Work Text:
Enjolras would not, Enjolras would not—Grantaire could build a fortress had he a brick for everything Enjolras would not, and most he’d heft and place and mortar with a deep sense of dissatisfaction, but not this: that Enjolras would not admit that the first compliment Grantaire graced him with still pricks. For speech to become memory granted one a kind of laurel crown, and he’d wear this one even if it was twisted about with a thorn-bush twig. They’d been strangers to each other, seated at the same long table in the back room of a tavern where Bahorel liked to introduce revolutionaries like a houndmaster who kenneled dogs strange to each other on neutral territory, when Enjolras rose to leave with his glass still full. Grantaire called after him, monsieur, monsieur—handsome ’sieur—monsieur with the cheeks of Venus and the eyes of Apollo—
To which Enjolras turned around, prompting raucous laughter from Bahorel, who sputtering demanded of Grantaire, Which set of Venus’ cheeks have you been admiring, lecher?
Enjolras would come to learn that even his great dignity could be sullied when breathed upon by Grantaire deep in the fumes, and that he might best preserve himself with disdain and disengagement. In the mistaken belief reason could reach the skeptic, he’d explained himself: he turned at the commotion, not the words—no, monsieur, he rejected the comparison—no, monsieur—he’d been very pale and his voice very cold, a half-hour later, when he at last disentangled himself from Grantaire’s absurdities and demanded, “What did you want with me that you tried to catch my attention?” He preserved the vous, now imbued with venom.
“Your wine.” He gestured towards the glass. “You speak about the people disenfranchised and impoverished to death, and yet you show no appreciation for what the banknote rustling in your wallet have got you. It shocks me to see a wastrel among Republicans. Well! I see you thinking on the point. Don’t bother: I have the solution for you ready-made. Donate your excess to the needy.” He spread his arms, knocking the bruised knuckles of the left against Courfeyrac’s shoulder with a delicious pain that brought the thought: I must get this fierce Hermaphroditus to go a round of savate with me—I’d like to see how well those legs can kick! “I see you question my—”
“I question nothing,” he interrupted.
“Oh, my shining monsieur, what a awful state to live in. When you form a retinue, by all means think of me: I will gladly provide my services gratis out of pity to find a naïf among such waters as swim good gentleman as this contentious beast here—” He gestured to Bahorel. “—here, who knows more than any one opinion can contain—” Combeferre, who did not know him well yet, and ignored him. This habit would only somewhat change. “—and this rogue! This rogue will light a fire as quick as he’s told there’s no brazier to contain it in and call it a quandary.” At which he again knuckled Courfeyrac. “Except, ah, no. I demand one retainer fee.” Now he plucked the glass from the table, and held it teasingly close to his lips. “This wine you have abandoned, monsieur, like a little child to the street. I promise the waif will be well doted on, embraced, and kissed ’til it doesn’t know whether I or it drowns in affection.”
“You misunderstand.” His lip curled back from wonderfully white teeth; Grantaire thought of a spar in which his cane furrowed the forehead of a man to the skull, how redly the flesh peeled back from bone—he’d been drunk, and never found a sparring partner since in Paris. He lost that fight, to boot. He felt himself likewise the tumbled combatant as this vision swung decisively away, words spoken in parting with long neck crooked around with all the elegant naturalness of a swan’s. “I have no questions for you, nor use for yours. You may have the wine regardless. Good day, monsieur.” He directed to Bahorel, as if he believed the fumes of wine obscure the ears as they do the eyes, “How has he got access to this back room?”
“He found it,” Bahorel replied. “Grantaire has a facility in opening doors to welcoming quarters. Besides which, the food is always either decent or cheap.”
Pretending deafness, Grantaire called at their backs, “I can find some other service to provide,” graceful under this assault on his legitimacy. Courfeyrac slanted him a look. To this, he said in an undertone: “Friend, what can I do but love a man who gifts me the water of life?”
“Is that what you call it? No, he doesn’t appear to be offering,” Courfeyrac murmured, not unkindly.
The brim of the cup brushed his lips; he withdrew; he inquired, “I assumed any friend of Bahorel’s has sympathies for the eccentric spirits.”
