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Today we'll be continuing les Miserables by Victor Hugo. Book four the Friends of the ABC. Chapter one.

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 molting people were undergoing a transformation almost without being conscious of it. Through the movement of the age. The needle which moves around 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 to democrats. It was a flood tide complicated with a thousand ebb movements.

The peculiarity of ebbs is to create inner mixtures, hence the combination of very singular ideas. People adored both Napoleon and liberty. We are making history here. There were the mirages of that period. Opinions, traverse phases.

Voltairian royalism, a quaint variety, had no less singular sequel. Bonapartist liberalism. Other groups of minds were more serious in that direction. They sounded principles. They attached themselves to the right.

They grew enthusiastic for the absolute. They caught glimpses of infinite realizations.

The absolute, by its very rigidity, urges spirits towards the sky and causes them to float in illimitable space. There is nothing like dogma for bringing forth dreams, and there is nothing like dreams for engendering the future.

Utopia today, flesh and blood tomorrow. His advanced opinions had a double foundation.

The beginning of mystery menaced the established order of things, which was suspicious and underhand, a sign which was revolutionary to the highest degree. The second thoughts of power meet the second thoughts of the populace in the mine.

The incubation of insurrections gives the retort to the premeditation of coup d'etat. There did not as yet exist in France any of those vast underlying organizations like the german Tugenbund and italian carbonarism.

But here and there there were dark underminings which were in process of throwing off chutes. The kerguerd was being outlined at Aix. There existed at Paris, among other affiliations of that nature, the society of the Friends of the ABC.

What were these friends of the ABC? A society which had for its object apparently the education of children, in reality, the elevation of man.

They declared themselves the friends of the ABC, the Abbasi, the debased, that is to say, the people. They wished to elevate the people. It was a pun which we should do wrong to smile at. Puns are sometimes serious factors in politics.

Witness the qutratus ad castra which made a general of the army of witness, Marbury et Baberini, witness tu es petrus et super hont con petrum. Etcetera, etcetera. The friends of the ABC were not numerous. It was a secret society in the state of embryo, we might almost say a coterie.

If coteries ended in heroes, they assembled in Paris, in two localities, near the fish market, in a wine shop called Corinth, of which more will be heard later on, and near the pantheon, in a little cafe in the rue Saint Michel called the cafe Mussen, now torn down in the first of these meeting places was close to the working Mandev, the second to the students. The assemblies of the Friends of the ABC were usually held in a backroom of the cafe museum.

This hall, which was tolerably remote from the cafe with which it was connected by an extremely long corridor, had two windows and an exit with a private stairway on the little rue des Grande. There they smoked and drank and gambled and laughed. There they conversed in very loud tones about everything and in whispers of other things.

An old map of France under the republic was nailed to the wall, a sign quite sufficient to excite the suspicion of a police agent. The greater part of the Friends of the ABC were students who were on cordial terms with the working classes. Here are the names of the principal ones.

They belong, in a certain measure, to enjolress Combeferre, Jean Probert, Thioli, Courfeyrac, Bohorel, Leschel, or Lagel, Jolly, Grantaire. These young men formed a sort of family through the bond of friendship. All, with the exception of Laigle, were from the south.

This was a remarkable group. It vanished in the invisible depths which lie behind us at the point of this drama which we have now reached.

It will not, perhaps, be superfluous to throw a ray of light upon these youthful heads before the reader beholds them, plunging into the shadow of a tragic adventure. Enjolras, whose name we have mentioned first of all, the reader shall see why, later on was an only son and wealthy.

Enjolras was a charming young man who was capable of being terrible. He was angelically handsome.

He was a savage antinous, one would have said, to see the pensive thoughtfulness of his glance, that he had already, in some previous state of existence, traversed the revolutionary apocalypse. He possessed the tradition of it as though he had been a witness.

He was acquainted with all the minute details of the great affair, a pontifical and warlike nature, a singular thing. In a youth, he was an officiating priest and a man of war.

From the immediate point of view, a soldier of the democracy above the contemporary movement, the priest of the ideal. His eyes were deep, his lids a little red. His lower lip was thick, and easily became disdainful. His brow was lofty.

A great deal of brow in a face is like a great deal of horizon in a view, like certain young men at the beginning of this century and the end of the last, who became illustrious at an early age. He was endowed with excessive youth and was as rosy as a young girl, although subject to the hours of pallor. Already a man, he seemed a child.

His two and 20 years appeared to be but 17. He was serious. It did not seem as if he were aware there was on earth a thing called woman.

