you?"

"A democrat-Bonapartist."

"The gray hue of a reassured rat," said Courfeyrac.

On the following day, Courfeyrac introduced Marius at the Cafe Musain.
Then he whispered in his ear, with a smile: "I must give you your entry
to the revolution." And he led him to the hall of the Friends of the A B
C. He presented him to the other comrades, saying this simple word which
Marius did not understand: "A pupil."

Marius had fallen into a wasps'-nest of wits. However, although he was
silent and grave, he was, none the less, both winged and armed.

Marius, up to that time solitary and inclined to soliloquy, and to
asides, both by habit and by taste, was a little fluttered by this covey
of young men around him. All these various initiatives solicited his
attention at once, and pulled him about. The tumultuous movements of
these minds at liberty and at work set his ideas in a whirl. Sometimes,
in his trouble, they fled so far from him, that he had difficulty in
recovering them. He heard them talk of philosophy, of literature, of
art, of history, of religion, in unexpected fashion. He caught glimpses
of strange aspects; and, as he did not place them in proper perspective,
he was not altogether sure that it was not chaos that he grasped. On
abandoning his grandfather's opinions for the opinions of his father,
he had supposed himself fixed; he now suspected, with uneasiness, and
without daring to avow it to himself, that he was not. The angle
at which he saw everything began to be displaced anew. A certain
oscillation set all the horizons of his brains in motion. An odd
internal upsetting. He almost suffered from it.

It seemed as though there were no "consecrated things" for those young
men. Marius heard singular propositions on every sort of subject, which
embarrassed his still timid mind.

A theatre poster presented itself, adorned with the title of a tragedy
from the ancient repertory called classic: "Down with tragedy dear to
the bourgeois!" cried Bahorel. And Marius heard Combeferre reply:--

"You are wrong, Bahorel. The bourgeoisie loves tragedy, and the
bourgeoisie must be left at peace on that score. Bewigged tragedy has
a reason for its existence, and I am not one of those who, by order of
AEschylus, contest its right to existence. There are rough outlines in
nature; there are, in creation, ready-made parodies; a beak which is not
a beak, wings which are not wings, gills which are not gills, paws which
are no