“That bourgeois is barely out of the nest, my friend. Grant the fledgling time to grow in his plumage.” He looked thoughtful. “You are a rare specimen, Grantaire: you always fulfill expectations. I cannot think of a worse object to fix upon than this young man.”
“Does my intended Theseus spend too much time with eyes on women to pursue and cross swords if I rustle his bulls?”
“No, and I do not say it only to save myself the ruckus of you playing the Pirithous. He has no women at all.”
Grantaire grinned, a witticism ready to his tongue, but on principle it would cut better wine-whetted, sipped at last from his appropriated cup. Thought, of a slight wetness on the rim, a sharpness before the sour of what might barely be called a vintage overtook it: ah, he’s a dyspeptic—there’s mint on his spit.
⁂
A year later, well bound in his subjugation, Grantaire asked wistfully of Enjolras, “Do you remember when we shared from the same glass of wine?”
“No,” he replied, in a curt tone, and leaned closer to M. Feuilly, that recent addition to his orbit. They had been deep in discussion.
Damn the strong hands and the talk of brotherhood of this common fan-painter, and damn him worse for being too good of a fellow for Grantaire to hold it against him. It seemed a fine time to discourse on the emotions of Anaxagores as he watched the moon eclipse the sun, and how one must find the rocks underneath all the light if one is to maintain one’s good humor; to think a god would hide his face would swell the spleen, and the blindness that came of straining to see him past the shadow—why, without understanding his composition, one thanked him simply to have been touched, even if only to harm, one could not be reasonable, yes, one must bring down one’s gods into nothing but compacted clumps of dirt, or the senses perished. Combeferre suffered to engage him and asked how the lunar eclipse figured into his poetic Anaxagores’ love-god troubles, though he did not look up from the draft of a pamphlet on which he made precise notes with an awful reservoir pen that spat as much as it wrote.
“I would have to consult the histories of the movements of the stars, and see whether he first witnessed the lunar eclipse as a buckling or an old goat—that will determine the height of his response, you see, upon seeing Tellus Mater cover up Luna and teach the lesson Marie Antoinette demonstrated between the legs of the Comtesse de Polignac.” Grantaire, who could be trusted to act crassly to those girls at whom he called out Floréal, Récamier, Tamar, until they rejected him and became Mistral, Corday, Judith!, and to hang a more diaphanous veil over his intent than would be granted by Dhaka muslin when he modeled for his artists friends—how he flexed his bosom, framed his ruddy piece between the spread of his thumb and fingers on his thigh and mons pubis, canted his hips to best show where wine and cheap meals made a robust curve of his buttocks—, under the influence of Enjolras’ rough treatment lost his coarseness, as a scraped pig-skin lost its bristles. The name Polignac drew a glance from the idol. Grantaire lost himself a moment in admiration of the clove pink petals which he fancied composed those eyelids, and his tongue dragged on by inertia tripped out the question, “Among the writings of Comte de Mirabeau, have you read his Ma conversion ou le libertin de qualité? You might find in those pages an explanation of this—” and halted, scraped raw by the drooping of those lids, followed as it was by the the withdrawal of attention, his mouth scorched with a sudden and terrible thirst as he beheld in the tender cup of soft skin behind the other man’s earlobe an errant dew of sweat, the room being stuffed-up in the summer with windows closed against mouchard ears.
“I haven’t,” Joly said brightly. “What happens in Ma conversion that has to do with de Polignac?”
“Nothing,” Grantaire exclaimed, a burst of gloom, his voice thick. “The Comte de Mirabeau teaches us nothing about the real tribade. He was a fool to think someone who tasted of women would ever be dunce enough to turn her thoughts again to the cold hearts of men. But ah! does the wind of the Sahara not rush against the Atlas Mountains, to be shrugged away by those indifferent frozen shoulders?”
Joly, out of sincere concern as much as to play the jester, took possession of Grantaire’s left wrist, and felt at the pulse there. “Ah!” he exclaimed. “A bottle of wine in circulation already, and to have such cold hands!”
