They are Pollux,
He was ironical and cordial. His indifference loved.
His mind could get along without belief, but his heart could not get along without friendship. A profound contradiction; for an affection is a conviction. His nature was thus constituted.
There are men who seem to be born to be the reverse, the obverse, the wrong side.
They are Pollux, Patrocles, Nisus, Eudamidas, Ephestion, Pechmeja.
They only exist on condition that they are backed up with another man; their name is a sequel, and is only written preceded by the conjunction and; and their existence is not their own; it is the other side of an existence which is not theirs.
Grantaire was one of these men. He was the obverse of Enjolras.
One might almost say that affinities begin with the letters of the alphabet.
In the series O and P are inseparable.
You can, at will, pronounce O and P or Orestes and Pylades.
Grantaire, Enjolras’ true satellite, inhabited this circle of young men; he lived there, he took no pleasure anywhere but there; he followed them everywhere.
His joy was to see these forms go and come through the fumes of wine.
They tolerated him on account of his good humor.
Enjolras, the believer, disdained this sceptic; and, a sober man himself, scorned this drunkard.
He accorded him a little lofty pity.
Grantaire was an unaccepted Pylades.
Always harshly treated by Enjolras, roughly repulsed, rejected yet ever returning to the charge, he said of Enjolras:
”What fine marble!”
A GROUP WHICH BARELY MISSED BECOMING HISTORIC
At that epoch, which was, to all appearances indifferent, a certain revolutionary quiver was vaguely current.
Breaths which had started forth from the depths of ’89 and ’93 were in the air.
Youth was on the point, may the reader pardon us the word, of moulting. People were undergoing a transformation, almost without being conscious of it, through the movement of the age.
The needle which moves round the compass also moves in souls.
Each person was taking that step in advance which he was bound to take. The Royalists were becoming liberals, liberals were turning democrats. It was a flood tide complicated with a thousand ebb movements; the peculiarity of ebbs is to create intermixtures; hence the combination of very singular ideas; people adored both Napoleon and liberty. We are making history here.
These were the mirages of that period. Opinions traverse phases.
Voltairian royalism, a quaint variety, had a no less singular sequel, Bonapartist liberalism.
Other groups of minds were more serious.
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