He had but one passion, the right but one thought, to overthrow the obstacle on Mount Aventine. He would have been gracchus in the convention. He would have been St. Just. He hardly saw the roses. He ignored spring.

He did not hear the carolling of the birds. The bare throat of Evadne would have moved him no more than it would have moved Aristagieton.

He, like Harmodius, thought flowers good for nothing except to conceal the sword. He was severe in his enjoyments. He chastely dropped his eyes before everything which was not the republic. He was the marble lover of liberty.

His speech was harshly inspired and had the thrill of a hymn. He was subject to unexpected outbursts of soul. Woe to the love affair which should have risked itself beside him.

If any grisette of the place cambrai or the rue Saint Jean de Beauvais, saying, that face of a youth escaped from college, that pages mien, those long golden lashes, those blue eyes, that hair billowing in the wind, those rosy cheeks, those fresh lips, those exquisite teeth, had conceived an appetite for that complete aurora, and it tried.

Her beauty on an astounding and terrible glance, would have promptly shown her the abyss and would have taught her not to confound the mighty cherub of Ezekiel. With the gallant Cherubino of Beaumarchais by the side of Enjolras, who represented the logic of the revolution.

Combeferre represented its philosophy. Between the logic of the revolution and its philosophy, there exists a that its logic may end in war, whereas its philosophy can end only in peace.

Combeferre complimented and rectified Enjolras. He was less lofty, but broader. He desired to pour into all minds the extensive principles of general ideas. He said, revolution, but civilization.

And around the mountain peak, he opened out a vast view of the blue sky. The revolution was more adapted for breathing with combeferre than with Androlris. Enjolras expressed its divine right, enfer its natural right.

The first attached himself to robespierre second confined himself to Coeur de Comferre, lived the life of all the rest of the world more than did Enjolras. If it had been granted to these two young men to attain to history, the one would have been the just, the other, the wise man.

Enjolras was the more virile, the more humane. Homo and vir. That was the exact effect of their different shades. Compier was as gentle as, and jeweller's was severe through natural whiteness.

He loved the word citizen, but he preferred the word man. He would gladly have said hombre. Like the Spanish.

He read everything, went to the theaters, attended the courses of public lecturers, learned the polarization of light from Arago.

Grew enthusiastic over a lesson in which Geoffrey Saint Hilaire explained the double function of the external carotid artery and the internal the one which makes the face and the one which makes the brain. He kept up with what was going on, followed science step by step, compared St.

Simon with Fourier, deciphered hieroglyphics, broke the pebble, which he found and reasoned on geography, drew from memory a silkworm moth, pointed out the faulty French in the dictionary of the academy, studied peuce, gueur and Deleuze. Affirmed nothing, not even miracles, denied nothing, not even ghosts. Turned over the files of the montier. Reflected.

He declared that the future lies in the hand of the schoolmaster. And busied himself with educational questions.

He desired that society should labor without relaxation at the elevation of the moral and intellectual level, at coining science, at putting ideas into circulation, at increasing the mind in youthful persons.

And he feared lest the present poverty of method, the paltriness from a literary point of view confined to two or three centuries, called classic, the tyrannical dogmatism of official pedants. Scholastic prejudices and routines should end by converting our colleges into artificial oyster.

Bedsheen, he was learned, a purist, exact, a graduate of the polytechnic, a close student, and at the same time thoughtful even to Chimeras. So his friends said. He believed in all dreams.

Railroads, the suppression of suffering in kegurgical operations, the fixing of images in the dark chamber, the electric telegraph, the steering of balloons. Moreover, he was not much alarmed by the citadels erected against the human mind in every direction by superstition, despotism, and prejudice.

He was one of those who think that science will eventually turn the position enjolras was a chief. Comfier was a guide. One would have liked to fight under the one and to march behind the other. It is not that comfier was not capable of fighting.

He did not refuse a hand to hand combat with the obstacle and to attack it by main force and explosively.

But it suited him better to bring the human race into accord with its destiny gradually, by means of education, the inculcation of axioms, a promulgation of positive laws, and between two lights. His preference was rather for illumination than for conflagration. A conflagration can create an aurora, no doubt, but why not await the dawn?

A volcano illuminates, but daybreak furnishes a still better illumination. Possibly Comferre preferred the whiteness of the beautiful to the blaze of the sublime, a light troubled by smoke.

Progress purchased at the expense of violence. Only half satisfied this tender and serious spirit. The headlong precipitation of a people into the truth a 93 terrified him.

Nevertheless, stagnation was still more repulsive to him. In it, he detected putrefaction and death.