“There is the error,” Bahorel said, who had half-listened to the exchange, but being rather sauced himself felt nonetheless qualified to provide advice. “I am sure he forgot to warm his fingers before commencing the dance, and now the lady’s a desert in her particulars. You must make sure to chafe heat into one’s tools before beginning such a project, my friend.”
Enjolras disdained them all for this speech without blushing over it. This agonized Grantaire, who would have been foul to expulsion if he thought it would earn him sight of risen blood. Instead, this: hands, on which he could see the calluses of a canne fighter, and in the crook of the thumb a patch of ink, poured another glass of wine for the newcomer, and made a polite—awkward—reassurance, Oh, no, monsieur, on my bill, you do not need to worry—call you tu?—truly, for respect’s sake—. Grantaire fell into an uncommon silence, as reverie will confine even the most loquacious to a barren place into which the voices of others cannot penetrate, and his own cry feels to him futile. With the corona of a candle all the light in his eye, he reflected that he would have been gracious should Enjolras deign to pour the spit-oozed dregs of his own glass into Grantaire’s own, that he would make that mouthful last the night, and on each sip dwell ’til he could taste the red of lips under the dark of wine. Should he have been captured then as now, how he would have mouthed and lapped and lingered on the damp rim of that year-gone glass!
Grantaire had developed, as with a goat that may be asked the day of the month and kicks a tambour the correct number of times, not because the beast was mathematical, but out of a refined ability to sense the crowd’s peak of expectation, the ability to know his audience’s precise tolerance for his flights of mood and the squalor of his thoughts: brainless instinct, well-tuned by an affectionate nature’s fear of abandonment, as the goat had been trained by the switch. The libertines with the finest sense of consumption were dead, and their spirit did not imbue this company. It being difficult to muffle up the question, physician’s apprentices among us, tell me, does a lover’s spit dissolve into the blood when swallowed?, knowing it was the first step on a road ill to travel, he turned to liquor.
Some watery passage of time later, Joly checked Grantaire’s pulse again, reeled away laughing in consternation to be kissed floridly upon the cheek as wages, and catching at Combeferre—they were, at the time, rooming together—fled. Before he followed them out, Bahorel slapped his shoulder and noted the brandy did not cost less because the hour drew closer midnight. Feuilly, with the catholic benevolence of one whose history featured many men numbing the hours with drink, put a pitcher of water at his elbow and wished him a safe walk home. The wineshop proprietor, when he came at last to distrust the fullness of Grantaire’s wallet and the safety of his floorboards from the spirits’ reintroduction, whether from the one end or the other, tipped two men out into the night: the drunkard and Enjolras, who appeared to have been so absorbed in his incorporation and counter-correction of Combeferre’s notes to have missed the departure of the others.
“Admire my affability to the innkeeper,” Grantaire bid him, and emptied his stomach and then his bladder into the alley-gutter. “See, he needn’t have voiced his concerns. I am a well-trained beast. The—” He retched a second time, his expression one of some surprise, took two steps to the left, and seemed apt to sit on the curb.
Enjolras put himself under Grantaire’s arm, turning his face away from the smell of his breath and his sweat. “Tonight’s not one to sleep on the street.”
“What, you eschew the most democratic bed? Those paving stones accepted bullets to their breasts for your freedoms, my friend.”
Ignoring him, he went on, “The thieves might leave the lint in your pockets, but the rain will still wet it through. Feel how low and heavy the clouds are? It seems the lamps light up their bellies. Come on, man! One foot in front of the other.”
Grantaire, on whom dawned awareness of the lean and powerful body which supported his, allowed himself to be guided at the firm pace Enjolras favored, and if he spoke, neither of them paid mind: his thoughts dwelt on the way their hips bumped against each other, though he was the taller, on account of the other man’s longer legs. It seemed at first very charming to him that they aligned in this manner, innocently so; and then, as he became aware of the smell of Enjolras’ body, even more so exciting to think of how conveniently they might be fitted together. Amidst a confused discourse on the spread legs and wild hair and firm high bosom of the Vitruvian man, critical of his furrowed face and rapturous on the fierceness of his gaze, he slumped, and in doing brought his working lips against Enjolras’ neck. The taste of salt, the wet on his lips, the sweat—he experienced it as a clenching of the bowels, an arrest of the heart, a flood of saliva.
