th 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 Grantaire.
He smiled at them. Scepticism, that caries 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 Loizerolles.
"They are greatly in advance to be dead," he exclaimed.
He said of the crucifix:
"There is a gibbet which has been a success."
A rover, a gambler, a libertine, often drunk, he displeased these young dreamers by humming incessantly: "J''aimons les filles, et j''aimons le bon vin."
Air:
Vive Henri IV.
However, this sceptic had one fanaticism.
This fanaticism was neither a dogma, nor an idea, nor an art, nor a science; it was a man:
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?