ly a conventional
popularity with serious drinkers. There is, in fact, in the matter
of inebriety, white magic and black magic; wine is only white magic.
Grantaire was a daring drinker of dreams. The blackness of a terrible
fit of drunkenness yawning before him, far from arresting him, attracted
him. He had abandoned the bottle and taken to the beerglass. The
beer-glass is the abyss. Having neither opium nor hashish on hand, and
being desirous of filling his brain with twilight, he had had recourse
to that fearful mixture of brandy, stout, absinthe, which produces the
most terrible of lethargies. It is of these three vapors, beer, brandy,
and absinthe, that the lead of the soul is composed. They are three
grooms; the celestial butterfly is drowned in them; and there are formed
there in a membranous smoke, vaguely condensed into the wing of the bat,
three mute furies, Nightmare, Night, and Death, which hover about the
slumbering Psyche.

Grantaire had not yet reached that lamentable phase; far from it. He was
tremendously gay, and Bossuet and Joly retorted. They clinked glasses.
Grantaire added to the eccentric accentuation of words and ideas,
a peculiarity of gesture; he rested his left fist on his knee with
dignity, his arm forming a right angle, and, with cravat untied, seated
astride a stool, his full glass in his right hand, he hurled solemn
words at the big maid-servant Matelote:--

"Let the doors of the palace be thrown open! Let every one be a member
of the French Academy and have the right to embrace Madame Hucheloup.
Let us drink."

And turning to Madame Hucheloup, he added:--

"Woman ancient and consecrated by use, draw near that I may contemplate
thee!"

And Joly exclaimed:--

"Matelote and Gibelotte, dod't gib Grantaire anything more to drink.
He has already devoured, since this bording, in wild prodigality, two
francs and ninety-five centibes."

And Grantaire began again:--

"Who has been unhooking the stars without my permission, and putting
them on the table in the guise of candles?"

Bossuet, though very drunk, preserved his equanimity.

He was seated on the sill of the open window, wetting his back in the
falling rain, and gazing at his two friends.

All at once, he heard a tumult behind him, hurried footsteps, cries of
"To arms!" He turned round and saw in the Rue Saint-Denis, at the end
of the Rue de la Chanvrerie, Enjolras passing, gun in hand, and Gavroche
with his pistol, Feuilly wit