Enjolras jostled him back upright. “You’ll talk yourself into a swoon,” he warned.
Grantaire, in a transport, hummed a note of agreement, and parted his lips no more as they walked the length of a boulevard to his rooming house. There, he managed to navigate key and lock, and saluted Enjolras by way of parting. Let him think that Grantaire played at a game, or felt too much resentment of that final correction to say thanks. If this should be the night he decided he cared enough to be mindful, he would see the softness in Grantaire’s eyes, and know his feelings; if he did not care so much to do that, why, an offense didn’t deeply touch a disinterested man. Grantaire must swallow to speak, and he would not, so long as he could taste the sweat—he imagined he could still taste—well, he would linger over it a while longer, even if he could not.
⁂
When he woke to a pillow well-soaked in his own spittle, he said to himself: Wretch, you will walk yourself to the Tuileries, find a cherubic gentleman with hair like Helios, eyes that shine with—it matters not what, so long as they do shine—, salute him as befits virile young dogs in common cause, and make a fine lunch of amourettes and a chanterelle washed down with a mouthful of bitters—he’ll be so fresh, a spirit green as Chartreuse—, yes, yes, what can’t be cured by—and his sickish head and gut would not have stopped these thoughts when he straightened from his sprawl upon the bedding, but a tickle at his throat stalled him, and the long hair he plucked from where it clung to his waistcoat collar dissolved all his senses but the one, the nerves of his finger-pads alive to that filament as if it were the cutting edge of a knife. Or perhaps the sun, come into his eyes, blinded him, and the smell of himself muffled up his nose—what did it matter? The hair was blond; it could have been from his own head except that it shone and described a curl, where his prickled with the color and roughness of straw.
He hunched on the edge of the bed with the hair held across his open palms. At last the urgency of his bladder outwon that of his adoration, and he placed the strand of hair on his pillow, having plumped the feathers and smoothed the case. It came to his attention that, being in no condition the previous night to remove them, and Enjolras having left at the door, he’d slept in his boots, and the street-muck had dirtied his linens. Profit to the laundress through the work of the bottle! So be it. He discarded the lees of his francs into the chamberpot, then set about on a thorough cleaning of his teeth, an assault upon enamel, a invasion of gums, ’til blood filled in the gaps between them and all he could taste was salt and ash and essence of rose and copper.
This preparation done, with the faintest understanding of why he undertook it, he discarded his clothing with the intent of refreshing himself further; instead, he returned to the bed, planting his bare buttocks upon the coarse weave of the blanket, and plucked the hair to peer at once more. He fiddled it into a love-knot. Was there, he wondered, some incantation to be said, which would make an admirer of the admired? Countryfolk knew of such things, and the fortune-tellers in their stalls. He tongued at sore gums: blood, mint. Nonsense milled around trembling indecision: for Grantaire, a state equivalent to another man’s silent pause before a momentous act. He opened his mouth as if to receive Communion, placed the love-knotted hair upon his tongue, and swallowed it.
Or: his tongue arched to the roof of his mouth, his lips pursed, his throat worked, the hair caught, he gagged. At last a swallow of wine permitted this consumption, foiling the body’s instinctual revulsion. The spirit, after all, triumphed.
⁂
Grantaire understood his own capacity for what conventionality called depravity, this being a matter of course within his social circle. Take, for example, that occasion on which he held forth for an hour on the matter of the rectum, having positioned himself in Enjolras’ wonted place in the Musain with the intent that he provide the room illumination on some essential matter, their usual instructor being taken with ‘a minor grippe’ as per his dispatch in the hands of Combeferre, and thus abed in concession to the body’s natural tyranny. The inquiry of whether he was properly ‘abed’ or ‘a-pot’, that was to say did he drip from the top or the bottom, or in other words was the grippe of the lungs or the guts, secured from Combeferre a diversion onto the question of opium’s contradictory effect of freeing the brain while stopping the bowels and suppressing the action of the lungs, rather than the direct answer he desired—cholera, or no. What tonic to this anxiety? Speech, of course. It would vent him.