On the whole, he preferred scum to miasma, and he preferred the torrent to the cesspool and the falls of Niagara to the lake of Montfaucon. In short, he desired neither halt nor haste.

While his tumultuous friends, captivated by the absolute, adored and invoked splendid revolutionary adventures, Comferre was inclined to let progress, good progress, take its own course.

He may have been cold, but he was pure, methodical but irreproachable, phlegmatic but imperturbable, Comferre would have knelt and clasped his hands to enable the future to arrive in all its candor, in that nothing might disturb the immense and virtuous evolution of the races. The good must be innocent, he repeated incessantly.

And, in fact, if the grandeur of the revolution consists in keeping the dazzling ideal fixedly in view, and of soaring thither athwart the lightnings with fire and blood in its talons.

The beauty of progress lies in being spotless, and there exists between Washington, who represents the one, and Danton, who incarnates the other, that difference which separates the swan from the angel with the wings of an eagle. Jean Prouvaire was still a softer shade than comphir.

His name was Jehan, owing to that petty, momentary freak which mingled with the powerful and profound movement whence sprang the very essential study of the Middle Ages. Jean Probert was in love.

He cultivated a pot of flowers, played on the flute, made verses, loved the people, pitied women wept over the child, confounded God and the future in the same confidence, and blamed the revolution for having caused the fall of a royal head and of Andre Chinner. His voice was ordinarily delicate, but suddenly grew manly. He was learned even to erudition and almost an orientalist.

Above all, he was good and a very simple thing to those who know how nearly goodness borders on grandeur. In the matter of poetry, he preferred the immense. He knew Italian, Latin, Greek and Hebrew. And these served him only for the perusal of four poets.

Dante, juvenal, Achilles and Isaiah. In French, he preferred Corneille to Racine and Agrippa to Diogmenine to Corneille.

He loved to saunter through fields of wild oats and cornflowers and busied himself with clouds nearly as much as with events. His mind had two attitudes, one on side towards man, the other on that towards God. He studied or he contemplated all day long.

He buried himself in social salary, capital, credit, marriage, religion, liberty of thought, education, penal, servitude, poverty, association, property, production, and sharing the enigma of this lower world which covers the human anthill with darkness. And at night he gazed upon the planets, those enormous beings like Enjolras. He was wealthy and an only son.

He spoke softly, bowed his head, lowered his eyes, smiled with embarrassment, dressed badly, had an awkward air, blushed at a mere nothing, and was very timid. Yet he was intrepid. Puli was a working man, a fanmaker.

Orphaned both a father and mother who earned with difficulty three francs a day and had but one thought to deliver the world. He had one other preoccupation, to educate himself. He called this also delivering himself. He had taught himself to read and write.

Everything that he knew, he had learned by himself. Hughie had a generous heart. The range of his embrace was immense. This orphan had adopted the peoples as his mother had failed him.

He meditated on his country.

He brooded with the profound divination of the man of the people over what we now call the idea of the nationality, had learned history with the express object of raging, with full knowledge of the case. In this club of young utopians occupied chiefly with France, he represented the outside world.

He had for his specialty Greece, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Italy. He uttered these names incessantly, appropriately and inappropriately, with the tenacity of right.

The partition of Poland is a theorem of which all present political outrages are the corollaries. There has not been a despot nor a traitor for nearly a century back who has not signed, approved, countersigned and copied.

Nate veratured the partition of Poland. When the record of modern treasons was examined, that was the first thing which made its appearance.

This poor working man had constituted himself the tutor of justice, and she recompensed him by rendering him great. The fact is that there is eternity in right. Warsaw can no more be tartar than Venice can be teuton.

Kings lose their pains and their honor in the attempt to make them so. Sooner or later the submerged part floats to the surface and reappears. Greece becomes Greece again. Italy is once more Italy.

The protest of right against the deed persists forever. The theft of a nation cannot be allowed by proscription. These lofty deeds of rascality have no future.

A nation cannot have its mark extracted like a pocket handkerchief. Courfeyriac had a father who was called Monsieur de Courfriac.

One of the false ideas the burg would see under the restoration as regards aristocracy and the nobility was to believe in the particle. The particle, as everyone knows, possesses no significance.

But the bourgeois of the epic of la Minerva estimated so highly that poor day that they thought themselves bound to abdicate it. Monsieur de Chauvelin had himself called Monsieur Chauvelin.

Monsieur de Camartin, Monsieur Camartin, Monsieur de Constant, de Robiquet, Benjamin Constant, Monsieur de la Fayette. Monsieur Lafayette Courfeyrac had not wished to remain behind the rest and called himself plain courfriac.

