When Denis Grantaire was five, his father instructed the nurse to begin teaching his eldest son the alphabet. In her overly careful hand, she wrote out the twenty-six letters, first in capitals and then in lowercase, on a single sheet of paper. She then sat her reluctant little charge down at a table in the sitting room and made him repeat after her as she pointed to each in turn. A: a majuscule. B: bé majuscule. C: cé majuscule. They made it halfway into the miniscules before little Denis, who had been slouching further and further into his chair, slid off the seat entirely and sped off from between the legs of the table.
The next day, they made it through both sets of letters twice. By the end of the week, Denis had reached the point where he could identify most letters on sight. His nurse would point to a random symbol on the increasingly battered page, and if he named ten in a row correctly, he would receive a sweet. Petit bé and petit dé were the cause of much gnashing of teeth, but soon the lines and curves began to cement themselves in his mind.
Then their roles switched. She would name the letters for him (having long since abandoned the bulky majuscule/miniscule for the convenient irreverence of grand/petit) and he would find them on the page.
"Petit esse"
He pointed.
"Correct. Petit ixe."
He pointed.
"Correct. Grand erre."
He looked up at her. "Yes, Martine?"
"I said grand erre. Where is the capital R?"
"Oh! I thought you said Grantaire." His buggy brown eyes widened. "Grand erre! That's me!" He jabbed a finger on the right letter. "Look, Martine! I'm in the alphabet!"
"Silly thing," she sighed. "That is a granD erre. You are a GranTaire. Let me spell it for you." And so she pulled out a fresh sheet of paper and laboriously wrote out her charge's full name. He was most disappointed to see that it only contained a little r. "But you are little," she patted him on the head. "Now go play."
Sprawled out on his floor, idly twisting a corner of the blanket hanging off of his bed, Denis imagined himself as the letter R. He was unsure if he liked it. It was an indecisive letter, with both its curve and its two lines. A P was like an O stuck on an I, or like a mistaken D, or like a B that ran out of ink, and an R was like a P and a K got into a fight that neither really won. An R was a mixed letter, and Denis Grantaire didn't know if he was a mixed boy.
So he began to imagine other versions of Denis, a whole alphabet of friends or other lives. He was Denis R, but what of Denis Q before him, and Denis S after him? As he lay in the fading sunlight from his window, a whole cast of characters began to take shape. Grancet was a doctor. Grangé was a farmer known for his magnificent barn. Grando was a strongman in a circus in Spain. Grandesse was a fancy duke. And so on down the alphabet, all the way to the magician Granzède.
When it came time for his lessons the next day, the letters had come to life.
As he slowly learned his words, he paid special attention to those that began with R – rouge, rue, rentrer – and began to wonder what his R might stand for.
When he was nine and went to school for the first time, he signed his name with the rebus R, and the teacher laughed and called him terribly clever. The second time he did so, the teacher rapped his knuckles and told him that the joke had grown old.
When he was ten, he learned that the Romans had written entirely in capital letters. He developed an instant fondness for them and told himself that he was meant to be a Latin.
His tenth year was when he won a prize for his penmanship, and when he first learned that he was ugly. He told himself that Denis R did not care about his looks, but mentally added a note that Grandesse was the most handsome man in his province, and Granzède would only work with the most beautiful assistants.
When he was older, he moved to Paris, where the other young men would instantly take to the simple wit of his rebus. He began to use it always, and took a special joy in perfecting the wild flourishes with which he adorned that single letter.
Not many years after that, he started hearing an entirely new set of R-words; not Restauration but République and Révolution and all the different shades of red that a cap can take. He gravitated towards these terms, and wondered if maybe these were the letters meant to follow the unspoken question of his grand erre.