His strongest declamation, he felt, came when he spoke thus: those moralists who consecrated this honorable orifice to the worst sin ought understand that it served in the humdrum role of maiden aunt, excellently: for as the maiden aunt who waited on the courting couple and prevented them meeting like the spade meets the earth, and by her presence consigned the seed to later be beaten out by hand and tossed to waste on the kerchief, the involvement by the rectum accomplished her essential purpose in a shorter span and with less laundry, that is: the bud remained unbruised, the oven idle, the couple’s reputation intact.
“I contest you in the matter of laundry—one ought to offer the lady a kerchief, after,” Courfeyrac put in, mildly. “It’s only gentlemanly.”
The sodomitical proposal did not, itself, warrant reproof. Jean Prouvaire, who lately told them of bringing his lady of the day down into the Catacombs to enact life upon the stage of death, and might have put the bones there to some ingenious purposes, could be forgiven his expression of boredom at such minor sexual transgression.
Such an atmosphere inclined him, at first, to view the business of literal consumption as a natural continuation of a gustatory temper. Indeed, the first hair, Grantaire thought to confess to Prouvaire: there was romance in it. The second, picked from a table at which Enjolras had spent the evening, seemed opportunistic, and not worth boasting of. The third began to savor of crime, stolen directly from the back of his coat, and framed thus might entertain Bahorel. When he paid the barber for Enjolras’ hair-clippings and consumed them, singly, over the course of the night, saying after each and the rest I will save, there are enough to last such-and-such amount of time, it became impossible to him that his appetite could be spoken of; the weakness of his character infected it, and made pitiable what could have been entertainment to friends accustomed to grotesqueries.
He went so far as to declare to Bossuet, “I might find artistry in loneliness,” but his friends were good, and the sincerity showed in him, which alarmed them more for itself than the sentiment. They inquired: had he got a woman and lost her, so quickly they didn’t mark the beginning of the story and now must provide consolation at the end? Since not that, was he going on a trip? He couldn’t be lonely for men’s company in Paris, leading the life he did.
Hateful to a secret! Who knew him to be so honest? Who knew him to despise subterfuge? Or to despise, in any case, the effort that went into it.
Enjolras’ regularity in visits to the barber ought to have made collections simple, but on the second occasion that Grantaire thought to make one, his feet found the doorway of a wine-shop in which he saw the silhouette of a friend whose off-the-cuff theater review could be beat only by his generosity in sharing a bottle. In the course of their discussion, Grantaire could not let mention of La cocarde tricolore pass without recounting the story of Courfeyrac’s dear handsome foolish friend with the Napoleonic airs, a speech that required two more bottles of wine to lubricate, such that the hour of barbershops had well passed by the time he conducted himself—a trifle less steadily—back out to the street.
Grantaire, on strength of doing little of substance, committed few errors of substance. A few duties, such as the payment to his landlord and his laundress, the failure to discharge of which would cause inconvenience, he entrusted to a married sister who lived on the Rue d’Enfer, who asked in turn only that he wrote their parents quarterly, and provided the extra service of reminding him when these filial letters were due; as to the rest of his concerns: the grocer always forgave him, and when they were in a period of estrangement, Grantaire dined out. His sister, the bourgeois woman who would always to his heart be the little mouse Mademoiselle Cui-cui, doubly could not be responsible for the matter of the hair clippings: on the one hand, he could provide no adequately conventional explanation; and on the other, he could not let his little sister be mixed up in a matter that concerned his cock.
So he must err, and keep silent on the matter. It did not comfort him to speak his failures into a glass of brandy or to waste his metaphor on beer, though in his efforts to keep his secret he tried the method. The second time he missed his rendezvous with Enjolras’ clippings, his heart needed company, and his head demanded fumes.
