Page 1113 - les-miserables

it was in the second. There was in Tholomyes a district at-
torney, and in Courfeyrac a paladin.
Enjolras was the chief, Combeferre was the guide,
Courfeyrac was the centre. The others gave more light, he
shed more warmth; the truth is, that he possessed all the
qualities of a centre, roundness and radiance.
Bahorel had figured in the bloody tumult of June, 1822,
on the occasion of the burial of young Lallemand.
Bahorel was a good-natured mortal, who kept bad com-
pany, brave, a spendthrift, prodigal, and to the verge of
generosity, talkative, and at times eloquent, bold to the
verge of effrontery; the best fellow possible; he had daring
waistcoats, and scarlet opinions; a wholesale blusterer, that
is to say, loving nothing so much as a quarrel, unless it were
an uprising; and nothing so much as an uprising, unless it
were a revolution; always ready to smash a window-pane,
then to tear up the pavement, then to demolish a govern-
ment, just to see the effect of it; a student in his eleventh
year. He had nosed about the law, but did not practise it.
He had taken for his device: ‘Never a lawyer,’ and for his ar-
morial bearings a nightstand in which was visible a square
cap. Every time that he passed the law-school, which rarely
happened, he buttoned up his frock-coat,—the paletot had
not yet been invented,—and took hygienic precautions. Of
the school porter he said: ‘What a fine old man!’ and of the
dean, M. Delvincourt: ‘What a monument!’ In his lectures
he espied subjects for ballads, and in his professors occa-
sions for caricature. He wasted a tolerably large allowance,
something like three thousand francs a year, in doing noth-

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