We might almost, so far as Courfriac is concerned, stop here and confine ourselves to saying with regard to what remains for corfirac cytholamys. Corfriac had in fact that animation of youth which may be called the beaute de diable. Of the mind.

Later on, this disappears like the playfulness of the kitten, and all this grace ends with a bourgeois on two legs and with the tomcat on four paws.

Only Courfriac was an honorable fellow. Beneath the apparent similarities of the exterior mind, the difference between him and Tholamys was very great.

The latent man which existed in the two was totally different in the first from what it was in the second. There was Antholomis, a district attorney, and in Courfeyrac, a paladin.

Enjolras was the chief, comfir was the guide, porphyroc was the center, the others gave more light, he shed more warmth. The truth is that he possessed all the qualities of a center, roundness and radiance.

Bahrail was a good natured mortal who kept bad company, brave, a spendthrift, prodigal, and to the verge of generosity, talkative and at times eloquent, bold, to the verge of effentry, the best fellow possible.

He had daring waistcoats and scarlet opinions, a wholesale blusterer, that is to say, loving nothing so much as a quarrel unless it were an uprising, and nothing so much as an uprising, unless it were a revolution. Always ready to smash a windowpane, then to tear up the pavement, then to demolish a government, just to see the effect of it.

A student in his 11th year, he had nosed about the law, but did not practice it. He had taken for his device, never a lawyer, and for his armorial bearings a nightstand in which was visible a square cap.

Every time that he passed the law school, which rarely happened, he buttoned up his frock coat, the paletots had not yet been invented, and took hygienic precautions. Of the school porter, he said, what a fine man, and of the dean, Monsieur delving court. What a monument.

He had peasant parents whom he had contrived to imbue with respect for their son, he said of them, they are peasants and not bourgeois. That is the reason they are intelligent. Baharel, a man of Caprice, was scattered over numerous cafes. The others had habits, he had none. He sauntered.

To stray is human. To saunter is parisian. In reality, he had a penetrating mind and was more of a thinker than appeared to view.

He served as a connecting link between the friends of the ABC and other still unorganized groups which were destined to take form later on.

The king frowned, glanced at the signature on the petition, and beheld the name written l e s G l E. This non Bonaparte orthography touched the king and he began to smile. Sire, resumed the man with the petition.

I had for ancestor, a keeper of the hound, surnamed Las Julius. This surname furnished my name. I am called Les Julis, by contraction, lescul, and by corruption, Legol. This caused the king to smile broadly.

Later on, he gave the man the posting office of Meaux, either intentionally or accidentally. The bold member of the group was the son of Descal or Legol, and he signed himself Legol de Meaux as an abbreviation.

His companions called him Boussuet. Roussette was a gay but unlucky fellow. His specialty was not to succeed in anything. As an offset, he laughed at everything.

At five and 20, he was bald. His father had ended by owning a house and a field, but he, the son, had made haste to lose that house and field. In a bad speculation.

He had nothing left. He possessed knowledge and wit, but all he did miscarried. Everything failed him, and everybody deceived him.

What he was building tumbled down on top of him. If he were splitting wood, he cut off a finger. If he had a mistress, he speedily discovered that he had a friend.

Also, some misfortune happened to him every moment, hence his joviality. He said, I live under falling tiles. He was not easily astonished, because for him an accident was what he had foreseen.

He took his bad luck serenely and smiled at the teasing of fate, like a person whos listening to pleasantries. He was poor, but his fund of good humor was inexhaustible he soon reached his last sou, never his last burst of laughter.

When adversity entered his doors, he saluted this old acquaintance. Cordially he tapped all catastrophes on his stomach. He was familiar with the fatality, to the point of calling it by its nickname.

Good day, Gugnon, he said to it. His persecutions of fate had rendered him inventive. He was full of resources.

He had no money, but he found means, when it seemed good to him, to indulge in unbridled extravagance. One night he went so far as to eat 100 francs and a supper with a wench, which inspired him to make this memorable remark in the midst of the orgy.

Pull off my boots, you five. Luigi Bosset was slowly directing his steps towards the profession of a lawyer. He was pursuing his law studies. After the manner of Bahrain.

Beauset had not much domicile, sometimes none at all. He lodged now with one, now with another, most often with Jolie. Jolie was studying medicine. He was two years younger than Beaucet.

Jolie was the malayed imaginaire juniore. What he had won in medicine was to be more of an invalid than a doctor.