“I have proved that doctors are all quacks,” he proclaimed, some glasses later, to Joly. “For no man whose error resulted in such a grave loss as of life and limb could be expected to do ought on getting home but following his patient to the final rest—and one presumes a surgeon, were he truly the master of the body, would have plentiful methods by which to do himself in. No, they sip their cordials in peace in the evening, the only guilt upon their minds that of any other burglar with coin in the pocket he didn’t earn; you see, a burglar can sleep easily at night, if his pillow’s soft enough. Were doctors so essential in the matter of cure, why, they’d be the most prodigious murderers within their own consciences, and they’d hang themselves by the clutchful.”
“Stand up!” Bossuet cried in response, before Joly could put in a word. “Up, up—there we go—here, let’s count—a first arm, a second—a leg to match each side, and the same length even, or with a sous stuck on the heel of one shoe to level them up, no need to inquire too closely—lean in, let me get you by the ears like an old auntie, here’s a kiss on either cheek, yes!, the final confirmation: the man breathes, I have felt a boozy gust sizzle my chin-hairs. All right, my good fellow, tell us, lean into my ear close, what did you do—or not do?”
“I want to hear,” Grantaire insisted, “from our medical man. Are you to be a hack, monsieur, or a murderer?”
Joly, sitting with his fist upon the head of his cane, and his chin upon his fist, only smiled genially, and said, “I have only got so far as the hacking. Haven’t I invited you enough times to come see the dissections for you to know that much? I will be sure to tell you, friend, when I learn the answer to your question.”
⁂
Best tactics would see them each scattered separately; he followed Enjolras.
“The kindling’s caught and the logs aren’t far behind,” Grantaire said, and spat coppery into the gutter, “but I sense they are rained upon. There’s a humidity to the air, stinking; like someone’s boiling buckets pulled out of the Seine; my head is fair clogged.” And, pinching shut one nostril with the press of a bruised knuckle, he snorted a plug of mucus and blood from the other. “God have mercy on them: to think that the governments’ bully-boys are so inelegant as to interrupt a meeting before the carafes are emptied of wine. Don’t they know revolutionaries run slower drunk than sober?”
Enjolras grunted in response.
While capable of the same inelegant noises as any man—Bahorel could tell a knee-slapper about a law professor and a fart—Enjolras tended towards a precision of communication that a grunt lacked. More alarmingly, he yielded when Grantaire took him about the shoulders to guide him into the circle of illumination shed by a lamp-post, though they were not so many streets over from the raided wine-shop as all that, and would do better to keep to the dark side of the street.
He held his arms close to his chest, the fingers of his left hand pressed hard in his right fist; blood welled, dribbled over his knuckles, snaked his wrist. “It’s minor,” he said to Grantaire’s clucking. “I caught my hand on the wall.”
Clawed the wall, more like, as a gendarme seized him by the opposite elbow; Grantaire witnessed it, and by the distraction earned his bloodied nose. It diminished his respect not at all, who knew in the history of scars and healed bruises what indignities the rules of fighting-games sought to avoid, but Enjolras surprised him by blushing. Place the marble bust by the fire and even it would redden, he supposed, and with impossibly increased tenderness presumed to take the handkerchief from his own pocket, the one that Joly had pulled the stitches of the initials JG from and clumsily restitched with an R, and said—oh, words!, what did they matter?—said, with a press of his gloved hand upon fiery skin, that he may be of service, and most wondrously was allowed to see the red open palm, the three fingers with torn cuticles and raw flesh where the nails ought to be.
“Putain,” he said. “Such are the challenges of revolution: you will have to scratch your rear with your left hand for a little while. Let me wrap it—thus—does it sting very badly? I’ve only had them fall off of their own, when an ass stepped upon my fingers, and by then it was a relief for the nasty dead things to be gone. Such are the consequences of going four-legged in the farmyard. Don’t mind the details—I would weep to tell them.”
“You have told me before,” Enjolras said, “laughing,” and withdrew his hand. “We would do better to get off the streets.”
