you.”
Grantaire blinks, stricken. Enjolras looks back at him, eyes alight with a burning determination, as constant and self-assured as he has always been. It is enough to make Grantaire believe him.
And then the explosions begin, and they go on and on until Grantaire can hear nothing but a constant ringing in his ears. Through the fire and dust, Grantaire sees Combeferre cry out, a bayonet run through his chest. He sees Courfeyrac slumped on his knees, stained in so much red he no longer looks human. He does not look behind at the rest of his friends, though he knows Feuilly and Bahorel and Bossuet and Joly are there, because he is a coward and cannot bear to see them dying. He looks only forward, to where Enjolras stands tall at the top of the barricade, silhouetted against the rising sun. He is deadly, beautiful and terrible, Michael with his flaming sword held aloft. And then Enjolras stumbles, trips, and falls quietly from the ledge, disappearing over the other side.
Grantaire cries out, an unintelligible, guttural thing that rips unconsciously from his chest. He scrambles to the top, over bodies and weapons and broken things, and looks over the other side, but the dawn blinds him, and he can’t make anything out through the light. Below there is only a strange, white brilliance.
----
The barricade rises at the Corinthe, which Grantaire considers a personal insult—here had been his favorite wine-shop, once, and he had given it to Enjolras and the rest as evidence that yes, Grantaire knows things, look at what he can find, look at what he can bring you! And now it has fallen under the shadow of rebellion.
It is perhaps the mark of an artist to think of one’s life as a story, for all art is a story, in the end. The ancients knew two sorts of stories, only two—comedies and tragedies. In these they saw the full breadth of a human life. But, Grantaire used to wonder, reading his Aeschylus and Sophocles, where were the adventures? The romances? The mysteries? Surely the world was not entirely either tragic or comic. Surely men were made of more.
He understands now, though he is not so old and wise—the Greeks were right, there are only two stories men know. Most are tragedy. All great things are tragic, but love, Grantaire finds, most of all. It is absurd. It is nothing more than an inclination of the heart, a sting in the chest, and yet it has brought him here. It is charming and terrible all at once, and somehow it is quite inescapable.
Musichetta tells him, as she slips out onto Rue Mondetour to the Rue des Prêcheurs, neatly avoiding the assembling National Guard, “You, of all people, do not need to be here.”
“I know,” he says. “I am not needed.” He looks at his feet, the cobblestones he has known for years and years. “Still, I think I shall stay."
“I hope you are not killing yourself for him,” Musichetta says. “You’re worth more than that.”
“I am not so pathetic as to forget myself for want of another.” Grantaire grins wryly. “I only go to the barricades for him. The dying is mostly for myself.”
Sad sympathy begins to creep into Musichetta's eyes, and he protests, “Oh, please don’t look like that. If you’re going to go on living, don’t do it looking so distressed.”
Musichetta nods, scuffing her feet across the stones. “Right,” she says, sniffing. “Well. I’ll ask you not mess up my café too badly. I’ll have you come back and put it straight, otherwise.”
“Promise,” Grantaire lies, because living is another sort of tragedy.
----
On one particularly bright spring day, Les Amis forgo the Musain’s smoky rooms for the Luxembourg Gardens, at Marius’ recommendation. Grantaire suspects it is because it reminds him of Cosette, for it was where he saw her most before their meeting. Marius denies it, blushing furiously.
The woman in question is intent upon her chain of flowers, which she braids into Marius’ hair with delicate fingers, a gentle smile on her lips.
“Don’t move your head so much,” she admonishes.
“You’ll look very pretty,” Courfeyrac offers, from his position in the shadow of an arching tree. “A forest nymph, perhaps. Or someone who has tripped and fallen into a florists’ shop.”
“Sage is for wisdom,” Jehan says. He has placed himself in a dappled spot of light and basks in it, feline. “The clover, gentle love.”
Courfeyrac snorts. “You’ll have to remove the sage, Cosette.” She shoots him a dangerous glare, and he quickly wipes the teasing grin from his face.
“How odd for love to be a weed,” Grantaire muses, his chin in his hand. “I suppose that is how it begins, and once it has it is hard to root out.”
“How have you come to become such an expert?” Combeferre asks, laughter in his voice.
Grantaire, grinning, waves his hand vaguely. “Oh, Aphrodite herself has visited me, you know, she comes to me in my dreams. I am her most devout worshipper. She rose from the seafoam and thought, Grantaire, now there is man who shall become my disciple. Unfortunately she did not know I was already promised to another, and now it happens that her first disciple is only half as devoted as he might be, but still twice as much as the next man!”
Courfeyrac snorts inelegantly.
“And you, Enjolras,” Grantaire continues, never knowing when to stop, “Who is your patron saint? Aphrodite Pandemos, if you are to stay republican, or perhaps Aphrodite Areia, for your revolution? Perhaps not Aphrodite at all, perhaps Patria alone. But no, is Patria not Aphrodite in another form? She is surely the strongest motivator of men, then; we do not act if not for love. I do believe it is impossible to do anything at all, otherwise.”
He does not expect Enjolras to respond, really, so it is a surprise when, over the gentle whispering of leaves, Enjolras murmurs, so softly as to be nearly inaudible, "Yes. It is love."
Grantaire lets the words wash over him, memorizing the shape of Enjolras’s lips as he says them. Of course it is for love. One cannot die for something by any other cause. And though he thinks perhaps he knew this before, still it is nice to hear the word.
Courfeyrac leans forward from the shade of his tree, his dark curls falling into his face. A knowing grin tugs at his mouth. “Who is your other deity, R? The one which keeps you from your Aphrodite?”
Grantaire leans back on his hands, letting the sun’s gentle warmth soak into his skin. Beside him, Jehan regales Combeferre with the intricacies of flowers in his hopeful, melancholic way. Enjolras is flat on his back in the grass, eyes closed, his hair spread in a golden halo about his head. All his hard marble seems to melt away in the sunlight, and he is for a moment only a man. It is only some spring day, but the grass is soft, and the sky is clear and bright.
“Apollo,” he says. “Always it has been Apollo.”
He looks again at Enjolras. His eyes are still closed, but there is a small smile playing at the corners of his lips that had not been there before. It is just a little thing, but they are only students, and little things are all that matter. The future is so plain from here—there will be another spring day tomorrow, and then another, and so on into summer.