815
was the death of the game. Such was Feuilly's habitual text. This
poor workingman 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 prescription. These lofty deeds of rascality
have no future. A nation cannot have its mark extracted like a pocket
handkerchief.

Courfeyrac had a father who was called M. de Courfeyrac. One of
the false ideas of the bourgeoisie under the Restoration as regards
aristocracy and the nobility was to believe in the particle. The
particle, as every one knows, possesses no significance. But the
bourgeois of the epoch of la Minerve estimated so highly that poor de,
that they thought themselves bound to abdicate it. M. de Chauvelin
had himself called M. Chauvelin; M. de Caumartin, M. Caumartin; M. de
Constant de Robecque, Benjamin Constant; M. de Lafayette, M. Lafayette.
Courfeyrac had not wished to remain behind the rest, and called himself
plain Courfeyrac.

We might almost, so far as Courfeyrac is concerned, stop here,
and confine ourselves to saying with regard to what remains: "For
Courfeyrac, see Tholomyes."

Courfeyrac had, in fact, that animation of youth which may be called
the beaute du diable of the mind. Later on, this disappears like the
playfulness of the kitten, and all this grace ends, with the bourgeois,
on two legs, and with the tomcat, on four paws.

This sort of wit is transmitted from generation to generation of the
successive levies of youth who traverse the schools, who pass it from
hand to hand, quasi cursores, and is almost always exactly the same;
so that, as we have just pointed out, any one who had listened to
Courfeyrac in 1828 would have thought he heard Tholomyes in 1817. Only,
Courfeyrac was an honorable fellow. Beneath the apparent similarities
of the exterior mind, the difference between him and Tholomyes 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 in Tholomyes a
district attorney, and in Courfeyrac a paladin.

Enjolras was the chi