“I follow,” he replied, and did. Crossing the Seine back to the Latin Quarter, he felt each of them marked on the bridge by a pair of passing gendarmes, and thought dreamily that Enjolras might for the sake of subtlety have worn a veil over his hair, that the moonlight not settle there, and reignite the sun on earth. Also, he might not have raised his hand in a mocking salute, realizing only after touching his brow that his glove, being a light fawn in color, showed bloodstains clearly—and from the whistle he made with each exhale, his face was fair swollen. No matter; tomorrow he would tell a young man who paid him as a savate instructor—as of the last quarter, a most theoretical payment—that they could consider themselves without debts besides the natural emotions of friendship so long as he would claim to have kicked Grantaire in the face the night prior, should suspicious sorts come asking after such details. It would doubly please the student: in the pockets and in the ego.
And Grantaire—he did not put his glove into his mouth. Even in the profound dark of the Rue de Grès, the Musain’s back shutters closed overhead, a place familiar as his mother’s womb and as unshocked by any of his nakedness—even there, he did not. Observe him, the ascetic! Conduct him to the desert and place him on a pillar, or lay him upon his shield and let him lounging be carried to his mother, he, a holy-man, a warrior, he was hunger denied, a Spartan, a man too parched to drool—ah, he was at the gate of his own boarding-house. His face stung when he smiled at Enjolras and dipped a bow. “Good-night, good-night, dear friend, but first—you are not bleeding any longer, are you? I’ll take my handkerchief back, then. Your fingers will want air, and—”
“I will have it laundered,” Enjolras interrupted, with the delicate bow of his lips pulled all awry, and his gaze steady on Grantaire.
Who flushed, and denied the significance of that look. “Laundered? It will need to be soaked first, and I won’t put you through the trouble.”
“Do you soak all of your clothes for the laundress?”
“Those stained with blood or wine? Yes.” He flapped his hand at the disbelieving glance this earned. “I aspire to, and in this case: I intend to. Every moment it spends drying is another minute the laundress must spend scrubbing, and you have a fair walk home. If you cannot have sympathy for the plight of woman, consider her a laborer, and mind one of Feuilly’s speeches in that regard.”
“Grantaire,” he said, and held up his wounded hand, halt. “I do not buy you absinthe, either, do I? A man’s foibles are his own to manage, but that does not mean I will return this handkerchief to you, and foil you myself. Hush. You have already taken a blow to the nose; do not let’s have me deliver one to your dignity, such as you have. Hasn’t the night been long enough?”
“This night, long? The moon’s just risen over the rooftops,” Grantaire replied, with a laugh like the crow startled from its nest in the night. “There’s time enough to start another revolution and have the government changed before dawn. Twice, if we snitch the language of our founding articles direct from ’93, with a few revisions to claim originality.”
“Good night, Grantaire,” said Enjolras, and left him to himself.
He tapped at the door for the porter to let him in and went up to his rooms, where he filled the basin on his washstand with water and a peel of soap, and flung his glove therein. There to blood as absinthe, and a you’re welcome to the laundress! Now, for the flask tucked under his mattress, three swallows for comfort while he stared at the bubbles scumming the water’s surface in the basin. He shed, after a bleak while, his second glove, after a close inspection for blood—his own only, he thought. Damn it all, did it matter what foibles a man had in private? And did it matter if his foibles were more public than he knew? He went and picked the glove from the basin, flung it back down, and left his rooms again, bare-headed. This lack of a hat compelled him to avoid the wineshop he intended to take himself to, the night after all truly being young, and unable to alleviate the agitations of his spirit by wagging the tongue at some acquaintance or serving lass, he exercised his legs—back to the right bank, to a street where certain of his friends had with the cooperation of the police effected the early close of a tavern, through which a broken window a conversation of some seriousness between the proprietor and an interrogator could be heard.
He crept past the scene of their recent fracas, thrumming with fear—not of discovery, but that he might fail to find—here—his body blocked the dim light form the nearest lamp, he must lay his hands upon the wall where he witnessed Enjolras for a moment cling, as earthly as the taste of sweat. Damp, upon his palm. He sniffs it—nothing, city-dew, faintly scented by piss and chimney-smoke. Where, the blood? Here, here, the brick crumbles at he brush of his thumb. He bends—pauses—retraces the spot, flinching at the sharp edge that catches the crease between palm and ring-finger. Enjolras’ nails, which he expected to sift from the muck at the base of the wall, had stuck in the mortar. He plucked them free.
