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
hours of pallor. Already a man, he still seemed a child. His two and
twenty years appeared to be but seventeen; he was serious, it did not
seem as though 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 Saint-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
Aristogeiton; 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,
seeing that face of a youth escaped from college, that page's mien,
those long, golden lashes,