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Updated: May 21, 2025
"Are you going to drink those two bottles?" Laigle inquired of Grantaire. Grantaire replied: "All are ingenious, thou alone art ingenuous. Two bottles never yet astonished a man." The others had begun by eating, Grantaire began by drinking. Half a bottle was rapidly gulped down. "So you have a hole in your stomach?" began Laigle again. "You have one in your elbow," said Grantaire.
All those words: rights of the people, rights of man, the social contract, the French Revolution, the Republic, democracy, humanity, civilization, religion, progress, came very near to signifying nothing whatever to Grantaire. He smiled at them. Scepticism, that caries of the intelligence, had not left him a single whole idea. He lived with irony.
"Breakfast with us," said Grantaire. The child replied: "I can't, I belong in the procession, I'm the one to shout 'Down with Polignac!" And executing a prolonged scrape of his foot behind him, which is the most respectful of all possible salutes, he took his departure. The child gone, Grantaire took the word: "That is the pure-bred gamin. There are a great many varieties of the gamin species.
"Echo, plaintive nymph," hummed Grantaire. Near Grantaire, an almost silent table, a sheet of paper, an inkstand and a pen between two glasses of brandy, announced that a vaudeville was being sketched out. This great affair was being discussed in a low voice, and the two heads at work touched each other: "Let us begin by finding names. When one has the names, one finds the subject."
Grantaire added to the eccentric accentuation of words and ideas, a peculiarity of gesture; he rested his left fist on his knee with dignity, his arm forming a right angle, and, with cravat untied, seated astride a stool, his full glass in his right hand, he hurled solemn words at the big maid-servant Matelote: "Let the doors of the palace be thrown open!
Grantaire rose to his feet with a start, stretched out his arms, rubbed his eyes, stared, yawned, and understood. A fit of drunkenness reaching its end resembles a curtain which is torn away. One beholds, at a single glance and as a whole, all that it has concealed.
A severe thought, starting oddly from a clash of words, suddenly traversed the conflict of quips in which Grantaire, Bahorel, Prouvaire, Bossuet, Combeferre, and Courfeyrac were confusedly fencing. How does a phrase crop up in a dialogue? Whence comes it that it suddenly impresses itself on the attention of those who hear it? We have just said, that no one knows anything about it.
Grantaire was a daring drinker of dreams. The blackness of a terrible fit of drunkenness yawning before him, far from arresting him, attracted him. He had abandoned the bottle and taken to the beerglass. The beer-glass is the abyss.
"I don't think much of your revolution," said Grantaire. "I don't execrate this Government. It is the crown tempered by the cotton night-cap. It is a sceptre ending in an umbrella.
"What about me?" said Grantaire. "Here am I." "You?" "You indoctrinate republicans! you warm up hearts that have grown cold in the name of principle!" "Why not?" "Are you good for anything?" "I have a vague ambition in that direction," said Grantaire. "You do not believe in everything." "I believe in you." "Grantaire will you do me a service?" "Anything. I'll black your boots."
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