“What’s this, then?”
He thought to say: Monsieur, I am retrieving my friend’s possessions, do not mind me; and in so thinking, panicked himself, whose friends often emerged from stints with the authorities minus their funds or watch or once even—Bossuet still bemoaned it—a particularly handsome hat. The jeweler, the bank, the milliner, none of them could hope to create an object as dear, compelling, unattainable, as that which he now held. Panicked, he palmed the nails into his mouth and swallowed, and by experience with other keratinous things did not gag or choke, at this one effort succeeded, so that when the man behind him repeated his question, tone gone markedly unfriendly, he wore an expression of such perfect satisfaction as he turned about that it did more to secure his release than ought else: a dissident, caught lurking, could not be so pleased with himself.
At the authority’s inquiry into his ruffled appearance, he let them smell the brandy on him and said, “I heard there would be stewed capon served here tonight—have you had it, messieurs?”
“Nothing stewed here but you, good man,” put in the tavern owner from the door, fussily. He might’ve recognized Grantaire’s voice, except it emerged thickly, his throat mucous-clogged and scratched by his petty cannibalization.
At first triumphant upon his release, he grew melancholic as he retraced the path he so lately walked with Enjolras. “Will you crawl along with your nose to the paving stones in hopes of finding a drop of sweat, a gob of spittle, a shed hair, with all the bitter gluttony of a truffle-hog squinting its pink eyes at its handler? And who handles you? Ough! You sound like a toad.” He did; and when he returned to his rooms, chased by the scolding of the porter, he found that wine burned his scratched throat almost too fiercely to imbibe.
He sat aloof of Enjolras for a few weeks, after—they were both honest men, though driven by such contrary impulses as intemperance and ferocity, and he feared how the conversation should end if he found himself inquiring, Might I have another nail, my friend? This one need not be torn from the bed, sauced with blood. That would be greedy of me. You see, I ate the last set too quickly. One or the other of them would walk away discomfited. In the meanwhile, he sat separate with the security that he held inside him fragments, alive with spirit, though discarded from the flesh. Knew, besides, that to resist forever was beyond him; he would drift close again, offer himself again, take again.
⁂
When Grantaire fell, the blood of his friend spattered upon him from above, who engaged in the business of dying by bullet-hole with the usual messiness, heroism having its limits. Though he might have put out his tongue and tasted it, he died close-lipped, satiated at last by the press of a hand.
His sister learned of his death from the papers, and made an effort to retrieve his body, gone among the gawkers at the morgue. As good-hearted as her brother, she identified two others and secured them for their families, Bahorel who once kissed the back of her hand and scandalized her when he said, citizeness, there’s room for women in the print shops, you know, and little Joly, who her husband grudgingly favored, being a medical man himself. Had said husband not been in bed with a case of nerves, the sound of cannon fire in the city ever being a source of agony to him, and instead been teaching students the particulars of how to promote a wound to useful putrescence, or tie off a vein with a stitch, he might have recovered his brother-in-law’s body, which numbered among those diverted in the name of science. Given he once ranted in favor of the practice, arguing even that God’s matter could be detailed in the cadaver, Grantaire might have approved it as an end; but then, he’d bickered with Combeferre on the topic of dignity once, prompted by discussion of a dead woman’s swollen and fibrotic liver, and the personal history it spoke to. His liver, he might have been glad to hear, excited little remark, the content of his stomach being more remarkable than yet another case of cirrhosis.
Drawn by the muttering of the students and their teacher, the old peasant who mopped the congealed fluids into the drains after they were through with the corpses drifted closer. Uttering a noise of surprise, he told them, “I got a good price for one of those found in a billy-goat’s belly, once—didn’t know a man could have one. Are they still good for curing poison, messieurs?”
“It evidently cannot cure a bullet-wound,” replied the doctor, wryly, and dropped the bezoar onto the table, sloppily, so that it fell against the cadaver’s hand, and curled there against its fingers. Even degraded by acid and bound up with filth, the gold showed in it.