Page 1112 - les-miserables

Courfeyrac had a father who was called M. de Courfey-
rac. 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, pos-
sesses 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 him-
self 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 re-
main 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 gen-
eration 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

1112 Les Miserables