Page 1844 - les-miserables

ill, Grantaire is drunk.’ It was to Bossuet that he sent Navet.
If he had come for me, I would have followed him. So much
the worse for Enjolras! I won’t go to his funeral.’
This resolution once arrived at, Bossuet, Joly, and
Grantaire did not stir from the wine-shop. By two o’clock in
the afternoon, the table at which they sat was covered with
empty bottles. Two candles were burning on it, one in a flat
copper candlestick which was perfectly green, the other in
the neck of a cracked carafe. Grantaire had seduced Joly and
Bossuet to wine; Bossuet and Joly had conducted Grantaire
back towards cheerfulness.
As for Grantaire, he had got beyond wine, that mere-
ly moderate inspirer of dreams, ever since mid-day. Wine
enjoys only a conventional popularity with serious drink-
ers. 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 fear-
ful 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 fu-
ries, Nightmare, Night, and Death, which hover about the

1844 Les Miserables