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Enjolras bore within him the plenitude of the revolution; he was incomplete, however, so far as the absolute can be so; he had too much of Saint-Just about him, and not enough of Anacharsis Cloots; still, his mind, in the society of the Friends of the A B C, had ended by undergoing a certain polarization from Combeferre's ideas; for some time past, he had been gradually emerging from the narrow form of dogma, and had allowed himself to incline to the broadening influence of progress, and he had come to accept, as a definitive and magnificent evolution, the transformation of the great French Republic, into the immense human republic.
Therese gave birth to them, Jean-Jacques represented them as foundlings." And Enjolras addressed Courfeyrac roughly: "Silence in the presence of Jean-Jacques! I admire that man. He denied his own children, that may be; but he adopted the people." Not one of these young men articulated the word: The Emperor. Jean Prouvaire alone sometimes said Napoleon; all the others said "Bonaparte."
Marius, thoughtfully, and with his eyes diked on the ceiling, repeated almost mechanically: "My mother? At that moment, he felt Enjolras' hand on his shoulder. "Citizen," said Enjolras to him, "my mother is the Republic." That evening left Marius profoundly shaken, and with a melancholy shadow in his soul.
"To be free," said Combeferre. Marius lowered his head in his turn; that cold and simple word had traversed his epic effusion like a blade of steel, and he felt it vanishing within him. When he raised his eyes, Combeferre was no longer there. Probably satisfied with his reply to the apotheosis, he had just taken his departure, and all, with the exception of Enjolras, had followed him.
It was at the most intense point of this preoccupation that Enjolras accosted him. "You are small," said Enjolras, "you will not be seen. Go out of the barricade, slip along close to the houses, skirmish about a bit in the streets, and come back and tell me what is going on." Gavroche raised himself on his haunches. "So the little chaps are good for something! that's very lucky! I'll go!
Three men raised the body of the unhappy wretch, which was still agitated by the last mechanical convulsions of the life that had fled, and flung it over the little barricade into the Rue Mondetour. Enjolras was thoughtful. It is impossible to say what grandiose shadows slowly spread over his redoubtable serenity. All at once he raised his voice. A silence fell upon them.
One of those emotions which are superior to man, which make him forget even to defend himself, seized upon the insurgents, and they approached the body with respectful awe. "What men these regicides were!" said Enjolras. Courfeyrac bent down to Enjolras' ear: "This is for yourself alone, I do not wish to dampen the enthusiasm. But this man was anything rather than a regicide. I knew him.
The idea of keeping "Les Miserables" away from the ladies! just as though there could be found in the whole country a sixteen-year-old maid with any pretensions to intelligence who hasn't wept over little Cosette, been in love with Enjolras and "doted on" Gavroche and Jean Valjean! So ultra nice has the world become that we must skip the Canticles.
Enjolras hastily quitted the urchin and murmured a few words in a very low tone to a longshoreman from the winedocks who chanced to be at hand. The man left the room, and returned almost immediately, accompanied by three others.
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!"
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