At three and 20, he thought himself a valetudinarian and passed his life in inspecting his tongue in the mirror, he affirmed that man becomes magnetic like a needle, and in his chamber he placed his bed with its head to the south and the foot to the north, so that at night the circulation of his blood might not be interfered with by the great electric current of the globe. During thunderstorms he felt his pulse. Otherwise he was the gayest of them all.

All these young, maniacal, puny, merry incoherences, lived in harmony together, and the result was an eccentric and agreeable being, whom his comrades, who were a prodigal of winged consonants, called Jolly. He may fly away on the four ells, Jean Provert said to him.

Jolly had a trick of touching his nose with the tip of his cane, which is an indication of a sagacious mind. All these young men, who differed so greatly, and who on the whole can only be discussed seriously, held the same religion, progress.

All were the direct sons of the French Revolution. The most giddy of them became solemn when they pronounced that date 89. Their fathers in the flesh had been either royalists, doctrinaires.

It did not matter what. This confusion anterior to themselves, who were young, did not concern them at all. The pure blood of principle ran in their veins.

They attached themselves without intermediate shades, to incorruptible right and absolute duty. Affiliated and initiated, they sketched out the ideal underground.

Among all these glowing hearts and thoroughly convinced minds, there was one skeptic. How came he there? By juxtaposition, this skeptics name was Grantaire, and he was in the habit of signing himself with this rebase.

Our grantaire was a man who took good care not to believe in anything. Moreover, he was one of the students who had learned the most during their course at Paris.

He knew that the best coffee was to be had at the Cafe Lemblin, and the best billiards at the Cafe Voltaire. That good cakes and lasses were to be found at the hermitage on the Boulevard du Main. Spatchcocked chickens at Mother sagets. Excellent.

Made a lutes at the barriere de la Cunette, and a certain thin white wine at the barriere de compat. He knew the best place for everything, in addition boxing and foot fencing, and some dances. And he was a thorough single stick player.

He was a tremendous drinker to boot. He was inordinately homely. The prettiest boot stitcher of that day.

Irma Boise, enraged with his homeliness, pronounced sentence on him as follows, grantaire is impossible. But grantaires fatuity was not to be disconcerted.

He stared tenderly and fixedly at all women, with the air of saying to them all, if I only chose, and of trying to make his comrades believe that he was in general demand. 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 grand terror. He smiled at them. Skepticism that carries of the intelligence had not left him a single whole idea. He lived with irony. This was his axiom.

There is but one certainty. My full glass. He sneered at all devotion in all parties. The father as well as the brother, Robespierre Junior as well as Loz Rolles.

They are greatly in advance to be dead. He exclaimed. He has said of the crucifix, there is a gibbet which has been a success. Moreover, a gambler, a libertine.

Often drunk, he displeased these young dreamers by humming incessantly jamins les filets et jamans les bonne vin. He vive Henry IV. However, this skeptic had one fanaticism. This fanaticism was neither a dogma, nor an idea, nor an art, nor a science.

It was a mandev. Enjolras. Grantaire admired, loved, and venerated Enjolras.

To whom did this anarchical scoffer unite himself in this phalanx of absolute minds to the most absolute. In what manner had Enjolras subjugated him? By his ideas? No, by his character, a phenomenon which is often observable.

A skeptic who adheres to a believer is as simple as the law of complementary colors. That which we lack attracts us. No one loves the light like the blind man. The dwarf adores the drum major.

The toad always has his eyes fixed on heaven. Why? In order to watch the bird in its flight. Grand Tyrre, in whom writhed doubt, loved to watch faith soar in Jelleras, he had need of injolras.

That chaste, healthy, firm, upright, hard, candid nature charmed him without his being clearly aware of it and without the idea of explaining it to himself having occurred to him, he admired his opposite by instinct. His soft, yielding, dislocated, sickly, shapeless ideas attached themselves to Enjolras as to a spinal column.

His moral backbone leaned on that firmness. Grantaire, in the presence of Enjolras, became someone once more.

He was himself, moreover, composed of two elements which were to all appearance incompatible. 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 pollocks, patrocles, nisus, eudamatis, ephesian, pec major. 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, it will, pronounce o and p. Or orestes and pylades.

Grandchair, Angelus, 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, humorous Enjolras. A believer disdained this skeptic, and a sober man himself scorned the drunkard.

He accorded him a little lofty pity. Grantaire was an unaccepted pyladeus, always harshly treated by Enjolras roughly repulsed, rejected, yet ever returning to the charge.

He said of Enjolras, what fine marble. Thank you for joining bite at a time books today while we read a bite of one of your favorite classics.

Again, my name is Brie Carlisle, and I hope you come back tomorrow for the next bite of Le Miserable.